Mrs S has been busy in the kitchen again. It will be a while yet before I can retire on the proceeds of her burgeoning cake empire, but meanwhile we can feast on the offcuts, and you can see what they look like here…

FX, one of our satellite TV channels, is rerunning Babylon 5 in its entirety at one episode per weekday; and Nick has become quite taken with it, watching it religiously. Most of us are joining in with him; I’d quite forgotten how good it was.

I expect that watching one episode per day will give us better insight into the 5 year story arc, which will now be compressed into about four months or so.

Nick’s regular eye test revealed that he now needs glasses, so we bought some. Spectacle wearers now outnumber those with good eyesight in the house 3:2.

Now that I have found this, I am hatching evil plots for Giulia’s wedding. Mwah hah hah!

My lady wife has been busy in the kitchen again; click here to see the latest baked-to-order cakes.

Giulia has now selected a church for her wedding. Huzzah! I’m told it’s very pretty.

I hadn’t realised how much work is involved in organising a wedding; as an only child, I haven’t seen brothers or sisters get married, and my own wedding was organised on my behalf in another country. (I highly recommend that as an approach, given the levels of work and stress I’m seeing at the moment.)

Meanwhile, the clergyman concerned initially told Giulia he couldn’t accommodate her preferred wedding day (some months hence) because he had a funeral booked. Either he has an interesting sense of humour, or he has a sideline best not pursued…

As it’s not long now until I can exterminate all traces of Vista from the family network, I am reading reviews of Windows 7.

I found one reviewer who praised its “large, lickable icons”. I do so hope that is a simple spelling mistake. However, having seen the other bonkers ideas coming out of Redmond, it could be true.

Can you imagine the support calls I’ll get if it is?

It came to me last night, as in a dream, that my life has drifted into an undesirable pattern. What used to be leisure time, spent with friends, has turned into overtime and commuting. Apart from dinner with my family (most nights) and work, I only see real people for a few days each August; my personal life is on the Internet at odd hours of the night.

This is not acceptable. Time to move back into meatspace, so if posts become intermittent again, that’s why; I’ve decided to get a life.

It’s updates again. The bane of my life.

A while ago, we got an Xbox; this happened when I noticed that every time Nick got a new PC game as a present, we had to upgrade the PC. You need a new graphics card. And a new power supply for the new graphics card. And a new operating system (Vista, may it burn in hell forever). And so on.

Aha, I thought, a games console wouldn’t do that; it would just run the games, and it’s cheaper than the graphics card, let alone the other stuff. Job done.

And so it was, for a while. And we were at one with our Xbox. Then I decided to add a wireless link to the home LAN and try out Xbox Live.

First, of course, Xbox Live insisted I apply a series of updates, which completely changed the look and feel of the user interface. Then it insisted I change my profile name from something meaningful to something not. (Microsoft – there is more than one person called Andy in the world. Figure out a way to deal with it that doesn’t mean I have to be known forever online as “MeaninglessRubbishUserID8371235406-897.” That isn’t my real gamertag, but you get the picture.)

Then I couldn’t log on. It took about a day to figure out I needed to recover my gamertag – why is beyond me, since I didn’t have one as such, but there y’go – since the error code generated by login attempts wasn’t one their knowledgebase had an article for. Then it trashed all my save files. The saga continues, but I have to say I am not impressed.

I’ve been quiet for a few days, because my bride is back from Sicily! Yay!

And since then, our evenings have been spent in front of that worthy addition to our busy modern lifestyle, the Sky+ box. Even after I culled a load of stuff, and a determined assault on the remainder over the bank holiday weekend, we still have about 40 hours left to watch. So what has filled our box? I’m glad you asked.

• Chuck: A fish-out-of-water sitcom, featuring a guy who works in a discount warehouse who has bizarrely learned the bulk of the secrets held by the CIA and NSA, which they have then lost. An average guy trying to keep up with the superspies. This is territory that has been covered before in things like Jake 2.0 and (to an extent) Reaper, but it works well. Like Father Ted, in that I sit down each week thinking it will be awful, but find myself enjoying it.
• Dollhouse: Which I have enthused about before. A grown-up version of Joe 90, but none the worse for that.
• Life: Which I like for its bizarre plots and strange protagonist (a millionaire Zen Buddhist detective).
• The Mentalist: Another detective show with a strange protagonist, a fake psychic turning his powers to fight crime. Entertaining, but takes liberties with things like NLP for the sake of the plot.
• My Own Worst Enemy: An interesting premise, but it struggles to hold my interest after half a dozen episodes – it would have been better as a movie. The premise is that there is a group of secret agents who have deliberately induced split personalities; their cover is unbreakable because it is a separate personality completely, which knows nothing about the agent – except for the protagonist, who due to a technical fault switches randomly between the two. There’s only so much you can do with that.
• NCIS: One of the better detective shows. Perhaps because it is limited in scope (NCIS investigates crimes involving US Navy and Marine personnel only), it develops bizarre crimes for the team to unravel, and has a range of fully developed and unusual (not to say weird) characters. Probably the best of the bunch for us.
• True Blood: Was there for awhile, but we lost interest halfway through the pilot and erased the lot. Twilight meets Californication. Not our cup of tea.
• Ugly Betty: Which my better half watches while I’m playing with my toy soldiers, of which more anon, no doubt.