labor of love Sitting up late on Sunday night and then spending most of yesterday's Labor Day holiday in my jim-jams playing with html code and trawling through different templates certainly was a labour of love. But hey, I'm pleased with it. I was getting very bored looking at the coloured spots of the old page and I think it needed a change, if only to give me more stimulus to write stuff as I've had a fair amount of 'bloggers block' since I returned from holiday.

I still need to figure how to put Haloscan back on as my comments link and play with Flickr, which I currently use for my photos. Anyway, with my work now about to go into overdrive until the end of November, I'm pretty happy to have done the ardous work over the weekend.

Friday I nursed a hangover and then sat on the lawn at Ravinia and listened to old crooner Tony Bennett, who actually was very good. Unfortunately he didn't sing my favourite "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire," but then again it is hardly Christmas. Yet.

Otherwise it was a quiet weekend, went to dinner on Saturday night, which was very pleasant. I missed the England game on Saturday. It is hard to knock McClaren so far, although why that ugly git Phil Neville got in before Young I don't understand, and I say that as an England fan, not a Charlton one. He's now nursing an injury, one which rumours say trumped his move to West Ham in summer. Although his early season form has been excellent.

I do hope that Benty gets a run out tomorrow, a game I maybe able to sneak out of the office for. Kick off here is at 2pm.

That reminds me that I was bloody pissed off today. There is a good chance I could be home weekend of October 7th, so who have Charlton got? Poxy no-one as it's another International week. Jeez.

Finally a couple things that made me happy the weekend. My Dad had an angioplasty operation last week and came out of it well. I was worried and felt pretty helpless out here and these things test your resolve to live 4,000 miles away from your parents. And secondly, my son has bought me a signed Alan Curbishley book for my birthday, for which he queued up an hour and a half for last week in Bluewater.

"It's for my Daddy, he lives in Chicago." he pointed out to Curbs. "Oh so does one of our (it must be a hard habit to break that!) directors." I guess he meant Michael Stevens.

"Does he go to the pub with my Daddy?" asked my son. How funny. But hey, I might be onto something. Another Chicago Addick?  ¶ 10:58