Didn’t shoot too many photos, but got something like 30 of Mr. T. Zahn, so I’ll be checking those in Lightroom when I get home.  Hopefully there’s at least one good one we can use on the UberCon site.  I also need to get his contact details to see if he minds if I use them in my personal (online) portfolio.  Missed the tear-down of the convention by being a lazy sod and sitting in my room reading.  However, I helped pack the truck for the trip to the con, so I think I’m excused.

MJ brought two of my boxes of books.  I know where one is right now, just need to find the other one and see how many books I can fit in my checked luggage.  I’ll be able to put some in my carry-on too, as I don’t need to be quite as cautious about what goes in my checked luggage this time (for the flight out I had all the camera gear in the carry-on).

Spent several days this week mowing Kevin’s acre of land, after I fixed one of his lawnmowers and the weed-whacker.  The weed-whacker had a combustion chamber and air filter that were full of water, and the spark was all gummed up.  A bit of shaking and leaving in the sun dried the filter and chamber, and a bit of gasoline and sandpaper fixed the spark.  Presto, working weed-whacker.  MJ came down Tuesday evening, and we’ve been having good chats, working on the garden beds and just generally been the good friends that we are.

Didn’t manage to run the BBS at UberCon, but that’s life.  I should have it up and running on the Avatar game host in the next week or so.

Boss has kindly said I don’t have to be on call until Tuesday, which is good – I could do Monday night, but I’m bound to be jet-lagged (my trick doesn’t work so well when going forwards in time zones).  So, I get back to the UK tomorrow morning, and I’ll be back at work the next day.  Pity that, I was just starting to relax properly.

The flowering cherry is covered in pink flowers, the wild strawberries are putting forth their white flowers, the Japanese maple is budding, the (crab?) apple is covered in green, with dots of pink.

A plant I don’t know the name of is covered in tiny white flowers, another plant I don’t know the name of has put forth purple flowers, the bluebells are gearing up to flower, the daffodils have had their last hurrah, the hebes are growing, the lavender is sprouting fresh new leaves, and the heather is moving along at a good clip.

And the lawn needs mowing.  Again.

Step 1 – Start taking plants out. Rather than take them all out at once, I decided to just start at one end of the bed and work my way towards the other end, lifting each plant out as I went. The big hebe (a hebe buchananii) really didn’t want to come out of the ground, and required liberal application of the pick-axe/trenching tool to get underneath the root ball and lever it up. It also got a good trimming while I was at it, as it was a bit large for the bed. The rest of the plants came up with nary a protest.

Step 2 – Fork the entire bed over.

Step 3 – Fold in 100 litres of manure, and 75 litres of compost.

Step 4 – Choose new locations for all of the plants, dig new holes, wet down the holes and put the plants back.

Step 5 – Collapse into a chair with some hot food, as I’ve been working flat out for over 2 hours.

• the hole in the pond was fixed (created by Mum and I lifting some water plants out a week or two before),
• the two plants were in the ground,
• the trench for the armoured cable was started,
• the compost bin was restarted,
• the junk crazy paving that was being used as a wall was removed, the bricks underneath were removed, and logroll was installed,
• the lawn was mowed,
• and I had three new fish in my tank (thanks to Dad, Red Dwarf Gouramis).

So, one fix of the browser proxy, one set of virus remanents removed, various anti-virus and anti-malware tools updated and the machine was back on the net.  It managed to lose the soundcard driver along the way, and the automatic upgrade to IE 7 broke a few other things – I dealt with those this weekend.  Should have been no more than 20 or 30 minutes of work, but I got dinner out of it, and an offer to help with curtains etc in the house.  Sounds like a fair deal to me.

This weekend saw the fixing of PSAPI.DLL (which caused BTHelpNotifier.exe to go belly up, thank you IE 7), the fixing of the sound card drivers and the installation of The Sims for the daughter.  Installing the Sims was interesting – I’ve never seen a machine complain about autoexec.nt before.  Turns out it wasn’t in system32 like it should have been.  Copied it from elsewhere on the system and life was golden.  My neighbour didn’t believe I could hear the speakers clicking once the driver was installed either.  Proved they were working by firing up Media Player :>

Also achieved this weekend – painting of some of the fresh (hah!) plastering (and the process of touching up a house is apparently called walloping in Staffordshire), emptied the pond, chucked pond muck on garden beds, refilled pond half-way.  Oh, and a good load of laundry.  Also achieved last weekend – got the corkboard up on the wall.  I’ve been meaning to do that for about a year now.

The peas have been producing quite well, despite the onslaught from slugs and snails.  I refuse to use modern chemical methods for getting rid of slugs and snails – they’re quite handy in other parts of my garden.  I just don’t want them near my peas, onions and carrots!

