Oops...

...Yikes, the longer I leave this, the more stuff I have to write to catch up with things.

Yep, it's been a month to the day (more or less (which completely defeats the object of saying "to the day". Oh well)) since I last posted anything up, however, inbetween the big bits of nothing that have been happening, other various events and things were experienced, and so I shall try to remember some to write about.

Hmm. Current affairs. Bloody hell. Coalition warplanes flying over Libya, the Libyan airforce now in tatters, consisting entirely of half a dozen trainee pilots with a handful of rubber bands to twang between them, Gadaffi running off into the middle of the desert with 40/50 however many virgins (isn't he supposed to wait until after death for all that lot?), and he still pops up out of his burning hole in the ground every few days with his megaphone, to proclaim "We are winning ze var!" before ducking back underground to deplete his supply of (either blind, or very rich, by now) virgins.
Still, it'll give your average student activist something to protest about, which is good. Activists are easier to identify as assholes when they're visibly protesting about something.

In other news, the past week or two have been filled with news stories about tsunamis and earthquakes and exploding nuclear reactors, all happening, completely unfairly, to the same country at the same time.
Yep, things aren't all that great in Japan. Let's hope the folks get back on their feet sooner rather than later.

Ever remember when you were little, and you thought that the future was this golden thing full of awesomeness and light and fun?

Sooooo...

In computer land, things are going pretty well.

I went to college one day and asked if I could borrow a surplus motherboard to use in a test rig I was building at the time. of course, being a dell motherbouard, it only fits in Dell systems. So to use the board I had to borrow everything attached to it.

Before I knew it, I was lugging a 15 kilo Dell tower PC through the rather pleasant studenty part of town.

"OMG No wai!" I hear you cry, no, I did not get given a fully working system.
The tutor's rather liberal interpretation of recycling and sales policy seemed to go along the lines of:

"We shouldn't give working systems away. We can give scrap away. If that computer is fully complete, minus a power supply, it's classed as not working. Therefore take it home and put a power supply in it".

Which was done.

In the past few weeks I've now upgraded every bit of the computer that I can upgrade, and it's not a bad little system. If only I could figure out what to do with a completely functioning but completely surplus computer.

I guess it's fun to take to bits and reassemble every now and again. Either way, I managed to turn a halfhearted arsing around 10 minutes fitting a power supply, into a full-blown in-depth 7 and a half hour reconditioning the system completely, rebuilding it from the ground up, and writing up in great detail, all my work in the process.

Look. See? Shiny! I was pretty pleased with the way that it turned out, and it seems to have been almost universally complimented on its content and layout. Both my tutors had a little chat with each other and then with me, after agreeing that I should consider looking into a carreer as a technical documentation writer.
I'll think about that maybe, but at the minute my priority is getting on with this course. I'm also going to see if I can get my name on the waiting list for the course subsequent to this one, which again, is two certificates, each worth £££.

Finance wise, I'm now broke. I have no source of income whatsoever. The job center have decided that since I'm studying on a (2 day a week) part time course, I'm not looking for a job, and therefore am not eligible for financial support. But all the terms and conditions I signed up to at the start still apply as long as I'm on their books.

In actual fact, I am still looking for a job, and tomorrow I intend to explain to these lovely people that if I'm not eligible for financial support anyway, they can shove their terms and conditions where the sun doesn't shine.
I'm not going to word it like that obviously, cos I'm a nice person.

But yes, at the minute, my income comes solely from scavenging spare parts from broken systems and selling them on the eBays. Difficult when my spare stuff comes from only one source, and of course I'm careful not to monopolise the scrap pile - other people want extra bits too. So hey.

In other news, We've all been spending a lot of time with my nephew, in fact it was his birthday not long after the last blog entry. Off we went to laser quest, and we had 2 awesome games of running around, zapping each other with lasers, and generally having lots of fun.

I got the awesome score, coming in first place, with an extra bonus for "stupendous accuracy", which was 12%. Okay I spose, considering that ammo conservation doesn't apply, and especially considering that the average accuracy is 6%.

The second round, I came in 8th out of 9. Even my ickle nephew beat me heh.
I'm not sure what went wrong there. Whether it was cos everyone ganged up on me, whether I wasn't able to use mobility to great effect (in the first game everyone else was walking round slowly while I was ninja-ing all around the mezzanine (heh!), which we decided we weren't going to include in the play area for the second game), or whether I was simply unlucky, I dunno. It was good fun either way.

Later on, we had a beautiful spring day, so my nephew got suited up in his finest Armouron armour and off we went to the park for some questing. This basically consisted of him running around fighting trees while I stood close to make sure he didn't do anything dangerous or whatever. A nice time was had by all.
Later on, his parents brought his remote control boat around, and we spent an hour or two sailing round the lake...

WE INTERRUPT YOUR PROGRAMMING...

Bugger I have (what is probably the first of many over the summer) a huge moth in my room. A grand moth even. I shall call him Tarkin.
BRB getting moth out of room.
There. Now Grand Moth Tarkin is sat on my window waving his little antennae in gratitude.

So yeah.

...

My sister brought her PC monitor round so I could use it to set up her computer which I was getting ready for her, and for a short and kinda cool time, I actually had two PCs working at the same time in my room, which was fun. The whole place looked a bit like a workshop at times, I have to admit. But it was cool. I spent the evening at her house the other day setting the computer up and getting it all working together, and it works like a treat.

So yeah. To summarise:

• I got more free computer stuff.
• The weather is turning nice.
• I am rotten stinking stoning stinking broke and selling my possessions to stay afloat.

Here is a picture of my cute little CPU collection. I haven't included the AMD X2 64 in there because my computer needs it to function.
I was going to put in another bunch of pictures, but they're just more computery ones of computers in various stages of disassembly :-).

Oh well, have fun. I'll try to report in when stuff gets interesting :-).

EDIT: There was a post following on from this entitled "Heads up".
I've deleted it because it's a load of rubbish :-).

I'm getting dizzy...

...the number of times I've been on a roll this week!

But first, february.

PART ONE: FEBRUARY

Well, so far this month we've had rain, frost, very cold biting winds, and snow, all topped off with today, which is actually a lovely spring day.

Everyone is doing stuff outside, whether packing caravans, cleaning cars, taking their dogs for a walk, taking their kids to the park etc. The birds are singing, the ducks are quacking, the sun is beaming down on everything, the grass is green, the water is wet, even some flowers are starting to come out, adding a splash of colour (to compete with the frequent splashes of muddy puddles) to the local park.
And in addition to it all, the local kids have been attending the "Sheffield Parks and Countryside Rangers' Minibeast Safari".

And, with a loud buzzing of wings, I think the first wasp/bee of the year has just flown into my room! Seems to have buzzed off now (They're a bugger to get out of the house again, since I refuse to kill them, the only solution is to kinda guide them through the house to the nearest open window).

Anyway, the safari. I can't remember the poster word for word, but it gave the local kids (the little ones who are interested in such things - the older ones are interested in getting drunk and fighting each other, obviously) the opportunity to wander around the woods and grass in the park, finding stuff like centipedes and spiders and millipedes and oligochaeta etc, and look at them with magnifying glasses and things, and even "help the rangers set up 'minibeast hotels' for them". Which presumably took the form of plastic containers with leaves and twigs and stuff for the creatures to crawl around in and eat and stuff. The kids were also invited to draw pictures or make models of their favourite minibeasts.
The rangers had set up a little marquee with tables and stuff in the park, and there were plenty of kids wandering around with butterfly nets and bits of paper and everything, and to say that we had an inch of snow a week ago, watching everyone out in the sunshine enjoying themselves made me smile. For my part, I was bimbling around on my (very muddy, but it works just fine) bike, and generally being cheerful. The air seems to have that odd slightly spicy peaty smell that it tends to have on lovely spring days like this, so it's all nice and seasonal.

I would have taken my ickle nephew to the safari, but he's with his parents and my mum on a trip to the coast. Not to worry, I've got some cool birthday presents for him for this weekend :-).

PART TWO: COMPUTERYNESS

Well, things have been proceeding apace at College (depending on who I talk to, where I go seems to change. To friends, it's College, to close friends it's Skool, to Americans it's Tech College etc etc, Tech College sounds best I spose. Maybe I should start calling it that). We've been storming through the modules to the tune of one or two a week, and so far my lowest end-of-module-test score was 91%. I could be doing better, but not much. With two test scores at 100% and two over 96%, I'm not doing too badly.

