Oh, And….
... It's actually on. We're due to complete on the house on Monday at the latest, though due to availability of movers we can't actually move in until Wednesday. But I've just wired a large amount of money to our solicitor and that serves to make it all feel very real.
We're both going to be sad to leave the flat - we've been there nearly three years after all, got the cat there, and got married from there, so it's a very important place for us both. But now it's time to have a new important place. Expect news soon.
I Keep Letting Things Here Slip
Must try harder.
Oh well, by way of catching up: The Bank Holiday weekend was somewhat given over to having a bloody good go through all the stuff we've been dumping in the attic for the last couple of years, somewhat else given over to slumping really quite badly, and slightly given over to going to Heathrow Airport for a work trip.
The attic day was very productive, and left us with the realisation that we'd been seriously overestimating the amount of stuff up there. We rid ourselves of a lot of old videos, books and the like, and found ourselves several useful bits and pieces we'd pretty much forgotten about. The number of empty boxes that get stored ('for if we need to move the computer/monitor/miscellaneous electronic item') long after their original contents have left the premises is ridiculous.
The Heathrow trip was as you might expect - I went, I checked in, I waited for departure, I departed. Was just an overnight trip, but it was enlivened on the return by the sight of a man who'd been pulled over in the customs hall having the DOZENS of boxes (and by that I mean 200 -to-the-box size boxes) of cigarettes being counted by the customs officer who had removed them from his suitcases. The following morning someone on Today was talking about how much tobacco smuggling there is, and I found myself nodding in agreement.
In News news, the whole saga over Her Horsiness attending or not attending the memorial service for Her Over-Ratedness serves no other purpose than to show that we're not quite out of the silly season, but I truly wish we were. And there seems to have been an earthquake in Manchester this morning, the sixth in a month, but hardly anyone really seems to have noticed.
House – Two
The TV series, that is. The Mrs has discovered it and is really rather liking it. I've seen odd episodes, mostly in gloomy hotel rooms in the US, and thought that it was very well done, but I've never been able really to get into it. It's one of those things that I ought to like, based on past performance, but which I've failed to get to grips with.
Does anyone watch it? Is it worth me making an effort with?
House – One
It's all taking shape. We've had survey and gas/electrical inspections done (all's well) and are just waiting for all the local authority search stuff to come back before hopefully moving quite quickly. We're confident enough that it's really going to happen, and quite soon, that we've had someone round from a moving company to evaluate the scale of the job.
And yes, we're being moved, and yes, they're doing the packing. What do you think, we're idiots or something?
Oh All Right
As The Mrs is so signally not talking about the exciting trip next year, I shall announce it myself.
We're going to Japan.
Specifically, he's going for five weeks to have a good old explore and be an Independent Traveller, and I'm going to join him for the last two weeks mostly to cover Tokyo and Kyoto.
It's going to be huge.
Travel Plans
The Mrs and I have been discussing a big trip for a long time. The view has always been that we want to do something really impressive with quite a significant number of Frequent Flyer miles I've been accumulating for the last few years. We always had one particular faraway destination in mind to go to for a couple of weeks, travelling for free in a 'premium cabin' to minimise cost, inevitable stress and The Mrs' terrible jetlag.
Then, sometime in the last week, the plan suddenly exploded into something rather bigger to be embarked upon next spring. I'll leave himself to provide some details over on his own blog, as his is the most exciting side of things, but we booked the flights last night, and suddenly it's all real. I know it is, because suddenly I don't have a couple of hundred thousand miles in my account 
Only The Good….
Mike Wieringo, comic artist and by every reliable account an all-round great guy, died of a heart attack at the weekend. 44 years old and a regularly exercising vegetarian. Clearly that's not right.
'Ringo, as he was known, had a justly renowned run on DC Comics' Flash title with writer Mark Waid, and after various other assignments re-teamed with Waid to breathe some much needed life into "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine", Fantastic Four, a series which had been lacking in drive and direction for some time (and which has returned to that state under the dismal guidance of J Michael Straczinski). He and Waid were shortly due to announce another shared series for Marvel which I would almost certainly have picked up on the strength of their previous collaborations alone, even without knowing what it was to be about.
