…is that I seem to have acquired a biological barometer just behind my right eye. Every time the weather takes a severe nosedive, I get a pisser of a headache – as in, can't-function-and-want-to-gouge-out-your-eye headache. Advil helps, but it's really annoying when one whole side of your head is pounding. Not fun, not fun at all.
Month: December 2006
The tree is dead, long life the tree!
Finally took down the cat toy xmas tree this morning, much to the dismay of the pussycat. Not doing much else at the moment. Katy's having a nap cause she's been working all week and her dad spread the cold bug love around.
I've been playing at ripping MP3s and organizing them on my shiny new ipod for most of the week, though I've been told that I can't use it in the house because the noise-blocking heatphones I also got work too well and Katy has to scream at me for me to hear her :)
Yet another reason why I'm glad I'm not american
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Selective Service System is making plans to test its draft machinery in case Congress and President Bush need it, even though the White House says it doesn't want to bring back the draft.
The service's director for operations and chief information officer, cautioned that the “readiness exercise” does not mean the agency is gearing up to resume the draft. “We're kind of like a fire extinguisher. We sit on a shelf,” Campbell told The Associated Press. “Unless the president and Congress get together and say, 'Turn the machine on' … we're still on the shelf.”
And a nice bit of spin control further down the article:
Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson prompted speculation about the draft Thursday when he told reporters in New York that “society would benefit” if the U.S. were to bring back the draft. Later he issued a statement saying he does not support reinstituting a draft.
That fits in quite nicely with recent news that the US is thinking of granting citizenship to immigrants who join the army/navy/airforce. If you don't get killed in some useless political exercise that should never have been started in the first place, you get a green card. Sign me up, boyo… NOT!
The cat is annoying me, part 2
I'm trying to do a bit of coding work, which is not helped by the fact that the cat is attacking his catnip mouse at my feet. Repeated attempts to throw him out of the office are useless, because the dumb thing apparently enjoys being flung in the air and always comes back for more… sigh.
How can something so cute be so damned annoying?
I was reading in bed just now. I just finished the Agatha Christie book I've been reading. The cat was sleeping on my chest for a while, with two white-socked paws sticking under my book, then migrated to my legs, then got bored and annoyed me until I started throwing his mouse at him. That slowed down my reading a bit. I
cringe every time I hear his claws tear up and down the carpet on the stairs or when he's doing a sharp turn. He's currently eating the blue throw that lives on the back of the office chair.
Annoying little bugger.
An entry that's been 4 days in the making
It was Katy's birthday last Friday. Did you all remember to send her love?
We went to London for a few days of pre-xmas R&R. We got there on Thursday morning and went to the hotel to drop off our bags. When we got there, we were told that our hotel was closing for the holidays because they didn't have enough guests to warrant staying open, but since it was part of a large chain, they relocated us to another hotel just 5 minutes down Tottenham Court road (the Radisson Kenilsworth). Got checked in and went walkies.
We ended up in Soho and found the pub where we had a snack the last time we were in town (it's called the Brewmaster. Nothing fancy, just good cheap pub food). We wandered around Leicester Square and went to Chinatown in search of a tea shop where I could buy a tea boat. We never found one, which is surprising really, but we found tons of shops that sold Peking duck (most of which was hanging in the window).
We went to Fortnum & Mason to gawk at stuff that was too pricey for words. F&M is a shop that must be seen to be believed. The xmas display is new each year. Last year was Dickens' Christmas Carroll. This year was Alice in Wonderland. It's impressive. It's completely over the top. Given the snootiness level of the shop, it's completely appropriate. F&M is a playground for people who have so much money they don't bother about little things like prices and if they can afford the stuff anymore. They have things that I can't even put a name to or even begin to contemplate a purpose. When even the props they put on the sales display are out of our league. I mean, who the hell needs a full size leather rhinoceros??? Don't even get me started on the hand-decorated soap bars! And the food! The food… If you want to buy overly posh, snootily exclusive, overpriced and hunted to the brink of extinction things, this is the place. True story that made me laugh my ass off. Food Uncut, a cooking show, recently reviewed 3 xmas puddings by doing a blind taste test. They were testing cheap (Morrissons, £3/kg), moderate (Waitrose, £10/kg) and ludicrously expensive (F&M, £35/kg) puddings for taste and texture. Unanimously, all the testers raved about the cheapest one and slagged off the most expensive one. Made me giggle :)
When we exited la-la land and went back to the real world, we walked to see the lights on Bond Street and Regent Street. Last time we were in that area, Katy drooled at the sight of a pastry display in the window of the Patisserie Concerto on Piccadilly Street. We decided to go in for a tea break this time. It smelled really nice and the menu looked really promising, but we already had dinner plans so we decided that we'd come back for lunch tomorrow and settled on some tea to get warmed up.
