IMS_Blog

Another thing it’s taken me over a week to mention is that Jan and I went to the cinema to (finally) see An Education. This isn’t particularly a review of that. Suffice to say I can see why it got awards nominations. It’s a “critics film”, all so neatly put together and appealing to their general sensibilities. Neither Jan nor I thought it was that great (quite boring at times, actually). Personally I found the lead character a little unbelievable (however well acted) and far to towards a clichéd idea of critic’s intelligence (oh look, she speaks fluent French and plays music and…). The ending was also predictable (oh look, it all goes pear shaped and she does her exams and gets where she’s going) and possibly a bit rushed given how long it took to get there. Three stars, I suppose.

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Things I did at the weekend part umpty-two. Not all B-words were performed at once.

Er, last weekend. This is about a week late by now…

It all started off simply enough on Saturday when Jan and I decided we really should clean under the bed properly (we’d been putting it off quite long enough for fear of what beasts might be lurking there in). I could post pictures of the frankly disgusting blackness we’d been hiding ourselves away from but I don’t want to disturb anyone more than necessary. Suffice to say we set about attacking it armed with water, bleach and a mop. Nobly I dipped the mop into the the bucket of diluted bleach, lifted it out—and the mop head promptly fell off, with perfect comedy timing. These things just happen to me. Turns out the mop was a bit too old, and had corroded away at the base. So it was off to a local hardware store for a new mop and, as we were there, a new brush and even a better bucket. (A proper hardware store at that, with bits of chain, screws and unidentifiable things in its Aladdin’s cave interior. It’s not even the only one nearby).

Suitably armed we (well, mainly me as we only had one set of marigolds) set about the task, with mop and scrubber. What a wonderful way to spend a Saturday (warning: previous sentence may not be true). The best part was probably that moving around the furniture in the bedroom to make room for all this cleaning did reveal Jan’s thought lost disposable camera, so she may now actually finish the film off and we can find out what forgotten captured moments are on it.

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As I seem to be documenting baking more than anything else here at the moment, this weeks efforts were an apple and blackberry pie I more or less made up and a banana loaf from Nigella’s Domestic Goddess:

We really need to get that Mars programme rolling to go and bring the poor little rover home^*. Seriously though; given it was supposed to last 90 days, it’s been one hell of a successful mission!

It’s just possible that my youth may have been overly influenced by such things as Short Circuit, Doctor Who’s K9, and friendly robots like Twiki. I think that Spirit deserves to be brought home, or at least have a museum built around it so the nasty Martian dust won’t bother its solar cells.

As I had a recent birthday the wonderful Pixie presented me with How to be a Domestic Goddess as Nigella Lawson does lots of cakey goodness :-)

Of course, I had to test some things out at the weekend. A cake (lemon and almond), lovely snickerdoodles, and, just for the hell of it, some fairy cakes!