Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.

We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted.  We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.

Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.

We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.

Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.

After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.

So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own.

For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game

As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now.

I have finally fixed my analytics issue’s, but some how lost the sidebars off the front page. They seem to be on most other pages? go figure. I’ll have to accost one of my co-workers and seek some sagely advice tomorrow.

My Akismet Plugin tells me that it’s captured 2,999 spam comments, Fantastic! Recently though, I had a spate of spam trackbracks thankfully though that seems to have stopped. Have any other WordPress users had this problem, I wonder?

Hope you have a great day, Grannymar.

On a side note, while looking for a picture on Google images for this post and my first search for “Happy Birthday Grannymar” yielded these results. I’m shocked and surprised that Google knows me this well but what use is a a search engine to me when it shows me so many images on my own blog?

I think it’s fair to say all who attended had a great evening, so without further ado it’s time to share the link love. First up the results from the Irish Blog awards blog.

Unfortunately, Grannymar came away empty handed although, Twenty’s post today gave her a big grin and a link so I think that made up for it. Both her and Ellybabes managed to meet Twenty himself. I managed to miss the opportunity and held a reverent distance, partly because I was worried I might get a beatin’ but mostly cause I enjoy his blog and thought that maybe speaking with him might in some way might shatter that illusion. If you have any idea at all what I mean by that.

The other thing I would like to mention, and I know loads of people have already blogged this today, but it deserves the attention. Bernie Goldbach won ‘The best Contribution to the irish blogosphere’ And without a second thought thanked everyone, but refused to accept it as it should have been awarded to Damien. Cue the first of two, very deserved, standing ovations for Damien Mulley during the evening. My hats off to you Bernie, not everyone would do the same in your position.

My thanks to the organisers for a great evening and I’m looking forward to next years event already, who knows there could be a horrific blogging related incident that wipes out all the good bloggers so the likes of me has a chance.

They could be preparing for war, for all I know. The warpaint is out, there seems to be a lot of discussion and debate over God only knows what and it’s only 2pm!!! the awards aren’t kicking off for another 4 hours, this is serious preparation.

Me, I’ll pop off in a while for the 3 S’s (2 of them are shower and shave, the third, well, I’ll leave you guessing) Pull on some pants and a shirt hell I might even go the whole hog and splash on some aftershave seeing as how it’s a formal occasion :p

That’s what I love about being a bloke, Preparing to go out is soooo much easier.

Anyways, If your heading along then I’ll see you there, if not, come back tomorrow and I’ll hopefully have a report on all the important thing’s that happen this evening.

Good luck Grannymar

For those that weren’t here I will be uploading a movie to youtube once I work out how to do that, I’ll place a link here once I have done that. I wasn’t the only one recording it either, Donncha was using his macbook to record as well. So I’ll link to his as well once it’s available.

A large part of Elly’s presentation was to do with a particular blog and Audiocast this one. Elly will also be posting her presentation later so I will link that as well.

Once again, congratulations sweetie

*update* You tube didn’t like the length of the video so Elly uploaded to blipTV instead. the movie below starts the presentation and Dooncha’s recording (see link above) follows on from where I ran out of memory on my camera (sounds like an excuse for bigger memory cards )