Birthday Boy

~~Backblip~~

Sunday was Mathew's 24th brithday :-D

I woke up at about 7AM, feeling worse than ever. I had a massive coughing fit that resulted in me spewing up masses of phlegm. However, I went back to bed and woke up feeling much better than I'd been for days.

Nell set off for home, and Mathew and I went into town. I'd lost a battle between my head and heart. Mathew's pretty good to me, and he's helped me out financially when times have been tough. Things are looking up a little (well quite a lot) so I decided to push the boat out, and we went to get him an iPad. We tried it in the shop, and he was disappointed that it wouldn't do the one thing he needed it to do, so he decided against the iPad. He was pretty gutted, but didn't see a need for it if it wasn't going to do what he wanted. I was pretty gutted too, as there was nothing else he wanted. In the end though, we found a way to get it to almost do what he wanted - to do enough of the job to make it worthwhile, so he's now the proud owner of a shiny new gadget. Having treated him, I felt it was only fair that I treat myself too... not to anything as flash as the iPad, but I now am a two-lens boy :-D Curry's had a Pentax DA SMC 50-200 zoom lens at a knock-down price, as it was the display model. I guess they were making room for the new Pentax K-r stuff coming out soon. Either way, I'm happy. Lens = mine.

Later at night, once he'd had a good chance to play with the pad, we went off to the Bay to get a good old-fashioned urban portrait (i.e. so I could play with the new lens). I like the pretty bokeh, but the lens does take some getting used to. There are some more shots on the flickr, including this one Mathew took of me. I did the processing, but there's no crop, that's just the way he composed!

In other news, still no broadband. We phoned BT who told us that they could see we'd reported the issue online (thank god for dongles) on the 5th, but a COMMUNICATIONS fault at their end meant no job had been raised. Mathew entered full pissed-off-customer mode and had a lengthy argument with the dude and his manager, the end result being...