Holiday Toes

Bright and colourful for holidays! 'Nuff said!

Flower Power

I've had my toes done again - this time all spring flowery!!!!

Can't wait until I can break out my open toed heels for work. Still a bit chilly for that at the moment tho!

International Barber Shop Competition Winners 2009

I don't know about you, but I suppose they might be good enough!!!

Zebra Toes

Carrying on the animal print theme, I went and had Zebra print put on my toes last night...

 

Cool!

Leopard Toes

A few weeks ago I blogged about a new nail treatment I'd discovered - Minx nails and I also posted a pic with my new jazzy toes.

Well I've been back - and this time I've come over all "animal"!

 

Aren't they fab???!!!!

  

 

New Obsession

Image courtesy of http://www.jbox.com/

So, I was looking online the other day at 'stuff' - you know - general browsing that has you jumping from one topic to another, using StumbleUpon and generally having a nice time, when I came across an advert for one of  these - it looed like a beautiful lacquered box, with matching accessories.

How cute, I thought. What is it?

I love pretty boxes & containers of all sorts (don't ask) and wanted an excuse to buy one of these.

It was then I noticed that the 'accessories' actually were chopsticks! What was going on?

Reading a little around the subject, I realised what I was looking at is called a Bento Box and is, effectively, a Japanese lunch box. A beautiful Japanese lunch box. With matching accessories.

Nice. Pretty. Slightly boring. I have quite a few lunch boxes, so no real excuse for another one of these.

How wrong could I have been?

I started googling for Bento Boxes.

It would seem that, in the way that the Japanese people do with many things, they have elevated having lunch to an art form.

Image courtesy of http://casabento.com/

The boxes seem to be available in about a million different shapes, sizes, colours & designs. Some have layers, some come with a matching bag, some have chopsticks.

But, it's not just what they look like that's important, and they are gorgeous; what goes inside them is equally important and part of the art form.

There are 'principles' you have to stick to.

First there's the 3:2:1 principle - 3/6 of the content should be rice, 2/6 of the content should be veg, 1/6 of the of the content should be protein.

Pic courtesy of The Blogging Mum on Flickr

Then there's the colours - you have to have 5.

Next, if you're being purist, you should use 5 different methods to cook the food (boiled rice, fried wonton, steamed veg etc etc) which is being presented in the bento.

Then, and I'm not sure why, but this is the bit I like the best, you have to make the contents look as attractive as possible...rice shaped like animals, veg cut in the shape of flowers. Anything, in fact, that makes the contents look lovely.

See what I mean about the art form?

Pic courtesy of Bentobird on Flickr
I don't know what it is with the Japanese people and cute stuff - anime characters - dressing up - they get completely obsessed!!! It's fab.

So, I was not so surprised when I looked further into the bento accessories and found ALL SORTS of gadgets to make your bento lunch contents as adorable as possible.

Gadgets which include...

o A thing which you put your hard boiled eggs in to change their shape into cars, bears, stars, cartoon characters - seriously - there are molds for Winnie the Pooh shaped eggs!

o Little silicone sheets printed with designs such as monkeys, octopus, rainbows, and cartoon characters which you wrap around the food to keep the flavours separate from each other.

o Cutters which cut face shapes into (and out of) anything. Ever seen a rice ball with eyes?

Pic courtesy of CasaBento.com 

 o And - a personal favourite - a weiner cutter (that's Americano for hot dog sausage) which makes your hot dogs look like a fish, a crab or a penguin. No, really. Look. Penguins made out of hot dogs. In your lunch box.

Pic courtesy of CasaBento.com 

Isn't it stupendous?

Talk about creativity. This is ultimate foodie creativity. Check out the Bento Flickr Pool. Many people who consider their lunch pretty enough to be worthy of a photo. Imagine that.

Gas Part 2 - Gordon is a Hero

The fist part of this story is here ---> 'Gas'

We were left, cut off from the mains, at 2am, snow outside, and the doors and windows having been open for an hour to stop us being asphyxiated!

What to do?

1) HEAT - run around looking for my little electric heater that I used to use in my two, previous, very cold, houses. I found it! We shut the door and cranked up the heat. Fortunately, it being a well insulated house, it only took about 10 minutes before we could take off our skiing jackets! Brrrrr.

2) EXTRA BEDDING - nick Dan's old (15 tog) quilt from the spare room to supplement the 12 tog one we already had on the bed. Done. Result was one cozy night's sleep!

3) SLEEP - it was after 2am. ZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzz!

The next morning we put out a call to Gordon - our friendly Corgi/Gas Safe guy. He's the chap who did our two fab bathrooms, and a family friend of the Aldridges.

