www.flickr.com

nothing because it has to be connected to my computer to work, grrr


prawn cocktail crisps

pilchards on toast (you can get pilchards there but they just don't taste the same)

decent tv

jaffa cakes

Greggs pasties

proper beer (as in Black Sheep, or Timothy Taylor's Landlord, or Cwrw Haf, the list goes on...)

Sunday, April 30, 2006

I'm going slightly Sudoku

I'm convinced, utterly and completely, truly, madly, deeply...oh no, wait, that's sad film with Alan Rickman in it. Anyway, I'm utterly decided that Sudoku inventors are scheming to take over the world. It's possible that they're all aliens and they're using us, our brains, to run a program to crack open some mystifying equation that will give them power over the entire universe...oh no, wait, that was the Krillitain in Dr Who battling David Tennant.

Whatever, they must be involved in some fiendish plot to take over the world. How else would Sudoku, and Kakuro, and Bridges and Loop-the-Loop have become so damned addictive in such a short space of time?

Look at it from my point of view. When I left for my travels in January last year no one, and I really mean NO ONE had heard of Sudoku. I remember my mum saying whilst on the phone to me that she was trying to solve a puzzle and said that it was really addictive and I HAD to try it. I managed to avoid the contagion, as I'm sure this must be a virus of some sort, spreading from person to person. That is, until the last couple of weeks. Mum gets the Guardian and in there they do a Kakuro puzzle every day. After being told a couple of times that she didn't understand them and was much better at Sudoku I decided to try my hand at it. Alas! It was there, that fateful day just before Easter, that I succumbed to their fiendish plot.

I did the puzzle.

It took a while but I began to see patterns and find the ways that you could solve this, the telltale signs (such as when you need to add up to 10 over 4 spaces, the ONLY possible solution involves 1,2,3 and 4) and methods with which to tax my brain. The Guardian Easter Special Puzzle book was my downfall. And lo! within it's evil pages were other puzzles, like the Bridges one, or Loop-the-Loop. Unlike crosswords which I do like but have failed to become addicted to over the years, these puzzles require only logic, not special knowledge, to overcome them.

Yesterday, I finally reached the height of my fever. I attempted a Sudoku puzzle. What can I say, I'm hooked. As I run to find my puzzle book and solve yet more of the pieces of the aliens' fiendish plan I find I have enough will left to shout one final warning. BEWARE!!! These games will take over your life! THEY ARE OUT TO GET US!!!!!

Now lets see, I've got a 1, and a 3 so that must be a 7...
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Thursday, April 27, 2006

My brain is a turncoat

I don't know, I do everything to suit my brain. I think the thoughts that it wants to think, I let it do puzzles and stuff that are challenging and new (is anyone else addicted to Kakuro?) and all sorts of stuff. I feed it to keep it's power up and read a lot and keep it occupied and active and lovely. What more could a person do?

Still, it seems to hate me. Why else would I dream this morning that I'd gone back to Murchison. Everything was nice, Sandy was talking to me and Keith had said that I could stay back at the hostel with no hard feelings. People were there and laughing and smiling. I walked down the main street and I went into the pub and saw all my friends and sat and talked to Sharon for a bit. Saw Gina and got to play with Devine, her daughter. The boys were in the next room playing pool and all of them said hi to me and asked how I was, and joked and laughed. All apart from the CTG. Then they left and on the way out he turned to me and said 'Yeah, you're back. Tell you what, it's so good to have you back that I'll give you lift whereever you want to go so when you decide to bail again I'll take you to the airport. I'll even buy you your ticket back to London. Now's a good time, I'm free' In my dream I turned to the bar and laid my head on my arms.

I woke up crying.
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Onions

What is it with raw onions in salad? I mean why???

Now, I'm not your average onion hater. Caramelised onions, french onion soup, you name it, I love cooked onions. Note the stress.

Raw onions are something altogether different. It was a rather disturbing feature in my Uni hall food. We always had a salad there and, without fail, it had onions in it. I simply don't understand it. Salad, or stir fry bought in a packet, has a remarkable range of textures and flavours, a wonderful bouquet of taste. Add raw onions to that and those fabulous flavours are not merely dampened but obliterated almost immediately. There is no point in the slightest in adding this ingredient unless you have no friends or anyone who is likely to get close enough to smell your breath in the near future.

