Saturday 31 December 2011

The End is Nigh!? Nay.

I had a good hard think about 2012, what with all the rage in the news about "the end of everything." I don't believe that one bit, even the Mayans regarded it more ass the end of an era.

Now, here's a question for you folks; what are your New Year's Resolutions usually? Are they like mine each year: lose weight, buy a house, pass driving test, save enough money to go on holiday?

So, in appreciation of the new era, I thought I'd do things... a new way. Why not add some little things in, things you don't normally think about, things that are easy to do, that you'd like to do, that you've been meaning to do?

 This year, starting as soon as the year begins, I'm going to send off a message in a bottle. I'm going to do some more sketching - stream of conciousness art (anything that comes into your head, do a brief, fast sketch - an idea of the item/person and move swiftly onto the next thing, just to see what happens). And finally, I'm going to find a nice pebble on the beach - then post it to my friend in the US, just to confuse him.

 So, what about you? How will you mark the beginning of a new age? If you're stuck, this might give you some ideas: 50 things everyone should know how to do.

The Mayan tourist board have got it right: "We don't think the world will end. But come and see our culture before it's too late - just in case we're wrong."

By the way - Happy Birthday Bogle!

On a personal note, this will be the last post I make all year, as I will be otherwise occupied for the most part with excessive drinking, partying and such.

Thursday 29 December 2011

Hopefully this'll help the New Year's Eve party go with a bang!

Happy dragons - we left them tucking into some yummy melon slices whilst we nommed on some Serrano ham and peppered cream cheese with our share.

Well, it was a good shopping haul; not only did we get the yummy ham, but we got the paperwork for the gvt sorted, found both of my sibling's presents, loaded up with lemonade, juice, tins and other heavy items  - and bartered a reasonable bargain on a bagful of fireworks.

File:Southerncomfortlime.jpgThere's a nice chap I know on Freeman St who usually has a good collection of explosives, so we made a quick visit to his store. We picked up 22 mixed rockets, a 16 shot barrage box and some MAMMOTH sparklers (though I keep wanting to call them "sprinklers") for £25 - I checked online for their proper prices, and it should be closer to £40.


We also found, oh heaven of heavens! that Southern Comfort finally do Southern Comfort with LIME! No more messing around with the bottle of Rose's and getting the measure wrong - this is a ready made Steamboat in a bottle - just add lemonade.

Needless to say, I have purchased a bottle with some of the money I was given for Christmas. Thanks Nana M, it's lovely stuff!

His Lordship treated himself to a bottle of Martini Bianco with his Christmas money, having discovered both a taste for it and that it's not a "girly" drink. "Well hey, if Bond can drink Martini..." It's the soft vanilla note that appeals to him, the cream soda style flavour in lemonade, as opposed to my preference for the crisper bite of Extra Dry Martini with a nice tart twist of lemon.

It'll be interesting discovering what my sister likes best - her 18th is coming up soon...

Sunday 25 December 2011

Happy Christmas!

Christmas this year has been GREAT! It's been such a treat to actually be with family, watch them open presents and see them laugh at some of the really silly things I found.

I spent a whole week trying to perfect my practise run jelly mixers - the full run took four days to complete (mostly setting time), but they are worth every minute of it!

I had to keep the alcohol levels tame, as my siblings were also having them, however my friend LD came up with a great name for the full powered version: Traffic Light Jellies: "Because when you hit red, you gotta stop."  There's sour apple spirits, plain lemon, Glava whisky with orange and a sweet cherry liqueur.

I still have to push the extreme limits of jelly setting and beat my mother's famous vodka jelly some day.

My "Treasure Chest" of presents worked out really well, with my brother's "crap present" of a Glow-in-the-Dark Toilet Roll raising laughs, and my mother's response to her teeny weeny pink frying pan was just marvellous.

We also got some great presents - my mother bought me a HUGE box full of canned beardie foods (Sandy is DELIGHTED, and made off with most of a can of crickets). His Lordship got an awesome inflatable shark Zeppelin - it wandered off and scared the bejaysus out of me when I walked into it at head height in the utility room.

I especially like the Smelly Toes, it's a lovely perfume. His Lordship stuck his finger in the USB fan. Apparently it hurts and he won't do that again.

Dinner was fantastic too (thanks Mum!) and His Lordship has fallen in love with both cranberry/red cabbage mix and Serano ham with melon - we had to go out and buy some specially! Maybe Bogle will cook next year, now she has so many cookbooks?

Or maybe not. You know, just in case.

Saturday 24 December 2011

Stampy Claws is comin'... to Tsam!

Christmas is nearly here, or at least, that's what Tsam tells me. He's been watching for it. I've made sure that all my presents are wrapped, my jellies are made, my clothes are ready!

I do have to work out how to get the Dragon's stocking back out of Tsam's tank - he's having an early night to make Christmas get here faster. It does mean he's now SLEEPING on it though.

