Friday 29 July 2011

Calling at Kendal fest!

In about, oooh, one hour's time I will be getting picked up right at my very door, packing my very old, battered and filthy rucksack, plus one tent, one sleeping bag, one blow up mattress (must camp with style), and one very excited Dizz and D! Yep, it's festival time - yippeeeee! We are off to the sunny (hopefully!) Lake District for a weekend of music, merriment, and mud :D

A shout-out must go to the lovely Tizz as we are normally the festival buddies, but this year she was double booked and has had to go to deepest darkest Cornwall instead of a-festival-ing with lil ole me. I'm sure she is having a fabulous time and I'm sure I also will have a fabulous time but I'll miss you much, lovely x

This year's fest looks very exciting, haven't been to this one before so it's a whole new festival to experience. It's only a wee one and actually won best small festival last year. Blondie are closing the festival on Sunday night (OMG!) and there are many other cool bands that I can't wait to see. There's a library with a twist as it lets rock'n'roll bounce out of it all night, we have to dress up as beasts or monsters (face paints at the ready), and there's tonnes of other coolio stuff.

It's funny as when I was about 9 years old we went to the very same campsite where it was being held. My overwhelming memory from this was sleeping in a big blue and orange tent, on a blow up bed that kept on deflating...let's hope that doesn't happen this time as sleeping right on the ground at 36 ain't no fun!

Happy weekend to everyone! I will report back once we return to normal bed and non-camping shores. Keep your eyes peeled on the face-site as I'll probably be doing a few mobile uploads along the way. Bye-eeee!

Monday 25 July 2011

Star Wars

Whoever wrote this Alchemy game is definitely a Star Wars fan. Couldn't sleep and aimless combining made robot + hero = R2D2 then jedi + frog = Yoda. Made me smile.

Sunday 24 July 2011

Take-over

Fizz has totally taken over the blog! Tis a most wondrous sight to behold. Time for me to kick my feet up, relax, and enjoy all the posts that come my way *blissful sigh*

Friday 22 July 2011

2D v 3D

The verdict according to Fizz: not much difference. The 3D-ish-ness was very subtle in most places. The only time I really noticed it was at the end when there's a lot of bits of ash floating about - those who've seen it will know the bit I mean, those who haven't won't find any spoilers here. Sweetie. Anyway, the bits of ash looked like they were really floating just a few rows in front of us. Very cool but not hugely in-your-face. Which is better really, there was always the danger that the 3D would be OTT and spoil the film. But no, it was still an ace film. And Neville still rocks!

Harry Potter glasses

Here's PBfH with the 3D glasses. How cool?


POT-TER! POT-TER!

Going to see HP 7.2 for the second time tonight, but this time in 3D. I'm not that bothered about the 3D to be honest but I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I think you get a lot more out of a film the second time round, you notice more of the little details. PBfH is coming with. I don't think I've introduced her to blog world, so here's a quick bio: her name is Phsycho B**** from Hell, which is meant completely ironically since she's the sweetest person imaginable. She's a mum of two and works in the same madhouse as I do.
So I'll blog my thoughts on 2D v 3D later...

Thursday 21 July 2011

More alchemy

Today I created among other things Dr zoidberg, ghostbusters, Mario and a lightsaber! Geeky? Nyeh.

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Alchemy

I am clearly susceptible to addictions at the moment. Not only am going to see harry potter twice in a week but I'm also addicted to a game I found on Android market. It's called Alchemy and it's so cool! You start off with the 4 elements, earth, air, water and fire and combine them into increasingly complex things. Last night I created a vampire then I created a stake, then I did vampire + stake = corpse. That was cool but my next creation was even better: doctor + vicodin = House M.D. I CREATED DR. GREGORY HOUSE!

Monday 18 July 2011

AWESOME!

The dragon, the kiss, mcgonnagal and the statues, the hellfire - wow! And Neville! Neville! Who'da thunk? As Dizz said when the credits started to roll, can we watch it again?

We're here!

It's Potter time! Dizz and I are waiting like, I don't know, kids at Christmas. So excited! I'm almost tempted to add more than one exclamation mark. POTTER! POTTER! POTTER! the music has just stopped and It's time for the ads. Will let u all know ...