Grrr.
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Time differences

Having spent the better part of the last 18 months in a rather different time zone to GMT, I have got rather used to attempting (and I do stress 'attempting') to work out the time differences for whereever I may be trying to contact.

In Australia and New Zealand it was, generally, rather simple. When I got to NZ it was 13 hours difference, then it became summer time in Britain and winter time in NZ taking it down to a manageable 11 hours. In Victoria (and Queensland when I was there) was a rather delectable 9 hours which changed back to 11 last winter. Easy-peasy.

Then I came back home and TAB, with whom I am still in quite regular contact, was in Adelaide. They were only 9 1/2 hours ahead of GMT and now we've gone into summertime and they're 8 1/2 hours, I think. With my husband still in Victoria I have to remember that they're 9 hours ahead and thankfully I no longer know anyone in Queensland as they don't have daylight savings and so are something like 10 hours ahead. It all really rather confuses me when they throw in daylight savings and things.

What brought this on was that when I logged onto blogger.com it very helpfully told me that there's a scheduled outage at 4pm PDT. Excuse me for being a little bit dim on occasion (well, ok, pretty much constantly) but what the hell is PDT? GMT - Grenwich Mean Time. Fine. But PDT? Pacific Down Time? Pretty Dirty Time? PisseD off Time? And, given that I don't know where in the world PDT relates to (am guessing America but that would spoil the rant a little) the fact that at 4pm their time they're having a scheduled outage means diddly-squat to me! I logged on at 2 minutes to the hour and didn't know if I'd be thrown off the site almost immediately or not. I've actually had to go to The World Clock to double check which cities are in the time zone that have just passed 4pm(which, for those interested are Edmonton, Denver, Guatemala, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa (??) and Managua) in an attempt to work out if I would be in danger. I figured I've probably got just under an hour until LA and San Francisco arrive at tea time.

I think I may have lost the plot somewhere along the line. Or maybe that should be the time zone?
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Monday, April 24, 2006

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon

Sunday's are great. Even when you know that you have to go to work tomorrow, there's something terrifically lazy about Sundays. Even, and here's the odd part, when you're not being lazy.

Today, I had a little bit of a lie in, it's true, but not that much. I got up and mum and I went out and did some gardening (and really, as before, I don't mean gardening in the nice, quiet way with little seceteurs and trowels, gently weeding the odd bit of ground elder from where it's not supposed to be, oh no, I mean mass destruction, slash and burn, total annihilation of pretty much everything. Mother and I are waging war on various parts of the garden. Our weapons? A rake, fork, shovel, clippers, saw and the almighty electric hedge trimmer. And a wooden spoon (it's probably if you don't ask...). We've actually accomplished quite a bit, cutting back the catoniastas that have long since hidden a few of the walls in front of the kitchen and the side of the house. We've cleared brambles and pulled up roots and - and believe me, this is quite amazing - the path up to the paddock is completely and utterly clear and visible for the first time in YEARS.

In between waging war against the rebel garden, we also found time to go shopping at Somerfields, cook Sunday dinner (roast beef, roast potatoes and yorkshire puds, heaven!), watch the GP (I'm a Button fan, I don't really want to talk about today's fiasco) and herd some sheep. I even got to play on my newly reclaimed PS2 for a little while.

Mum and I actually only had to help the neighbours with the last bit as they occasionally keep sheep in our field and were moving some more in today. Lots of little bouncing, baby lambs now occupy the field next to the house. One tried to make a last minute dash for it and, in an attempt to catch it, I made an incredible dive that any rugby player would have been proud of.

I missed the lamb, but that's not the point is it?

I love Sundays.
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Friday, April 21, 2006

Easter

was fantastic. I met my nephew and I got to see my brother and sister-in-law for the first time since Christmas 2004, all in all, a good weekend.

