Stop - Book Crossing!

Today we used my award vouchers at Pizza Hut after a good afternoon at the cinema, which was nice - but the nicest thing happened on the way home. I spotted a book abandoned on a bench in the middle of town and strolled across to pick it up. I stopped in surprise at reading a sticker on the front: "This book is not lost!" Fair enough thinks I, looking for the owner. The rest of the sticker explained: "It's a travelling book, waiting for you to find it!" How wonderful!

I'm now a member of BookCrossing - a team that's best described as guerilla librarians. It's really rather a beautiful system for sharing a book you've enjoyed and want to pass on. BookCrossing gives it a unique BCID Number and you then "release it into the wild" to be found by a passing stranger. Whomever finds it, like myself with this book, "Witchcraft & Black Magic" (BCID: 003-7425446) is to read it then log a record of it and it's release on the website. You can even follow my BCID to see where it has been, and where it goes!

This book (along with some of my own BCID'd novels!) will be released somewhere on my travel home to Lincolnshire in a couple of weeks, so if you're in any big train stations between Somerset and Lincolnshire, have a look round - you never know!

Weightloss Water and Cream Cakes

That's just grand. After a month of fussing and promising, I only found out that I'm not being shifted after all. Now I'm deeply annoyed - I don't want to be where I am. I wouldn't mind so much if anyone actually asked before swapping my role. I turned down a nice admin position out of "loyalty" because I knew we needed staff and I thought they were doing their best to help me too. I won't make that mistake again.

But anyway, enough rant. We did have giggle at work for a change today - one of our regular phone customers called up again in his ah... influenced state and offered us all free holidays in Brittany.

I heard THE most ridiculous thing today. "Bio Synergy Skinny Water!" - low calorie water?! What the - Contains "L-Carnatine, a vitamin-like nutrient." Having done a little looking into it, this "miracle substance" hasn't been proven to help increase weight loss. Snakeoil anyone?

On a plus note, and not "lo-fat", we're making apricot and rhubarb cookies again! I smell of ground cloves. Also, I have a fridge and freezer full of yummy, yummy cream cakes. Get this - Tesco normally order 2 cages of creamcakes for the weekend. Due to an administrative error, FIFTY NINE arrived in our local branch. Everything half price! We've had eclairs, cheesecakes, slices, doughnuts, custard, choux pastries... It's going to be a good defrostables month.

"Halle Berry's boobs - slightly more interesting than Pokemon" - Himself

Chicken and Chilli...

Wowwee. Well, I've recovered from the week of crazy that was the family visiting - small dog and all. His Lordship was... impressed is the wrong word, with the ability of the dog to choose the nice carpet to go to the toilet on. I wouldn't mind the livingroom carpet so much, but it was the nice carpet.

Oh well! It was good to see everyone, chicken gravy just as I remember it should be and a fiiiiine pot of chilli. My great big stockpot didn't even last the evening, it was that good! My Mexican Chilli cheese was greatly appreciated by my sister - she likes the spicy. I may have to post some, but I haven't decided yet.

So much for recovery - I just found this shocking photo of one of my old friends... Augh! Get me some eye bleach, quick!

It's my own fault, I've been looking for a friends of mine from back home. Properly weird though is another chap I know, whom I lost touch with at least five years ago. He's turned up living less than 30 miles away. What are the chances of that?! I hate to admit it, but Facebook's actually really handy for this kind of thing.

I spent a good couple of hours on the terrarium the other day, carefully layering the hydroleca, netting and potting compost. After, I released some earthworms and woodlice to create a natural biocycle and topped it with some dead magnolia leaves. I planted two miniature palms, Terry's favourite peace lily and my own special treat for the gecko - miniature alpine strawberry plants, so when they fruit, s/he can eat them fresh. Thankfully the nice old gent of the magnolia plant didn't think it weird that I wanted dead leaves. I must pop a pic of the tank through his door as a thanks.

Ridiculousness and ROLLED!