Hyphen knows something is up, but isn't sure what; as usual, his self-preservation instinct isn't quite up to scratch and so I found him wedged in his Christmas tree.

Thursday 22 December 2011

MmmmmmmONOPOLY!

My brother made cookies. Can you tell? To his credit, they were very tasty and had edible glitter on top.

We then went on to have a lovely evening with the boys - my new table turned up and I got it built just in time for a rough game of Monopoly - I played slow and MEAN, resulting in trashing the lads with over 11,000 in profit from just 8 strategically placed hotels.

Ah well, they can't complain, I did buy pizza.

Actually, that was even better - all the pizzas are £2 cheaper here than they are in Somerset! How is THAT for awesome! Chinese meals also seem to have bigger portions whilst being cheaper too, and the buses are half the price - all I need to do now is get my job back.

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Goddamit Gemologists!

Some of you may know I used to handle and grade minerals for a living. I still enjoy rockhounding and collecting interesting gems - but I find it hard to express how much it ANNOYS me trying to find nice samples on eBay. I wish there was a filter to source out the "metaphysical" specimens.

Here's a chunk of choice words used by "crystal" sellers that really tick me off:

 New Age! Healing. Reiki. Shamanic. Enchanted. Lemurian. Tibet. Sexuality. High. "Body and emotions". Dream. Seed. Vision. Elevated. Grounding. "Rare" (That's a favourite of mine - usually the item in question's a chunk of cheap, battered quartz, but you've given meaning to all it's dings. Oh, it's damaged and "repaired" itself - it must be good at healing people!). Energy. Fairy. Meditation. Stabilising. Unique. Quest. Confidence. "A Grade!" (It never is.) Isis. Clearing. Power! Hemimorphite! (Just kidding, that's a real stone.) Transformation. Aura. Blockages. Essence. Love. Chalice. Talisman. "True Natural". Goddess. Boost. Chakra. Ornate. "Carved Shiva Lingham" (You can't have a CARVED Lingham. It defeats the bloody point. Ask me why only if you're REALLY interested.) Spiritual. Luck. Money. Bohemian.

Seeing dyed agates also cheeses me off - trashing a lovely slice with tacky flamingo pink colourants. Yuck.

It seems that if you attach one or some of the above words to your chosen rock, you can inflate the price to incredible levels. At risk of sounding hypocritical, I am even comfortably conversant in the "magic abilities" of some of your basic minerals for the people who are actually into and believe that kind of thing and I appreciate it's very effective for boosting sales (I can sell you a crystal for that, nudge nudge...)

 But I'm sad for all the poor people out there that are being conned into buying a nasty bit of glass because someone has laser etched an angel into it and called it "Shamanic High Energy Enchanted Tibetan Meditation Quartz Lemurian".

There's a lot of fake crap comes out of a certain big country. Bad sellers. BAD!

Some good did come of today though - I found this rather handy little gidget: http://iruler.net/ It measures your screen settings and produces a true to size ruler for you! Handy!

Monday 19 December 2011

Slug it out...

Well would you look at that!

The last week, I have been hunting high and low for my motorbike keys to send to my insurers. Now, I knew I had put them somewhere very safe, visually prominent - but for the LIFE of me I haven't been able to find them.

Of course, now I have been informed that my bike is not "economically viable" to recover and repair, I have suddenly found my keys. In a very safe, visually prominent location. Sod's Law, thine victim receives your punishment with joy.

On the plus side, I MIGHT get a grand back from the insurance company. His Lordship suggested I ought to cash in my tax disk, but as I pointed out that the entire year only costs £15 and it was due for renewing... Well, it wouldn't really be worth it for all of £2.50!

His Lordship made an interesting find this evening - a little leopard spotted slug, in the middle of our bathroom floor. I'm not sure how it got there, but it certainly made me laugh.

It turns out that it's a Limax Flavus, the Yellow Slug, which explains WHY it's here - they like to come in when it's cold, enjoy climbing damp walls and they're mostly nocturnal.

Needless to say, I took it back outside.

In other news, Cousin John at FastFrames did a wonderful job with my pictures and got them all done in record time, complete with a marvellous silver box frame for Kyle's X-Ray. I'm going to get some LED units and rig up a lighting kit so that I get the best effect out of the film.

Quote of the day: "The gods too are fond of a joke!" - Aristotle.

Friday 16 December 2011

Baggain a Bargain.

Vax C91-MZ-B Mach Zen Multicyclonic Bagless Cylinder VacuumScored some good bargains this week, starting with this lovely new vacuum cleaner online at Pricelover (get yours HERE) for £30 less than Tesco.