Our dinner plans were to go to Itsu, the sushi restaurant chain that gained notoriety recently for being the last meal of the ex Russian spy who got poisoned with polonium a few weeks ago – though not the same branch, for obvious half-life decontamination reasons. That place was a real letdown. It looked pretentious – the type of restaurant where the sushi goes around on little conveyor belts and you pick what you want and hope for the best. Also, since all the stuff is made in advance, it's no good for me because all the rolls had sesame seeds on them and apparently (Katy asked), all the dipping sauces have garlic in them. So yeah. No sushi for us. We were disappointed, but the evening was saved when we found a little hole in the wall called Niko Niko that served really good sushi and soba for dirt cheap. It doesn't look a lot from the outside (and the inside is nothing to write home to mom about either), but the food is good, not pretentious and you get a lot of it :) My kind of place.
The following day, we went back to the The Tea House, on Neal Street in Covent Garden. We'd gone there the previous day but it was so packed that it was unbearable. This early in the morning, it was possible to buy a cast-iron japanese teapot that I'd spotted the previous day and fell in lust with. I also got some orange-flavoured oolong tea that I'm keen to try. We returned to Fortnum & Mason because we wanted to get some clotted cream fudge that we'd noticed in one of the xmas hampers the previous night. After 30 minutes of looking around and not finding anything, we grabbed some poor floor clerk and got him to do the looking for us. Poor guy was sent from clerk to clerk and nobody seemed to know (or care, really) where the damn thing was. In the end, he said that they were sold out on the floor but he could have a look in the storeroom. I wasn't really looking forward to waiting another 15 minutes for him to go and come back saying he couldn't find any, so we left it (though Katy did buy some nice biscuits that subsequently had to be rescued from her mom a few days later).
We had reserved tickets to the London Eye, so we made our way to the waterfront. On our way there, we walked passed a woman who was having her chauffeur pack the boot of her Rolls Royce. She was the stereotype of the socialite, and again, it reminded us that we're so not even in that game that we don't even want to think about it. We stopped at Trafalgar Square so that Katy (i.e. bladder woman) could go powder her nose. I snapped a few pictures of Nelson's column and developed a heartfelt relationship with a pigeon, and then we were off to the eye.
The trip itself was a lot better than I thought it would be. My vertigo never really kicked in, even though the cabin we were in went through a 360 degree revolution around its center axis while the whole thing circled around the eye. The engineering of the thing is freaky. It was still a bit foggy, so we didn't get the best view of the city but it was fun nonetheless. What was funny though is that I'd forgotten that they do a search of your bags and the same restrictions as air travel apply so the Leatherman that always lives in my back pocket would have been a problem… if they'd seen it. They were too busy harping at the fact that I couldn't bring my tripod in the cabin and I had to take it out of my bag now please!!! to bother actually running me through the metal detector. Apparently, a tripod is considered more dangerous…
After the eye, we went to eat at the Oxo Tower for Katy's birthday. I think they thought we'd lower the tone of the restaurant, so they stashed us completely at the back of the restaurant. I didn't really mind though, cause it was nice and quiet. The food was good and the company was brilliant. A nice evening all around :)
We were a bit tired the next day so we took it easy. Bought another teapot and crashed at an internet cafe to waste a few hours. We had tickets to go see the matinee showing of “We will rock you” at the Dominion on Saturday. That was Katy's birthday present. She'd been wanting to go see that show ever since it came out. The show was… ok. It's a musical that uses Queen songs to score a story. The plot revolves around the following premise
On Planet Mall all musical instruments are banned. The Company Computers generate the tunes and everybody downloads them. But Resistance is growing in the form of the Bohemians – rebels who believe that there was once a Golden Age when the kids formed their own bands and wrote their own songs. Legend persists that somewhere on Planet Mall instruments still exist. Somewhere, the mighty axe of a great and hairy guitar god lies buried deep in rock. The Bohemians need a hero to find this axe and draw it from stone. Is the one who calls himself Galileo that man? But GlobalCorp is also looking for Galileo and if they get him first they will surely drag him before the Killer Queen and consign him to oblivion across the Seven Seas of Rye.
The idea is good, but the implementation left me bleh. I found a lot of the performers to be, well, annoying would be a good word. Still, Katy loved it so I'm happy. We got our bags from the hotel and headed home.
Katy's parents and uncle were coming down on Sunday to spend xmas eve, day and boxing day with us. We were hosting our first ever xmas dinner and I was doing all the cooking. I'm glad to say that it went really well. We had waaaaaaaaaaayyy too much food.
Let me re-emphasize this.
We had a STUPID amount of food.
As in, half of it is now frozen because there's no way in hell we can eat it all before it goes bad. Even with having handed out leftovers. Even with not having thawed out food to begin with.
We had too much food, but it was damn good!!!
My cooking was well received, which made me happy. It's a good thing too, because I spent most of my time in the kitchen preparing stuff :D Everybody ate their fill (and a bit more) and we had a good time.
Katy had to pop into work for a few hours on xmas day, so we waited for her to come back before we attacked the mountain of presents underneath the tree. As a side note, that tree managed to survive the cat, but just barely – poor battered thing. Santa's been really generous this year. I got a mountain of chocolates, some cookbooks, Bobbles snow globes, a new wok, a hand blender with a bajillion attachments, season 1 of Rome on DVD and an ipod with Shure E4C headphones. I've been hemming and hawing for those for the last year and I finally have them. My preciousssss!!!
