Monthly Archive for December, 2003

‘Tis the Season to be..

By Sarah on December 25, 2003

…stuffed to the gills with unhealthy food.

We’ll be sitting down to roast duck in about two hours.. mmmm greasy. Can’t wait. It’s pretty much the only time of the year I even eat meat, so I fully expect to spend most of Boxing Day rolling around with stomach cramps. Yay.

It’s been a nice quiet day so far, and I’ve accumulated three new books thanks to the lovely Darcy. thumb

Sur les Terres de Tolkien

is from John Howe, it’s a French book, so I can just about manage to read it with my rusty O Level French. It’s a beautiful book, a little minimalist in it’s text, as are a lot of art books, but there’s a wealth of wonderful imagery in there. What I really do like about it is that it includes illustrations / paintings of the First and Second Ages of Arda ; Gondolin, Ungoliant and Morgoth. I don’t know if there’s an English language version of this one, there didn’t seem to be on Amazon anyway. Darcy doesn’t mind me lookng them up, I think we’re a bit too old for the ‘you mustn’t know how much it cost’ routine.

Also got The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare.

This is a film book, but it’s a fascinating one. There’s a lot of information to delight the anally retentive (retentive..moi?) and also some info that re-inforces the feelings I’ve been having that there’s a lot missing from the films that didn’t make the final cut. Indeed, one photo shows a scene that didn’t even make the final cut of The Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition; the Orcs that are massacred after trying to follow the remaining members of the Fellowship into Lothlorien. The other one that interests me is the small section on The Mouth of Sauron, who is, sadly, missing from the final film. I was looking forward to seeing Bruce Spence, albeit under heavy make-up, no doubt. After all, who wouldn’t want to see the Gyrocaptain in a TLotR film? Oh well, hopefully if they have any sense they’ll put it in the extended edition and clear up that monumental continuity error that (in my opinion) is caused by his removal…

Darce also got me the latest Michael Moore book: Dude Where’e my Country, so I guess I’ll be digging into that later and getting annoyed about lots of things.

Why am I blogging on Christmas Day? Hell, it’s beats watching The Muppets.

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Assault on Aisle 13

By Sarah on December 23, 2003

Well, the maneovures worked well yesterday so in about 6 hours we’ll be suiting up for a precision strike on Tesco. If we hit hard and fast in the pre-dawn hours I’m thinking we’ll be able to capture at least 2 packets of pigs-in-blankets before the Morgul Hordes descend. I should mention here, I absolutely loathe shopping, of almost any description. The only exceptions to my rule are dvd/record shops (particularly old musty record shops), electronics shops and book shops. Oops and comic book stores, mustn’t forget those. Darcy is much better at shopping than me, must be that infinite patience factor, something that comes in handy for people who spend a lot of time around me.

I wonder if it’s a telling fact that this year I have (or will be when I get my ass in gear tonight) sent more ecards than paper ones. Is this because I keep in touch with my old friends over the internet? No, although I try to keep my end up with a couple of people (alright one) that are dear to me. No, it’s because I’ve made some good friends in the last two years, and hey guess what? It’s entirely down the The Lord of the Rings films. If I hadn’t stumbled into the BBCi messageboards looking for somewhere to froth at the mouth about The Fellowship of the Ring I’d never have had the benefit of their cyber-friendship, including all the people I’ve been talking film or trading innuendo with that aren’t LotR fans. So thanks and love to you all, you know who you are, and thanks for making me chuckle.

The office was deserted today, most people with a shred of sanity booked these three days off, so as a result the lack of bodies and switched on workstations meant that the wing I work in was holding temperatures low enough to store a turkey in. I had to keep my coat on ’till about 3pm. There’s only two of us in that end at the moment, and the other guy is off tomorrow morning and Wednesday, so I think I’ll thwap me speakers up and listen to some music without having to hide under the headphones all day.

Oh, and yes it’s official, fish really are stupid. I had to feed the fish in the courtyard today, but the water is iced over round the edges, so after tapping the tub on the side to let them know the grub was on it’s way (yes they do respond), I threw it towards the middle where the fountain is. Then I entertained myself for a good five minutes watching them repeatedly bonking their heads on the underside of the ice just in front of me as they tried to get the food. They cottoned on eventually….

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Stealth Shopping

By Sarah on December 21, 2003

Ha.. thirty minutes, that’s all it took me to complete this years run at the shops. I counted on the majority of Christmas shoppers to be too lazy to park more than 50 feet from the entrance to the shopping mall and I counted right… suckers. Slipping neatly past the boxy formation of Milton Keynes:centre, nipped nimbly (as nimbly in you can in a defunct 12 year old Clio anyway) round the back to the cinema and glided into a space surrounded by nothing more than the desolate emptiness that signifies it’s “too far to walk”.

In actual fact the hardest part was trying to thread my way through the morass of horn honking red faced Christmas shoppers, trying to squeeze their enormous 4×4′s into a space barely big enough to park a pram. I don’t know why MK even bothers to have a park and ride system.

The tactical strike on the few gifts I had to get was quick and painless, having done some reconnaissance in the last few weeks I knew where they were, how much they cost and how to thread my way through the shop with the minimum amount of fuss and exertion. Mission accomplished and back to the car without even getting accosted by the guy flogging mistletoe outside MacDonalds. Job done.. I even remembered wrapping paper.

I’ve also tweaked this page, it’s now a nice simple, clean three column table-based layout. The pointless reduced opacity tables have gone. They looked alright for a bit, but frankly the text was too hard to read and it looks much better now. Think it’ll be staying this way for a good while now. What brightens my day most about it, is that I haven’t used anyone elses template as a starting point, it was all me own work using Golive to create a page and then just slotting in the blog codes and converting it to a template. Go me !!!

Off to see The Return of the King in a couple of hours (again).

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