7 January 2011 (Friday) - Parrot and Weight Loss

Up early, and I spent half an hour stroking and fussing the parrot. She’s daft really – she’s quite content to be stroked – I can be stroking her with both hands and she’s fine. She’s not keen on being picked up, and she’ll walk away if I try to pick her up, but soon comes back for more cuddles. I came home from work this evening and carried on fussing her. After an hour or so “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” came home, and far from having the soppiest parrot on the planet we suddenly had the parrot from hell. A vicious beak was snapping left, right and centre, managing to fang both “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” and me. But the moment “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” left, the parrot went back to being a right softie.

‘er indoors ^TM  has also commented that the parrot will only tolerate her presence when either me or  “My Boy ^TM ” are about. I have heard this about parrots, but seeing it for myself was quite an eye-opener. Having an animal which will only behave for half the family isn’t going to be practical.

I overheard an interesting conversation today. There was a gentleman standing outside the front of the hospital, bellowing into his mobile phone. Fortunately for him, the Almighty had chosen not to over-burden him with intelligence. This chap was shouting into his mobile phone that she was getting better. I wondered who “she” was – apparently she’s had an operation to put some stitches in. That was nice for her.

And talking of people of restricted intelligence and hospitals, I see Britain’s fattest man is planning to sue the NHS. Apparently he wasn’t pleased with the advice he received when his weight was a meagre thirty stone, and blames the NHS for allowing his weight to reach seventy stone. Perhaps he did need specialist help. But at the end of the day, who was the person who was pushing pies down his neck? On reflection I honestly think the NHS should sue him for the cost of the bespoke treatment he has received.

Speaking as a porker on a diet myself, you can ask for all the help in the world, you can blame weight gain on everyone in the world, but at the end of the day you either exercise more, eat less, or gain weight.

And as I reach the end of the first week of diet, I’ve not actually lost any weight at all…

6 January 2011 (Thursday) - More Stuff

A late start, so I had a bit of a lie-in. I awoke to find an empty house, and the parrot was surprisingly quiet. I wondered if she was asleep – I didn’t want to wake her, so I got some brekkie and wandered to my PC where I did some accounts (still skint), and let my blood pressure go through the roof.

One of the advantages of living where I do is that we’ve got an excellent travel network. The trains leave town in five different directions, and there’s a motorway too. The motorway has the occasional (almost weekly) hiccup though. Whenever the cross channel ferries aren’t running, the freight lorries can’t get to the continent, and so the local police close the local motorway and use it as somewhere to park the lorries which are waiting to get to France. Sometimes these queues of lorries are over five miles long, all parked, going nowhere, and staying put for days.

On reading this, most people would think that such an occurrence would be rare, very rare. In practice the ferries cease operations with amazing regularity, sometimes seemingly on a weekly basis. And when they shut up shop, so the motorway is closed too. For many years it has been suggested that a purpose-built staging area be built to house lorries waiting to cross the channel. Today the Government announces it will not fund this project. The solution is simple. Bill the French. After all, the port closures are usually due to them being on strike anyway.

Meanwhile a pointless government quango is doing it’s best to waste a million pounds of public cash to ensure it will have still funds to waste in the future.

I then did a bit of research. It’s my birthday in a few weeks time. And every year I like to do something for my birthday, but I struggle to find what I might do. Those few attractions which are open are oh-so-cold in February. On the NHS discounts website I fund I could get a 45% reduction on the price of a trip to Legoland. Now at first sight that looks like quite a bargain, but I still begrudge paying over twenty quid to go to Legoland, By the time I’ve shelled out to park my car I’d be looking at paying the best part of forty quid, and even then I’d be lonely. I can only get the bargain for me, and I doubt anyone else is going to fork out forty quid for the non-discounted ticket. I suppose the people at Legoland know what they are doing – they must be getting enough punters through the door at forty quid each, or they wouldn’t charge so much. But I’m not paying that price. What price would I pay? In all honesty – no more than a tenner.

And then the phone rang. Someone claiming to be called “Hector Grey” phoned claiming to be representing “Burnhill investments”. He said I shouldn’t worry – he wasn’t trying to sell me anything. He was merely letting me know that his company would be writing to me to let me know about the credit crunch and how it had affected land values. He obviously had a script to work to, and really didn’t like me asking questions. I gave him two minutes, and when I eventually got the spelling of his name and company out of him, I told him that seeing how he could not pronounce either his name of the company that employed him, I didn’t really want to have anything to do with his company. He had no idea what I was talking about, and tried to continue with his speech. I hung up.

