The same

Exactly the same!

Pie Mungus!

Friday is the best day for the food at work, it’s always pie of some kind.

Today was Chicken & Mushroom, and here is the close up of the plate. As always I ended up with a corner piece, and so did my buddy Jeffrey……

If Only We Could Keep Her In This Until Christmas

Today we purchased our Christmas tree, a real one, yes last week I bought  a bloody false one for £15 in B&Q! Well today I got swizzed for£35 for a small tree from the local garden centre.

It seems to me that the trees this year are much more expensive!

Ok, so as part of the tree wrapping process the man for no extra charge did the same for Emma

Luckily she was free at the checkout, and it kept her out of trouble for a little while!

I’m so looking forward to decorating this tree, not!

Emma Gets A Video Message From Santa

Emma was over the moon when an email arrived from Santa linking to a special personalised video for her.

If you want to watch it, click on the link below

Emma's message from Santa

Sumvision Cyclone Primus–Part 1

Ok recently I purchased a Sumvision Cyclone Primus for the specific purpose of putting all my daughters films onto the device so she could just switch on and play!

I was fed up with the ridiculous amount of bloody adverts and shit you have to sit through to get a kids DVD to start! So over the years I’ve been removing all the crap and making into XviDs to save some space.

So here is the official spec of the device I purchased…

Features

Supports Many Popular HD Videos:
The Cyclone Primus supports many popular 1080p HD video formats currently on the market

Formats supported include H.264; MKV; DivX HD; MPEG 2-TS; RMVB (up to 720p) and WMV9

Supports USB Host and Memory Cards:
With USB Host support you can plug storage devices such as hard disk drives; flash drives or mp3 and play them directly through the Cyclone

With its built-in 3-in-1 card reader; the Cyclone Primus is able to support memory cards such as SDHC, SD and MMC

Fully built-in SATA HDD player
Media player which has a internal 3.5 SATA drive slot

HDMI Digital Output:
With the HDMI interface you can enjoy superb digital video and audio quality playback on your TV

SPECIFICATIONS

Media Storage Support:
USB devices with file systems: FAT, FAT32 and NTFS only.
SD, MMC, SD and SDHC Memory card devices with file systems:
FAT and FAT32 only.

Video:
Container (MKV, AVI, TS / TP, MP4 / MPV , MOV, VOB, PMP, RM / RMVB, MPG,
M2TS, FLV, WMV)
Codec (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, XVID, DIVX, H.264, H.263, WMV / VC-1
and RMVB).
Resolution up to 1920 x 1080 (30fps)

Audio:
MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, APE, AAC, AC3, ATRA and DTS

Photo:
JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF” Support 1080p when using HDMI output to TV

Other Formats:
ISO “only supports above media files”

Subtitles:
Subtitle Support:SSA, ASS, SUB, ACSII and UTF8

Functions:
Playback

Input Connections:
2x USB2.0 and 1x SD / MMC / SDHC Card

Output Connections:
1x HDMI 1.3 and 1x Composite (AV) and digtial coaxial

HDMI:
Up to 1080p

OS Language:
English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese

DC Power:
12V 2A

 

Part 2 of the story to follow shortly after a little bit of usage of the device…. watch this space….

Emma Visits Father Christmas

This year we went again to Whitehall Garden Centre in Whitchurch for the annual trip to see Father Christmas, to be fair it was a bit of a disappointment.

They charged £7.99 to get in, and whilst you do get to choose what gift you want (aimed more at the younger children), a small christmas tree in a pot and a badge, it didn’t make up for the 8 or 9 kids that went in all at once!

Thats £64 a time, for 5 minutes work. Even lawyers don’t earn that much!

That said Emma enjoyed it, as you can see below!

 

MacGregor The Jack Russell

With great sadness my parent’s dog MacGregor (aka Whiskers) has had to be put to sleep today.

He suffered a stroke on Thursday, and become more poorly today. To avoid unneeded suffering my parent’s and the vet made the decision that was the kindest.

Everyone is very upset, as he was a real character, and will be missed by us all.

Hope you are having fun wherever you are Whiskers!

Rubbish vs Trash

What is the world coming to, well I mean the UK, when your child starts talking about her school Christmas play and calls rubbish by its American term “trash”!

Is this what we are teaching our kids these days? We are not American, and never will be, so why are we using words like TRASH? It’s called rubbish!

On the same subject, the previous school celebrated the 4th July, and the Indian Light thingy, but not St.Georges. Now I know that St.Georges is just an excuse for chavs to look more chavvy for the day by wearing ridiculous St.Georges cross hats and bunting, but it comes to something when my daughter asked me what St.Georges was!!

Let’s remember we are British, it’s about time we stopped worrying about upsetting anyone else who isn’t. We should be teaching our kids about the British stuff as well as the cultural stuff.

So remember… trash is rubbish, not trash!

Yeeee Haaaaa!

Christmas Decorations

Today we went out to Gardener Haskins in Bristol to have a look at some Christmas decorations, here you can see Emma pointing outside to the sign. We were waiting for Catherine to come out of the store.

