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…
Dad mentioned he’d put up pix from xmas festivities back home, and here they are. Cast includes: Mum (jenny), Dad (john), Sister (Bethan), Future sister-in-law (Ali), Grandma (Dad’s mum, Lillian), & Nanny (Mum’s mum, Winnie). and Jed, Beth’n’Ali’s dog.
Sita and I stayed in last night and watched all of the first series of Peep Show. It is fantastic. Thank you Bethan and Ali for that one. It’s bloody brilliant, we were in stitches. Televisual find of the year.
I got hiccups 5 different times yesterday. And since someone googled “necrophilic photos” and arrived at my book reviews page. I’m going to list my favourite hiccough cures here and try and encourage some healthier traffic to the site.
1. Drinking from the other side of a glass. Which involves bending right over and resting the far side of the glass on the inside of your top lip with the other side nearly over your chin. Drink the whole pint of water. NB Beer won’t work.
2. Get a pint of water (beer sometimes works). Take a deep breath, don’t exhale. Take a gulp of yer water, say “Hiccups I have got”, don’t breathe, take another gulp, say “Hiccups I don’t want”, another gulp, “Hiccups go away”, gulp, “hiccups are no more”. Slowly exhale and resume regular breathing.
3. When all else fails: Relaxation technique. Lie down, listen to your breathing. Point your toes far forward, breathe in, hold, then exhale as you relax them. Then again, this time pointing them towards you. Then yer thighs, tense, hold, exhale, then legs, then hands, then arms, then stomache, head. Stop once your hiccups go away… This can take 10 minutes or so.
Oh, and click ‘more’, below, for the results from the latest meme I found on Flash’s site
{{popup sita+klem.jpg sita+klem 480×640}}sita+klem
{{popup sally+lulu.jpg sally+lulu 480×640}}sally+lulu
{{popup bunnywaistcoat.jpg bunnywaistcoat 640×480}}bunnywaistcoat
sita+klem
sally+lulu
Well Xmas eve was grand… lots of nice pressies given and received. Daniel & Monica came round and stayed the night. Atticus behaved himself for most of the evening. But, in retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have given him leftovers, and Dominican Republic egg-nog, rompope, after he’d already finished off the brie. It played merry hell with his digestion and Sita has finally got around to cleaning up after him. I got Sita a gizmo called “BowLingual” which is based on bleeding-edge Japanese research and after configuring it for “Schipperke” and entering his name we tried it out by getting Sally to say 3 words and thus put him into a frenzied barking rage. The machine started applying its algorithms and condensed wisdom of the generations and it turns out that far from being a murderous call-to-arms, Atticus was merely saying “Let’s Play!”. Who’d’ve thunk it? Then Daniel sneezed which meant “I’m misunderstood!”. Suffice to say I’m glad I kept the receipt…
I woke up at about 3am not sure where I was (on the sofa in the living room), and after locating the Pepcid antacid stuff, ibuprofen and drinking 3 pints of water, i couldn’t get back to sleep and grabbed me coat and set off to explore the Santa Cruz coastline. I walked for about an hour heading towards the barks of sealions and ended up being confronted by either the most bellicose urban fox this side of the zoo or a mini-mountain lion. Having studied the sign for preparing for mountain lion attacks, I made myself look big by stretching my coat over my head and waving me arms around making loud shoo noises while slowly backing off. The animal started coming towards me, then a car went past and scared him off a bit and I walked away (backwards) v. fast. They tend to go for joggers, so I wasn’t going to run anywhere. So I couldn’t go back that way and wandered off to the pier where there wasn’t a soul. Just hundreds of seagulls doing their best Alfred Hitchcock impression and staring at me with their unblinking scavenging eyes. So I had a bit of a sit down and watched the moon reflected in the waves for a while. All very calming and I was having a think about what was going on in Blighty (see me dad’s blog for pix) then mosied on down towards central Santa Cruz and then back to the house. Sita had woken up 30 minutes before and was worried enough about my whereabouts to have woken her mum up. Lucky she hadn’t been up for all 3 hours… Sita appears to think there’s some kind of curfew in operation and I should have brought my ID at the very least. And I could have been assaulted or summink. And me, a veteran of closing time on the Kingsway, Swansea. Say what you like about the states, but I’ve never felt threatened by people on the street, unlike late Friday/Saturday in any UK town you care to name. Anyroad, I’m glad Sita didn’t call me mum up to worry her like when I went for a nap in the basement once at a hallowe’en party and she thought i must have had an onset of schizophrenia and was a danger to others and myself…
Anyroad, got back to sleep eventually and was woken up by a nice phone call from me folks but i hadn’t had enough coffee yet. so made coffee with me new grinder from sally, and headed off to that building with the pointy roof and the men in dresses who chant songs with words that don’t make sense or rhyme and play with incense and children. The mass was mercifully brief and then breakfast and the rest of the afternoon was spent with more pressies and working out how to convert PAL DVDs to NTSC format (“Never The Same Colour twice”, according to me Dad).
Sally’s cooking away right now and we’ll be dining in style again in a couple of hours. Anyroad, I hope you had a lovely Christmas, dear reader, and will check back again to see how the obedience training’s going. Also, another pressy for sita was a harness & lead for bunnies. We’ll be test-driving that one soon and may well be a photo-op. Stay tuned & nadolig llawen (mispelled Welsh for happy xmas) and bloywen newith dar (phonetic welsh fer ‘appy new year”)
Jesus… he’s not getting on with the grandparents. Can’t stand much more of this barking & aggression… Mayday. Mayday.
have a look at some photos that just went up in me dad’s blog.