My nephew I am hoping was a bit under the weather (that's not as cruel as it sounds if you'll just let me elaborate...) as he decidedly didn't like to be passed to me. The first time he saw me he cried. Then, on the last couple of days, if I picked him up or he was passed to me then that was it, tears, wailing and terrible cries ensued until he got passed back to either parent and then he was happy as larry again. *Sigh* I'm chosing to believe that he wasn't feeling to good, as his parents said, and simply wasn't happy being passed to a relatively unknown relative. With scary blonde hair.

I've been quite technically minded as well. Not only have I fixed my comments (woohoo!) but I managed to sort out a lot of my music on my mp3 player too which is good because it's been bugging me for, well, 14 months now, that I didn't have time to sort it all in the first place and an awful lot of stuff was put under rather strange genres (Hayley Westenra's Pure was under the 'Rock' catagory) or under the heading of 'various artists'. Helpful as I'm sure you'll agree.

The other great thing about visiting my brother is that we have fairly similar tastes in music in some respects but he's much, much better at hearing about it and having the money to buy it so he generally gets to tell me about all the things I should be listening to which is fine because (and don't you ever repeat this to him) he's usually right.

Amy's home this weekend, must ring her tomorrow to meet up. Properly this time, without me getting terribly distracted by men chatting me up.
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Sunday, April 16, 2006

Celebrations!

Woohoo!! I've commandeered my brother's broadbank internet for a couple of hours and after looking up a couple of things decided to try and fiddle around with my comments and template as it doesn't take 10 minutes to change things on this lovely fast connection.

I figured out why Amy's posts decided to come up on every post (that she could see anyway), it was because when I'd pasted the very helpful things that my sister had sent me into the template, there was a 't' missing from the end of postCount, so it wasn't. It was just adding it to every post. I would be very grateful if Amy would let me know if she can still see them all, I may have to actually delete the comments (sorry).

I also worked out why (but don't ask me how) they weren't appearing on the main page and, as you may have already noticed, I've sorted that little problem out as well! I'm very proud of myself at the moment.

I'm also very proud of my little nephew who is quite a star. He doesn't cry all that much and generally lies there and giggles. It's fantastic! We went for a walk today with him in his new carrier which means he looks out over my brother's shoulder at the world rather than from his front. He seemed to enjoy the different perspective and we managed an hour and a half walk with a little snooze and no complaints which is apparently a little unusual.

I had a bit of a shock on Wednesday when my phone rang and I didn't recognise the number. After finally running around the house trying to get a stable connection on my mobile, the person on the other end turned out to be a girl I used to know waaaaay way back in secondary school. Amy had mentioned running into her mother a couple of months back in Derby but I never expected her to ring. Apparently she'd just had lunch with Ames and had asked for my number. Which was nice. It really was lovely to hear from here after all these years (I think it's been nearly 7 since we last saw each other) and it would be really quite interesting to see what her memories of secondary school are like compared to mine.

Anyway, am going to go and play with my nephew and make him giggle somemore.

Good luck with the sponsored silence Amy!
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Stuff

I've been gardening. For those not in the know, mum's garden is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is...Oh, sorry, that's space isn't it? Mum's garden isn't quite that big, but it gets close :)

The last few days we've gone for the careful, considerate, delicate approach to gardening. With a chainsaw.

Well, actually it's a hedgetrimmer but the overall effect is the same. Bushes, hedges, anything overgrown is getting the same drastic treatment. Bits of the garden are looking neater than they have for years which is fantastic. And the hedgetrimmer is fun to wield! (although I had a moment of panic yesterday morning when I was perched on a bank above our pond trimming the hedge above my head whilst holding an impliment attached to the mains power supply. Am really glad I've got a good sense of balance!)

And now for something completely different. I got chatted up a week and a half ago. I was in the pub and got talking to this guy. We had one of those conversations where you forget what time it is and how long has passed because you are so involved (I still feel quite guilty about that actually because I was supposed to be at the pub with Amy who I really wanted to spend quality time with. I'm quite useless really).

Anyway, I spent a couple of days basking in the warm glow of being found attractive but someone and then promptly forgot all about it. Until this weekend that is.

