Waking bleary eyed to this today was awesome - thanks Heidi!

Several months of on-going disaster must have at least some detrimental effect on a person... take a good friend of mine, names witheld, so let us call him Matt. First up, a few months ago Matt experienced hardware problems with the server(s) he maintains. The knock-on effect of this was moving several sites from one server to another, whilst simultaneously setting up the server environment on the new machine, on a new OS (well, a new flavour of Linux).

Then, his own hardware at home starts packing up. First to go is the hard drives. They crash and stick - each time losing Matt's work and forcing him to re-format and re-install. Whilst he's considering replacing it, his super-fancy graphics card (barely six months old) starts spewing out drunken polygons in the middle of Call of Duty 4...

Back from a 5-day camping trip at Rhoscolyn in Anglesey. Due to a combo battery/stupidity incident, I have boff all photos. Here's Neil anyway, fishing out on the rocks. We got some wrasse and pollock, and one poor bugger ended up on our barbecue. He am tasty.

Wotcha. Our trip to Newquay collapsed, so some of us crammed in a Micra and headed over to Shell Island on the west coast of North Wales. A ridiculously expensive trip to Tesco (we did buy a torch each...) and a somewhat slow drive in a struggling one litre later we were settled with steak on the barbecue and more alcohol than was sensibly neccessary. Here's some pics.

(the rest of the photos reside on flickr)

I'm off to sunny France once again for my hols tomorrow, spending a week in Normandy and a second in Brittany. I'll try to get some pics this time.

I'll be unavailable work-wise for two weeks, but I’ll be back as from Monday August 22nd. Messages and e-mails will be checked when I'm back, but Dylan will be around should you need anything.

So, all the pages for 2004 have been torn from my calendar and thrown into the waste-paper basket of time. So that was 2004, and what have I done?

Babylon Leaf had a bit of a non-year, in terms of gigs, practices, new equipment... well, pretty much everything. We basically started as we went on: after a great party for Xmas 2003, we decided to take a break. That month-long sabattical dragged into January, turned into two months, then three... I started full-time at HMV in Chester in February and began juggling that with work for Leafish, and so time for the band became more scare for me. Neil (our singer/guitarist) and Sally brought new life into the world in the summer, meaning his time was probably being spent washing nappies and looking for the lost dummy underneath the sofa.

In retrospect, I think I fucked up with the band this year.

Well, thats me for a couple of weeks: I'm off to sunny France for my hols... somewhere near Concarneau on the south coast of Brittany.

I'll be unavailable work-wise, but I'll be back as from Monday August 16th. Messages and e-mails will be checked when I'm back, but Dylan will be around should you need anything.

Its official: HMV will be opening a new store in Wrexham on August 26th, and I'll be moving there part-time on weekends, freeing my time up once again to concentrate on leafish and our clients!

Thanks to all who've beared with me since February (when I started full-time at HMV in Chester), your patience while I sorted my house move and finances is much appreciated. Feel free to harass me as much as you want now ;)