weekend 6/7 Feb 2010

Posted 8 February 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.

“Quiet”, would best sum it up, I think.  Stuck a ham hock in the slow cooker in the morning, then took the car out for the first time in a fortnight(!) for the monthly Big Shop, and sallied forth to Makro (mainly for cat food, plus some other bits), Pets at Home (for cat litter), and Asda, for the stuff we couldn’t get in Makro, and also I wanted a basil plant.  We bought a few bits and pieces, and forgot the bloody basil plant.  Then to Grain on Newland Avenue, which we don’t like much, but is the only purveyor of Pete’s blackcurrant juice we can find in the area, and the butcher and greengrocer.

On Saturday afternoon, Pete put up a hanging bracked for the £3 hanging basket (planted, too!) we bought at Walton Street Market on Wednesday.  And then we slumped, apart from trying to work out how Reactive Cooking got hacked, and how to fix it … fix it we did, but how it happened is a bit of a worry.

Watched the last half of Independence Day on C4, which was entirely down to inertia, as the DVD is on the shelf!

On Sunday, we:

  • cooked a big fry up for brunch
  • made a slow cooker’s full of Gujerati beef (recipe to follow)
  • turned 5kg of carrots into wine – well, the start of wine; a couple of quid from Makro for a huge bag, had to be done
  • made some carrot soup with the stock from the ham hock
  • made cheese scones for Sunday tea
  • bottled 11 bottles of red wine

We also got up to date with Brothers and Sisters, which we really like – this season might have new writers, because it seems much wittier this time round.

And that was that.  Tonight we’re off to the Eagle on Anlaby Road to investigate the Hull Transition movement – we go out far more often here than we ever did in Long Ashton!

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How to report the news, by Charlie Brooker

Posted 5 February 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.
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plunging stats

Posted 4 February 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.

I’ve just taken a look at the Google Analytics for this site – it was never busy, but it has now plunged almost into negative figures! The majority of visitors came in from Google, looking for photos (which have now all moved to Flickr, and I suspect it will take a long time for Google to reindex, and the traffic to build up again. If it ever does.

Gloom.

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The secret life of the ladies’ loos

By mac and has no comments yet.

light path I took this in the Ladies toilets at the Lincoln Collection, a rather splendid museum. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such nice loos outside of posh hotels!

This post is really to test a) the x-posting from my new WordPress site, and b) the Flickr widget plugged therein.

Edit: and I don’t like the way it styles and lightboxes the image, so I’ve changed it to an old-fashioned link.

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weekend 30/31 jan 2010

Posted 1 February 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.

Up bright and early – well, ish – made a batch of blueberry muffins, consumed bacon and black pudding butties, then walked into town.  It is *so* nice to be able to go to all these places on foot.  We took the barometer to the clock hospital, but they said they couldn’t fix it – ghod knows why not, as it didn’t look that difficult to replace the glass to us, but ho hum.  I shall be upset if I can’t find anyone to do it (it broke in the move).

We had a mooch round the old part of Hull – there’s some wonderful architecture there, and some of the city is medieval; must go down with a camera on a nice Sunday afternoon.  Then we met (most of) the rest of the fledgling No2ID group in The Mission pub, had a meeting to discuss strategies and what we do next, met a chap who is standing for the Greeens, and lives 8 doors down from us, and then we all ventured out into the freezing cold and set up a stall in the centre.

It went better than I thought it might – we got several pages of petitions signed, gave away loads of leaflets, and engaged plenty of people in conversation.  After what seemed like *hours*, but wasn’t, Carla did a tea run and I brought forth the muffins, and we managed to carry on a little longer,

On the way home, we stocked up with dried beans and organic bread flour and other stuff from a shop we discovered in South Street that sells them loose – hurrah!  Not a huge range, but better than buying them packaged.  And we stopped off in Argos to buy a carpet sweeper; the cats are scattering litter all over the upstairs, and I’m bored with carting the Roomba round the house every day.  A tenner for the sweeper seemed like a bargain, and it did a cracking job. Needless to say, the Tribe have been neatness itself today ….  We had a lazy evening after that, and I made some cappuccino cupcakes as a test run for next month’s No2ID meet, and some polenta bread.

