I'm too busy

Sorry.  I shall fling my hands around to demonstrate this ABSOLUTE MAELSTROM OF BUSY IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF.

Now I shall go home and open some packets of food and call it cooking.

Tip top

Screw you, Big Brother! The very best reality TV show ever returns tonight - America's Next Top Model. And no Twiggy! Yes!

More random brain things.

I just looked at the copy of New Scientist what I bought a week or so ago because of CERN.  It's issue number 2671!  I make this approximately 51.4 years of New Scientist, meaning it started in about June 1956, which means it is SO NOT NEW anymore.  It's really OLD Scientist.

If we can't trust it on something as basic as its own name, how can we expect to trust it on important things like us all being sucked into a black hole and dying - OR NOT?

Closure

I did buy the automatically-retracting umbrella.  It's so effing cool.

my arachnoid nemesis

I had a big ol' fight with one of those evil bastard huge spiders this morning.  You know the ones I mean, the ones that grow HUGE and then scare the living daylights out of you as they scuttle madly across the living room - but only once, then they disappear, leaving you wondering where they might be...

I was just rinsing the draining board when I noticed something move by the plug.  Thinking it a regular house-spider, I pulled the chain of the plug and out it scampered.  There's something about they way they move - purposeful, quite light, and extremely fast - which just makes my skin crawl in a way which a normal, regular spider just doesn't.  Still, at least it wasn't as big as they can get.  With this in mind, I grabbed the spider-evicting glass and approached my foe.

Damn his eight eyes, he was on the corner of the sink, not the easiest place to get to.  OK, so I needed a new tactic.  Not taking my eyes off him, I part-filled the glass and sluiced him with water.  Because, as you know, spiders hate that.  It doesn't seem to do them any harm, but they do curl up in defensive balls, which are much easier to entrap.  Not this one, though.  Hard bastard that he was, he just rode the wave down into the sink.

This, I feel, was him taunting me.  Well, not today, my friend!  I was going to be late for work if I didn't sort it out soon.  So while he was temporarily discombobulated in the sink I lunged with my spider-glass and, by some amazing stroke of fortune (because I was only half-looking), I got him.  Hah!  We'll see who's several orders of magnitude larger than who now!  Or is it whom?  Anyone who can tell me when to use "whom", please get in touch.

Anyway, this ends with him being dumped outside and me getting on the bus to work.  I hope to have more exciting news soon (eg. "Ooh, I bought an umbrella that automatically retracts!"), but that's it for now!  See you later. xx

Minibreak.

Sorry, been ages.  Been on holiday.  Been to Norwich - it was our first anniversary, so we pretty much looked at places we haven't been to and went to one.

So what's Norwich like?  Well, it's very pretty, as it happens*.  Small, but that's half a decade in London for you.  All places that aren't London seem these days.  I'm just kidding; I'm sure Tokyo is a perfectly reasonable size.  Anyway, yeah.  We walked, we rode open-topped buses like SHAMELESS TOURISTS, we took boat tours of the Broads, it was great.

We had a lovely hotel room, though I'm not sure about no shower curtain and parquet floor.  Well, feh, we don't have to live with their damp-proofing.  We actually felt a bit constrained by our proposed three-night stay and ended up there for four nights, which was lovely and oddly made the holiday 50% more relaxed for a simple 33% increase in time, or something.  I'm not sure about the maths, someone else work it out.

So that was our first anniversary.  Or, to look at it another way, our sixth.  We're over half way to ten years!  You know, I think we might just be right for each other...

*Though, true to stereotype, at times the denizens made you feel a bit like you were wandering through the set of David Lynch's new adaptation of Shadow Over Innsmouth.