I’ve been messing around on the DVLA website this afternoon looking at a personalised number plate. It is my 40th birthday this year and thought I’d mark this milestone (if you would call it that) by getting something special.

I went to the DVLA website and typed my initials in as I definitely wanted them and clicked search. 23 pages of number plates came up and I started trawling through them until I found the perfect one. I previewed the number plate on Volkswagen Golf as that’s the car I have, although not that new and nice looking!

Check the picture below, what do you recon? Not bad for £250 and it has 40 in it as well. Might have to ask the wife nicely if I can order it now so I don’t lose out on it, which might be a struggle because my birthday isn’t until July

I had bit of a win at the weekend on the horses, so I booked the other half in to get her hair done. She came back and she had some highlights done and bit of a chop, anyway I gave her £100 thinking this would be enough, well it would of been but she fell in to the age old trap of buying some saloon shampoos which are really expensive at around £20 a bottle. So she managed to buy two bottles, shampoo and then a conditioner so that’s £40 leaving only £60 for her hair so she ended up going about £10 over the £100 I gave her which she paid for herself.

The good news is that has received his tobacco tin and blunts that i sent him a few days ago.

I won about £500 on the horses the other day so i still have a little bit left for myself well £400 actually, I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do with the rest yet but I’m sure I’ll be to spend it somehow.

We lost our pool game last night my doubles game was well played by the opposition, as both only I and my partner only got 1 visit to the table. My singles games was ok but it was bit of a lucky game for my opponent.

No really, I mean it, this time I’m going to get my bathroom sorted, I’m going to get a new shower enclosure sorted and also get a shower unit bought , I’ve been looking at some of the Mira showers and think I’ll probably opt for one of the middle of the range ones around the £300 mark.

I’m hoping to get the Shower unit in first and then get the get the shower enclosure built around that, hopefully this way I should really only be out of action for 1 day.

It’s probably going to cost around £1000 roughly, £300 for shower and around £500 for the enclosure which leaves £200 for the plumber to do his work.

My shower can be a bit temperamental at the moment, it can’t supply constant hot water the temperature seems to fluctuate quite a bit which can be rather annoying to say the least.

I sent my dad’s birthday present on Friday I sent it via royal mail. Hopefully it should be there within a few days, I’ve already rung him and said it might be a tad late.

I decided to buy him a pack of blunts as well which gives him another option for smoking. I’ve got him some flavoured blunts from the original blunt wrap company, i got him rum, whiskey and mojito flavours. They should keep him going for a few months well that’s if he doesn’t smoke them all over his birthday.

To behonest I bought a pack for myself as I got a deal on them.

Last week rushed by for me, I was busy at work sorting everything out, and home was even worse car needed M.O.T’ing which it got an advisory on; also I had to buy brakes first so that was £250.

Hopefully this week will be slightly cheaper and less stressful, but we all know how quickly things can change.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update you on the Blunts that I bought later in the week if I get chance to have a smoke

My wife has just bought a new Dualit hand mixer and decided to write a review about it for my blog. It is her first post so be nice:

I’ve just used my new Dualit hand mixer for the first time and I have to say I am very impressed the robust design which makes it very good to use. I decided to buy a Dualit hand mixer because I have previously bought other kitchen gadgets in the same range and I found them to be very durable also I like the retro look that Dualit offer so this mixer matches my other gadgets well.

Although it is on the higher end of the scale price wise you do get so much more for your money than other cheaper hand mixers, it comes with two multipurpose oversize flat beaters, two dough hooks and one balloon whisk ideal for a range of cooking and baking needs. It also has five different speeds, manual retractable power cord for easy storage and a convenient beater ejector lever for easy release. Also during use the beater is not too noisy compared to cheaper mixers I have had in the past, I also found the handle easy to grip and use and it was not too heavy ideal if you have a lot to mix over a long period of time.

I used my mixer to make meringues, not the easiest of things to make however I found that I managed to get plenty of air into my egg whites when using the balloon whisk attachment, something I have found hard to do in the past by hand. It didn’t take long for soft peaks to form when using the mixer and when they came out of the oven they were perfect, all in all my first use of my mixer has been very successful.

I’ve been looking into ski holidays and finally got our 2nd honeymoon booked, i was looking at this back in November, but only just managed to pull my finger out and get the holiday booked. After lots of looking round I’ve decided to go to Whistler in Canada. I love the buildings in Whistler there’s just something about grey coloured stone buildings with timber on the outside and trusses for the roof.

We are flying into Vancouver which is one of the closest airports, but it’s still a 2hr journey to get there from the airport. I’ve been on Google and had a look at the route using the street view, and it’s not a rickety old road like I thought it would be, it looks like quite a well maintained road duel carriage way in parts and normal A road in others.

