Bear blog

This thread is precisely what I hate about women.

I've just eaten a licquorice toffee (I know, it was horrible) that, just for a couple of moments, tasted like the tortilla chips my dad used to buy when I was little. Happy memories of sitting in front of the fire with my dad and nibbling on a corner of a chip (they were too spicy to eat a whole one) came flooding back. Until I started tasting the licqourice. Bleugh!

I love my dad, me.

Friday was all about scary foreign films, seeing random people, and having curly toes. There were blankets and cushions and screaming girlies, skittery fingernails on floorboards, toilet related deaths, too much pizza and dubious sex scenes. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, you know fuck all about vampires.

Saturday was all about seeing Rod in a shirt and tie (tee-hee), letting parents do the majority of the work, and a trip to Halfords. There was wallpaper, a dirth of skill on my part, fat hairy men, and an unearthed garden. Having hoped to have got the hall/landing/stairs all nicely wallpapered and ready for painting, I was a little disappointed in our progress. But I've learnt many things. Like plumb lines are funny, and wallpaper makes me swear. The garden, however, is looking magnificently like a garden after Pete's dad took his northern prowess at hacking and slashing to it. There's even edging on the lawn.

Sunday was all about looking at our new garden and deciding that a barbeque was a much better idea than carrying on with the wallpapering. There was an abundance of food, an abundance of people, my first trip to the park, success with boomerangs, and gooey marshmallows. We saw Matt and Sarah, which was very nice, Lizzy and I threw things at each other very poorly and failed to catch them and once again, Pete and I went shopping for a barbeque and bought enough food to last us a month.

Monday was all about deciding that it wasn't worth doing any wallpapering at all until the new windows are put in, and pedalling pedalling pedalling around Rutland Water. There was an horrifically annoying number of people walking/cycling/standing around where I wanted to be riding, an horrifically annoying number of people without the least sense of spacial awareness or common curtesy, way too many hills for somewhere that's supposed to be flat, and a pair of rather achey legs at the end of it all. The sun was shining though, and Alby was good company in between his bouts of speedily dashing off ahead for no apparent reason. I slept well last night, at any rate.

Someone in the Engineering department obviously reads my blog.

 The University has issued this statement about the display thingy:

"...the numbers of the display have the following meaning: 

- the top line displays the actual amount of electrical power in kilowatts being produced by the system. The display is updated with new readings every 2 minutes.

- the middle line shows how many kilowatthours of electricity the system has produced since it was commissioned in March 2007. As a reference the typical electricity consumption in the UK is around 3,500 kWh (= 3.5MWh) per year

- the bottom line shows the amount (in tonnes) of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are avoided by the generation of the PV system. This amount of CO2 would have been added to the atmosphere if the PV system had not been in operation. Again this amount relates to the operation of the system since the commissioning in March 2007.

Unfortunately, adding this information to the display would have made it very cluttered..."

Isn't Alby clever?

Our landline was connected today by a very nice man from [a certain national phone company]. He was supposed to be arriving 'in the morning' which I had taken to mean any time after about 11. But at 9am sharp there was a very polite knockety-knock-knock at the door and a smiley man with a toolbox was stood on the doorstep.
"Come in and do your duty," I cried, stepping aside to let him pass.

"Ooh dear," He said, upon seeing the handywork of the last inhabitants of our house. "That shouldn't be like that. Not like that at all."

"To be honest," I replied, "I'm not at all surprised."

But he sorted it all out wonderfully well, complete with diatribe on how malicious and greedy the capitalist swine at [a certain national phone company] actually are, and with emphatic orders, when I broached the subject, that I was not, under any circumstances, ever to entrust the job of moving our sockety thing to said company under threat of being ripped off good n'proper. Instead I am to get the old man to do it himself of a weekend, or alternatively to slip £20 to the bloke who advertises his skills in such matters in the back of the local rag.

"It's disgusting, really." He sighed, upon leaving. "The good-for-nothings you have to put up with these days just to get your bloody phone connected."

To meet someone with such obvious job satisfaction at that time of the morning leaves a fuzzy feeling in my tummy.

Pete and I both took this little thirty-second test and both came out as a couple of our favourite books (I was 100 Years of Solitude, Pete was Ender's Game.)

Me likee.

Our iconic new building is covered in solar panels, mega-techy-poly-christaline louvres, and general shininess. A bloke has just stuck up a little information sign with a built in monitor so we can all keep tabs on how wonderful and environmentally friendly we're being in our massive offices while we have the air conditioning on full blast and a few hundred computers pumping their evil out into the atmosphere. But having read the thing, I still have no idea what I'm looking at.

This morning's readings were at:

• 90.00 kW
• 8.120 MWh and
• 3.491 t

Is that good? Should I be running from the building for fear that the sun's rays are going to bake me alive? Should I be busy scoffing at how much money they've spent on this crap?

I need a geeky type to tell me what it all means.

Alan has sparked an interest in me about what brings people to my site. They're not as good as Alan's but the best few over the last couple of months have been:

• Blarg faceplant
• hubby beater
• i need poop paper
• nicola holt big bugger
• physics of poop
• clap pigion crawley

and

• skin tight rubber gay

I do seem to get an awful lot of searches about poop. Not that I'm complaining.

Our shiny new composter has arrived! I'm terribly excited. Not only is it all big and hefty and the-business-looking, but it came with a fridge magnet *and* a bin sticker. I feel truly blessed. Not least because our recycling box hasn't arrived yet and the council have given us the teeny-tiniest wheelie bin in all existence with no regard to the vast amount of poo that two cats produce.

I have already scraped together a small pile of compostables and in six to nine months I shall be scattering it upon my nice green garden. Huzzah!

In other housey news, we were paid a vist last week from a terribly nice man from a certain national UPVC windows company who kept us entertained for about an hour and then left feeling dejected and forlorn without any prospect of our business. Pete's father came down and tinkered with the porch for a day, and Rod scrubbed the crap off our conservatory roof in a very manly fashion before insulting my painting skillz.

I rode my bike to work this morning from the new house. It was all terribly exciting. There was lots of swoosh, swoosh, zip, whiz, voom and I didn't fall off once. Pete rode with me though (just to be sure).

We got all the way through Braunstone without getting our tyres nicked. Then all the way down Narborough Road without getting run over by a bus. Then all the way through the 'Nuts' without knocking anybody over or being way-layed by stupid road works. Then we crossed big roads without any screeching of brakes or squeals of terror, and rode up a couple of steep hills without me having to get off and push. Not even once.

Pete won't be there to ride home with me tonight though. If I never post again you'll know I'm under the wheels of a car somewhere.