One of the awesome things that I love about my course is that it's hands-on. The last one was all theory, which I hated, so I left. This one actually puts theory into practice, and putting together machines properly and getting everything just right, is starting to become a source of personal pride for me; as an example, while I was installing an OS on a system yesterday, I spent the free time removing blanking plates off nonfunctioning computers, fitting them to mine, and making the machine physically look as good and as appealing as possible :-).
The note on the bottom of the spec sheet that I taped to the case, warned "Do NOT disassemble. I spent ages making this box look leet". I think Tech college would probably be the only place in the city where everyone got the joke.
It got a better laugh than I expected actually!

One awesome side-benefit of studying there is that as I've already mentioned, due to whatever agreement they have with whoever supplies them with their systems, they don't seem too hung-up on donating bits to needy people, i.e. students who ask for them nicely. This week, I came home with an Intel Celeron 2.4 CPU, a special blanking plate for the back of my computer, and a 40gb 2.5" laptop hard drive.

The Celeron came in useful for my side project...

PART THREE: SIDE PROJECT

Back in the good old days you see, before I built the lovely shiny computer that I'm using at the minute, I used one that I bought from PC world. A sparkly shiny silver and white Packard Bell that at the time was a pretty cool machine. It had a Celeron 1.8 processor and 256mb of ram.

Of course, when I built my new computer, it went up in the loft, saved from the bin only by my stubborn habit of keeping things with sentimental value. And there, it stayed, on its side, in the cold loft, for the next 5 years.

Of course, I figured that I may as well get some hands on skills in my own time, so down it came. Initially I was just going to take it to bits for the hell of it, but partway through I figured it'd be just as much fun to see if I could get it working again.

I started by stripping the computer down to its last screw, to a completely bare chassis. Every part was cleaned of dust, including the CPU fan and heatsink which were fairly icky, and every part was carefully put back together. I found an old hard drive in a plastic bag, in the drive bay, and figured I'd fit it properly and use it as a primary drive.

And what do you know, the computer works. It runs windows just fine, even a couple of older games with its cute little ATI Radeon 9000 graphics card (which at the time cost me about £120, and now costs £6.50!!! Talk about depreciation!!!).

I started getting a bit carried away, upgrading the computer's RAM, taking it from 256 to 1024MB, and I replaced the old 1.8 Celeron with the aforementioned 2.4.

And it still works! In fact, it now officially works better than it ever did. I'm hoping to pass it onto my sister :-).

So there we go!

Here are some shiny pickatures.

Peripheral Vision (also, Happy Birthday To Meee)

Also, Happy 250th Blog Post :-).

Yep, it's me again. I mean it's my blog, come on, who else would it be?

Well, as you can see, I'm kinda running dangerously low on space on my desk. Even at the best of times it's always been a bit of a squeeze, and my lovely shiny briffday present (the wheel) means that if I want to chat AND race at the same time, I have to lean over to use my keyboard. Bad ergonomics.

How long this situation continues however, is of course, ever open to debate: My desk might have been reasonably solidly built when it was new, but years and years of continual daily use (14,600 hours in the past 5 years, at a rough guess) means that the desk is held together more with wood filler and rawlplugs, than with screws and dowels. Three sets of runners are knackered on it, so the pullout shelf, the drawer, and one of the CD trays all do their best to dump their contents on the floor if I'm not careful. Not to worry, I want to rebuild it sometime this year anyway. This is another "I'll do it when...(I have some money)" project that sits on my mental "I'll do it when..." shelf, next to the big shiny new computer that I haven't yet started saving up for.

But yes, the wheel. It's a thrustmaster Ferrari GT, and taking into account the gift voucher I used to pay for part of it, plus the money I was given to buy it, and the loyalty card points I got for buying it, it cost me -£19. It seems that "the best things in life are free" only applies to other people while for me, I actually get paid to take them. Which brings me neatly around to my course.

Yep, I've now finished week 2 of the course, and while tuesday's "theory/revision" lesson consisted entirely of 4 hours of revision and end-of-module-test taking (I have access to all the course materials including the ability to take the tests at home, so theoretically I could do the first of the two courses that I'm on without ever setting foot in a classroom), the practical on wednesday was much more interesting.
Again, the day started with doing a clean-sweep of some systems and installing an OS on them so they could be resold, but the lesson was much more hardware oriented. Having been expecting to be sitting watching progress bars all day, I was pleasantly surprised by the end of the day to have swapped out a malfunctioning DVD drive, as well as installing two CPU assemblies, and about half a dozen sticks of RAM.

Highlights of that lesson included one of our new classmates (the 17yo kid, Liam, seems to be wavering as to whether he's really bothered about the course at all) opening a system up, and finding the CPU sat loose on the motherboard, and the heat sink rattling around in one of the drive bays (!), a second new dude's system beeping at him and refusing to boot, but only until I opened it up and put a stick of RAM in there (everyone starts somewhere, I know, but even I find it funny when someone puts a computer with no PSU on the workbench, and then complains that he can't find where to plug the power lead), and weirdly, a malfunctioning CD drive that the first dude fixed, turned out to have a coin rattling about inside the mechanism!

The second set of highlights was cooler though, since we restore these machines to factory spec, things like firewire/usb cards, graphics cards, and sound cards, tend to be taken out and given to the students, on the basis that "the computers cost us nothing, why not spread the love?" or something like that.
I set off home on wednesday with a new (to me) fairly old, (but very shiny and much better than the on-board realtec sound chip I was using) Sound Blaster Audigy ZS Platinum sound card, as well as a front-mounted USB/SATA/Firewire/Audio/SD/CF Card reader all-in-one thingumabob. Like this, but better.

Aside from some driver issues with the sound card (now fixed, mostly) and the fact that the card reader doesn't like SDHC cards, (I just plug the card into a USB adaptor and plug that into the reader), they're both now happily sitting in the computer doing stuff.

As for my wheel and pedals, They come in very handy when playing one of my favourite driving games. I didn't realise quite how handy until I plugged them in for the first time. Let's just say that using a wheel instead of the keyboard has made a slight difference to my lap times, heh.

And finally, we come to my birthday. Yep, I never writing this thing in order, but hey. My sister was the first to come bearing yummy gifts, including a box of yummy sweets from my ickle nephew, a huge pack of yummy pork crunch just like my Christmas one, and a cardboard thingie with lots of yummy beef jerky on it. Now someone (Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, I can't remember) commented on the fact that they print lovely ladies on the cardboard backdrop, to inspire customers to keep buying peanuts/beef jerky etc on the off chance they might eventually get a look at a cardboard nipple. I'd always considered it unlikely that the women on any of these backdrops had nipples on display because pubs were, well, still public places. Nevertheless, after eating 7 of the packets, the woman was more er, exposed so I had a quick look.
There are no nipples. See, I was right. Though to look, there may well have been not only nipples, but full blown boobs, if her arms and hair weren't in the way. But using that logic, any woman walking on the street could be said to be showing her private parts off, her modesty protected only by clothing (!).
What was I talking about? I don't know. But the beef jerky is yummy.

From my mum and dad, I got a signed (from my mum and dad?) book, "Healthy Family Recipes". This was due to me expressing enjoyment of cooking, and a wish to cook more often (I really AM turning into my father's son. That or I'm just getting domesticated). I'm loathe to admit it lest I sound like I'm 46 instead of 26, but some of the recipes in there actually look really yummy. Provided I don't burn them like I burned my last attempt at cooking a family meal.

After lots of hinting and outright asking on my part, and after playing an awesome game of UT3 where I got an epic score (see pic), I went to the lovely local restaurant, where I had not one but two of their lovely milkshakes, followed by a couple of pints of very slightly flavoured golden fizzy water called Becks. At this point I was presented with a lovely magnetic gift from my Brother and his wife, a set of 216 (I still have all 216 of them, despite struggling to retreive 6 that got stuck - literally - down the back of my radiator (EDIT: I now have 211. Bugger!!!)) spherical magnets.
So far, I have learned to make several interesting shapes with them. I can make: A line, a strip, a square, a hexagon, a triangle and a tube :-). I can also make a long chain of them and wear them around my neck, which is probably fun. They're quite annoyingly fun to play with. Annoying because they encourage you to play with them for half an hour at a time when you should be doing other stuff.

We were sat at a table, where I had some balloons tied to my chair to mark me out to everyone, and I was handed a rather elaborate and colourful balloon hat to wear, to add to the festivity.

