I’ve
come to a conclusion I’m going through a bit of a foot-in-mouth disease,
at least on LiveJournal when commenting in some other journals.

So
as to not cause more faux pas I’ve decided that I should remove those people
who’s journals I’ve accidently said things others have thought were offensive
from my friends list so that I don’t feel tempted to comment in them.

This
decision was mostly due to an incident last week which I’m still pretty angry
about where someone wrongly extrapolated an impersonal, tongue in cheek comment
and took it personally. It’s also to do with a number of other incidents.

For those people I de-friend on here, please dont take this as a personal affront, I still like you.

PS. Smiddly, if you’re reading this, sorry for cluttering up your journal a number of times.

Seeing as I’ve not got LiveLizard working satisfactorally there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t update my journal.

Let’s see, what’s happened since last time I typed..

Friday
morning at work was punctuated by a paniced call.. “Could you come down to
the lecture theatre and fix the projector so it works with the video? Help!”
Yes, you guessed it, they wanted the digital projector set up as a big telly
for the world cup match. After some soldering of plugs and changing the projector
from NTSC to Auto mode, everythign worked fine. Seeing as everyone else was
watching the match I decided to tag along. For a football match, it was reasonably
entertaining. I did pop out to get my baguette in the middle of the first
half and heard the goal being scored on the radio in the shop.

Friday
night I spent a whole lot too much time talking at the departmental happy
hour. I didn’t get to leave until about 7:45, far too late to go do my weekly
shopping at Sainsbury’s in preparation for my trip to Liverpool on Saturday..

Saturday
morning I got up half an hour earlier than normal to get ready and pack fro
my trip up to see Lindsey in Crosby. I finally managed to start off at 9am,
getting to her place by about 12:30pm. I managed to stop off at one of the
services on the M6 to “powder my nose” and to buy Lindsey a birthday card.

Upon
arrival I was greeted by a cup of weak, milky tea. Lindsey likes to show
the teabag to the hot water from the other side of the room.. It’s that weak!

After
a little time chatting and drinking tea, we set off for Woolworth’s to get
the two disposable BBQ’s (one meat and one veggie) and some cheese slices.
After we got back to her place we waited around for all the other people
to arrive. I think Matthew was the first, followed by various other people
including Clive.

Anyway. Of the male guests there, only myself and
Jim were not ex-boyfriends of Lindsey. This made for an interesting evening
where the various ex’s ganged up and teased Lindsey and the various current
girlfriends ganged up with Lindsey to tease back.

Much fun was had..
followed by going to bed. I had been given a half deflated airbed to sleep
on, which I couldn’t pump up futher because Jim had borrowed my footpump
as he’d left an importnt part of his back in Aberystwyth. Oh well.

Anyway
at just before 4am I get a knock ont he door and Lindsey asks if I’d like
to go see the sun rise.. I said ok.. so we all trundled off down to the sand
dunes on the coast where we watched swifts swarm, larks lark about and kestrels
hunt. Unfortunately, because it was cloudy we merely saw the clouds get lighter
rather than a sunrise.

So, it was back to bed at 5am and up again at 10.

General
tea drinking and breakfast eating ensued until Matthew and myself were asked
to leave at midday as Lindsey needed a bath and a sleep before she recorded
things in the afternoon.

I popped over to Mel’s place to recover my
footpump. It would have helped if I’d have the right house number in my records,
but eventually I found the house. The cat tried to show me the right house
but I didn’t recognise the cat. In the end Eddie found me instead.

As
it turns out it was fortuitous that I had popped around as Mel had made a
roast chicken lunch but all those she had made it for had decided to leave.
Jim & Katrin because they needed to get back home before the shops closed
and Clive and Pepsi because Pepsi wasn’t feeling well. So, I got to have
a rather nice lunch . 🙂

The journey home was panctuated by stops
at various services to pee and drink coffee (The Costa’s Coffee place at
Knutsford services doesn’t know how to make a latte by the way). Oh, and
a detour from Junction 11 to Junction 7 on A roads to avoid stationary traffic.

I
got home, flaked out and finally went to bed at 9pm.. sleeping through ’til
8am.. 30 minutes late, but it doesn’t matter really.

Yesterday wass a NULL day, really.

Today,
nothing exciting has happened yet, though I’ve been invited by a 4th year
undergrad to help her celebrate finishing her exams along with her boyfriend
and other friends this evening, starting at 4:30. That might be fun.

I’ve
just downloaded and installed the LiveLizard Mozilla plug-in to see how good
it is as a an entry system for LiveJournal entries.

If it works it’sll make updating the journal from work a heck of a lot easier!

Well, actually a week since my last entry. Let’s see what’s happened.

Friday evening my parents arrived from Cornwall, I was nicely fed and watered. We then watched one of my DVD’s. (I can’t remember which one.)

Saturday was spent driving up to my Nan and Uncle’s place in Ilkeston, Derbyshire to visit them and then driving home again. My Nan seemed rather more gaunt, deaf and somewhat more forgetful than when I last visited. She’s 98. My Uncle, who’s my mum’s younger brother lives with her and is, if anything, less spritely. he shuffles about at such a slow speed. My Nan seems to do more of the house work than he does even though she’s got failing eyesight on top of the deafness and forgetfulness.

