Soy pelirroja otra vez.
Voy a España este jueves para diez dias.
Aqui, in Inglaterra, hace frio
.. pero, no es importa. Hola la playa de Alicante!

It's dark when I leave work.

On another note I started reading the heaviest (albeit not the longest) paperback I've ever seen yesterday. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, it's good so far.

Got some more gas for our BBQ yesterday too. Which I've been hanging out for. I ended up putting a deposit down on a whole new bottle, since I couldn't find a flogas outlet in Wimbledon, carrying a 13kg bottle of gas back home would have been interesting too. This means BBQs for the next week.

Elisse and I took a trip to Staffordshire to see a family friend of Elisse and get away from London for some fresh air. On Friday we went to see Sudbury Hall, which was the setting for the interior of Pemberley - Mr Darcy's estate in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. Elisse was so excited by this that we then watched the entire BBC series back to back (6 by 45 minute episodes) and finished up at 2am.

Now we're back in London and having to deal with wintery things like waiting three days for clothes to dry and so on.

Obsessive Compulsive Galactica (Disorder)

Like, SO fantastic.
[S.03 Ep.04]

If you were at Feeling Gloomy (at Bar Acadamy) last night and were wearing a sky blue polo shirt, green converse, have about a #3 buzz cut and wear glasses then you have been awarded the inaugural E&H worst dancer award. Congratulations and keep on moving those elbows!

Otherwise Feeling Gloomy wasn't really as good as it could have been, a little too cheery and while the music started out pretty good by the time we left they were playing 'Total eclipse of the heart', and I don't think it was getting any better.

A word from the wise(er than I was yesterday):
If you create a FileMaker database don't move the folder where it resides while it's still open. I managed to lose a database that I worked on all morning yesterday. Fortunately a lot of that time was spent learning how to do stuff, and it only took me half an hour to rebuild the entire database from scratch (it had no data in it luckily). In any event I now know a fair bit more about FileMaker than I did before, and have a nice database for Belle Maison (check on that next week - there will be something there).

Elisse and I booked a trip tonight, to go to Stafford at the end of P&R week - don't ask me what either P or R stand for, I don't know.

Having heard you get nectar points on thetrainline.com we went there first. Then found that for some bizzare reason only one rail card can be used per booking. So off we head to the standard national rail site.

Having got through the booking process, which takes time, and got the price and being ready to pay, turns out you can't actually buy tickets there any more, they just redirect you to another site - without sending along any information about what you were about to purchase.

So we ended up back at the train line site and went through the process, signed up, entered address details etc. and finally got a single ticket for a young persons rails card in the basket. Then I went to enter the same details (for the 4th time) to purchase the second ticket. Only to discover that by some miracle of the gods this section of the site will allow you to specify as many rail cards as you like. So I went through the whole process again with 2 adults and 2 railcards and then deleted the first lot from the basket.

All in all there are many easier ways to give someone £44.80.

I needed a release after cleaning the bathroom...

When I'm queen of the world, I'm going to ban putting cheese on top of spinach in toasted sandwiches. It belongs underneath, on top of the meat or tomato or whatever, and will normally stay put without qualms, as opposed to having cheese soup to clean up if it were to find its way above the spinach.

Some people just don't understand...

So, we've both been flat off our feet lately, and what do you do when the going gets tough?
Change your hair, of course.
Haydens gone for the LOOK AT ME style once again, and I'll come out with whatever my mood determines on wednesday, when I'm submitting my poor head to the student academy. It's cheap, harmless and makes people stare. Who needs expensive clothes/shoes/toys?!

It snapped cold on Wednesday this week, and all of a sudden it feels like we're heading towards winter. I think the worst thing about this time of year is knowing that it's only going to be getting worse. Every day I notice the sun a little lower in the sky as I cross Blackfriars bridge. It won't be long before I'm arriving home in pitch black, of course then daylight saving will end and I'll be leaving work in the same darkness. It's cold too, I've actually had to wear a jumper to work a couple of days this week.

Were suppose to have the second Titan Bookclub meet this week, but a whole bunch of people baled and so it's been moved to next week, which along with some do for Titan Books' 25th anniversary and a big project finishing at work will make for a fairly busy week. A few of us caught up on Thursday anyway - and made a pretty good effort of not talking about Idoru - this months book. Being a huge William Gibson fan I'd already read Idoru a couple of times, but reading it again was great.

Jonathan - previous housemate - had a house warming party in his new place last night. We took Tim along and had a good time drinking and talking crap. Same as last year Jonathan managed to invite a whole load of first years from college, except now they're all younger - we really did feel like the old crowd. It's a little depressing sometimes.

Been even busier than usual at work this week. In fact you could probably go so far as to say too busy. I'm not doing a very good job of stopping for lunch. Don't get me wrong, if I wanted lunch I'd take it, I've just not been wanting lunch so much, just stop to eat something.

The MySQL cluster is now up and working - this was a lot of the afore mentioned work - although there was an issue with the Acers we got not handling over 1GB of RAM. So we've had to replace the two data nodes with other machines that can. The whole thing has now been moved upstairs to the comms room. So yesterday in an effort to stop working for a moment I made a ph34rb0t to guard the cluster. I'll get a photo up at some point.

Elisse and I had dinner 'out' last night. We got some food and went to the park to eat - in the dark. We had potato salad and roast chicken from the supermarket, which was all great. We had a fox turn up part way through our meal and sit a few metres away, for all the world like a house trained dog waiting to be fed after the meal. We left some chicken scraps for it since it was so well behaved.