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On Saturday night I went to my friend Kay’s 21st birthday party at the Chicago Rock Cafe. I bought her a silver bracelet as her present. Overall, the party was really good; we went for a meal (all you can eat for £10), and afterwards we went to the newly re-opened Lava and Ignite nightclub (previously known as Time). This was the first time I had been since it had re-opened at the start of this month, but the design of the building hadn’t changed as much as I thought it would. I like it anyway, and the music they played on Saturday night was good.

The atmosphere at the party was really good – in total there were about 15 people, including Kay’s sister, boyfriend, workmates etc. We all had a wonderful time, in spite of a certain grumpy person who didn’t speak to me once all night long (not even to say hello or goodbye to me and Kay), but I just kept on dancing and smiling because I don’t care about him anyway. (I can’t say too much about this, in case he should somehow happen to come across my blog, but if you are interested in hearing the full story, please leave a comment below, and I will consider posting a protected entry about it).

OK, you probably all think I am mad now. But let’s explain. Yesterday evening I went to a works party held at Dunston Hall, which is a very old building, and many people believe it is haunted. Our party was held in a big marquee on the grass outside, so we didn’t stay in the main hall for too long. I never saw anything unusual anyway.

Well, I arrived home at midnight, and I was getting ready for bed. Just before I got into bed, I switched off my mobile phone, put it back in my handbag and turned off the bedroom light. But the very second I switched the light off, the most scary music started playing. I had never heard it before, but I knew it must be my mobile phone, so I switched my light back on and fetched it out of my handbag. It was still blaring out this tune really loudly, even though I had pressed the off-button five seconds earlier! I was so confused! I frantically kept pressing the off button, but whatever I pressed, it simply would not stop. The screen was completely white, and none of the usual icons were visible. I flipped the lid closed, and the tune stopped for a couple of seconds, but then it started blaring out again. At this point, I felt quite scared and I went in to Mum and Terry’s room, as they were still awake at the time.

Terry said “That sounds like devil music!”. When he said that, I felt even more freaked out. I glanced up at Mum, and she looked concerned, although it now seems that she was mostly worried about the loudness of the music more than anything else. She said, “We will have to take it to a mobile phone shop. You won’t be able to take it to work tomorrow if it keeps doing this!” In the end, Terry removed the battery and sim card, and we could finally enjoy a silent night’s sleep. As I was laying in bed, I kept laughing about the tune and how awfully creepy it sounded, although I soon managed to get to sleep.

When I awoke in the morning, Terry put the battery and sim card back in the phone, and it was behaving normally, as if nothing had ever happened. What’s even more spooky though, is that this morning I looked through my directory of ringtones and listened to each one individually, yet I simply could not find the one which was blaring out last night. I could not even find one which sounded anything like it. I have no idea what could have caused the music to start playing, and my phone had never done anything like that in the past. Could it be some kind of security mechanism to deter someone from stealing the phone, which I activated by mistake when switching off the phone? The mind boggles.

On Tuesday evening this week, I went to see my niece Anya perform in a school play. The play had a Victorian theme, and Anya was involved in singing and performing poetry. This is her last ever week at primary school, as the summer holidays start next week. She will start high school this September, at the age of 11. During the interval in the play, we went into one of the classrooms where they were giving out drinks. It was the same classroom which I was in during Year 5 (age 9 to 10), and it was interesting to see how it had changed in the last 10 years. Most of the teachers who taught me have since retired or moved elsewhere. It all brings back memories of the time when I was Anya’s age, and leaving primary school. I had an autograph book, which I asked all my classmates and teachers to sign and leave a message for me. I have still got it now.

I’m glad that tomorrow I can finally have a lay-in; I haven’t had one of those for nearly 2 weeks! Tomorrow afternoon I will go to the city to buy a present for my friend Kay’s 21st birthday. I’m looking forward to the party tomorrow evening.

On Thursday I had my graduation ceremony, where I was awarded the certificate for my Computing Science degree course. It was a really good day, and the weather was good too. In fact, the only bad thing was that after I had put my gown on, we all had to stand outside the hall in the baking heat until our ceremony started. In the actual ceremony, they called each student onto the stage one by one. My Mum, Dad, Terry and Nanny were in the main hall watching me, and my 2 sisters were sitting in one of the lecture halls, watching the proceedings via a video link (we were only allowed 4 tickets for the main hall). We have ordered a copy of the video, but I have no idea when it will arrive. I’m looking forward to watching it though.
After the ceremony, we had photos taken, and then there was an afterparty held in a marquee outside, where we were given wine or orange juice and a few bitesize snacks.

In the evening, we went to the local Townhouse restaurant (where my Mum works) for a meal with the family. I had marinated chicken, which is always my favourite dish on the menu, and a chocolate sundae for dessert.

About this site – I have now found out how to do subpages, it is just a matter of finding time to transfer all the pages from my old site to the WordPress blog. I will also get round to installing some more plugins. I am going out this evening to watch my niece Anya perform in a dancing show.

There are several other exciting things happening in the coming week – on Thursday evening I have been invited to a party by the company where I work, and on Saturday it is my friend Kay’s 21st birthday party.

That’s about it for now.

The engineer came round today to fix the cable modem. It turned out the modem had completely had it, so he installed a brand new one. As I was at work today, I left some notes for my Mum about how to use the computer. I’m just relieved that everything is OK now.

I have had a good weekend; on Saturday evening we went to the Lord Mayor’s Procession, which is a carnival parade held in Norwich city centre every year. After the parade there was a funfair, music festival and a fireworks display. The fireworks were really good, however it was quite foggy (yes, even though it’s mid-July), so some of it wasn’t very visible. But the finale was the best bit, as they had fireworks going off in all directions.

The next day we went to a local wildlife park, which was fun, as I hadn’t been there for about 10 years. It was a hot sunny day.

About my site – I have transferred some of the content over to this new blog, but not all of it, as I’m not yet sure how to have WordPress organise it in categories – ie, in my old site, I had about 5 sub-pages within the “Me” section. I will try to find out how to do that.

I’m sorry that people’s comments didn’t appear automatically – today I noticed that I had the checkbox ticked so that all comments were held in a moderation queue. Apparently that was the default setting. But now I’ve set it up so that comments appear automatically, unless they are suspected to be spam.

The reason why I haven’t been able to update this new blog as quickly as I would have liked is because, since last night, my cable internet has stopped working completely. Usually, this problem would be easily solved by unplugging the cable modem and re-connecting it. Not this time! I tried that 3 times, to no avail. So I ended up calling the technical support, who said that there is something wrong with the modem, and they are going to send an engineer round on Monday afternoon. The only trouble is, I will be at work while they come round, so it will be up to my Mum, who knows absolutely nothing about computers, to supervise!

Right now, I am using dialup to carry out essential duties such as checking emails, etc. All being well, I should be back to normal on Monday evening.

If you are a regular visitor, you will probably be surprised to see that this site has changed so radically. I have decided to convert my entire domain to a WordPress blog, as now that I’m working full time, I needed a site which is quicker and easier to maintain. Don’t worry though, because all the existing visitor content will soon be transferred over to this new blog.

Hopefully it will also be easier for me to edit my site online, without having to rely on FTP to upload new pages, as there is a facility in WordPress which allows you to create new webpages on the fly.

I’d better go now, and continue working on getting this fully set up.