Coq au Vin

After 2 hours (half way!)

Dan's been buying fireworks.

I'm scared!

Coq au Vin

"Before"

Making Pumpkins

Mrs Bedford's Toffee

Blog entries like twitter posts today - this is the precursor to the toffee (finished product posted later today)

Wainer's Advice

Over the summer when Anna & Wainer were here, Wainer was giving Janie some very good advice about nutrition and how to get the right sort of chemicals and nutrients into her body, especially when she's going through a phase of being not well. One of the pieces of advice was to have red wine, not white, and one finger of it...as you can see from the picture, he didn't actually specify WHICH finger! We chose the top one!

You'd have thought someone had taught us to cook!

The last 2 nights we've gone for the 'bitty' tea in grand style! Prawn cocktail - pictured, and fabulous bruschetta with artichokes, anchovies, olives, capers, ham - also in the pic. Really really nice. Last night we even filled vol-au-vents with pizza style toppings. Really superb. They're definitely going to come out for the next dinner party!

Scary Webcam

As a result of the new lapotop, on Thursday night, when Janie arrived for the weekend, we were able to get online on MSN to see Mum and Dad on their webcam! Very scary! In fact when we did "full screen" view it was just like sitting across the dining room table from them at home!
The pic is at a point where we were trying to get some online game thing going! It's all a bit scary close-ups tho! Mum's microphone is very very quiet, we have to have the volume turned up VERY loud, and she has to lean forward into the laptop so we can see what a good job Dad did on her roots!!! It's all been cause for great hilarity!

Mum's new laptop

Yaaaaaaawn, we're a bit tired today - we didn't get in last night 'till 3am! No, nothing like that! Mum's got a new laptop and broadband and we (well Dan) went over to help her set it up and get everything started. Only 2 problems

1. it's Vista
2. it keeps freezing

very distressing on both counts. Even super Dan couldn't work out what was going on. It's very puzzling and we've had to raise a support record with Dell. The only problem is that after 24 hours they've not contacted us (or even sent a confirmation email) and, worse, when Mum phones up for help, I have no idea how to find anything or how to direct her towards the right bits! It's like a foreign language! Hopefully armed with a copy of this though, she'll soon become the family Vista expert!!!

Current TV faves

Greys anatomy (Season 4 Just started)
K-Ville - Cope show based in new orleans (started off very well)
Californication - Great series with the guy from Xfiles
Damages - Lawyer type of show starring glenn close