Kristen has just done her taxes for last year in about 15 minutes. That is pretty good going by any standards.
Friday was unseasonally hot with temperatures apparently reaching 18degrees which is pretty good for the uk. I think it was spring trying to show us that it was ready for today (first day of spring). However the effort was clearly too much as Saturday and Sunday have been dreary and overcast – but at least it is not raining.
Just heard on the news that in this budget fuel will not go up until september, stamp duty is now £120,000 – so no stamp duty if you buy my house in congleton, company car tax is static and you can bring back up to a more realistic £1000 from abroad as opposed to the miserly £145. I’m still emigrating though 🙂
Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham’s BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre – not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee’s though – it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham – we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ….. which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday’s instead). Photo’s uploaded to my flickr page.
Can you imagine how much deicer you would need if you lived at the place these Ice Storm pictures were taken at?
It is a bit scary how many foods are getting added to the list of Food Standards Agency – Sudan I product lists 21 and 22 February 2005.
A quick look through the list shows how important it is to provide home cooked food as opposed to ready meals! (just go easy on the worcester sauce)
Kristen brought me Froderick the Gnomad for valentines day – similar to a travelbug used in geocaching, this is a cute gnome that is trackable and has an online photo album. When I saw Mike’s gnomad I wanted one too but at the time we only had 1 day left in the states and I wasn’t going to be able to get one.
Kristen remembered and got me one – thanks luv!
I got home from work last night and volunteered to help paint our kitchen ready for part of it to be tiled this morning. It now looks really good but does need at least one more coat of paint. My arm and fingers ache from pushing on the roller though. Hopefully all the paint and tiling and tidying up will be done before a viewer comes round on Saturday.
Sorry the sites not been updated for about a week – last weekend we were at my cousin Neil’s wedding. Then Monday-Wednesday I was involved in doing some disaster recovery for a client, Thursday was a night in together relaxing and today’s Friday!
..is a chef trying to get out. Actually I noticed a leaflet on the noticeboard at work from another company in the same building that our office was in. They were seeking volunteers to follow some recipes for a book they were doing and would pay expenses and also a small amount per recipe that was cooked. I thought it sounded like a good idea, Kristen agreed and so I contacted them. A week or so ago I got the recipe’s. Some looked pretty strange and disgusting, others looked really nice and some just looked interesting. So Thursday night after getting home from work I made Lemon Tuna on lettuce leaf bed and White Chocolate Fondue – guess which one was our favourite 😉
The fondue just screamed out for some artistic work so here are two pictures of the dips. Overhead, Side on