Who let the Dog out?

This morning started in the same way most Saturdays start these days. Owen going berserk as the post man arrives. I'm amazed he does hesitate when he puts the post through the door as Owen must look as intermediating as heck through the glass window when he leaps up.

We were held up on our way into Loughborough not by traffic or by roadworks by rather by a dog. It looked like it might have been some kind of husky and our best guess was it had escaped from a yard somewhere as it had half a chain dangling from it's collar. The silly thing had no fear what so ever and kept trotting into the road without looking and then wandering all over the road then getting back onto the pavement before repeating the whole process again. Some people were trying to catch him but everytime they got close the Dog bolted. Eventually he disappeared off up the road allowed the queue of traffic which we were a part of to get moving again. I hope someone was able to catch him eventually either that or he found his way home.

Town was surprisingly quiet today considering it was a payday weekend. Not that I'm complaining of course as it did allow me to get all of my shopping done rather quickly.

I did find an interesting second hand bookshop that I wasn't aware of. As I happened to be going past a street and I suddenly realised I hadn't ever been down that street and wondering what was down there. It had an interesting selection of books but unfortunatly nothing that really grabbed me. I'm sure Engineseer would have loved it though as there was a whole room with books about aircraft and such.

That does remind me, I really ought to go up to borders in Leicester one of these days as the selection in Waterstones in Loughborough is really not improving.

anyway,

Later folks!

Slow on the uptake

One of the definite signs that it is a Friday asides from the very empty roads on the way to work ( i still can't figure out whats up with that. Do all the schools get Fridays off?) is the fire alarm test that always happens at 11am every Friday. And yet somehow still manages to make me jump everyweek. Well this morning the fire alarm went off at around 10.50am. So it was quite amusing as a lot of the people in the office (myself included) all looked at our watches/clocks and our first thought was. " Hmm the test is early today" and it took a few seconds for us all to realise that the alarm wasn't stopping which ment we had to go outside.

Lots of people are still going on about the pension that this former boss of RBS will be recieving. One thing I have noticed though is that people only seem to be objecting because the bank is in trouble. Would no one have cared if the bank was fine? Apparently his pension works out at something like 2 grand a day! 2 grand a day! What could you do with 2 grand a day. Well I suppose a easier question would be what couldn't you do? :-)

In geeky news apparently the online game has been deemed more addicitive then cocaine after one teenager played it straight for 24 hours non-stop before collapsing in a fit. Well I suppose that could prove that it is addictive or that he should just remember to take a break once in a while.

It was quite sad writing this weeks ward bulletin as among the announcements is one about a birth and one about a death. I've never had two announcements like that before together in the same bulletin.

Well it's the weekend now, which means I have two whole days to myself. Plus it's payday which is always a nice feeling. I also have a new 'toy' to play with this weekend as something I ordered came through. I'll post some photos on Sunday if I get it finished.

Later folks!

On my ipod

Just for a really random post I've just though I'd share the list of the 25 most played songs on my ipod right now. ( as well as being random it will probably demonstrate my bad taste in music :-)

1. Lacrimsoa Dominae by Immediate
2. Raindrops by Sash
3. The Heart asks pleasure first/The promise by Michael Nyman
4. Starship troopers by London Theatre orchestra
5. Pjanoo by Eric Pydrz
6. Throw it on me by Timbaland
7. Beat it by Fall out boy
8. Fides en Lucius Dei by Immediate
9. Disturbia by Rhianna
10. Robin Hood-Prince of thieves by City of Prague Philiamonic orchestra
11. Ready for Love by Cascada
12. Prediator by Globus
13. Ring the Alarm by Beyonce
14. Phat Planet by leftfield
15. Anthem by Filo and Perri
16. An Epic Age by Immediate
17. Til the Dawn by Dre Sidora
18. Eye of the Tiger by Survivor
19. Rock this Party by Bob Sinclair
20. The Longest Day by 24
21. Right here right now by Fatboy slim
22. Absurd by Fluke
23. Unforgiveable sinner by Lene Marlin
24. Toca's miracle 2008 by Fragma
25. Damaged by Plummet

But I want it nowwww!!

My job is cool. I know many might not think that but I do. Heck I get paid to be more or less surrounded by my hobby all day. One of the small downsides is when I sit in the planning meetings where we make decisions about future books we're going to be releasing. As we have to plan far in advance some of the books we talk about won't be hitting the shelves for two years in some cases. This is a downside in the sense that I get to hear about all of these really cool books but I can't read them. What'd ya mean the author hasn't even started writing? Well tell him to hurry up I want to read it nowwww..... Still considering all the plus points of my job I guess I can live with having to wait. I suppose I should look at it as a good exercise in improving my patientce.

I was amused to read that the former head of RBS ( who've just posted the biggist losses in uk coperate history) has refused to bow to pressure and give back any of his £650,000 a year pension. Now I'm not amused that he gets that much as I think it's obscene, but I was amused that some people seemed surprised that he decided to not give any back. Well why would he? he's gets over 600 grand a year for the rest of his life for doing nothing.

I also saw that a office up north has installed a helter skelter to allow office workers to get from the third floor to reception in 7 seconds. ( can well imagine the look on the health and safety officers face. You want to install what! ) Now only if we could install one at work for our office. Of course it would be pointless as we're on the ground floor anyway but it would be a good talking point :-)

I've also discovered that one of my favourite series has just 'come back from the dead' as it were. A somewhat ironic turn of phrase as the series was called "Dead like Me", in the form of a straight to DVD movie. Unfortunatly it's only avalable in the US with no UK release date in sight darn it!

oh well. Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll decide to release it sometime. What I really can't wait for is the last season of Battlestar Galactica.

Grumpy is trying to train Owen again. Or Owen is trying to train Grumpy. It's hard to tell which way round it is sometimes :-)

I also have a free evening tonight which I wasn't expecting as the one person on our list who we can actually get hold of for home teaching was poached by the Elders again to go teaching when we were supposed to be hometeaching him. And this is the 2nd time this has happened.

I also discovered on Wednesday that I've got enough credits to get my advanced diploma for institute which I wasn't expecting, I thought it would be another year.

Anyway, only one more day to the weekend.

Later folks!

Why sometimes it's better not to ask

Well I've become aware this evening of another 'silent' reader to the blog. Which just goes to show that my belief that I have a extensive silent readership is probably right. Plus it also means google anayltics was right as well. Something on the internet was right what are the odds :-)


Owen has managed to break yet another collar. I think that was his sixth. So he's now on his seventh. Grumpy got him the thickist one possible from the shop so hopefully this one will last a little longer then the others.


Work was good today if busy. I also had one of those conversations that was really odd but sometimes seem par for the course sometimes. I can't remember exactly how the conversation started but it finished like this

me: " How about I say we just use Monkeys on typewriters."
" No that's far too cliche, we'd want to use something else"
me: " Evil robot monkeys?"
" No I know bears!"
me: " Bears?"
" Yes Bears"
me: " Operating typewriters?"
" Yes, no wait even better their tap dancing Russian bears that type on massive typewriters that are as big as the keyboard from big, so they dance from one end to the other."
me: " Have you been eating pure sugar again?"


Institute was good, although I had to spend sometime before I went in clearing the rubbish out of the back of the car and putting it into the boot as some of the YSA needed a lift home. However after all that it turned out hey didn't so I didn't realy have needed to clean the car but I suppose it needed it. I have to admit I was slightly disappointed as I do miss playing taxi sometimes. It's nice to have someone to talk too.


I also ended up going on a magicial mystery tour while trying to get home as the main road from Leicester to Loughborough was shut so I had to follow a diversion which seemed to wander all over the place.

never mind,

Later Folks!