I had nachos, of course, because TGI's only serves the best nachos, cooked in-house I believe instead of the other places that seem to cheet (haha see what I did there? :P) and use doritos. After my burger and just before I was able to escape, I was cornered against the table and had a song sung to me wishing me happy birthday, which raised a lot of cheering and clapping from a (possibly drunk) work's party on the next table.
In leiu of a birthday cake (I just realised! I didn't get a cake this year!!!!) I was then presented with a bowl of yummy ice cream with chocolate bits in, and strangely, a fork to eat it with, heh.

After getting home, I hastily completed the TGI satisfaction survey (I promised the staff member I'd do it, as she seemed very friendly and she mentioned she could get a bottle of champagne if we said we liked our service - I'm a sucker for people being nice to me heh), which apparently entitles her to a bottle of champagne, and me to some free nachos.
I then went and drank my traditional birthday alcohol before having a very late night.

And now I think I'm off to do the same. Might hit the roads again later :-).

Have fun folks!

Back to School...

...Well...

Sorry for the long pause.
I got them trapped in a lift door.

Ahem, so, what has happened in my life in the past 3 or so weeks?

Weeelll, I've slept a lot. Drank a lot. Drank lots of TEGH (which is my secret special drink), and up until recently, that has been the sum of my activities, in their entirity.

For the past two days though, I've been wandering round a technology college, carrying notepads full of weird acronyms and terms like "Parity", "EEPROM", ESD, DDR3 and NTFS. Yep, as the title suggests, I seem to be transitioning from "unemployed bum" to "Trainee ICT Technician (and I receive some kind of Cisco accredited certification as well apparently - 2 certificates for the price of one!)", which as I understand it, is a fairly good springboard to more specific and specialised jobs in the IT/ICT sector.

My course is broken into two bits, the Cisco bit, which seems to cover everything from "A computer is an electrical device capable of performing calculations based on a set of instructions" to things like, lemme see... (I've got access to the course material at home, thanks to the intermernets)... "Advanced Networks", "Advanced Security" etc etc, which is done in the classroom, and the Other bit which we started to get into today, which is done in the "lab", which so far (it's only day 2 so it's not going to be advanced straight away), seems to consist of wiping everything off old (well, celeron 1.4) machines, reformatting and doing a clean OS install (plus updating the drivers and installing basic software etc), prior to sending them to being sold on.
As time goes on apparently we will progress into diagnosing faults, fixing them, and eventually be building systems from scratch.
Mixed in with this are various modules on customer relations/plain speaking (no, really! Technobabble is more likely to annoy than to inform apparently), health and safety in the workplace (never attempt to work on a CRT monitor, and never never ever do so while attached to it with an antistatic wrist strap - the majority of it is common sense really). So it seems to be a pretty thorough course.

The college itself is a decent enough place, all new carpets, white walls, glass and steel. Nice and air conditioned (ah, not so good when you're working in the lab), full of vending machines which liberally but expensively distribute drinks that you are allowed to drink in the lab/classroom "Use your common sense, if you spill it, what are you going to damage, other than the carpet? Nothing? Go ahead then", and right in the middle of town, 5 minutes walk from the most incredible sandwich shop I've ever been to (£3.50 will get you a super deluxe joyful chicken burger the size of a lava lamp, seriously).
The atmosphere is relaxed "If you need to leave early, or come in later than usual, or if you want to go and get a drink or whatever, that's fine, you can come and go", and the tutors seem to place great emphasis on what we want to get out of the course "If there is something you want included that isn't included, let us know and we'll do our best to include it").
There are only five of us in the class, and we range from one bloke in his 50s who wants a change of carreer, to our class clown, a 17 year old kid, who seems to come out with the strangest utterances at the weirdest moments. But hey, to say we've only been studying there for two days, we seem to get on pretty well together both with each other, and the tutors, and will generally hang out with each other at lunchtime or whatever, so yeah, it's definitely better than sitting on my ass alone at home.
Considerably better.

And when time comes to go home, I wander some more around the studenty part of town (I don't go there to wander around, our college is kinda in the middle of it), and the peace gardens and see the waterfalls and shiny/huge new buildings and whathaveyou, and I seem to have decided that Sheffield is an awesome place to study. Or to be a student.
I study, but I don't know if that makes me a student. I don't get student discount or anything heh.

Still, I think I'm onto something good :-).

The Great Mediocrity...

I've never been too fond of this time of year.

Gone are the lovely colourful Christmas illuminations, the sense of cheer, merryment and excitement. Gone is the snow, the sledging, the happy anticipation, and gone are the trifle, Quiches and turkey. In their place we have the cold and wet mediocrity that is the first few weeks of the new year. And worse, my birthday next month, so I have the lovely opportunity to get some socks and a reminder that I'm getting older still, and the things I should be doing as a young man, are the things I'm going to end up getting weird stares for doing in my forties.

But it's not all doom and gloom, no. Things come along, things progress. My rather fruitless search for a job that isn't working at McDonalds or at a call center isn't one of them, but on the other hand I have been referred to one of the local education authorities, with a view to enrolling on a rather interesting course that involves what I've been up to earlier, that is, tearing a computer to bits and putting it back together.

Yep, my faithful computer doesn't have a speck of dust inside it at the minute, and seems to be purring along very happily. I spent half an hour with an air blower removing dust bunnies, dust sharks, and dust dinosaurs from ridiculously constricted intake grilles, and generally sorting the airflow out. And yet...

Well, I've been "promoted" on a website I frequent. 20 posts was all it took to be awarded an award (what else) and recognition for "outstanding contribution" apparently, in the form of 3d meshes and objects, which cheered me up. Yes, it seems that my years of arsing around with 3d modelling are finally producing tangible results, both in the form of meshes that people are now using in their work and incorporating into actual content for games, and in the form of recognition as a very good 3d modeller.
So that's good, that's cheered me up. The only downside is that producing this content is time consuming, and takes effort, both from the computer and from me. So much effort in fact, that on some of my larger projects, the software is now crashing, citing "out of memory" errors.

Having asked around, it seems that my system (dual core 2.8ghz processor and 3gb of ram) while mostly adequate for my purposes, is woefully inadequate for the latest software's most powerful functions, which historically relied upon network rendering, rather than single machine rendering. Unfortunately, with my motherboard supporting an absolute maximum of 4gb of physical ram, it seems a new computer may be in order sometime before the end of this year. Especially if I'm going to be producing models as something other than a form of self amusement.

As with the system I'm now using, I made the mistake of going to overclockers, where I have once again seen lots of shiny stuff that I would like to buy. Having acknowledged that my computer is rather noisy, I am giving thought to some form of water cooling, or at the very least, buying a "quiet" case.

So yes, I've been happily rendering things, making my computer work hard, drinking loads of TEGH (a nickname that if you don't understand I'm not going to explain it to you), searching for a job, trying to get information on a course (difficult when the sods won't email me back at all never mind "within 2 working days"), and generally saying "Yes, life ground to a halt at the end of 2010 as it does every christmas season, now it's time to start it again".

Things are going okay so far, they could certainly be worse :-).

Now all I need is more pork crunch, cos I've run out! I saved the bag though, so I can refill it and use it as my perpetual pork crunch supply.

And now I'm off to tidy up and sit about and whatnot. Hope you all had a happy new year's day :-).

2011 Incoming...

22:29 Yep, not a blog entry, just a marker of the terrifyingly inexorable passage of time.

So what's happened in 2010? Well, plenty of stuff as you've probably read. Lots of it good, lots of it bad, and lots of it fondly remembered with a rosy-hued drunken haze.

As time counts down to 2011, what have I been up to? Well, tidying up mostly, helping my nephew find the latest in a long line of missing bits of lego, and drinking surprising quantities of Earl Grey, even though it gives me a headache. I think I'm acquiring a taste for it.

Soon I'm going to stick Knightmare on, and watch that with my lovable nephew (he likes it cos it has dungeons and stuff in, I like it cos I used to like it when I was tiny), eating delicious pork crunch that my brother did get me (it's become a miniature tradition - watch Knightmare with pork crunch).

22:42: Well, my ickle nephew is demanding my attention, so I'm going to stick Knightmare on, drink nice cold cider, nice hot tea, and listening to the fireworks.

Back later, maybe. If not, see you next year. I won't be going anywhere in the meantime :-).

23:55 Right: Off downstairs with the family. See you next year!

Christmas Day 2010!

