I will be away...

I think we ate that comedy carrot with supper last night. I'm sure I had a leg-shaped piece on my plate. Either way, it was very tasty!

Anyway, I am going away for three weeks tomorrow, travelling to India, Nepal and Hong Kong. A bit of a whistle-stop tour, but it should be good! I shall be seeing the Taj Mahal and the Annapurnas, and doing far too much shopping I imagine.

I will leave you with a pic of some of the wool samples colours we received back the other day. Aren't they lovely and glossy? That's the natural lustre of Romney wool. Avail for purchase in December, all you knitters out there!

Have a good few weeks all, I'll type and post some pics in around three weeks.

K

Comedy Root Vegetables

Just pulled this fantastic carrot from the garden:



Can't get better than that! Apart from a slug has started to have a go at him already. Interesting that it went for the leg first and not his diddly dander. Must have been a postman-biting canine in a former life.

I must credit mum though - also from the garden I got: courgettes, butternut squash, beefsteak tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, chilis, beetroot, ruby chard and red onion. And some eggs from the hens. Anyone want to have a Ready Steady Cook go at a recipe suggestion from that lot?!

Successful knitting project

I have a problem with sizings in knitting projects - usually jumpers come out vast. So vast I can fit two people in them at once. I don't get it, I knit the test swatch, all the measurements match the pattern, and by the time I've finished the thing has grown like one of mum's courgettes (aka marrows). But it's only jumpers - cushion covers, toys, anything else comes out fine.

So, it was lovely to do a project where you are actually *supposed* to knit the thing huge to start with. And then, in this case, bung it in the washing machine on a hot cycle (another woolly disaster area we know all too well) and shrink the thing down to something manageable.

Here is a pic of the complete bag:

Here is a pic post-wash. Count the bricks!



And here is a gratuitous picture of Mir, requested following previous mention. I told you she poses shamelessly for the camera.

Teen Romance

I must be getting old. There is a teen romance blossoming in our office and it is quite gruesome to watch. For a start they get lunch together and it's a bag of Haribo and two cans of Red Bull. Huh? Nutritional value? Oh, and a box of chocolate zoo animal biscuits. This is the guy that passed out following a week in Ibiza a while ago and I had to tend in a first aid capacity until the ambulance arrived. (They biffed him about until he came around and said he was dehydrated. They should have biffed him more in my current opinion.)

Second, the bird is the reception airhead who gets my hackles up - yes me, and it takes a lot to get a rise out of me. She sneaks up here to get a cup of tea and pick a fight with him. 'I'm upset', she pouts. 'Oh, d'ya wan' me ta buy you s'more cloves then?' he asks without taking his eyes from his screen. Good grief.

Spamalot

Saw this last night - very funny. Tim Curry was great as Arthur - not ingenuous like Graham Chapman was in the role, rather slightly sexually subversive in his Rocky Horror Show way. Lots of laughs, lots of silly jokes, lots of risque jokes, and lots of dialogue from the original film too, which of course the audience loved. ('I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!')

I particularly admired 'Ye Olde Rippe Offe Shoppe' in the foyers, selling Spam sandwiches, special tins of Spamalot spam, 'Fetchez la vache' Tshirts, coconut shells for horse hooves and fiersome Rabbit of Caerbannog hand puppets complete with Big Pointy Teeth.

We also tried out Gaby's on Charing Cross Road (just south of Leicester Sq tube station), which I have walked passed a hundred times but it looks like a dubious salmonella emporium from the road. In fact it's a very popular Turkish/Greek diner and the food was pretty good. Starters great (vine leaves and falafels), lamb kebabs perhaps a little dry though. But very busy, which always bodes well. And they gave us free dessert and another half bottle of wine on the house. *:)

Technology

Well, I finally did it and bought an mp3 player. Not an iPod, praise be. It's an iRiver, so we shall see how that goes. However I think I have been too long in a tech department staffed (apart from me) wholly by blokes, as I no longer bother with reading the instructions, but just start pressing buttons until the damn thing does what I want it to. Bloke mentality seems to be contagious. I will have to be careful. *:)

The trouble is, I am dancing along with the music! I'm working a bit late as I'm going to see Spamalot later, sitting here with one headphone in, and can't sit still! Will I be boogying all the way home on the train? Steve says that sometimes he finds himself singing along on the train. I think dancing may be slightly less embarrassing!

Hey ho. Only two weeks to go until holiday.....

Congrats to Clare!

Clare's Three Beautiful Things blog has been a Blog of Note for the past few days, and her hit counter has now exceeded 50,000! Well done Clare, and well deserved. I agree with lots of the comments, that there aren't enough positive blogs about - things that make you realise that actually, life is pretty good. Clare's is a great example of being positive without being schmaltzy.

So, this morning I managed to brave the Indian High Commission and get a visa. The form says: state date of arrival, date of departure, number of days you want the visa for, and number of entries to India. The visa comes back: start date today, for six months, multiple entry. Huh??

However, it was a good morning. Despite not getting there until after 8am (Steve warned me that dire things would happen if I got there late) I only had to queue down the street in the rain for about 40mins. And I made it through the scrum successfully with visa in hand by 10.40am, which is not bad at all. I have to say I have never seen a more tin pot system in a government building. I have a premonition that is the flavour of things to come on our travels....

Shopping

I did it! I've bought myself a new gun. Here it is:

It's a Lincoln Premier 20 bore over and under. And because it's brandy new it's an absolute pig to open and close. I literally have to break it over my knee at the moment.




It's a bit flash harry - the trigger is gold! A little bling for me I feel. Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to bag some pheasants this winter with it.

Nothing like spending money just before I go on holiday / buy a house / buy a car... Let's just hope the wool starts pulling in come ca$h soon.

Speaking of which, they have done a test spin but they are going to wind a ball for us before sending it over to inspect. So we should have something next week sometime. The website is growing - the web man has put a few more pages on.

Right, I have to walk the dog and fill up the pheasant feeders. Here is the dog:

She's a little camera shy, but still smiling. And has been following me around like a shadow all day, demanding entertainment. She's sleeping with her head on my feet as I type. Such a soppy dog.

To grump or not to grump

Trawling across the blogsphere, checking out how Other People do their blogs, it seems that either blogs are (a) vents for vitriolic spleen, or (b) places to be positive and happy, to work towards being in a Better Place in a shrink's office sort of way, or share luck and contentment and joy joy thoughts.

While type A can be quite amusing, they can also verge on the offensive (viz, The Finger and The Thumb). Type B on the other hand can become saccharine to the point of requiring a bucket, and/or desperate and/or dull. It's hard to strike a type B balance. Type B bloggers also seem to own an inordinate amount of cats.

I suppose there are also type C blogs which are sort of observatory diaries. While a teenager in Tokyo, potentially a window on a different culture, completely fails to deliver ('I went to the cinema with my friends heehee'), sometimes these sorts of blogs are the most interesting. A mom living in the country in the southern states of the USA, telling you about her neighbourhood, can be fascinating in the detail.

So in this fledgling blog, what direction should I take? I think I have dabbled in a few type A entries, but that started edging into the rest of my thinking, and I am not a ranting type person. At the moment, in fact, I am more of a happy positive 3BT person. So I consciously and subconsciously edge away from rants. I don't believe I am teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown and require therapy and moral support from other bloggers, so type B is out. So should this be a type C diary and observation blog? To make that work I need, I think, to add some more *details*. Argh. Do people really care to read about my life?

What do you think makes or breaks a blog?