This last 7 days has been incredibly hectic; it’s rushed by in a bit of a blur.

Last Saturday we went to see The Cirque to Soleil, as you know, and they were brilliant. After a lie-in on Sunday, Daisy took me to University where I would meet 4 of my collegues and a taxi that would take us to Heathrow. At 4:40pm the taxi departed and we got to Heathrow in very good time. In fact, far too good, because our initial attempts at checking in were foiled because the flight check in hadn’t yet been opened. One of the nearby BA girls opened the flight for us, as we all checked in. That meant we had to wait around for about an hour and a half until boarding. We got some food, and I bought myself a magazine.

At last we boarded and the flight took off late at about 8:30. We arrived at Aberdeen an hour and a bit later, and then had to wait for a taxi in a long queue. We eventually got to our hotel near 10pm, and promptly headed straight to sleep (as much as you can on the first night in a new bed).

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The Patio Hotel

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My hotel room

7am and the alarm went off and, after breakfast, I headed out to the taxi and to the University where the meeting was taking place. It was my first view of Aberdeen and it’s surprising how grey the place is. It’s all made of granite, and all the houses look like they’ve been pebble dashed in grey stone. There is the odd pink place, of course. Granite is, of course, radioactive, so, having visited I am now probably sterile. That would explain why the city only has about 200,000 population. After the first day of the meeting, at about 6:30pm, we headed back to the hotel and then out to a meal in The Manchurian – a lovely Chinese restaurant.

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View of Aberdeen from near my hotel

The other two days went very similar [though I skipped breakfast both days], visiting The Foyer restaurant on the second night, and heading back to the airport on the Wednesday night. Daisy picked me up again and I got home Wednesday about 10pm.

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Aberdeen beach at sunrise

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Oystercatchers

Here’s the route our flight took to and from Aberdeen, captured by my GPS receiver and my PDA. The more easterly flight is the flight to Aberdeen.
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Click for bigger

Thursday morning I had a chore – fix the light on Daisy’s car. It was going in for an MOT at 10am, so I had to fix it before it went in. This was all I had to do, wasn’t it? Dad reminded me I also had to replace the rear wiper rubber at 9:10. I drove like Colin McRae over to Halfords and hurriedly fitted a new wiper blade (far quicker) and fixed the light, then rushed to the garage and dumped the car upon the blokes there. At about 1pm, Daisy arrived home as we were due at the dentist at 2pm. Our teeth passed their MOTs and so we celebrated with enormous tea-cakes at Cloisters – a local café. We collected the car which, thankfully, also passed its MOT.

All my galavanting early in the week meant we had missed our ballroom lesson on Tuesday evening, so at 7pm Friday we went to an alternate beginners class at the same dance school. We actually ended up learning the same stuff as we had the previous week, as they are 1 week behind. Afterwards, because we had salsa lesson at 9, we didn’t go home; instead we joined in the beginners salsa and I ended up demonstrating with Linda the helper, because our salsa teacher had a bad neck. Daisy and I then helped some people out in the corner. In fact, in our main lesson we ended up helping some other chaps out who were having difficulty too.

We could have gone to the pub, but instead we went home and passed out on the bed. We didn’t get up early, but we were meant to.

At about 11:30 on Saturday (yesterday) we eventually left for Wales to go and visit Mother-in-Law. Once there, the weekend got about as lazy as you can get, thankfully. I plodded through my book of Kakuro and did little else.

Arrived back just now, and it’s already bed time and back to work. I hate it when the week’s been so manic and the weekend passes by in a barely noticed blink-of-an-eye.

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Yesterday Daisy and I went up to London to see the Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall. It was Daisy’s birthday yesterday, and the present was a Christmas present from her Dad (bought on my birthday – just to keep the coincidences going). It was a great day out, and the show is absolutely spectacular.

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Inside the Royal Albert Hall prior to the show starting

If you haven’t seen it on the TV, the Cirque du Soleil is a circus without any animals. They have some amazing people on the show performing the usual juggling, high-trapeze and trampoline stunts, to more unusual stuff like hand-balancing, contortion and fire juggling. The clowns that performed a little show in between each main part were also very good – actually quite funny which I wasn’t expecting. The music was great and the costumes and set were pretty impressive too.

