Storm

Man, that came in fast. Compare that view to the one behind my big head from September. Guess I'm stuck in the office for a little while. Bet the bloody pool is overflowing too.

Whilst I'm Moaning

The Cricket World Cup is on. Scotland are playing. Right now. I can not bring myself to care. I tried. Really I did. A lot of the guys in the office are into it, big time. The West Indies beat Pakistan yesterday and there were tears and taunting all over the place. I would normally be interested in watching Scotland compete at a world level and I'm not ruling out a change of heart should we play England, 'cos let's face it, Scotland playing England at tiddlywinks is going to be ultra-competitive, but I don't think it's going to happen, because Cricket is boooooooooooring.

Iomvyja

Google's word verification thing is playing tricks with my head. Every time it pops up now I clearly type in the visual verification correctly, only to be told I got it wrong. Sometimes it takes three or four attempts.

That's bad enough, but now after I do successfully post a comment I get the comment box back with my original comment still in it and think I've failed the word verification. So I hit "Publish your comment" again, leaving my comment twice. If you've noticed a lot of "This post has been removed by the author" things on your blogger blog from me recently, that's why.

Spring's Here

For one reason or another I didn't make it out of the house much during daylight hours this weekend. As a result I missed the arrival of Spring. The pear tree in the front garden was bare last time I saw it. I came home last night after work and, thanks to the early switch to DST, it was still light enough to see that it now has little leaves and flowers all over the place.


I'm taking it as an official sign and declaring that Winter is over. You may put your heavy coats, scarves and hats away now.*


* May not apply to residents of Stonehaven or surrounding areas.

Brazilian Arts

Saturday night a friend and I went to the Brazilian Arts Foundation for an evening of, well, Brazilian Arts. There was Samba, loud drumming, free booze and a Capoeira demonstration:


Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art that involves a little bit of dance and a little bit of acrobatics but from what I could see, though these blokes were aiming to miss each other, if they really wanted to do any damage to you, they could.

Anyway, the most interesting thing about the night was the discovery that I am the ultimate wingman. On two occasions Saturday night the guy I was with needed assistance, once to distract the bored friend of a girl he was chatting up so that she didn't start sending the secret 'let's go' signals and another time when he couldn't remember the name of a girl he was dancing with who we had both been introduced to earlier. No trouble for me, I couldn't remember her name either, but since I had no agenda, I had no problem saying "I'm sorry, I forgot your name, what was it again?" and then relaying the information.

So there it is single blokes - now you know. Some people say you need another single bloke as a wingman, but let's face it, he's looking out for himself and is direct competition, plus you have to return the favour. I've heard another theory that you need a gay bloke as your wingman, and that may get round the competition problem, but you still have to spend time being his wingman too. Nope, there's no-one better for the wingman job than a married bloke and all it costs you is a few beers.

300

So I'm going, with about 300 other guys (and Salimah), to the movies tonight. We're going to see this movie that's got, like, a 300% freshness rating on rotten tomatoes and is almost 300 minutes long. We're all meeting up in the Red Lion where we'll have 300 beers before we go to see it. I can't wait. I think it's called The Spartans Kill Lots of Persians Then Die.

Oooh, pretty.

Blogger's got all this cool new template stuff that I want to start using, but I've heavily customized the HTML on this blog, so I think most of it will break if we upgrade.

I've set up a sandbox over here for me to play with it and see what happens. Snagged my own name for the URL too, that was cool. Let me know what you think, here, not there, 'cos I'm not checking there.

The Root of All Evil

The chicken thing totally worked.

We made 39 cents in advert revenue out of the chicken entry, compared to only 17 cents for the herb one, so that's it, more chickens* from now on. Presenting, Rasta Chicken:



*I think I've pretty much run out of chicken pictures from the rodeo** and I don't think pictures of precooked chickens is going to do it, so there may not, in fact, be more chickens from now on.

** Now that I think about it, there may be more pictures on the other camera. I'll check later. I recall taking a beauty of Rasta Chicken, but it's not on my cell phone, so there may, in fact, be more chickens from now on.

Herbal

Nikki and I, with much help from Malc and Sandy, did a lot of work in the garden last weekend. Nikki now has her herb garden:
The big plant at the back is Rosemary that was already in the garden, to the right at the back is mint, hopefully contained in its own pot buried under the soil. I don't know what any of the others are except the basil, second from the left at the front.

The impressively large Rosemary, not showing too much transplant shock we hope. We dug it up whilst turning the soil over and replanted it not too far from its original position.
This poor little Basil had a tough time. First of all he's notoriously fickle about where he chooses to grow, then he got trod on by a size 10 flip-flop, then he got totally covered in mud and lost until we dug him out. Don't think he's going to make it.

Also being planted were some tomatoes. The hose pipe behind is porous, throughout the herb garden it's under a liner and the mulch, but it's lying on top of the soil round the veggies for now. It may get buried under a little soil later, we need to see how good a job it does on the surface first.

This is a Cayenne Pepper plant, there's also a yellow Bell Pepper plant in the garden. We've heard that planting veggies in the spring is a waste of time in Houston and that the autumn will yield bigger and better crops, but it's not like we're going to starve if the tomato plant fails, so we'll see what happens. Check back for regular updates.

Recruitment Drive

In the 7 months since the move to Blogger not one person has clicked on the two adverts under Selling Out (bottom right, under the Archives, in case you're looking, which, let's face it, you haven't been so far). I know I could move the adverts somewhere else on the page, like to the very top, but I'm not really trying to make a living out of this, I just want to see what happens and I don't want to take up valuable top of the page real estate with commercial crap. So how do I solve this problem? Well, it's quite simple, I need to drive more traffic to the site. More traffic, more eyeballs, more chance of people spotting the ads, more chance of people being interested enough to click on them, more chance of me making enough money to buy a round of drinks at the gravity enabled space bar of the future in 2052.

Now, I could do this by writing one or more carefully crafted entries every day that are entertaining or funny or controversial or all three, slowly allowing word to get around about what a fun few minutes it is to visit here regularly, but I need instant gratification, plus, you know, I don't write too good. But fear not, for I have a cunning plan. I present you with gratuitous pictures of baby chickens for no reason at all! Tell your friends.