No, really? Where do I begin. 36 days since my last entry. Very, very, very poor. Let's see where things are at.

June came and went very quickly. Too quickly, as it turned out - as I discovered that the car tax on the RX8 was running out at the end of the month. Equipped with the fancy form from the DVLA and the interweb, I endeavoured to renew it.... and, about this point is when I discovered I'd totally forgotten about the car needing an MOT... Whoops!

So, I quickly booked the car in for the service it was due, and its MOT - on the 4th of July, a few days after I noticed the car now required an MOT (being over 3 years old), four days into the month the car's no longer taxed for. Erk. To make matters worse, this weekend was Katy & Mark's wedding weekend, and I was due to be in Shropshire over the weekend. Time, as the saying goes, was of the essence!

It was also around this time that I became aware of a dull pain in my right ear, and the gradual hearing loss I began experiencing. Over the course of a few days between the MOT expiry and the wedding, my hearing levels in my right ear dropped to barely audible.

The 306 trundles on! So far my money-saving plan is going pretty well. The Pug gets over 500 miles to a tank, which is at least 300 more than the RX8 did. Sure, it tops out at 100 (and feels decidedly ropey above 90!) but in doing the job of transporting me from A to B without costing me the earth, it's doing a great job.

What's more, it's coped with over 3500 miles in the last four weeks alone. Unfortunately, the concept of 'zero maintenance' seems to have passed by the wayside.

As mentioned the other week, the radiator appears to have a little leak. However, I can report that chucking a small packet of Radweld into it appears to have plugged it up. How long it'll last, however, is anyone's guess.

There was heavy rain the other day driving down the M18, heavy enough to necessitate the use of the 'fast' wiper settings. However, this vigorous wiper use revealed a hidden horror of the vehicle - the rear and front passenger wipers were held on with (very well concealed) zip ties! After a few minutes, the wipers were scraping the window as opposed to removing rain. A new set of wipers ran to 20 quid from Halfrauds. Bugger.

We were away for the weekend, at Emma's mam's. Emma is getting her bridesmaid dress all fixed and fitted up for Katy's wedding in July. We came home on Sunday evening, ensuring we'd left the Bank Holiday Monday free for a full day spent together as a family.

It wasn't til bedtime that we'd realised that we'd need to go grocery shopping. The idea of wandering around Morrisons on a Bank Holiday didn't really appeal, so I reckoned that we could get with the rest of the 21st century and order our shopping online. We've done this a few times before, but for some reason the habit never sticks.

By the time we'd got a list together, and found all the items on Tesco's site, it was nearly half one in the morning. To my amazement, the site offered us a delivery slot between 2 and 4pm that afternoon! The same day! On a bank holiday! Madness.

And, just after 2pm, as promised, the Tescos van drew up with our shopping. That's pretty damned impressive. Obviously, Tescos has a ready-made logistics and distribution network (eg. its stores all around the country) which makes this feat somewhat easier to manage than a traditional online business, but wouldn't it be lovely if all big retailers could manage this?

So, it's been a couple of weeks with the bargain basement 306, and I've spent enough time with it to find its faults - we'll see how much more falls off in the coming weeks.

The radiator seems to have a leak. I've had to top the beast up with water a couple of times in the last three weeks. A red light flickers on the dashboard when the water level drops below a certain level in the system. Topping this up seems to cure the light for a week or so. I read on t'interweb that 306's have a tendancy to eat radiators, and with age and mileage, they tend to leak at the bottom of the radiator. From a quick inspection this seems to be where my water is leaking from.

I can find a replacement radiator off eBay for about 40 quid, and I think i could make a reasonable crack at fitting it myself - the DTurbo is a purely mechanical beast, no crazy engine electrics or anything, but this car is supposed to be 'zero maintenance' for me, so I'm tempted to just chuck a can of Radweld in the rad and see how it goes...

Another blog hiatus - good reasons this time, though!

One, holiday. We went to Lanzarote for a week in April - blummin' lovely. The weather was nice and toasty all week - topping out at a positively sticky 38.5C! Really very hot - especially for Aimee, who point-blank refused all week to wear her sun hat. She only accepted the sunglasses too towards the end of the holiday, and even then only because we'd managed to convince her that they were 'cool shades', with us demonstrating to her multiple times that mummy and daddy wore them, so she should too!