Place your bets now for Nemesis's reaction

One of the side benefits of working for a publishing company is we often gets lots of interesting news about what other publishers are up to. One particular story grabbed my attention as I could well imagine Nemesis’s reaction to seeing such a headline

“ Austen’s Bennet Girls go Zombie slaying”

Apparently movie studios are vying for the film rights for a parody of Pride and Prejudice to be published in April where the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet is somewhat different to what most Austin Fans would expect. Yes her foe is a plague of the undead sent to reduce the villages of Longborn and Meryton to smoking ruins

Yes this new Parody is called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Described as the first mainstream ‘mash up’ of Austen and Horror. The author stated that he and an editor, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

He then goes onto state
“ It quickly became obvious that Jane austen had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel ( we’ll take your word for that) Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s Doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters obviously” Okayyyy, I think he might be slightly reaching there but he goes on

“ From then on it was easy to imagine Bennet and her four sisters as zombie slayers, trained since childhood in the deadly arts of Chinese Kung Fu, and Fitzwilliam Darcy as a promoter of the socially superior ninja skills of Japan. Together they stand bonnet to epaulette against a plague of cannibalistic interlopers from the accursed city of London.

Of course my hopes that this might be a one off and this person might well be returning to whichever darkened room he emerged from (especially after he added that 85% of the text will still be the original Austin text which lead me to become even more confused) were dashed that they now believe that this ‘mash up’ will now herald the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature “ Monster-lit”

Apparently other ‘monster-lit’ works well in the works include a version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine returns as a Japanese style ghost to haunt and terrorise Heathcliff. A version of Jane Eyre where Mr Rochester has something more terrible then a insane spouse in the attic and a versions of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss where it is powered by Human sacrifice.

So does anyone else have any suggestions for potential ‘monster-lit’ stories.

Why Would you be this mean to your child?

A website has just released the names of ( in their words) some of the unluckiest people in Britain.

Among the people on the list are Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Stan Still.

Further down the list are Terry Bull, Paige Turner, Mary Christmas, Anna Sasin, Doug Hole and Hazel Nutt.

Still it’s not just in the UK where you have unlucky people. In the USA you can find Pearl Button, Jo King, Barry Cade, Carrier Oakey, Tim Burr, Annette Curtain and Bill Board.

They also found some people with job specific names as well, as there’s a Dr Doctor and Dr Surgeon.

Brings a whole new meaning to the joke " Doctor, Doctor."

First on the reading pile

I've decided that it's time to revisit a few books from my extensive collection to re read them and see if there was anything I missed and also use them as a good excuse to write a slightly different blog post from normal. Plus I suppose I ought start re reading some of the books from my collection otherwise they just become rather unusal paper weights/ dust collectors. First up from the Shelves is Kethani.

It takes an alien race to show us what humanity truly is. This is the irony faced by a group of friends whose lives are changed forever when the mysterious alien race known as the Kéthani come to Earth bearing a dubious but amazing gift: immortality

Or so sayeth the book blurb. Kethani to me really stands out among the multitude of 'first contact/aliens visit the earth' novels mainly due to it's scope. It doesn't try to focus on the real world ramifications it instead focuses in on a tight group of friends and follows them over the course of Decades. Plus these friends meet in a yorkshire pub which you don't often see in Sci fi.

One day the Kethani arrive, with mutiple silver towers appearing all over the earth. They bring with them the gift of immortality a small implant which is placed under the skin of your temple. When you die you are taken to a tower, sent to the Kethani homeworld then return months later, rejuivinated and immortal. But what price does this gift bring? What happens to a world where you can live forever? Are the Kethani all they appear? and do you really come back as the same person who left?

Sensibily the novel doesn't answer all the questions that you want answered which I think makes this novel that much better as in real life you rarely get all the answers, plus not answering the questions leaves you hungry for more.

The novel consists of several smaller stories each focussing on a different friend and shows what happens to religion, morals and science in a world where death is no longer the end of your life on earth. The focus on each of these friends is also good as they are simple ordinary people, not scientists or soldiers, who you can emphasise with and you can almost see yourself in their places facing the problems they face.

I think a really great novel is one that makes you think and keeps you thinking long after you've put it down and Kethani certainly fits that bill.

I would highly recommend it and it will definatly be keeping it's place on my book shelves

Codename, codename my Kingdom for a codename

Last night I found out that I have yet another silent reader of this blog as it were as one of the girls admitted that she does search for the blog from time to time but she was disappointed that I never mention her and she wanted to know if she could have a codename.

So as it’s far from it for me to refuse a request from a lady I’ve been trying to think of a codename for her ( I don’t know if this is seen as being a status symbol or something. Would be cool if it were : - )

And I’m stuck.

Seeing how a packet of chewits, well maybe not a whole pack more like two went straight to her head ( see outside of the church people have alcohol go straight to their heads inside the church it’s sugar ) I initially considered Sugar Rush. But then I realised that was also the name of a TV series and a series of novels which mean it wouldn’t really be appropriate. Likewise that also ruled Sugar out. As that would also be affected by the same thing plus it would sound a little creepy calling a girl that when I’m not from the deep south of America or not a chav.

I then considered a codename connected with her surname using the same clever yet somewhat needlessly complicated history process I used to come up with Drats name. However the only historical reference I could come up with that connected with her surname was ‘Tank’. I’m certain that, that wouldn’t be a good nickname as I’m sure no girl would appreciate getting the codename Tank and the whole situation would probably end with me getting drowned in a tank of the water variety.

Convert is out as there is already a convert. Likewise for the codename Hyper. Student is not that original and says nothing about her character and the only other thing I could come up was in connection with a joke that O made last night which I’m sure she wouldn’t want repeated. And I’m sure I wouldn’t want repeated either as it’s probably the last thing I’d never do.

Which leads me back to my first point. I’m stuck!

Which in turn leads me to two further conclusions. Firstly it will probably be just as easy to ask her for a suggestion and secondly I need a new project to occupy my time as I’ve probably spent far too long contemplating this.

Oh well : - )

Later folks !

Mind Boggling awesome

I saw this photos in the news today and I thought I'd share them. They are photos of some '3d' street artwork that a artist painted on some street down south.

Normal service has resumed

Well half term is over which means that although the gaming hall may be a lot quieter the roads are now once again a lot busier which means one thing and one thing only the 'traffic jams' are back.

Still it could have been worse as I was only stuck in traffic for 10 minutes.

Work was good if busy as it usually is on a Monday. Still I was able to get most of what I needed to done cleared which gives me more time for some projects later this week.

It's also possible that spring is going to be on us soon as it's starting to get a lot lighter. It's actually light now when I wake up in the morning. Hopefully in a couple more weeks it will be light when I start out for home as well. Which will be nice as I much prefer driving during the day as opposed to night. Mainly as most of the lunatic drivers seem to only come out at night. Of course that is a relative term as there are some lunatic drivers on the road during the day. The bright spark this morning who started three cars back and continued to overtake past me and the two cars in front of me whilst on a blind corner, going uphill with a blind summit seems to be a good contender for the term.

We had YSA FHE at the chapel tonight. The Elders bought along a couple of investigators one of whom was somewhat loud. Or to put it another way she makes convert seem as quiet as a church mouse. She also managed to really confuse O during our lesson about the word of wisdom. When we were talking about alchol she chimed in and said no alchol was good as when she has too much she dances on tables. O later mentioned he couldn't believe that a table dancer was investigating the church obivously unaware what he just said.

The activity afterwards was making pancakes. Due to a lack of people familiar with cooking pancakes and the rather rubbish cookers the least said about this activity the better me thinks.

Still I had a really fun evening and I suppose in a way it was a nice confidence builder for me. I'm still not feeling totally part of things and it will probably be a while before I do but I felt I made a bit of progress and maybe my biggist problem isn't that I can't talk to people or break into a 'group' but more I'm far too hard on myself.

One to ponder me thinks.

Later folks!

