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Friday, July 4th, 2008
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1:52 pm - camping
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we are off camping for 3 days (2 nights).
I am leaving my shiny thing. I am taking my iphone though, so i shouldn't feel too disconnected.
I am also taking my tequila kit - mixings, lime, and in place of a shakes, one of those steel vacuum coffee mug thimmajigs. a perfect shaker, with a sippy straw on top.
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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
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9:41 am - i feel great. GREAT.
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and i don't mean pharmacologically enhanced kind of great. nor do i mean post coital kind of great, or tequila kind of great, or curshing the soul of an innocent employee kind of great.
last night, i had 7 solid uninterrupted hours sleep. for the last two weeks i've not really slept at all and it's been affecting a lot of things: motivation, enthusiasm and to a certain extent, judgement. For the last week or so, i've not been properly eating either - little appetite.
Today i have a clarity of thought sadly missing of late, and want to get on and get some jobs closed off. Feels fantastic.
Furthermore, I hit another weight-loss milestone this morning. I am now 1 stone lighter than when i started. And I've dropped a waist size.
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
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10:12 pm - book meme
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Bold the one's you've read. Italicise the ones you intend to read (well, the could just be not the null set i suppose) and underline the ones you love.
Or in my case, italicise the ones you thought were pretentious or inpenetratable or just plain boring wank, and should be taken out and shredded.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - some camp hobbits walk around, lots of family trees get recited. some people have a fight. others with beards and questionable hygiene defend the books.
</em>3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - i gave up though - same old plot being recycled with pimples.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - who, *who* would read alll of of this.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - played the game, not interested in camp hobbits.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - ha ha - i haven't wasted 1 day of my life reading this dribble.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So, why was Hamlet listed and also the complete works? too much dickens. not enough sci-fi.
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1:48 pm - hobot
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so, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) baldowl and i were discussing if we needed to invent a hobot, and if so, what would the three laws of hobotics be:
so far, he's come up with
it cleans itself
it does, what I say, period.
Also, it must be solar powered.
Do you have any suggestions for the laws of hobotics?
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| Monday, June 30th, 2008
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6:58 pm - hells donkeys was i busy today
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morning . . la la la
10am - good phone call came in
10:30 - bad phone call came in - one of our BI reports isn't telling the client what they want to see, mainly because they didn't specifiy it that way. however, the client claims they will get sued if the report isn't fixed today. busy busy
13:30 off to get specialist tiny brake part so i can go to the rolling road tomorrow
15:10. supply of tiny part exhausted in harrogate. make do with a farmer job.
17:30 - finish work, back in garage immediately
18:57 - blog update, sat in pants about to go out to theater
19:05 - cab comes for theatre.
when i get back, i have to bleed the brakes.
08:00 tomorrow - off to the rolling road to make my engine beautiful.
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4:57 pm - disturbing thoughts
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so, anyone fancy writing haiku in a yorkshire accent for me?
go on lad, if tha can tolerate such foreign poetry, like.
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| Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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9:00 pm
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nurofen, San miguel, tequila, Blue bols, 4 lines, one litre of cold pressed olive oil.
What could possibly go wrong ?
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12:45 pm - stopping and MOT
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Yeayy - the car passed the MOT - one adisory note about the nearside steering ball needing adjusting, but that's easy to do.
The new brake master cylinder has arrived, so that should mean i can get the front brakes working much sharper. Once they bite more, I can then dial in the rears and hopefully the car will stop on a sixpence.
That's this weekend's pottering taken care of.
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| Friday, June 27th, 2008
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11:33 pm - MOT tomorrow
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So, i think i've prepped my car for tomorrow's MOT. three hours in the garage having spanner therapy.
The oil has been changed. weird stuff oil - i don't have a recirculating oil breathing system (production cars do this, but it cuts down on power) so the oil vapour goes to a closed breather tank and needs to be drained. this means when one empties it, oil pours out, then water pours out. As far as engine oil goes, there's always water and detergent in the oil, and in the cheaper non racing oils, there's more water and some weird creamy caramel coloured shit comes out as a result. it looks suspiciously like a knacked head gasket or head.
so, 4 litres of oil out, and 2 litres of crap in the catch tank. good.
I've changed the brake fluid (dark in the car at the moment which means water's getting in) but i'm not doing much more than a flush. for brake fluid colours, think "pissing blood = bad, slight amber colour = good". i have a new master cylinder on the way with a different bore which should make my super sexy racing brakes actually bite and stop the car. Once this arrives (tomorrow) i will fit and bleed the entire system.
i've done a lights and electric check, adjusted the tappets (only one slightly out) and have the air filters out for cleaning. They'll go back in tomorrow. The cam is clean and there are no marks on the lobes. It's nice to know my expensive racing head job is still in good condition.
I'm going to fit new spark plugs before the MOT as well - for the norms out there, a production car will go for anything between 12k and 30k miles. On my car, they start to break down after 1k miles. That's because the ignition system puts in over 20x the energy of normal ignition systems.
I was originally concerned that the car was losing power, but if the filters were a little clogged, the plugs are breaking down and it was holding onto 1l of oil more than it should have, that might explain the loss in power.
Once the MOT is out of the way, i'm off to the rolling road on tuesday to have it fettled and twiddled with. then i get my power back.
current music: old harry's game - recreational break -
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10:19 pm - shit sci-fi update
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well, it's 12 monkeys, which wasn't shit at all.
i will enjoy this and won't get me some equilibrium
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8:55 pm - plan for the evening
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revel in how i smell
watch shit sci-fi
chat to whomever's out there
catch up on my radio 4 comedy cataloguing
drink boz
maybe do a bit of stalking
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| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
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10:44 pm - hard boiled pain in the middle of my gut
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so yesterday, i was ill. up at 4am kinda ill. i shall spare you the exit based details, suffice to say i didn't get to sleep again until 8, for a couple of hours.
