Tag: blog

99 LuftBallons

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Thankfully no tales of work travel this week.

The main thing of note to share from the past few days was our gig last night, which was our first public outing as the Neon Vortex, our 80s tribute band.

We had rehearsed on Wednesday and felt completely unready for public performance, mainly due to a lack of rehearsal time due to our collective busy lives. Anyway, that fear drove us all to do enough homework before last night for it to go off almost mistake free.

It was pleasing to see this new show go down so well with the audience and hopefully things can only get better from here on in.

Earlier in the week something a bit odd happened. I started to get alerts that my blog was getting large volumes of traffic. Now, those days are long gone so it felt weird and certainly unexpected and I wondered if someone had uncovered my secret scandalous life of drug abuse and crime, but no. After a bit of digging into the stats and the source of the traffic almost all of it was coming from Facebook but in Germany.

Of course I have legions of readers all over the world as you would expect but the sheer volume was off the scale of even the height of my relevance and readership.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, mainly as I stopped researching it as soon as I figured it out, it would appear that I am not the only one who can’t type kingdom. A typo decades ago on The Dis saw me create a username of mkingdon rather than mkingdom and here we are. Still, it made buying the domain cheaper and easier.

At some point during last week something happened in German politics which saw a group or party get banned or something and they were called Kingdom of Germany. I have no idea how, but it seemed folks searching for that somehow then led them to click through to my blog.

I can only chuckle at the bizarre and surreal experience my new German visitors had when trying to make sense of the absolute trivial nonsense I pump out here when they were looking for some insightful information on whatever these Kingdom folks said, did or had done to them.

I only hope they used Google translate on my posts to see what it was all about and suffered whatever Google made of my drivel. If any of my German friends have stuck around, literally all I can say to you is Ich mochte ein stuck shwarzwalderkirschtorte bitte.

Two years of German study in the mid 80s has not gone to waste.

Ironically, one of the songs we did last night was Nena’s “classic” Neun­und­neunzig Luft Ballon. We did however take the easy option and do the English version. It’s spooky how different themes collide or at least how I can desperately mash them together in an attempt to churn out a few hundred words every week.

At this point doing these posts is solely driven by my “completion complex” (not a euphemism). I’ve been posting nearly every week since 2009 and every cell in my body rejects the idea of stopping now, and of course once I pop my clogs, all this inane crap will be a fitting testament to my time on the planet. Take from that what you will.

Till the next time……

Video, Vloggers, and Very Little Else

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Sunday again. Another post to come up with when it was only about six and a half minutes since the last one. Clichés are clichés for a reason and the one about time going by too quickly once you are of a certain age certainly rings true.

At least that brings July closer more quickly and our two weeks away from the work routine and for me a break from ” can you see my screen”, “jumping on a call” and “circling back” to things I didn’t want to deal with the first time round. I’m not doing anything manual or even important but at times it really does burn you out.

For Louise, it’ll be a break from things much more gruesome, somber and depressing of course, but that has never stopped me bemoaning my comfortable office based first world problems.

Aside from work taking up far too high a percentage of last week than I’d like, we also took delivery of the previously teased band video for Mustard. Yeah, another bloody video to inflict upon you. It’s the first with our new singer and we’re pretty pleased with the results. Do not fear, I shall only put you through the short one-minute version. If you want to see the full six-minute marathon you can seek it out.

This weekend has been an uneventful one as Louise is working both days. It has just been me and Bean, our elderly cocker spaniel, as Woody, the sausage dog, has gone with Emily to her boyfriend’s in Liverpool where he has been barking at anything and anyone daring to invade his space as is his way.

Emily often takes him off for weekend adventures and for such a little thing, you wouldn’t believe how much calmer the house is when he’s not around.

Bean. bless her, is getting on a bit now. She’s lost a few teeth and is going a bit grey around the edges but she’s still pretty sprightly and long may that continue. She loves the one-on-one attention when Woody is out of the way too.

My plans for today are not very expansive. I have a few songs to learn for a band rehearsal this evening and a football match to watch, which as a Liverpool fan is equal parts exciting and terrifying in equal measure at the moment, as I want to believe we’re going to win the league but daren’t allow myself to just yet. Bean and I will venture out for a wander at some point too.