Our lager, which art in barrels; hallowed be thy drink. Thy will be drunk, (I will be drunk). At home as it is in the tavern, give us this day our foamy head snd forgive us our spillage as we forgive those who spill against us. Lead us not into incarceration but deliver us from hangovers, for thine is the beer, the bitter, and the lager. Barmen. - Anon.

Interesting fact for you: the loose skin on your elbow is called a "wenus". His Lordship started rubbing his wenus on me, and asked me if I liked him.

GinjaNinja just dropped a pile of baccy on the floor - and used the dustpan and brush to sweep it up - then proceeded to roll a fresh one using it!

Schoolboy gains bus qualification

"A schoolboy has gained a qualification for getting on a bus - despite not knowing he had taken the test. Bobby McHale, 15, received a letter from an exam board recognising his ability to walk to the bus stop, wait for it to arrive and to board the vehicle

It came from the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, the largest of the three English exam boards, and was titled Using Public Transport (Unit 1)." - With thanks to UK MSN News.

Pensarn, Pensarn...

What a journey. We got on multiple trains as of silly o'clock on Saturday morning, having discovered my party earrings had not arrived. The dragons were sound asleep wrapped in their towels and the journey was perfectly planned to the minute - connection after connection made beautifully (I realised I had forgotten my specially bought hat on the second train) and almost pleasant if it weren't for the extraordinary amount of Scouts. In fairness, they were wonderfully behaved and great entertainment for the dragons, whom had a fabulous time watching the humans and out of the window. (Points A through D on the map to see our trip!)

We arrived in Pensarn a couple of minutes late - and couldn't see our taxi. The conductor, just preparing to head off, suddenly said "Is it Abergele you're going to?" We agreed and asked if he knew a taxi number, being as ours hadn't turned up. "Oh

." he says. "This isn't it."

Apparently, the Pensarn the trainline was advertising isn't OUR Pensarn. Our Pensarn is Abergele. In fairness, our Pensarn is big, with a little town (Abergele) just down the road and the inhabitants of our Pensarn didn't even know there was another one! The Pensarn we ended up at was simply a train track with a shelter... There was one house across the road, and some sort of traveller's day centre. That's it. And we were now late for our friends wedding.

Thankfully a lovely girl called Rachel in the Pensarn day centre sorted out a cabbie to take us the 50 miles completely across Wales to the right Pensarn. He was fantastic, and I'd like to thank him and his two little boys who had a bit of a long trip to get us back to Abergele. We got to the Bull Hotel whom kindly let us borrow their phone to call the Black Lion accross the road from the community centre where the reception was being held and let the bride know we hadn't got killed - just delayed by four hours.

The reception was lovely, the bride was delighted to see us, which made my day, Tsam and Kyle had a brilliant time tiring themselves out running around on the grass, taking Wee C for a walk, Rich discovered he didn't like Belgian lager but the cake was just right for him (no marzipan) and I found a yummy carrot, orange and lemon juice goes well with sparkling perry. The bride looked fantastic and the blushing groom was as happy as jam scones. Wee C made me laugh - on receiving and taking a big bite of her very own cake, we asked her what it tasted like. "Hmmm. It tastes like... cake."

We finally got back to the Bull - if you ever end up in Abergele, please do visit the Bull Hotel at the very least. The landlord and his family are lovely souls, the rooms peculiar in shape and with luscious dark wood furniture. Our room had a curved wall that leant in on the one side... We slept in a very comfy, creaky bed and awoke to enjoy a huuuuge cooked breakfast.

We got to the local trainstation and had to wing it from there... F-J on the map. We explained to each conductor the Pensarn-Pensarn situation, and they let us continue on our way. With some creative map reading and sensational timing, we managed to knock four hours off the journey! The lizards always enjoy train trips, but Tsam had a particularly good journey, flirting with a nice lady passenger. She got this great picture of Tsam showing off how big and male he is... (Pic credit K1m)

Colours and Carbons...

I got my hair done ready for my friend's wedding on Saturday - chestnut brown, a few shades darker than my normal colour and venetian red - C80815 to Hex coders. When told the colour was innappropriate for work, I politely pointed out that it couldn't be - I'd chosen it specifically to match the colour of my uniform!

