San Francisco quand il pleut

Went to the SF MOMA for the 1st time and sneaked a few crafty pix in with the zire palm thing. Generally not too impressed with that museum. anyroad, maybe tomorrow i’ll post them with a few thoughts about the contents of the museum. meanwhile, gotta take the canine round the block… constantine’s been universally slated, and so to plan b, Anchorman.

Off to SF

Sita’s performing her ablutions, I’ve just had a chat with me folks and have been checking out the usual B3TA nonsense. And we’ll be off for a drive in a minute… Hope there’s no burglars reading. Maybe I should wait till we get back before i hit the ‘post it’ button… US/UK difference #452, collect the set: The verb ‘To burglarize’ (US), versus ‘To burgle’ (UK). Both look odd when you stare at them, but why use, sorry, utilize 3 syllables when 2 will do?

Anyroad, back to b3ta, i overestimated by about 10 quid the prices on this ‘guess the price of the Tesco Value grocery item’ game. Can’t believe the price of sliced bread. It costs an arm and a leg down the local safeway here. and tastes like sugar.

Any to any burglarizererers reading… we’ll be back at any moment and the dog will deafen you if you get near the house. then chew your foot. he may eat your toenails given half a chance. also, i’m taking my zire 72 with me so there’s nowt to steal. got that? you scoundrels…

Me folks

have been to Salcombe for a couple of days, looking forward to hearing how it went on a marathon phone session tomorrow. Dad’s already posted some pix of them pottering around the seaside (click for bigger, 87k).

I have a 3-day weekend which started 10 minutes ago courtesy of the presidents of the united states of america. Which is the first nice thing they’ve ever done for me, frankly. I am pitifully grateful. Not just a 3 day weekend, but also a four day week. What are the chances, eh? Shall fill every waking minute with soul-nourishing activities. I promise. Mind you, I fancy seeing that Constantine film too, I’ve not read any reviews of it yet though… and i have to watch anchorman first before i take it back to blockbuster. despite the “end of late fees” they’re trumpetting, if you don’t return it in time, you’ve just bought that DVD and its crappy yellow case. harumph.

My new driving license arrived today with the cheesiest of grins on it… 10 out of 10 for speed of processing, bugger all for pressing the camera button at the wrong time. I refuse to take any responsibility for how I look in that photo. Someone at the DMV owns a copy of photoshop and has too much time on their hands.

A couple of new signees on the guestmap- let’s give it up for Tash and ‘Naridu‘ from blighty and oz respectively. It’s quite fun to surf around the world via people’s guestmaps. 7 degrees of separation and all that.

Trader Joes and view from Treasure Island

So the camera in my Zire 72 isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad. here’s a couple of shots. One, as promised earlier, of waiting in Trader Joe’s queue for the checkout. You’ll just about make out a lot of wine and After Eights. There’s no flash, but the second picture is beter: a view of the Bay Bridge from Treasure Island next to San Francisco where i ended up this morning by accident on the way to Berkeley.

Not sure on the etiquette here…

feblast99visits (3k image) Is it so wrong to post my site statistics like this? I find it immensely gratifying that people surf by from Algeria to San Jose searching for information on schipperkes, pictures of bunnies and Michael Jackson Dance moves. And talking of searching, S**ita’s name’s been searched and replaced with Sita in all previous entries, just have to wait for a reindexing by all the major search engines to get her web anonymity back. And to break into Mountain View and wave large magnets around next to Google’s data bank of cached pages. Maybe tomorrow on the way to Berkeley…

‘Mirrackullous Chai-neese Chork’- N.B. Post contains strategic misspellings

A n t s found my desk today so i went to the local chinese 99 cent store and asked if they had any insecti cide, sprays, powders, or chal k maybe? He asked how many, I said 5 (cos this stuff is hard to source) and he solemnly reached into the depths of the area behind the counter and quickly put them in a black plastic bag and took his 4.96 +tax. This chalk stuff is incredible, ants sniff it and fall down dead. I’ve always been amazed that this ‘non-toxic’ mix of homeopathic herbs and lemon extract could do that… Maybe a little naive on my part… Anyroad, I read the label and this time, instead of ‘non-toxic’ it says low-poisonous which was a little concerning… so I googled it and here’s one of the articles about it. Not quite as homeopathic as I’d thought…
On the other hand, the active ingredient, deltameethrinee is a common insecticide, the D E A seems to have issues with it being in handy chawk stick form which kids might eat/use. Which is fair enough, but we don’t have kids. just a dog and rabbits and they’ll be kept well away.
What do you reckon? Comment me your thoughts…
In other news. Une autre jour infernale chez CA 95076.

