They Say A Picture Paints a 1000 Words

I will let the pictures do the talking, rather amusing incident yesterday in the staff restaurant (well canteen!).

The corner gods did not favour me today, i got a massive corner piece. Well when I say massive, I mean the corner bit of pastry!

Check out the next photo showing the scale of the actual pie I had! If I had not gone back for my Welsh comrade I would have had a middle piece… leave no man behind… hmmmmm

But little did I know that my greed would have saved me from having to chew through some of the gristliest meat yet seen chez Atlas House!

Jeff had a nice little pile he’d gracefully removed from mastication attempts, now where’s that Dolly when you need her eh Jeff!!

So the moral is…

Being a greedy bugger and gloating about getting a middle piece when its “steak” on the pie name does not always mean you’ll be better off! For I was quite full after eating my tiny bits of beef and massive lump of pastry!

Audi A3–What to do!

My current Mondeo (which was the inspiration for this blog site to commence) is overdue for replacement. It was supposed to be replaced at 70,000 miles or 3 years, well it is way past on both counts there!

My speedo, thanks to the wondrous reliability of the Convers+ system is currently on 34,000 miles. Ok, it’s not 70,000 miles you say! But then it doesn’t take into consideration the 60,000 or so I had on the clock before the Ford dealer changed the bloody central console. So the total, which to be fair is possibly 1000 out either way, is about 96,000 now.

Anyway the car I am interested in replacing it with is the Audi A3 S-Line Cabriolet.

I had a test drive for a week in the Sport model of the Cabriolet, it was awesome!

You can check out some footage on YouTube if you feel so inclined…

In Membury Services…

My main man John M on the video cam… nice 360 action

So the issue I have is that the car is quite expensive and a bit of a tax burden.

It’s £28,000 base price, which on my car allowance will cost me £27 a month out of my salary. This is fine as my Mondeo is much worse for Co2 emissions and therefore costs more on the old tax. So the A3 is well offset by the money saved by the Co2 being so low on the Audi (119 for the record).

But I want to add some options (as you do), which pushes the price up somewhat!

That said, it’s not the end of the world…. but… thanks to income tax changes, NI increases and my company final salary pension changing to a new scheme I am now £100 a month worse off in my take home pay!

So I need to choose wisely…. as I am stuck with it for 2 years minimum.

So these are the options that I wanted originally, the ones in BLUE are the ones I am proposing to get.

• Sound Pack (Symphony CD/Radio, iPod dock, BOSE Premium Sound System)
• Storage Pack
• Comfort Pack (Lights/Dimming Mirror/Cruise Control/Rear Parking Sensor/Auto Wipers)
• Tyre Pressure
• Folding Door Mirrors
• Hi-Beam Assist
• Xenon Headlight
• Bluetooth
• Reversible Boot Mat
• Front Parking Sensor

Well there you have it… I need to study costs and think ahead. This is the car I want, I haven’t got a second choice car (well apart from the Audi A3 Sportback Black Edition).

Interesting Thought

Ok so at breakfast recently we got about to talking about the ridiculous world we live in, where only white hetrosexual men are allowed to be made fun of.

This led on to me bringing up France’s stance on the bhurka, not allowed in public (well from what I heard on the news).

So the question was raised, if caught by a speed camera in this country, in that get up, how could you tell who was driving by photographic evidence?

Well, our outspoken, grey haired, welsh diplomat had a cracking idea….

Put a number above the slit that can be seen on camera!

Hilarious I thought at first, but then soon thought, he had a good point. How would you know!

So then I am thinking, you will fail an M.O.T in the UK if you have an air freshener hanging off your rear view mirror. But for religious reasons its fine to hang beads and sword replicas off of it (not sure what religion that is).

What gives with this bullshit, it’s fucking ridiculous. We should stop bending over backwards to stop offending! One rule for all, leave the magic trees alone!!

 

Lovely Day In Lyme Regis–The Fish Were On Holiday Though!

We all headed down for a well deserved and full days fishing in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Our favourite spot at the Harbour Wall was free to take as usual, as its not really a great place to catch massive impressive fish.