I have discovered something cool though - I have been quite interested by Nanotech development over the years, and they're putting some awesome technology to use properly now.

Carbon nanotubes are being developed to replicate muscle fibre - adding special compounds allows this supertough material to "flex" when a small electrical charge is applied. Imagine the possibilities - muscle repairs, patched into and running off your own nervous impulses...

The second coolness I will tell Dad I want for Christmas. It is commercially available, but it is one of the funkiest materials available.

SLUUUUUUUG!

We saw a slug, and it was THIS big! Yes, that is a two pound coin for comparison. Notice this slug is in a sleeping state - I have no idea how long it would be awake, but it's the size of your average dog poop, making it a big-ass slug. We have lots of them in the basement at work - they come and go through the ventilation bricks, I often see them when I go to check the cellar safe... "Hello Slug!"

For the third year running, the summer is a two week long burst of sunshine - and the rest rain. Not that I mind, but I'm aware the weather has been better up north! The rain has been good for the rhubarb though, as it's now got arm thick stalks with two foot wide leaves. We've been eating rhubarb everything! We were also debating (as a household) exactly what group rhubarb falls under - turns out it's a vegetable.

His Lordship made me laugh, he asked me whether the voice in my head sounded like my actual voice. "Which one?" says I. I wanted to know what the voice in his head sounded like then, and he responded "Hang on, let me just think of something then."

"Food comes for free on vegetable trees, so we should like, sell it at the farmer's market." - Girl at Santa Cruz Council Testimonies (slightly edited for ease and glee of use!)

Google Chrome - Great Creation!

Google Chrome is a HUGE improvement to IE. Not only is it so much faster, it's deeply intuitive, loads up faster - I timed it, it's about 5x faster load (both the browser and webpage)! It even makes FACEBOOK posts near insta-load and when you start typing in the address bar, you don't have to select the title you want before hitting enter - it loads it into the bar and you just hit enter. I am also amused by the fact there isn't a "Stop" button - it's been made redundant because the pages load so damn fast, by the time you'd get there, it's already loaded and done!

GC utilises space so much more practically, putting the tabs up in the title bar rather than wasting valuable screen space and sizes the webpage in the most efficient manner for your screen. IE always has it too big for my little lappy. You can even create direct shortcuts on your desktop to favourite websites... That's cool. Better yet, you can grab a tab, drag and dump it onto your desktop for a whole new window - AND you can do it in reverse and put it back!

It's the little tweaks that have won it for me, things that Microsoft should have implemented years ago: it has a built in automatic spellcheck, phish&malware protector, a little highlighter for when you're using text boxes in pages, tweaks for multiple page starts and taskmanager - including "stats for nerds"! I love the personable style, the little comments like "Minor tweaks and Under the Hood" - it's not stale and stuffy like old Great Grandad IE.

Stuffy old GGrumps IE doesn't have Incognito Mode either - ideal for you blokeys that don't want people seeing what pages you've been visiting! GC is much more open minded and up to date.

It takes a lot for me to get out of my comfy ways, programmes I know, for example I refused to look at firefox because it was too lumpy - but Chrome's sumthin' else... I'm so looking forwards to downloading the new operating system in 2010.

"Google - thinking not quite out of the box. Oh hang on - the links come out of the edges!" - Him, realising Google are so far out of the box, they knew Microsoft were stuck in it and avoided making the same mistakes.

A Reptile Dysfunction (and A Ruined Dessert)

We've decided anyone whom has forgotten what it was they meant to do and are standing there looking blank is suffering from "a reptile dysfunction". This of course comes from Kyle's "reboots", where she will be running and suddenly stop, mid-step, and switch off. Several minutes at a time on some occasions and nothing will distract her.

Men's styling products contain rocks, salt and iron minerals. Have you noticed women's styling products contain flowers, bamboo, fruits? Talking of fruit, Tsammo eated de fruit. Tsammo eated lotta fruits. He's a whopper lizard now - we measured him at over 20" long, and over half a kilo, easily pushing 600g, with a three inch wide skull. Terry on the other hand, whilst growing fast, is certainly the smallest of my menagerie at only 4.2 grams.

