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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?
(more…)

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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As you can see, I’ve been trying to change the templates for this blog so make it a dynamic size rather than fixed width. it’s not behaving itself though. You can’t preview the changes you make, so you have to wait 15 minutes for it to rebuild all the files and so I’m leaving it as it is for a bit… The latest bell/whistle I’ve added is the current weather for Santa Cruz under the moon phases thing…

Had a fine time yesterday, we almost finished cleaning up 629. Just the oven and the bathroom left to do. On the way home we stopped at “Ye Olde Watering Hole”, our nearest bar. It’s alright, touch screen quiz machines, pinball, pool table all present and correct. Too much American Football on the tellies though and the only beer on tap is Budweiser. Anyroad, had a swift bottle of Sierra Nevada with sita, then we got supplies in for the night including Funyuns- America’s anwer to twiglets. Then Tanya & Scott came round and we dined, drank and played scrabble and trivial pursuit. I also learnt that Graham is pronounced Gram in US english. I already knew, but shall repeat here, that Craig is pronounced Kreg and Atticus is Addicus. Like, enough already. WTF DUDE. LOL. ROFL. That’s a link to a 12-year-old AOLer translator… enjoy.

Plans for today include dog walking and scarf shopping… and i’d quite like to see The Indredibles. See yas

Click on the pic of Atticus for a few pix from this morning which serve as illustrations to the goings on round Santa Cruz way. Massachusetts residents, take note of the lack of snow…
So I rang me Mum this morning and she sounds a lot better and feels it too. She’s still too housebound for her liking but the end is in sight. See picture “Sita on the phone with mum” for a visual aid. Dad finishes school next wed so at least there’ll be some company for mum and dad can forget about malfunctioning computer networks for a few weeks.

I went to the garage to get petrol and oil for “El Poderoso”, our ‘vintage’ lawn mower. I can’t remember if I mentioned buying this one, but basically the moral of the tale is never buy garden equipment in pitch black darkness, cash-in-hand on an as-is basis. It took a good half hour of fuel-spilling, cord-pulling and poking-bits-with-knives, but I was quite chuffed to get it working. Your average electric toothbrush has more power and I found myself having to slowly lower it onto daisies to keep the motor running. Still it’s done but I think we’re still in the market for a newer model.

Atticus barked for something like the third time as when i came back in the house i had petrol and oil smells all over me. So maybe he’ll be a good guard dog? As long as the burglar doesn’t carry any cats with him/her, cos he’s more than a little scared of them.

Lulu escaped from the bunny cage and was moseying around the garage when I went in to get the mower… he looked very sheepish but i managed to corner him and get him back in his deluxe accomodation. Blimey… well that’s life on the farm so far today, it’s not even 12 yet. we’re off to 629 Koshland to do some more cleaning up and to read the latest issue of Das Loopline- UCSC Family Student Housing’s monthly missive consisting of pictures to colour in, details of events like “Kiddy Song”, disaster drill articles and new commandments for living there. I’m expecting them to issue a curfew some time soon and maybe some new directives on naming your children.

Miserable weather here in SC, rain, wind, it’s just like Taunton… anyroad, at least I wasn’t getting neutered today which is more than I can say for the latest arrival to Bellevue St.. Sita was going to pick Atticus up from the shelter, but she had an exam to envigilate/proctor so I went meself. Atticus was carried out to me, cos he was still sleepy from his op, and handed over with all his medical records and suchlike. We had a painless journey to the house. I walked him round the garden for 20 mins or so, as per my instructions, in the dark. I then let him into the kitchen, let go of his lead and he darted off into the living room to crap slap bang in the middle of the carpet. I told him my feelings on this, said I was dissappointed rather than angry… I wasn’t sure whether to get dog shit clearing up equipment or my digital camera… I plumped for the former and we went on a 30 min walk round the block. We encountered 1 cat on the way which reared up and Atticus tried to hide, then I called round Tanya’s who provided me with vittals and good cheer and is coming round later to make veggie lasagna. Atticus is in the kitchen now. I am in me office. I’m about to download an mp3 of Talking Heads “Once in a lifetime”.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?
And you may ask yourself, what’s that scratching sound on the kitchen door?

Sita seems happy. He’s a very dark dog, might have to wait for daylight for decent pix.

If I’m understanding everything right, today we pick up Sita’s dog from the pound. He was called Sputnik by the staff there, was briefly renamed Huasco last night, and today is probably Atticus (of To Kill a Mockingbird Fame). Anyroad, just wanted to blog that this is the last dog-less day I’m going to have for next 13 years or whatever they live to be. On the plus side, at least we went from rabbits to a dog without acquiring a cat along the way, on the negative side, AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH how did this happen? Post from now on may acquire the title “Confessions of a reluctant dog owner”… photos soon, natch.

Here’s just one of the three 4′ tall ice sculptures:
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I took bloody tons of photos, but because I didn’t have a tripod, they’re all blurred to buggery due to atmospheric indoor lighting and shaky hands. I should’ve learnt by now. At Joop & Laura’s get together t’other night he showed me his new SLR digital camera. It was a sight to behold and to wield. I’m experiencing yet another bout of camera-envy… Anyone want to buy my Fuji Finepix S5000? One careful owner? 250 of your earth dollars… or 6 pounds, probably given the exchange rate these days.
Have you ever been to www.last.fm ? It rocks- enter 3 of your favourite artists, choose someone with a playlist that looks to your taste, then listen to streaming radio from that person’s favourites list. You rate the tracks as you go and teach it what you like and it should start showering you with nothing but tunes you like. It’s, like, a radio TIVO. And it’s free apparently. It might start weaning me off NPR and BBC Radio 4…

Just received these lovely pix of Bethan and Ali’s new puppy, Jed
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In other news, hot tubs rock…
am feeling a little cloudy today, monica surprised us with a visit this morning and went for breakfast downtown, and we’re off to a Hindu wedding with horses and everything this afternoon…

I was planning to do some kind of E-advent calendar- I only just realised it’s december, that means there’s already 2 chocolates waiting to be devoured- anyroad, it may still happen. In the meantime, I never got round to posting any Mexico photos from last year. I had planned to write a novel of some sort, but instead I took about a thousand photos and learnt how to use photoshop. I was a bit too enamoured with the photo border plug-ins, but have a look at a sample of pix from the trip here