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Denys the Ukranian hand-balancer, taken from Friday’s Working Lunch TV show

So from the Circus of the Sun and Sunny London, to grey Aberdeen. Today I fly up to Aberdeen in Scotland, well known for being perhaps the greyest place on Earth. I have a meeting that starts at 9am tomorrow morning, so I have to fly up this afternoon with lots of my collegues from work. It’s a 3-day meeting, so I don’t get back until late on Wednesday. Oh joy of joys.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4630892.stm

I am flabbergasted at this; Some Catholic group has asked for the Davinci Code film to be given an adult rating because children should be protected from what it calls “insidious” lies about Catholicism.

“Any adult can distinguish reality from fiction. But you cannot expect a child to make proper judgements.”

Absolutely! So it seems incredible to me that they would then have us teach our children in school all about Jesus and how he was killed but came alive again, then disappeared up into the sky and so on and so forth. Why is one fiction worse than any other?

I’ve been watching Richard Dawkins’ show on Channel 4 recently called ‘The Root of All Evil?’ which is, basically, him preaching atheism; and about time someone did too. It’s really quite a convincing show (albeit somewhat confrontational and blunt) about why we should all be atheists and not agnostic (or even religious, for that matter).

Now, I’m atheist, and so be it; I really don’t mind if other people decided to believe in a God – whatever. But when they outwardly attempt to control how we are allowed to see the world (by, for example, dissallowing certain groups into cinemas to see a film) it really drives me around the bend. Leave us alone to make up our own minds, damnit!

Last night we went to our usual ballroom dancing class. It was very good last night as there were a few less people there. We went through the previous stuff we learnt, doing the slow waltz again. Our teacher showed us how during the steps we should rise and fall, and how we should ‘drag’ our feet, rather than lift them, which looks very stompy. Later in the lesson we began to learn the slow rythmn, which is the famous “slow, slow, quick quick slow” thing.

Ballroom dancing is actually more difficult than it looks. Because the hold is so close, you cannot actually see your own feet and its so easy to step on your dance partner (Daisy), particularly as the man leads and, if he’s dancing correctly, doing heel-leads. There was still a few too many people at the class imo, and it meant that some of the older people were dancing incredibly slowly, while others were dancing incredibly quickly. This meant there was rather a traffic jam as we danced anti-clockwise around the floor. Me, being a considerate driver, had to keep applying the brakes to poor Daisy who was dancing backwards. The guy behind me though wasn’t so considerate so his lady kept stamping on my heels. Thanks for that, whoever you were.

Unfortunately I’m away in Aberdeen next week, but our teacher is starting a new beginners lesson on the Friday, so we may go to that. It’s about an hour before our salsa lesson!

Warning: Techie Content Ahead

For Christmas my parents bought me a TV card for my computer. Nebula TV are a British company based in Kent and their product is fantastic, but I was having problems getting the damn thing working on my computer. The picture was breaking up all the time, and after a 10 seconds it would just stop.

I found out by looking at the forums that pressing ‘i‘ showed debug information and the line HW FBUS shows the conflicts that happen on the PCI bus. This number was counting up erratically meaning that the DigiTV was getting all these conflicts causing the picture to break up.

Looking on the forums I found there were lots of problems with SATA controllers eating PCI time, but after various debugging I found that this wasn’t the case with mine.

Anyway, the third email I received from Nebula support sounded like your typical “not sure” answer and told me to do all the normal stuff like check I had the latest drivers, latest BIOS, swapping to different PCI slots etc.

Cynically I checked I had the latest drivers – I did – checked I had the latest BIOS – I didn’t; ok, so I’ll upgrade.

I upgraded and the damn thing works! Surprised the hell outta me that the latest BIOS clearly fixes a bug the old BIOS had that was obviously eating up PCI cycles.