Sunday 17 July 2011

Dizz23

A fabulous friend called Jillybean has been doing this thing called CPD23. I don't really understand it all that much but it seems very worthy and professional so I thought I'd give it a go for the past week. My interpretation of it is that you talk about your achievements and your interactions and your presence on the web and in your professional circles. So here we go, Dizz achievements for the past week:
  1. spent the week wearing the usual array of fabulous outfits
  2. had huge hair one day, like properly huge. One of the upstairs peeps nearly did a double take as they approached the desk at the huge fluffball before them
  3. managed not to break a pair of shoes (HUGE achievement - do I get extra points?)
  4. gave excellent contributions in meetings (cheeky yet to the point comments - me be quiet for 16 weeks, you have got to be joking!)
  5. volunteered my services within the team to assist with the giant amount of work they have going on
  6. signed myself up for a Walking Challenge at work with 3 other buddies. Who can get the biggest number of minutes walking over a set period of time? I bet we can!
  7. Booked a long weekend to Liverpool in order to see the Magritte exhibition at the Tate as well as all the other sights the city has to offer, and found a potential holiday cottage in the Lake District for a week in late October/early November
  8. Wavey and I went up to Washington Arts Centre yesterday and were very busy learning circus skills such as plate spinning and juggling. Then I did stop-start animation and he did digital photography. We rounded off the morning enjoying a yummy lunch and a glass of real ale (beer - we heart you so)
  9. Got ourselves a V+ box which means we can now pause live telly (awesome!), record shows onto the box (we'll never miss another episode again!), and now have access to HD stuff. Methinks we will never return to normal telly again
  10. Dragged Wavey into the 21st century and he now has a smart phone, yay! We can Crackberry chat for free now and our calls will be free as via the same provider. Cool and economical, what more do you want!
  11. Bought a pair of scales. Jumped on, eeeked, declared ourselves reet fat knackers, and are now on target: weight loss *sad face* My own personal target is 1 stone. 14 whole pounds. Supermodel-dom here I come once that's come off...
  12. Dug up the BIGGEST root (more like a small tree!) from the front garden which means it's now completely clear and ready to start with whatever we're putting in there. Decision pending
  13. Made cornbread for the very first time. Looks exactly like Levi Roots says it should. Also made up a yummy chili for tonight's tea and homemade cereal bar for the rest of the week. Yummo
  14. Went to see Harry Potter 7.1...
  15. ...and booked tickets to see Harry Potter 7.2 for Monday night *squuuuueeeeeeaaaaal*
  16. Booked tickets for Imelda May in November
  17. Taken pee out of Fizz for geeky 3d glasses idea. Ask her. You too will be amused...
  18. Advanced to almost 1000 picarats in Professor Layton on my DS
  19. Resisted the urge to begin the French wine and finished off old stock first
  20. And finally...can't think of a finally. Isn't 19 enough for you?!
I'm not sure how all of the above would rate on the CPD scale, but in terms of a crackin' fun week it's right up there!

Saturday 16 July 2011

Potter mania

How cool are these?


Monday 11 July 2011

Busy brillo weekend

Eeeeh this weekend was fab! It started at 8.30 on Friday night when I went to pick up D and we headed to the Town Hall in our fair old town to see Morrissey! What a coup! I have no idea why he added Middlesbrough to his tour choice, but I say thank you very kindly sir as you were pretty awesome amazing. And he wore 3 different shirts! This photo shows him in his second shirt of the evening:


Saturday came around and I met up with my girlies for lunch/brunch thing in our local yummy deli that we've recently discovered. Fizz came along for the ride too which was just fabby, and we met Jillybean who was up for the weekend and T. We had a delicious first course and so of course we were obliged to get pudding too:

Coming back from our holiday and finding the garden the overgrown jungle that it has become made Wavey and I realise that 2 big gardens are just too much. So after much umm-ing and ahh-ing we've decided to pull all the plants up from the front garden and make a weeny rockery with alpine plants in one corner and who knows what in the rest of it. We've pulled up most of it already but this photo shows us in the beginning stages. Digging-tastic!


Also this appeared when were on holiday! All along I thought I was just growing a leafy green plant and then this amazing flower has appeared and it's just one of many. So pretty!

On Sunday whilst I went to see X-Men with Fizz (OH SO GOOD!) Wavey headed off to B&Q to buy man toys. First time he went he came back with some sort of power saw that looks to me like a giant carving knife. But when we both went the second time we came back with this wood shredder:


Oh it's ace! One of the big bushes we dug up from the front garden didn't even fill one big black bag with the chippings. This is possibly the best purchase we have ever made for a garden our size!


All in all a fabby weekend. Can't wait for the next one as this Saturday sees Wavey and I heading off to a circus skills training course...

Thursday 7 July 2011

Experience of working

This week we've got a work experience girl with us. She's 15 years old and until today has been as quiet as a mouse. Today though she came to join our team. Of course we are the coolest team and therefore must be the ones who will make her feel most at home. From the time she joined us at 9am she literally hasn't stopped talking all day, this loooooong stream of 15 year old conscious. I had the pleasure of her company twice - first up we were doing journals and later this afty we were packing up books for our new campus.