01:07: So I'm sitting here in a nice fresh clean bed with delicious Xmas beer, watching Dilbert on my iPod, relaxing and generally being cheerful. The only way things could be better is if I wasn't full of cold, but even that seems to be receding.
Ahh, I bet the lil dude is having a hard time sleeping hehe. I'm gonna sleep soon, but for now, I'm happy just to chill out.

08:57: Well, after a couple of false starts, I've finally been shouted awake, as the family have started arriving.
For my part I've downed a couple of flu plus, and I'm hoping they'll stave off this rather annoying headache of mine, for the rest of what is hopefully going to be a lovely day filled with cool gadgets, gizmos, and happy family members :-).
Now, to get dressed...

12:56: Well, that's all the pressies done with. I'll go into more detail soon cos I'm kinda busy enjoying a nice family Christmas at the minute. I've got plenty of cool stuff to go on about which I'll do later.
Looks like we're getting ready for dinner so I'd best get on with that.

21:10: Well, the day is finally beginning to wind down.
Sooo, what happened?

Well, from the me point of view, I got some really cool stuff. One of the first presents I opened, appeared to be something like a large sweater or some other item of superfluous clothing, only to turn into a humongous and very cool multipack of pork crunch, made of only the best win and caek. Or something like that.

I also got a really shiny 72mm polariser, which is pretty awesome.

One other gift that definitely got my attention this year, was a lovely cheerful happy little gift for all those lovable scamps with a sense of humour, an electric shock pen.
Basically, it's a rather cheerful device that's disguised as a pen, and when some fool presses down on the clicker, it gives them an electric shock.
Now I'm generally reluctant to have anything to do with electric shocks, but nonetheless, I reasoned, to have the moral authority to subject other (admittedly unwilling and uninformed) people to its various voltages, I should at least be aware of what the device itself did. So I picked up the pen, and pressed the clicker, expecting something like a mild/moderate tingle.

The effect, much to my surprise, felt more like being thumped in the shoulder really really hard. The shock travelled from my hand, up my wrist, up to my shoulder, before travelling down my left-hand side, and disappearing sideways up the tent pole. 20 minutes later I was still feeling the after effects.

I also got some other cool stuff, including a Game gift-certificate-card thingie which will get me £20 off Formula 1 2010, Toblerone, Terry's Chocolate Orange, some very amusing books (indeed one was so good, I received two copies of it!), and some truly sensationally coloured socks, that I have admitted I might one day wear, provided I wear a second pair of socks on top. Also included was plenty of smelly stuff which is always good cos I've been running out.

I also got some awesomely comfortable new slippers, and an awesomely awesome new bath robe dressing gown thing (cos both of the old ones were falling to bits) which cheered me up too. I also got a lovely football shirt from my sister :-).

But yeah, christmas this year really is the christmas of identical presents: My mum and my bro both got Monopoly Revolution, and my mum and I got three copies of "A simples life" between us.
But it's all good fun.

We had dinner after a while, which was incredibly yummy, and the soup was excellent as always. The day was really nice all in all, so yeah.

I have to admit to being more than a little sleepy though, which is why this whole thing might read as being a little vague or whatever. I didn't sleep particularly well this morning - something I hope to rectify later tonight. So yeah, sorry the whole entry is a bit perfunctory, I've been busy all day in one sense or another and now I'm sitting here more or less too tired to do anything.
I think I'll have a lovely bottle of Hoegaarden, and some yummy Pork Crunch! I think I can stretch to wearing a paper hat at the same time :-).

In the meantime, here are some nice pickatures. I'll prolly elaborate on this more after I've had some sleep. Hope you all had a good christmas :-).

Christmas Eve!

06:02: Well, after waking up for the final time, ending a period of sleep that was not so much broken as shattered (It was like this: Sleep, wake up, roll over, cough violently, sleep again - repeat ad infinitum), I've finally decided to get out of bed so that we can get the next part of Christmas to a start :-). I admit, I feel better than I thought I would.
I'm still not sure which supermarket we're going to (generic boring one vs christmassy one that looks like a castle) but I guess I'll find out soon.
After we get back, I've got all my bedclothes to wash, 4 final pressies to wrap, and I need to take the lil guy to see Father Christmas, give him his special Christmas surprise, and put him to bed :-).

But that's a good 15 or so hours away.
Ciao for now :-).

06:13: My nephew's cutest Christmas-ism of the day: "If you open all of the windows on your advent calendar early, is it Christmas before Christmas?" Hehe, cute.

10:09: Well, we went to the "supermarket that looks like a castle" which was a pleasant surprise; that part of Christmas had looked to be under threat for a while until I pointed out how much my nephew loves going. Of course, I'm a great stickler for tradition too.

The lil dude went up and down the travelators, and we had a fairly cheerful time buying yummy tastyness and whatnot. I even managed to find some "buenos" (lil chocolate bars) for the lil guy, and, figuring that a nice huge drink of very cold orange juice might help my poorly throat, I went and got some of that too.

We disappeared afterwards into the cafe for a bit of a sit and some toast, before heading home.

I've not been in long, just got back from delivering the Christmas cards :-). Now I'm going to have a nice nap.

16:00: Shouting comes from downstairs "Don't get another quiche!"
Yep, my mum has produced, as is traditional, a load of lovely quiches filled with the traditional lovely christmas gloop, which seems to include mushrooms, bacon and possibly onion. And as usual, people seem to be eating them more or less as they come out of the oven. She definitely makes good quiches, my mum.

Well, I managed to have a nice sleep, and got pretty relaxed laying about watching Dilbert on my ipod and generally recovering from my Christmas cold, thanks to some rather clever (and expensive!) stuff.

Later on - not much later on, actually (!), we've got to take the lil' guy to see Father Christmas on his sleigh, and after that, he's going to spend the might at his dad's, which gives me the opportunity to tidy my room, put clean bedding on my bed, wrap those last couple of presents (now the 2 missing ones have finally arrived!), and have a nice bath. After I've done that, I think I'll relax with my nice Christmas beer, a couple of mince pies, and my nice chilli chocolate that I bought at Gainsborough.
And maybe a quiche or two. More to follow :-).

16:45: Well, there are about half a dozen people in the queue to see Father Christmas. We're getting changed to go down now.

17:22: Well, the queue expanded pretty quickly, with people queueing almost all the way to the entrance to the park. It didn't take too long for my nephew to get to the front of it though, and once there, he was given a lovely mini fudge bar.
On the way back we exchanged Xmas pleasantries with our neighbours.

The way things are going, Rudolph isn't going to be the only one with a red nose this year. I hope this medicine works as advertised heh.

Well, onto more Christmassy things.

20:55: Well, the uncle and cousin have just disappeared after coming round to catch up on old times. Nice to see em, as their visit is always part of Christmas.
I've got a few pressies to wrap up, then I'm gonna make my bed, have a nice bath, and relax with my nice Christmassy beer, a couple of mince pies, and maybe a nice ice cream. At some point, I need to get the presents down from the loft too. But hey, it's all falling into place.

23:47: Well, the pressies are down from the loft. They've all been sorted into their awesome christmassy paper bag things, and we've worked out a kind of seating arrangement for tomorrow's festivities. All that's left for me to do now, is to make my bed with nice clean sheets, and to have a lovely bath.
And drink my lovely Christmas beer, of course. I'll have an ice cream with it. I'll skip the quiches though, had five already and it's not even Christmas Day yet.

Christmassy Goings-On...

Well, as a result of the traditional Christmas Cold, which at least one of our family must have at Christmas, I abandoned last night's Christmas beering and had an early night instead.
After waking up about 3714 times during the night, I was finally roused from my (not that long, actually) sleep, by my mum blasting very loud Christmas music around the house.

Looking out of the window, the first thing I see is a lovely load of Christmassy snow! Snoe! Snow! Sneau etc etc, yep, it's back again just in time for christmas, mum is hard at work downstairs assembling various quiches, dad is in his office doing whatever he does in there, my ickle nephew is in his room surrounded by Lego, and I'm sat here considering going to the shops for some nice ice creams for my throat.

Apart from the three sat on top of my wardrobe, all the presents have been wrapped (even though two of them have yet to arrive :-\), and are chilling out in lovely festive present bags in the loft waiting for Father Christmas to arrange them in the living room. We did the Christmas Pudding last night, and it's merrilly simmering away in the big huge cauldrony thingie that only ever gets used to do the Christmas Pudding :-).

