My last post on here was 29th May, the opening day of DG One.  The first few weeks were as expected, queues out the door as it received the usual Dumfries welcome to anything new opening.  However, the honeymoon period seems to have been even shorter lived than expected.  I was there 3 weekends ago, and it was much quieter already.  I couldn’t make it the last 2 weeks, but was back again today, and the initial rush is definatley well and truely over.

It is still quite busy, but nowhere near as busy as it was for the 1st 3 or 4 weeks, and not as busy as I’d expect it to be after such a short thime. So why?  I believe it’s down to 2 things - a pretty poor timetable, and over efficious life guards.

The timetable for the school holidays actually looks much better, although the training pool is still very rarely available to the general public. My wife has already decided to keep taking the kids to Annan (which has re-opened after a short closure) because the rules at Dumfries mean she can’t take our 3 year old and 6 year old on her own (she can at certain times at Annan) and anyway, she finds the Dumfries pool just too big to keep an eye on them both on her own anyway.

Craig Tara at Ayr used to be my favourite holiday destination because we love swimming so much, and it has a superb pool (still eclipses the new Dumfries pool), but, a couple of years ago, they replaced their happy go lucky life guards with some clones with whistles, and it’s been less enjoyable since as you never know when something that was OK last year will get you into trouble this (and my 3 year old is not immune to them!).  They seem to have had the Dumfries staff trained at the same place.  Although the training pool is open on a Sunday morning, it appears they employ 3 life guards to count the number of people in it, and one to blow his whistle at random intervals to tell you the pool is full, so you aren’t allowed in.  I haven’t even tried to get my 6 year old onto the slides yet, as the sign says it is for over eights only.  Another pool I go to, in Letterkenny, has the same sign up, but use the common sense approach, “If her Dad thinks she’s Ok for it, she can go on” approach.  I can’t see this prevailing in Dumfries somehow!

The DGone leisure complex finally opened, about a year later than scheduled, yesterday.

Against my better instincts, my little girl dragged me along tonigh, as she was desperate to see it.  As it turned out, it wasn’t as busy as I had expected. My initial impression was one of slight disappointment.  We are very keen swimmers, and have been going down to Annan regularly while Dumfries has been without a pool (even when it did have a ‘pool’ because I wouldn’t have set foot in the old place!), and to be honest, I can see that continuing.  The timetable for the new pool looks pretty poor, if you can understand it, and it’s difficult to pick out a time after 5:00 when you’ll actaully be able to go for a swim. Even tonight, within about 10 minutes of us getting in, they closed down the ‘training pool’ for the swimming club, the big pool was split into 2 from the time we got therr (meaning my little girl couldn’t practice her widths), and it would seem this will be a pretty permanent arrangement, and the ‘leisure pool’ was a huge disappointment, not very big atol, and when my wife took my wee girl into the ‘rapids’ section, she was immediatly thrown out for not being a strong enough swimmer, despite the fact that she has been in many similar facilities at other pools. Hopefully this is just early over efficiency, which I was actually expecting.

We didn’t even try the flumes because of the queues, but I did notice the sign saying they were for over 8’s only.  Let’s hope they aren’t too strict on this. My wee girl has been going down the slides at Craig Tara in Ayr, Centre Parcs at Penrith, Water World in Newcastle and The Time Capsule in Coatbridge since she was about 4 years old, she’s 6 now and wouldn’t be impressed if she’s not allowed down the flumes, especially as they actually look pretty tame in comparison!

Overall, initial impressions aren’t great, let’s hope things settle down a bit, and I may enjoy it more in about 6 months time when we are among only about 10 people who are actually still using the pool!

The Chamber of Commerce’s effort to beat this site at it’s own game, itsmydumfries.com, seems to have accepted defeat, so now the council are chipping in with goDumfries.co.uk.  It’s nowhere near as good as this site, but it does have quite a good slide show on the front page! If you still wish to view their effort, click on the Site of The Month link in the menu.

There have been a few changes to the site recently. As promised, the Placefinder has now been AJAXed, making it much quicker. This was  my first venture into the world of AJAX, but it was actually quite easy, so there may be more to come!

What used to be the e-mail list is now the Dumfries People Finder.  I hope to make it an easy way for you to find your friends and family from Dumfries on their existing Social Networking Sites, and would urge you to register if you haven’t already.

Finally, you may notice some arrows at the top of certain menus now.  These will allow you to hide certain areas of the site to help make  it easier to read, and let you customise. These can’t be saved yet (future  project) but hopefully you’ll find it useful.

Is it just me, or has anyone else suffered from Hayfever already this year?  I’d swear that what I had on Saturday (15th March) was hayfever.  I have noticed that a lot of the trees are in full bloom already. I have a diary note to start taking my hayfever tablets, and it comes out in the middle of April, so if it was hayfever I had at the weekend, then it’s really early this year. Of course, I could have just had a cold!