Meanwhile “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” desperately needs empty cigarette packets for her friends college project. If any of my loyal readers can save empties even from friends and family for me it would be greatly appreciated :o)

5 January 2011 (Wednesday) - Stuff

Up with the lark (or should that be “parrot”?), and I sorted laundry whilst watching telly. I say “watching telly” – most of the time was spent watching the antics of the parrot. Having opened her cage I thought she’d be happy enough to be left, so I went to get on with the washing up. I popped my head round the door to see “F.B.” marching across the living room table; clearly on a mission. “What are you doing?” I asked, and the parrot ran back to her cage.

To Asda to get lunch, and a radio for the parrot. We had this plan to leave the telly on for her, but modern tellies switch themselves off after a couple of hours. So the parrot now has a radio of her own. She can listen to Radio Four and swear at the politicians. I also bought her some grapes. And then to work, where I spent the morning worrying about F.B. Fortunately “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” wasn’t at college this afternoon, so I was able to get regular parrot updates. It would seem that when I’m not in the house, the parrot is incredibly talkative and is quite a potty-beak, regularly using the F-word. What a rude parrot.

I came home to find the parrot somewhat subdued, and to add insult to injury she doesn’t like grapes. She took one from me, passed it from beak to claw, then back to beak and she spat it across the room. How ungrateful!

Meanwhile in non-parrot-related news, the world continues to turn. We are on Day Two of the diet. I had a couscous salad for dinner. I have absolutely no idea whether couscous is good for weight loss or not. Pundits are very quick to say what one should not eat when one is trying to lose weight, but not so fast to recommend foods which will aid weight loss. I suppose it’s because there is no such food. The best way to lose weight is not to have any food at all. Mind you, I’ve not walked to work yet. Yesterday it was raining, and today I didn’t want to walk – I wanted to be home promptly to see the parrot.

I had some fun at work today. Next week an associated department is having a formal inspection, and the more junior staff were being coached on how to deal with the inspectors. It is likely that inspectors will ask them where certain documents are to be found, what they should do under certain circumstances, to which senior members of staff they should refer for various matters.  Keeping a straight face I told a gathering of lab-assistant-types that if questioned and they didn’t know the answers to any of the questions, then they should cry. Normally bursting into tears puts most people off, but if that didn’t work, my back-up plan was that they should bite the inspectors. It would be a brave inspector indeed who would not give up after receiving a vigorous fang-ing.

(I bet someone will squeal on me about this to management, who just won’t see the funny side…)

This evening I went to the astro club’s committee meeting. Whilst I’m technically not actually a committee member, that’s never stopped me sticking my oar in. On Saturday we’re holding an event to co-incide with the BBC’s “Stargazing Live” program, and tonight we had a little conflab to make plans for Saturday. If any of my loyal readers are at a loose end on Saturday, from 6pm we’ll be doing the astro thing at Woodchurch village hall. It promises to be a popular evening – in the last five days the club’s web site has had over three times the average monthly number of hits. And most of them are coming from the BBC’s “Stargazing Live” links.

4 January 2011 (Tuesday) - Diets and Parrots

For all that I’ve resigned myself to being a porker, I don’t actually enjoy being one. It’s the way I am. I get rather hurt by people commenting on my weight. I actually eat a lot less than many people who are a lot thinner than I am, and it’s not as though I choose to be fat.

Quite a few of my friends (both on-line and in reality) have started their post-Xmas diet, and I’ve jumped on the bandwagon.

There has been a lot of drivel said, posted and written about weight loss, weight gain, and the whole sorry story of diets over the years. Biffidus Digestivum, low carb atkins, cardiovascular, fat-burning diets… so many buzz-words are bandied about. And then there’s the whole “gym-ethos” cashing in on the perceived low self esteem of us porkers.

Do any of these buzz-words actually mean anything? Do any of these diets actually work? One of my cousins is rather forthright – yesterday she posted on Facebook “its not rocket science, if you want to lose weight you cut out all the crap, you exercise, and hey presto, you lose weight!” Me – I tend to look at the matter from a more medically-related point of view. Consider the above diagram. Hole A is larger than Hole B.

