Do You Know Anto?

Ah, first post of the New Year. 🙂 Last night I went to the Ozone with Mark, his mate Aido and Aido’s girlfriend, Aishling. Was a decent night with the usual crappy DJ but we only paid €10 in which could have been worse (going by what we’ve paid in there before :shock:). Unfortuneatly I injured my ankle last night so it’ll mean I’ll be out of footie for at least a week. Have the support bandage on it today to shore it up.

This post is to mark the day that over 140,000 people died in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. I’m writing this almost two weeks later and the scale of the devestation is just unbelievable. Whole families have been wiped out and I don’t believe a true total will ever be known. Watching the news footage over the past couple of weeks has been horrendous and its hard to take it all in. I can’t imagine the horror that has been inflicted on these people. 🙁 I’m sorting out my donation this weekend and I hope to be as generous as possible.

On a personal note, I know of a few people who are/were in the region pretty close to the time of the disaster. TheOriginalH I know from SitePoint and was in Thailand up to a week before the disaster, luckily he had gone home for Christmas. One of the guys from work, Anto, has his brother out there, Brendan (used to work here and is a good mate), but he wasn’t affected thank god.

If you haven’t pledged more already please do. TheOriginalH has posted a list of organisations on his site and there are more more links around the web so please take the time and help these people out. They have little or nothing left. 🙁

Went ice skating with Anne-Marie last night down at Smithfield. I had booked the tickets on Sunday via the web (there was no booking fee which was a nice suprise :)) so there was no hassle with queues or whatever. When we got in we discovered theres no cameras on the ice which we didn’t know but makes sense I suppose. We started out fairly tentatively by sticking to the railing. Although I think she was more nervous than me. 😀 After a while we started to get the hang of it but shortly afterwards, some girl decided to come flying up behind me and use me as a brake. All would have been fine except there was some other punter in from of me who I then ran into it and I ended up on my arse.

Anne-Marie nearly went a couple of times after that and eventually went and took me down with her. I almost stayed on my feet but managed to get up pretty quickly and get her back to her feet. We got a few more laps of the place in after that and ended up walking into town to get the bus home. All in all a good night and a change from going to the cinema all the time.

The Christmas work do was on last Friday. I had a half day so I went home and then got the bus back in with Niamh and Rob. Went to “The Forum” bar on Dame St. first of all and then headed on to the “The Castle Inn” which is at the back of Christchurch. We then had dinner and drinks with cabaret, Neil Diamond impersonator and then a DJ until 2.30am. 🙂 Was great craic and whoever had the office digital camera certainly made use of it by taking in excess of 120 shots. Some classic photos which I have to sort out after Christmas.

Getting home was a bit of a nightmare as town was absolutely jammed. I’ve never seen it that busy and there could have been serious issues with crowd control on Westmoreland St as everyone was waiting for the nitelink. 😯 Eventually got a 67N cos Niamh and Rob were going to Celbridge. Turned out I was the only guy getting off in Lucan so I got some slagging from punters standing downstairs. 😆 All in all, a good nite.