Bye bye Beanies! Hello
Abel & Cole! I'm sick to death of every week getting a couple of carrots, a couple of courgettes, a lettuce, an onion, a couple of potatoes and cauliflower. Every fucking week. Well enough Beanies, enough. Abel & Cole now deliver in Sheffield, and they have more variety, allow you to block certain items (no more sprouts!) and deliver a wide range of other foodie items too. You account is managed online, where you can get a heads up of what to expect in the next box, and you are billed automatically (seriously Beanies, why can't you take my payment automatically, you useless hippies).
The downside is it's not cheap, but then Beanies wasn't exactly value for money either.
So, I'm giving it a go, I'll let you know how I get on.
Labels: food
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:23 PM
If you are my friend on Facebook (what do you mean you're not? Get with the program you
square!), you may have noticed that my blog now gets posted there too. Basically, facebook grabs the RSS feed every few hours and adds new posts as a "note". Quite a simple, yet effective integration. Simple is often the best, ain't it?
Labels: thefacebookrevolution
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 3:42 PM
Well, it's been a really nice weekend. Saturday was my birthday, and we did one of my favourite things in the world -
pottering about. Me & Liv pottered about the house, B&Q, Decathlon, CCC (camping shop) and Waitrose. I was as happy as Larry.
In the evening we did another of my favourite things, eating. We went for a meal at the seafood restaurant
Catch. It was a really nice meal. Then it was of to the Forum to Mai's 30th birthday party.
Sunday, we went to Leeds for the cricket, but as you can see from the post below, no cricket happened. Still, I was happy enough drinking all day.
Today, is Monday, but we're not at work. Imagine that! I've pottered about again, still happy as Larry. I might do some decorating in a bit.
And to top it all off, we've just a 3 1/2 day week this week, as on Friday, we're off to Oxford for the weekend.
Monday, May 28, 2007 5:29 PM
07:00 - Crawled out of bed
07:30 - Left the house to walk to the station
08:00 - Met everyone else and had a coffee
08:30 - Got to the platform, and in unison with everyone else went "What the fuck? Two carriages? Are you kidding me? They don't seriously expect us to stand for the entirity of the 90 minute journey to Leeds do they?".
It turns out that they do.
08:55 -
Parners and Hodge start the drinking.
10:00 - Arrive at the pub in Headlingly and everyone else
everyone else starts drinking.
11:00 - Still no cricket, but we head to the ground regardless and drink more beer.
12:30 - Still no cricket, so we drink more beer. Amuse ourselves by playing
see how many empty beer cups we can get into Phil's poncho hood before he notices. Quite a few it seems.
13:00 - Still no cricket, so watch a bit of grand prix on the telly at the bar. Tony and Liv start arguing about linguistics.
14:00 - Still no cricket, so leave the ground and go to
a bar down the road.
14:47 - Still no cricket, Tony and Liv are
still arguing about linguistics.
15:30 - Give up on the cricket, so head into town to get some
chow. I start drinking G&T and reach "the tipping point". Celebrate by wearing a pink scarf for two hours.
17:15 - Meet the rest of the gang at some
pool hall.
17:45 -
Phil tries to get some shut eye.
18:00 - Me, Liv, Satomi and Mark throw in the towel and decide to head home.
20:00 - Get home, grateful that we don't have to work tomorrow.
4:40 PM
All the kids are talking about. I have to fight to get at my laptop because Liv is usually logged into it.
Facebook: it's a bit like MySpazz, only a lot less spazzy.
So, after numerous attempts at trying to understand what it is (yes, I know it's a 21st century digital social networking utility on the internets, but
what does it do?) I decided to create an account and see what it's like for myself.
It's quite good really. I mean, it's of limited use to me right now because my peer group aren't really into it. But, I can see the point. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I'd say it's Friends Reunited done well. Or Friends reunited with Twitter and Flickr added on. And with blogger. Oh fuck it, I'm too tired for this and I've had some wine, and I can't be arsed to write an intelligent post about Facebook. The only way to really "get" Facebook is to try it out for yourself.
So, sign up and make me your friend. The way I see it, the more friends you have, the more use it will be. A bunch of folk have this week: Hot Phil, Christian, even Coco McRiley (I had to tell him there was an API before he'd even consider it). So if you sign up, you'll get to waste a bit of time, you'll probably find a few old friends you'd lost contact with, and you will know what all the fuss is about.
Thursday, May 24, 2007 9:34 PM
Last night I went for a swim for the first time since I was a teenager. It's an activity that has long been on my list of things that I need to do but have never got round to, despite the fact that I work 10 metres away from an International Competition standard swimming pool.
The first thing I'll say is that thank god you don't forget how to swim. At the back of my mind I was thinking: wouldn't it be embarrasing if I climbed in the pool, pushed away from the side, and then started to sink. Well you don't forget.
There are things that you do forget if you don't go swimming for that long: You forget what it feels like to swallow water that is chlorinated due to the fact that 4 year olds wee in it. You forget that there are people who think that the best way to swim a length is to imitate a drowning cat. But mostly you forget that swimming is an activity that makes you feel really good, and doesn't put nearly the amount of stress on your body that running does.
Plus, for some reason, when I bought my ticket they gave me a big bag of Liquorice Allsorts as a reward. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's to keep you coming back, in that the sweets totally nullify the burning of calorie that the swimming induces, forcing you back for more. Who cares why, they're liqourice allsorts!