Waid is one of several creators who offer their own memories on this Newsarama thread.
The Move (Again)
So in anticipation of the new house (see postings passim) actually going ahead, we spent a disturbingly lengthy stint on Saturday giving the bedroom a going over. This involved getting everything out of the surprisingly capacious cupboard, the various drawers and the space under the bed, and deciding to keep it or bin it. The object of the exercise is that when the movers come we can just say "everything in that room is to go" secure in the knowledge that we won't be taking tons of stuff we don't actually either want or need. We're moving on to do the same in the other rooms the evenings of this week.
I'm very keen on this plan, as having done something similar as I was clearing out my old flat a couple of months ago I'd realised exactly how much junk it's possible to accumulate. I've got everything I wanted to take out of a one bedroom flat (barring furniture) into a pretty small storage space. The rest went in the bin. I was quite impressed with my own ruthlessness, but this is precisely the quality that has to be applied in the circumstances. As the Mrs said on Saturday "No sentimentality!". The end result was bags and bags of rubbish and a much less cluttered space.
We've been saying for a while (and it's obviously partly the motivation for the move) that we've filled the flat, and it's true that we simply didn't have the space to put away a lot of the things we own, even allowing for the attic, which is also pretty well loaded. Now, in one room at least, we have space to breath again. It's a sad fact that there's so much stuff in a home that it's so easy to accumulate unnecessarily.
Recently Tomorrow
Where did the last few days go?
Well, on Tuesday evening I joined various of the gang from Millarworld as Millar was in town with Marvel Comics' Editor In Chief Joe Quesada and introductions were in order. For various reasons it ended up being a rather more crowded do than the intimate affair that was originally planned, but much fun was had, and I saw a certain writer of Doctor Who more pissed than I think anyone has ever seen him before. There's a write-up on the evening on Newsarama, though I wasn't around for all of it as I had to head off for an early start the following day.
One of the many conversations I had with people that evening was about the Big Finish audio dramas that *aren't* their Doctor Who output, specifically their Sapphire and Steel and The Tomorrow People series. I haven't heard any of the S and S stuff, and I'm sort of of the feeling (as was the person I was speaking to) that although they're reputedly very good, there's a completeness to the six televised stories that I don't want to break.
The Tomorrow People audios, on the other hand, I've been intrigued about for a while. This is the series that even more than Doctor Who defined my childhood TV experience. It was probably the first fully realised focus of the geeky obsession that I'm all too horribly capable of. Even then I wasn't blind to the shonky production values and the more than dodgy acting that characterised it (especially in the later years), but still I couldn't imagine missing a single episode. And so the 'intrigued' was heightened earlier this week to the point that I actually bought one of them yesterday. Rather than going back to the very beginning of the run, I decided to start with the most recent 'series', though I accidentally picked up the second story rather than the first. I'm not really sure what I make of it, because I've clearly come in right in the middle of some serious ongoing stuff, which makes it hard to judge in isolation. I think it'll need a re-listen.
But in the meantime, the obsession is rekindled and I'm now eyeing the DVD boxset on Amazon with keen interest. The Mrs reminds me that on a shelf at home we actually have a copy of what's generally regarded as the definitive TP story, The Blue and the Green, so I think I need to watch that this weekend before I make any rash purchases. It's possible that seeing it again may make me realise the error of my childhood ways....
Into A Greener World
So my new car was delivered yesterday, and it's a Toyota Prius. It's shiny and silver and has a very space age console which holds the controls for lots of the functions and the display for the sat-nav and engine performance monitor. There's been a certain amount of mockery of it at work, but to be honest, with a cheaper to run mileage (especially when so much of my driving is in town) and a significant tax saving, I think I know who'll be laughing loudest in the end. It's a lovely smooth drive, and it's remarkable how much interest it attracts from other road users. I haven't felt this pretty in a long time