Last week (Thursday I think) we bought our new kitchen! We had a couple of hours to spare before popping into London so we went to B&Q and bought the kitchen we were planning on getting. It’s going to look very pretty, it has doors, a worktop and some other stuff (spot who was paying attention when Becca was picking stuff). It’s gonna take months to get done though 🙁 Probably mid-June by the time they get round to doing it.

The work I’m doing for the schome people in second life has taken a bit of a turn, now they want me to learn ruby on rails so that I can help out with the development of new stuff and also be a backup if our ruby guy falls under a bus. So with less than two weeks to go before the big launch day I have started to read around stuff. It is something I have been toying with doing for a while, so to be getting paid to do it is great. It claims to be the best thing ever, I am dubious but I’ll give it a shot. So who knows, in a few weeks I may have thrown wordpress to the gutter and have written my own blogging engine!

Well Cat and i just had our first modern belly dance lesson. Basically its belly dancing to modern latin american and middle eastern influenced music. OK so we don’t quite shake our hips in a seductive manner like Shakira – we’re just not co-ordinated enough yet! Its also quite awkward to do – God knows what we all look like jiggling away 🙂

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow – my legs are gonna ache! I find it a much more appealing form of excercise than the gym…

My list of things to do has had an entry of ‘sync network’ for a while, well today I finally got around to looking at this. If the program I found to do this is as good as it claims then I am very happy. It’s called foldershare, and it claims to be able to do many things, one of which is sync specified folders. You install a small piece of software on each thing you want to sync and log into your web-based account, from here you tell it you want to sync whatever you want. It’s currently syncing my music on my laptop and study computer.

The reason why I’m bothering with this is that both Bint and I use the study and laptop at various times and we have a lot of data that we really don’t want to lose. The hope is that I can set up both these computers to sync with the media pc we have in the living room, thus saving all my pictures, web site stuff, music etc etc etc. Microsoft bought the company last year (thus admitting they couldn’t figure out how to do it!) so I think it should be relatively ok to use.

Also, today I have installed a TV areial in the study so I can watch TV at the same time as Bint and I finally put the trim around Cats window.

Becca and I have spent the last couple of days in Norfolk after my uncles funeral on Wednesday. It was a nice service in which I learnt many interesting things about Dennis’ life, such as; he was in a film! The church was packed, showing that he was rather popular in the village.

Goodbye Dennis, and best wishes to Rita, Ian, Helan and Louise.

So now that the roof has been done, we figured that we should paint the door. So we picked red, bright red, and painted it today. I use the word ‘painted’ in the loosest possible terms. We used brushes and paint, but we may as well have just thrown the paint at the door! It has dripped down, there patches we missed, the edges haven’t been done, and there is paint all over frame. So we are going to have to put a second coat on, but we are going to have to sand it down a bit first, sigh. So that’s next weekends DIY planned.

As for the extractor fan, well that’s all up and running, some clever wiring and upgrading of stuff meant that it wasn’t too traumatic to install. Now it’s just a question of setting it up so the humidity sensor actually does it’s job properly.

I was just looking for a rss feed aggregator and I happened across google reader, this is awesome! It lets you subscribe to as many rss feeds as you want and it displays the newest content on one page for you. You can even make a public page of your feeds so you can share them with your friends. Is there anything google can’t do?

The only downside is that it means no one will ever vist my blog again 🙁

I thought I would jump on the band-wagon and talk about the snow. It’s everywhere and it looks very pretty. The car is covered in it so today is a work at home day, which means lots of neighbours and diagnosis murder watching 🙂

Ingredients:

Parsnips

Animal fat (fat drippings from roast chicken/duck/meat) or olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Honey

• peel the parsnips and slice into long wedges
• Place in a bowl and add animal fat/olive oil and mix till all parsnips are coated
• Place parsnips on a baking tray and sprinkle with salt and pepper
• Place in a hot oven (180oC) for 15 mins or untill golden brown
• Remove from oven and drizzle honey over the parsnips, mix well till parsnips all coated.  Return to oven for a futher minute.

Ingredients:

peeled and chopped potatoes

animal fat  (fat or roasting juices from roast chicken/meat/duck etc) or Olive oil for a more healthy option!

Salt

Pepper

• Boil the potatoes in a sauce pan till soft and fluffy on the surface
• Drain the water and put thepotatoes back in the sauce pan.  Add the oilive oil or roasting fat/juices to th saucepan and replace the lid.  Carfeully shake the pan in a circular motion to coat the potatoes with oil.
• Place the potatoes in a roasting tin, sprinkle with salt and pepper
• Place in a hot oven (180oC) till golden brown