So when I said I wouldn’t be posting, clearly I meant I wouldn’t be posting anything of substance for the next few days.

Turns out May 25th is towel day.

For fans of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this will mean something. If you’re not a fan, then you probably won’t be carrying round a towel all day, so you can ignore the rest of this post and go back to doing something constructive.

I will be. Then, I will also be going to the gym after work, and by ‘carry’ I mean ‘have in my gym bag’. But it will be accessible, and in close proximity to my person (under/on my desk) all day, and that is the important thing.

Will you be carrying a towel tomorrow?

(I’m not really posting this. I’m still in major hermit-mode, but I had to share this before I forgot. Memory retention of a brain injured goldfish, that’s me).

*delurks*

I’ve found another use for coComment – verifying if something is spam or not.

It works like this:
I have Bright Meadow set up to record every comment people make (mwhahahhaaa! I’m keeping my eye on you!). coComment will only collect the comment, however, if someone has actually hit the ‘submit’ button on the comment form.
So, if a sneaky little spam-bot has left a comment, coComment doesn’t track it.

Occasionally, comments get through Akismet that are ambiguous. It could be spam, it could be a comment left by a nice person (case in point, one I had tonight that said “I love this site, good work…”) with a proper name, and a url that isn’t too obviously a spam blog. Now, sometimes I might let a comment like that slide, especially if I remove the URL from the comment, but if I do that Akismet doesn’t learn, so I am spammed forever more.

Dealing with one or two of these tonight, I realised that if they aren’t listed on Bright Meadow’s coComment page, the chances are, they weren’t left by a human.

Well, I wouldn’t want to delete a comment that was genuinely saying nice things about me now, would I?

*relurks*

cocomment, spam, akisment, comments, conversation

Ok, so I just realised the down-side to more or less blogging your life. Turns out, there are things you just don’t want to discuss on a website. At least not right now.

Please excuse me while I go take my head, sit in a dark corner, watch lots and lots of Battlestar Galactica and almost certainly the entire series of Firefly, drink far more tea than is generally healthy for me, and probably indulge in some cake. Basically I’m gonna feel a bit sorry for myself and spend the next few days determinedly not thinking.

So I will be looking something like this.

Worry not, normal service will be resumed very shortly (I expect by the weekend if not sooner). Meanwhile, do have fun playing with the archives. They go all the way back to 2003 you know. Worth it, if only to laugh at how far my writing style has come!

I promise you, the Cas you all know and love will soon return bigger and better than ever before. Just… she needs to have a few days of hermit-mode first.

Huggles and love to y’all 🙂
~Cxxx~

The 8th of May was my unofficial birthday. To cut a long and rather depressing story short, I don’t like to make a big fuss over my real birthday. A few years back Tiana decided in which case we needed to celebrate my birth on some other day. This day (and the reason why did make sense at the time I promise you) was the 8th of May.

Recently, I’ve not really celebrated my unofficial birthday either. I’m never one for a fuss, and I hate surprises, so people don’t tend to give me surprises. This does backfire somewhat when it comes to parties, but ah well. This year, the day itself passed with very little note indeed, but I came home on Friday evening to discover a large cake sitting on my shelf in the fridge – Moose had got baking. She said it was because she felt bad not to have done something for my unofficial birthday, but I reckon she just wanted to bake and was using that as an excuse.

Not that this is a bad thing. Cake is, after all, cake, and this is a particularly good cake!

As quite a lot of Nigella’s cake recipes are, it’s unusual, but works really really well:

Chocolate Guinness Cake

For the cake:

• 250 ml Guinness
• 250 g unsalted butter
• 75 g cocoa
• 400 g caster sugar
• 142 ml sour cream
• 2 eggs – from happy hens (that is free range). This doesn’t affect the taste, but it will affect your karma
• t tbsp real vanilla extract
• 275 g plain flour – that is flour without rising agent added
• 2 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

For the icing:

• 300 g Philadelphia cream cheese – Moose used generic and it didn’t set very well. Have to assume that real Philly works better
• 150 g icing sugar
• 125 ml double or whipping cream

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4 / 180^oc, butter and line a 23 cm springform tin
2. Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter gradually, and heat until the butter has melted. At which time, whisk in the cocoa and sugar.
3. Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and pour into the brown, buttery, beery pan and finally whisk in the bicarb and flour.
4. Pour the cake batter into the greased, lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack as it is quite a damp cake.
5. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar, then beat together. Add the cream and beat again until it makes a spreadable consistency. Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of a pint.

– A few tips that the book won’t tell you:
This needs longer to cook than less – if it looks wibbly in the middle when you take it out of the oven, it probably isn’t done yet. We’ve not worked out the optimum cooking time, but rest assured we will keep trying!
The middle will probably sink, and it will ooze a bit of Guinness, but keep it in the fridge, and it tastes amazing!
Probably not suitable for the young or teetotal.