Welcome to Earth

It was rather odd trying to photocopy the ward bulletins this morning as for the first time ever there was actually a queue for the photocopier. I did wonder if having a queue would mean that the darn thing would not be able to resist the temptation to break down but it didn't. I was on my way out fo the library when one of the Elders was photocopying something. It came out and he said to his companion " Oh thank goodness it's come out the right way up. I was afraid it was going to come out upside down so I wouldn't be able to use it." I bit my lip and kept walking resisting the urge to say something sarcastic.

We thought we were going to have a problem in Sunday school as we didn't seem to have enough room to fit everybody as we had that many people in the class. Fortunatly we just about managed it although some people might have had to get a bit closer then they wanted to :-)

In the Elders quorum lesson one of our visitors had their little son with them who soon discovered that if 'daddy' didn't pay attention when he threw one hymn book off the stage, he certainly paid attention when he pushed a whole stack of them off the stage. Plus they made a fun sound too :-)

I gave physics a lift home after church, it takes like three minutes in the car and saves him nearly twenty minutes walking. We were talking about the whole 'pleasentaries' (not sure I spelt that right) that some people do and church. Basically it's the whole thing where they walk up and say things alone the lines of " Hi, How are you? How's your week been?" then wait for about two seconds to hear your response before saying " That's good to hear" and moving onto the next person with their sincerest looking smile leaving you wondering if they even listened to you. Once one person did that to me and I responded " I feel terrible, my week was awful." Their response? " That's good to hear" and they walked off proving they hadn't been listening to me in the slightist. Physics said he's tempted that the next time somebody does this and he thinks their just going through the 'pleasentaries' motions he'll respond one of two ways to the question " hi physics how are you?"

1. I'm not physics. Physics died, I'm his clone.
2. I'm Good as I can now drop my disguise and tell you I am a lead scout for the Martian invasion. Surrender your planet!

I laughed and said I was tempted to do that and I could say something along the lines of

" I'm not Saxon I'm his evil twin brother."

Physics pointed out that it might work but it only worked under the assumption that the other twin would be evil. When I asked if he was calling me evil he did point out that all the bad guys in films tend to be into geeky things like science, come up with in depth plans and do tend to ramble on quite a lot. I said I didn't agree with that at all.

My plans are never in depth.

He then pointed out I didn't have a twin so my first evil plan should be to perfect cloning. But I pointed out that any clone wouldn't be my twin. His response was to say that it wouldn't be the first evil plan to have a massive hole in it.

I just saw briefly in the news that a english man who was arrested for trying to smuggle three suitcases full of cocaine has come up with an interestng defence againist the drug smuggling charges. He says he thought he was smuggling diamonds not cocaine. D'oh!

Well Monday tomorrow, so a fresh week of opportunities await!

Later Folks!

and another one's gone

Well another shop has disappeared from Loughborough. Well it's technically two but I'm counting them as one as they were both part of the same group. Barratts shoes and priceless shoes have both shut with immediate effect which means another two empty stores in Loughborough town centre. With Zaavi (which ahs now closed it's remaining stores) and Big W having closed other retailers in the town centre have got to be getting a bit twitchy right now.

Actually speaking of Big W the last ever 'pic n mix' bag of sweets from the chain has just been auctioned on ebay to raise money for a charity. The bag went for a mind boggling £14,500!

Asides from that it's been a fairly quiet day. Town wasn't that busy so we were able to get the shopping done with no problems. Well asides from a kid in Icelands who decided to throw a world class hissy fit over the fact that he couldn't have any sweets and his screams of " I want sweeties!" did seem to be approaching roughly the same noise level as a jumbo jet.

I was very amused to see that apparently a 'official report' has stated that train fares in UK are the most exspensive in europe. Isn't it great that they have to have a official report to tell us what we already now. I mean a great example of this is when I went to Luxembourg to see Engineseer. The airface for areturn flight to Germany was less then half the price for a return to and from London by train. If that isn't a good example of whats wrong with our trains I don't know what is.

Anyway, Church tomorrow. At least we don't have to sing this week although on the plus side at least singing with the whole priesthood for a musical item meant there was a lot of other voices to drown mind out :-)

As I've said before I have talents, singing is not one of them. I'm more then willing to leave that one to the people who have that talent.

Of course the downside is that most of my talents aren't really that useful for Church. Of course there is always the outside chance that someone might need to know the background to the first founding of the Space Marines or need a model putting together but it's unlikely. Still if it ever does happen I'll be ready ! :-)

Anyway,

Later folks!

Well I'm sure it makes sense to him

It's Friday night which means another week of work is behind me and I have two whole days to myself. Yaah!!

For those of you who haven't notice I have added a new blog to the blog roll. Now the Mcnugget Diet is written by smooth who used to be a member of the Loughborough YSA before he went off to BYU and surprise, surprise got married. Not that he didn't make the most of his time there before he got married. When he came home one Christmas he announced he was finding it hard as he was going to have 8 dates with 8 girls in 8 days. He then added that all of the girls were awae of this and didn't mind which left me and a couple of other people somewhat baffled as to how he was able to get away with that as he sure as sure wouldn't get away with it over here. But I digress. The point of his blog is to document that over the next two months he is planning to eat Chicken Mcnuggets from the generic high street resturant that Engineseer used to work for. Why he's doing this I have no idea. Quite why he's doing this I have no idea but it's like that saying 'car crash tv'. You know if this keeps going something bad is gonna happen but you just can't look away....

Well the trip into work today was nice and quick as the roads were still clear. Of course this was the last day I could enjoy the clear roads as come Monday all the kids will be back to school and the roads will be back to doing a very good impression of a car park.

We also have some unexpected house guests this weekend as Tapdance has gone away so she needed us to look after her birds, Whiskey and Max. Owen is somewhat confused about the whole situation and spent most of the evening in a sulk as he's not the centre of attention.

They've started showing the new series of the Big bang theory which is just awesome. I would have to say Sheldon is starting to become my favourite character. Especially when he invented the 'friendship agorithm'. If only it were that simple to make friends.

anyway,

Later folks!

Wanted: Killer Biscuit

Another one of those

as in another one of those days. Of course it might be that it was a perfectly fine day and my mood was skewed by the tractor I got stuck behind on the way to work. I wonder if it's accidental or on purpose that most farmers round here seem to choose rush hour to move their darn tractors from field to field. Usually I don't mind tractors as their heavy traffic anyway but it's just when you know that the road in fron of you is clear except and you can't pass this flipping tractor...

Still at least work was okay once I eventually got there.

Well only one more day to the weekend. Weekends are a funny thing as you seem to appreciate them when your a kid as it means no school for two days. You then forget how to appreciate them when your a uni student and go right back to appreciating them when your in full time work.

In case you were wondering where that came from I've found myself in a reflective mood today as I've been going through some photos from my uni days. I realised that this September it will be ten years since I began my university course. That's ten whole years. I certainly didn't think I would be where I am where I am now back then.

anyway,

Later folks!

They seek him here, they seek him there

Irish Police had finally caught up with the country’s most reckless driver. Although this is a tale they will probably want to forget very quickly as their unlikely to win any awards for their work.

Prawo Jazdy originally from Poland was wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and massive numbers of parking fines.

However each time he was caught he managed to evade justice by giving a different address despite the police confirming his name by his polish driving license.

However his cover is now blown and the police now know who they are looking for, this elusive driver with over 50 identities on the Irish police database..

There’s just one small problem though.

Prawo Jazdy isn’t human.

Prawo Jazdy is polish for Driving License.

D’OH!!!

Hereeee's Owen!

While searching through some photos this evening I realised I still had some good ones of Owen that I hadn't posted from when we had all the snow. Please feel free to leave your own suggestions for captions!

Owen either had a slight problem with his new Frisbee or he decides to refute claims that he's ever bad as he does have his own Halo :-)

Owen decides to take the most Direct route to China.
Either that or he's after buried treasure and he ain't leaving this field till he finds it!