So after spending a few quid in there, we headed to B&Q to see if they had any decent beds for the 3rd bedroom (which was a waste of time to be honest!).

But we did pickup a half price faux Christmas tree (as you can see in the trolley in the picture below!), Emma will take custody of it after we get our real one next weekend!

I got the decorations out the loft too, which is always fun! It looked like a bombsite in our house… time to relax this evening before a new era tomorrow at work for me.

Emma’s Yule Log Design

Emma has decided she wants to create a chocolate Yule log for Christmas, and decorate it herself.

Check out this excellent plan, we are in for a real treat I think……

By Emma Smith (Age 7)

Chesil Beach, Calm But Cold!

So with snow forecast, and perfect conditions we headed down to Chesil Beach to our usual spot at Ferrybridge. We were feeling confident with recent posts on the WSF Forum about larger than average fish being caught!

So after a slightly delayed start at Veals in Bristol (as the ragworm hadn’t turned up), and a nice McDonalds double sausage and egg McMuffin we were finally off on the shitty journey to Weymouth from Bristol.

I hate the journey, as the A37 is not the best of roads, and then the road out of Yeovil to Weymouth is not much better to be fair!

Anyway we arrived at 12:30 in the car park (well massive space with craters that wouldn’t be out of place on the moon!). £6.50 to park there, scandalous, what more can I say!

So after traipsing onto the beach, it was apparent that it was actually very warm indeed! I took the chance to do some spinning in the water, but alas a wave came out the blue and soaked me from the waist down! Annoyingly I had not put my fishing suit trousers on as it was very warm! So there I am after 20 minutes with soaked jogging trousers and pretty much zero chance of getting them dry!

So luckily I had my waterproof boots on, so socks were dry as a bone! So it left me no choice but to remove the garments and just wear the suit trousers (which are luckily waterproof and windproof!).

Above you can see Dave and Neil setting up, I on the other hand had a record 90+ minutes before getting a baited rod into the water!

Here you can see me in my favourite spot, in the chair! The sun was setting and it was getting bloody cold, bloody cold.

So then me, the laziest of all of us (not including Dave as he never stops!) actually catches a fish! A nice dogfish, and another species for me as it is the first I have caught off the beach. It’s not too long before I am sat back in my chair, with a ridiculous amount of hats on to try and keep warm!

Neil also pulled in a dogfish, a fair old size to be honest. Dave caught two dogfish and a small fish that we are not sure exactly what it was.

The night and day ended with Chesil Beach once again not living up to it’s reputation of big fish (or any fish)! We returned to a snowy and very windy car park!

On the way back to Bristol, me and Neil stopped for a nice nosebag in Dorchester, a nice doner kebab with chips. It went down a treat as it was friggin freezing!

I am hoping we can get one more in before Christmas, but it’s not going to be bloody Chesil Beach that’s for sure!!!

Tight lines…………………….

Neil thought he had something, he didn’t!

 

Dave gets chatty with the locals……

Deep Sea Fishing On The Top Cat III, Weymouth

It was a lucky break in the weather….. we had chosen a day that was not windy, wasn’t raining, and to be fair wasn’t that cold either considering the fact it was the 19th November!

Clive had organised a trip out on the Top Cat III, a great vessel from Weymouth with a superb skipper called Ivan (who had a fantastic never ending supply of rock music that played all the trip!).

There were 9 of us, no one from my usual crowd of fishers as Neil didn’t do too well on the boat last time. This time though I think he would have enjoyed himself, it was a different experience altogether from the previous one on the Bonwey with Captain Cheerful!

Starting from top left…

• The power of the boat can be seen behind
• My second fish (first was a doggie!)
• Clive pulls in a nice fish
• Clive with same fish
• Another nice little fish
• Clive’s best of the day I think
• Me looking a bit too relaxed
• The back of the boat
• Outside the wheelhouse
• Nice shot of the boat powering towards Weymouth
• Ditto
• Our haul
• Our haul again

All in all an excellent day out, we must have caught over 100 fish between us, a few too many dogfish but plenty of codling and whiting.

Here’s a few short videos I took as well…

The journey out to our mark

Heading back, it was a little bit rougher

Powering back to Weymouth!

Emma’s Viking Homework

During the week’s holiday, rather than let the children enjoy themselves the school tasked the children with doing some research into Vikings, and then present it in whatever way they want (e.g poem, picture, model, song, writing etc etc).

So Emma decided to do a canvas using crafts to show the Vikings attacking the Saxons and stealing their treasure. I am quite proud of her, she did most of the work, and we helped only on the houses and longboat really.

Happy Halloween!

Here is our crappy attempt at a pumpkin this year, the one we bought from Tesco’s was rock hard! It was a mammoth task trying to cut the bloody thing, it was 2 inches thick in places and needed all sorts of knives and stuff to try and cut it.

Ok so the black you can see is where I would have cut it out, IF the bloody thing hadn’t been so damn rock like!

Now on the other hand, next door got a pumpkin from a farm, it was massive and looked really impressive outside the house on our wall we share.

Happy Halloween to all, even though it is an American tradition that I bloody detest!