Here’s to 2006

New Year Resolutions…
1) Don’t make any New Year Resolutions…

Stay tuned for more exciting developments in the coming year.

Happy New Year to all our readers. You know us, we know your ip address. If you’ve visited us, come back. If you haven’t, why not?

Better go - it’s nearly midnight and I don’t want to be blogging the new year in - how sad would that be?!

So here it is…

Happy Hogswatch to all our readers. Today’s picture shows my (successful) attempt to recreate the buncefield oil depot with nothing more than a christmas pudding and several gallons of industrial strength brandy.

Bubble bubble

There was a small amount of culinary activity here today. I hunted out my notes from Nairn’s cook school and set about making some chicken and beef jus as a base for a sauce for our Christmas lunch (rack of lamb - we’re a turkey free zone this year).

So, ingredients:

4lb chicken carcasses. “Oops, sorry, none left” said the butcher.
1 pigs trotter: “Ah, fresh out of them too”

Resorted to rib of beef which is a wee bit extravegant for what’s basically stock, but the result is a nice full bodied flavoursome liquid, and we have lots of beef rib for dinner tomorrow.

That stock recipe in full:

1 colossal quantities of dead animals
2 er
3 that’s it

Mad friday tonight, the bar is busy and the blue WKD is flowing like (sticky blue) water. The new red WKD has so far failed to win many converts - I think we sold two or three this week against two or three crates of the blue stuff.

Nearly closing time - better go and help Rob clear up.

Christmas rush

OK, So With the benefit of hindsight, Tesco in Galashiels probably wasn’t the best place to be three days before Christmas, but I was at an electrical supplier in Gala to buy some cable and connectors for our new generator. It’s a 4KW machine which will keep the central heating, some lights and the freezer going and maybe one of the beer chillers. Of course, now we’ve got it there’s almost no likelihood of a power cut - a bit like the way it doesn’t rain when you have your umbrella with you.

We were both in Penicuik yesterday for my niece’s 18th. Lunch at the “tout p’tit” then a quick coffee at my sister’s and then hurry back to take over from Rob who was minding the shop.

Things to make you feel old

Some years ago - it doesn’t feel like that many - I found myself in Reims, a town in the north of France that is best known as the centre of the champagne industry.
I spent a couple of days sampling some of the local produce (yum!) before being joined by my (then) brother in law and my sister who was pregnant with her first child.

She’s 18 tomorrow.

All together now

It’s Christmas, and one of the local amateur choirs was doing a concert tonight. Christmas and amateur choirs - what do those two words generally mean.

Yes! It’s Handel’s Messiah of course. All 2hrs 40 mins of it, sung very nicely, but reminding us that it’s basically rather a long piece with a few nice tunes and lots of boring bits.

Reminds us of the comment that Wagner has some great moments, but some truly dreadful half hours.

Carpet cleaning tomorrow. Party yesterday, lots of young people - not going there again, nuff said .

We have a cunning plan…

After a site visit by the project managers, the structural engineer and one of the builders, a plan has been formulated to sort out the wall debacle that you’ll all know about if you’ve been paying attention.
Briefly, the bedrooms are supported on two colossal wooden beams which rest on the brick wall dividing the function room from the old dining room. The wall itself rests on the wooden floor of the function room. Bad design guys! Anyway, having looked at the site today, the consensus is that the best approach is to remove the brick wall totally (having propped up the beams above first of course) and then install steelwork to take its place. The previous plan involves trying to insert steel beams under the wall. We didn’t like that plan and neither did the builders.
Work’s due to start in January on that, the refurb of the upstairs kitchen, the lounge bar and the creation of three new bedrooms on the main stair from the front hall. The fact that we have had to turn away 5 guests on a cold Tuesday in December tells us that there’s demand there for more bedrooms. Work will also start on services (electricity, plumbing, drainage: boring but necessary) which will be upgraded as the work continues.

Revenge of the nerds

I’ve finally got my realplayer plugin to work on Mozilla. If you don’t know what that means you’re probably completely normal. It took about 12 hours.
It would be nice to think that each new distribution of Linux allows easier configuration and auto-installation. But no.

To install realplayer you get the appropriate self extracting package thingy and install it. That’s fine and gives you a stand alone realplayer. But to allow Mozzie to use it as a plugin you copy various obscurely named files to equally obscurely named directories and then ensure that /usr/local/RealPlayer/realplay is in your environment path (by editing /etc/profile of course - why didn’t I think of that earlier)

Spit snarl swear curse mutter

It’s actually been a good day. Our project management folk were up and, totally co-incidentally the guy from planning decided to drop in unannounced. As I said to Q*** if we’d arranged that something would have gone wrong.
Anyway, the planning guy was very positive - no major issues and we’ve okayed the first block of work to start mid January. You can read about that in another place

Young people

Some too young.
When asking if someone’s over 18 we get all sorts of interesting replies.
“Oh, I don’t drive so I don’t have a license”
“It’s OK she’s my sister”
“Aye he’s over 18 he went to school wi me”

Lots of very bad singing in the bar tonight. Here’s a tip:
Don’t try to sing along to any of the following:

House of the rising sun
anything by Roy Orbison
anything by Queen

That’ll keep everyone happy.
Not a great night, but fair. No guests (except Taz who doesn’t do breakfast) so no need to leap out of bed at unsociable hours.

More investigations

The builders were back to find out where exactly the beams supporting the bedrooms are, so that the structural steelwork can be positioned accurately. A strip was removed from the dining room ceiling and the beams exposed. The whole top floor is supported by two big beams… both of which are supported by THAT wall.