Part Two: Yesterday Was Nice

Yesterday had to attend an appointment in a building that was part of the "Supermarket that looks like a castle" complex (which I would link to but wiki is being crap again), which seems to be my ickle nephew's favourite supermarket. After said appointment, I had a little wander round inside the place, bought a few essential things (like cheese and nuts), and had a cheerful time.

See, we only go in that particular supermarket at Christmas, and so through years of doing this, visiting on a cold Christmas Eve morning seems to be as much a part of the Christmas experience as any other part, so there I was, cheerfully wandering round, listening to the beeps of the checkouts as people did their Christmas shopping, and to the cheerful Christmassy brass band, playing traditional Christmas tunes (as they always do there, over Christmas), and I have to admit, it definitely cheered me up.

The Human mind is weird like that.

Last night, we finally got the house nice and clean, and the very last little bits of the decorations went up. Now the house looks wonderful.

And now, I think I'm off to lay on my bed and try to feel ill and cheerful at the same time, if that's possible.
Talk soon!

16:55: Yep, in 24 hours, assuming the snow holds off, Father Christmas will be round on his sleigh to distrubute small fun-sized confectionery to happy and excited kids :-).
Also, my final two missing Christmas Presents have finally turned up in the mail. Great stuff!!

21:44: Well, I'm retiring to my bed fairly early, for three reasons. One, I feel a bit crappy still. Two, I have to be up at 6 tomorrow to go to do our traditional Christms Eve shopping, and three, I can't wait until Christmas day :-).
Ciao!

Extra-ness (the sign goes up)

I'll be honest, I wasn't really planning on writing another entry right now, but hey, here we go. It's only a short one, mind.

Yep, the sign that indicates Santa's imminent return to these parts upon his Toyota Hilux-driven sleigh, is merrily tethered to the lamp-post, gently soaking up the lovely december rain.
Yeah, halfway through december, a week or so after snow brought the country to a halt, and it's piddling down with rain, and there's no snow or ice to be seen.

But not for long apparently, yep, we're told that we're due some incredibubbly heavy snow later this week, which apparently will take us all the way through to Christmas. Which is a bit of a bugger, because half of my Xmas shopping remains to be done, and some presents that I HAVE ordered, have yet to arrive.

I finally caved into the christmas spirit and bought the ickle dude a bigger submarine to go with his ickle submarine. Admittedly this was my plan all along (no, really!), and it goes with the even bigger submarine I strongly hope his dad has bought him.

So um.

Well, the majority of the Christmas lights are up, the tree is standing proudly and shinily (although slightly leaningly) in the living room, and we have only uh, four more sets of lights to put up. The first in the hall, now that my mum has bizarrely and unilaterally changed the entire layout of the Christmas illumations in the hall... Er, the retina-burningly bright neon blue lights that seem to have become all the rage in the past ten years, that need to go up in the living room, some lovely good old fashioned bulb lights that need to be wrapped around the tinsel on top of the wall unit (30 metres of lights around a 12 metre rope of tinsel, not impossible but bloody difficult to arrange!), and the lovely shiny colourful stars that go in the front window.

But still, there's plenty of time to get it done, and we hope to have the house all decorated and finished for this Friday. Which is the weekend before Christmas eve.

One week to go, more or less!
What the heck! Where did this come from?! Christmas has always been a far away thing and it's skipped "approaching" and "nearly here", going straight to "RIGHT NOW!"

Still, assuming there are no major ballsups, I should be ready in time.

I leave you with some cheerful tunes from an artist I have recently discovered (and by that I mean some dude credited them for the music in one of his youtube vids and I thought "I like that", and seemed to find quite a lot more of their stuff on the interwebs. 1 (angry), 2 (dramatically eerie), 3 (cheerfully awesome).

PS: Bloody hell, you know what?
I think Blogger might have finally got the hang of tables! [Hahaha, I just reviewed the entry - it's still as clueless as ever hehe].

PS PS: Something I feel I should mention, assuming any readers (assuming I have readers) out there have ickle kids, my nephew got a rather wonderful and personal video message from Santa Claus himself.
I wasn't lucky enough to see him the first time he saw it, but apparently no one has ever seen him so wide-eyed with excitement before. I suppose for a six year old to receive a personal message from Father Christmas, must be akin to some kind of religious experience.

Here is the link, go here, make your own. I hope it makes your kids' Christmas like it seems to be helping to make the lil dude's, here.

I guess I'll be in touch before the big day. Merry Christmas all the same :-).

Super PS: I also ordered a new sound egg a few days ago. It arrived in the post today.
It's nice to have awesome sound back, since the bastards at Bassingbourn blew up my old one by playing it too loud, the arses.

Turbo PS: (This was a normal paragraph until I dared blogger to let me put it in a logical order).
And here are the aforementioned pickatures. In no particular or logical order whatsoever. Among them are my nephew's awesome supper, the awesome shiny snapperons I ordered the lil dude, the shiny cool book I got my mum from amazon, a few pretty snow pictures, the lil party we had together after his original christmas party was cancelled, and a rather pleasing picture of a rather angry looking sky.

Down come the Decorations...

15:00 I'm in a rush and didn't want to sit about for ages thinking of a cool title.
Well, I've just put the hatch back on the loft, having got all our shiny and sparkly christmas decorations down. And so far, with the exception of mine(!), they all seem to be working quite happily.

Why am I in a rush? Because I've lost my bank card. Yep, I went to the shops with it a few days ago in huge piles of snow, bought something (A ham and cheese sandwich and a can of monster lo-carb, if you're curious), and didn't come back with it. So now every time I want to buy something, I have to walk to the bank and take some money out at the counter. Which is tantamount to a load of old crappiness, actually.

Once that's done, I've got to make sense of these weird christmas decorations, decide how I'm going to wrap up the Armouron Snapperons that have just arrived thanks to the beleaguered postman who apparently nearly/actually fell on his butt thanks to huge amounts of Ice earlier, and I've got to tidy up the place too. And find bulbs for my non-working candle arch. Bugger!

17:48: Right, I'm back now. Actually I've been back a good hour or so, helping my dad put away a truly sensational (£305!) amount of shopping, including various goodies such as all the ingredients for the yummy Christmas Pudding. My sis has also come over to visit which is nice.

I had a rather cheerful wander through the park to the bank, where I took out just enough to buy something to guzzle, something to munch, and something chocolatey for bedtime. I also had occasion to nearly fall on my ass in front of a group of schoolkids, and had just enough time - between going from walking upright, to being a flurry of arms and legs, to being upright again - and them bursting out giggling hysterically, to put on a very confuzzled face, and shrug.

Yep, there's plenty of ice out there, inches thick in places, and where before it was lovely and snowy with 6, 8 or even 10 or 12 inches of deliciously snowy snow, it's now just bitterly cold, and every solid surface is covered in a layer of glasslike ice. I even took the opportunity to fall on my bum on the way back home, walking down a path down a hill through the park, the universe decided I'd benefit from a closer look at the ground.
I landed with a hugely satisfying crunch on my backpack (filled with super noodles (mild curry and southern fried chicken flavour)), and once up again, hurried to a bench to check that the two pressure vessels I was carrying (containing a volatile flammable liquid!), hadn't ruptured.
Fortunately they hadn't and they are now in the back garden, in the snow and ice, cooling down nicely :-).

And the Christmas decorations?
Ah well, turns out my mum's workplace is being inspected by its governing authority tomorrow, (basically an audit of employee competence and whatnot) so after the epic struggle of getting the decorations out of the sodding loft, the majority of them aren't going up tonight after all. Or tomorrow. Not unless I do them myself, which is one option I suppose.

So now I'm just sitting about, I may well try to put my own lights up. What I am going to do, which would be a bit cheeky if we weren't putting "ours" up another day, is to take a functioning lightbulb from the big candle arch, and substitute it for a nonfunctioning lightbulb from my little one. So at least we can get one room set up today :-).

So I think I may get on with that now (18:15).
Ciao!

18:20: Okay, the little candle arch doesn't have any defunct bulbs, what it does seem to have is a loose connection. Nothing the occasional gentle tap won't fix :-).

20:02: Well, after 56 minutes (I timed it - putting up lights always felt like it took forever so I wanted to see for myself hehe) of arsing about, my nephew attended the Grand-Turning-On-Of-The-Christmas-Lights and got to press the button (on my remote control plug sockets) himself :-). So now here I am sitting about in my nice sparkly christmassy room.
Having had a word with the lil guy's dad, it seems perfectly possible that we (the royal we, meaning him) may well be able to get the lil dude Spikes after all. That way the lil dude can pick and choose how to customise his awesome armour.

