Postman Tw*t and OUR black and white cat

Got the Audiolab amp out of the box. Needless to say its beautiful and it has motorized switches which go clunk when you press the corresponding button on the remote. However I neglected to notice on the details that it doesn't have a phono stage. This means I cannot connect the turntable unless I buy a separate pre amp. Needless to say I did that yesterday and it would have arrived this morning. I waited a little while before heading into college for the postman. It got to about 10am no sign of him. I went out to the letter box and there was a 'while you were out' card! I wasn't out! I was sat inside waiting for him! I will have to wait until tomorrow and go get it from the depot.

I booked the cats in for their little snip. Or total abdominal hysterectomy as its known in the trade. Trotsky (the black and white one) is going to have a hernia repair at the same time and they are both going to get microchipped. This little lot is going to come to about £250. Then there's the issue about maybe getting radio tracking collars for them before we let them go out and get stolen by Polish chavs again.

Girlfriend in an interview, I know, I know, it's serious

A is at this very moment in an interview for a job. Her blog is full or all sorts or crap to do with her current job and I have been hoping that she would find another. This potential way out has been slowly coming into view for some time now and A has been preparing diligently all week for her presentation which forms part of the selection. She has been saying that the job might not be any better and that it is not secure given that the trust is massively in debt. However I have been arguing that what she has at present is shit and insecure. She hasn't got much to lose by moving to another similar but better paid job where she won't be working for the same evil boss. Maybe I'm being a bit grass is always greener about it. Perhaps she should wait to decide once she gets the job offer which I hope she is going to get. I am a little worried that I have bossed her into applying for this job.
This is all academic I'll see what transpires when I get home.

On a lighter and enormously geeky note my new amplifier has arrived and is in the back of my car waiting for me to get it home and set it up. I will sell the old one on ebay which should raise a hundred quid I hope. I have managed to get the s/pdif digital output from my computer working so that music stored on my PC is now being outputted to my DAC and from there to the amp. From now on any music added to my harddrive will be encoded using the apple lossless encoder and will therefore be as detailed as the original CD. So I have a brilliant quality huge jukebox. Awesome!

Activity weekend

All sorts this weekend. Started early as A and I had the day off to go Skiing. This is because the indoor ski dome place in Milton Keynes runs three hour beginner lessons but the availability is really bad. We needed to go before April and when I booked in mid Feb there were no places left on weekend courses that were before our deadline. We had to book a weekday morning. Anyway we were a little bit late (35mins) and the receptionists were really down on our chances of the instructors letting A join the class. I tried to remain calm and just about did but I fuming underneath. Of course the instructors didn't mind and A joined the class which was lead by the oldest ski instructor in the world. I was delighted to see A snow plowing down the slope at half a mile an hour within 30 seconds of her standing on skis. She really enjoyed it and put it all down to the excellent teacher. She also had a laugh with the others in her group. I suspect that A has just got the point of skiing which is that it is for fun and that competition isn't what its about at all. Needless to say when we get to the Alps I am sure she will love it.

Friday night I spent at K as the surgical reg on call and my worst nightmare occurred. Sorry I can't be specific here. There is a massive gap in provision for this one problem. Its the same in most district general hospitals. K being no exception. It leaves the doctors on the ground watching someone bleed to death and being able to do nothing about it except fill them up again and hope it stops. I managed to keep this woman alive until I handed over to the daytime team. I was a massive effort and I used up a good portion of the hospital's supply of blood products. I phoned every tertiary referral centre who were all very helpful but none would take her without an investigation I and everyone else present in the hospital could not actually do. The consultant who can do this investigation arrived in the morning. I hope she managed to get to definitive management. The plans to centralize specialist interventions will lead to more of this crap.

I slept most of Saturday and in the evening we went out to dinner with one of A's friends. This lady has being going to some form of group therapy and organizing this evening out was part of her treatment plan. If A had told me this before I went I would have definitely refused to go. My heart sank when she whipped out some self help literature during the main course. But in fact it was quite interesting and the lady herself is so pleasant and funny you couldn't help but join in and suggest different ways of meeting her targets. I ended up drinking a bit more than the others and possibly was a bit loud. However I figured at least I don't have a powerpoint presentation and handouts for everyone so I can probably get away with it.

Sunday we went up to visit my cousin J and her partner M for lunch. It was smashing and I'm not just saying that because they will be reading this. Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes were there amongst the usual Sunday roast veg and were really interesting smelt wonderful with a really earthy taste. The chicken was lovely and J's nutroast acted as a really nice stuffing substitute especially because it was quite spicy. I am toying with the idea now of making a chicken dish stuffed with a spicy version of traditional stuffing. Probably a boned chicken joint rather than a whole bird then you could slice it and have the stuffing running through the middle. I remain very impressed with J's plans to become a plumber and I am sure it will make her fortune in the future. Lioness Plumbers all female plumbing cooperative or something like that. I can see the fleet of pink vans and matching dungerees now. Free pink sink plunger with every callout.