Dinner last night consisted of cold roast beef, fragrant thai rice and fresh peas – very tasty.

The oven is working out quite nicely – this weekend saw two treacle tarts (Gran style, [no lemon and ginger] but with a bit too much syrup unfortunately),  and some homemade bread.  Pity I messed up the yeast amount for the bread – the flavour was a bit off.  Still good bread though.  This weekend might see a Texas Sheet Cake – a recipe I picked up in the US that uses sour cream to make a cake.  It’s a bit odd, but it tastes sooo good.

Dad dropped by today on his way up to Leeds – I had repaired part of his lamp with some epoxy during the week. He remarked that I seem happy in the kitchen, and I’m not surprised. I love the new kitchen, and I love cooking. As with most people I dislike the washing up, but there’s got to be some downside to cooking I suppose. Lunch was a nice slab of roast beef, perfectly pink in the center, fresh picked peas from my garden, sliced carrots, yorkshire puddings and gravy – traditional English roast lunch. Next on the list of things to cook will be a stir fry tomorrow night – noodles, bean sprouts, carrot, fresh peas, pork, satay sauce. Then perhaps a treacle tart…

Went to B&Q to find a plate for mounting and sealing the bathroom vent, but had no luck, so Mum will check around for me. Ended up buying a set of 10 solar powered lights though, so they’re now installed in the garden. Should see in about 15 or 20 minutes how well they light up. Also spent yesterday afternoon dozing in my garden – pleasantly warm afternoon, warm breeze, birds and bees bouncing around. Nice and pleasant way to relax. Then shot about 80 photos of birds in the garden that evening – I need to offload that card and see if there are any good ones.

Talking to someone on an IRC server I frequent, he mentioned that he used to grow all the ingredients for a good salsa in has garden – that’s a tempting idea for next year.

All the onions are looking in good form, there must be about 50 of them!  Enough onions for a year if I’m lucky, and the packet only cost me a quid or so.

Need to get the channels filled in, and the wall re-skimmed where the tiles left holes. After that, I’ll have to decide on the splashback, and the kitchen will be pretty much done. It looks like it could use another lick of paint, but there’s no so much surface to cover now, so that’s something I can handle.

The garden also met with approval from Gran – she saw it a few months ago, and it’s come a long way since then. The peas are growing quite well now that I’ve got cocoa shells around them (slugs can’t stand the shells apparently), and I’ve moved most of the onions to the top bed under the flowering cherry. Apparently peas and onions don’t get on very well, so I’ve evicted the onions.

Put the new oven to the test the other night, and prepared a wonderfully moist roast chicken. I’ll be taking a knife and a long simmer to the carcass, and creating a nice chicken stock / soup tomorrow. Also made a batch of chocolate chip cookies from the Tollhouse recipe that I have – they went down a storm at work. I fear for my waistline now that I have an oven!

Got a call from the fitter Friday evening – the electrician was available Saturday at lunch, Sunday morning early or Monday, which time was convenient for me? Saturday lunchtime please! Mum and Dad showed up earlyish on Saturday (before 8 A.M.) to lend a hand with the de-packing of the living room, and stocking shelves with things. When we started, it was a bit of a case of ‘So much space, we’re going to need to shuffle things around every day to make the cupboards feel used!’ We ended up with something in pretty much every cupboard, and a bit of moving things around a few times. The drawers are a bit far from the stove, but that won’t be too much of an issue, as I’m aiming at right-leg being the food preparation area, back wall being the cooking area, left-leg is washing and drying and random things on counters (well, maybe not the random things on counters).

Plates and glasses are over the food prep area, electrical cooking goods (bread machine, hand blender etc) are under the prep area, knives and baking gear to the right of the prep area, and large things like bags of rice and bags of chocolate chips to the left. Should work fairly well, but I’ll know once I have a gas supply to the oven and hob.

Yep, that’s right dear reader, the gas man isn’t available until this Monday to do his work. We’re short staffed this week coming, so having to be home for a few hours on Monday isn’t going to sit that well with work, but there’s not much I can do. At least I can remote in via SSH to do some work.

Went up to Dad’s place in Leeds with Mum for the night, had a pleasant slow evening. Found that the Sainsbury’s chorizo, chilli and cheese crisps are most excellent, so might go hunting in town for a bag of my own to eat. Rolled back down the M62 and M6 this morning with Mum to finish working on the house. We (Mum mostly I think) got pretty much all of the laundry loads done, more work on the garden (cocoa shells to stop slugs and snails, ripped out one of the logrolls and put down pebbles instead), cleaned up the bathroom and two bedrooms. I’ve got a pile of ironing to do, and a pile of filing. Yay, more paperwork.