On a completely unrelated note, you may have noticed that blog entries about either the Kelham Island Christmas Fair or the local Christmas Concert [are noticable by their abscence], because both have in fact, been cancelled, due to the weather.
Yep, too much of a good thing (snow), really does leave one wanting less, it is a bit of a disappointment as both are generally cheerful and happy family occasions, but hey, at least we've had plenty of awesome snow to keep us occupied instead.

Not to worry though, now the roads are usable again, the various Xmas pressies I've bought should start arriving :-).

For now, I'm going to tidy my room, and have a nice relaxed night.
I'll post some pictures soon :-).

Whiteout!

Or Yellowout, I guess. Good old sodium lamps.

Yeah, the weather in the past few days, has been vaguely disappointing verging on absolutely nuts. As reports of heavy snow bringing the country to a halt filled the news, I sat in my bedroom looking out on a street covered in half-melted slush, and rooftops dripping with water from melted frost, wondering what the big deal was.

But oh, no more folks. Nope. Nopers.
The weather has been pretty cold, though getting warmer (in part due to the presence of huge snow clouds over our heads I spose), and even while 12 hour old facebook status updates spoke gleefully of snow that never quite appeared, my ickle nephew and I looked to the skies. For different reasons.

See, the lil dude was due to go on a school trip today to one of the local football stadiums ("stadia" sounds crap) for a christmas party of some kind. He'd been watching the skies with apprehension, fearing, quite rightly that the snow would stop him from being able to attend.
For my part, I looked at the clouds cheerfully, because I love snow. Always have, ever since I was ickle. And even as I saw the snow coming down in huge falls of snow (what else?), I kinda felt sorry for the lil dude, but was awesomely cheerful to be able to look forward to the home version of a snow day.

However, all was not lost, as we had a contingency plan.
Today, my icke nephew went to school, only to reappear an hour later, with the news that the place was closed. Not to worry. We spent a day in the awesomely snowy park, where I built the most beautiful, smooth, and almost, but not quite, completely not round at all snowball about the size of a soccer ball. This snowball is currently sitting in the back garden, with a tiny tennis-ball sized "head" on top of it and a couple of sticks forlornly but heartwarmingly poking out of it.
I spose after all this snow it's not so spherical anymore. Cone-shaped would be a good guess.

As with last year, the ickle dude finally decided enough was enough and complaining of cold feet, we went home to have our "emergency party".
Yup, in leiu of a real party, we went up to the local store and bought all manner of tasty goodies, and had an impromptu substute party at our house.

The rest of the evening was taken up with him watching me drive Argos trucks around on UK Truck Simulator, pretending we were driving Christmas Presents about. The snow picked up about the same time.

Wandering to the shop for christmas essentials, alone, in the snow, was a kinda weird experience. Save for the odd set of hour old footprints, their outlines softened by the dirt - ahem, now softened by snow, the place was completely silent, no people, no cars, and the snow only increased in intensity.
I got back with some general grocery type stuff, and have since been sitting inside watching a snowstorm rage outside that goes from being merely "heavy" to full-blown "insane".

And so end the last minutes of November. Heavy snowfall, awesomely christmassy weather. Even the car drivers (who I have affectionately dubbed "carfags") driving up and down the road no longer leave dirty great tyre marks, no, the snow just crunches under their tyres.
Awesome stuff :-).

A Cold Snap: Take Three... (Real Gainsborough)

Well, I eventually got tired of watching the snow and decided that I'd see what the results were in the morning.
I was woken up at half 7 in the morning by my mum telling me that it had been snowing (really?) and that we had better set off early just to be on the safe side. I'd managed to write our traditional christmas music album to CD the night before, so after a cup of tea etc, we grabbed that and headed out to the car.
As it turned out, despite the inch and a half of snow, troad conditions weren't really a problem, and we made our way to a local petrol station, where I reinflated the car's tyres (always me that does it, never the car's owner, ever) while my mum got us a couple of sausage sandwiches.

A quick drive round the houses (well, round Wentworth) and we eventually passed over the M18 and into the countryside, noting that some public buildings in Maltby already had Christmas lights up. A nice drive through a couple of towns later, and we arrived in Gainsborough, fnding a parking spot first time!

Instead of going straight to the hall, we spent some time walking around the market and shops etc, where my mum found an art shop. Being a big creative-type person, my mum had to go in, and I went along with it, finding some nice jars of coloured glitter/sand to make abstract photos of.

Eventually though, we wandered round the mostly-still-undisturbed snow to go round the Hall. Again, we met some familiar faces, bought some nice stuff, and as always, sat down in the great kitchen next to the fire, with mince pie and a huge (compared to last year's!) drink of fruit punch stuff.

Eventually we left, and wandered around the town again visiting the various shops, where I picked up some all-important pork crunch, as well as a cool lil' cartoon bedspread for the lil' dude to sleep under at Christmas time/Xmas eve, depending on arrangements for who's coming over and when, and whatnot. I also bought two inexpensive but "luxury" (funny how words like "Luxury" and "Professional" are used to denote products that generally aren't luxurious, and usually aren't useful for professionals, isn't it) hollow-fibre bed pillows, in a nice bulky plastic bag, which I vaguely considered using to bat annoying shoppers out of the way, to upgrade my cool bed, turning it into an awesome bed.

Eventually, we left Gainsborough and proceeded to the next stop on our little travel plan, Tickhill Garden Center, which as always, had a nice Christmas department (complete with 2 "dead" (until I put them back upright) illuminated reindeer) with various christmas lights and whatnot. I noted with annoyance and a tiny smidge of amusement, that rather than go and buy a real Christmas CD, this place was playing a horrible mixture of crappy cover versions (no doubt by obscure "who he?" artists), of songs that themselves weren't particularly festive. But no matter, I managed to get a cool pressie for my dad, and my mum bought some terribly bad (but quite inexpensive) chocolate/walnut praline thingies.
So there we were, driving round the countryside, listening to our nice Christmas CD, eating chocolate digestive biscuits, pork crunch, and crappy walnut chocolates.

Now remember I mentioned that my ickle nephew had become fascinated with a certain product he saw on TV, "this year's must-have toy for kids" apparently, well, I'd been searching online to find it cheapest, and discovered that while most places wanted £30/35 for it, good old awesome Toys'R'Us only wanted £25 for it.
Of course they also wanted £5 delivery, so we figured we'd drive there and save me £5. After a quick search, we managed to find the armour, "Reduced: Was £25, now £14.98". For a £35 product, wahey! So it was very quickly bought.
Realising also that the lil dude desperately wanted some shiny golden bits to stick on it (well, shiny silver bits - see below - , but we weren't given a choice (!)), and Toys'R'Us didn't have the accessory sets in stock, we drove even closer to home to pop into Argos, which did have them. However, bizarrely, you paid for an accessory set, and you didn't get to choose which one of the three you were given. Which is a shame cos out of Spikes (you don't get the gold things on the bottom), Flames, and Wings, I reckon Wings is (at least as far as the shoulder spines and shield spikes are concerned) probably the least good of the three.
On the other hand, the gold goes with the blue a lot better than silver would have, and the helmet crest looks awesome. The shield doesn't look that bad, so maybe it's just personal preference. My nephew was very definite about wanting Spikes, but later admitted he didn't really mind which set he got as long as he got a set.

The armour itself looks pretty cool (I had a peek before wrapping it all up), and is made, as you can see, of one million and one pieces of some sort of plastic foam, all joined together by special plastic clips called snapperons. The snapperons that join the majority of the armour are shiny black, but the box also points out with great enthusiasm that included with the set, are two "free" silver ones. Silver or Gold snapperons are available to purchase seperately, and I'm toying with the idea of getting some, purely to make his armour look even cooler. By and large though, the stuff looks extremely well designed, and to be honest, I wish I was 6 again just so I could get my own set, heh.
I have, as I mentioned, been spending most of today sitting on my awesomely upgraded bed, supervising my nephew, eating pork crunch, and wrapping Christmas presents (6 wrapped so far), and surfing for yet more presents. I didn't get the little guy a sword, mostly because no one who knows him trusts him not to run round hitting people/animals with it. Instead I was/am considering getting him this, on the strict condition that I will keep hold of the arrows for him, and he is to only ever use it in the park :-).