However on the way home events turned for the worse. I was low on petrol and not knowing where the nearest station was headed for the main road back towards London thinking I would come across one. I was wrong.
We were going uphill. It was quite a steep one the car started spluttering. I knew if we crested the hill and were going down the other side the petrol would get to the engine again and the station would be just over the hill surely. We were so close to the brow of the hill but it just died. What's more we were in a single lane section of roadworks and so we were blocking the whole thing and causing a tailback. I could have cried. I pulled off the road onto the soft verge as much as I could. A asked "are we braking down" I said "we've run out of petrol" A said "really?" I screamed "YES!" and stormed off to get fuel stupidly leaving my mobile phone in the car. Anyway in fact there wasn't a petrol station just over the brow of the hill or indeed the next or the next hill. I asked directions from an old lady who told me to carry on in the direction I was going. I did but after half an hour's trudging still no station. Then I asked another local who told me I had been going in completely the wrong direction. All in all it took about an hour and a half to get back to the car with fuel. I was knackered and my feet were killing. A had been worried. There had been no working payphones to call her from.

Now that I have the fuel can, I am debating whether or not to keep it full. It's probably illegal. I have only ever run out of petrol twice in my life including this time. Perhaps not.

Cook me a green veyron

Had an excellent weekend mooching around with A. Really glad I swapped out of the Sunday at the stinkhole. An unexplained crabbyness on Sunday afternoon was sorted out by a few beers and watching the rugby. I was pleased to see England beaten by the French despite being a supporter. I want to see England do well in the world cup and a few domestic defeats will wake them up a bit. The mechanical almost German like method on display during the last world cup has been lost. There is individual flare but the cohesiveness has been lost. In the last world cup we showed the world the way the game should be played and they have learnt and have turned it round on us and we can't do it as well as they can now. I think that has happened several times with just about every sport to come out of Britain. Did we invent curling?
'A' bought me an awesome book 'Great British Dinners' by James Martin. Its a fantastic book it has everything your mum would cook in it. It has included in the category of British food things like goulash, CTM and spag bol which of course only an idiot would deny are as British as her majesty. They are unrecognizable to natives of their supposed countries of origin. In Hungary goulash is a soup not a casserole of housebricks like it is here. Because that's what British means just like Lizzie who herself is a mixture of genes from a wide assortment of countries so Britain draws on influences from its historical links with the whole world, bastardises them and then incorporates them into the national identity. Then we proudly export them as our own invention. There are restaurants in Delhi run by ex pat British asians serving Anglo-Asian cuisine. In other words we're selling British curry to the Indians. Notice I didn't say "British" but British because it bloody well is British curry.
I digress the book is awesome it has nice simple recipes emphasising real solid flavours and I intend to become expert in things like shortcrust pastry, roast potatoes and real custard. In summary I want to cook like a granny. I want to cook a gooseberry pie with lard in the pastry and eggs in the luminous yellow custard. I want to cook dumplings made from suet. If you had to explain what British cooking is like to someone from a part of the United States where people never close their mouths even when not eating or speaking (South Dakota for example) this would be the book to read out loud to them.
A also bought a timeout guide to ski resorts and she discovered that there are some excellent restaurants in Corcheval one of which is a 2 star and runs a weekly halfday regional french cookery lesson. In fact there are two 2 star restaurants. I have been bigging up the quality of the food in the chalet to A in the hope that she would be keener to go. I am conscious of the fact she isn't mad keen on heights, speed or cold. The prospect of good food on the other hand always lights her eyes up. She actually seems excited at the prospect of going now and therefore I'm looking forward to it all the more.
If there are any readers of this blog and if any of those readers don't know A you might be forgiven for thinking she is an amorphous blob who eats and grows ever larger and that this is one of those 'Fat girls and feeders' fetish based relationships. In fact A is very small and trim despite eating more than me. She exercises daily but I don't think she really gets out of breath. Its all very gentle but I guess it must work.
I watched best of Topgear instead of the BBC's flagship 'Planet Earth' program. Putting them on at the same time was an inspired piece of scheduling as people interested in super-cars tend not to be interested in the planet. Jeremy Clarkson was driving the Bugatti Veyron in fact he was racing it against a light aircraft. Clarkson pointed out that the car was an engineering exercise. Apparently the head of Volkswagen on purchasing Bugatti said "lets build a car with I -dunno 1000 horsepower and capable of somethin-like 400 kilometers per hour without looking into what that would mean in terms of engineering reality and the engineers were given an unlimited budget to just get on with it. I say it is a Foley. Just like those towers on country estates put up to improve the view. Its a fantasy made real. Yes it is stupid to build but by building it we all gain. Apparently Ken Livingston is christening those areas of London likely to flood in the event of a rise in sea level 'Clarkson Zones'. He said so everyone would know who was responsible for them flooding. Now Clarkson and his kind possibly me included have to take the blame for our share of climate change but come on Ken! Clarkson flooded London all by himself. Does Clarkson have a patio heater? Do you Ken? How about your mates? Ken is pushing hybrid car technology and the fuel consumption figures are no better than conventional engine technology. You are still burning fossil fuel to turn the wheels. And things like the weight of the car and its equipment battery etc are the factors which determine the fuel economy not the method of translation of bang energy to move energy. Ironically people like Clarkson striving for ever better car performance paying huge sums for silly cars have enabled engineers to push the development of lighter materials and more efficient engines. If you want to go green Ken then lets all go to biofuel. We can pay our underemployed farmers a decent living to produce huge amounts of vegetable oil for us and we can all drive round in slightly converted supercars with a clear conscience. A green Veyron just imagine! VW boss make them build it please!
The long awaited Audiolab Digital to Analogue Converter (8000DAC) should arrive this week and I am seriously looking forward to hearing my CDs and music stored on my computer sound (almost) as good as the vinyl LPs I have been playing.
I must get on with some work.

