Zorac's LiveJournal

Well, it seems that the meltingly hot weather which made the working week such fun has done the traditional British thing of fleeing the moment the weekend arrives. This rather steps on the Lj post I was going to make along the lines of: So, it's only a week until I get to flee this stiflingly hot weather for the south of France. Where it will probably be even hotter, but at least I have access to a swimming pool. And more importantly, where I don't have to do any work (except in the likely event that there's some fruit which needs picking...)

Yesterday actually started well, but took a rather sudden turn for the worse in the form of a torrential thunderstorm. Amusingly, this happened just as I scurried into the cinema to see Stormbreaker. More amusingly, the drenching I got as I headed home afterwards showed up my prophetic choice of T-Shirt: "Dry is not an option" (from Splash Mountain at the Magic Kingdom - where it, in fact, doesn't really apply. The Kali River Rapids at the Animal Kingdom would be much more appropriate - but I digress). Less amusingly, I'd cunningly left several windows wide open in the hopes of letting some cooling breezes in, and instead came home to find my kitchen pursuing a new vocation as a paddling pool.

The hottest part of yesterday, naturally, was while I was having a haircut - being trapped under one of those lovely keep-all-the-hair-out-but-all-the-heat-in plastic sheets was somewhat akin to being roasted alive. Still, there was the novelty of wearing pyjamas to bed without risking heatstroke (this is why having houseguests in the heat of summer is a risky business) - although hiding under the covers as well was clearly a mistake, given that I woke up in the middle of the night severely overheated.

I've always been one for media addictions - whether it's desperation for a Favourite Author Fix, eagerness to see the latest movie, or rampaging through a TV show to the exclusion of all else. It's the latter that's been hitting me lately - first sophie10 got me hooked on The 4400 (which at least is still on the weekly drip - the only one, now that Doctor Who has finished) and Alias (all five seasons in around three weeks), and now frayer has cunningly introduced me to House (yes, I'm posting this to take a break between the first two seasons). Once that's done, I've got Space: Above and Beyond which I picked up on a whim, and seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation to work my way through (although that's more of a "maybe one episode a day" show than a "one more episode or sleep?" one). Hopefully that's enough to keep me going until new seasons of some of the above, plus 24, Battlestar Galactica and Lost...

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Now that I've started moving back in, some more kitchen pics. At last, a home for my alcohol collection! And now for something completely random:

So, this evening I did the first batch of laundry in the shiny new washer-dryer in my shiny new kitchen. It killed two of my favourite T-shirts. The design on the Kenya one had some how got all fused together, and the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror one started crumbling off. I hope this is just me picking the wrong program and won't be a recurring feature...

GAH! WHY DO THEY HAVE TO KEEP MESSING WITH THE START TIME OF DOCTOR WHO?!?

Honestly, is it too much to have it start at the same time every week. Or maybe even approximately the same time. Especially when it's the second half of a two-parter. I bet I'm not the only person who's been caught out by the 6:35 start this evening; I imagine that there are a fair number of people tuning in around now expecting the closing stages of Strictly Dance Fever before Doctor Who starts some time just after seven. I do at least have a Sky box so I can get BBC3 for the repeat - except that there's no chance of me being home from London by seven tomorrow, so that's something of a moot point. Raaaaa!

Thank God for BitTorrent...

I really hate it when the weather gets multiple personality disorder around this time of year. One day it's nearly summer, the next it's almost winter - not a good thing when you have a fairly narrow comfort range of temperatures. Mostly it's playing havoc with my pitiful attempts to sleep. Winter is fine - the heating is on, so the temperature inside stays fairly stable and I can just hide under the thick duvet in my Pyjamas. Summer is less good, but fairly easy to work around - under or on the thin duvet, with or without clothing (and if it gets really hot, open the window). Right now, however, one night I wake up sweating like a pig because it's too hot under the thick duvet, even sans nightwear, the next night I wake up shivering under the thin duvet despite re-donning my PJs. it's just not fair!