The new Dog shoes with built in springs were a roaring success.

and they came with Ears for extra 'lift' :-)


Later folks!

Time passes, things change

I was looking through some photos today and I found two examples to show how much Loughborough YSA had changed over the past few years. This is the Loughborough YSA almost five years ago.

and this is a picture of the Loughborough YSA last Monday ( not the Monday just gone , the one before). For those of you who have noticed there is just one person who appears in both pictures and you not going to need three guesses to figure out who. That's right, it's muggins here. Everyone else in the top photo has either moved away, got married or are on a mission. Leaving me as the oldest YSA in the ward and the only one in full time employment. The rest are students.

Can you say " Last man Standing" I think ya can.

The only thought that springs to mind is will I have to turn out the lights :-)

Later folks!

Clever or poor taste? You decide

I've just been reading some news website and I've seen a story which is about an idea which is really clever or in really poor taste. Basically in order to celebrate the 2009 oscar season some organisers, well.. organised a screening of Titanic in HD in a special venue. Now what could be considered poor taste about that? Well the venue for this screening was swiming pool and the audience in victorian clothing watched the films from lifeboats. There were even 'icebergs' in the pool and as the event was sponsered by Sky some of the audience were even issued life jackets which had Titanic printed on them with the phrase 'Sky + HD' underneath. The head of the sponsers said " 'Combining the excitement and intensity of watching movies in High Definition with the unique swimming pool setting should have film fans feeling like they are actually taking part in the film.'"
You have to wonder if someone did remind him that this was a film about a actual disaster and possibily not the best choice for trying to push HD.
Still clever marketing or poor taste? You decide!

Also in a " I really don't want to ask how they investigated this or came to these conclusions" newstory the vatican has just issued a new report that states when it comes to captial sins they believe men are most likely to commit Lust followed by gluttony, sloth, anger pride, envy and avarice. For women the most dangerous is pride and then envy, anger, lust, gluttony and the last is slothfulness. The only reason I happened to notice this is that the headline to the story was "The gender divide in Hell" which I thought meant that the vatican had decided to say men don't get punished for their sins as much as women. However the one interesting thing I learned was that apparently the Vatican added seven new capital sins last year to the list which include genetic modification, human experimentations, polluting the environment, social injustice, causing poverty, financial gluttony and and taking or selling drugs.

Next in a " must have seemed like a good idea at the time" new story, a church of england school has sparked an uproar because as part of a anti bullying exercise a teacher ahd a group of ten year olds write down all the rudest and most offensive words they knew, they list them in order of offensiveness, from 'harmless' to 'really upsetting'. Cue a lot of parents getting a nasty shock that night when their kids returned home with the lists in their exercise books and proceeded to ask what the words meant.

That's teachers in trouble.........

Later folks!

Rolling, rolling, rolling. Just keep on rolling

I don't know what it was about this morning but I really struggled to get out of bed. Which is unusal as it's usually Mondays where I have problems getting up.

The roads were once again clear as it's still half term which I am really enjoying as it's so nice to drive and actually keep moving rather then getting stuck in long traffic jams that take you twenty odd minutes to go a distance that on a clear road you could do in 2!

Work was good but also busy. We're goingto be holding a event soon which is the first time we have ever tried holding an event like this. So there's lot's to do and plan. Plus lots of oppotunities to solver :-)

In the news today a driver examiner is sueing a learner driver for 'the worst test in 12 years' which he claims caused him to have whiplash! Car dealers are so desperate at the moment to sell cars they are selling some for half price or even " buy one get one free!" which I suppose works out to the same thing more or less. Now if only I had the money to go out and buy a brand new car for half price.

Still the main items of news for most news websites was that the simpsons have a new opening title sequence.

Yes I'm getting the feeling that today was a slow news day. Are you ? :-)

I've just seen the trailer for the new transformer movie and it looks awesome. Especially the shorts of the aircraft carrier sinking! Of course the trouble with advance trailers is you know you have a long time to wait before you can actually see the film!

Oh well, I guess I'll just have to learn to be patient :-)

Later folks!

Not that I'm complaining

I seemed to have one of those mornings today when I seemed to be stuck in go slow mode when I got up which meant everything seemed to take twice as long to do which in turn lead to be leaving the house five minutes later then usual.

Being a Monday I was slightly worried that this meant I would get stuck in a huge traffic jam and it would probably take ages to get to work.

Fortunatly I was wrong as I had forgotten that the kids in Nottingham were on half term this week which meant gloriously empty roads. Which is oh so nice seeing how much time I usually spend stuck in traffic jams.

Of course with it being Monday it was a busy day at work but I was still able to get everything done I needed to so I was feeling quite pleased with myself by the end of the day!

Plus the roads were also as clear coming home as they were going in so I was able to get home really quickly which really made me happy as it's not often you get twenty or so minutes of your day 'back'.

Owen was going a little mental when I came in as their's someone next door doing a lot of work to their house. Now we know it's not the guy who was living there but as to his actual identity. Who knows? He might be our new neighbour or he might just be a workman. I guess time will tell :-)

If your a reader from the UK and you hold a drivers license you might want to have a quick chec of it as apparently there's a lot of confusion over our photo licenses as although you are authorised to hold a license until your 70 you have to get it renewed every 10 years. As the first license were issued in 98 the first batch of 200,000 odd people are due for renewal andapparently over 40,000 people haven't and could well be driving around with a invalid license.

This doesn't affect Grumpy though as he still has a paper license will be valid until he can't drive anymore. It is funny watching people when he uses it as proof of ID. They have a look on their face which reminds me of the monkeys who find the monolith in 2000AD as they realise that it is a actual drivers license.

Big news of the day, a British and a French nuclear missile submarine managed to collide with each other out in the atlantic. Yes it was bad that they collided but on the plus side it appears that all the money on making them silent was money well spent as they couldn't hear each other coming.

Some pictures have also emerged of a man who decided to take a short cut across some railroad tracks and almost got hit by a train. In fact he was so close to being hit the bottom of his shoe was sliced off. His excuse for crossing the tracks was that he was late for work. Well as it turned out he was almost very very late for work.

anyway,

Later folks!

feeling sleepy

Even with the best will in the world at some point most people will find something boring at church. It happens. What didn't help today was that they had all the heaters turned up to maximum to try and compensate for a broken pump on one side of the building. And compensate it did! The chapel was boiling in places. It didn't help in Sunday school that as well as there being nearly a dozen people in the classroom I also ended up next to the radiator which was on full blast which meant it started to get very very warm. Which in turn meant it wasn't long before I started to feel that slight itchy/burning sensation you get in your eyes when your feeling very very sleepy.......

Fortunatly I managed to keep myself from falling asleep. Mainly by banging my foot, toe first on the floor under my chair but it was possibily a close run thing :-)

One of the other YSA surprised most people with his new hair colour today. He said that he had agreed to let a friend dye his hair as long as she chose a colour that was suitable for him and he didn't see it till she was finished. However she ended up choosing a extremly red/ginger style colour and from what I understood it was also a permant dye as well. So I guess he's stuck with it till it grows out. However he seems to be taking the whole thing with a lot better humour then I would have ( probably a lesson for me there somewhere).

There was also another one of those moments which made me feel really old as the teacher asked if people had enjoyed half term and I realised that I was the only one in that class who is not a student and is in fact in full term employment!

On the new 'whose who' board they've put up at the chapel they've included all the various callings and the names and photos of whose in which calling. However Physics simply says " Single adult ward rep". So I asked if he had decided to change his name. Physics being physics simply said he had and suggested we could call him sawr for short.

The story of that 12/13 year old dad has take another twist. Apparently two others lads have come out and claimed to have slept with the 'girlfriend' at around the same time so reckon they could be the father. so the 'orginal dad' is now insisting on a paternity test. This case is just so sad, the lads 13 years old. He shouldn't have to be considering paternity tests or how to support a baby!

