dale lane

Yesterday, I went up to Islington in London for a “fun” poker tournament. The entry fee was paid for by my wife as a surprise birthday present, and was my first experience of playing poker against people I didn’t know, or for more than £5 stake!

The game was no-limits Texas Hold’em – with about eight people to each table to start with, and the top three players from each game moving on to the next table.

Amazingly, I did quite well – winning on my first table quite convincingly, and making it through to the last two players on the last table. Where I got pressured into going all-in before I was really ready. Shame.

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I’m not a travel writer. If I was, I’d be rubbish at it – writing code is one thing, but my attempts at stringing together anything vaguely like an engaging narrative are basically rubbish. And even if I thought I was good at that sort of thing, I’ve been in Manila for about three hours, so any conclusions I might come to now are massively premature.

Still, why let that stop me, eh? Because it’s been an interesting arrival, and without blogging, I’ve got noone else around to talk to about it. 🙂

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I’m all for declarative living and putting everything about myself online, but it’s not for everyone. I’m thinking that I should come up with a name for my wife and daughter to use online.

MetroDad talks about “Boss Lady” and the “Peanut”, both of which names I love, and have frequently been tempted to blatantly plagiarise. 🙂

Ian refers to one of his kids as “predlet” (it makes more sense if you know that his online identity is often epredator… at least, I guess that’s why).

I think Roo has referred to his lady as “Mrs Roo” before (but I can’t remember where, and with roaming data charges at £7.50 a meg, I’m not gonna spend much time looking now – you’ll just have to take my word for it 🙂 ). I like it, but I would worry that if I started talking about “Mrs Dale” then people might think I’m talking about a camp alter-ego.

Kelly uses “The Girl”, which I quite like. And I think she uses “Himself” for her husband. (same excuse as before – I’m writing this offline, and coping without Internet access is a little like coping with half my brain lopped off!)

Anyway, this is really all a roundabout way of saying that, whatever I call them for this post, I’m missing them both lots while I’m away.

I’m sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for my flight. Through sheer dumb luck, I managed to blag a business class “Club World” flight. (no economy class seats available at this late notice). So I’m sat in the posh lounge bit for the wealthy types, which is all new to me, and very nice.

I’m feeling very relaxed. 🙂

I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think the reason (and the value proposition behind the Club World experience – although I’ve not seen it marketed like this) is all about trust. The difference between this and the facilities available to economy class passengers is that they trust you…

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We’re moving to Basingstoke, so we’re now going through the joy that is house-hunting.

Since we started, it has kind of felt like my phone hasn’t stopped ringing with estate agents wanting something, but today has been a special kind of joy. 🙂

Estate agent 1 – Phoned to get feedback on what we thought of a house after a viewing. Sounds like a reasonable question, except that we haven’t been to see that house yet. (And she is the one who is going to be showing us round that house later this week.)

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Grace doesn’t watch a lot of TV, but when she does it tends to be CBeebies – BBC’s digital channel for kids. (I’m not entirely sure if there was a lot of thought behind why CBeebies – but ITV’s kids channel has only been around for a year, so I guess it was mainly that we got into a habit when it was one of the only options.)

I’m bringing this up because Grace watched Winnie the Pooh on telly in bed with me this morning. The TV in our bedroom doesn’t have Freeview, so I was limited to terrestrial channels. I happened to come across ‘The Book of Pooh’ on five just by chance – she loves Winnie the Pooh, and it bought me an extra half-hour in bed, so everyone was happy.

Anyway, this is just an observation, and I’m not trying to make a deep and meaningful point here… but the difference between watching kids TV on the BBC and five was striking. Adverts.

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