I managed to spend the rest of the day in a weird fugue and know i had conversations with people and i don't remember them (stuntpilot99, not you).
Last night I could face food again, and prepared a fairly stunning chicken in a white wine sauce, with fresh organic corn cut straight from the cob and cooked into the sauce.
this morning i woke up at 6, then more properly at 8. i am still a completely foggy, and have that tight painful knotted ball in the sternum feeling. gaviscon isn't helping.
Got a truck load to do as well today :(
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| Monday, June 23rd, 2008
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1:58 pm - on cats
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so, what is funnier - that sooty has finally got himself a bird, or that he's playing with its corpse in one of h's shoes?
not that i'm stopping him.
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| Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
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2:50 pm - bongo thumb
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on bongo thumbs, birthday parties and spontaneous pleasant surprises.
before i even start this post, i credit stealthfish and tadpoleuk for joining me and encouraging me in this madness, in their respective orders. consider yourselves kissed inappropriately.
So, yesterday, it was agreed that stealthfish and I would have a play date with the kids (my #2, his #3), and one of the things i wanted to do was go and get some bongo drums (actually a mix of djembes). off we trot to leeds, and back we trot with a various collection of things one can bang.
as well as getting a drum circle going for the afternoon, it was his #2's 17th birthday, so we joined them for food and the celebration.
the drum circle was kind of fun for the smaller kids, and the more simple games worked best - i have discovered that you need to warm kids up mentally before you try and get onto the more complex rhythm and sound games that the grown-ups find most pleasing on the ear. i expect we played the kids games for about 30 minutes or so, which was a good amount before breaking for food. [games listed below].
after food and a couple of drinks, #2 and I settled into the lounge for a bit of a bong, and we were joined by stealthfish's #1, and himself. this time we played more of the rhythm games, and once we managed to get a nice complex sound emerge - we kept it going for a couple of minutes, and everyone felt good at what we'd created. again, it was the classic complexity emerging from simple rules.
later on in the evening, #2 and i were just playing on our own and some of the teenagers came in - more games were played and again, a lot of fun - different games emerge as being successful depending on the age group. #2 got to think she was the cats tits, playing with the big (almost adult) kids.
so, a fantastic day, good party, lots of drumming, lots of laughs. h even joined in for a bit, and mrs stealthfish also had great fun. it helps that we've got a few different sized drums.
the games
for the little ones, we had two that were quite successful - the kids tend not to settle into the rhythm games until they've gone through the bait the shit out of it phase, so these are good openers.
the conductor - give a kid a stick, and then let them set the volume everyone rumbles at - hold it up high and we all bang loud, low and quiet. swipe it and we stop. the kids love the volume and the banging, and the kid loves being in charge. let them run for a minute or so, and then stop. you then hand the baton onto the next kid and everyone gets a go. that's a good ice-breaker.
hide and seek - send a kid out of the room and hide something (don't make it too hard to find - boys have no finding gene). then when they come back in, everyone rumbles on the drums - louder = closer, quieter = further away; basically playing hot and cold with volume. then the kid gets a round of applause when they find it, and you move on to the next kid.
fizz-buz. - take a couple of boings, and hand them onto the next person, let it go around a little bit, and then one person calls fiz or buz and they reverse the order of the boinging, or cause a gap. this one is just about getting a laugh and getting everyone else to listen to where the rhythm's going.
favourite food: this one goes around the group again, and is about building up a good group sound. get someone to announce their favourite food, and for each syllable, the leader boings out. banana gets 3 bongs. keep this up and the group just joins in when they can. it's a good one for joining in. then bring it to a sharp halt. then move on and get the next person to announce their favourite food and build it up again. once you've been once round the group, calling out a food means everyone joins in fairly instantly. good fun. a good variation was to vary the volume as you boinged out the note - it's fun to make it really loud, and it's a good listening exercise for everyone.
follow the leader - one person starts with a few simple notes, and the next person just listens in and joins in with more. keep going around the group and if you're lucky, something good emerges. things we observed was that if you start with something that sounds good but is complex, there's no room left for anyone else to insert notes, and it just ends up being a copy.
duelling rhythms: one person starts with a rhythm and hands it on to the next - reverse the pitch of the notes to challenge back. you can swap this so you divide he circle into pieces and have either side duel with the other.
after that, i ran out of games, but definitely had fun and observed at the end of the night i had bongo-thumb.
other good stuff happened as well, such as the kids playing in the garden in the rain, excellent food, company and wine, etc. one of the best fun days for ages. soon to be repeated i think.
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| Saturday, June 21st, 2008
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11:09 am - haruki murakami
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| Friday, June 20th, 2008
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10:35 am - how to improve my stalking
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6:33 am - egads
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| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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3:37 pm - one for the ceo
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weird - i have grimethorpe colliery playing riverdance. how did that happen?
you can't beat big brass to uplift the spirits though.
current music: Riverdance (Whelan, arr. Farr) - Grimethorpe Colliery
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11:21 am - in honour of my dear friend beltza
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in honour of my dear friend beltza i would just like to announce that i have coffee. for those that want the detail, it's kenya peabody, and was ground fresh for me yesterday in bettys.
current music: Please Push No More - Gary Numan
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
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2:12 pm - i am toying with a default user pic
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