It's Monday tomorrow and that means another week of work is about to begin! So I guess we'll just wait and see what opportunities the week will bring. Won't we? :-)

later folks!

Time warp

Tempus Fugit or to put it another way, Time flies! Which is seems to do especially on Saturdays. Mabe it's because theres also a time warp over geektown as well as a weather null zone or maybe it's just because it's the weekend and we never seem to have enough time. Who knows!

Owen was feeling very pleased with himself this morning as he managed to scare somebody away from putting a flyer through the door as he did he usual trick of barking and jumping up at the door. Grumpy is getting annoyed as he is starting to scratch the door but did wonder this morning if this was a acceptable pay off as it were if it stops junk mail.

Loughborough was very quiet today as they seemed to be a distinct lack of people around. So I was able to get the shopping done very quickly.

It's hard to remember sometimes that just because I work for a company whose ethyos when it comes to customer service is to provide " Outrageous customer service" ( in the positive sense before anyone trys to make a clever comment) not every company works to the same standard as I observed with a staff member in Carphone warehouse.

Now I know that the most annoying thing to parents is when people they don't know give them unwanted advice, ( if you haven't visited Nemesis's blog in a while do so now as she has a very funny post involving this topic) I've certainly never considered doing this before but I almost did today as whilst outside a shop I noticed a mother with a couple of children walking up the stairs towards the shops. a little girl was walking in front of her looking down in the dumps, the mother then called out
" This is your last warning. You will listen to me as your mother and come here otherwise I will put you on a wrist leash. Your choice!"
The little girl continuned to walk along looking fed up and obivouly suffering fro ma case of selective hearing. The woman then sped up grabbed her by the wrist and yelled at her
" That's it! You've only got yourself to blame"
and started to drag the girl by the arm up the steps. (I'm guessing the girl was about five or six). The little girl started to cry at which point the mum bent down, got in the girls face and told her quite loudly and please excuse the language as these are her words not mine
" Stop that. I'm a horrible bitch remember and crying won't get you anywhere with me"
before dragging the still crying girl into the shop. A couple of other people had stopped to watch this with stunned expessions as well. Now of course I might be judging this woman extremly harshly as I don't know the rest of the situation. The girl could be a complete devil child and routinly swears at and hits her mum but it's just I've never seen anything like that before.

Anyway, church tomorrow and the priesthood are supposed to be doing a musical item ( oh joy). I'm a firm believer that singing should be left to the people who can sing. I may have many talents being a good singer is not one one them!

Later folks!

It's like Freaky Friday

In the sense of the film rather then it's the fact that todays Friday the 13th ( nothing happened mind you, maybe it's all being stored up for next month's Friday 13th). Now I'm sure your wondering exactly what I'm gibbering on about right now.

Well it's simple ( like me)

There's been a load of news stories today where it seems that Adults are acting very childish and kids are acting far too much like adults.

For example Gordon Brown was attempting to get out of trouble by using a line a lot of children use " Well no one told me!". The mother in the US whose just had eight kids is trying to cash in on her fame as quickly as possible and the wife of a footballer dumped her husband on facebook. He took it in a very adult like fashion by cancelling her mobile phone contract in revenge.

On the other end a nine year old has just published a book on dating. Yes that's right he's nine and took part in what has to be one of the most creepy radio interviews I've ever heard when they bought in a 22 year old girl and asked him to chat her up. I'm not sure why the girl agreed to go along with this but I have a feeling a large amount of money was probably involved somewhere along the way.

However this pales againist what I consider the sadest story of the day. A Lad of 13 is now a father after he got a 15 year old girl pregnant when he was just 12 ( and he looks like he's eight!). In a interview he insisted that being a Dad woudl be great and he would are for the Baby. However when asked how he would copy financially his response was to ask what financially meant. As you can imagine this story has causd huge ructions and theres lots of questions being asked right now. Including why the parents let the two stay over at each others houses and share a room! The boys father say that's he's proud of his son as he's trying to take things seriously and not " playing on his playstation instead of going to the hospital". he then also added that " It hasn't really dawned on him. He hasn't got a clue of what the baby means and can't explain how he feels. " Maybe thats because he's 13!! and most lads at that age can't explain how they feel, let alone construct a good sentence or not fly off the handle about stupid things!

This will probably all lead to another round of political one up man ship and even more people claiming that this case proves that sex education needs to be started more in depth at a earlier age. Of course I'm sure that as part of these plans no one will suggest that they should also try and teach kids who've jsut left primary school just not to have sex.

oh well. I guess we'll just have to hope that the new baby won't pay the price of this horribile mess. I think most people including myself are hoping for a happy ending but I don't think it's likely.

Still they weren't the only news storys today. A woman spent over a £1000 taking photos of herself recreating the scenes with the roses from American beauty for her boyfriend as it was his fav film only to discover she had got the wrong end of the stick and it's not his fav film. In fact he's never even seen it. D'ooh!! Not that he complained when he got the finished photos according to the newspaper and if it's in a newspaper it must be true ( danger, danger cynical alert!)

A woman in wales found a meerkat in her back garden, lego are apparently about to launch a range of gadgets such as mobiles and cameras which look like they've been made our of lego bricks and it finally looks like the cold weather is coming to a end.

still it's the weekend now. So two whole days to myself.

Later folks!

Now it's get annoying

Now when I was on Holiday the snow was fun as mainly I didn't have to go anywhere. Now I'm back at work the snow is getting annoying. Especially this evening when the trip home took nearly and hour and a quarter as it started snowing again. I'm not getting much sympathy from Grumpy however as it considers it payback for when we were younger and he used to moan about snow when he went to work and we used to tell him he should enjoy it rather then hate it.

Yeah that's come back to bite me hasn't it.

Work was good if rather busy once again. The theme for this week seems to be staying firmly as 'catch up'. Still I should be able to get everything finished by tomorrow which is always best as you should always have your desk clear as it were going into the weekend.

With the death of Batman in the DC comics ( yeah that will last :-) one of the new characters their advancing to 'replace' him is Batwoman. Of course as I'm sure you've already guessed this is a particurly mainstream media story so there is a 'twist' to this as summed up by one news paper headline " Holy Smoke Batman! What's happened to the missius?" Yes Batwoman is making her comeback as a openly gay superhero or as DC Comics put it "a lesbian socialite by night and a crime-fighter by later in the night". I'm sure that sentence sounded fine in their heads.

Of course the danger wth characters in comics and sci-fi/fantasy when they make a big issue about the character sexuality (especially in the media) is that the whole subject can completly overshadow the character themselves let alone the story. For example, Captain Jack out of torchwood in the first series watching him seemingly either flirt with or snog anyone in sight got very wearing, it was like " Yes, we get it, he's bi. Can we move on with the story please?" Fortunatly they seemed to tone it down a bit for the 2nd series and although his sexuality it still a part of his character it not the only thing to define the character. Another example is a series of books that I used to read where the lead character was very interesting but midway through the series the author started 'sexing things up' for want of a better term and the story started to suffer in fact it's the only series that I've ever given up on. I have heard that the later stories are quite 'graphic' if you know what I mean.

I did hear that the author bases the lead character on herself. Which if true means I think she needs to get out more.

Or less.

Also in the news today was the story that a Commications satellitle was struck by a defunct Russian Satellitle. Which did also lead to the most pointless cgi animation of the day which was intended to show people how the two collided. The animation showed two satellitles rushing towards each other and then hitting each other. Because of course we couldn't imagine ourselves what a collision looks like with out computer animation could we :-)

anyway,

Later folks!

One of them

Or to be more precise it's been on of them days.

