How does this stuff get into my computer

Dawn and Lucy are proud to announce the birth of a beautiful new Barbeque!

Expected on the 8th of October, 2006; a bouncing new Barbeque: Housewarming! (parents: Lucy and Dawn; Stu).

If you are reading this, you and your friends are (probably) invited to come and sit around, and coo over it, and poke its chubby cheeks and sling meat at it! Come one, come all.

We are not religious people so we will be baptising it with only the finest Hereford Scrumpy and Chilean Chardonnay (please provide own Holy Water).

Please contact the proud parents for further details!

Holiday-on-Wye

I have been on holiday! It was exhausting.

We wanted to keep ourselves busy, not because we were in the least bit interested in the activities but because we didn't really have anything to say to each other, and so that we'd have lots of things to boast to our friends about when we got back. So we planned a packed schedule of exploring¹, horseriding², kayaking³, country-lane-rallying⁴, base-jumping⁵, hiking⁶, mountain-climbing⁷ and sword-fighting⁸, and swore that we'd kill our own supper⁹ every night and come back with more scars and better stories than we left with.

I confess, we were daunted by the ocassional day of rain, and we might not have leapt out of bed at exactly the crack of dawn every morning, but our indomitable British (Welsh border) spirits never failed and we kept the adrenaline at high tide and the conversation at bay admirably.

Now I'm back, and I'm looking forward to carrying on with my new-found anti-social activity-based lifestyle! I can only imagine where it might take me next.
________________________________________________
^{1 Incorrect use of the SatNav. 2 Looking at horses. 3 Boat trip on the River Wye. 4 Meeting other cars head-on down single-track roads. 5 Clattering down two flights of stairs in the rental house. 6 Walking around bookshops. 7 Walking around villages. 8 Arguing about the Mappa Mundi. 9 Feasting like kings in the local gastro-pub.}

So I lost my job,

a lot of customers lost their deli, and I no longer get to work with my friends. If anyone wants a team of enormously overqualified baristas with a severe customer service intolerance and excellent grammar, I can help you out.

But at least it's sunny, and I can sit outside in other people's coffee shops and read the paper and watch people through my sunglasses which is basically my ideal job and my previous job, without all the free coffee. Buying groceries instead of raiding the stockroom is going to be a bit of a shock though, I can tell you. And I'll probably get scurvy if I can't shoplift Innocent smoothies every morning.

Blatantly, though, the main impetus in getting a new job is that I've got way too much time to spend poncing around with my camera at the moment and I'm in danger of becoming a very dull person.

Attempts at discovery; eventually defeated by owls. Ends in a meal.

On a rare joint day off, my illustrious partner in exploration and I travelled into darkest (leafiest) Derbyshire and discovered: the Peak District! Luckily, the natives had installed cable cars (but, unluckily, hadn't solved my rather panicky fear of heights). These were good for hauling us high into the sky.


The heights led to some rather spectacular views and the chance to ponce around with the saturation settings on my camera! Always the cornerstone of any good day out.

Later on, we discovered this previously unreported Devil Owl. It pretended to be a children's maze, but when we realised that a pair of averagely-intelligent degree-holders couldn't figure it out, we deduced that it is actually probably a portal to hell or similar and was probably best left undiscovered.
Note the wrath in its mosaic eyes! Clearly, this is not a creature to trifle with.

We did like, however, the benevolent Grandfather Carved Out Of A Tree, which we found a little way away, up a very steep path. His whole family were there, but I only saw fit to take pictures of the grandfather, probably because I was envious of his luxuriant beard and manly physique. Lots of things we discovered were up steep paths, now I think about it, which may explain why the area has gone unmapped for so many years.

Other things which involved the steep, and the steps, were the many (pair of) caves, one of which was hidden deep in the hillside and was quite wet, and the other of which was hidden in Middle Earth and was very fucking wet indeed (also quite dark and scary).



Soon after we finished discovering (got bored of) these 17th century caves, we travelled back down the mountain in a handcart (cable car) and ate fish and chips and bread and dip by the river. A fine feast to mark the end of a fine day's graft at the the fine job of discovering tourist attractions in the heart of Matlock! A round of applause wouldn't be inappropriate, I feel.