Utopia

How fucking good is this? What a singer, sends shivers down my spine.

The real Lady G...

One of my favourite bands Goldfrapp is bringing out a new album very soon! I'm very excited! I want to post the video for the song "Rocket" (like everything at the moment it's a bit of an 80s pastiche, but a fanastic tune) but it's not on YouTube yet, so I'm going to have to paste this instead...

The Sundays

I had such a crush on the Sundays' singer when I was a student, I loved her voice. Further reading (and an excellent article) here. A very british band.

The New Outpatients

First visit to the all new outpatients yesterday. This was for a Tobi trial with the Ineb. They have put the outpatients in the old Pearce Ward, so the outpatient rooms are the old in patient rooms, which is a bit odd, kind of brings the memories flooding back. The last time I was in there there was a communal kitchen / social room where you could hang out, watch videos and fix yourself breakfast (this was about 10 years ago before the cross-infection rules kicked in for everybody, not just Cepecia patients)

The Tobi trial went OK, I got a new lilac coloured filter with a bigger container for doing the Tobi nebs. Nice. Unfortunately, the Tobi takes about 4 minutes to dispense, and you have to do 2 lots of it, which is a bit rubbish because I can neb Colymycin and Ventolin in 50 seconds flat. DNase takes about 2 minutes. Apparently it's because the Tobi is a lot thicker.

The blows before the Tobi test were a disappointing FEV1 2.7 FVC 3.6. The blows are in that area where they're not that bad but not that good; so it leaves me in a bit of a no man's land. If they were down a lot (say 2.3-2.4) I would go straight onto IVs, and if they were up high (3.0-3.1) then I would be happy as a butchers dog. Meh. When I do the spirometry test I get a high pitched wheeze so I think the 10% loss of FEV1 over the last few months may be down to that, because my sputum seems to be completely under control with nebbed Colymycin and now Tobi. In fact the last time I had IVs I didn't *really* need them I just had them to see if they would improve my FEV1, which they didn't have a massive effect on.

Anyway, I asked the physio about trialing Hypertonic Saline, as I want to see if this can reach the parts that other nebulised solutions can't ;-) Roll on next month...

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42...

The final season of Lost is just around the corner. I'm so excited! Well almost...I must be the only person still watching this! Hopefully this time we'll get some real answers as to what the hell's going on as well ;-)

Questions:

• Who is Locke?
• Who is Jacob?
• Who is Richard Alpert and why does he never age?
• What is the black smoke?
• What happened to Claire?
• Why is Jack's dead father on the Island and is he really dead?
• Why spend 4 seasons trying to get off the island and then spend the fifth season getting back on?
• Could the people in the past (70s!) change the future or has it already happened?
• Does free will exist?
• If I can't exercise my free will not to watch the final season does that prove free will doesn't exist?
• Is Juliet hotter than Kate?

Last night I went for my first jog of the year. Just went for a run around the estate for 10 minutes after R had done her run. Didn't feel too bad, although the cold night air made my lungs burn. I made sure I took my seretide, ventolin, uniphyllin so that my lungs didn't seize up. Oscar has come down with yet another cold, he's not really full of it in his nose and throat, he's quite hot and he doesn't seem quite himself.

Last of the snow in pictures

Some pics of going sledging in the snow last week before it all melted. We went to see some friends up in Ramsbottom (in the hills) in North Manchester and it was freezing cold ;-)

2009: Stop me if you've heard this one before...

Bluffin' with her muffin? You'd have to have been deep in the amazon jungle to have escaped this song, it was everywhere in 2009. The greatest pop song of 2009? Up for debate obviously.

The thing with Lady Gaga now is that it is becoming impossible to talk about her songs without talking about her image in the media, and she undoubtedly makes good copy and sells plenty of papers. She probably can talk art/fashion bollocks, she can talk about Bowie, Madonna, Warhol and pop-art till the cows come home. Is she faking? Is it all a mask? Who cares? IMHO None of that really matters. All that matters is writing catchy pop tunes that people like to buy and maybe listen to with the volume turned up before they go out on a Friday night. And you can't really fake that.

p.s. I'm a 38 year old dad, surely I'm too old to like Lady Gaga? I'm going to be such an embarrassing dad ;-)

2009: Best songs last year, part 1...

Well, as usual it's taken me a while to get around to listening to Florence and the Machine; but I like this album; there's some great tracks and there are signs she could go on to greater things. I like the way she fuses parts of dance and indie rock. She's definitely one of the more interesting female artists around at the moment. She's not my favourite female artist though, PJ Harvey is still in the lead in that race, with Goldfrapp coming up fast on the outside...now, if only I could get Abby into her, or Lady Gaga for that matter (I bought Abby Lady Gaga's album for Christmas but she was totally unimpressed, she prefers Disney musicals ;))