Tag: life

Return of The Crap

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Is this thing on? Testing, 1, 2…testing.

Hello again. Turns out I’ve had, and needed, a little break from the weekly blogging so apologies to anyone….anyone??? who missed these on the last few Sundays. It wasn’t really planned and just happened but it was very much required and unavoidable.

I return today unable to promise a weekly delivery but for now, mainly as I’m off work until the new year, we blog again.

Over the years I know I have regularly moaned about work being busy, but I was a young naïve fool, as only now do I feel justified in claiming that. In the late summer I was asked to take on some new responsibilities at work as well as my real job and it’s been carnage ever since. It’s involved some travel too with visits in recent weeks to London (a few times), Southampton, Birmingham, Leeds and of course our Manchester office which, with the commute as it, is qualifying as a trip all on its own.

I can’t say I am deliriously happy at work, but that’s not really related to the silly levels of busy, but more the over arching landscape since a new boss and some changes came around during this last year. Everything will pass I guess and when you’ve been there as long as I have, these Johnny come latelys don’t seem to stick around for the long haul so hopefully this is a temporary thing as I could do without having to find another job at my time of life.

So that work stuff meant that for the last few months I really haven’t had a minute to think about much else, and the prospect of sitting back at the laptop at the weekend to write this nonsense did not appeal. I’ve already been spending good chunks of evenings and weekends either working or travelling for work so I decided to not spend whatever free time I did have typing these posts for a bit.

How’s everyone doing? Well, Louise keeps on nursing despite not really wanting to, Emily still works with me and Rebecca, Tom and the boys are all good, with Rebecca now working part time in a local nursery.

Yesterday we went to see my Mum to commemorate what would have been her and my Dad’s 67th wedding anniversary had he still been with us. She’s doing well, is fit and healthy for someone in their mid 80s and she’ll be joining us for Christmas Day next week. Louise is once again working on the day itself and for a lot of the festive period, such is the life of a Community Nurse and she tends to volunteer to do/get stuck with Christmas Day as many of her colleagues still have young children and they want to be there for the big present unwrap.

Both of my readers may have been wondering if we have any holiday plans for 2026. Well, next year is a significant anniversary for Louise and I, as we will hit 30 years of marriage, so we are hoping to gift each other not one, but two holidays, if funds allow.

We have hopes of a return to Mexico and Secrets Akumal in April. We’ve paid a low deposit to secure our dates and have to decide by February if we’re going. It ain’t cheap so we’ll make a call then as to whether it is wise to once again blow all our available funds on overseas travel rather than more sensible uses. Our house continues to conspire against us financially so we’ll see what major bills hit between now and then before inevitable saying sod it we’re going anyway.

However, our main trip next year is a, perhaps surprisingly a Disney one.

In September we have booked to return to Florida, this time with Emily and her boyfriend. It’ll be an off-site affair in our usual villa, flying with Virgin and that’s about all we know at this point. Our boycott of the US was not an easy thing to lift, but after Emily went last year and found that inside the WDW bubble all was well, we decided we didn’t want the orange turd dictating our holiday plans for the next three years so we’re going despite our strong objections to current events over there.

So let’s see how long I can keep this blogging up, and I’d like to as I do like to look back on these things many years later, and to do that, I suppose I have to write them first!

Till the next time……

Hasta Luego

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Uncategorized

Well, as punishment for daring to go on holiday, last week at work was one of the worst I’ve experienced in all the decades I’ve been sucking this shit up to pay the bills. Just two more similar days to go before I can pretend to not think about it for two weeks.

I can feel the stress coursing through my body and my neck and shoulders feel like I’ve done something that is very bad for your neck and shoulders.

All that meant that yesterday was also stupidly busy as I had to do some work that has to be finished before I go and I’m in meetings for every hour God sends from the start of Monday to the end of Tuesday and then start to try and prep the stuff I prep for the holiday. That meant printing off the stuff we might need (I’ve been over cautious as this isn’t our familiar journey) and can I say, how is it that in 2025 AI can do your job for you but we still can’t build printers that print? I also filled the rucksack, which won’t be Ryan for this trip. Louise says he’s too scruffy to go a resort like ours and I gave in as his role is solely for US based trips. Instead I’m taking son of Ryan, the brand new exact replica Louse bought me a few years ago.

Filling the rucksack is faffy, ranging from the essential passports and docs to the relevant phone and watch chargers, camera, kindle, painkillers, money and credit cards etc.

What I also learned this week was trying to order some US dollars in specific denominations appears to be impossible. I tried a load of websites and nobody gives you the option to request smaller bills (these dollars are only for tipping folks) so in the end I had to go old school and rock up the local post office and ask them to give me the smallest they had. They were still mostly too big.

