The exciting (for me) news this weekend is that I get to move back into my house on the 8th of August. 

This is good in that I will no longer be sleeping on my friend's sofa-bed, will have a lot of my own things back and be able to do what the hell I want when the hell I want to...

What is bad is that I only know because I called our tenants, who apparently informed our letting agent a week and a half ago that they are off.  Marvellous.  Why can't there be a little more honesty in this kind of business. 
Perhaps more to the point, why the hell can't people just do things the way that they should be doing them. 

I wonder if it will all be that straight forward. 
I am going to Guildford this weekend anyway, so I don't even have time to worry about thinking about sorting out what needs to be done for then.  ...in good time

In a day or two I will get paid and then (and probably only then - it was a heavy month, I bought a car and travelled from France to England to France to England and things), I am going to but the new PJ Harvey album.

I have read great things and know besides all that media stuff that she is an outstanding artist... I know that it will make me want some real hi fi back though.

Ah, hi fi...
I am going to Guildford at the end of the month and I will be pilling a load of stuff back to my friend's flat (where I am currently staying until I get my own house back). The main items of interest to me being our 'spare' hi fi that has been at Grinding Halt for safe keeping (rather than in our loft like our frying pans, Jock the dog and a Pioneer mini system, or in France where all our Important Stuff still is). I can't wait to have it, even if it is a collection of relics and cast-offs.

Luckily I still had enough money to buy some food.

Hannu has booked a flight back to the UK for the 8th September. That is when I will next see my wife and that is a little scary.

But not anything that we won't live through and remember it in years to come as 'the sort of thing that we do'. I don't think that we are unusual in that we have spent quite a bit of time apart in the - almost five now - that we have known each other. But I know that there are mostly good reasons for it all.

Like making some sacrifices in the present in order to live how we want to live in the long term? Maybe. Quality of Life is one of my favourite things and for me that phrase does not always seem to meet with practicality... and that is absolutely OK.

I am at work, finishing some things off and kind of waiting for the right moment to have someone let me out.

I'm back in the media centre... it's really quite nice. 
 
More when there is a moment. 

OK, let me get this straight. Right now I am in France. It is the second week of my two week 'visit' back to where I grew up and where I have been living with Hannu since Christmas. But I am returning here from a month spent in the UK, where I have just started a new job. There, although we own a house (I am sure there will be more about number 42 at some point later), I had to stay with a friend as our property has been let while we were out of the country... and I was not expecting to be back so soon.

So I was in a familiar city, wearing my same old clothes and seeing the same lovely friends. But the rest of life suddenly leapt into a different dimension.

Having a totally new job is great. In fact I cannot believe that such a beautifully insane place to work would suddenly appear to me just when most needed.
But it is just mind bendingly odd to live on the uncharted territory between all that is familiar... and driving past the end of 'my street' but never turning down to our front door because someone else lives there. And well, none of the cars that I have been driving have been 'my car'. Because I work in a somewhat rural area, I have had to just buy another (UK based) car so that I can get to work and back. And I have to settle back to this new life and sort out my mobile, yet give out someone else's contact details and pretend that they are mine. It is kind of like being a secret agent and having to erase a past life (well, for a couple of months at least). Or pretending to be amnesiac and not remembering what I should really be doing.

I am of no fixed abode.
And Hannu will be in France until September.
... I think it might be another odd summer.

So long as I can take more of my record collection with me when I head back North again.