This morning, we ventured over to Walton Street market and did the fruit and veg shopping, and then pottered round the house. Someone was meant to be collecting a Freecycle item this afternoon, but never turned up, which made me seethe.  Cooked a roast chickie! with cabbage, leeks, carrots and roast spuds.  Slumped. Ate coffee cupcakes.  Bzzt.

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bang!

Posted 31 January 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.

Forgot to mention last night’s excitement …

We live 5 minutes from Princes Avenue, which has loads of bars and restaurants that are very busy on Fridays and Saturdays, thus, we often hear rather drunk people on their way home down our road.  They always sound good-humoured and often sing … sort of.  They’re never remotely alarming,

However, last night, about 11:30, someone was coming down the road shouting his head off, sounding incredibly angry. Whatever language he was shouting in, it wasn’t English.  We live in an end terrace with a narrow alley between us and the next block, which is secured by a locked metal gate either end.

The house literally shook suddenly, and we think this guy must have been rattling the gate, and seconds later, there was the sound of smashing glass – not, thankfully, from our house, but further up the road (although I did make Pete go and and check, not least because the cats like sitting in the front window and watching the world go by).

When we went past this morning, their bay window had been boarded up – I can only guess that this guy was hoping to get into the house via the back yard and alley, and when he couldn’t open the gate, he went for the window.  *I* was scared, so the unfortunate occupant(s) of the house must have been utterly terrified.

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we went to Lincoln …

Posted 24 January 2010 By mac and has 6 comments.

arch at Lincoln Cathedral
Originally uploaded by ramtops

… via Grimsby (we didn’t stop), and Cleethorpes, where we breakfasted on tea, sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, beans and hash brown for £4 each.

Cleethorpes bore that unmistakeable air of British east coast resorts out of season – I’m very familiar with it, having lived in Great Yarmouth for some years. I rather like these places out of season, and it has a lovely beach, with some rather disconsolate donkeys waiting to pimp their rides.

On the way to Grimsby we spotted a completely barking building, and stopped off to have a look; it was Thornton Abbey, closed until April, but will be well worth a look in the spring, I think. Those monks did themselves proud, there’s no doubt.

We found somewhere in Lincoln to park for £6 for more than four hours – I’m torn between saying "Six quid? That’s practically an armful", and "Six quid – that’s a bargain for city parking". Anyway, we paid it. For my own reference, it was in Westgate, close to both castle and cathedral.

We went and looked at the cathedral, but we didn’t pay and go round it – that’ll be for another day, as will the castle. The cathedral is *huge* – I had no idea – and utterly impressive. The city is very like Norwich (which is unsurprising when you think about it), and had a lovely feel to it. Although when people say Lincolnshire is flat, they’re clearly excluding Lincoln itself; some of those hills are lethal!.

tea and teacakeWe had tea and teacake in nice tea shoppe, walked along the dock area, all round the old part of town, before meeting up with Dave and Linda (WANOLJ) for an early chinese buffet at the Laughing Buddha, to celebrate his birthday.  Pete got a new hat, as his was very motheaten, and I bought a lovely bright red soft woolly scarf, both from the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.  And we got some barley flour from a health food shop, and some salmon for the Tribe in the pound shop.

Home by 8.30, and a lovely day out – we shall be going *there* again, that’s for sure.

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surveillance

Posted 23 January 2010 By mac and has 3 comments.

From the Guardian:

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the “routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

Nice.

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British Gas …

Posted 22 January 2010 By mac and has no comments yet.

We paid the gas in Long Ashton by direct debit, and when I checked, the account was £140 in credit after the final reading.

“Oh good”, I thought – that’ll stand me in good stead for the next hideous bill after all that cold weather, especially as another £120 will have gone into their maw.

But when I looked again today, the credit was still sitting on the Long Ashton address, and there are no additional credits from a direct debit on this address at 90 ramtops road, and WTF no 94 ramtops road is doing on the account, $deity only knows.

I phoned them up, and a very nice man told me that they refunded the £140 back to the bank at the beginning of December, so I’ll have to check that (and if so, why does the bloody thing show a credit? – surely it should show a zero balance), and that they don’t automatically transfer standing orders from one address to another, even when the transfer went through the house moving team. So instead of being £250 or so in credit with the gas, I’m starting from zero again :( I’ve set up the direct debit again, but how STUPID is that practice?

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when is a book not a book?

By mac and has 3 comments.

Want. And I don’t even *own* a Macbook.

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