Tsam's been very helpful, eating bits of leftover fruit from my attempted sorbet, all except the rhubarb. Sadly, sorbet is far beyond the capability of our crummy freezer - 28 hours later and it's still a nicely chilled syrup. Never mind, it'll be great on my vanilla cheesecake - it's rhubarb, raspberry, pear, passionfruit, pomegranate, cherry, lemon and vanilla. "Very fruity, the passionfruit really emphasises the raspberry."

Sacha Baren Cohen - the Marmite Man. You either love him or hate him. Personally, I can take or leave Marmite, for example: I wouldn't have it on my Bran Flakes, but I wouldn't have my mum's pastry wheels without it. But I digress, I was discussing SBC's latest movie, Brüno. Once again, it was cringeworthy, embarrassing and offensive - just what the doctor ordered!

Most of the population don't get SBC's work, seeing it purely as the three descriptives above, but they don't take into account that he's working along similar lines to John Agard:

"explain yuself
wha yu mean
when yu say half-caste
yu mean when light an shadow
mix in de sky
is a half-caste weather?
well in dat case
england weather
nearly always half-caste
in fact some o dem cloud
half-caste till dem overcast"

Sasha's work is about taking people's prejudices and forcing them to breaking point. Take Borat for example, he's not actually being offensive about Kazakhstan, he's just picked a country he knew very few British and American people would actually know about and worked with the assumations they develop. With Brüno, he's taking the mick out of us for our ignorance, picking on his victim's unfamiliarity with Austria. Let's face it, this time two years ago, even I didn't know Kazakhstan existed. I now know it's capital is Astanta and the favoured traditional instrument is the Dombra - a two stringed lute! It's not to reinforce incorrect views, but to show the audience how ignorance makes people look stupid! Sasha himself is Jewish, so casting "Borat" as an anti-semite reporter was bold, humorous and educational. (Pic: Harpers Bazaar)

"When will you Jews return the pyramids?" - discussing politics with the Hammas.

Tough To The Tax!

If you can get it, get Outrageous Orange hot chocolate. Add a tiny drop of good coffee and a splash of rum, and I promise you, it's the taste of Christmas. I use Bundaberg Royal, but sadly you can't get that here in the UK - I got lucky and a friend sent it back over from a visit to the Bundy factory a couple of years ago.

Here's a handy tip for Acer One users! I only found it because my scroller was being temperamental. If you go into device settings, you can programme "tapping zones" - so I can now open a browser with a quick tap to the top left, and my notebook likewise on bottom left. Superfast browser, huzzah.

TV RANT: All the other channels manage perfectly well on advertising. It's galling that BBC purports not to advertise - but they advertise their own programmes instead of normal adverts. If I'm going to have to put up with adverts anyway, I'd rather watch washing powder adverts and NOT HAVE TO PAY FEES! It takes the mick when I even have to watch BBC adverts at the cinema... Long live the other channels! Do away with the fee, go for advertising like the rest of the channels. I resent paying for what I rarely use. Come sign the Scrap the BBC Licence Fee Petition with me!

http://www.petitiononline.com/time2go/petition-sign.html - Viva la Petition! (Number 1053)

(Pic: Sky 3, Scandanavian boat that my Uncle spotted and snapped.)

We had spam, chips and eggs today for tea. It was just like being a kid again - Dad used to like Spam.

I also learned you can only fit 10 large grapes in His mouth until He looks like a turtle laying eggs... G says he can manage 16, but His Lordship mumbled (through the grapes) G has small grapes, small grapes don't count! I can manage 14.

Grammar drives me insane. If you can see the problem in the bracketed sentence, then thank goodness for that. (In a minute, A timer will be started.) I'm aware good English is becoming rare, but I hope that the upholders are not a species doomed to extinction just yet! And so, I have found my happy place - thank you to JChip8 for this picture of Fern Gully, it's like a vision in a dream.

"Please do not flush used teabags down the toilet" - some clever wit took tippex to it and it finished as "Please do not teabag the toilet."

