Liverpool-Smiverpool and other things this week

See how I cunningly made no reference to Monday's Liverpool v Everton game? I got the draw part right, it was inevitable as soon as Liverpool conceded a free-kick with three minutes to go. How frustrating! Well, they can do it all again in the FA Cup on Sunday afternoon (4pm, on Setanta - hmm, is the Wendover beckoning again? Perhaps I'll just listen on the radio instead).

I watched Barack Hussein Obama fluff his lines on Tuesday, but was impressed by his speech, it'll be interesting to see how things change in the coming months as he undoes those thing Dubya set up. I was also impressed how he went to 10 Balls in one night (at 2am Washington time he was at #9 apparently), had to dance and give a speech at each one, yet he was in the Oval office at 8.35 the next morning. The power of Red Bull, eh? During the inauguration I wasn't impressed with BBC's coverage which had the commentators desperately trying to talk all the time about anything at all rather than just chipping in with pertinent comments at the appropriate time; I nearly missed the swearing-in because I was channel hopping over to CNN to watch their coverage. I did come back to the BBC in the end because not even they chose to talk over Obama's speech.

I was watching this via our spanky new Sky+ box; we'd been having problems with the old one, with the picture and sound freezing on recorded programmes, and a bit of googling took me to a forum where someone had suggested a method of convincing Sky that it was better for them to swap an old, dodgy box for a new one rather than risk losing a perfectly good paying customer (here's the post). So now we have double the recording time and can use Sky Anytime - their on-demand service. We used that last night to watch a programme on the Iditarod Dog Sled Race in Alaska on National Geographic, and the added bonus was that Anytime cut out the adverts! While we watched these teams of dogs pull sleds for 1800km in below freezing temperatures, we wondered if Mishka would be any good at that... he was asleep on the sofa in a pose that only boy dogs seem to be able to pull off. Typical bloke..

Having a dog and a crawling baby means that one of the most important bits of technology in the house isn't the 2 laptops, the PC, the wireless multimedia streaming thingy, or even the Sky+ box, it's the hoover. We have a record of breaking them at an alarming rate, and we bought our third in less than a year last week. It was a great deal from Empire-Direct.co.uk, an online electronics retailer I'd used before, and Mum has used as well. It turns out it was such a good deal because they were trying to raise cash - they went into administration on Monday! Our hoover arrived last Tuesday, we were only just in time.
Olga reports it's very good, by the way...

On that note, it's time to go and pick Lara up from nursery - my favourite part of the day, as she genuinely is happy and excited to see me and comes steaming over to be picked up, usually pushing the other kids out of the way en-route. Then it'll be a clip round the ear from Olga once she's read this post later tonight...