But it’s easy to come up with pet theories about weight loss. Doing it is not so easy. Or is it? Over the next few days I shall be really good. I shall cut out all meat, bread and potatoes from what I eat. I shall stop drinking beer. I will not have a biscuit with morning and afternoon coffee breaks. We’ll stop having crisps in the house. When not on a late shift I shall walk to and from work rather than driving. When on a late shift I shall (hopefully) go for a swim before work. When my stomach hurts from hunger I will tell myself that this is a good sign. And the weight will fall off. In the first week I shall lose about six pounds – maybe as much as half a stone. By the end of the month I shall be a stone lighter than I am today. By mid February I will be visibly thinner.

And I shall also be fed up with the dull food. And so I shall allow myself the odd treat. Or two. And by the end of February I will have given up all pretence of diet. By the end of April I shall be back to the weight I am today, and will be talking about a diet again.

I’ve done diets before. When “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” was a lot smaller I once went on a mega-diet. I lost over six stone in weight. I did it then. I can do it again.

Let me qualify that – I *can* do it again, but what incentive is there? Food is to be enjoyed. A lifetime of salad is simply not enjoyable. I have a theory that if I exercise more, then eating less might not be such an issue. I can walk to and from work. I shall start off with that (when it’s not raining), and see how I get on.

I came home from work this evening to find a large van outside my house, and “My Boy ^TM ” supervising the unloading of a large cage. I helped move said cage into the living room – “Feathery Bollox” has arrived. She’s (!) quite a sweetie, she likes monkey nuts, dried bananas and chicken. She likes climbing all over the outside of her cage, and she was fascinated by my doing the ironing.

She’s still rather timid – she’s quite happy for people to be around, until they get to within about a foot of her. Then she backs off. She does a very good imitation of a smoke alarm, and says “What?” occasionally.

I have actually always wanted a parrot. We’ve got her for a couple of months – let’s see how we get on….

3 January 2011 (Monday) - Rochester Castle

I was up till quite late last night (this morning) mucking about with my backup PC. I got it to be *nearly* fit for purpose. I was quite pleased with my progress. It has to be said that ‘er indoors ^TM is loathe to throw away anything that might be useful, and over the years whenever we have upgraded the computers, we’ve saved an awful lot of computer bits. And we’ve recycled a lot of those bits by having built an almost working PC out of the scraps and fragments of leftover PCs. And I’ve done it without having to make too much of a nuisance of myself to my more IT-savvy pals. (Well, the Hose Beast was in Ashford for bowling anyway…)

I say “almost working” – when I went to bed last night, Windows was running fine. I’d got the thing onto the home network with shared space available for the backing-up I wanted to do. The only problem was that it wasn’t seeing both the hard drives in Windows, even though they are there in the BIOS. But I could fix that one…. I thought. I can remember having a similar problem when I bought a hard drive for a PC in 2003. I fixed that – if only I could remember what I did.

But then this morning when I switched it on, it started to boot up Windows, gave up and hung. And that was it. Now it won’t boot into Windows at all. I suspect that old hard drives that have been laying idle for some years aren’t quite at their best. I’m going to give up on this silly idea now (at least for a little while).

I spent the morning sulking in NeverWinter, where trolls have become endemic.

Following on from the success of yesterday’s little jaunt to an English Heritage treasure (!), we thought we’d enjoy another of their cultural wonders today. Lullingstone Roman Villa was open, according to the English Heritage website, so we arranged to meet up at the place with Simon and Corinne; they too would be able to make the most of their English Heritage membership.

We got to Lullingstone Roman Villa to find it was closed. As had dozens of other people. It has to be said that I’m not impressed with English Heritage – I shall complain in the morning.

We saw signs to Lullingstone castle, so we thought we’d drive up to that instead. It too was closed, as was nearby Eynsford castle. We got out our English Heritage books – they claimed that Rochester castle was open, and so we set off. I used the opportunity to try out the sat-nav on my phone. It worked surprisingly well; the only hiccup was that it insisted on measuring distances in kilometres, even though I’d told the thing to use imperial measurements.