It was icy yet again this morning which meant I had to spend five minutes de icing the car which is always a tedious ( and cold job). Still on the plus side I was able to get into work without any problems.Which seemed to be in contrast with a lot of other places as the lack of grit in some areas was turning roads into ice rings.

It was also quite busy at work as I had todays work as well as the work from yesterday to do. Still I mustn't grumble too much as I was able to get it all done so it could have been worse :-)

Institute was okay this evening. The lesson was gine but I'm starting to feel like I'm struggling a bit again when it comes to the YSA. I'm still feeling like an outsider and I really don't know what I can do to change that. I did reflect that when I was younger I always thought it was odd that when some YSA got to a certain age that they seemed to stop coming to institute and I think I'm starting to see why as once most of your peers have either left or got married it gets very hard to make friends with the new younger YSA and you can start to feel very alone.

Still I suppose I shouldn't focus on that as otherwise I'll just start to feel all self pitying again and that never ends well, especially with V day on Saturday. There is supposed to be a YSA dance on in Birmingham on Friday. Apparently the girls get free ice cream, the guys only get ice cream if they bring a date. I was tempted to be sarcastic and ask if the date had to be female but I resisted as I thought there was a outside chance that some people might think I was being serious. Of course these dances are usually much better if you have a group of friends to go with and right now I don't. I could go by myself but if I'm going to end up standing on the sides by myself with no ice cream I might as well stay at home.

At least that way I'd have ice cream :-)

Ahhh!! Must stop with the feeling sorry for myself rubbish. I suppose it's just been that kind of day where the little things seem very big ( even if they aren't).

Oh well, things could be worse.

Speaking of things getting worse the pound has tumbled yet again after another person in a postion of importance opened their mouth to say that things were going very wrong. It's reassuring to see that with things changing they can also stay the same. The economy can't get to a place that we can't make worse by talking about it!

A women who won a makeover on a morning TV show here in the UK ( called This morning funnily enough) might be regretting it as after her new look was revealed her ten month old son didn't recognise her and burst into tears whilst frantically calling for his mummy.

The lead actor in the TV police drama Midsummer murders is leaving the show. There's been nearly 200 hundred murders in the county he patrols. We theorised that the only thing that has kept him in charge in a county with such an appallingly high murder rate is that he has the best murders solved rate in the country!

One woolworths store is coming back from the dead. Well sort of as the manager has bought the shop and intends to re open it as, wait for it..." Wellworths". Well no points for orginality but it's still a good name :-)

and finally a grey haired 59 year old who can only walk with a zimmer frame was unable to buy some cigarettes in a shop as he didn't have any id that proved he was over 18 years old! I wonder if he had trouble deciding whether to be annoyed or flattered.

Two more days till the weekend.

Later folks!

if it's not one thing it's another

The weather is continuning to be a real pain right now. When I went to bed last night it was really snowing quite heavily so I had visions of having to drive to work through lots of snow and ice. However when I woke up all of the snow had vanished to be replaced by heavy wind and rain. Still it could have been worse at least we haven't had the flooding they've had down south where someplaces had a months worth of rain in one day. Still as I've said before Geektown is on quite high ground so if we ever do flood I think that would mean the whole country is sinking.

The away day we had today was interesting we were doing a lot of planning for the 'future' as it were. It was also different to actually leave the office and go off site. I think it really helped us to 'focus' as if you were on site there's a much greater chance for distractions, or popping back ot the office to check your emails etc.

The police have been busy in a town near by as they swooped on a wild west themed party after a member of the public mistook the guns the party goers had for real weapons. They obivously have a real problem with gangs who dress up like cowboys in castle donnington.

I also got a friend request on facebook from one of the Elders who helped bring our family into the church today. It was really weird seeing a photo of him after all this time ( nearly 18 years since we last saw him) plus he has a family of four now. Which also seems odd as it doesn't seem like it's been that long, I still remember him as a newly arrived green missionary.

Well it's institute tomorrow. Hopefully the weather won't be too bad as I don't fancy driving all that way in heavy rain etc.

Anyway,

Later folks!

Snow fun. Ice Bad. Icy snow real bad

Aware of the doom and gloom weather reports for last night I made sure I got up this morning slightly earlier then usual as I wanted to leave myself plenty of time to get to work just in case the roads were in a bad way.

And it was a good job I did give myself extra time as when I went out to the car I found that we must have had snow at some point overnight followed by freezing temperatures as the car was covered in what I can best describe as 'ice snow' it was way too thick for the de icer to have any real effect what so ever and even using the scraper I couldn't shift it. So I had to sit in the car and let it run for ten minutes with the heaters going full blast to loosen this stuff to the point where I could scrape it off.

The whole time I was doing this Owen was sitting in the window looking most bemused as to what I was up too.

Fortunatly for me the roads weren't that bad so I got to work with no problems. However when I got to work I discovered that there was still snow all over the car park. So the walk from the car to the office was rather slow and careful.

Unsurprisingly I had a rather busy day as I had to get caught up with things. But I did manage to get caught up with nearly everything so I was feeling quite pleased with myself by the end of the day.

It will also be interesting tomorrow as our team is having a 'away day', which will make a change from the usual flow of things as it were.

So anyway,

Later folks!

Back to Reality

Well as nice as the last week has been tomorrow morning will see me going Back to Reality as it were as I'm going back to work. I think Owen will be confused as I think he was just getting used to me being at home all week.

The weather has also turned again as it was raining but it's now snowing. Their also forecasting gale force winds and torrential rain as well, so the trip into work tomorrow will probably be fun. I'm also going to give myself lots of extra time as I have no idea what state the roads will be in or even if they will be gritted. Apparently some councils have got so desperate that their now resorting to using table salt to grit the roads.

Yeah, I'm probably going to be a little tense by the time I get into work tomorrow.

We also have a YSA FHE tomorrow night at the chapel. Apparently it's some sort of party to celebrate Chinese new year with most of the cooking being done by the chinese students. Of course the YSA organising this party forgot that not all the YSA are students and decided that it will start at 6.30pm meaning I'm going to have to go straight from work. It's annoying but theres not a lot I can do about it.

It was fun in the car park this morning at church. There was still lots of snow and ice about which meant it was somewhat of a challenge trying to get into the building. Someone had put grit down on one pathway but it was getting to the pathway which was the problem!

We also have a new substitute teacher as CF has now been moved to teach the gospel essentials class. We now have Bro RH instead who I have to say is a very good teacher. Although no one told us of this swap, he just arrived in the classroom this morning and told us. It was a bit of a different lesson to what we were used too as this guy is very skilled at getting discussions moving. One of the younger YSA asked about plural marriage and while the discussion was going on Physics leant across and said to me
" It's good that we don't do plural marriage anymore otherwise the scales would be unbalanced"
When I asked him what he meant he responded
" Well if someone had more then one wife he would never get to win a argument."
he then paused a moment longer before adding
" It's also good as it's hard enough to find a girl to marry anyway in the church without someone whose already got one being greedy and stockpiling more "

anyway,

Later folks!

Well maybe it makes sense to them

There's a certain well known supermarket here in the UK that has started advertising a deal they have on choclates for Valentines day. Two thoughts immediately occur. Firstly is any guy likely to buy them for his significant other as if the other has also seen this advert their going to look really, really cheap for buying them half price choccies for V day. Secondly if this deal is intended for Valentines day why the heck is it running until the 15th?

Still it still makes slightly more sense then the deal in another supermarket where you could buy four tins of baked beans in a pack for £2.25 or you could buy five tins of the same baked beans individually for £2. I don't think someone in that marketing department thought that one through. Especially as the packs and individual tins were right next to each other.

It was also somewhat packed in town today which we were quite surprised about. I'm guessing lot of people who would have gone in earlier in the week couldn't because of the snow so decided to leave it until today.

It was also Tap dances birthday so we took her out to lunch in Loughborough. I got her some bits for her Nintendo DS which she is still on a thin line between loving and loathing as the brain training game is driving her mad right now.

