Don’t know if you’ve ever been to NationMaster. It’s an interesting website with all sorts of random statistics about the countries in the world. You can even go and see the country league tables and find out what they’re best at.

For example, according to the statistics (and statistics never lie), the UK is top in the world for the total agricultural yield of wheat and barley. How about that? Perhaps unsurprisingly we have the highest number of English language speakers per capita, although ironically, we also have the highest number of asylum seekers too. Perhaps surprisingly, it says we have the highest amount of obese men, although I don’t think this data includes America – I mean, how could it? )

My most proud statistic has to be that the UK is the top tea consumer. Woo! Get the biscuits.

See here for the UK’s other best bits.

It’s not often I feel compelled to write about the virtues of a packet of crisps, but today I had for the first time a packet of Nobby’s Barbeque Rib flavour crisps and they were absolutely goregous. I’d had some Nobby’s Balti Chicken crisps some time before, but they don’t [quite] match up to the BBQ ones. I don’t eat crisps often, but when I do I am almost definitely going to buy Nobby’s again. I hadn’t realised that they were made by Walkers Crisps (having no mention of the Walkers brand on the packet – even in the small print) and was going to say what a wonderful entrance into the market the people behind Nobby’s have made, but as it turns out Walkers have alot of clout so it’s not so surprising any longer. These crisps are, according to the Walkers site, apparantly aimed at “today’s 17-34 year old males (28% of the population – about 16.5 million people!)” and are “a range of blokes snacks including ridged crips, nuts and coated nuts, all in real food flavours“. After a month of being released they were bigger than McCoys Specials, which just goes to show how much effect marketing has, as the packets contain almost the same stuff.

Niki at Esurientes tagged all her readers for the 23rd post meme. It’s just a silly little thing that might give you a strange giggle.

The rules are simple:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

The 5th line of my 23rd post makes my life sound so exciting. I must have kept very high company back then:

It was late at night and they were testing the new bat mobile and Wesley Snipes, who was the new Batman, was there.

As it turns out, I was describing a very strange dream I’d had the night before. You can read the whole thing here.

The last part of the instructions is to tag 5 others. I’m not sure I know 5 others, so I tag anyone who might read this – consider yourself tagged. What does your 23rd post’s 5th line say about you? I think mine says I’m destined to become a movie star stunt coordinator….

Well, it’s that time of year again and Autumn has started for real, and the balmy days of summer are almost officially in the past. Today is the day when the day and night are the same length.

I had a really busy day today – in fact, I barely stopped. Meetings in the morning, phone calls, busy hacking away at web-page stuff for work, and then after driving home, half an hour of work again, it was out to evening class. Way too much. The stress made me snap a bit at Daisy, which I’m particularly sorry about, and my head’s now thumping with a headache. Oh well, such is some days. Work from home tomorrow and hope that I can relax a little.

We’ve had a busy weekend going out and doing fun things for once, instead of just being busy doing normal, boring chores!

On Saturday we went to Slimbridge with an internet friend of ours but I’ll let Mr Factobrunt tell you about that seeing as he took all the photos there.

On the Sunday we went to National Bird of Prey Centre in Newent for more feathery photographic opportunities. Mr Factobrunt took loads of photos with his expensive, fancy camera but I have to say, I got lucky and got the best photo by pointing and shooting

This is Grafton, a Magellanic Horned Owl, a species of Eagle Owl, showing off his flying skills.

The centre puts on three wonderful flying displays every day from February to October and is definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in Gloucestershire.

Just got back from a new course that myself and Daisy have taken up. The course is basically an introduction to adult education teaching, although rather politically correctly has the mouthful name of City and Guilds 7302 Introduction to Delivering Learning. It’s taught by a lady named Mrs.Lush (no kidding), and so far seems high on the paperwork, high on the “talk to someone you don’t know” and high on the going-to-be-slightly-dull fronts. However, it does mean that, should I complete it, I will have a qualification that will allow me to start adult-ed teaching, should I need to, which could bring in some extra money once I finally get rid of the university that’s attached to the ball and chain around my ankle.

I’m having some time off this week, so yesterday I spent a little bit of time doing some baking. I love cooking and baking; I find it gets me away from the computer, anyway.

A few weeks ago Niki at Esurienties posted a great looking cupcake recipe that looked pretty easy to make, so last time I went to the super-market I made sure I got some chocolate peanut butter. Our shop didn’t have the Kraft Nuts About Chocolate, so I got some Nutella and some Snickers spread, and would decide later which to use. In the end I decided to use the Snickers spread, (after tearing my finger away from the jar!).

I think these cup cakes are big enough to be called muffins, over here, and they taste damn good too, although my swirly technique needs alot of practice!

When the muffins were in the oven, I decided to make some individual chocolate trifes – something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. I had an idea that I could replace the custard part of the trifle with chocolate angel delight and the fruit with something like Nutella.

