AVin' a larf...

They say the devil makes work for idle hands to do and this morning was my opportunity to put it to the test.

Today is water meter installation day, which as described in an earlier post, entails my having to take an entire day off work as they can't guarantee to be finished (or even here) in time for me to get to work for the afternoon. So what to do?

Firstly, because I knew I didn't have work today, it meant I could be a bit more relaxed at Lisa's leaving party last night. She leaves today to start a new life in Spain so it seemed only fitting that she got a really good send off. To put things in perspective, even I was found doing the timewarp, the conga, the Saturday Night Fever thing and some poorly timed random movements to Wham. Not bad for a bloke who "doesn't do dancing". Just in case you do get chance to look in Lisa, good luck and thanks again for a great night out.

Today's first task was to take full advantage of my last helping of un-metered water supply. I got up as though it was a normal morning, shaved, showered, made a cuppa, ate breakfast, washed up, cleaned my teeth, all before 7:30 am. There was no way they would arrive before 8:00 so I put a load of washing on aswell, but aside from topping the kettle up, that was about as far as my abuse of water consumption went bearing in mind it was far too cold to risk an expedition into the garden or wash the car.

I still had to find something to occupy a few hours without leaving the house and top of the list was to sort out the DVD recorder I bought before Christmas. Basically, I went out to buy a cheap DVD player to play films for the family while they were staying over at Christmas and ended up spending considerably more on a DVD recorder with hard drive. It played DVDs just fine, but I could never seem to tune it into the TV channels, which is kind of critical if you're wanting to record something. So today, after having wrestled with more SCART leads than you can poke a stick at, spent several minutes in complete panic when I thought I'd completely screwed up my new TV, I found to my subsequent amusement that all this time I only needed to press the AV button a couple of times on the remote.

Now I've actually ventured into the instruction manuals, I've discovered it does loads of things I didn't even realise. Why didn't I think of studying them before? Probably for the same reason as we never stop the car and ask for directions...