What can you say ?

The football was crap but the company and music ( not to mention the BBQ) was brill.


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Location:Newbold Back Ln,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

England v Germany Party

Big screen football at
the Ballroom followed by a Tesco Finest BBQ. .
Every little helps....


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I've got my first baking gig !

Quite excited, I've just got my first baking gig!
It's a school fête actually, but the deal is you pay £10 for a stall and get to keep the money that you make.
I will keep it quite simple, Muffins, CupCakes and Scones and then limit to three types of each. I do need to think about the quantities though!
Better start thinking about it, the event is the afternoon of 2nd July. My sister has kindly offered to pick me up as I still don't have car. I could have got my goodies via the motorbike but I suspect that I would have looked like something from Wallace and Grommet
Today I will be mostly trying out Apple and Cinnamon muffins!
Any ideas for cup cakes ?

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Location:Woodmere Dr,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

Feedback

If you are following the blog and think it's OK I will be more than happy to recieve feedback via the 'comments' functionality.
Retirement is lonely and sometimes I don't speak to other people for days on end.....
:-)
Only kidding but feedback on posts would be gratefully recieved.

Snail

I'm plagued with Snails, not normal snails but fuck-off  huge snails and they are eating my new 'erb garden.
At first sight I was charitable and gently lifted them out of the container and placed them in another part of the garden where they could munch on the weeds and other vegetation till their hearts content.

No..... That's not good enough for these greedy bastards, they much prefer the Hilarys sweet lemon mint, French golden Oregano and other tasty occupants of my bed of gastronomic delights. They appear also to be quite partial to my Sufina (miracle plant of the 90's) too.

Be warned  you slugs with a mortgage. I am on your case. Through neccessity I have taken to getting up in the middle of the night. Armed with a torch I track them down. I'm beyond gently repositioning them. They are now flicked from my garden trowel onto the hard car park  with a great deal of force.... They can then cook in the summer sun (if it ever comes back)  or make make tasty morsels for numerous birds in the neighourhood.  

Get a penchant for dot leaves and nettles you slimy grubs or you are history............

An ironic footnote -They also like Garlic......

England v USA

Football isn't football without Pie and Mushy peas at the match!


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Location:High St,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

Resiliant little buggers

Only 10 days after the massacre of their young the parents have dusted themselves down, built a new nest  (from my new hanging basket I have to say) and populated it with yet more pastel blue cadburys mini eggs. I'm not sure how many but I have had a surupticious pike and can see at least two. Lets hope they have better luck this time around. Thankfully, they have had the sense to pick a less accessible location in the Leylandi hedge.
I shall be keeping an eye on Charlie this time. I would be very dissapointed if his recent murderous activity is repeated and he turns out to be a serial killer.

Testing BlogPress

I've just spent quite a long while setting up a "blog" account. I had previously had my own website but after a big falling out with my hosting company I decided to bin the blogging website and move http://www.soloartwork.com/, my art website, to a new hosting company, taking the opportunity to do a bit of redesign and making it a little easier to manage using up to date technology. The blogsite is http://soloartwork.blogspot.com/

My old blog was more of a diary, there was no functionality to add comments. Google's 'Blogger' looked ideal. And even better, it was free. I set about pulling it all together and transferring some of the detail from my old website onto the new blog. After a few hours work it now seems that 'Blogger' does not work with iPad.

Bollocks!

The beauty of iPad and iPhone is you just switch them on and away you go. No waiting for the laptop or netbook to boot up and all that nonsense, it's pretty immediate, consequently I was a bit miffed that it didn't seem to work with the mobile

Is all lost? I think maybe not. I found this neat little app called BlogPress.

So let's see if it works..... It was only £1.79 so it's not the end of the world if it's crap. Will be ideal for my travels.

update- 8/6/2010 - Oh ye of little faith, it seems to work a treat. Obviously it does not have the full functionality but it is fine. I have quite a few people asking when the blog will be up and running so here goes. One nice little feature of Blogpress is the locations it gives when blogging on the move. It shows the reader where you are in the world when you post the blog. Wicked !

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Location:Woodmere Dr,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

Planning the tour of South East Asia

Where to go?

When you sit down and look at it South East Asia is a fucking big place.

The starting pont was booking my flights to KL. That done,via Emirates on Airmiles, it was on to sorting out the Itinary. I have a BIG list of places that I want to visit. In no particular order.