So, I thought I’d blog if for those poor buggers who are searching the internet for problems with their Nebula DigiTV. Particularly if they happen to have an Asus A8V – upgrade your BIOS!

I spent Friday in London again, and had to stand all the way back on the 5:05pm train! Oh well, at least I got back in time for salsa, which was a bit hit and miss this week. I’m glad I managed to make it because it was the start of a new term, and our salsa teacher had brought a load of new people up from the beginners class into the improvers class that we are in. Unfortunately, it meant that we were pretty different in terms of experience, and so the lesson ended up being a bit bitty.

On Saturday I put together the new wood shredder that I bought. As we’ve cut down so much stuff from our garden it seemed a great idea to buy a wood chipper and make the cut trees into mulch for the garden. We spent a few hours using a chainsaw to cut some trees down and then shredding it using the shredder.

Sunday morning I got up and at about 10 [not to wake the neighbours from their lie in] started with the chainsaw on a big fir tree that blocks out loads of light from pretty much every window on the back of our house. By the time Daisy was up, it was gone [but for a few foot of trunk that we will use to pull up the roots] and I was chipping it already. We had to stop at lunchtime, so although all the hard bits of chopping from the garden is done, there is a HUGE amount of shredding left to do. Fortunately the shredder can take whole branches and eats them all up, so it might not take as long as it looks like it might.

I will put some photos up later, and maybe some video if I can work up the energy.

Recipe time! Yes, I did my own recipe tonight with some more of the lovely organic vegetables that we got in our weekly box. The idea of rostis quite appealed to me because they have a “junk food” look and feel to them but are still pretty ok for you. So, I went ahead and made some to go with a simple mushroom omlette made from the remaining mushrooms from last week’s box; would have been entirely organic if we had some chickens that had produced the eggs.

I wasn’t sure what to expect because I usually stick pretty close to recipes but this was almost made up as a I went along. Surprisingly they were absolutely yummy, so here’s the recipe for you:

Ingredients

• 3 medium potatoes, peeled
• 1 carrot, peeled
• 1/4 of a medium celeriac, peeled
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped

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1. After washing and peeling the veg, throw the potatoes and carrots in one of those food processors that grate them for you. If you really want you can do it by hand, but I can’t imagine grating a potato is easy.
2. Once grated, gather the veg into a ball and squeeze it really hard over the sink to remove lots of the water.
3. Grate the celeriac also. I also put the onion through the processor but I don’t think it did much.
4. Get a frying pan on the pan and add a bit of oil and a big knob of butter. Eventually the butter will sizzle and bubble. This is what you want. Get a [metal] cookie cutter and place it in the pan and stuff a handful of the gratings into it. Press them down firmly. Do this a number of times until the pan’s full.
5. Add a bit of seasoning (salt and pepper) to the top of the little rostis and I also added a little bit of thyme to each.
6. Cover and let them fry for about 10 minutes.
7. After 10 minutes, get a little 1/2 teaspoon knob of butter and place it on the top of each rosti. Cover the pan again and let it melt into each rosti. Yum.
8. Once the butter’s melted, get a flipper and flip each rosti over. The bottom (now the top) should be a lovely golden brown colour.
9. Cover and let cook for another 5 minutes.
10. They’re ready! Flip them out onto a plate along with a nice omlette and enjoy!

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Yesterday I spent the day in the big smoke, aka London. My alarm went off at 5:45, so I could make the 8:08 train from Southampton. We arrived in London just in time for the meeting which we were going for at 10.

I’ve recently started a new project at work, that involves a whole load of governmental departments and the organising of the information that they collect. As part of this project we have already got some help from The Stationery Office (previously HMSO) and we were initiating talks with other departments, like the Land Registry and the Home Office. It felt very strange walking into a side-door of the famous Admiralty Arch.

Today I’m back in normal work, although tomorrow I’m going back up there to continue talks with some other departments and a couple of local authorities. Unfortunately, the meeting tomorrow is in the afternoon, so I’ll have to be travelling back home at rush hour on a Friday evening (Friday the 13th too!).

