David's diary: September 2010

Katy alerted me yesterday evening to the fact that I hadn't added anything here this month - indeed it's pushing two months since my last update, and quite a bit has happened since then. Nothing earth shatteringly exciting, and much of it costing money we'd rather not be spending, but some good bits amongst them for sure.

Starting with the positive, we went to the Wings & Wheels air and car show at Dunsfold (home of Top Gear) on August bank-holiday Monday, which was a truly excellent day out, as a belated birthday present to our friend Darren. Whereas the Farnborough Airshow has become tedious in recent years, the air-display element in particular of Wings & Wheels was really quite inspired and had a near-perfect mix of crowd-pleasers from the Spitfire through to the Eurofighter Typhoon, of course via the Red Arrows and the ever-wonderful Blades aero teams.

That was about the least expensive thing that's happened though, with other things including our car needing an expensive service and cam-belt renewal (thankfully saving about £200 on main dealer prices via a good mobile mechanic Darren recommended) and most recently our cold water tank needing replacement after it mysteriously developed a leaky hairline fracture, which didn't come cheap with three hours labour. At least through the latter we have now found a plumber we are happy with, having had some pretty poor experiences with the last couple.

My Goznet Systems work's plodded on patchily, with a couple of new sites produced for less money than I should have quoted, but I'm too kind to my friends... One of those was a simple Facebook application though, so that's a useful feather in my cap, having had only very unsuccessful attempts in that area previously. There's some other potentially massive projects in the offing, but I'm not pinning too much hope on those converting into actual development work this side of the new year. So no, overall it's not been too great business-wise lately, and these extra car and plumbing expenses came at a pretty lousy time, but thankfully we still have quite a few reserves left after Katy's redundancy pay-out last year, so no need to panic.