I decided earlier in the week that the best way to approach it would be to actually let her do the work. I'm sure she's been talked at a lot over this past week and I know how much that puts me to sleep. And so we did the journals thing, we opened the post, we checked them in, she got to stamp the stamp on people's heads and put the security strips in; the excitement at being able to take the trolley up in the lift was just too much. Oh and then enjoying a bit of banter with one of the upstairs peeps, he flicked the v's at me as he was walking away in front of her!!! I went over and said you can't do that she's only 15!! Think he felt pretty bad - she loved it!

This afternoon, being much more at home with me, we talked about all sorts from which ipod was coolest to how brillo Blackberry chat is compared to texting (so last year). There was lots of fun stuff to play with as we RFID tagged the books, and ripped out old date labels and glued new ones in, spotted spine labels and did more stamping. As the time was drawing near, she actually did the barf face when I told her that it was time to go for her next appointment and she did the whiney "can I stay with you?" I managed to get her another 5 minutes so she could finish tagging the shelf but that was it. Onwards she had to go. She gave me some chocolate as we'd been talking about it and went her unhappy way. Later on the person responsible for the work experience peeps came over to me and told me that she had said how I'm "the best". It made me feel nice and I hope it helps her to get a positive image of work.

Of course all this being 15 and on work experience made me reminisce back to my own version. For some reason I believed that I wanted to be a nursery nurse and so I was dispatched to a local council run nursery school in a very bad part of town where I basically wiped up children's snot for a week. It worked really well in that it utterly convinced me that there was no way on earth I wanted to be a nursery nurse. I can't really remember whether any of the people were nice, I think they just seemed really old to me. They were probably the same sort of age as I am now!

I wonder if she'll decide that libraryland is where she wants to be as a working person? Or will it put her off the idea completely? Who can know. Maybe she'll talk about it tomorrow in another looooong stream of 15 year old conscious :D

Monday 4 July 2011

Negative flexi and broken shoes

Oh dear, there appears to be a very large 'ole in my shoe!


And I'm so sad as I love my dotty shoes *sad face*



Working in libraries is bad on shoes! My lovely dotty shoes were fine until I started doing my relegation project and crawling around all over the library and the grotty old store pulling books off, shelving books in, packing boxes to send to worthy charities...and now dead shoes, boo!

And despite being away for like 2 and a half weeks my negative flexi hasn't magically disappeared and I'm still minus 7 hours and 11 minutes. Ho hum.

"Negative flexi and broken shoes" it's either the name of my autobiography or the name of my first cd, depends on if I become a rock star before I become an author...

Sunday 3 July 2011

Urrrrrrrgggghhhhh oink oink!

2 and a half weeks of eating 3 course meals, drinking copious amounts of wine and Alsace beer, the required icecream every day whilst on holiday rule, plus many many packets of crisps (cos they're easy when you're driving) means I feel a bit like this:



A big fat pig! Wavey and I have decided that it has to stop and we're determined now to be extra extra good and healthy. We've only been back a day but so far so good. It's been salad, cereal and fruit all the way. Yay! Plus we really really loved cycling when we were on holiday and I already have a bike. All we need is one for Wavey and then we can be off on little jaunts pedalling as fast as our little legs will take us.

But I tell you what. It was worth it! The food was lovely, the Lavender flavoured icecream was my favourite and the patisserie that the French make should really be called works of art cos they're so beautiful to look at and even more beautiful to eat, yum yum scrummy yum.

Saturday 2 July 2011

A quick pop

It's not often that you get the opportunity to pop in for a cuppa when someone lives 275 miles away. But today, coming back under the sea to Grande Bretagne, we were able to do that and catch up with the ever delightful Tizz. 90 minutes of non-stop, not pausing for breath talking and we popped right back to the car to head north. Thanks for the first proper cup of British tea (oh how I missed it!) and fabulous to see you, as always x

It's only 8.40pm and we're utterly pooped! A whole day pretty much in the car will do that for you. We are weary travellers my lovelies, weary indeedy. I think not too much longer and we'll be heading to bed-bobs in our own lovely bed *big sigh*

Quick recalculation is needed now that we've unpacked the car. Turns out that Wavey has been very sneaky and all along telling me that we would only buy 20 bottles and we'd just get these extra 3 to take us up to 20. Guess what? We've got 23! Eeep! Our dining room table looks like we're about to open a new French wine bar, yay!

So this tired traveller will drag the suitcases up the stairs, look at the mounds of washing and ironing (boo) and say a sleepy nite-nite to all.

Friday 1 July 2011

Aurevoir France!

16 nights.

8 hotels.

1 beautiful twisty turny 14th century house.

2000+ miles.

19 bottles of wine (to take home)

1 bottle of cider (again to take home)

2 bicycles + 2 very red faces.

Hot hot hot hot! Sun sun sun sun!

Many many footsteps...



...1 very dead (and very smelly) pair of espadrilles.

Merci beaucoup France, you've done us proud!