Having taken my bike in for a service and discovering I am stranded on an industrial estate for the better part of two hours, I find myself in a small cafe, Ell's Kitchen. Somewhat frustratingly, the networks in the area are closed with WAP keys, thus looking unsecured until you try to tap them.

On the other hand, there are green and white checked plastic tablecloths, tattooed bikers eating "Hell's Breakfast" and thankfully they serve a fried egg and mushroom sammich. I feel right at home in my sleeveless shirt and biker bottoms. Not so with my book and my little blue laptop, but hey, you can't win everything.

Besides this freakin' sammich. I mean damn, this is the GOD of Eggshroom sammiches. The bread, I exaggerate not, is an INCH thick. Each slice! The mushrooms are fried into crispy submission, and the yolk exploded satisfactorially. And messily. Bread that thick is difficult to get around! So sitting here in this greasy spoon with a yellow smeared plate and a can of coke, noting the slightly odd smell of seaweed drifting in the door, I'm reminded very much of Home. Days working at Instores and nipping into the similarily greasy spoon next door. Marvellous. (Toast: Toastalicious.com)

Interestingly, Cineworld Screen 4 does have a WIFI network, but not currently accessible. However, just to prove a point as to how darn portable my nice new blue laptop is - I'm currently blogging in a packed out cinema, waiting for the adverts for Ice Age 3: 3D to start. ... And now I'm blogging as His Lordship tucks into the Sub Of The Day (Ham) at Subway! It does occur to me that companies could advertise by using WIFI - I'm sat here trying to access some more ports kicking around the area, and I don't know where they are. Little bit sad really, I'd be tempted to drop in the store to find if I could access the network. And once I'm in, I can see the stuff they're selling - which means I know it's there and might be tempted to buy! IP blockers are mean.

"D'ya want bready butter or toasts with that?" - Possibly Lady Ell herself. "There y'are, toasts."

Biker Beardie

My grandmother is deeply puzzled. She can't work out how a teabag managed to get into the duvet cover, but she has found out that it's left tealeaves all over the washing machine and clean sheets. Might be due to Grandad falling asleep in bed with his cuppa.

I bought a fig tree today, to have figgy yummy biscuits later! It's only a wee tree, but it has two big fig bulbs on already. I put it in a chocolatey red square pot and put it under my strawberry basket - the ultimate in recycling plant water. Water the basket, and the basket waters the fig!

Kyle had a moment today. She was rattling around as she often does, on the bedside table, when there was a thunk and she vanished. It took me a while to find her, as she'd climbed into the top drawer and made her way down the inside into His Lordship's pants drawer... (Pic: Not one of our dragons, but very cool. Unknown source, please contact for referencing.)

The Aircon at work is about as useful as most middle management - it's not doing much besides blasting hot air out. 26C in my cube, and I'm melting. I also discovered today that we pay more council tax than the Queen! She pays £1375 a year - for a house with 755 rooms.

"Pizza - Made of 10% Genius" - Himself

Fronds and Fresh Fruit

My mother's madness has taken an extraordinary new leap. I have to say, it's a unique fruitbowl... Talking of fruit, we've had a lovely week for fresh garden fruit. All my plants have gone insane, so His Lordship made rhubarb squares (Meranguits) and I served up raspberries and strawberries with chocolate icecream, still wet with rain.

Hopefully we've got some more strawbs to come, as I've purchased a nice strawb basket to hang from a bracket. I also bought some more shrimplets as, sadly, Paste passed away the other night. The original batch must be about three years old, but I now have 12 shrimp divided between the two tanks, including a teenytiny one called "Clunk".


Kyle is determined she'll move into Terry's tank, she's been knocking on the door, climbing the sides, getting her claws snagged in the galvanised roof - she's seen the new Tillandsia moss I put in there, a fine waterfall of pale fronds. Terry hasn't found it yet, but took a 0.2g poop on my scales. He's about 3.5g now.

I was overtaken by a van on the way to work yesterday, and it made me laugh - "Gurd & Flatt - General Builders." His Lordship got a surprising message too, after pulling a few alphabet candies out of a bag. Perfectly spelt on his hand: "FATASS." He also discovered I can fit one of my long handled sundae spoons up His left nostril...