Sam & I do some cooking

Snowy Langrish

Had a quick traipse out in the snow earlier and took a few snaps, click the pic below for a collage thingy or click HERE to see the pics properly. It’s certainly the most snow I’ve ever seen in the UK, and although I don’t think I really capture the depth of it, it’s one to two feet deep in a lot of places.

Most useless machine ever…

…and I want one!

Source : The Register

My New Niece

Here are a few picture of Matt & Nat’s new addition,  Eloise Katyrina Knight. Congrats to both of them again.

PS: Despite my phone camera’s best efforts, I can assure all worried viewers that she definitely has brown hair and it’s not ginger.

That last mouthful was just too much.

When books come to life

This is fabulous, shame it’s an advert really, but still wonderful to watch.

BTW hope you like the snow on the site, thought it fitted well with the theme, and well it’s Christmas in 3 weeks. If you don’t like it, don’t worry it will be gone in the new year.

A twitter would have sufficed…

This should probably have just been reduced to a twitter but nevermind. It’s currently just coming up to 07:00 which is bad enough for a Saturday morning, but I’ve been awake for nearly an hour & a half already.  I guess I should be used to waking up early nowadays,  but currently I don’t think I’ve slept past 06:30 for weeks and I’m knackered. It’s not entirely the boy’s fault, I tend to be awake, or not. So once I’m woken in the morning I find it very hard to get back to sleep . Anyway…point is, I’m tired.

So this morning I got woken up the early morning call of Samuel at 05:40 declaring his bed needed changing. And he was right, it did. Unfortunately he’d also managed to wake up Ben with his morning cacophony of noise. Neither of which had any inclination of going back to sleep, in their bed or mine. So I ended up getting up at 06:00 to strip Sam’s bed and get the boys up.

I then came downstairs to discover a miscellany of Dog diarrhea and vomit spread over the kitchen and lounge floor. Sorry, but there’s not really a nice way to say that without removing the full impact of the statement. I won’t describe it further, but let’s just say though it wasn’t very nice. God knows what the dog had eaten to cause that, but it was truely unpleasant to clear up, especially whilst trying to stop the children from treading/playing in it. And all this before my morning cup of tea!

Harrumph. Well it’s all cleared up now, I’m having said cup of tea whilst I type this and it’s just the normal morning routine now. We have Oil again so the central heating is on at last, and it’s nice and warm. Alex is due back in an hour or so and I don’t have to work today. So it’s not all bad, just didn’t start very well and needed to vent. Thanks.

Laggy Photos

So I haven’t posted here for a few days, which is for two reasons. Firstly I’ve been busy uploading 12,359 photos to Picasa and secondly our home internet has been shocking.

Internet at home has recently been getting laggier and laggier, and I’ve spent an inordinate about time trying to work out precisely why that is, without any success. Networking has always been a black art but this was getting ridiculous. According to the router it was connected without issue and at a decent speed but the network lag belied that, which made me think the issue had to be the home network rather than with our outside internet connection. Then a couple of days ago the phone died as well and we weren’t getting any dial tone. Firstly it went extremely fuzzy and then nothing at all.

Because of this I naturally assumed the issue must be related to the phone line (which the internet goes through as well) rather than a local network problem. Or potentially a separate issue. So today I borrowed a phone from a neighbour to confirm it wasn’t the phone itself, and when I plugged it in, I got a dial tone and it worked fine. It was then that I noticed the loose wire. To explain, our master telephone socket has a built in filter on it, with two sockets on it, one for ADSL and the other for the telephone. The one for the telephone has a splitter in it which has a cable running off it which once upon a time fed the Sky box, and the telephone plugs into that splitter. And it was the cable that fed the Sky box that appeared loose. When I’d plugged in the neighbour’s phone I’d removed the splitter and plugged it directly into the socket. I did the same with our phone and voila…a dial tone. And the internet -seems- to be lag free again, although time will tell if that’s actually resolved.

In hind sight, wonderful thing that it is, there have been issues for a while with the phone, as I’ve been told a number of times that I’m very quiet or sound distant. So I’m hoping that this loose cable was interfering with both the telephone and the internet and caused all the problems.