There was a minor calamity on the way to Rochester – the roads were rather busy. The queues to get into the Bluewater shopping complex were amazing – traffic was backed up for over a mile in the slow lane on the A2. Why on Earth would anyone continue queuing when the traffic was like that? We sped past the queues, and soon were at the castle which (thankfully) was open. Open, but cold. It was cold the last time I came to Rochester Castle. In fact it was snowing then. I went there as a birthday treat many years ago. Talking of birthdays, I was amazed to find out how many of my loyal readers have birthdays today. Happy Birthday all of you – and I hope your day was warmer than mine was.

We spent an hour or so looking round the castle, and then wandered over the road to have a look round the cathedral.

There was a sign up saying that there was a service in progress, but we went in anyway. I couldn’t see any services in progress. There was a vicar making a foul stench with a joss stick, but that was about all that was happening. It was interesting looking round the cathedral – there seemed to be half a dozen mini-churches inside the place; all sorts of different places where religious-types could do their religion-ing. I thought it cheeky of them to have a placard advertising that the place was free to visit, but they welcomed donations – a suggested donation being three quid. The placard went on to say that it costs ten grand a week to keep the cathedral running. The apathetic agnostic inside of me can’t help but wonder if those ten thousand pounds might be better spent elsewhere.

And then home - seeing we were in Rochester we came via Toys R Us to look at the lego. I was vaguely thinking of buying myself a pressie, but the cost put me off somewhat. And it’s not as though I’m short of lego….

2 January 2011 (Sunday) - Sutton Valance Castle

Once I’d got up and had some brekky, I slept in front of the working PC for an hour or so whilst it played NeverWinter Nights. We then went round to B&Q for a big box to put all my Lego into. Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a bit of the stuff, and it had got to the stage where it needed to be herded together.

We then went on an outing. A week ago we joined English Heritage. I had mentioned in a previous blog entry that I was considering cancelling my membership, but I have been told that would be a foolish thing to do. English Heritage is good, I like it, and I am going to enjoy being a member. And if I don’t, ‘er indoors ^TM will break my face (!)

“We” had decided that it would be nice to go to Sutton Valence Castle today. Something which is easier said that done. The place is described as being “in the village of Sutton Valence which is on the A274”. So we had this naïve idea to drive into the village along the A274 and look for signs. We found the village easily enough, but there were no signs to any castles. After a while we tried exploring some of the side roads off of the A274, and once we’d gone round several labyrinthine twists and turns we round an English Heritage sign pointing along a dirt track. So we went along this dirt track and we found a dead end. We came back, and found a turning we’d missed. We followed that to the end and found a hoity-toity old biddy walking her hounds who directed us back into the village.

We eventually found the castle. I say “castle”… I am reliably informed it was once a castle. There are five large(ish) lumps of decaying masonry and two information placards. The entire thing can be seen in all its glory in five minutes. I know this, because I timed it with my stop-watch. In order to waste some more time, I enjoyed “the panoramic views over the Weald”. They weren’t so much “panoramic” as “cold”, and were only worth watching when the view was interrupted by a pair of local urchins running down the hill; one falling over and winding himself quite seriously, and the other skidding down the hill on his bum, covering his trousers in mud.

Home to find “My Boy ^TM ” in high excitement. His new car has arrived. This is his fourth car. I didn’t get my fourth car until I was in my late thirties. He’s also tidying up in readiness for his house guest. Later in the week he’s assuming temporary responsibility for his mate’s parrot whilst his mate goes on holiday. I must admit I’m quite looking forward to the parrot’s arrival. I’ve often fancied the idea of having a parrot, and I shall be interested to see how we get on with “feathery bollox” (as I am assured the bird will be known). An interesting choice of name, as it would seem that the gender of “feathery bollox” has not so far been reliably determined.

I had intended to spend some time mucking about with my backup PC today. But I gave the matter some thought. The thing was broken. It was probably repairable. I decided that it would be far more productive for me to wait until an itinerant techie-minded person should come along. I could then smile at said techie minded person and hope that they might take pity on me.

As luck would have it, the Hose Beast came calling this afternoon. He spent half an hour fiddling with the broken PC before announcing that he concurred with my initial diagnosis. ‘er indoors ^TM then produced an old hard drive and a motherboard and asked if they were any good. We decided that these bits might form the foundation of a new PC I could build from the wreckage of the old one. So whilst everyone else went bowling, I got jiggy with the screwdriver. At the end I had to call for help. It was only a small problem, but a serious one: where does the mains power switch attach to the motherboard?