It might not quite be summer yet, but it's close enough for me to hit the salad bowl, and my house salad goes something like this: Start with some lettuce, I've usually used iceberg in the past, but that's more through force of habit than because it's any good. Next, add some sweet pepper for crunch - yellow or orange ones add some colour, but green or red will do. Add some tomatoes - I've mostly been using cherry tomatoes or similar, because the slices you get out of normal-sized ones are just too big, and because it's easier to get flavourful small ones. Now for some meat - a couple of slices of ham (chopped) - Sainsbury's have some new seville orange-topped ham which is really rather yummy. And then some more meat - a few inches of dried sausage (the sort that's about an inch in diameter, not your big salami), thickly sliced. Finally drench it in home-made vinaigrette (3:2 ratio of extra-virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar, a good dollop of wholegrain mustard and salt & pepper to taste. No need to make it every time, I make up a fresh batch in an old Snapple bottle every few days). Toss, then enjoy with something bready on the side.

Oh, shiny black MacBook, how do I perve on thee! I'm sorely tempted to go out and get one right now, but I already made the decision to wait for at least the second generation of any Intel-based macs (plus Leopard and iLife '07, if possible). Still, it is so pretty!

Meanwhile, I've been working my way back through my LJ history, tagging all my entries. I've got back nearly three years so far, but I keep inventing new tags, so I think this is going to be something like painting the Forth Rail Bridge.

Tired now. Time for bed.

So I've finally got an install date for my shiny new kitchen - 12th June. those of you who have seen the current one will know that the only way to say anything nice about it is not to say anything at all, so I'm really looking forward to getting the new one in. Of course, there are still a bunch of other things I need to do - today I visited my good friends at Carpet Right to order some vinyl flooring (currently I have carpet. Who puts carpet in a kitchen?).

Other things to do:

• Get an electrical survey done - all those shiny new appliances are going to need power, and it would be useful to have some sockets by the worktops where they'll do some good.
• Get tiles and paint (OK, that's fairly self explanatory)
• Get the phone socket moved to somewhere more sensible. Like, say, the living room. Not vital, now that health and safety thwarted Plan A (which would have but the over directly in front of the 'phone socket).
• Probably some other things I've forgotten about.

Other things like sorting out a table and chairs can wait until after the fitting.

After I'm done with the kitchen, the final step of the redecorating spree will be the living room. The fun starts just with the logistics of getting everything out of there and finding somewhere else to put it. The sofa search is also proving tricky - the main stumbling block here is that the only way in is through the front door, up the stairs, and then an immediate left turn through the internal door. Finding a sofa which it isn't physically impossible to get in here is going to be a challenge...

Notes to self:

1. Do not use the washing machine and the tumble dryer at the same time.
2. Spare fuses are good things to have.
3. When a plug is scorchingly hot to the touch and both it and the 4-way it was plugged into have melted patches, that's bad.

Laundry is such fun.

So much for the weather. The distressingly nice Friday was, of course, followed by a wet and gloomy weekend. The rain forcing everyone indoors means that everywhere's full for lunch and the packed shops have ridiculous queues for the changing rooms. To add to the joy, both Slither and Silent Hill had moved to evening showings only, leaving me with my third choice, M:I:3. It's actually a pretty reasonable action flick, marred mostly by the annoying Tom "shark sofa" Cruise trying to insinuate himself into virtually every frame. Oh, and the new Superman trailer is rather promising.

Now that The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google is drawing to a close, the puzzles are really starting to get tricky - the first three tiers were fairly straightforward, but the fourth, not so much. Yesterday's sudoku-style puzzle was really quite nasty, and today's "Restoration" one was taking so long by trial-and-error, that I ended up writing a program to solve it (what, me, a geek?).

I'm fairly sure that I've only stumbled onto MySpace once, and the horrible mishmash of text, images, sound and video sent me running for the hills, but apparently some people do use it. According to El Reg, since the lovely and benevolent Mr. Murdoch took over, the terms and conditions and conditions have been tweaked just a little. The synopsis seems to be "News Corporation pwns j00" - anything you put on MySpace, they get to keep forever and use however they like. Yup, when the MySpacer grows up and becomes famous, all those skeletons in the MySpace closet can pop up in the Sun or on Fox News. Lovely.

The last couple of days I've been working through my newly-arrived DVDs of the final season of Blakes 7. Yes, the wobbly sets and dodgy special effects are still there, but considering the tiny budget, one can hardly complain - and it's the story and characters that you watch it for (yes, I still want to be Avon when I grow up, why do you ask?) The influence on later shows like Babylon 5 (league of non-aligned planets, anyone?) and Firefly (a bunch of renegades on a spaceship fighting an evil federation which uses pacification drugs...) is clearer than ever. Plus you get one of the greatest endings to a TV series ever...