January 29, 2004

  • After such a long gap I'm not sure if I can remember all that's happened. However, don't fear I'll try to stay away from the real trivia.


    My daughter's shop has now been open 3 weeks. She has a fair amount of stock and is slowly building up the number of customers. Still not enough to pay the bills but we keep encouraging her. We have a number of things planned to help publicise the shop over the next few months. She's finding that there are long boring periods when noone comes in. She also has to take her 7 month old daughter to the shop and look after her there. I'm not working at the moment so I try to pop in every day to give her some company and to hold my granddaughter. We've kitted her out with a microwave, chiller(for milk), TV and VCR. The TV is so she can play videos for Mya, her daughter. I think it might help with customers children as well.


    I've finally managed to get an American style fridge freezer. I thought it might be difficult to get through the door as it's so large. But the delivery guys had no problems with. It's great that we can now have ice and chilled water whenever we want. I'm not so sure about having to user a thumbprint to get into the refrigerator part and I do think the voice print and iris recognition is over the top for the freezer. I should have guessed when the delivery men asked if I had a machine readable passport which they made me stick in a slot in the front. I'm sure we'll get used to all this security. If not then we'll just have to starve.


    Still looking for work and reciving plenty of phone calls, mostly offerring reasonable rates. Unfortunately, none have developed any further. So not even an interview yet. I did get one surprise. The company I used to work for, six and a half years ago, are putting a bid together for some local government work and wanted to include me in their offer. I agreed but don't feel too confident about them succeeding. Chances of winning bids like that are about 20-25%. I haven't been offerred any work in Iraq yet. But then I'm not sure I'd want to go at the moment