Let’s start with Friday. I got home from work around 5ish and Sita and I took Mr. Atticus to the beach where he was correctly identified as part schipperke by a stranger. This happens with alarming regularity, many denizens of Santa Cruz appear to have an encyclopedic knowledge of dog breeds. My in-built dog reference guide has bulldog and poodle with a big gap in between. anyroad, after much leaping around and photography we headed home, put Atticus out to pasture and brought Klem and Lulu in for a hop around the furniture… Then we went out for a sophisticated romantic dinner at Pearl Alley Bistro with fine wine and rare meats, dessert and an espresso, all bankrolled by my folks as birthday treat. We went to Well Within and on the way out saw a friend from Scotts’ Valley High, where I used to work, we spent 15 minutes in the street catching up on the goings on of the last few months, and agreed we’d meet up for a beer in the near future. We said our goodbyes and then, as one, turned around and said let’s have them now. Lo it came to pass and we spent the rest of the evening getting through pitchers of Newcastle Brown in the Poet and Patriot pseudo-Irish pub and talking nonsense. Result. or ‘Epic’ as some readers of this blog may say… got home settled Mr.A into his deluxe doggy bed and hit the hay… cue saturday morning. – TO BE CONTINUED- Have to go and watch sita play netball with girls from ucsc at the local elementary school.

Sun streams in throught the window, coffee gets brewed, breakfast is slowly knocked together and a nice long phone call from me mum’n’dad arrives… after that i saddle up the Nissam Altima, get me mobile, radio and camera together and I headed off into the Santa Cruz mountains for to explore the sights and sounds. I timed it just right to hear Car Talk, This American Life and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell me on NPR. And when they ran out I had a few episodes fo the ‘The 99p Show’ burnt onto CDs. Went all along route 9, stopping at the summit for an hour’s walk or so with well pretty views, then moseyed on to Saratoga for a coffee, a muffin and to pick up a copy of The Wave and then onto town…

Haven’t even had me coffee yet but i wanted to share this home-made e-card from bert(1 meg PDF). He’s a designer, you know, and has a heart of fluffy gold. Hope Carter USM and Fatboy Slim don’t sue.
Bert features in the gallery of London pix from last Summer (short hair, Hugh-Laurie-a-like) if you’re new to all this…
more later

I’ve been having a great weekend, not blogging is usually a good sign… just made proper chips, with oil and potatoes and salt and vinegar. and peas and lasagne and baked beans and a pint of dry blackthorn cider. living like croesus… Anyroad, according to a 10-question meme:

Took loads of photos as the sun set yesterday. Click on the picture to see the gallery.

I’ve nearly got all the things I had to do today more or less under control and to celebrate, I added another couple of reviews. Here’s one all about Louis DeBernieres’s’s’s’s’ tiny little book, Red Dog, and here’s another for Black Books. There’s a nice unifying theme in the last three reviews…. red dogs, black books, dogs in the night time… maybe not.
You can also click on the links on the ‘consumed’ section to the right, of course.

I’m thinking of putting a tagline by the reviews, something like ‘Making other people’s efforts all about me since 2004’. Suggestions?.. In fact, I remember reviewing The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett as a last minute, ‘Arse, I need more coursework to submit for my GCSE English Language’ thing aged 16, so maybe since 1991… keep checking by.

ridiculously busy at work right now. reports, planning, training, supervision and budgets. it’s up to you to guess how much fun it all is.

At least 30 people came to our party last night and at one stage dancing broke out. The empty bottles won’t fit in our huge recycling wheelie bin. And even Atticus behaved himself. T’was grand. There’s a few photos which I’ll get on here soon of peeps. Anyroad, thanks to everyone who came. It more than made up for our uneventful new year’s eve.

Cheers for the e-mails, Mark & Annelise. Off to play scrabble now will write soon…

Sita had her Qualifying Exam this morning from 9-12. She was up at 5, bless her, preparing. And I just heard she’d passed so CONGRATULATIONS, guapita! This means she is ‘ABD’ which sounds like a hyperactivity disorder (and just may be…) but means she’s ‘All But Dissertation’ for her PhD, so she’s done all the classes and written the papers and just needs to do her dissertation to walk out as Doctor Sita, it’s still 2 years or so away, but this is a MAJOR step. Am well proud of me little wifey… 99 bottles of beer quiz tonight, which is a little less intimidating than a verbal exam in front of 5 awe inspiring professors. Party on Saturday…! (and that’s 2 exclamation marks more than i usuall write in a blog entry) ! 3…

also, a friend just emailed me with the following poser:
“I’ve lately embarked on a sci-fi/fantasy movie project with my nephew. he’s fascinated by lord of the rings, but new to the concept of sci-fi and fantasy as genres. so now i get to watch all sorts of cool old movies with him, as an intervention, education sort of thing. or i could refrain from theorizing it, and just say it’s a good excuse to watch fun, silly, and/or good movies. got any suggestions?”