With Louise out working I was also in charge of doing multiple washer loads, mainly of the dog’s bedding, and our bedding despite the fact that our house sitter is Emily, who lives here. I waited in for a delivery for Louise, which I “missed” as when it arrived, the chap rang the bell and then seemingly sprinted to his van and drove away by the time I walked the thirty steps from the couch to the front door.

Then I had to do some mowing up on the field as the grass was getting ridiculous despite me attacking it with a strimmer for the past week and I had to at least cut some walking paths in it for when Emily walks them whilst we are away.

I took delivery of an obscene amount of pet food for the dogs and cats and then nipped to the supermarket to get enough food to feed us until Tuesday and then I made tea.

It was a busy Saturday and today is looking similar. I’ve done some more work this morning, wrote this clap trap and then I have to go to a shop to collect an order Louise clicked last night and then go and see my Mum.

Anyway, as it always does, time will pass, I’ll get through work and we’ll be off soon enough. I’ll probably share some stuff on the Mkingdon Facebook page whilst away so do what you need to do if you want those. A day by day trip report is unlikely as it would be (more) boring than a US trip and I almost certainly won’t have time to write it, but I will of course share thoughts, highlights and food in some way.

See you in a few weeks.

Till the next time……

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……

A&E I O U

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Another week whizzes by. Work for me was full-on in terms of hours spent, complex stuff to deal with, and having to spend an unwelcome amount of time physically in the office. Insult to injury, indeed. I’ve said it endless times before, but I will say it again: How I did that commute five days a week for decades is beyond me.

There was also a team-building night at Junk Yard Golf in Manchester, followed by a curry. Whilst always grateful to the company for spending money on stuff like that and actually enjoying it to some extent once I’m there, they are not essential for me to want to work somewhere.

Still, I came joint first at the golf and enjoyed the food, so I should probably stop moaning about it and show some gratitude.

Louise has had less fun this week. Having worked last weekend and a good number of days on the trot, she had all this week off and had lots of plans.

Instead, she’s been pretty ill, and we ended up in A&E on Friday evening after her GP sent her there to hopefully get sorted.

Fearing a couple of days in the waiting room, we did OK. She was triaged within an hour and then was given an appointment with a doctor a couple of hours later, so we were able to go home, get some food, and go back at the required time. Another hour or so and we’d seen the doctor and were on the way home with Louise reassured it was probably nothing too serious.

She did have to go back on Saturday to pick up the prescribed painkillers and other drugs as the pharmacy didn’t have them in stock, and they gave her an IOU. Ironicall,y that took longer than the previous evening as she was given duff info about the opening times and spent several hours wandering the hospital, filling out forms, and generally waiting around just to get her hands on the all-important meds.

Hopefully, with those secured, her recovery will be swift. She certainly feels better today than yesterday.

Emily has been away from home doing some house and dog sitting for a friend who has gone on holiday to Italy. This is Pablo.

If this kind of work funded trips to Disney, I think she would happily do it full-time.

I’m still a little concerned for her August Florida trip as the US continues its rapid descent into anarchy and chaos. I know I have, without doubt, over-thought and over-egged potential issues for tourists to the Sunshine State, but it’s clear I’m not the only one, as stats are starting to emerge from the US of sharp declines in tourism this year. Hopefully, that just results in smaller queues and the same trouble-free experience as we are all used to.

It doesn’t feel like this level and rate of chaos can be sustained for four years but what do I know. Often, very little indeed.

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…….

Wet, Wet, Wet.

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

There’s some cosmic irony to us all losing an hour’s sleep on Mother’s Day. As if it commemorates the plight of most mothers to never properly sleep ever again. Here’s wishing all mums a lovely day and we’ll be taking mine out for tea later as tradition dictates.

Don’t worry, I can’t do another post this week about the relatively simple decision and task of changing our holiday plans. All we have left to do now is wait, anticipate and turn up at the airport which is a pretty different experience to your typical Florida trip as we all know. Oh wait, there is an app I may need to download at some point that gives me vital information about the resort so I need to make plans to reserve several minutes to do that.

I am still getting drip-fed small crumbs of planning activity for Emily’s trip, though. They are doing the full Disney and Universal experience, so there’s a lot to think about. With a couple of first-timers tagging along, Emily feels the familiar pressure of being the planner, organiser, and expert for everyone.