We have hired a car to get from the airport to Whistler then we are free to stop and have a tea break if we like and take a few snaps. Now I’ve been left in charge of actually booking the car. Now I’ve booked a class e car which means either a Dodge charger, Chevrolet Impala and a Pontiac Grand Prix. Now I’m hoping for a Dodge Charger, I’m really hoping for a 69 muscle car charger, but I’ll probably end up with a lame 2010 Charger.

We’re only going for a week due to the extra cost of going the further distance but I think I’ve got my head around this ski deals thing now and will book 2 weeks for next time.

It’s my dad’s birthday soon so I need to send him a birthday present over. It needs to be lightweight, small and fairly strong so that it survives the rough journey over there.

He likes to smoke his hookah pipe on a weekend, so I thought that I would send him a few tobacco tins, well 2 actually.

I’m going to send him air tight ones as it will stop the dust getting in and keep his tobacco fresh. I’m going to send him one with a Union Jack sticker, so that he knows it from me and then one with a cool gothic dragon on. If he doesn’t like it then he can sell it as these are often harder to come by over there so he might make a little extra money.

I’m hopping postage won’t be much over £10. I’m going to send it via royal mail as these are often cheaper than courier but in turn I won’t be able to track it.

I need to get the item posted by tomorrow, otherwise I’ll be standing in the post office for around 30 minutes with all the oldies while there getting their pensions.

I’m surprised by how quickly this week is going all ready, tomorrow we are half way through the week and its pool, well if they don’t cancel it again due to the poor weather that we have been experiencing since Christmas.

Tobacco Tins

We are now in 2010 and its time to tackle a renovation project I have been putting off for some time, a new kitchen. I have decided not to rip out the old kitchen completely because the actual layout of the kitchen is ok; I have instead decided to replace all the cupboard doors and work surfaces with new ones, hopefully saving me money as well.

Me and my wife (mostly my wife!)have been designing the look of our kitchen for the last year and will be going for a more modern look with high gloss cupboard doors and granite worktops, with a tiled floor.

At the weekend we took a trip to our local kitchen store to have a look around and get a rough quote on what it would cost to renovate the kitchen. We looked at various different styles of cupboard doors, but decided that a simple flat design with chrome handles would suit our design best.

We then looked at some granite worktops; I didn’t know there were over 20 different granite styles so we took some samples to compare to our existing kitchen accessories. Being stupid, I only took some simple measurements of the kitchen before we came out so we couldn’t get quote; I will be measuring all the cupboards and worktops this week and we will go back at the weekend.

The snows really starting to grate on me now, road surfacing is starting to break up and small potholes are now big pot holes and there’s new big pot holes where there wasn’t before.

The only thing that I’m glad about, is not having to clear ice from my windscreen on a morning. The best car that i had in the winter was my Ford Fiesta RS Turbo, mainly because it had a heated windscreen, which was a great labour saving device as it just put that on when my windscreen was iced up and within minutes i was able to drive off without cold and damp fingers. As any RS Turbo owner will know the cold weather brings you another great gain which is the cold air which is denser and gave your car more noticeable power.

Anyway i have noticed that recently that some cars are better than others in the snow. Vauxhall Corsas seem to be great which ever model you have, where as Astra’s seem to be a little bit poo, and you can’t even put it down to larger alloy wheels because the one I’m think of has steel wheels.

Out of town there’s still quite a bit of snow around and personally I think it’s going to be another 3 weeks before the majority of roads and fields are clear.

Fiesta RS Turbo

So it’s my girlfriend’s birthday this week and I’ve got a long list of potential things to buy. The ever-ubiquitous “smellies” as they call them (actually soapy things for the bath)… some awful CDs by cute boys and the like and some hair straighteners?

Well I might be the last person in the world who knew anything about these things, but apparently girls use special tools to get their hair straight. In my naivete, I assumed it was a matter of hair gel and dedicated brushing, but it turns out that there’s a tool for the job

Essentially it’s a pair of super-heated elements that grasp the hair. Then, when they are pulled through the hair the heat acts to straighten out the hair. Somehow. I guess it’s magic.

Like so many things, there’s a whole bunch of complications. Traditional metal straighteners are prone to overheating which is both dangerous and prone to singe the hair. So professional salons go for ceramics – which to my blokey mind puts me in mind of the ceramic brakes you get on high-end supercars.

Anyway, a company called ghd based in Leeds (near where I live!)launched ceramic hair straighteners a few years ago. So thanks to some slick marketing, every chick I know wants ghd hair straighteners.

That’s fine, I thought, and went off to the shop. Ouch. £100! Wasn’t expecting that. So I did some looking around for cheaper alternatives and it turns out there aren’t that many. Worse still, ghd straighteners have been ripped off by the Chinese and the market is flooded with fakes. And those fakes can be dangerous.

So, the lesson for me is that I have to stump up the cash and pretend I’m happy about it. Either that or persuade her that she looks best curly….