IKEA and the Flatpacks

Recently I called into Ikea with Mrs P to purchase a spice rack. We left two hours later and £600 lighter with a trolley so stuffed full of gear that we were debating whether we'd get it in one car run or two back to the house.
Currently, back at the house, I'm assembling my third shoe rack. Although putting together the furniture is a pain in the rear end I take my hat off to the furniture designers and also those who devised the construction plans. The latter no longer comes into 25 languages but with no lingua at all. All you get is a series of diagrams but they're easy enough to follow. Happily nowadays with this kind of flat pack furniture you get a second chance. If you go wrong you can unscrew something and go backwards way. In the early days of flatpack you had no such alternative. One wrong move and usually the panel you were wrongly forcing into the wrong front section of the drawer was slotted in for life and you had no choice but to look at your mistake hanging off the incomplete music centre for the rest of its natural life. Worse too, the instructions would come with a note telling you that school kids in East Germany assembled the same bit of flatpack perfectly in less than 40 minutes!

We never did find the spice rack.

Of Cleaning Up the Plastic Bag Habit

I spent two hours in my local river yesterday evening. I was with a bunch of volunteers on our annual clean up of the Six Mile Water. In just two hours about half a dozen of us fished out a shopping trolley, a hoover, part of a washing machine, half a bike and the remnants of countless plastic bags. 

This morning at Tesco I was asked if I had brought my own plastic bag with me. When I admitted I hadn't I was dealt such a face of disapproval from the assistant that I felt lucky not to have been subjected to a citizen's arrest. But she was right. Plastic bags are the scourge of the countryside and thoughtless shoppers like me just don't help. Time to raise my game...

Of You Must Meet Martin

"You must meet Martin" - that's what I had been hearing for the past five years from a variety of quarters. Martin is head of a company based in Antrim that is selling fantastic technology all over the world.
At the end of last year I managed to get him out for lunch. Yesterday we sat down for almost two hours and talked about a  product development idea of mine. Every question he asked me was right on the money. The leads he threw in my direction were phenomenal. The business models he generously shared with me were priceless.
Take it from me. If someone in Antrim says to you "You must meet Martin" they're probably right...

Of Why You Can't Rush the Russian

I'm doing Russian vowels with my teacher at the moment and the pain is intense. Some vowels are relatively easy when you realise they always sound the same but different to how you would pronounce them in English. "O" for example, is much closer to an "A" sound then an "O" but pronounce it as "A" and it wouldn't be right (though close enough one hopes).
There's one corker of a vowel I just cant do at the moment. It's a letter the like of which I've never seen before and the closest I can get to it is by making a gentle retching sound whilst trying to smile at the same time. It's a great language Russian, but definitely not one for the self conscious!

Donegal Easter Weekend

I climbed up Mount Errigal in County Donegal yesterday. Being Easter Sunday it felt a bit like an Easter pilgrimage and I think it was busier than it normally is.

The views at the summit are spectacular but all I remember now is that we were clinging onto each for dear life. The wind was blowing like it knew our names and tugged at our coats all the way up and down.

Of Two Today

We're celebrating this week the second anniversary of the opening of our training centre. Since March 2011 our new centre has been used for its seminar rooms by countless organisations wanting somewhere quiet but central in Northern Ireland with plenty of parking.
Best of all we hope to extend the property further to add another couple of rooms and offer even more to local businesses and employers.

Of the Hell of Good Intentions

I'm learning Russian at the moment with a view to doing a GCSE in it next April. It's tough going.
The alphabet is full of lots of awkward letters the like of which I've never seen in any other foreign language. Some letters I've discovered do nothing except change the pronunciation of letters it follows. As I read out loud to my Russian teacher it must sound as painful as it does awful.
And there's worse to come. Verbs it seems change according to the tense they're in and the gender of the noun they're working with. Get it? No, me neither....