So in other news, I bit the bullet and paid out for additional storage from Google and am in the process of uploading 12,359 photos to it. I’m almost all done with just some of the animal pictures to go. Hopefully below you’ll see an embedded slide show of the pics, and here is a link to the full gallery.  I still have issues with Picasa and Google need to do a lot more work in giving options to improve the aesthetics of the web gallery, but it is in my mind the best way to upload that number of photos without having a self hosted site or having to use something like JAlbum or Flickr, both of which I just don’t get on with. Having the dedicated offline photo management software also helps too

Work & Funeral

After a quiet start to the week and my adventures with apple juice it’s turned into a manic work week ending today with a funeral. All sorts of things going on at the moment in the office which is preventing me from getting bored, and looks like that’ll continue for the next few weeks. Wednesday I was woken up at 04:30 due to issues at work and ended up working pretty much straight through until I finally gave up around 16:00.

Today was Uncle Jack’s funeral. Uncle Jack, although not a real uncle was someone who lived with his wife, Elsie, and two daughters opposite my Mum as she was growing up. The two families went on numerous holidays together, and I have always got along with their grandson, Giles, who is the same age as me. The point being, they’ve always been like extended family, so although I don’t really see any of them any more, I wanted to be there today to show my respects. Auntie Elsie died a few years ago, after 68 years (I think) of marriage,  and he passed away a few weeks back in his sleep with his daughters by his side after having his favourite drink (Whisky & Ginger) and a bowl of strawberries at the ripe age of 98. A good innings by anyone’s standards and as good a way to go as any.

My Mum & Dad came down from Norfolk for it and my brother, Matthew, came up from Bournmouth too. It was good to see some familiar faces and although obviously a sad event it wasn’t by any means a morose affair. I could have done without the ever present ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ though. After consideration I’ve decided I want two songs at my funeral, firstly one to be listened to, either ‘Something I Can Never Have’ or ‘And All That Could Have Been’ both by Nine Inch Nails. The other would be Monty Python’s ‘All Things Dull and Ugly’, which is obviously their parody of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. For those that don’t know it’s genius, the lyrics are as follows -

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid–
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Amen.

Oh and as an aside my brother is relaunching his blog, you can check it out here.

Juicy Goodness

So today was a bit more of a success with motivation. Alex being away has been quite surreal, looking forward to her return tomorrow morning, although I’m sure there’s something I haven’t done but should have though! The boys have been surprisingly good all things considered. Sam even managed to eat all his dinner today, so had pudding for the first time in about a week.

Yesterday after officially giving up on trying to work I decided to try out my Christmas present from my sister-in-law, an apple press. We have two apple trees, a Bramley in the back whose harvest has been shocking this year. The tree went through a period about 4 months ago where the bark started peeling and the leaves were unseasonably brown, it’s picked back up now and we never did find out what was wrong but it seems to have recovered, but it appears to have affected the harvest. Out the front we have a…something (I can never remember the variety) but it’s an eater (Bramley’s obviously being a cooker), and that seems to be doing well.

Last year I tried making apple juice by various methods without much success, as it tended to bruise the fruit too much and it killed the flavour of the juice, it was also very cloudy (which didn’t settle as sediment as it should). So on my Crimbo list last year I put an apple press on it, not really expecting anyone to buy me one as they’re bloody pricey, and Amy & Steve very generously purchased one for me.

Anyway, so the apple season is upon us again, so Sam and I took it upon ourselves to try juicing again. And it appears to have worked admirably! As I don’t have an apple crush we cut the apples up and gave them a quick burst in the food processor and put them in the press, which takes about 20 apples at a time. Several turns of the press later and out comes apple juice (around a pint). Added a bit of lemon juice (to help with colouration) and sugar (to sweeten as apples are still a little tart) and voila…apple juice. We drank about half of it straight away and then repeated the process about 3 times, which gave us about 2-3 pints. This was left to settle and then I ladled out the clearer (still very brown) juice. Very tasty. I made some more today and was a bit cleverer about the process, the results of which are currently settling in the fridge, ready for breakfast tomorrow.

To make it properly clear (although that’s only really an aesthetic thing) I’ll need to buy some pectolase but as money is short at the moment I think I’ll make do for now. Although if this is going to progress into cider making I’ve read it’s much better to put pectolase in first. But that’s for another day.

This post has taken me about two hours to write as I’ve been watching the latest Star Trek film at the same time. Which was surprisingly good, not as good as some have made out, but a good entertaining romp with some excellent casting. Now to watch Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe before sleeping. G’night.