In other news, I have seen a fair bit of content online about Epic Universe. Well, to be accurate, I have seen the exact same footage from about a dozen vloggers. I have to admit to being pretty ignorant about the whole thing at this point, having no parks in our foreseeable future. The bits I have seen look impressive, even if I don’t know exactly who some of the characters are. I’m sure we’ll make plans to go at some point, although, if I understand it correctly, the Express thing you get from on-site stays do not apply here which makes it a little less appealing. Once the initial crowds (50% of which seem to be content creators) die away, it’ll be on our list, I’m sure.

If anyone goes in the near future I’d love to hear your take of course.

I shall go and do my chores, learn my songs, walk my dog, and watch my football. Enjoy your Sundays.

Till the next time…….

Only Orlando?

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

Another week of crazy from over the pond and I have seriously started to look into what alternative options we might have for our summer trip that didn’t involve the lottery of US airspace.

A “quick” web chat with Virgin (nope, there was a huge wait of course) and it seems whatever we do, it’ll cost us £250 each to amend our flights, plus any fare difference so it’s not something to do lightly.

Ignoring the cost for a second (and I really never will), we face the challenge of the limited options that Virgin offers for flying from Manchester. If we stick with our original dates, and we really have to due to the enormous amount of time it took to identify a suitable window for Louise and me plus Emily as our house and pet sitter and then get Louise’s time off approved, then there is almost nothing they can do directly.

Caribbean options would seem to make the most sense, but to get to somewhere like Barbados or Jamaica on our dates, flights are indirect and a lot more expensive so it becomes prohibitive. We can’t go to Dubai in July as we will melt in the 40-degree-plus temperatures and I really don’t fancy Mumbai or Johannesburg, as lovely as they may be.

Cancun would be somewhere we’d consider but again on our dates that is indirect via Atlanta, although at a similar cost, so in effect that looked like our most likely or only option.

Then we would get into the doom loop of scrolling through endless hotels and their reviews trying to overcome my aversion to unfamiliarity to try and find somewhere affordable, clean, and maybe even impressive to stay for the same budget as Drury Plaza.

However when taking that option a little further, for some reason the return flights have two changes, so that is blown out of the water too.

Again, indirect, but Toronto is within the same price range that we paid for Orlando (plus the £500 admin fee of course) but that’s a very different holiday and I know zero about Canada, other than having friends who know a lot about it. Perhaps one to explore further as a plan B but I’d be starting from scratch with no idea where to stay, what to do and how to do it. Maybe some people find that fun? 🙂

Sigh. I’ve written some first-world problem blog posts in my time, but this one takes the biscuit, dunks it into my tea and then drops it down my shirt.

So we may be “stuck” with flying into Orlando. That is a sentence I could never have predicted typing. Maybe I am being very stupid anyway as I would imagine flying to any of the other destinations involves US airspace so it does little to remove that risk however real or not it may be.

Then we only have to worry about things like hyperinflation, civil unrest and white supremacists.

On the bright side, at the rate at which the US is collapsing into chaos the orange turd may be flushed by July. You can live in hope.

For now, we sit in suck-and-see mode I suppose as swallowing the loss of the monies paid to Virgin already is not an option I’d like to consider.

If anyone who has perhaps changed their Virgin flights similarly in the past has any ideas I’m open to them of course, as well as any tips and info on Canada or other alternatives?

I suspect the most likely outcome is we stick with the plan as is, have a problem free lovely holiday and you can all shake your heads in disbelief at the nonsense I spouted in this post. Of course, none of this solves the real problem that Jellyrolls is closing/moving from the Boardwalk which is an issue much larger than the US descending into a fascist dictatorship.

In other news and in an attempt to end on a lighter, less ridiculously overreacting type way, when I inflicted one of my musical projects on you recently in the form of the video of the Pink tribute band I’m in I hinted that there may be another project in the works. Well, it has arrived!

Alongside the Pink tribute and Mustard (our main function/wedding type band), we have just launched an 80s tribute too. I of course am far too young to remember any of the songs from that era (honest) but thanks to YouTube I was able to learn them.

So I will leave you with the brand-new, Neon Vortex and the video we recorded live on one of the coldest days in January in one of the coldest rehearsal studios on the planet.

Till the next time……