I’d hate to think what the calorie count of just a slice of this is, but who cares, right? It’s cake, and cake isn’t meant to be good for you. Enjoy 😉

Ok, I’m hoping there’s some clever person who understands the vagaries of the K2 mod reading this blog, because I am stumped.

How the frell do I order the pages as they appear in the header at the top? Contact shouldn’t be in the middle, it should be on the end!
It should go:
Blog, About, Blog Minions, Bright Cast, Links, Contact.

And can I get it to do that? No.

Help?

On a related note, how can I make it so a page doesn’t automatically appear in the header bar? There’s one or two pages I want to have, but I only have so much real estate at the top of the screen, and anyways those pages wouldn’t fit there.

There’s probably some really obvious solution that entails messing around with the advanced settings and custom fields or something, but I am drawing a blank. It’s not a big thing, but it is bugging me.

I’m really wishing I’d kept that “like living inside a bouncy castle” quote back now. The Sunday Roast I used it on wasn’t as appropriate as the following post…

Which might clue you in to the fact I am going to be talking about my breasts again. I’ve talked about them a time or two before, and no doubt before I am finished I will be talking about my breasts a time or two more.

Today is one such day. Well, we’ve had the serious, now it’s time for some fun!

It’s a matter of record, my ambivalent attitude towards my breasts. I’m still leaning more towards the “Yay! I have breasts!” than “Ugh, I have breasts 🙁 “, but they do bug me from time to time.

For example, I am not a woman designed to move at great speed. Even when wearing the most supportive sports bra you can get short of a corset I… there is only one word for it… bounce. And bouncing is painful. Most men don’t appreciate this fact, and nor do some women, but it is painful. I was trying to think of something to compare the sensation to and just couldn’t pervert my brain enough, which is a first for me.

Running for the bus when certain items of underwear are part of the wardrobe is not a good idea. In one particular pretty pink bra, running puts me in serious danger of falling out of said undergarment.

Why, therefore, do I always seem to be wearing that bra when I am late for the bus? Someone up there clearly has it in for me. The Boy Temp just couldn’t understand why I was so reluctant to run for the bus the other day. He wouldn’t leave it alone, so I told him quite plainly “because I would fall out of my bra. And it hurts”. ^*1*

So it pains me (in several ways) to have to face the fact that I am now a generous 36D. I’m not translating that for American sizing. You just have to understand it’s larger than average. The 36 part is fine – I’ve been a 36 for several years now. 36 is actually about the national norm. It’s the ‘D’ part that is starting to bug me. It’s a definite increase on what has gone before, and shows no sign of stopping. Hang the expense of being forced to buy a totally new set of lingerie in the next size up every six months, the sheer physics of the situation is start to get too me. Much bigger and I’m gonna be in serious risk of toppling over!

Think Barbie, but shorter, chunkier. And brunette.

And that’s a 36D in M&S. I went into La Senza the other day as they had a sale, and I wasn’t even fitting the ‘E’ cups. I refuse to accept I’m bigger than an ‘E’ cup. People are gonna start thinking they’re fake, and they’re not! *wail* I want to be able to wear halter neck tops and no bra! *double wail* Going dancing the other week? That was a trial I can tell you, because of course the bras that are most suitable for moshing aren’t the bras that look good with the skimpy clothes. It’s harder than it looks, getting ready for a night out. There’s more things to plan than you might think on cursory inspection. It’s like that scene in Bridget Jones – wear the big pants to hold the stomach in, or the sexy pants in case you get lucky? It’s guaranteed that no matter what decision you make, it will be the wrong one.

And don’t get me started on how most clothes just aren’t designed for people with breasts of any size, let alone what genetics have seen fit to bestow on me (I am very much my grandmother’s granddaughter in temperament and build. Especially build). I went shopping the other weekend and not a single top I tried on actually fitted.

Ah well, despite all that, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I certainly always get quick service at the bar 😀 (Though of course I also have to fight the whole “big breasted = easy” stereotype. It’s just so hard, being a woman *sigh* 😉 )

Endnotes:
^*1* Poor guy didn’t say a word for the rest of the journey. Not sure if my mother did the right thing, bring me up to be so plainspoken, but it sure makes for some fun facial expressions 😀 ^Back

I do have a genuine follow up post to the whole 9rules round 4 thing, but it kind of got waylaid by fun. I honestly started it – I have the first paragraph and an idea of the whole – and I was going to write it out when I got home from work. Then illyna kind of kidnapped me, fed me lasagne, and gave me penguin wine.

Needless to say, nothing constructive is going to get written this evening. I feel bad.

Watch this truly awesome video instead 😀