That's about it really. What's left of the snow is slowly turning to frozen puddles, the roads, while mostly snow-free are now covered in patches of glass-like pearlescent ice, and it is still, regardless of the insanely bright and surprisingly warm winter sunshine, brutally hand-burningly cold. It's quite cloudy tonight, as well as hugely cold, so hopefully tomorrow morning will see at least a few inches of fresh snow.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit about, look forward to sleeping on my awesome bed (now with 6 pillows!), daydream about Christmas, surf for presents, and look for food. I would have bolted this entry onto the bottom of the earlier one, but I was so sleepy yesterday that I really wasn't in the mood to do a big writeup, and instead just wanted to make up and try out my awesome upgraded bed :-).

Here are some shiny pictures :-). It was nice to go on a Christmas outing with snow on the ground, for once :-).

Mini Epilogue Bit (22:56):

Well, having done more reading online, it seems that I should really buy extra snapperons to attach the extra bits to the armour. So I have done - the lil' dude now has two addon packs of 6 gold snapperons to make his armour look even cooler :-).

A Cold Snap: Take Two... (Gainsborough!)

Part One: The Night Before (Hopefully)

Well, as we speak, or rather, as I type, the snow outside my window is falling quite happily. About time too, every other bugger has got theirs. Now we have too :-).

Today (Friday) I woke at the uncharacteristically early time of 7:30, that's AM, not PM :-). I was going to rall over and go back to sleep but once I'd checked the news, read my emails etc etc, it was 9am and time to get up anyway.

So, what have I been up to? Spending 2 and a half hours going through my ickle nephew's lego, handful by handful, sorting out the broken lego, the new lego, the old lego, and the non-lego, of which there was a surprising amount.

I found a fair amount of "lost" playmobil, and oddly, about a dozen dice of curious polyhedral variety, which I suspect may be long-lost relics of my older brother's hobbies.

Non Sequitur:

Yikes, it is actually snowing pretty heavily now - I do hope we can get to Gainsborough "tomorrow", I've been looking forward to it for ages!

And now back to your regular programming:

Later in the afternoon my third Xmas present arrived, I ordered my fourth, and my ickle nephew turned up. We spent the evening relaxing, I played Walking Legs, he watched Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, and after a few biscuits and an awesome supper, he went to bed to watch The Santa Clause 2.

As for me, I'm going to pop outside for a while to watch the snow come down personally, as opposed to watching it through a window, then I'm probably going to sleep fitfully, worrying about whether or not we will be able to get to tomorrow's lovely Christmas Market.

The awesomely snowy snow seems (rubbish, seemed, seemed!, snow's like that!) to be getting lighter, except now it's not, it's getting heavier!
Oh well, we might be able to go to Gainsborough on sunday.

Ciao for now, folks!

Yikes! Earlier than last year!

Apparently...

...our region has its first "Snowww/snoeee" or whatever I called it last year. Okay, so at the minute it's kinda meandering downwards in a vaguely snow-like fashion, and sort of disappearing either before or immediately after touching the ground (Hard to do anything else I suppose), but I reckon if it's as cold overnight tonight as it was overnight last night, we'll have a few centimetres in the morning.

Now this could be a good thing AND a bad thing. A good thing because I love snow, and so does my ickle nephew, and bad, because as with last year, if it messes up transport, getting Christmas supplies in place could be a little difficult. Akward because I still have my entire christmas list - minus three presents - to buy.

My nephew's christmas list seems to be as long as it's ever been, in fact I think this one might even be longer than last years'. I have a few really cool ideas for things he might like, based on his fascinated and amazed reaction to an advert that popped up on some kid's cartoon channel (talk about targeted advertising!) a few days ago. Second opinions I've asked for seem to vary from "Looks expensive" to "looks amazing" and "Noooo it's encouraging him to fight". Huh, yeah, and taking him to karate lessons, letting him watch movies like spiderman (1,2 AND 3) and letting him watch Ben 10 which is all ABOUT fighting, didn't introduce him to the idea of fighting?

Besides, the beauty of this one is the red and the blue guys are on the same team, as part of the concept, so it's not like he's gonna find someone suited in red and start hammering the hell out of him. Not only is the armour really cool, but you can bolt extra bits on, kinda like a wearable version of X-mods I suppose. He made sure it went on his christmas list as soon as the advert was finished, and if I'm honest, I think the concept is so cool I'm happy to oblige. I was thinking about a NERF (pic is not nerf but a decent copy) gun to go with it, but the idea of every surface in the house including the dog's face, covered in those foam darts, kinda put me off.

So yeah, it makes a change from more soft toys/action figures/lego (not that there's anything wrong with lego, I've got him some remember :-)), and whatnot. I'm still figuring out what to buy other people. I kinda have an idea of a couple of things for my brother and another idea for my dad, but Nanodots are bloody expensive for what they are, AND the dog might try to eat them, so I don't know.

On another equally awesome note, my bro has now returned my lenses to me, which is kinda cool as my super ultimate camera bag of power now looks really shiny and sparkly.

As far as pressies are concerned, all helpful ideas are appreciated at this point. For now, I'm off to watch the "snow", which at the minute, is more like frozen fog than real snow - maybe that'll change overnight :-). We'll see.

EPILOGUE-BIT

Our snow never materialised. Everyone else has got theirs, all we've got is snow clouds. Meh, it's always the way of things. Oh well, maybe over the next couple of weeks we'll get some. Just enough to make everything fun without stopping me being able to buy Xmas pressies would be nice :-).

London Trip: "The Rain in Spain ..."

Is apparently not as cold as the Snow we're expecting at the end of this (*checks clock*), yes, this week. Now if last year's winter was anything to go by, we may well be in for some slippety slidy fun over the next couple of months. Already parts of the country are covered in snow, and snow is predicted to fall over the next couple of days over an area of the pennines, a mere 20 miles from here or so, before the white stuff reaches us (hopefully) on thursday/friday.

And as the runup (or countdown - maybe the two will meet in the middle in some sort of tinsel and turkey explosion) to Christmas goes, I've been kinda caught out by the very space-time continuum in which we live, itself. It's often commented on that as something approaches, the distance to it seems to decrease at a speed out of proportion to your speed of approach. Basically, christmas has spent most of the year being a far-off abstract concept, and now it seems to have a stark, colourfully-lit snow-crunchingly real reality to it, and all of a sudden it seems to be rushing up on us with not that many days to go.

Part One: Winter Wonderland

And of course, yesterday (Saturday is yesterday as far as I'm concerned as despite the fact that we're 84 minutes into Monday, I haven't been to bed yet, therefore it's still Sunday) we found ourselves on the coach on our way down to London. I sat cheerily for 3 and a half hours in front of two rugby fans who spent the trip discussing the match, alcohol, and the combination of the two, while merrily swigging cans of [what smelled like] cider. Still, they seemed quite friendly, so no problem there at all.
3 and a half hours managed to disappear pretty quickly, and we got off outside Marble Arch in London to find that in comparison to 2008, which was fairly wet and crappy, the weather, while cold, was overcast but clear, and without rain. And off we went, to Winter Wonderland, in Hyde Park. The German/European Christmas market thing that seems to be there each year. The place as we entered seemed to be fairly quiet, but it sure as heck didn't last, quickly becoming absolutely full of tourists from all over the world, judging by the accents. The place was packed with people. And the cameras!
See, I'd been hesitating whether or not to take the D90 to London, lest it get nicked by some light fingered loony who needs his drugs more than I need my camera, and yet while I walked around, I saw at least four or five D90s, one with a shiny 50 1.4 on it, a couple with the cool little 18-105 like the ones I just sold, and one dude who had the same lens as me :-). Other guys walked around with various canons of weird and wonderful descriptions, and one dude was even walking around with a D3.

There were a huge variety of market stalls, selling many various variations on a theme of European cuisine, mulled wine, Christmas decorations, Christmas gifts, all sorts of lovely and festive stuff, including, and I think this is awesome, instant snow. My experience with instant snow is limited to 60 seconds of playing with it, but the upshot of it is, it's soft, it's cold, it's fluffy, and it feels like real snow. It's really cool stuff. My mum bought some for my ickle nephew so he can get into trouble for sodding up the carpet or something. When my mum mentioned that I couldn't have any cos the dog would eat it, the guy selling it explained that it was non-toxic and that she'd just "swell up" (complete with mime of a dog swelling up) a little.