Skiing and vinyl

A and I have booked and paid for a skiing holiday in April. We are going with a group of very close friends of mine.
Just booked a visit to the Milton Keynes snowdome in an effort to get A a bit of a head start when it comes to learning to ski. The worry I have is that if she absolutely hates it then that might pose a bit problem and she might be very unkeen to go on the real thing. Especially since she has borrowed skiwear from a friend of hers that looks about as warm as a wet tissue and equally as waterproof. I'm pretty sure that you shouldn't be able to see light through a ski jacket if you hold it up to a 40watt bulb. A thinks that the styling is retro whereas in fact it is just nasty. Turquoise and off white. It looks municipal. Like when they painted underpasses to make them less dismal in the 80s. However buying new ski wear seems a waste if she is going to hate it for reasons unrelated to comfort. Hmmm.
I guess she can layer up for now and get some better kit if she enjoys the actual skiing.
My journeys into vinyl continue with the arrival of 3 albums of 'old music' two crosby stills and nash records which remind me of my parents home in my childhood and possibly the tenth copy of radiohead the bends I have ever bought the others (on CD) having all be borrowed lost etc. Hopefully on vinyl it will be harder to lose.
Isn't it funny how the albums you love are the ones you lose and the ones you regret buying sit there staring out at you. Scooter for example refuses to get lost or even damaged. Bob Marley legend I must have replaced at least twice and can I find it. No.
Its obviously related to usage but I suspect there is a malevolent force at work within the fabric of the universe to take away the things you love. Like space pens, a sock from your favorite pair and loved ones. It might be called entropy.
Research is hampered by the fact that what I'm doing is so dull that my brain can create a list of 50 things that I should do before getting down to it. I have never tidied my desk until today nor have I actually drank 8 cups of water in a morning before. This blog is actually just another method of avoiding working.
Get on with it! The trouble is its all self motivating. No one will care but me if it doesn't get done. I need a nasty boss. Perhaps I could use the electronic insect bite zapper as a geek prod.

Typical burst of activity.
True to form at the inception of a new scheme enthusiasm reigns. I'm adding my second entry in the space of a few hours. I've already checked to see if anyone has bothered to comment twice. This is despite the fact that I would be alerted by email the very second someone did.
I have spent the day entering data printed on a table into an excel spreadsheet. Its totally pointless yet needs doing. This how we push back the frontiers of science with relentlessly dull miniscule steps. There are millions of us round the world all copying tables reading papers like an army of geeky moles. We all should have gone to specsavers.

I've been having a great time of late setting up my hifi. I've added better interconnects, a DAB tuner and a awsome Audiolab 8000DAC Digital to analogue converter which will make the music on my computer sound cool (when it gets here from Austria). I have also added a turntable (Rega planar 3) so I can play A's records. I have been knocked sideways by the amazing sound. I am a child of the CD era but the clarity and richness is really obvious to me and I'm almost deaf in my left ear. So today I've been bidding on a few LPs. Important classics like the Top Gun sound track. 99p is my current bid.
Hopefully the new DAC will add sufficient sparkle to my cd playback to check this vinyl obsession or I will have to start buying all my favorite albums again.

Should I bother starting this blog buisness?
Is this going to be one more project started that will fizzle out. Don't I already have enough things I feel guilty about not keeping up with. Like cycling, singing, my research project. On the way to work today I was actually contemplating writing a novel and was thinking up character's names. A friend of mine J suffers almost continual teasing from me based around the theme of him coming up with mad-cap schemes to transform his life. Like becoming a rock star, professional gambler, wedding planner when he has an extreamly good life already. The thing is I'm as bad if not worse. With me I think of something that could be cool to do start it and then it slowly ebbs.
Well I guess there's only one way to find out.