So, that’s what I did.

1. Chop 50g of plain or dark chocolate into very small pieces (I use the chopper tool on our hand blender)
2. Place one tablespoon of Nutella (or similar) into the bottom of each of two glasses (preferably desert glasses, but we didn’t have any). I warmed the spread in the microwave for 10 seconds to make it settle better into the bottom of the glass.
3. Mix up 2 portions of chocolate Angel Delight (or similar – we used McDougalls), and as it begins to stiffen add in the chocolate bits.
4. Split the delight into the two glasses
5. Whisk up about 100ml of double cream until stiff
6. Split the cream into the two glasses and flatten.
7. Curl some chocolate onto the top

It’s really easy to make, and exceedingly rich. Certainly not something to eat if you’re on a diet, obviously. In fact, 2 portions of angel delight might be a little too much, and you might want to only do 1, and maybe a little less creme, but that above is what I did, and Daisy and myself enjoyed them very much! We’re now a few kilos heavier though.

Daisy’s already explained about this weekend, but I thought I’d put in my two-penneth, also. Besides… I have pictures!

I’m not sure why, maybe it was my trip to Essex, but I’ve been madly tired the last few days. However, we managed to cycle into town on Saturday morning, after the Slimbridge idea was ruled out, and stocked up on food. We then promptly left all this lovely new food and headed Wales-ward.

There I was met with the task of putting up 3 flat-packed drawers from Ikea. Now, I’d always thought of Ikea furniture as the same sort of cheap flat-packed crud you get from Argos, B&Q and MFI. However, I was most surprised by the quality of this stuff. Although it uses all the same funny little interlocking screws and such, and, it’s true, the basic underpinning of the furniture is chipboard, the outer veneer is actually real wood veneer – not fake printed stuff. Certain parts were also MDF, which increased the furniture strength and weight. For the price, I thought it was pretty good.

So, here are my efforts. Do you like them?

Sunday afternoon I just flaked out. Not sure what’s up with me. I’m only 29, for Pete’s sake (whoever Pete might be).

On the way home we stopped briefly at the lovely town of Tintern in the Wye Valley. I’ve driven through this pretty little abbey town loads of times during my days of courting Daisy, and since when visiting Mother-in-Law, but I’d never stopped to take photos. Having a photography blog to up-keep, I decided I would stop and take some. The light was getting bad – rain, and late evening – but I still managed to rattle some off prior to heading back home.

This one is Daisy’s favourite:

I have to take the remainder of my holidays before the end of September (academic year and all that), so I’m taking Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday off next week. Unfortunately, I have to go in and do a software demonstration on Wednesday – one of the days the petrol people are considering their blockades… Typical!

Well, our run of take-away dinners finally came to end – but only because we went to stay at my Mum’s on Saturday night

We had originally planned to meet a friend at Slimbridge before going on to my mum’s for the evening but we didn’t manage to get ourselves organised in time and missed out on going to Slimbridge.

We decided to go on up to Monmouth to visit my mum anyway, whereupon Mr. Factobrunt spent most of his time assembling flat packed furniture for my mum! Not the most fun way to spend a weekend but he said he enjoyed it. “It’s like carpentry without the difficult bits”, he said

Ah, I see Daisy’s not been keeping my blog upto date while I’ve been away then

Oh, well… I’ll update you… There’s been a bit of a gap because early this week I suddenly got some work to do (being an academic work comes along now and again), and so I had to rush to get it started. Then on Wednesday evening I headed over to Colchester (Essex University) on the train with one of my bosses (the nice one!). We met up with the organiser of the trip, who was a very nice German guy who clearly loved his drink. We drank at a lovely little pub called the Rose and Crown in Wivenhoe, and then headed back to his place where I entertained on a piano briefly. Not used to all this socialising, by the time we got to our hotel at about 11:25 I was shattered.

Thursday was spent in a small room listening to and giving presentations to a bunch of generally nice people. I usually hate these “networking” events that academics use as an excuse to go to nice places (Essex?), but in this case it was actually ok.

We headed back down south at about 4:20pm, and I got home not long before 8pm. The poem I quickly posted last night I wrote on my PDA somewhere around Winchester!

I’ve just back home from a usual day at the office – left me with a headache, a deep loathing of everything office-fied (which includes our computer science labs) and wanting nothing more than to sleep off the various travelling I’ve done.

However, after a 7 week break, our salsa lessons start up again. Daisy’s talking on the phone to her mum at the moment, and mentioned that we might go and try beginners tap dancing too… sounds alot of hard work that I can’t be arsed with at the moment – but maybe come Tuesday I’ll feel more like it! Check out our dance teacher’s website – slight plug there as I designed it

hmm.. still no food in the house today…. yet another take away on the horizon, perhaps?