Cleaning up at EuropeCrazy HQ

Today I became the proud owner of that must-have gadget which I've been saving up for - a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner.  It's pretty fab too.  The down side is that you have to charge the battery unit for a while and only get 15 mins hoovering (or should that be Dysoning?) in return.  But on the plus side it just means that you have to move pretty fast to get all your cleaning done before the battery runs out.  But look on the bright side....it cuts the housework time down and leaves more time for fun stuff! 

All killer, no filler

I know this is a music-related post so it doesn't belong here, but here it is anyway....

This weekend my iPod reached full capacity.

Now there are two things you can do in this situation: you can buy a new one with more capacity, or you can get the quality control hat on....

I like my old iPod too much to get a new one, so I went for option two and ruthlessly un-ticked about 100 songs on iTunes. Of course the best thing about having an iPod and iTunes means that you're only ever going to listen to good stuff, that you'll never have to suffer Scouting for Girls or "JA-SON DERUUUUUULLLOOO" ever again. But sometimes it just gets a little overcrowded so it was quality control time :)

For me, my iPod is the world's best radio station, and today the world's best radio station just got better. There are now exactly 1000 songs on it, no more, no less. Today I was off work for a very productive day of pre-holiday retail therapy (for a holiday I still haven't booked yet) and my day was soundtracked by my new leaner, meaner iPod, on shuffle and I didn't have to hit the skip button once :)))

Touchy!

It's not been all bad news over the last few days though, as I've got me a new phone, one of those state of the art today, obsolete tomorrow, touch-screen phones. Which is surprisingly easy to use, (even with my index finger all plastered up following a horrible accident at home last Friday) and it might even help me to text quicker. Being the world's slowest texter, that's a tall order :)

Anyway it's got 'widgets' and a decent camera and I've even got some music on it, even if it's only five songs just now, all by the same person. Yes, that one.

Which brings me to a conversation earlier tonight with the eternally technophobic faithful travelling companion:

Me: "I've got a tune from a certain Swedish musical genius as my ringtone."

Him: "Basshunter!"

Windows 2010 / Frozen Britain / Buffering / Phone....

Taking a bit of "chill out" time which in these temperatures takes on a new meaning!

I'm not referring to some new operating system, but actually to the new windows at EuropeCrazy HQ which are very nice and functional and ...new, but there is so much else to be done, involving continued upheaval over the space of the coming week which means normality and blogging and stuff is on hold yet again.

FROZEN BRITAIN! yells the headline scrolling across the screen of all our news channels. As this country is totally rubbish and can't get anything right, we're therefore subject to salt shortages. (I wonder what the implications are for chip shops across the UK???? What will you have with your vinegar??) Anyway there's a grit shortage, cars are skidding and crashing, people are falling and fracturing limbs, and we've been looking out at the same snow/ice which has refused to shift since about mid-December. Still, it could be so much worse. You could live in a part of Russia which is -40 degrees. Wonder how they cope? Better than us, I should imagine.

What's been annoying me today? Constant buffering on YouTube, and not being able to watch the Norsk Melodi Grand Prix because I don't have this super-duper-fast internet connection.

On the plus side, I got my new touch screen phone on Friday, which is going to take me about 5 years to actually learn how it works, ha ha.

And one more thing: woolly hats with pom-poms totally rule.