Birthdays and So Much More

For Dori and me, this last weekend marks the start of a holiday season that goes all the way through to next spring.

It began with my birthday, which I celebrated by watching Team Europe squeak a victory in the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor in Wales. As I foretold in my last post, the weather left a lot to be desired for much of the competition, only to end with a gloriously sunny day on Monday as the contest entered an extra day for the first time in its history. To say this year’s event was close would be a massive understatement, with every single match counting towards the final outcome. If just one individual match had gone from a Europe win to being halved, or from being halved to a US win then the American team would have been flying home with the Ryder Cup yesterday.

The tie ebbed and flowed considerably over the course of the 4 days, with Europe starting well only for the US to gain the upper hand, and then Europe fighting back with a stunning third session of games to take a commanding lead into the singles matches. But all was not done and dusted, and the Americans made a tremendous effort to claw their way back into the contest and level the scores with just one match left on the course. The pressure on those two final players must have been immense and it was US Open champion Graeme McDowell who managed to hold his nerve better and secure the win for Team Europe. Yet again the Ryder Cup produced sporting excellence and drama in equal measures and I am already looking forward to the next staging of the event, which will be at Medinah Country Club, Illinois in 2012.

Aside from the golf, we also went out for a meal together with my Mum, who celebrates her birthday on the same day as me. The food was delicious and we all had a very pleasant time. It was a good weekend.

But, as I was saying, this is the start of our holiday season. Being from two different places, as I have mentioned here before, means that we get to celebrate even more holidays than most people. Starting with my birthday, we then have Halloween, Bonfire Night, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, Dori’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, Pancake Day, Mothers Day, St George’s Day, Easter and our wedding anniversary – and no doubt I’ve forgotten one or two in there :-) And by the time we have gone through all of it will be time to start looking ahead to next summer! Time to get buying cards methinks!!

New Boxes and Old Heroes

It was a good weekend here in the Yellow House. Sunday was Mother’s Day in the UK and we took some flowers and a small gift round to my Mum’s house to celebrate the fact. She was most pleased with the gift and we spent a couple of hours over there just hanging out.

We also had a visit from the satellite engineer on Saturday. The analogue TV signal will be switched off over the next two weeks in our region, as part of a programme to convert the whole nation to digital television. We already have satellite TV on our main set, but the switchover would mean that we would be unable to watch different shows on the main TV and our bedroom TV, or to record something other than the channel we are already watching. So, we decided to upgrade our satellite box, and move the old box upstairs for use on our bedroom TV.

The engineer was here for about an hour replacing our old satellite dish, installing the new box and moving the old one. The new receiver we have for our main TV is a Sky+HD box. Our TV isn’t an HD (High Definition) ready one yet, but it was more the Sky+ features that we were interested in getting. Sky+ is the UK equivalent of TiVo, as well as being a satellite receiver. So, we can now record over 200 hours of programming without the need for loads of video tapes or DVDs, record 2 channels at the same time, pause live TV and record a whole series automatically. The Yellow House has now truly joined the digital age! :) As a bonus, we now have access to all the satellite channels on our upstairs set. We feel like we are in a 5 star hotel! LOL

This is our new Sky+HD receiver.

In other news, today marks the 41st anniversary of Swindon Town’s momentous League Cup victory at Wembley. They defeated the mighty Arsenal 3-1 with the legendary Don Rogers scoring twice. This is still arguably the club’s finest hour – although I would suggest that their promotion to the Premiership in 1993 was a greater achievement. Anyway, today is a day to remember the boys of '69.