I also think that I need to go up to Leicester to visit borders soon as the only bookshop in Loughborough has a really poor selection of books as despite a real close inspection of all of the bookshelves I couldn't find anything interesting in the slightist.

Speaking of shops the Zaavi in Loughborough has finally closed. I guess they couldn't struggle through any longer. This does now mean that theres nowhere major selling DVD's etc in the town centre. Hopefully this means that thers a good chance HMV might decide to move in as theres no one else now in Loughborough to compete with.

It was the last in the series of Demons tonight. It was good, in fact one of the better ones in the series, however I'm not entirely sure it's not going to be a case of too little too late. There was also a heck of a lot of revelations but theres been no build up and with out this some things seemed to be coming a little too much out of left field. Still if it does get to a 2nd series there are quite a few interesting plot threads for it to pick up and the last shot in the episode was full of potential for next series as well.

Anyway,

Later folks!

Melting, Melting, Melting!

Well it seems that the weathermen only got two out of three right with their predictions this week as I'm sure we didn't get 4 inches of snow last night. Heck I'm fairly sure we didn't even get 4cm. However they did have some problems down south with over 200 people stuck on a busy A road having to be rescued.

Of course this prompted another round in the media of " Lets find a scapegoat" for all of the transport problems that have occured this week. Many of the more outspoken critics are continually pointing out that no other country seems to have problems like this with snow. However what most of them seem incapable of admitting is that all these other countries unlike us seem to get snow on a regular basis so they've had to invest in large scale support systems to deal with snowfall on this scale. The last time we had snow fall this bad was 19 years ago. Yes we could go out and buy lots of snow ploughs but it's not exactly a good use of money if there not going to be used for another 19 years.

Still it was the last 'official' day of my holiday today so I was making as good a use of the time as I could do. The time seems to have gone so quickly, it really doesn't seem like it's been a week already.

I have been able to get most of what I wanted done, so I'm pleased with that because it would have been all too easy to loose my mind to the evils of daytime tv :-)

The snow around here is slowly melting much to Owens disappointment as he's been having great fun the past few days routing round in the snow having a great time. Hopefully he won't find his walks too boring once it all melts.

Oh the new Torchwood trailer for season 3 looks ace and also a little creepy. The best bit had to be where an entire school yard full of children suddenly comes to a stop and then simultaneously all start saying " We are coming, We are coming." A close second to that bit has to be where Gwen comes flying out of the back of a ambulance gun in each hand firing.

Anyway,

Later folks!

Jump, jump!

In the afternoon we took Owen out for another Walk which delighted him as it meant he got a chance to play in the snow again. Plus we took his new frisbee which he thought was great.

Of course his main problem was that he was so keen to get hold of the frisbee he didn't want to wait for us to throw it. Now it's only when you get a picture of him jumping that you realise just how high he can jump.

and no he didn't boost himself off Grumpy here to gain extra height. That's how high he can get from a sitting start. Grumpy meanwhile after seeing this picture admited at the time he wasn't impressed that Owen barrelled into him , but was glad that his aim was lower.

and once again in his efforts to grab the frisbee he manages to boost himself to head height.

now I'm sure you can see why he scares the heck out of the postman when he leaps at the door each morning.

A winters tales

I was woken up by Owen making a racket out on the landing this morning as he really wanted to go out. Not because he was desperate more that he had looked out of the window and seen the huge snowfall we had, had overnight which was a lot deeper and thicker then the snow on Monday. As I was up I decided to join Owen and Grumpy for their early morning walk which admitally wasn't so early at 8.30am but I'm on Holiday so that counts as early :-) I decided to take my camera with me as who knows when we're going to get snow like this again!
Owen as we've discovered loves snow as was running across the fields here there and everywhere having a whale of a time.

He seemed even more full of energy then usual which for Owen is quite an achievement. He did seem to stop and look around a lot almost like he was looking for someone. Grumpy reckoned that he was probably looking out for one of his 'friends' to play with. I.e one of the six or so Dogs he tends to see out and about.

The advantage of going quite early was that hardly anybody else had been in the fields so it looked quite awesome with snow as far as you could see.

The only small problem we encountered was that as the snow was so deep we didn't know where the paths ended and the road began! Grumpy actually managed to step in a snowdrift deep enough then it went over the top of his wellies. This is the view from the green down the side of our house. The house on the left is ours

This is Grumpy and Owen as we made our way up to the fields. The only time Owen didn't seem to enjoy the walk when it was time to come home. I'm sure he would have bee more then happy to stay out there as long as he wanted.

Tap Dance got snowed in, out in her little cottage so she was unable to get to work. So she had a 'snow day' as well. Come to think of it, it seems like most people on our estate did as well as there were a awful lot of cars still on driveways this morning.

The snow started to melt a bit towards the end of the day but then stopped as night fell. We're supposed to get another four inches of snow overnight so I guess we'll see in the morning what the state of play is.

Later folks!

View from the window mk2

No I have not simply reloaded the picture from Mondays post. This is the view that greeting us when we woke up this morning. The weathermen were right again ( twice in one week what are the odds?) and we have had a lot of snow during the night. More then Monday in fact. We've already had a call from Tap Dance this morning. She can't get to work as her road has been blocked by snow.

An Unexpected visitor

Our central heating system like most has it's own 'character' in that it will make the occasional noise from time to time which you do get used to. However when watching a DVD this morning I became away of a rather odd clanging sound. Now I was worred that maybe the central heating was starting to develop a fault at the worst possible time but then I realised that the noise didn't seem to be coming from the heating system but from upstairs in the direction of Grumpys office. So I decided that either he was shifting stuff around or Owen was up to something.

However the sound started to get closer and louder which was very weird as it definatly wasn't coming from the direction of any of the pipes, I then started to hear this ever odd noise. So as you can imagine by this point it was starting to seem a little horror movieish. You know what I mean, the build up as the bad guy is about to close in on one of the 'good guys' and bump them off in a horrible way. Of course as soon as I thought of this I couldn't help but run through a list of bad guys in my head. It couldn't have been freddy as I wasn't asleep, it couldn't have been Michael as I wasn't a babysitter, it wasn't Jason as I wasn't near a lake and it couldn't have been pinhead as I haven't been playing with any puzzle boxes. Still these noise was getting louder and louder. Suddenly I noticed movement at the bottom of our fireplace as I could see something trying to force itself through.......

Then had to duck rather rapidly as something flew directly at me. I quickly scrambled into the hall pulling the door shut behind me in time to stop this thing flying at me a second time. It was at this point that I got a good look at my 'assaliant' and it was a bird. Now quite how a bird got itself down our chimney I have no idea. Quite how it managed to squeeze through a less then half an inch gap is also a puzzle. So we now how a bird flying around in our lounge, going somewhat batty. In a situation like this it called for a definite plan, for action, for a well thought out solution.

However I didn't have any of that so I did the next best thing I could think of.
" Grumpy? Help!"

Grumpy quickly came downstairs and I explained the situation to him whilst he stood there somewhat bemused. Owen on the other hand looked delighted and kept trying to get past us and into the Lounge ( remember folks he can open our doors by himself. Don't believe me see here ) because I guess as far as he was concerned he finally had a bird cornered and it couldn't fly away like the birds usually do on his walks. I held onto Owen as Grumpy went it to try and open the window to coax it out. However he couldn't find out how to open the window (D'oh!) and the bird kept flying at him. So I then had to go in and open the window, then Grumpy went back in to try and coax it out. Owen was pretty much going bananas at this point. The bird then decided instead of going for the open window it would fly into the dining room instead. However Grumpy was able to get the big window in there open and it eventually flew away, leaving Grumpy and I to puzzle over how it got under the fire and Owen sulking in the corner as we let the bird get away.

