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Sometime last year some stupid pillock decided it would be fun to throw some of the life-preservers that are dotted around the pond thing into the water. Good one. Really good fun, I’m sure.

But the birds that come and breed in there every year seem to love it! (I think it’s the same pair as last year, but who knows. They all look the same to me!) They’ve got a big steady base for their nest that floats casually around the pond giving them a different view all the time. Location, location and more locations!

They seem to build their nest out of just about anything too. I have no idea how they manage to drag some of the twigs they do across all the water, and dragging plastic bags up onto it has gotta suck when you’ve only got a little bill to help!

Everytime I walk that way I always have a wee chuckle. It’s the little things!

They’re growing!  They’re growing well!

In fact, some of them have the start of flowers popping out.  I suspect the first actual flower will be sometime this week for the  Ring of Fires, and the others don’t look too far behind.  In the last couple of weeks they’ve all started to take on their own types of foliage and stalk angles.  I can almost tell them apart now by just looking, rather than reading the labels on the pots, but not quite.  Almost time I re-potted them up to their final pots, I think…  Maybe next weekend.

First up: NO, neither of us ran it! Just have to make that clear after seemingly nearly causing various heart attacks around the world the last time we put up a blog entry about a run.

The course for the marathon runs around the main roads about 500m from our place, so if we’re around town when it’s on we go and have a look and add our small bit of encouragement to the clapping and yahoo-ing that goes on hopefully motivating the nuts who decide it’s a fun thing to do on a Sunday to go a bit further.

We had a bit of a disaster though. For some reason Bec thought that the race started at 10am, so even though we got up well before 8 this morning we were just pottering around doing stuff… Then we finally turned the TV on only to realise that the women’s race was just going past our place, and the guys were getting close. PANIC!! But we managed to get out there in time for the leaders of the guys race to come through.

You won’t see any photos of them here, though, as Bec had a bit of a nightmare and pushed the self-timer button with her nose and missed them. She seems to do that quite a lot. You don’t get a second chance to get a photo though. They’re off! Not sure I could run that fast for 200m, let alone for a marathon!

Once the really serious guys have gone through in little clumps, you just get wave after wave of people coming past, all with various looks of pain and concentration on their faces. Sitting on the wall watching them all stream past actully made us feel a bit dizzy and ill, like travel sickness. I think I can understand how animals like Wilderbeasts avoid being attacked by predators when they all just stream along together!

But good on everyone that did it. I hope you all finished, and may your pain tomorrow all have been worth it!

After last year’s history tour of Egypt, our holiday there last weekish was a lot more sedate. As we’d pretty much had our fill of pyramids, and tombs we decided that sitting on our butts on a nice warm beach sounded pretty appealing.

We just about didn’t make it though! When we turned up at the airport we were told that they’d overbooked the flight, and we’d be pretty lucky to get on. Would we like £450 each instead and maybe be able to catch a flight tomorrow. As we were on a pretty tight schedule to meet up with our friends in Cairo before heading out to the beach we weren’t happy! Luckily we managed to get the last 2 seats and get there as planned in the end. Phew!

A night in Cairo to catch up with and pick up the guys there, and then an extremely early flight from there to Sharm el Sheik. What does one say about a beach holiday?! It’s pretty much sun, sleep, beach, food, drink, snorkelling (where we saw some pretty colourful fish) and then more sun.

We did it eat some pretty good places though, Indian at Tandoori, pizza/seafood at Pomodoro, Japanese at Little Budha (the waitress was scary). Oh yeah and then the not so good fish restaurant at the hotel, we were the 2nd group in the restaurant and watched everyone else being served before us, it took an hour to get our food, only to be told that it had not been a long time waiting. I think we all knew what a long time was. Apparently there was a problem in the kitchen that we could not be told about – bad luck there goes your tip buddy!

I’d have to say other than that the resort we stayed in could not be faulted, so if you’re thinking of going, look up the Hilton Fayrouz, it’s made up of a lot of bungalows and has it’s on private beach.

The staff are very helpful and the cleaners make a different pattern or scupture out of your bed linen each day. We had a lot of great laughs and I nearly forgot we did actually do something other than just lazing…… We all went quad biking in the desert for about 3 hours, which was great fun, and the head scarfs are a great idea to keep not only the sun but the sand out of your face.

Then back to Cairo for the last 3 days, to do a bit of shopping – you can pick up some great bargains there on nic-nac type things. The rest of the time was just spent lazing round the pool. Next year maybe we’ll head to Dahab and perhaps learn how to dive!

Whlist we were away the web server fell over so that means a couple of not backed up entries were lost, and that included Maurice the camel and Dolly the dragon. I have no idea what we wrote about them in the old post. But here they are. I remember we had to redo the camels head as we sewed it on a bit wrong and it did not resemble the true form of a camel, however, after a bit of unpicking and an operation it was fixed!

Dolly the dragon followed shortly afterwards and I do not recall any sewing mishaps on that one. She’s the brightest colour of the toys so far, I think she’ll be heading to our neice in NZ (that’s if Mike will ever let me give any of them away).

You might have noticed that this blog has been off the air (or wires, or pipes, or however you want the think of it) for a little while. Seems like the day after we left to go on hols the server decided that it had had enough and threw a bit of a wobbly. Actully, I think the hard drive died. Bugger. It would happen then, wouldn’t it!