Hopefully, this will become a weekly activity.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 7:12 PM
Sorry about aborting yet another blog post there. If someone sits next to me in the internet cafe at work and eats an apple, they might as well shoot meet in the knee cap. I find it literally that unpleasant. I'm not using the word literally ironically, it is literally that bad. If you want to know what it feels like to me to hear someone eat an apple, shoot yourself in the kneecap 16 times (assuming it takes 16 bites to eat an apple - maybe it's more, I don't know because I never stick around to find out). If one day the British public finally sees collective sense and make me their king, I will ban people from eating apples in my presense. People will say it is a strange eccentric quirk, they might even mock me, to which I will reply "Screw you, I'm the fucking king, I can do what I like and there's nothing you can do about it. If you don't like it, then perhaps you shouldn't have made me the king in the first place. You knew what I felt about apples, you knew."
If I had finished the previous post, I'd have gone on to say that I would no doubt have enjoyed it considerably more had I not been utterely exhausted and didn't have a headache and basically just want to be in bed. And if I didn't lose all the fucking time.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 6:20 PM
Last night I went to the dogs. I can't say I cared for it that much.
Basically, you stand in a ridiculously smokey bar (I can't
wait for the smoking ban), on uncomfortable seats, drinking crap beer and every so often you go and give a man behind a counter some of your money. In return he gives you a worthless slip of paper reminding you how much money you gave him, and the name of a dog. A dog that is pretty much gauranteed to come last in the 30 second race that follows.
I would tell you more, but someone has just sat down next to me and started to eat an apple, so I must leave now.
3:28 PM
It's oddly a long while since I've bought any CDs. I have just rectified that by buying blind a few new albums which I will now briefly review based on a single listen at work:
Bjork - VoltaVery good album this. That's to be expected really, this peculiar Icelandic sometime be-swanned freak box has never released an album that is anything less than very good. There's two types of Bjork album really: ones that are "
Very Good" and ones that are "
Very Good, with a bit of an edge too it". This falls into the latter category.
Rufus Wainwright - Release the StarsMore of the same from him really, which is a shame. I was hoping he'd have developed his sound a bit from
Want One and
Want Two, but this is not much of a leap forward. Maybe if I heard it in isolation without his back catalogue I'd be singing high-praises (with a melodramatic but overly synthesized string backing), but the fact is he does have a back catalogue that you simply have to consider when rating this.
Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst NightmareYeah, good innit. To be honest, they're a bunch of talented guys, so this was bound to be good. It will though be interesting to hear their "tricky third album". Let's hope they don't go down the Oasis road of just churning out the same sound over and over again without much artistic development and instead explore avenues that you wouldn't normally expect a bunch of spotty kids from Sheffield to tread.
Pick of the bunch? Bjork. Bless her.
Labels: music
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 1:08 PM
In general I agree with what
Jakob Nielsen says here, but feel that the fact that he has a head like a giant bollock detracts from his message.
Monday, May 14, 2007 3:50 PM
Huh? Eating meat is one thing, but I just don't understand why dead animal need be a vital part of
Mars Bars.
3:44 PM
Dammit. Today I was hoping to be able to fill you in on my 00 flour findings. Sadly things didn't go accordingly to plan. Last night I made Pizza dough using my favourite dough recipe for "New York Style" pizza: 1 pound flour, teaspoon dried yeast, half teaspoon of salt, half a pint of warm water and a table spoon of olive oil. It makes a tasty and manageable dough.
As usual I put the oven on for a few minutes to make it warm, then turned the oven off and left the dough in it to rise for an hour or so. Forty five minutes later I turned my attention to the topping, which would be a jar of passatta (reduced by half with added garlic and salt), buffalo mozerella, and roasted cherry tomatoes. Sadly, when I went to pre-heat the oven for the tomatoes, I forgot my pizza dough was in there. In its place was a half baked loaf of bread. Dammit.
I faired a bit better with the pasta, but the problem is I struggle with my little work surface getting it thin enough. Time to bite the bullet and get a pasta machine to roll it out good and proper.
This post would be longer and more interesting and better written, but the person next to me is eating an apple, so I must leave now.
1:26 PM
I like to make my own pizza and pasta. When you look at recipes for either, they usually recommend that you use type 00 flour.
"Fine," I exclaim at the recipe (not out loud - I'm not a mental)
"but where exactly am I supposed to buy type 00 flour? None of the supermarkets sell it, not even bloody Waitrose."Well it just so happens that I found a great Italian deli today, bursting with authentic Italian produce. In fact the place was so authentic that they struggled to understand me.
"Hello, shop keep," I didn't really say this, but let's pretend I did, as it emphasises the cultural divide between me and the aged nonna that served me -
"do you sell flour?""Uh?"
"Flour, do you sell flour? Like, pasta flour?"
"Go to the bottom of the shop..."
"right..."
"...and when you get there, ask the man who is down there."
"Right-o, thanks awfully!" I didn't say.
Well to cut a long story short, I asked the man at the bottom of the shop, and now have 2Kilos of type 00 flour, which this weekend I shall use to make
tagliettelle and if time allows, pizza.
The only long term draw back of all this is that this Italian Deli was in bloody Maidenhead, just round the corner from my company's head office, so if the stuff is really that much better, I can't exactly nip down there to pick up some more. But at least I can try it, and if I like it, make the effort to buy it online.
By the way, I just found out that making fresh pasta is bloody easy and not expensive. Basically, per person, you just mash together 1 egg and 100g flour into a dough, and then roll it out, and that's basically it. Maybe I'll do a proper post on pasta making before long.
Ciao for now.
Labels: food, pasta, pizza
Friday, May 11, 2007 9:00 PM