Never been to Lanzarote before - been several times to Tenerife, another Canary Island, but never to Lanzarote. It's often been said of Tenerife that "it'll be nice...when it's finished" - a nod to Tenerife's non-stop redevelopment, with more building sites and construction cranes than actual holiday resorts, and that downtown Playa Las Americas is a bit of a haven for lager louts and clubbers - and this is true, but there's also some very nice parts of the island and the year-round summer climate is certainly welcome.

So, when we touched down in Arrecife on Lanzarote, I was braced for more of the same. As it turns out, I was quite wrong.

Some time ago now, I bought some wine from Virgin Wines. It was cheap, and the quality middling - though their full money-back offer if you didn't like the wine was (and still is, I believe) too good to miss. As a customer of theirs they send me their marketing offers via email every now and then, and unlike many other companies, they send me an email maybe once a month.

Other internet retailers - This is good. I don't want to know about your MEGA SPECIAL OFFERS more often than this. Once a week is too often. Twice a week is where I look for the unsubscribe links, and any more often than that and I'll be blackholing your mail outright.

However, recently I've noticed that they're resorting to some pretty daft e-marketing 'tricks' with their offer emails. Like the one above, which arrived with the subject line of 'SAVE £192.50... a bottle! Only 500 cases left".

The email paints the picture that Virgin are selling bottles of wine that could go for £200 a time, at the princely sum of £7.50. An amazing deal, if it were true.

When we heard, months ago, that Sheffield's dilapidated 'Roxy Disco' building had been purchased by the AMG group - operators of the 'Carling Academy' music venues - with a view to it becoming the 'Sheffield Carling Academy' we were quite excited. As time moved on, and we found out that the venue's opening act would be Grenoside's own 'Reverend & The Makers', well, let's just say that the clickthru to seetickets.com was more-or-less instantaneous.

As it turns out, it was quite lucky we bought our tickets when we did, because the gig sold out only a day or two later - pretty impressive for an act that's only troubled the top 20 twice.

We arranged for my mum to pop over and babysit Aimee, and we toddled off to the bus stop for the bus to town - a little later than we'd planned, but we weren't really bothered too much as we figured the first support act, 'Toddla T' (no, really) would be toss anyhow. If we'd could catch some 'Smokers Die Younger', the other support act, that'd be great. However, due to First South Yorkshire's dire bus service (our 'every 15 minutes' service arrived after standing at the bus stop for nearly 50 minutes) and our mixed up assumption of the running order, we arrived at the Academy mid-way through 'Toddla T's set. Joy.

...are, mercifully, unfounded! ;)

I am a very busy bee, you see.

Off to a Reverend and the Makers gig tonight, will report tomorrow.

I know, I know, I know. I'm as disappointed in myself as you all must be. What a bastard, not updating the blog for a whole week.

Well, that's well and truly broken the New Year's resolution. Damnit.

As it happens, the last week has been very busy, and has had some ups as well as downs. There was a 'shock' announcement at work, David came to visit us, and Aimee learned how to point to the various parts of ones body in the "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" song! Such a busy life!

Anyhow, David came to visit and stay for the weekend, which was great. We're doing some preliminary investigations into how feasible it might be for us to 'tank' out our cellar, and make it a livable room. Presently, the floor is laid with bricks - David dug some up and discovered that there's just bare soil underneath - so it might be possible for us to rip the bricks out and get a proper floor laid.

In other news - last week, my employers decided to announce the closure of the office I work from, and relocate all staff to their head office some 45 miles away. This is somewhat surprising and certainly disappointing news, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't totally unexpected.

All the online April Fools' jokes were poor this year. The whole point of them is that they're supposed to be vaguely plausible - so you'd read/look at them and think that it's real.

Who's ever going to believe that Google and Virgin would open a Martian colony? Or that kernel.org.uk, the home of the Linux kernel, was switching to FreeBSD?

Then there's the jokes that are just designed to get a laugh - like Youtube's redirection of videos to the Rick Astley classic, "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Maybe the days have gone where we'd be fooled into thinking spaghetti grew on trees, and we're all far more 'informed', due to the wonderous interweb...