Borneo

Indonesia

Phillipines

Singapore

Hong Kong

China

Vietnam

Laos

Cambodia

India

Sumatra

Thailand

Myanmar 

As I start checking out the flights and connections it is becoming clear that I probably won't be able to fit them all in, never mind, will just have to go again in the new year.

I did start to feel ather like a travel agent ;-).

AirAsia is probably one of the best value budget airlines in the area.  They serve a whole host of destinations in the area at a really good price. Kuala Lumpur to Singapore - £9.00. Cheap as chips !

I'm likey to be spending the next few weeks getting the trip put together but the first bit is done.

iPad

Despite the fact I have no job and no income at the moment it's still OK to splash out £750 on the 64g wifi and 3G iPad.
I love it!!

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Location:Woodmere Dr,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

Murder most foul !

Spring is such a great time of year, my favourite season. Light mornings, spring flowers, tweeting birds springing lambs (hmmmm) and the promise of summer.

In the front of my home I have a Leylandi hedge, wouldn't have been my first choice, but living in a grade 2 listed building has some disadvantages.  You can't put a hanging basket up or change a plug without asking permission from the local authority listings department.

My apartment is a converted Ballroom in a Georgian Manor house. That in iself is unusual, but the fact that it used to be a lunatic asylum prior to being converted raises the interest stakes. Each Sunday morning, at least half a dozen cars stop outside and disgourged their pasengers. These are usually of ex asylum workers, ex asylum inmates or people genuinly interested in the conversion of the Ballroom.

 It was a bit of fun at start, but over the months this does start to get a bit of a pisser having people peer through your bay window. I did have people knock on the door and ask if they could look around.

I contacted the listings people at the council to ask if I could put a fence up and, as expected, the answer was a big NO.

Over the years, I had got to know the council chap at the listings department, indeed, he had always been most helpful. While declining permission to put up a fence, he did empathise with my problem and suggested a hedge.

The point of this posting is that in spring the hedge comes into it's own, after a winter of relative inactivity, it springs to life, growing at least a foot. In addition it also attracts wildlife.

Each of the last five years I have hosted a family of blackbirds. They slowly construct their new home in late April and mid May they deposit a clutch of eggs and wait. We have had a couple of cot deaths over the years but nothing to compare 2010.

On my return from Ireland at the end of April there was the ususal 'Spring like' activity in the animal kingdom and I knew there was also the usual interest in the hedge. I only usually get one nest and the hedge is somewhere near 30 metres long. What sort of idiot bird would build its nest 3 foot from the ground and right opposite a slate obelisk that also doubles as a cats scratching pole.

Guess what, this years tenant is a rather dim Blackbird, lovely singing voice but not a great deal between the ears ( do birds have ears ?)

Over the proceeding weeks while tidying up the garden I occasioned to pike into the hedge and observed  Monk - I like to give things names and as this female always appeared to have the 'monk' on I decided to name her 'Monk'

Monk was either sitting there or she was out doing what Blackbirds do, there were five powder blue speckled ( uncannily like the Cadbury's mini eggs ) laid in the nest.

At the end of May the eggs hatched and five little baby blackbirds came into the world.  Apart from my occasional pike into the nest to see that all was OK I had deliberately kept away from that part of the garden also avoiding cutting the hedge (much to the dismay of Liz next door who gives her hedge a short back and sides every other week.)

I didn't want the noise to scare the birds as they were getting to grips with life and building themselves up to fly the nest and  become next years spring  dawn chorus.

No such luck. Arriving back from visiting friends after the spring back holiday I was faced wih what can only be described and a massacre.  Around the nest on the blue slate chippings were the  body parts of the five young blackbirds torn to pieces.  Very little eaten, just tortured and torn to pieces and left for the flies.


I have no evidence but I'm pretty sure I know exactly who the culprit is. But what do you do?
Punish him? Five murders in coldblood and you didn't even eat them. Is killing something lower down the foodchain acceptable? I don't think so !


I know you did it Charlie. God will be your judge, but if you come around here you'll feel the back of my hand you nasty twat.

Location:Woodmere Dr,Chesterfield,United Kingdom

A Lazy Month !

May came, and May went.

What did I do? Absolutly nothing.....

Actually, I probably did, it just seemed that way. Going from long hours in BT, leaving at the end March and then straight to 12 - 14 hour days in the bakery it seems to me that I deserve a bit of a break. I did make myself a bit of a list but at the end of the month it is just a wee bit longer than it was at the start of the month.

My word of the month had to be 'manjana. It really suited my thinking.