But for us, its relatively easy to get to, has great amenities (with Herbie’s being amongst my favourite reason!). The parking is only £1.40 for all day/night, so lets face it you can’t do much better!

Ok, so the weather was fantastic today, the sea was so clear it was untrue. We have never seen it so clear, you could see the bottom, and even your own weight and bait if you cast close enough to the wall.

Of course the other thing that you could see was the fact there were no friggin fish!

Now, I am a lazy bugger when fishing (unlike Dave Thurlow who never rests!), and my record for getting a rod in the water is measured in over 60 minutes, but today I beat it and then some! I don’t think I got a rod in the water until some two to three hours after arriving!

Of course, all during this time I had equalled the results of my mates Dave and Neil, so win win as far as I was concerned. Me and Neil on our journey down had discussed how long it would take before Dave started moaning about the fact there was no fish and that he wished he was back at work. I can’t remember what we chose, but it was over three hours in reality! Which is a record I think for Dave, normally its much earlier.

Dave was unlucky and caught the 6 in shoal rule for Pouting, plus one Ling of somekind (see below). In fairness he caught a total of 11 fish that evening, but only 7 counted.

I managed 1 codling, but it was enough to increase my lead on Neil by another one, which wasn’t hard as he was already on zero! To summarise his score for the evening it was… nothing.

At one point he fell asleep on the harbour wall, in the dark! He was snoring like a pig, which I believe hampered our fishing for the evening by frightening away our potential catches….

Dave 7 fish (6 pouting, 1 ling)

Duncan 1 fish (1 codling)

Neil blanked again!

My Biggest Fish!!

Friday night at the unspecified venue we have visited recently, I caught my finest fish to date, a 2lb cod!

We met Dave at about 5.30pm in the car park, he had kindly got the bait in for us from the local shop.

He wasn’t feeling so good so didn’t join in on the evening, but he stayed for an hour or so.

So after about 1hr or so, I caught this beauty! It was a lovely bite, and for the first time I felt something worthwhile on the end of my line!

Neil tested out his new Sundridge SAS MK6 fishing suit, which he picked up for a bargain at Veal’s in the sale.

A big thanks to Neil for baiting up for me, as my knee is still not bendable from my injury from the last fishing trip!

So I may be behind Dave by quite a few fish, but I am ahead of Neil and have 1 at last on the league for the year!!

Here’s a couple of HD videos I took on the day, uploaded to YouTube.

The first is us just arrived and setting up, the sun was still up.

Setting up!

The second is Neil holding my beautiful cod as I am filming (plus I didn’t wanna get my hands dirty!)

My best fish to date! 2lb cod… lovely

Mixed Fortunes And The Slip Of Pain!

It’s Friday, it’s pretty windy, but we are all up for going fishing!

Our venue today is Ladye Bay near Clevedon, as we fancied a more local fish than travelling 2hrs to get somewhere.

So we headed down to Ladye Bay via the Audi garage to sit in the A3 Cabriolet.

It was a little windy to say the least, but we were going to give it a blast.

To be honest, it was a mistake and if we had listened to the owner of the fishing tackle shop we would have faired better!

Well we tried, well Neil did and so did Dave, I didn’t bother it was pointless as it was so rocky and slippery that I couldn’t see the point, plus the tide was going out quicker than you could imagine.

Dave managed to catch a small fish (whiting/codling?), but by this time Neil had given up too.

We decided to tell Dave it was time to move elsewhere (as he was fishing on a point away from us at this stage), he wasn’t too happy to start with but soon realised after losing his rig that it was perhaps an omen!

Well even worse, I fell over on the rocks and bashed my left leg pretty badly, the pain was indescribable! But as I had my fishing boots etc on, I did not look at what was beneath on my leg until 8pm that evening when going home!

So off we went to our next venue…

I’ll say not a lot about it, but we all thought it was fantastic, even though only 1 fish was caught (a 2.2lb codling), which is no doubt Saturday’s dinner for DT.

A good afternoon/evening had by all… and two added to the lead that DT has over myself and Neil!

Layde Bay–Potential Next Venue?

Hopefully you get the idea Neil.