It was one of the worst slippy-snow days and it turns out he'd already cancelled the job he'd been planning to do that day - because of its location, his van wasn't going to get up the hill to the place where it was.

Anyway, even with a sore throat, and a killer cough, he said, give me an hour to come to (it was 8am) and I'll be over to see what I can do.

An hour and a half later we get a call from him.

"I am coming" he said. "I've been trying to get off our estate for the last hour"

As with our road, their estate was unvisited by the gritters and snow plough.

He got here eventually, and found us sat in the lounge - cardies and jumpers and scarves on - with our little heater now moved in there, so we could work!

After a brief investigation he capped the pipe to the hob and got the supply turned back on at the mains. The heating was restored to us by about midday.

It was a matter of another couple of hours for him to replace the hob with a new silver one! It's lovely!

Thank-you Gordon - you're our hero!

 

 

New Nails

Way back at the end of 2008, we decided to cut back a little on our expenditures so that we'd not be so exposed by the credit crunch side effects. One of our decisions was to try and pay the mortgage off a bit faster.

Some things had to go.

My once-every-3-weeks pedicures, (how fab do my toes look on Holiday?) and other regular beauty treatments were my biggest extravagance. I offered to give them up and put the money aside to make overpayments on the mortgage.

A hard decision - especially for my feet - but the right one for the house!

Anyway, here we are a whole year later and I decided that my tootsies were in need of attention. So, by way of a New Year treat, I booked myself into my regular salon (Skin & Health in Selby Rd) for a facial and a serious attack on my feet.

It was so nice to see Caz, the owner, and the 2 lovely girls, Em and Nat, who work there. (Hello Ladies, if you're reading!!!) Lots has happened in the last year, so there was a lot to catch up on. It was a really nice relaxing afternoon!

They've got the latest in nail technology. I've previously had gel finger nails done there, and Marina had hers done there for her wedding, but I've never seen these things before - called Minx nails, apparently they're the latest thing.

Anyway, look at how cool my toes are...they do so many designs - next time I'm having this pink and brown 'pringle' design!!!

Even more snow!

Just come back from a 9:45pm dash around Sainsbury's to find the last few obscure items for the Xmas repast.

Vanilla pods and chicken livers.

Came out to find it was snowing like mad outside.

Lovely!

On the way home Dan's car skidded twice but something magic in the breaks made us not actually skid. Clever!

The Gardner's Arms seemed to call to us on the way home. 2 pints of Guinness later we're now tucked up safe and warm at home.

 The pic doesn't really show how lovely it is, but it's very Christmassy out there!

Update! Some pics of the back garden in the morning after more snow had fallen!

 

Lovely Flowers

These came to the door on Friday! It's been a tough few weeks and they cheered me up no end!

Thank you nice lady

Coming back from London on Sunday, I decided to eschew Janey's offer of her company all the way to Euston in favour of her offer of a lift to Ealing Broadway. It was completely tipping it down and I was worried about getting soaked at the beginning of the 3 hour journey and then having to sit on the train in wet jeans - yeuck.

It was 9:50, Sunday morning, and there was noone parked outside Ealing Broadway station at all - and all the spaces (private) were empty.

Janey was going to just drop me off but as there was nothing going on outside, she pulled up in a parking space, grabbed her keys and said "I'll just walk you to the train".

She was parked just about where this little white van is parked on the Google StreetView pic.
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As we got out of the car, and started walking to the front of the station, a lady who was standing just at the top of the station steps came over and warned us that they'd been busy clamping that morning.

We'd not even reached the far kerb and as we turned round, the guy was walking towards Jane's car with the clamp in his hand! If you pan to the right, the clamper geezer was parked more or less opposite Starbucks.

She ran the 10 steps back to the car and zoomed out of the space. The guy calmly walked back to his car and put the clamp away, and got in.

Thank-you nice lady! You saved us £60!!!!

A sad bit of soppiness

When I was out in the USA, I felt pretty homesick on the Saturday I should have come home on, and basically holed myself up in the room with room service and a movie. No, not that sort of movie....this movie! It was a nice way to spend the day - channel surfing and trying to catch a bit of UK TV in an attempt to connect to home. I was flicking between the channels, when I came across a Lloyds TSB advert - the 'for the journey' one - with the little pointy faced animated characters and the very high-pitched singing.

I was instantly transported back home - the advert always makes Dan pose and posture and pretend he's singing the very high part - whilst pulling a multitude of funny faces - and, sad though I am, he has me in hysterics every time! I got an instant cheer up! There was only one thing for me to do....I put the song as a ring tone on my phone 'specially to annoy all around me!

It's a lovely tune - called Eliza's Aria is a classical aria from the ballet Wild Swans, composed by Elena Kats-Chernin.