We finally settled on the Vax Mach Zen because it's listed as 70% quieter than a conventional cylinder cleaner. It's multifloor and has a huge canister - whilst that makes it a touch bulky, it more than makes up for it with powerful suction and nippy manoeuvre-ability. I did discover that the dirt container opens a bit oddly, flipping down from underneath. This resulted in dust back on the floor again - but that's ok; I have a good vacuum cleaner to deal with the mess.

We got a nice little bargain from Tesco themselves, in the form of a simple table.

£99 all in for this rather modern oak effect and powder coated steel set - it'll go nicely with the laminated floor and provides both eating space and gaming space.

I also picked up a bunch of bargains for Christmas presents on Neopets and got them distributed early - all sorts of things, from a Black and White Scarab for a friend's black and white gallery to a Silver Gelert Candy for a dog-mad colleague.

Shortly after, I get an email off a good friend: "Just as I accepted your gifts...  Something has happened! A beautiful Fire Faerie floats down and gives you a Starry Petpet Paint Brush!!! THANKYOU!!!!" Heh, jammy mare - those are worth an absolute fortune.

Well hey, Merry Early Christmas!

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Seeing the funny side...


Well that's annoying. Someone tried to steal my motorbike last night. Now, if they had known ANYTHING about Honda NHX1, they'd have known about the immobiliser. As they didn't, they didn't get very far but they have done a fair bit of damage. Including shredding my seat in anger when they couldn't overcome said inbuilt locking mechanism.

Charmed, I'm sure. They ignored the neighbour's motorbike in exactly the same situation, physically lifted my third-of-a-ton of vehicle over the wall, lugged it down an alleyway just across the road and proceeded to try to make it go.

I woke up in the morning to the sound of a large vehicle and stuck my nose out, wondering if it was the dustbin lorry (not knowing what day they normally come. I now know it's a Wednesday) and discovered the police loading my bike onto a recovery truck. "OI!"

You have to see the funny side really...

The rest of the day didn't go much better, as I sat through the WORST screening tests of ALL time. The website doesn't work in ANYTHING other than Explorer if you want to log in, and the "assessments" were awful. No word of a lie, I had FIVE SECONDS to answer each question. This is a close and unnexaggerated replica of one.

Match the details - 5 seconds remaining. CGXNCYQZ

1.CGYNCXQZ
2.CCXNGYQZ
3.CGXZCYQN
4.CGXNCYQZ

18 of those, some others and then 30 percentages based ones. I can't do percentages at the best of times, let alone work out if Oilfield Amethyst, after having dropped 75% of it's production last year, will drop another 50% next year if it produced 120 million barrels in 2001.

I kinda get the Singapore Dollar to Hong Kong Dollar exchange rate conversion question, looking at export variables from 2008 - but it's kinda mooted by a very sturdy point: the currency ordering system does the conversions for you. If the currency ordering system has broken down to the point where you're having to manually calculate the figures, you can't order it anyway.

I sincerely believe I have been to the seventh levels of hell and back. That is one of the WORST things anyone could ever do to me. I can handle just about anything... except hypodermic needles and apparently percentage/ratio/exchange questions with a ridiculously short time limit.

At least I know I can do data comparisons in less than 5 seconds now, and my percentages one can't have been toooo bad (even though I ran out of time for the last two).
.
TXZQYNBDX - five seconds to find a match...

1 TXZQYNBDX
2 TXZQYNDBX
3 YXZQTNBDX
4 TXNQYZBDX

Update: Apparently I managed to pass that psychotic test. I didn't get the job though.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Managed the move

Off to a good start - we managed to get everything in the house - even with the VERY narrow corridor and two front doors to deal with. Mario Machon's boys did a sterling job even when His Lordship's favourite green comfy chair proved to be deeply frustrating. Whichever way it was turned, it would NOT go through.

Bless their sweet hearts, they grabbed screwdrivers, took the feet off the chair, took the front doors off and managed to get to squeeze it over the hallway radiator, just before it started to rain.

If you ever get them on Shiply, ACCEPT. All the work they put in, and only two things got broken - a glass bauble I hadn't packaged properly in a box and a spare sheet of glass from my spare tanks. I'm utterly amazed - one pane of glass out of 16. Well done lads, and thank you.

We also made "Santa treat bags" for our new neighbours, full of dinky cute treats - a wee pretty bottle of wine, a teenytiny Christmas pudding, chocolate coins and Fairy Rogers - I hope they like them. It's a modern version of milk and cookies, and ideal as "thank you's".

The first one went to Pete and Dee, for lending me their pliers - His Lordship left the other toolbox in Somerset as He already brought one. I discovered the one he brought is the one full of my makeup. I can mascara anything, but I'm stumped if I need to put nails in something. The second one went to Damon and Jo-Anne for holding a rather heavy box that turned up in the hour and a half I went out...

I also had a surprisingly pleasant encounter with the tv licensing phone system. First ever "talk to me" system I have come across that actually works - I successfully updated my details!