We were never planning to do any parks had we stuck with Florida, so I had taken my eye off any park-related news since our last trip. It seems there will be a lot of stuff closed when she goes, which is less than ideal. Stuff like Big Thunder is down for lengthy refurb, It’s Tough To Be A Bug is no more, Buzz I think is going down for a massive upgrade, Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer’s Island are gone, Astro Orbiter is not back until “late summer”, Hall Of Presidents is down, (hopefully for at least another four years) Test Track is still down, and I even think the Walt Disney Railroad is closed. I’m sure there are more than I’ve mentioned, too.

One positive, certainly for Emily, is the re-opening of Voyage Of The Little Mermaid. It will be called The Little Mermaid – A Musical Adventure. That has been sorely missed.

Whilst it’s of course unavoidable, having so much unavailable at once is not ideal even for a regular visitor, but for first-timers who may or may not ever return, it’s a bit of a body blow. That’s without even thinking about the whole question of value for money for your now very expensive park ticket.

They will of course have a great time regardless but it seems WDW is in another massive period of change and regeneration which is good to see I suppose. Not all change in the parks turns out well (are you listening Stitch’s Great Escape?) but it is inevitable.

Speaking of change. Some things never do. I often document the constant parade of tradespeople wandering around our house fixing stuff. If you remember back far enough we had a leaky shower about a year ago that only got finally resolved about a month back when we had to rip the whole base out and fit a new one having exhausted all other options.

Shortly afterwards, the shower in our en suite started playing up, so our plumber, once he’d returned from his round-the-world cruise, which we had funded, popped back to sort that. We’d also spotted, due to us being freezing cold every night, that a couple of radiators downstairs were only getting warm across a three-inch slither at the top, and they needed replacing. So he came to do all that on the same day a couple of weeks ago.

All was well, we were warmer and they even looked nicer as we’d moved from the standard white things to the anthracite column ones to better suit the period of the house.

Anyway, yesterday I made a rare visit to our downstairs loo which is in a room we don’t use that often. As I opened the door and walked in there was an unusual and unwelcome squelch. I looked behind me to see perfect footprints in the carpet.

Panic set in as this was the same room which suffered badly from all our roofing woes a couple of years ago so I was initially desperately looking upwards for signs of water ingress. With nothing to see my attention turned to other sources of water and I soon discovered that the pipe leading into the new readiator was leaking pretty badly.

An hour of trying to vax up the water from the carpet and fruitlessly tinerking with a spanner and some connections on the radiator saw little difference and I resorted to piling towels near the source of the leak and trying to get hold of our plumber. Being 5pm on a Saturday I was not hopeful.

To his enormous credit, he was with us within the hour, made what turned out to be some simple adjustments, fixed the issue and left us dry again and with no charge for his services. I may gold plate him. Perhaps that was a perk of our titanium reward card recognising our levels of spend with him in recent times?

Anyway, today I shall be vaxxing furiously again, trying to turn the sponge on our floor back into a carpet.

Of course, you will know that upon discovering the issue, seeing the state of the carpet and becoming instantly furstrated at my inability to fix the problem, I was in a right strop threatening to either move or torch the house to the ground. Turns out that may have been another slight over reaction as ten minutes of a spanner in the right hands was all that was needed, aside from maybe a new carpet if it cannot be saved.

There’s a lesson there somewhere that I absolutely will not learn.

Till the next time……

The Long Trousers

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

A week on from making the decision to change our holiday destination and it still feels like we made the right call. We’ve watched a lot of content about our new destination and we’re both excited about the trip now.

Our decision seemed to get endorsed a little during the week with the UK updating the travel advice for the US, albeit, just to be extra careful with your paperwork but I suspect those things aren’t done lightly.

I absolutely understand the sentiment that I see in many WDW Facebook groups that nothing has really changed, and lots of folks will, of course, still go ahead as planned, and I’m sure they will be fine. I think if we’d been at the peak of our (my) WDW obsession we would have made the same call.

I’m really hopeful that is the case, mainly because Emily is going in August and has no plans to change that. As worried as I may be about that, as Louise pointed out, she’s 30 in July and has been a gabillion times so I’m probably more concerned than I should be.

They are traveling with another couple who are first-timers and they have already had the lecture about how to behave at immigration. It always does depend on the agent you get as to how much interaction you could have but these days, with tales of them taking your phone to look for anti-Trump content, this is not the year to mess about it seems. If that was the case I would not make it past baggage reclaim.

Anyway, this year, for us, it didn’t feel right and let’s face it, we’re overdue a change in holiday destination so we’ve made the change and feel comfy with that decision.

Whilst it is very likely that those going to WDW will benefit from the Disney bubble effect and will not notice very much difference from any other year, it’s clear something is going on in the US that does not look great. Fingers crossed it results in nothing too nasty. We do very much want to return to our usual holiday destination and would rather not have to wait until the current administration is no more.

