Just about to head back to England after a fun few days over in Dublin visiting Louise (with big thanks to Roseanne and Vinnie for letting us stay). Seen lots of sights - well, lots of bars anyways, and of course the Guinness brewery which has mad views of the whole city from the gravity bar at the top. So, of course, drank some Guinness and whiskey, visited Bono, Enya and Eddie Irving's palatial residences and looked at the new big pointy thing in the town center. Mmm... pointy.

At the moment though I'm hoping my flight back is a lot less precipitous than the flight over. Having almost enjoyed a 24 hour flight back from New Zealand I find it ironic that a one hour flight can freak me out so much purely due to the fact that the plane tipped 45 degrees right after take off (followed by some more turbulence). Of course this was the first flight in ages that I hadn't taken any Dramamine (my flying drug of choice) and was sitting right at the back of the plane so that just made things worse. Luckily though my weekend flu-like illness, replete with dry cough and muscle aches, seems to have subsided meaning that it probably wasn't SARS after all...

For those of you who've been wondering where my usual witty and urbane bloggy banter has been (hi mum) I just worked out that Blogger had managed to lose my page template somewhere, hence it wasn't updating properley. Oops. Anyway, should all be fixed and luverley now so onto a quick update...

Ah, Easter bank holiday. A four day weekend when everyone rushes out of London to see some other part of the world, which is normally the motorway for at least the first six hours. Luckily for me I was driving into London on Thursday lunchtime to drop off my rental car, watching the queues of traffic the other way growing fat as more folk escaped from the city. Of course the great thing about this is that London becomes very quiet and chilled out for the whole weekend, with pretty much most things open as usual.

Well, as you might guess, I arrived safely back in England and appear to have gotten through the incubation period of SARS with no ill effects. Huzah! The flight went pretty quickly on the way back. It's interesting how as soon as you've done a long flight your brain can instantly block it from your memory, I guess that's because nothing much happened so it's equivalent to the time loss experienced when watching EastEnders and other such pap. Having said that I did meet the guy who carved Gollum for Lord of the Rings so had a fascinating chat with him.

So now I've met my new nephew (photos on the photo site) and gotten to do all the important uncle type things like holding him, going 'ah, bless', comparing hairdoes and then going 'I think he wants his mum' whenever he looks like he's about to do something like throw up. He is lovely though, but I found out I've been mis-spelling his name - it's Nathanael, not Nathaneal. Sorry about that, Nat. Strange coincidence - Nat was the name that Bob used in his book to replace my name... maybe Bob's psychic or sumfink.

Also had the fun of my step-brother's wedding. Oliver and Alena Green got married in White Waltham on March 29th. There was a civil service first in a barn, then a church blessing (with sermon by Simon, by brother in law). My fun for the day was wearing a morning suit, ushering type duties and driving the Riley around between places. Once that was all over my duties then involved getting drunk and dancing in a completely different way to my dad, although he disagrees. Luckily I have video...

Since then I've been catching up with folk back in England, trying to sort my room out again and contemplating flying back to Australia. Oh, and giving lots of money to the dentist - a grand total of around £1000!!! Arse. I'm very tempted at the moment to try and sue coca cola for the damage their drink has done to my teeth and try to reclaim some of my costs plus punitive damages. Gotta be a worth a try, especially after all the things you hear of teeth being dissolved in glasses of coke.

Meanwhile had lots of fun scanning in negatives last night. My scanner goes to 1200 DPI which isn't too bad, and it seems to do a pretty good job on negs - but it's not really designed for feeding lots of them through at once! It has this cool attachment (like a light box) that goes behind the negs and shines light through them rather than reflecting it back. Looks very strange in use. Strangely used this to identify that a set of negs were my sister's not mine, but in the process found a picture of my first ever girlfriend (who went to my sister's school) - ah, bless.

I was up till about one scanning things in - it's a slow process. Each neg takes about 4 minutes then you've got cleanup time in Photoshop. Ouch. Starting to get worried that I don't know how to callibrate my computer screen, so what I see on the there in terms of colours could bear little resemblence to what would be printed out. Hmm.. Guess there's a new learning curve to be gone over there. Ah well. One of these days I'll actually get a portfolio of images together and then maybe even do a show...