I was going to a friend's surprise 30th birthday party and had caught a lift down to Cardiff with his parents. Our first stop was his elder sister's house where I ran into his younger sister who's first comment was 'I hear you got chatted up by a friend of mine the other day!'. Apparently he'd started off a conversation by saying that there was a complete hottie at the pub after the concert which gave me that warm glow all over again, I'm not sure I've ever been called a hottie before!

Anyway, Charlie said that he was quite taken with me and kept on talking about me which is really nice. Although due to some unfortunate timing with photographs, I apparently look like I'm completely bored with what he was saying, which isn't the truth at all! I felt quite like a 13 year old again asking Charlie to tell him that no, I wasn't bored and I had a really lovely evening.

Even just thinking about it plastering a silly grin on my face. Which is nice.

Mind you, the last silly grin I had over my face was for the CTG so hopefully if I see this guy again I won't end up with a black eye, because I really don't want to go there again, I'll run out of places to hide.
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Saturday, April 08, 2006

I got my wish

Today, it stopped raining.

It started to hail instead.

*sigh*

And, on the ever ongoing issue of my fight with my comments, I KNOW that Amy posted a comment about the last post. I can access it on Haloscan, I log in and there it is. Unfortunately this page doesn't seem to agree with me. Maybe now I've read it it will appear?

*bangs head against brick wall*
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Thursday, April 06, 2006

Blogs

When you stop to think about it, blogs are very odd things. A lot of people keep a diary. I've kept one quite constantly since I was about 14, albeit with some gaps of a few months occasionally but never more than that. I would put things in my diary that I wouldn't put in my blog however. On the other hand I have been known to put things in my blog that I havn't in my diary.

Reading back on some of my entries gives me an entirely different perspective on events than I would get reading back on my entries in my diary. Not always a good thing but it made me stop and think.

Do I have a private mind and a public one? A right and wrong one? I don't think so because I've written some very personal things in here and being private/public hasn't really crossed my mind. Or telling the truth in one place and not in the other.

I do feel that occasionally there are thoughts that I can't share with all you loyal readers but that's because I wouldn't share them with anyone. They're the thoughts in my deepest, darkest places and not always rational, sensible, or likeable when I know I'm being silly and mostly I shield all of you from this. The ones I look back on and remember where I was and what actually happened, despite what I wrote. I remember the feeling I felt at the time which matters more than the words.

I remember reading once that people have faces. Not just the 2 that are most commonly thought of, but multitudinous, (ooh, long word!) myriad faces like the facets of a gemstone, each shining in it's own way it just depends on how you look at it. And you can't see all at once. To have something shining you must have something dark.

I know that I put quite a lot sometimes in this blog and I've tasted other people's and found them wanting because they either feel so superficial that I don't get to know them at all or because I feel they're trying too hard to be something that they just aren't. However I know that other people really like them. I'm fairly certain people have read mine and definately found it wanting and I don't blame them. My sister's blog is one I find almost always to be entertaining yet insightful but recently a friend of mine told me that she likes mine more than Rachie's because she knows me. She's not wrong and I wouldn't even consider thinking less of her for expressing that opinion. It just went to show me that everyone sees something different in everyone else. Different faces, different facets.

Blogs are very strange things.
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Wednesday, April 05, 2006

I can't sleep

This has been going on for days. Weeks even. I lie there in bed for hours tired, knackered, shattered, desperately needing to close my eyes becaus they've got to that nasty grainy stage where it hurts to have them open but still. I can't sleep.

I lie there and having got to the point where I'm too tired to read anymore I turn the lights off. I just wish I could turn my brain off the same way. I can't control what it does and where it goes and I really wish I could. Sometimes I can't stop thinking about why TAB and I went wrong and how really despicable a thing it was I did. Sometimes I think about what I'm doing here and how the hell I'm going to get my life started again. Mostly, I go back to the couple of days around Valentines day. Occasionally it unfolds before my grainy, sore eyes just like it did then and as I go through being carried to the car, unable to open my eyes, listening to him laugh, I wonder what's going on, why did he do this to me? A lot of the time I go through all the possible scenarios. The ones where I decided not to try and stand up for myself this time and just went home like he told me to. The ones where there was no argument at all. The ones where I blame myself completely for what happened but, being sort of fair, also the ones where he is totally and utterly to blame. He didn't have to hit me, that was a choice he made. I didn't have to argue, that was a choice I made.