I’d kind of been expecting it for a while really, as that disk was an old one before I put it in that box, and it’s been on pretty much 24/7 for a long, long time. So I had been doing a few random backups of various bits and pieces on in, including the blog. The last one I did was on the 15th of March, so I think we only lost one entry, and a few of the books I took on holiday. But if you registered after that date, you’ll need to do that again. Sorry!

But hopefully we’re back up and running now… I hope!
And I’ll be taking more regular backups now!

For those (few) of you who may be interested in some more techy stuff, I’ve ditched the Gentoo install on this server, and done with the latest Debian distro. I just couldn’t face another 4 weeks of compliing everything again if I’d reinstalled Gentoo. I’m sure there are still lots of things missing on the box, but at least the webserver is up and running again…

We were lucky enough to get the work box at the Royal Albert Hall, it’s a fantastic venue. So on Friday night we went to see the Kaiser Chiefs. It had been a great Friday which made the concert even better. Bec’s work had had some great news as they gained accreditation to the national IIP standard, so they were all on cloud nine. When we arrived there was a warm up band playing that were so loud you could probably hear them in France – we’re not being old, honest! Anyway the concert was great, which was helped along by all the champers Bec’s MD kept buying to celebrate. Anyway from memory they were pretty good and the singer jumped around the stage like he was having a great time too. A great night is always followed by a very long, tired and recovering Saturday, but it was worth it!

A couple of you seem to be interested in the progress of the chillis. Well, you asked me about them. Whether that means that you’re really interested or not, I won’t ask.

But here they are. About a month on from when they were first planted out as little seeds. And they’re just starting to really take off. It took ages for them to start getting their third leaves, but then for most of them the forth, fifth, even sixth have come along really quickly. It’ll soon be time to repot them again, I suspect. I think I learnt my lesson last year and remember that the roots are a lot bigger than the tops at this early stage. Don’t want to stunt their growth!

The hard part so far has been having to give some away already without really being able to tell which had the most Ooomph so I just had to guess which were going to be the fast growing, heaviest yeilding plants. We’ll see if my chilli instincts were right later on.

When the days start getting a bit longer, and the temperature starts to rise a bit, we think about travelling a bit to break out of the winter blues. This time it was a weekend break to Budapest. Why Budapest? No real reason, except that it’s there, I guess!

To be honest, out of all the cities that we’ve visited before, this trip was so far the one we’ve been least prepared for. We had no maps, no guide book, no memories of any friends telling us of things to see, no time on the internet beforehand to have a look… Nothing!

Which actually ended up being not a bad way to see the place. In fact, if there are sites that we didn’t see, we don’t know about them, and so we’ll not be missing them. And to be honest, a lot of what we did see we’ve really got not much of a clue what it was as the map got a bit tatty in places, and there is even less hope of trying to remember anything like the spelling to be able to look it up!

So what did we do there? A lot of walking around and taking photos, eating, drinking, and more walking… That sums it up really, I think! And our overall impressions of the place? A really nice town. Made even nicer by noticing all the time how clean the city was in general, especially the really cute metro stations. And we couldn’t help but notice and enjoy how quiet it was. Like really quiet! Hardly anyone around on both days. All we had to do was wait 5 minutes once or twice until a bus tour left the vicinity, and then we felt pretty much like we had the place to ourselves. Superb!

Everyone seemes to think that it should have been really cold too, but it was about 10-14C both days, with a bit of rain that we sat out in a pub on Saturday, but lots of sunshine (with a bit of Wellington type wind thrown in, I’ll admit) on the Sunday. Great walking weather.

Our recomendations for anyone else going there are:

• Write things down on a map as you find them! Things seemed to have a habit of not being anywhere near where you think they are, and the streets can all look the same when it’s raining.
• If you’re looking for a good meal, the Vegetarium restaurant on Cukor U. was great, and has a massive menu. It’s a vege place, if you didn’t work that out yourselves…
• Up on the castle hill is a great little cafe/winebar/restaurant called Miro. Good, cheap wine (great Pinot Noir), and we loved the cheese platter so much we had it 2 days in a row.
• Use the funicular to get up the hill. It’s fun, saves you walking, and you get to say the word “funicular”. Not many places you can do that.
• Have a beer in what must be about the smallest bar in the world. Pub Sorozo, again up the hill by the castle. All you can fit inside is about 8 people around 2 tables, and 4 standing at the side. But a great little place. Friendly barman who kept bringing over bits of cheese and really nice pumpkin seeds etc.
• Check the map carefully, or you may end up at the city cemetry thinking it’s a big park. No, we didn’t do that, but it was pretty close! The wee crosses all over it on the map should maybe have been a bit of a giveaway, but we were walking while reading the map most of the time.
• Check the excahnge rate before you go, and if possible print off a small table so you don’t get as confused as we did trying to translate from the Forint, through the Euro, to Pounds, and it gets pretty boring pretty quickly! I did mention that we were pretty unprepared this trip, didn’t I?!
• Grow a big Hungarian mostache. You know you want to!

Did I mention that the cheese was really yummy wherever we went for some reason?!

Normally I get really excited around my birthday the other day, not because it’s my birthday (that’s pretty boring, and I hate having to try to work out just how old I am on my fingers), but because usually the weekend around that day is the first F1 Grand Prix of the year.

YAY! Lots of Sundays on the couch watching cars go round! I normally even get up at stupid times to watch the first race, normally Australia, live.

But this year, birthday long gone, and there’s still more than 9 days to go until the first race?!

It’s just not right. Not right at all.

And it’s starting to make me grumpy!