With mains power to motherboard we could then get serious with the thing. We booted with smug grins, only to get what might best be described as “Quack Quack Oops!!” So we paused to strip out incompatible RAM, and started again. As I’m typing this, I’m installing Windows onto what is effectively a new backup PC. I’m hoping for the best, but fully expecting to be going to the tip tomorrow….

1 January 2011 (Saturday) - PC Problems

Yesterday was all about looking back – today I shall look forward. I’m hoping to make use of Google Calendar a lot more. I’ve already linked it to the “Dates for the Diary” section of the blog, and it’s embedded into www.mankybadger.com. Once Facebook iron out their wrinkles I shall include it over there too. So far I’ve listed all the events for the coming year of which I’m aware. I’m quite proud of myself – even though it’s still rather early in the year for the bonfire events to have confirmed dates yet, I’ve tracked down dates for the parades in Rye and Eastbourne.

Other plans for this year include having (most of) the mortgage paid off. That should happen some time over the spring. I’m dreading to find out how poorly the endowment policy fared. When we took it out (all those years ago), our financial advisor (father in law) assured us that it was a sound investment. We were promised vast sums of spare cash when the endowment matured, which would be useful – the maturation coincides with our silver wedding anniversary. Over the years I’d vaguely hoped to use the money from the endowment to go back to Jersey for a holiday over that anniversary, but I can’t see that happening somehow.

Talking of anniversaries and wanting cash - I could do with some spare cash right now. It’s an anniversary today; it’s been four years since I turned on my PC for the first time. A blog entry from that time described the device as “if not quite the dog’s bollox, it’s certainly the cat’s cock”. The PC has done well over the last four years, but just recently it’s really started to creak. Boot-up is painfully slow, and total freeze-ups requiring plug-pulling are getting more commonplace, despite my having had goes with Windows Defenders and C-Cleaners and PC Analysers.

Perhaps some of my more techie-minded loyal readers could let me know how long I should expect to get out of a PC these days?

Talking of techie-stuff, with today being New Year, I started to back up last year’s photographs. I’ve often said that computer-types make things overly complicated for no apparent reason – here’s another example…. My photographs for the year 2002 take up just under 600Mb of disk space. A similar number of photographs in 2010 take up seven times the amount of disk space. Modern cameras generate much larger files, but the pictures don’t actually seem to be of any better quality. Today I had a stroke of genius.

Rather than copying onto loads of CDs,  I could get hold of a stand-alone hard drive and back up all my photos to it. They would be more accessible than if kept on CDs, so we set off to PC world. We got there to find that their on-line catalogue was somewhat at odds with what was on the shelf. And then ‘er indoors ^TM  had an idea. Why didn’t we use one of the old PCs that are gathering dust at home instead? So we went home and had a look at the pile of PCs that are gathering dust. Since I had a clear-out of rubbish over the summer, it’s not such a big pile as once it was. In fact we only had two spare PCs (if you don’t count the one that “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” never uses).

I disconnected the mouse, keyboard and monitor from my PC and plugged them into spare PC #1. Spare PC #1 promptly announced that Windows was fatally stuffed, thank you, and goodnight. I shall take that to the skip tomorrow. Spare PC #2 booted up fine, but I realised that swapping out the mouse, keyboard and monitor was a bit of a chore, so I popped back to PC World to get a switch so’s I could run both PCs from the same set of mouse, keyboard and monitor. And then back home to plumb it all together.

Oh, the air was blue. I couldn’t get the poxy switch to work. My PC wouldn’t see it at all. Eventually I wrestled the device into submission by cheating and reading the instructions. It works fine. Which is more than can be said for Spare PC #2. Working fine at 4pm, by 6pm it had decided it didn’t want to play. Now it merely cycles round the boot-up sequence until it flashes a blue screen of death and then it starts again; never actually booting up. I had a plan to get round this problem by booting from a Windows CD. Spare PC #2 had other ideas….

I *think* the thing has more than one hard disk inside. I shall have a look tomorrow and see if I can’t adjust the boot sequence. Initially I shall do that carefully by adjusting the jumpers, and if that is unsuccessful, I’ve a large axe somewhere.