Unfortunately, work takes up all the daylight hours in the day, so the garden hasn’t been cut back any more, although I’ve ordered a wood shredder to help remove all the remains. It will come in handy for mulching the garden. Hopefully this weekend I can do some more too it, as the weather’s looking ok so far.

Yesterday saw the arrival of our second organic vegetable box. We upgraded in the intervening time, so this time is was a small box (rather than a mini-box). This meant we got a few more vegetables, which this week included 4 leeks, a cauliflower and a celariac, as well as the usual potatoes, carrots, onions and kale. We made a very yummy winter-vegetable casserole with much of it, and some remains from last week’s box.

Tuesday evening saw Daisy and myself going to our first beginner’s lesson of ballroom dancing at a local dancing school. The teacher (Jacqui Norton) seems incredibly organised, and despite a class nearing 100 people managed to make the whole thing quite fun. Both Daisy and I learnt the basic foreward and backward steps for the ballroom Waltz, before being put together to dance around the floor (although only in one direction – me going forewards, Daisy backwards). It was rather fun, although slightly embarrassing that we didn’t take enough money to pay for our class. [un]Luckily our teacher is very organised so we shall pay her the extra next week. Our salsa classes start again on Friday, although my trip to London threatens our attendance to that. Hopefully I can get back on time.

On Friday after making a beef Chilli, I set about using some of the organic pears we got in our weekly organic box for creating a pear tart. Daisy isn’t so keen on pears, so I thought by making something yummy she might actually eat them.

So, I found a few recipes and basically used one, although it’s altered very slightly.

Chocolate Pear Tart

Ingredients

• For the pastry
• 1 3/4 cups of plain flour
• 110g butter or margarine
• 1 egg yolk with 2 tbsp water
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp caster sugar
• For the Pears
• 2 1/2 cups of water
• 3/4 cup caster sugar
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 5 pears, peeled, halved and cored
• For the Chocolate Layer
• 175g plain chocolate
• 2 tbsp butter or magarine
• For the Glaze
• 1/2 cup of apricot jam
• 2 tbsp water

The easiest way to make the pastry is to bung all the pastry ingredients in a food processor with a K-blade, or pastry blade and process until the dough forms a ball around the blade. Put it in a bag and chill it in the fridge until required.

Now we’re going to poach the pears. Put the water, lemon juice and sugar into a pan and bring up to a simmer. This will be the liquid in which we’re going to poach the pears. Let it simmer for 5 minutes or so, to ensure the sugar is fully dissolved and forms a nice syrup. Place the pears into the syrup and poach for 15 minutes. If they are easily pierced by a fork, remove them and place them on a tray to cool.

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Put the oven on to preheat to 220^oC, and while the pears are cooling, we will get the pastry base ready. Retrieve the pastry from the fridge, and roll it out on a floured surface until it will line the bottom and sides of a 10 inch flan dish. The easiest way to judge this is to place the flan dish upside down on the rolled pastry and cut around the dish by a couple of inches. Liberally grease the flan dish and lay the pastry into the dish. Cook it in the oven for about 10-15 minutes until its beginning to turn brown. Put it somewhere to cool.

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While that’s cooling, we can make the chocolate layer. Melt the chocolate and butter (or margarine) in a dish over a pan of hot water, stirring often until the chocolate blends with the butter to form a shiny chocolate liquid. Spread the chocolate over the base of the tart.

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Now we’re going to make some apricot glaze. Remember the pears are still cooling, and now the chocolate’s cooling too. I use some of the water from the pan I melted the chocolate over as it’s already hot. Melt the jam and water together until the jam is completely melted and there are no lumps left. (I’ve halved the amount in this recipe for you, as I actually used 1 cup of jam and 4 tbsp of water and found that there was farrrrrr to much glaze). Sieve the apricot-water mixture to remove the lumps from the jam. You’re left with a glaze.

Now place the pears in a nice formation onto the chocolate base. Cut some of them into pretty patterns if you like. Brush the top of them with the glaze.

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That’s it. Place the lot in the fridge and eat when desired.