‘Mirracullous Chai-neese Chork’

A n t s found my desk today so i went to the local chinese 99 cent store and asked if they had any insecticide, sprays, powders, or chal k maybe? He asked how many, I said 5 (cos this stuff is hard to source) and he solemnly reached into the depths of the area behind the counter and quickly put them in a black plastic bag and took his 4.96 +tax. This chalk stuff is incredible, ants sniff it and fall down dead. I’ve always been amazed that this ‘non-toxic’ mix of homeopathic herbs and lemon extract could do that…
Maybe a little naive on my part… Anyroad, I read the label and this time, instead of ‘non-toxic’ it says low-poisonous which was a little concerning… so I googled it and here’s one of the articles about it. Not quite as homeopathic as I’d thought…
On the other hand, the active ingredient, deltameethrinee is a common insecticide, the DEA seems to have issues with it being in handy chalk stick form which kids might eat/use. Which is fair enough, but we don’t have kids. just a dog and rabbits and they’ll be kept well away.
What do you reckon? Comment me your thoughts…
This post contains a few strategic misspelllinggs…

I’d always wondered about this

Hello peeps, my favourite bit of the b3ta newsletter this week is this link to an explanation of what psychiatrists are up to when they administer the Roschach test- the one with butterflies and all that and, to quote Roy Walker, you say what you see… One part says that if you can’t see anything in the ink splodge, it indicates neurosis. I dimly remember taking the colour blindness test aged 7 or so, at Kingston St. Mary primary school and saying i couldn’t see any numbers at all and getting concerned looks from the nurses who were administering it. I think, for some reason, that year I really wanted glasses and hadn’t quite understood the purpose of the screening and i was probably quite a neurotic child too. I’ve still got 20-20 vision though, and when i was renewing my license in the DMV t’other day the only mistake I made on the ‘Read the 5th row of letters part’ was pronouncing ‘zed’ the correct way rather than the Sesame Street way… and blinking when they took the photo… I think.

In other news, my Zire-72-mother-of-all-mid-price-palm-pilots has arrived, so expect more mundane photography as I’ll always have a camera with me… And this is me in the queue at Trader Joes, and here’s me at the bus stop, and this is my office, so’s this one… etc. it’s grand and i can now play scrabble in full colour, record sounds, take pix, listen to mp3s, and much, much more.

Je ne l’ai pas passe tres bien aujourd’hui

Ca fait beaucoup de temps depuis que j’ecris en francais. Le bon chose c’est qu’on ne peut pas ecrire les accents avec le clavier qwerty que j’utilise. Je crois que quand j’ecris en francais c’est plus comme espanole avec les mots subtitues. Anyroad, Le boulot etait afreux. J’en ai marre. Vraiment. Ah bugger it… i’ll get over it.

link of the day for stateside internauts: maps.google.com is such a useful and technologically impressive site. search for ‘book shops in santa cruz, ca’ and zoom in. marvellous. and you can drag the map around with the mouse. well handy.

Happy Pancake Day

The trick is to put so much sugar on, you can’t taste the 4 different sources of saturated fats…
pancake (12k image)
G’night all…

Marching Band wouldn’t have me (see previous entry)

Thank you and welcome, new guestmappees, Tanya, Brittnie, and Matt. And cheers for the emails, Bethan & Jesse… 44 Gmail invites to go… Get’em while they’re hot.

Sita and the rest of the Monarchs had a resounding victory at basketball last night. Fair play to anyone who’s prepared to do anaerobic physical activity from 9 to 10 pm weekdays. It got a bit heated at times with some refereeing decisions…

Here’s my latest present to meself (I just broke my palm pilot), expect lots of low-res digital photos on this blog v. soon… am REALLY looking forward to this one arriving…

I’m off to try out for marching band…

How to Blog:

14. remember: nobody cares which N*Sync member you are, what State you are, which Party of Five kid you are, or which Weezer song you are. the second you put one of those things on your blog you need to delete your blog and try out for the marching band. similarilly, nobody gives a shit what the weather is like in your town, nobody wants you to change their cursor into a butterfly, nobody wants to vote on whether your blog is hot or not, and nobody gives a rat ass what song youre listening to. write something Real for you, about you, every day.

“50 new Gmail Invites”

If you’re internet obsessed enough to read other people’s blogs you probably have about 3 email addresses already. But if you’re interested in a Gmail account, there’re about to become a lot less exclusive since I now how 50 invites to give away. Add yerself to me guestmap and I’ll email you an invite. You can zoom in on the map if you don’t think there’s enough space…