We discovered that the cat is a catnip fiend. Katy had bought catnip tea bags from Whittards. They send him completely batty! We had to wrestle the bag away from him cause we were afraid he was going to have a fit or something :)
Katy's family left yesterday afternoon and we both crashed for a nap. It's been hectic, but now it's all quiet and should stay like that for the foreseeable future. We're going to be spending a quiet new year's eve because Katy is working on the 1st. We don't have plans to go anywhere or see anybody, and to be honest, I like that. I'm not a hermit by any means, but I like spending quiet downtime with my wife. (my wife, hee hee, that still makes me giggle).
[Recipe] Baked glazed ham
English gammon joint (2-4kg)
handful whole peppercorns
thyme
bay leaf
2 onions, cut into quarters
500ml apple cider
3 tbsp dijon mustard
3 tbsp honey
2 tbsp brown sugar
– place trivet or saucer upside down in a large pan. place the gammon joint with the strings intact as it holds the joint together during cooking on the trivet. Add peppercorns, thyme, bay leaf, onions and 400 ml of the cider. Fill with enough cold water to cover the gammon.
– bring slowly to a boil and reduce heat to simmer for 20 minutes per 500g, adding water from the kettle as necessary.
– At the end of the calculated cooking time, turn the heat off and allow the ham to cook in the cooking liquid for at least 30 minutes, until it's cool enough to handle. Transfer the ham to a board and pat dry with kitchen paper. Using a small sharp knife, peel away and discard the skin, leaving a layer of fat exposed
– score the fat into a diamond pattern. transfer to a roasting dish.
– preheat the oven to 200C
– mix mustard, honey, sugar and then stir in enough cider to thin the paste down to a pouring consistency. Pour the glaze over the ham and spoon over it until it is thoroughly coated. Roast for 30-35 minutes, or until evenly browned, basting every 10 minutes. With only 10 minutes left, after the last basting, sprinkle some brown sugar on top of the ham and roast until done.
– cover and allow to cool.
Getting there!
So far, this week, I've made a batch of homemade salsa, some porc pies (though I'm less than pleased with those results, but meh. They taste ok even if they look rough), another batch of scotch eggs (which turned out great!) and a ham.
While I was doing that, I finished wrapping up all the prezzies, dropped off the xmas cards at the office and generally kept everything clean and tidy. Katy, who has seen me cook, can testify that that last one is a feat :) I also managed to not kill the cat and that, given his general pain-in-the-assish behaviour recently, is also a feat.
It's getting down to the wire, but I can maybe hopefully begin to think that I'll make it :) We're going into town tonight to get some more smoked brisket from Bottisham and picking up the last of the ingredients we'll need over the holidays.
On my way to campus yesterday, I saw something that I'd never seen before. Freezing fog. Campus looked really eerie, but pretty. It was really funky to see all the spiderwebs that are normally hidden from sight covered in a layer of frost.
T minus 3 days and counting…
Been a busy weekend, and going to be a busier week!
I got back from Belgium very late at night on friday and spent most of saturday cleaning house in preparation of Katy's return from Leicester. She'd gone there to see some friends for a pre-birthday tea and cake party. On sunday, we went grocery shopping. It was The Big One! where we got all the stuff we'd need for the xmas entertaining we're doing. As such, it cost an arm and a leg, and even a bit of left kidney thrown in for good measure. I kid you not, it was 4 times our normal weekly shopping bill. Funny little tidbit though. I was planning on paying by cash, but I was missing 49 pence and Katy didn't have her purse. The only coinage I had on my was in euro, not pounds. I didn't want to put 49p on my debit card, so I decided to part with one of my lucky two pound coins. Now, a bit of background here. I've had two £2 coins in my wallet for the past year and a half. They're my lucky coins, and I wouldn't normally even consider parting with them. Except that time, it seemed like the most natural thing to do. So I paid with one of them.
The bill was £210.49 and I gave her £212.00. I got back £2.51 in change :) My lucky two pound coin came back to me :D How serendipitous is that? That made my day.
Today, so far, I have:
– called the garage that did all of our repair work on the rover. The front left tire is making such a god-awful amount of noise (but only intermittently) that we were ashamed to drive through the village yesterday because people were looking at us! He's going to pick up the car this afternon and look at it. He thinks it might have picked up a stone. Hopefully, it won't cost much to repair.
– called the cattery. The monster is booked in from thursday morning to saturday afternoon.
Even though I'm on vacation this week, I need to pop in to the office and drop off my travel expenses paperwork and hand out some choccies and xmas cards for people at the office.
It's beginning to look a lot like xmas
I'm looking forward to the holidays, but at the same time, I'm looking forward for them to be done with. The list of things to do, things to prep, things to buy doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. The only thing that's getting smaller is the window of time to get everything bought/prepped/done. I now understand why people get the holiday blues.
It shouldn't need to be like this.