Now about halfway down, among the stalls selling stuff like beautiful hand carved knicknacks, hand-made jigsaw puzzles, hand-painted pictures, hand-shot photography, hand-blown glass, hand-burning candles, hand-eaten food etc etc, next to a set of tables laid out in an X shape, is a "cabin" with a sort of grill suspended over a pit of "coals", atop which sit about 10 of each variety of sausage, tended by two cheerful German guys.
The sausages are Frankfurters (I think), Bratwurst, and Krakauer. "Mit" or Ohne (aha!) Sauerkraut.
I don't know what the German guys are called or whether they come with sauerkraut or not.
However.
I had a Krakauer (which regardless of its name seemed to be a spicy Bratwurst), in a proper roll of crunchy bread, such as you'd get with soup (which made a huge change for someone sadly accustomed to fluffy tasteless crappy poke-a-hole-right-through-it-with-your-finger crappy hot-dog rolls) as well as both Ketchup and German Mustard, and folks, it was the best Wurst in the world. So good in fact that after finishing my first while wandering around the market, I went and got another, which the guy cheerfully observed, should "keep you going until January". Nice guy, cheerful service. We like that.

Small Personal Recommendation
(It's not very often I advertise stuff on here, but this really was a lovely christmassy place to go which I enjoyed thoroughly, and it'd be nice if someone read this, went to visit, and ended up also enjoying it as a result :-)).

Now on the off chance that any of you are actually going to London before Christmas, Winter Wonderland [official website] is in Hyde Park, visible from more or less anywhere in the park (just look for the huge observation wheel (not the London Eye, which is nowhere near Hyde Park! (Though you can see either wheel from the other on a clear day)), on the side of the park closest to the Albert Memorial. Entry is free.
The German Hotdog place is about halfway down a big "street" of cabins past the "Bavarian Village" building and the ice rink, next to a set of tables in an X shape, within sight of (in front of, more or less) the Talking Moose. £4 for a hotdog might seem a bit steep, but these are big hotdogs and they taste awesome.

Ah yes, the Talking Moose.
For some reason, in the park, is an animatronic Moose's head mounted to the entrance to "Santa's Grotto". Now I forget the name of this Moose, but he's very talkative, and though he admits to being "a bit of a womaniser" (eh?), his intentions seem good, as he sings cheerful Christmas songs, and dispenses useful advice such as "Enjoy your day" and "Don't drink and drive".

Also in the huge lineup of stalls, is a lovely one crewed by two pleasant and friendly women, selling Austrian cheese, and something called "Speck". This stuff appears to be cured, spiced, smoked bacon, and smells absolutely awesome. It tastes very strongly like pepperami and is the chewiest thing this side of genuine fudge, which they also sell at the market.
It's also pretty expensive, being £5 for a chunk 4cm wide.

I think that we had a really great time at Winter Wonderland this year, and having rushed through it in 2008 due to the truly crappy weather, we were well rewarded this year for being able to take our time and enjoy it this time round. As I say above, highly recommended, great fun :-).

Part Two: Harrods

A short walk later past the lake (where my mum got harassed by a curious swan, and I got a few shots of squirrels that were so used to people that they'd scamper right up to your feet), we ended up at Harrods.

Harrods was a strange experience this time round. People say that perception defines reality as much as it is defined by it, and for some reason, the stuffy stuck-up atmosphere that I thought I noticed last time round, just wasn't there this time. Maybe it was because we'd taken our time getting there, having had a great time along the way, instead of hurrying there to get out of the rain that gave us a fresh look on the place, I dunno. This wasn't Harrods, the preserve of the rich, famous, talentless and pointless wastes of space that earn their living from being related to someone famous, or for doing 90 minutes work every other week, this was the "Everything for everyone" store filled with families, parents and kids, looking for something cool for Christmas.
The staff seemed pleasant and fun-loving enough with one member of staff in the toy department cheerfully flying an RC "gunship" in circles around his own (and a customer's) head, as a cheerful woman demonstrated some kind of art and craft set to a bunch of excited kids, as a father and his son (presumably) happily tossed a hoverdisk across the room to each other.
Walking further through the toy department, past a family of huge stuffed animals (a 6ft long plush hippopototamus for example), we passed through the Electronics department, past an £18,000 audio system, that looked quite shiny, but convinced me that I'm really not enough of an audiophile to need one, and some very sparkly and rather large HD TVs, to the Photography department, where I ogled a few lenses including the 80-400 (autofocus far too slow for my purposes), the 300mm 2.8 (Fixed length, not much use for anything really, why do people use these again?), and the exquisite 200mm Micro and the 80-200VR (both awesome but far out of my budget at this point). The guys seemed fairly knowledgable and friendly and made me feel not quite as unwelcome as I felt last time round heh.

My mum had to sit down to rest her tired legs though, and walking past a huge lemon citrine that looked as if it weighed a good 30 kilograms (and at £35,000, if it landed on your feet, the pain from your feet wouldn't be the half of it!), and we wound up at a rather upmarket cafe restaurant thing where a bottle of Sprite cost £3.50 (£1.65 in our local shop), but came with a glass, which, after emptying, I kept happily filled up with a litre bottle of water I had concealed in my jumper pocket.

Eventually though, we made our way out of that place, and got a taxi to Covent Garden, which despite the name is a fairly big market made up of two bits - one, a pair of sort of fairly nice covered mini-malls, and the other a fairly crappy formica-and-linoleum style indoor market. We bought a few things from there, and thankfully, didn't stay that long. Not to slur Covent Garden, which has been famous for centuries, but I don't do indoor markets, and I don't do crowds. It did have a Games Workshop though, and a huge Apple Store, as well as a rather amusingly named food place called Cafe Chutney, which had a nice Christmas tree outside.

Part Three: London Eye

A short walk through Charing Cross later, past a Canadian themed pub, an Australian themed shop, a TGI Friday themed restaurant, and a Law Enforcement themed Charing-Cross-Police-Station (more or less opposite my mum's old flat from when she was ickle like me), we caught a taxi to the London Eye (no we didn't. Not officially anyway. Officially we went to McDonalds).

While I wasn't there, I was careful not to take a few photos, we didn't hurry in and buy some tickets, and we didn't join the queue to board the Eye.
While queuing, I also didn't notice that for some weird reason, one of the pods had been stripped down to its metal frame, completely devoid of windows, ceiling and floor. Argh enough of this it's confusing me.

We got on the pod, and had a rather pleasant half-hour "flight" (as they call it) around the wheel. My calmest one to date, given that I'm terrified of heights, and that the wheel is 135 metres/442 feet high. My first trip around, I practically refused to look at anything other than the floor or ceiling for half the trip. I think if you don't like heights, the best way to think of it is that you're in a stationary room, and the only thing changing is the view :-).

Of course, the odd time when someone moved and the pod shifted very slightly (but slightly perceptibly) from side to side, or when I spent too much time taking photos of the distant ground, my mind started going wappy and I had to look at the horizon for a while to get my bearings, heh.

The flight ended soon enough, and off we went, to get a taxi back to the coach station.

Part Four: Home and other stuff

What's to say, the coach journey seemed uneventful enough. Eventually, fell asleep, waking up every now and again to find that not only had I gained a horrific pain in my neck, but that the clock had advanced by another 40-60 minutes, and before you knew it, the coach driver was announcing to the sleepy coachful of passengers (at a volume so loud I bet the local pedestrians on the pavement heard it) that we'd arrived in Chesterfield (about 30 minutes away from our destination) and would those who wanted to get off please hurry up and sod off.

We got back to our station soon enough, and wandered through the nearby streets, to an awesome parking lot with those roller shutter doors you see on Need for Speed games. A short detour via KFC later, and we were home. Job jobbed, as they say.
So there ends a very nice and very christmassy trip out.

So else has been happening?

My lens cup finally, FINALLY arrived after about 6 weeks of waiting for it. Is it as good as I'd hoped? Er, yes. It's shiny, it's a cup. The thing has lost a little of its novelty value, but it's still a cool gadget.
I've also managed to buy a third christmas pressie today, so that should arrive before long with some luck.

We've got a busy few weeks, christmas-wise, ahead of us. Next week is the trip to Gainsborough, which I'm really looking forward to, and the week after that is both the Kelham Island show, and the Christmas Concert that my mum has promised to take me to. The week after that, the christmas decorations go up. So yeah, things are definitely getting festive :-).

Here are some pictures I took that I thought you'd enjoy :-).

There was some weird on my page!) .