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!!!!

Celia Imrie, eat your heart out...

Friday dawned bright and breezy - and so after a coffee to shake off the fog formed due to the lateness of my arrival, we were ready quite early to head out locally into town. With nothing specific on the agenda today, there was no pressure to do anything so we just wafted around Ealing looking at the shops and making a few small purchases.

We decided we needed something to eat and Janey's fave bar/pub is a nice spot on the corner of Ealing Common called 'The Grange'. It was fabby...and we had a couple of their shared starter plates and some glasses of wine.

As we'd been wandering round Ealing, we had been into a lovely cookware shop and bought some Christmas themed wine glass identifiers - silly shapes which stick to your glass so you can see which one is yours at a party. The (rather super) salesgirl in the shop came over as we were looking at them and said "See the Christmas Tree? His name is Norman" - it's true - see the picture.

How could we leave them in the shop after knowing that?

They were really cute! We got them out in the pub and put 6 on one glass and 6 on the other. They looked so funny we then decided to take a picture of them.


I held up my phone and looked thru the lens to get the picture right. Janey was sat behind. As soon as I saw what was framed in the viewer, I started to giggle. Memories of "Calendar Girls" and of Celia Imrie holding up her iced buns!!!

What do you think?

I could hardly hold the camera up for laughing!!! In fact, I think you *may* be able to detect a teeny bit of camera shake!

Janey didn't know why I was sitting there hyperventilating into the table, so I just said, take a picture of me - and handed her the camera.

Her shoulders started to shake in that 'laughing so hard you make no noise' kind of way.

I felt really sorry for the people sitting near us as we sat there for about 10 minutes squeaking and squealing, trying not to laugh, but because all we could see of each other was a view with wine glass boobs, every time we looked across, we cracked up again! And this was BEFORE the 1st sip!

Totally brilliant!

I think I may have needed another glass!!!!!!

A quiet weekend in London #1

I'm not too big on public transport but I hate even more the thought of driving down the M1 late in the evening. So, Thursday found me sat on the 19.40 from Leeds to Kings Cross hoping that the person booked into the seat next to me wasn't going to get on at Wakefield! (They didn't!)

As it was the 1^st week in December and I'd not had time yet to write my Xmas cards, I'd decided that the train journey was going to be the ideal opportunity to sit down for an enforced writing session, and I prepared my addresses (labels) and Xmas greeting (a set of mini cards from MOO telling folks to read the blog rather than using up half a forest by printing out the usual round robin) in advance.

I got started before the train set off – I was so engrossed I hardly was aware of setting off or even the time! I kind of looked around every time I completed a pack of cards – one of 10, one of 15, one of 16! The numbers went up quickly In the end I'd completed 66 by the time I thought I was ready to stop! The time FLEW!

The tube to Ealing was nice and simple – Victoria and then Circle – so even though it was a late-ish start (19.40) and late-ish into Kings X (22.10) I was walking along the platform at Ealing Broadway just before 11pm really not bad at all!

Dan fixes stuff

As you can see from the pictures, here is Dan in 'fixing stuff' mode. Mum & Dad's lappy had a 'spontaneous massive existence failure' just like the Starship Titanic (get with the Douglas Adams quotes please!!)

So, last week, when they were over for a few days, he set to, and tried to work out what was going wrong.

As you can see from the sequence of photos, he starts off looking laid back but inquisitive. "Hmmmm what is going wrong here?"

In the next pic, he's already moved to the floor position - hunched. "This thing will not beat me!"


The final pic is a closeup - proper concentration!


What you can't see is that off camera, he's already taken the back off and has pulled bits out!


The good news about this is that he did get it fixed.


The bad news is that by the time M&D drove home, it was dead again!


Being a man of determined focus - this necessitated a trip to Bromborough the following weekend to finally put it right!!!

You might be able to tell I've been playing with the layout?

Hellooooooo!

