For those of you who haven’t been following my adventures on Tumbleweeds (and why not?), I am back in the country and I am recovering from what was almost certainly a short, swift, but definitely NOT very sweet bout of food poisoning. I want to blame some suspect fresh pasta Moose handed me on Thursday when I had nothing in the larder that tempted me for dinner. She wants to pin the blame on a dodgy Slimfast or some bug I picked up in Guernsey. Whatever the trigger, I’ve been lying round Meadow Towers, groaning pathetically for the past four days with just about enough energy to crawl to the sofa and watch episodes of Firefly all day, before crawling back to bed. Seriously! It takes more energy than you’d think to have a shower and wash and blow dry your hair. For the super-curious and to reassure those of you worried about my personal hygiene, the latter all have been taken care of. Slowly, and with many sit-downs to stave off fainting fits and embarrassing trips to A&E (you cracked your head open in the bathtub and then half-strangled yourself with the hairdryer cord how again, exactly?)

The diverse symptoms of possible food poisoning I won’t go in to because they were bad enough to experience first hand, let alone describe, but they have resulted in nothing more substantive than a few cream crackers and numerous glasses of water passing my lips since Thursday evening. Oh, and one cup of tea and an English muffin this morning that I’m not sure was the wisest move. Great for dropping a few pounds maybe, not the best for mental clarity or physical stamina. You would not believe how long it has taken me to write these few coherent sentences…

So I want to you take this Toast (just the thought of a roast right now is making me queasy…) as a sign that I do adore of all you, my blog-reading and commenting lovelies. It won’t be the best ever, or the longest, but I have missed you these past couple of weeks (thanks to Neko and Moose for looking after things and doing some great Roasts of their own) and didn’t want to keep you hanging around any longer for a genuine Cas post.

Because we (me especially) could do with a laugh, here’s a new web-comic that’s been catching my eye on and off lately - Rusty Fork.

Oh how I wish I had the mental thing-y-ness to write a coherent intro to this link right now, but I don’t. I’ve been slurring sentences, making up words, and just plain resorting to mime at times lately to get my meaning across (hand wave, gesture, frantic scribble, handwave, nod head, shake head, grimace, sigh Moose eventually managed to translate to “oh, you want to sign the tenancy agreement now?”). Take pity on me and go read how danah lost control of Facebook.

Not sexy, not funny, but useful: manual Gantt charting in Excel.

I have no idea how I stumbled across this site, but I’ve been an awed subscriber since before I got an RSS reader (so several years at least) - these gardens are just so gloriously beautiful.

Read and write on the screen, or resort to paper? Here’s how the greats do it. For the curious, here’s how I do it (an amalgam of laptop, notebooks, moleskines and lots of kit-kats).

Moose linked to The Nines movie trailer last week. This week it’s my turn to link to the audio commentary.

For the curious, the pictures from my recent trip to Guernsey. I didn’t take that many, being one of those people who prefers to look at the world as a whole, rather than just through a viewfinder, but I did take a couple of nice shots
And that’s it. I am now off to collapse on the sofa and watch either the rest of Back to the Future II, or more Firefly, depending on who wins the battle for the remote.