Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Enterprising

Well yesterday I had to catch a train from King's Cross Station Platform 9b and look what I found next to it

I suppose so many people were looking for it that the station managers decided to put it there - or perhaps it was there all along!

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Tutorial

Hi all.



My good friend Jill is attempting to show me how to put in photos in the snazzy way that she does. So this is rather a random post that may well get abandoned









By the way that is Lacock Abbey(famous as a set for Harry Potter), The Louvre (famous for the Da Vinci Code) and the Sistine Museum (Just famous really)
Thankyou for you time
love
B00

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

briannoyes.co.uk

The website I have written for Brian is now released into the big wild world, so can you have a look and tell me what doesn't work. Please bear in mind that this is the first time I have done a website and that i did it on a free piece of software which is a little bit moody. For instance when I looked at some pages on the pc at work there appear to be broken links to photos on the left side of some pages, however these aren't on the pages in Kompozer and don't appear on the mac so I'm not quite sure how to get rid of them.

Brian is a bit embarrassed by it really but it does the job, which is to give information about him, about the compositions etc to anyone who might be interested and is much easier and less obvious than a fat list of works etc on paper. That's the idea.

I actually really enjoyed doing it, though sometimes when Kompozer would do something one day and not do it the next it got annoying. You can get lots of free stuff now where you fit the information into a template and they probably look better than what I have done but I didn't know about them when I started, and this is finished pretty much now, but I might redo it sometime and make it prettier.

it is www.briannoyes.co.uk

Nicky is back home until she goes travelling in January, and is working at 2 stables, exercising race horses and looking after a show cob. However it is lovely to have her home for a while, and she was actually home for her birthday for the first time in 3 years!

love Helen

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Bread Slice Horror

The other week I made (using our fine breadmaker) a small wholemeal. Here is a picture of half of it. The other half looked exactly the same - at first.























Later that same day I came down from my ivory tower (also known as the spare bedroom) where I had been working at home to see this:

















Yes, it really was as it appears, cut not just at an angle, but with a convex contour effect. Must have been one heck of a sandwich! I'll let the architect of the shape explain more in the inevitable comment - I love her dearly.

Tee hee.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Wet weekend in Devon

This weekend I went down to Shaldon in Devon (near Torquay) to stay with Lucy who I lived with at university, along with Cath and Emilie who I also lived with at university. Needless to say we had a grand old time - the weekend kicked off with lasagne, wine and karaoke on the Friday night (and what more could anyone want from a Friday night?). Sadly though when we awoke on Saturday, a severe weather warning meant the normal sunshine, beach activities were somewhat curtailed, and yes unfortunately I was optimistic enough to take my bikini!.

However, Lucy's mum who lives down the road has recently purchased a camper van in the form of a Mazda Bongo (best car name ever?!). So we went on a wet and windy tour of the Devon coast taking in Teignmouth, Torquay (photo on the right is me, Lucy and Cath on the Torquay cliffs), Paignton, Dartmouth and the not-so-scenic Newton Abbot. The Bongo saved us really as we'd all packed flipflops and completely inappropriate clothing so we were able to be touristy without drowning. Saturday night was spent in the local pub which randomly has a Thai restaurant in it and we had a great meal on top of the picnic and cream tea we'd already had that day. Sunday dried out a bit and we had a lovely potter around Shaldon and I ended up being incredibly jealous that I, unlike Lucy, don't live a picturesque village by the sea. It's absolutely gorgeous there and I'd thoroughly recommend it for a meander if you're ever in the area.

I'm told there are compensations for living where I live though. When I said to Cath 'I want to live in Shaldon, there's nothing good about living in Swindon' she turned around and said 'Well, you have got a Matalan'.....hmmm.


Anyway, the other exciting thing about the weekend is that I got to see Cath who has lost 5 and a half stone in the last year! She looks absolutely brilliant and hasn't done any kind of faddy diet, just good old fashioned healthy eating and exercise. I felt a) very proud and pleased for her and b) very inspired to keep cracking on with my own weight loss mission. So I got up today and went out for a run to burn off the wine/lasagne/cream tea/thai meal/sunday lunch with which I stuffed myself this weekend :)









Love Kate xxxx

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Unusual encounters

When I was at university a waggish friend of mine wrote on the blotting paper in the Campus bank "Boo Carter welcomes lonely hearts". Obviously I scribbled over it but sometimes I think it has remained indelibly on my forehead. I have lived in the South East of the UK for most of my life and I think I behave with the general unfriendliness of our neck of the woods but it doesn't seem to put people off.


This weekend we went down to Southampton to see Kieran and Alice. We had a lovely time and learned that the Captain of the Titanic lived in the very street that they live in. Anyway on Saturday morning Trev and I went for a stroll around Southampton Common and stopped to look at a duck pond. We were actually watching in horror as a tern picked up a duckling in it's beak and then dropped it in the water again when a local man walking his dog came to stand next to us and said "Beautiful, aren't they?" I looked at him in surprise and realised that he was talking about the swans. I told him about the duckling's near death experience and he said. "Well, there used to be a lot more ducks on the lake. They used to have those pretty ones - what are they called?"
"Mandarin ducks?" I suggested.
"Yes, them! But the immigrants keep eating them" (Good grief) "So they put them in a sanctuary and they took away the boards around the lake that tell you which birds where which!"
"Goodness!" I muttered "Well, must get on now"
Walking away hastily and pondering on the thought that these immigrants clearly had a taste for mandarin ducks but they didn't actually know what they looked like!

Anyway later that day we all went to Chichester to see 6 Characters in Search of an Author. It was brilliant although the ending was rather unsatisfying. The end of the first act was rather harrowing and involved a violation and I noticed with relief that the child in the cast was not on stage for this scene. An elderly lady was sitting behind us and engaged me in conversation while Trev was buying the ice creams at the interval. "That little boy will never be the same again!" She said. I laughed and said that I noticed he hadn't been on stage. However she carried on regardless. When Trev came back she said to him: That little boy, he'll never be the same again". Then when her companions came back she said it again. Then when everyone in the row came back she said it to all of them!

Anyway we came home and away from the weirdness of the South when we got a phone call. Somebody in a broad Scottish accent said to me: "I've lost my cat, man!" I was silent and he said again" I've lost my cat, man" Then when I still didn't say anything he said "Is that Jessie?" I told him no and he apologised profusely and hung up.

All very strange and a good reason for me to never go on a cruise where I couldn't run away from these people