I said Back to the Future trilogy, Labyrinth, Hitchhiker’s Guide, the Black Hole and a few others, but what would you recommend, please help the education of the future leaders of America with the ‘Comment’ link, ta…

didn’t sleep last night, went to work feeling faint and came home, slept. Reviewed ‘the curious incident of the dog…’, went to video shop, rented ‘Hero’ and ‘The Control Room’. Still not 100%… 2 days to sita’s QEs. 3 days to Atticus getting a bath.

Not one for you dialluppers… It takes a good 30 seconds to download even on broadband.

when a Brit of Trivia happens at local bar, 99 bottles of beer, and lo and behold there’s a picture of us from a while ago. Have a look here. We’re half-way down, on the right. After Sita QEs on Wed, we’re going to spend the evening there and have a fiesta of sorts on Friday too. Anyroad, just finished a nice meal and may well head off to Blockbuster for more entertainment. righty, hasta pronto, gwyn

Just finished making a calendar with Ofoto for me grandmothers. Here’s the cover picture. I made it a while ago with a program called fotomosaic which seems to have disappeared off the face of the interweb. You tell it which picture to work on and what pictures to use to fill it, and hey presto, you have a 25 meg file. Hopefully the calendars’ll arrive b4 the end of January.

Didn’t really make it out last night… Scott, Becky & Naomi came round and we cooked, drank and ate stuff. Then they left b4 midnight so sita and I watched a few amateur fireworks in our street then tried to locate the phone (in vain) while it rang several times, eventually retrieving messages from such luminaries as Meg’n’Matt, me folks and Sam. Which was nice. Next year we’ll endeavour to keep the phone in an obvious place come midnight… I’m still surprised that they put footage of New York counting down on at 12 despite it having happened 3 hours before. Odd.

Got another “This review was helpful to me” vote from Amazon. Here’s the link to my reviews if you fancy it. Reviewer #24840 and counting…

I seem to remember muttering recently about having survived Swansea at kicking-out time enough times to look after myself in Santa Cruz. Well I just read in a lovely article in the Grauniad that tonight (31st Dec) in the UK “About 1.6 million people are expected to get into fights today”, “53% of the Welsh have not even thought about their plans.” and fun fact # 3: “the website surveyed 10,000 people on the internet and worked out that fully half the country will have snogged by midnight.” Fair warms the cockles…

What do you reckon to shoving this in the rapidly-filling-up right column? I haven’t accessed this blog on dial-up for a long time so if it’s going to add more download time to the page, it’s probably not worth it. It shows the current weather, moon phase, etc in Yeovil, Somerset, UK Comments? 😉

One last thing… I made a quick and nasty site for ABC, one of the child abuse prevention programs I manage, have a butcher’s here. It’s a work in progress, I’ll be digging out my copy of Flash MX to perk it up a tad soon enough…

Just saw “Closer” with Jude Law and Natalie Portman and various others. It’s great entertainment if you enjoy watching grown-ups breaking up with each other and getting back together again or not. Anyroad, Sita loved it and as such on the right in the “Consumed box”, Sita will be rating films with the Klem icon (the brown one) out of 5… just so people don’t assume she’s just as fond of I, Robot, as I am, or whatever…

Tons to do at work, and there’s all the peace and tranquility in the world to do it in, but I think I work better with the hum of activity around me…

Went to San Jose airport last night, Becky and little Naomi were meant to arrive the same time at SJC as Scott, but storms around CA stopped that occurring, so we picked em up and took them home and Scott got back in the early hours.

Should be off to the cinema tonight for some flickery. Really must catch up on the odd review, maybe that can be yet another new year’s resolution. I’m reading Hitchhiker, a biography of Douglas Adams, it’s the 2nd one I’ve read of him. This one’s a little too anorak-y, full of useless info “Douglas was paid 280 pounds for 2 minutes of material in episode 5 of Weekending in 1976” type stuff and footnotes…

Anyroad, got some work to do here. Don’t be shy in using the guestmap, if my sister’s pets can add their names to it, anyone can…

Pix of Mr.A by the sea…