Guess what I've been doing this morning? Yes, that's right - playing with the template & colours of the blog layout. What do you think? I wanted something that was a bit wider and had a different feel to it. I'm hoping the layout will mean I can fit more photos on without having to save and view 200 times during the creation of each post to see where the text & photos appear in relation to each other.

Lets see how this goes.

Comment if you would like to!

Liza

Yummy Pizza

Oh, we had a DELICIOUS tea last night - home made Pizza. A ~slight~ cheat as we used ASDA Pizza base mix. Not too much of a cheat though, it saves the weighing out of the yeast & flour, all you add is the water, but you still have to kneed the dough and leave it to rise.

In the meantime we cooked the remaining meatballs from Saturday night's dinner, made a little tomato sauce, and prepared the pizza stone by heating it in the oven.

The results were SOOOOO tasty that we've had part 2 of the leftover pizza, cold, for tea tonight - and it's STILL fantastic!

How good does that look? Yum!

Needlework - Extreme Closeups!

Well, a little bit more stitchin' has been going on, and I'm really making in-roads into the green.

But, there's a bit of a problem. I've mostly been doing fiddley bits, flowes and suchlike, which have not really covered large expanses with the same colour, but now I'm on the green, it's only 'light' or 'dark' so there's not much changing of colour, direction or thread to break up the colour block. So, it's much more noticeable if there's a difference in tension between stitches.

Anyway, I find that if I don't concentrate, and maybe do a row which has more tension, or less tension in the stitches, you get a stripe!

The top pic shows this quite clearly, in the middle of the lighter green expanse there's a tighter row, followed by a puffier one - hence, a little stripe.

I'm going to have to be really careful when I start on the cream which is the solid background colour, or it'll just be stripe-tastic!

Anyway, I spotted the above little glitch in the green, and, after an initial panic (Oh no I've spoiled it) I began having creative thoughts about the texture opportunities afforded by a bit of tight/loose stitching. (I think I must be catching it from my lovely friend Emma over on Mimi & Tilly who is having a super creative year.)

I thought I'd have a go at taking pictures so you can see the texture provided by the contrast between the stitches and the canvas.

I really like this!

In between starting each block of colour or pattern, I spend alot of time looking at the canvas, and running my hand over it. I really like the texture - it doesn't come over very well in the photos I've taken so far.

I'm hoping you get the feel for it from these pictures.


The rest of the extreme closeup pics are over in my 'Neeldework' album on Picasa.

Super night!

I met a couple of new people last night - Dan's friend "Snapey" (previously mentioned for doing the Helvellyn Triathlon) and his other half Lydia.

They came over for dinner, and it was a fab night. The wine and conversation flew - and the food wasn't too bad either!

The only downside was that the guys had to leave early Sunday morning so we couldn't do any breakfast/brunchy things - just what Sunday mornings are for!

Oooops!

We were making our tea last night and just as I was squeezing the tube of tomato pure (very hard) into the pan - it squirted out at an angle - all down the front of Dan's trousers! Ooooops!

He wouldn't let me take a photo for the blog tho. Booooo.

So here is a picture of my lovely coffee from this morning.



The double skin glass mugs are really cool, act like a thermos flask, and only cost about £4 from Sainsbury's!

...and run VT

Janey has been working on loads of different shows recently - Piers Morgan, Jools Holland and yesterday Alan Titchmarsh. Yes I know they're not all BBC but it would seem that the BBC department she works for, sell their services to whomever requires expert VT operators! So this is her Alan Titchmarsh credit I grabbed from the ITV Watch Again website...


Cool huh? You can watch the show here...ITV Player: The Alan Titchmarsh Show - Nov 10th and to get to the credits, scroll right to the end - about 45 minutes in - it then makes you watch a couple of adverts (well, who do you think this is, the BBC?) and then you get the last minute or so of the lovely John Sergeant's interview. Janey's name appears at the bottom of the 3rd page of credits!

Exciting!