The full surround sound digital quality picture that I've been plagued with the last couple of nights is the feeling of utter hopelessness, weakness, inability to make my brain work and most of all complete and utter shame when my friend dragged me to my boss the next day at work and made me tell him what had happened because both the CTG and I worked in the same place. I could not compose myself, I couldn't stop crying and, later that day, I couldn't stop my legs from deciding not to work either. I know now that I had concussion but at the time I felt so useless and I don't ever want to feel like that again. So why is my brain being so unco-operative?

Because I can't sleep in the evenings when I do finally get to sleep I can't wake up in the mornings because I'm so knackered. If I keep up like this I'm going to become completely nocturnal.

I just want to to stop.
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Saturday, April 01, 2006

Comments...AGAIN!

To quote Professor Henry Higgins 'Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!'

I'm still struggling with the eternal mystery that is replacing blogger comments with Haloscan comments. With a little help from my sister I have managed to remove the blogger comments from my main page. However, in true 'wouldn't you just KNOW it' style, the Haloscan comments link has not appeared. And I don't know why. If you feel you must comment (and please do, I really do welcome hearing what people have to say) I'm afraid you'll have to go only to the post you would like to comment on by clicking on it's title on the side bar. The Haloscan comments are still there, just not on the main page. If I had long hair, I'd probably be pulling it out at this stage.

Ah well, back to the drawing board.
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It's raining, it's pouring...

It’s one of those well known facts – the kind you just know but are never sure if it’s true or not – that Eskimos have 50 words for snow. It seems a tad ridiculous at first but, if you think about it, when you have as much snow as Eskimos do it makes sense. I was listening to the radio the other day (5 live I believe) and they had a phone in about all the different words that we have for rain in this country and it’s all to do with the same mentality. We have so much of the damn stuff that simply calling it ‘rain’ won’t do.

I had forgotten whilst I was away about all the kinds of rain. In Victoria (apart from in Melbourne which is well known to have at least 4 seasons in one day and its own bizarre weather patterns) in the summer it’s sunny and hot. Occasionally you get a torrential downpour with accompanying thunderstorm which drops its load rather spectacularly and then buggers off again but generally rain does not happen. In the winter it’s approximately the same, but colder.

The wealth of words and euphemisms we have shows a language that is incredibly versatile, creative and, most of all, incredibly expressive in telling us just how bloody damp this country is. Think about it. You’ve got:

Rain (obviously)
Downpour
Shower
Light rain
Heavy rain
Driving rain
Drenching rain
Scotch mist
Deluge
Cloudburst
Pouring down
Tipping it down
Raining cats and dogs
Spitting
Bucketing it down
Pissing it down
And, my favourite, the very British ‘drizzle’.

There are types of rain that look like walls of water that drench you in seconds, the kind of rain that looks innocuous and really, really light but once you’ve been out there for a minute you look like you’ve just had a bath with all your clothes on.

We have a permanent puddle out side the front of our house. I don’t think that there’s any time of the year when there isn’t water out there, although in varying degrees. It’s actually just had a remodelling because the oil tanker driver decided that he could fit down our drive – which he couldn’t – and that the only way to get back out was to do a 3 point turn in front of the house – which he eventually did although we couldn’t watch because the thought of him ending up in the pond was too much to bear – and drive back out forwards which he did with the help of a tractor in the end. This has rather substantially changed the puddle’s form. It’s made it bloody bigger for a start; the water now has a lovely change of scenery and gets to experience the ruts in the mud that the lorry left. I’m sure the water is happy, though I know mum really isn’t!

There isn’t much of a point to this post, I just wish it wasn’t so overcast and would stop raining. And if you can think of any other words for that miserable phenomenon happening outside, I’d be glad to hear them, it will make swearing at the weather so much more enjoyable.
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