Since changing our booking, we’ve watched a couple of resort tours of Secrets Akumal on YouTube, and we’re delighted with our choice. It’s a bit posh, and one slightly annoying thing (the firstest of first-world problems) is that for many of the restaurants there, a slightly more formal dress code than I would normally like on holiday exists. This means that I shall have to wear long trousers on some evenings. Indeed, it means I shall have to acquire some long trousers suitable for warmer nights. There has never been the need to cover my knees of an evening in Florida and Mexico shall be denied the thrill of my legs after dark.

One thing that we are especially pleased with is the range and variety of cuisines from the restaurants at the resort. There are nine different eateries, including Italian, Mexican, French, Asian and your more general stuff. An additional plus is that there is no need to book a table, which seems odd for someone like me to say when I am usually online at 7am 90 days before a dining experience making sure we bag a table. But this is a different kind of trip and having to try and secure slots to eat that are not a buffet on a lie-down and do-nothing trip is one of the things that had put us off all all-inclusive trips previously.

From all the stuff we’ve watched the place never looks packed, there are sunbeds available with nobody up at 6am throwing towels down and you can walk up to any restaurant and be accommodated. Let’s hope it turns out that way.

The sunbed reservation thing is actively prevented it seems, with the staff insisting that even if you have beds and are going elsewhere for more than an hour or so, you take your stuff with you to allow others to use the beds.

Whilst everyone will of course make their own call on whether to travel or not, already it seems there has been a significant downturn in tourism to the US. Canada seems to be the main reason for this up until now. It’ll be interesting to see what all this costs the US in the end and you again have to wonder why the President would undertake anything to damage their own economy intentionally.

Whilst he will be OK of course due to the numerous ways in which his term will enrich him, it’s the folks who work in tourism who will be hit, hopefully resulting in fewer votes for his party in future, should there be any future elections!

Over dramatic? Probably. All I will say is that we’ve started re-watching the Handmaid’s Tale in preparation for the final season which should be out soon. Whilst we’ve always loved it, on this second time of watching there are elements more akin to documentary than drama.

And on that bombshell, I shall leave you to your Sundays.

Till the next time……

Chat WTF

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

You join me live, as I sit in the Virgin Atlantic chat queue, trying to find out how punitive the terms would be should we cancel our flights for July. As uncomfortable as we would be giving the current US administration our hard earned and as outraged as we are at the horrific state of affiars there, we are not rich enough to wave goodbye to many thousands of pounds on that principle. I’m not sure if that makes us tight, amoral or a bit wishy washy but it is what it is.

Another week passes where a new low is found by the orange piss ant and at the speed at which things are going to hell in a hand cart, who knows what we may be flying to in July. It is time at least to understand all of our options and if cancelling gives us any better scenarios than changing to a new destination for at least £500.

If we could cancel it would at least give us a wider choice of alternatives not bound by where VA fly to from Manchester. We could of course just take any refund we may be afforded and bank that and save the money, but, well you’ve been reading this stuff for too long to know how likely that is.

I do strongly suspect that the terms of the booking will mean we would lose pretty much everything and having shelled out for Premium, that’s a high price to pay for principles and maybe an overblown concern that any of what is happening would affect a holiday.

I should know the terms of course, as I accepted them when booking. What was weird is that post booking I didn’t get any form of confirmation email from Virgin, in which I would expect to find said terms. I can see the booking on their website and in the app but what happens if I cancel seems to be buried so deep I have yet been able to uncover it.

It is of course very unlikely that I will have my answer before I finish typing up this week’s note of despair. Covid aside it would have been impossible to imagine having reservations about visiting what has been our second home for decades just a few short weeks ago. I’ve always at least tried to keep politics out of this blog but at this point there is no balance or other point of view to consider, so if I lose a reader or two it’ll be for the best.

I have no clue what Trump’s end game is really, other than to destroy everything so badly that he can somehow justify declaring martial law and suspend elections. Anything else makes little sense.

With a low expectation of getting any money back I haven’t really considered alternatives too strongly yet. Somewhere hot, with that elusive mix of being peaceful yet with enough stuff going on, with a direct flight and if at all possible without the hellscape that is a coach transfer from the airport of multiple hours and with no sign of any Agadoo style “entertainment” staff telling me how to have fun.

You can see why we keep returning to Florida!

I continue to wait for someone at Virgin to talk to me, so I shall leave you to shake your head in disbelief at how ridiculously seriously I take holidays and can over react in the most impressive way.

Till the next time……