Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Our darts team is rubbish. They couldn’t hit a dartboard if they were standing next to it and as a result we’re third bottom of the Jed darts league. Tonight however we were playing the Jedburgh Arms (known for some obscure reason as Forbses) who are even worse than us. So there was a fair chance that we’d break with tradition and win.

Except that by 8pm not one of our team had shown up. The Forbses team downed a few pints, threw a few darts and then disappeared. The bar, which should be reasonably busy, is empty.

I’ll no doubt find out what pathetic excuse they have when I’m at the butchers tomorrow (Gary and Liam both work there) getting supplies in preparation for the re-starting of evening meals on the 1st of March.

I’ve been making a few adjustments to the menu and spent yesterday afternoon trying a ginger and lemon cheesecake. This is baked and very nice, though the quantities need tweaked a little. It will replace the creme brulee which was never a big seller. The salmon will be in a balsamic and rosemary marinade maybe with some red pepper coulis, cherry tomatoes and salad leaves. Or maybe not.
We’ll have a pasta dish and the apple crumble may well become an apple pie. We’re also hoping to start bar lunches around mid April / early May. That’ll be a simpler menu which will mostly be prepared by the bar staff to allow me some breathing space between breakfast and dinner.

Oh and we’ve booked our holidays again. One week in November. Uppergate farm for a third year running!

I pod, you pod, we pod

Lorna’s just taken delivery of an iPod. It’s a nano and is very cute and very tiny. And I’ve got it to work on Linux.
That wasn’t so easy. The 3rd generation iPods will only work with iTunes. iTunes of course, does not work at all on Linux (go on, ask me how I know that). What Apple seem to have done is encrypted the database on the iPod so that any files transferred by third party software will not appear on the iPod. The transfer goes fine, but there appears to be nothing there.

Fortunately there’s a reverse engineered hack, but getting everything set up is less than intuitive and takes a lot of googling. Not so much plug and play as plug and swear. If the encryption was added to improve the performance of the iPod then fair enough. But it seems to have been added simply to prevent the use of programs other than iTunes. And in that respect it hasn’t worked.

Darts tonight in the bar. Pizza and sausage rolls were provided and for once we seem to have won. The bar’s still quite busy despite the weather…