My New Years Resolution was to update this blog every Friday with the latest from the local papers, and also to keep the What’s On section up to date. Here I am getting round to the blog on Tuesday, and the What’s On hasn’t been done (and don’t even mention the site of the month!).

 Still, I have a good excuse, as I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Dumfries People Finder of the site, and I hope you’ll agree with me that it has been worth it.

It’s been a pretty quiet week in Dumfries this week, as a lot of people are still off on Christmas and New Year holidays. The front page of the Courier focused on the snow which fell on the region Thursday and Friday, but to be fair, while the rest of the region had quite a bit of snow, most of Dumfries, and certainly the town centre, got away pretty lightly, and it was all gone within a few hours. My kids did manage to get out to build a snow man and have a go on the new plastic sledges we bought them just before Christmas, but let’s just say I’m glad I was at work and it was the wife who had to drag them round the garden!

Speak to you all again next week, when hopefully I’ll have more to say.

Both the Standard and Courier’s lead story this week is on the number of casualties dealt with at the hospital last Saturday as Dumfries was hit by a rare bout of black ice.

It was well advertised in advance that these conditions were likely to apply, and I for one, didn’t even attempt to step foot outside until about 5 o’clock, when I took about 3 steps and went straight back in! So why were all these people down the town? Because it was the last Saturday before Christmas? If memory serves me right, Christmas has been on the 25th December for the last few years, so why not try getting organised instead of leaving everything to the last minute. As for the guy who was banging on about the council doing something about it! They’re the council, not God! OK, they’re not perfect, but they can’t stop the unstoppable. He was complaining that no-one had salted the Vennal.  I don’t suppose it crossed his mind to have some salt at the ready and do it himself.

I’m afraid I have very little sympathy. Fair enough, if you are out because you have no choice in the matter, but people have to use their common sense, and just stay in the house on days like this if they possibly can.

How many of you experience what I call ‘on one days’? What I mean by that is a day when, for no apparent reason, everything is twice as busy as usual, and quite often with ‘bizarre’ things.  Today was an ‘on one day’ although to be fair, while I was twice as busy as normal at work, there weren’t many of the weird and downright crazy requests you normally get on these days. You can usually tell first thing in the morning if it is going to be an on one day, although they can occasionally sneak up mid day, but I find, if they start at 12:00 noon, they finish at about 12 noon the next day, and last almost exactly 24 hours.

Today for instance, I got my usual bus into town, and most days the traffic is fairly consistent. It does get busy in places, but not too bad, and always at the same points. Today however there were cars everywhere (The lay-by outside Noblehill Cafe on the Annan Road is usually quite a good place to gauge on one days, as there are normally loads of cars in there either parked facing the wrong way, trying to do a U Turn on the Annan Road or just generally abandoned in the middle of the road because the lay-by is full), and queues at places you wouldn’t expect them. As I said, at work, there weren’t so many crazy things, but I was there until half past 6 tonight just tidying up and catching up on the day. As I write this, my 2 year old is still up in his room (my 5 year old is sleeping now, a bit later than usual, but she seems to be developing an immunity now to ‘on one ness’).

I’d actually love to do a scientific experiment into it, as I’m sure there is something in the atmosphere, or the phases of the moon, or something which causes it. I remember hearing an article on the news about a police force in England which was making sure it had extra staff on on the night of full moons, and the news program was having a bit of a laugh about it. I however wasn’t in the least surprised, and indeed I’ve heard police officers say that they dread a full moon because they know they are going to be in for a night of it. As my friend once hypothesised!, the human body is about 70% water, and the moon affects tides, so who is to say it doesn’t affect humans?

I’m going to start trying to record ‘on one days’ on here to see if I can detect a pattern!

Do you find that people easily fall into categories?  I must admit, I am quite bad for ‘categorising’ people in a sarcastic way (I’m sure other people must do the same to me!) but they so often prove me right!

This morning, while I was waiting for my bus (go on Mr BMW driver, criticise people who get the bus to work for slowing everyone else down! See, there I go again), in near total darkness, 2 women with small children beside them, drove by with no lights on.  To be fair, only one of them was still putting her seat belt on as she drove (the other one had probably come far enough to complete this particular task!), but how typical is that of the ‘drive the kids to school’ brigade?

It reminded me of the other night when I returned to the car park to see a lady in a parked car pick up her mobile phone, dial in the number, and then drive off while on the phone!  Guess what she was driving?  That’s right, a 4×4.

I hope I don’t fall into any categories (I’m sure I do), but I’m damn sure it’s none of the above!