They are forcecasting 10 inches of snow for tomorrow. Considering the snowfall on Monday was measured in CM if we do get that I'm sure chaos is going to result very quickly especially as many councils are running out of grit!

Most of the snow melted tody but apparently many schools were still closed. The reason? Why health and safety grounds of course as children might be tempted to still throw snowballs and as much of the snow was now icy if it hit a child in the eye it might injure them and they would then be abe to sue the school. However did the Human race survive before the invention of Health and Safety?

anyway,

Later folks!

snow? Ice? Hard to tell anymore

Well the snow stopped late last night but it still remained very cold which meant the main problem facing most people this morning was that a lot of the snow had turned to ice which meant it was rather slippy to venture outside. Unfortunatly we had to as we needed to get the rubbish bin put out for collection. See schools are shut, some airports, there's a lack of grit for the roads but somehow the rubbish lorrys are still able to collect, go figure.

I was intrigued to notice a steady flow of young lads going back and forth down the side of the house with sleds full of snow. I looked out of an upstairs window and discovered that they were moved up and down the estate finding the best patches of snow still around and filling their sleds before taking the snow off somewhere before coming back with empty sleds to get some more. I don't know what they were planning but whatever it was it involved a heck of a lot of snow.

We also think our next door neighbours have moved out as they've been filling up cars and taking stuff away since yesterday. It's a bit of a odd get up anyway as they were using the ground floor for a business and someone was living upstairs. I think they were our fourth or fifth neighbours since we've lived here. We do seem a bit fated with our next door neighbours. Well I guess we'll just have to wait and see who we get next.

I've seen some footage from the new GI joe and transformers 2 movies. Plus I've also seen that their releasing a new 60 second trailer for the new series of Torchwood on the BBC website at 9pm. I'm still not sure of this plan of theirs to make it a five part series and show it over the course of one week but I guess we'll see.

Oh I've just seen that their forcasting another heavy snowfall for Thursday. I'm starting to feel glad that I took this week off otherwise I would have not enjoyed the trips too and from work. I probably would have ended up exceptionally tense by the time I arrived at work and thats no way to start a day :-)

Well in the news today ( asides from the usual the standard blame game starting of trying to find a scapegoat to pin problems with the snow yesterday on) a school has spent £25,000 on sending 40 pupils to San Francisco because 'they rarely venture outside of their council estate'. Lucky for some we never had anything like this at my high school! We only had a french exchange and even then we had to pay for it.

anyway,

Later folks!

It's snow joke

Even though it started snowing yesterday I was still half expecting to wake up this morning to find that most of the snow had gone and we were left with a few slushy remanents.

Yeah, got that wrong didn't I?

Far from disappearing there was lots of the stuff. As this photo from my bedroom window can atest too

and it hasn't really stopped snowing since. By early afternoon the Cars were doing very good impressions of large piles of snow. This photo shows just how deep the show was lying at this point. The snow on my car was lying as deep as my hand and yet it was still snowing!

As our road is a 'close' I was expecting the snow to drift a little bit but it got so deep that the kerb disappeared from view by late morning.

Still if you can say one thing about the snow it did make the estate look very peaceful and serene

This is the view alongside our house.

and this is the view looking the otherway.

I have to admit I was glad not to have to go into work today because as long term readers know driving in snow/icy conditions are my least favourite driving conditions.

Tap Dance started her new job today although it took her nearly 50 minutes to travel three miles on the way in and she then got sent home early as the snow was still falling.

Owen on the other hand thought all this snow was great and was having a wail of a time when he went out for his walks charging everywhere in the snow launching great clouds of it into the air when he jumped everyone.

However the snow was even heavier down south with motorways, the underground in London and even the buses grinding to a complete halt. Of course some people are incredibily confused how everything fell apart with snowfall only measured in centimetres. Including a church member over here from Canada cackling away on his facebook page about funny he thinks it is that everything stopped due to several cm of snow. However this is the most snowfall the country has seen since 1991 so i think it's probably more down to people not having experience on how to deal with snow unlike people who live in countries that have to deal with snowfall measured in feet on a regular basis.

anyway,

Later folks!

View from the Window

This is the current view from Grumpys office window. It has been snowing near enough non stop all day and according to some reports is supposed to get even heavier over night! It looks like I chose the right week to take off as I would have hated to have to try and drive into work through this!

No snow or snow no?

Well the day started out with a knock at the door. Not intentional mind you it was just Owen who had decided to sit out on the landing and sit there wagging his tail which happened to connect with my door on every 'wag'.

I got to church and realised that the weathermen might be right after all as it was starting to get very cold already.

I was in the middle of putting the bulletins out when I noticed the chapel was already starting to get very full which considering the time ( nearly 20 minutes before the start of church) was quite surprising and the car park was rapidly filling up. I then realised that this probably meant one thing and one thing only. There was going to be a baby blessing. And I was right as the chapel continued to fill up at a astonishing rate and the car park filled up too to such an extent people were parking on the street which I've never seen before.

Now things do go wrong from time to time at Church, but with so many visitors there today we seemed especially fated. We ran out of water so the blessers had to quickly run outside to get some more. The bishop then forgot the primary were supposed to be singing which they lead to confusion as everybody in the primary got up and only some of them were singing. We also had one vistor get up to give his testimony who seemed to go on for about 15 minutes!

In priesthood I looked around the cultural hall during opening exercises and realised that we had in the region of 60 priesthood holders there which was amazing. We also had a area authority there ( we're his home ward) who took the decision to have all the quorums stay together. So I did feel sorry for our teacher who had prepared a 'interactive' lesson in his words for our usualy medium sized (ish) quorum and was now faced with a class of 60, including the High priests, the Stake President and a area authority. Plus to add to his pressure the area authority and the stake president had asked for some time to speak to us at the end of the lesson so the teacher only had half the time he should have had to teach his lesson.

So remember ( all church readers) next time you have to give a lesson it's unlikely it will be as pressured as that.

The area authority also decided that as there were so many priesthood holders there it would be nice to get a photo as theres not many wards who get this many holders for a Sunday service.

As soon as church ended we left the hall to discover it had started snowing. The weathermen were right! Well it's bound to happen sooner or later. I had to wait to leave though as the car park was so packed some people had started to park in a line up the car park effectively blocking everybody else in.

I did smile though when I got in the car to leave ( I was using Grumpys car) it decided to flash up a warning that there was a risk of ice as if the windscreen covered in snow wouldn't have given me that hint already.

In the news even though it's a Sunday the PC brigade are still as busy as ever. Now it seems that everyone is keen to show their concern for the environment these days whether it's Smiths charging for carrier bags or car companies letting people know how much CO2 their new cars put out per mile even though those numbers to most people are probably meaningless. However even I was a bit suprised to see that the governments leading 'green' ( i.e the environment) advisor has warned that Couples who have more than two children are putting an 'irresponsible' burden on the environment. The advisor then added " am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate.'I think we will work our way towards a position that says having more than two children is irresponsible. "

Words honestly fail me that right now. but I can see why some people have started to say that some are turning environmentalism into a dangerous idelogy.

Meanwhile the Prime minster is also busy trying to dig himself out of a hole as he's condemed all this recent strikes as indefensible and also tried to explain his pledge of 'British jobs for British workers', insisting he had only meant people would be given the skills to compete against other nationalities. That might be what he meant but thats certainly not what he sent. It seems to me someone is frantically pulling a CMA action.

Also a video has appeared of violent protests in London a couple of weeks back over Israels invasion of Gaza. Some people have been quite critical of the police as it shows them 'running away' and says that they were humilated by the protesters. I think this is a stupid thing to say considering there were thirty police officers and a crowd of 3000 protesters. That's right they were outnumbered 100 to 1. I think they did exactly the right thing especially as they weren't in riot gear. I'll leave it to yourselves to reflect on the irony of a violent protest crowd protesting for peace.

Later folks.