ABC and PAPAS had out Xmas luncheon last week. Here’s me giving it some.
Twas the night antes de Christmas and all through the casa,
not a creature was stirring ?Caramba! ?Qu? pasa?
Los ni?os were tucked away in their camas,
some in long underwear, otros in pijamas.
Click ‘More for full poem.
And after much research it seems that Atticus is definitely some kind of Schipperke. A belgian dog, no less. Fond of children but not ‘Vermin’. So he’s probably not going to get on famously with our little varmints, Klem and Lulu. Ah well…
Saw ‘The Incredibles’ last night. Blimey. 4 Lulus. and saw ‘Sideways’ last week, 4.5 Lulus. I aint got time to review them so I’ll be coming up with some box that blogs what I’ve seen + a few comments in the near future. UPDATE- 10:45pm Sunday night, there you go, on the right, in that IFrame. Just what I wanted… so if I get time to write reviews I’ll link to them from there. I’m going to go to bed all self-satisfied now. Sita’s wrapping pressies in the living room and I’m not allowed in. Any suggestions for presents for the girl who has everything?
Read More “Sita forwarded me this. Me gusta…”
Late News: My cousin Ian and his missus, Yuri, had a baby boy, William James Fisher, weighing in at 8 lbs on Wednesday. He will be the first Fisher with an American accent unless Ian keeps his videos of Jeeves and Wooster on permenant rotation. Also, as the product of two of the finest minds in the county he’ll probably be up for his first Nobel prize by his 4th birthday. Congratulations to the pair of you.
We handed over the keys to 629 last night. After all the sweat and tears of cleaning that place (& thanks for your help, Tanya) I was hoping for a “Dude, you guys like totally cleaned this place. Damn! Awesome job!” from the official UCSC bloke, but nope. So it ended not with a bang, but a whimper and an overpowering smell of disinfectant. It was a nice little house, but we’re up for bigger and better things now…
Scott & Tanya came round again and we ate, drank and played scrabble again. and i fell asleep on the sofa before they’d left again. I really have to work on that. Tanya got a ‘bingo’ in scrabble as they say, all seven letters with the 50 extra points. I got 121 in one go on my palm pilot scrabble t’other day. Still not enough to beet Scott’s 123 with QANATS but I’m on it. Oh yes. It had been a long day though.
I recently discovered the joys of bittorrrent and more specifically the site target=”_blank”>YouKayNova.com which has all kinds of UK telly torrrents on it. I was happy enough just to be able to find tons of radio programmes to burn to CDs, but it looks like last night I went one step further and can now burn pretty good quality DVDs of programs like Room 101, Have I got News for You, Ivor the Engine & much much more. I’m still wary of getting slapped with a law suit if I downloaded full-on films so I’ll just stick to renting those, but I can’t see the BBC going after people for sharing files. The Beeb was talking about using bittorrrent to distribute radio programs fairly recently. So…
One of the many things I miss about the UK is the quality telly. And I never even had cable over there. You can peruse the back page of Guardian Two and join the dots between programs to keep yourself entertained for a good few hours every evening. Ad free on BBC 1 & 2, and on the other 3 channels even the adverts are occasionally amusing or intelligent. And they don’t run for 5 minutes urging you to ask your doctor about the “Purple Pill” or somesuch and then 2 minutes spewing out a list of side effects like nausea, sexual disfunction, boils, and premature balding as men and women dance around a beach at sunset and some brandname with a couple of ‘X’s and ‘Z’s lights up the sky. Which is nice. The US program Jeopardy has about the same type of audience as Countdown in the UK. Both last half an hour (last time I checked). Somehow Jeopardy fits 3 spasms of adverts into its running time. The show itself lasts 20 minutes all told. With Countdown you’ve got a short break in the middle with about enough time to make a nice cup of tea and settle back down for the second half, at worst you may catch a glimpse of Thora Hird selling Stannah Stairlifts from beyond the grave as you head back from the kitchen, but I know which I prefer.
I can’t watch a film on TV in the states, neither. First off, because they’re a) censored beyond belief and b) rarely worth watching. But mainly because in the event you do get into watching a film, the bloody adverts keep coming at you faster and faster until in the final half hour they practically interupt every other sentence uttered. I think there’s an inverse relationship between climate & winter hours of daylight versus general TV quality but that’s for another day.
So that’s my rant. Thank Jeebus I have my interweb to keep me entertained. Might be time for a coffee now… cheersy- gwyn
The rabbits had a much needed jump around the living room with us. Took lots of photos. 
Had an Xmas luncheon yesterday with all the staff along with secret santa scarves and cake… Then in the evening a social event for all the families in PAPAS which turned out to be exhausting but fun. Really need this week to come to an end soon though for a bit of a rest… Friday’s when we hand the keys back for our old place. Nowt much to blog, watched The Gift the other night. Predictable, but scarey in places. 3 Lulus. I need to catch up on all my reviews. I’m about to finish The Dirt- Motley Crue’s autobiography. Tommy’s in prison for wife beating right now… it’s a disturbing read. Anyroad, that’s yer lot for today, back at the weekend probly. All the best, gwyn
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