Monthly Archives: February 2006

Four Things

Liz is a gem. Not only does she give me things to think about and stretch my brain, she also gives me things that appeal to my sense of the silly.

I’ve been tagged! As it’s been a while since something like this found its way to me, I would feel mean abandoning it on the doorstep (so to speak).

Four Jobs I’ve Had:
1. Office cleaner.
2. Sales assistant for Whittard of Chelsea.
3. Kennel girl.
4. Office admin assistant.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over:
1. Robin Hood Prince of Thieves
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
3. Alien and Alien 3 (I also love Alien 2 and 4, but 1 and 3 are my favourites)
4. X-Men 1 and 2

Four TV Shows I Love To Watch:
1. Lost
2. West Wing (series 6 isn’t quite as good as the first few, but still great)
3. Desperate Housewives
4. ER
(And isn’t it pathetic that all of them are US shows?)

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation:
1. New York
2. Borneo
3. Singapore
4. Vast portions of Britain, Scotland, and Wales throughout my childhood

Four Tunes That Play In My Head:
1. That Rick Astley song (damn the Boy Temp!)
2. Matchbox, Twenty “Unwell”
3. Jimmy Eat World, “Hear You Me”
4. John Mayer, “Wonderland”

Four Favourite Dishes:
1. My Mum’s Beef and Macaroni Pie
2. Crab cakes
3. Thai green coconut curry
4. Salmon in any form

Four Websites I Visit Daily:
Ouch! This is hard, seeing as how Vienna gets me around 200 sites a day…
I’m going to wimp out on this one, and just direct you to my bloglines page so you can read for yourself.

Four Books I Really Love:
1. Neal Stephenson, “Cryptonomicon”
2. Stella Gibbons, “Cold Comfort Farm”
3. Charlotte Bronte, “Jane Eyre”
4. Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”

Four Places I’d Rather Be:
1. Kingston, Ontario
2. Edinburgh
3. Glastonbury
4. That one little beach somewhere on the north east tip of Borneo (I never did learn its name) near Bavangaso.

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging:
Let’s take this opportunity to get to know some of the newer people shall we?
1. Josh
2. Dewayne
3. Crazy
and for good measure, because… ah, just because
4. the Cute Canadian

Too nice to delete

I said recently how spambots were getting all nice. These two today are just too much!

  • Man I love this site. Some very insightful comments. I will add your blog to my favorites.I will be back shortly.
  • You must get tired of people telling you what a great blog you have. Hope you don’t mind one more!

I think I’m loosing my mind…

I have the distinct feeling I’m cracking up. I just saw the same old woman with purple hair twice. First time, walking same direction as me but behind me. Second time, walking towards me from the opposite direction. And there was no time/way for her to get past me… Ack! Glitch in the Matrix perhaps?

Sunday Roast: the Canadian was the killer? Oh that’s so un-Canadian…

Small but perfectly formed can, this week, be used to describe both myself and the Sunday Roast:

These iPod cases are quite cute.

This Rubik Cube for the blind is a genius idea! Not that I would have any more luck with this one over the standard colour ones (Curly Durly is the only one in the family who ever cracked Rubik games – but she cracked ’em all. One each holiday throughout my childhood. I think the clock was her favourite… but I digress). Good idea.

Ah, those Canadians… What will they think of next?

There are times in your life you just have to shrug and accept that you are dating a very odd boy. Funny and cute, but odd.

Because who knows when (if) I’m ever going to get a shiny new Mac, here’s some Apple porn pictures of a brand new MacBookPro as it comes out the box.

We live in a crazy world when actors held at the airport under the Terrorism Act.

I think people should stop giving Daniel Craig a hard time. The man is a damn fine actor and, let’s face it, Bond films are not exactly high art now, are they? At least wait for a trail before you condemn the film!

Everything these days seems to have a Creative Commons license slapped on it (at least on the ‘Net), but is it broken?

I’ve been circling round a review of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle for a while now but lacked the skill. Then I found this great review of it on BoingBoing. And then I found a link to an accompanying photoset on Flickr. Good day!

I’m doing temp work right now, so this report is mildly worrying. At the same time, my situation is slightly anomalous because of the nature of the temp-bank I work for. They are the good guys in this story.

And because I like to end with the NYT if I can (not sure why, but it’s become kind of a tradition) – I have to say “bad NYT”. In their review of ‘Doogal’ they make no mention of it having already been released in Europe last year as ‘The Magic Roundabout‘, with a completely different voice cast… Never saw the UK version and apparently it tanked, but still. To not mention it at all? (And researching this movie on IMDB kicked up a few omissions/mistakes in that venerable site!)

Ok, that’s it, I’m done and am off to the supermarket. Morrisons on a Sunday afternoon… I must have done something awful in a past life to deserve this.

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die…

People have asked me if I had fun the other weekend, going to visit the Crazy Canalman. The short answer is “Yes, I had fun”.

Now for the long answer…

We’ve always done DIY in my family – you only call in the professionals as a last resort. Like the time Granddad put a drill through the cold water pipes one May Bank Holiday, and Farv had to frantically bribe the plumber to visit whilst Mum (pregnant with me) dealt with a screaming infant (my brother, a horrible child by all accounts), the cat having a heart attack downstairs, and my step-Gran being… my step-Gran. Granddad, so family legend goes, just sat there till the plumber came, with his finger in the hole like the little Dutch boy.

This love of DIY has stood the Crazy Canalman in good stead on the boat. As soon as one thing is mended, another three seem to break, but we’ve only had to call in the professionals for fitting of the boiler and actually installing the cooker, though admittedly my uncle (engineer-turned-brain surgeon/army medic. Truly.) has helped a fair bit.

One of the reasons I went up to the boat last weekend was to give a hand with some of the ongoing works – somewhere along the line tiling the bathroom morphed into putting up shelves, but hey, it’s all fun!

I would like you to ponder something for a moment: how do you put up shelves when there isn’t a straight line on the boat, and when the entire centre of gravity is constantly shifting due to movement on the water?

The answer is not easily. It can be done. We proved it, as evidenced by this picture, but the entire thing was judged by eye and bodged together out of some Ikea units that weren’t really designed to work together. I think it turned out pretty damn good.

Anyway, to make more room, Farv had to say goodbye to his “captain’s chair”, a wonderfully comfortable black leather swivel arm chair I’ve coveted since the moment he bought it four/five years ago. The first time I sat in the thing I had this mental image of the Bond villain, swivelling round, stroking that fluffy cat, and we needed another chair in the living room at Meadow Towers, so…

bondchair

(And please note my shiny boots – the bargain boots).