Sunday morning and early afternoon were nothing special other than having a nice roast lunch. Later in the afternoon my Aunt & Uncle from Enfield (northern edge of the London conurbation) arrived. (They are my dad’s elder brother and his wife.) There was much talking followed by a very traditional tea of old-fashioned salad (lettuce, beetroot, tomato, cheese, white sliced bread, pork pies) and then we watched another of my DVD’s (In the Line of Fire). They left at about 8pm.

Monday morning was pretty lazy. In the early afternoon we went off to B&Q in Abingdon to get some paint and other supplies so as to repaint my front and side doors. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t brilliant so we couldn’t do much other than rub down the paint on the side door. Oh, and in the evening we watched another DVD.. I can’t remember which.

Tuesday was spent doing house things such as painting the side door, building a support for my apple tree, pruning the bramble and cutting down a blackthorn bush which a bird had planted rather too close to the house. In the evening, you guessed it, it was DVD watching again (The Fifth Element).

My parents left yesterday morning, taking my old telly with tham as it’s newer than my older Sony telly they have been using which is slowly dying. It was also back to work.. and then the weather decided it didn’t like me at all and REALLY poured down in time for me to cycle home and get drenched. Oh well.

Today’s been pretty uneventful.

So, that’s it.. you’re now up to date.

I must try to arrange with people to go see Spiderman when it properly comes out next week.

OK, so, I have nothing to say about long lunchbreaks other than I’ve not had one recently, but it made a good title. 😉

My first dinner party at my house (actually, ever) went well other than I made twice the amount of sauce I needed and 4 times the pasta.. next time I will know better.

The pasta sauce, made of 1Kg lean pork mince, two bottles of passata(I dunno what it’s called.. italian liquified tomatoes) with basil, lots of oragano, salami, mushrooms and salt to taste was a success despite it being a recipe I made up on the fly. The warmed focaccia bread as a side dish worked well too.

Pudding, sorry, desert course was made up of a Vienetta which my guests kindly brought with them and the Carte-D’Or strawberry ice-cream I’d bought for the occasion. This was followed by tea/coffee in the lounge.

I was amazed that I managed to squeeze 4 people around a table in my kitchen.. though the term squeezed is very descriptive.

I couldn’t be bothered to wash up after the guests left at 10:30pm, so I left it for yesterday. There was a lot of it.. it took nearly an hour to do, including cleaning the hob where all the tomato had splashed all over the place.

I’ll I’ve got to do now is work out how to store the rest of the pasta sauce which is filling up my fridge in its saucepan. I have a freezer but no containers to currently put the stuff in so as to store it in the freezer. Oh well. 🙂

Tonight, I’ve the final push of getting the house back the way it was ready for my parents to arrive tomorrow for the Jubilee holiday weekend. (Not that I’m doing any Jubilee celebrating.)

Talking of which, I saw on the BBC teletext news pages this morning that a poll said that they had found that 75% of people are going to be celebrating the golden Jubilee.. how come then, no-one I know is taking a blind bit on notice of the whole event and any that are are actively avoiding it? It seems the 1006 people polled are a very unrepresentative sample.

Well, I seem to have a social life again!

Friday night I was asked if I wanted to tag along to a pub.

Saturday was spent in Reading with Tom, Shona and little Tanaqui, firstly having a very nice pizza and then watching the latest Star Wars film. (Whoever it is who played Anakin should give up acting as he can’t do it.) That took a little over 6 hours to do, so it cost me £8 in car park fees!

Sunday, I watched the Grand Prix and lazed around.

Tonight I’ve got some cleaning to do and some shopping to get stuff I forgot on Saturday in preparation for my first dinner party, involving the same people who asked if I wanted to tag along to a pub on Friday night. It should, hopefully, be fun.

Well, so far I’ve seen about four of these types of entries, so I might as well tag along…

Continue reading →

In the last few days I’ve done nothing, been nowhere and met no-one.

I need to get out more. I’m going batty.

What a lovely, sunny morning it was this morning.

I got up at 10am and quickly put the bed clothes in the washing machine. After a nice, relaxing bit of free newspaper browsing it was time for lunch and also the washing had finished. Following lunch I put some stuff in the loft and then washed the car, so as to get rid of the bird mess. Those birdies must die! 🙂

A bit of a snooze during the afternoon was nice, but afterwards I needed to get out, so I went for a nice little drive around south Oxfordshire and a bit of Berkshire. It’s a pitty that the weather had clouded over by then, but still, it was nice to get out and about. It can be so clostrophobic staying in Oxford all the time, especially if you don’t see anyone other than people from work for weeks on end.

Sometimes I feel so isolated here as all my friends outside work live at least 25 miles away, the closest being in Reading and I get to see them so rarely these days.

It’s a fortnight since the nice visit from Jerry and Em, it’s 4 weeks since I visited Rachel, Graham and Christopher and it must be at least 6 weeks since I visited Alec. Maybe I should try to find friends who live in Oxford, but they’d just move away in time anyway, so what’s the point?

Hopefully, I can persuade people this week that a trip out to the cinema (and a meal) sometime this week. It’s been a great many months since the last cinema trip I was able to make. I think it must have been “Lord of the Rings” before Christmas.