The reason I spent two hours on the bus this morning: Major crash closes M8 both ways. Neil was going to a meeting in Kirkcaldy at 9.30 and managed to arrive at noon! I got to work at 11am. What a shame.

Well, stop the fucking presses.

Parents who stopped working so they could concentrate on trying to find their missing daughter (this post is not for griping about innocence or guilt) found it hard to pay their mortgage. Maybe it sounds a bit dodgy on first reading, but it’s reasonable. I presume people will be calling for an independent inspection into the workings of this fund.

(Apparently the folk who ate with the parents the night the girl disappeared have been dubbed the ‘tapas seven’, which explains why I want to be called, ah, you get it anyway. Wow, aren’t I funny.)

One of my favourite songs from Uni:

  • went to Monteiths Bar for a colleague’s leaving do (somehow ended up at Pivo, then went home, thanks for picking me up and then driving me to get a sausage supper, Neil)
  • woke early-ish and went to get my haircut while Neil went to meet the kitchen surveyor
  • then went to B&Q so Neil could buy more cement
  • did the weekly shop
  • watched Ratatouille (the short before it was absolutely hilarious, and what a fun movie!)
  • did not go to the Halloween party after all (wasn’t feeling up for it, neither was Neil, went to bed at 9.15pm)
  • woke very early (especially early since the clocks went back by an hour for daylight savings)
  • watched a bit of Star Trek while Neil finished bricking up the fireplace
  • … and then it all went off (nothing I really want to talk about, although I wish I could)
  • had a good chat with my mum and my sister
  • had dinner at Ravellos
  • had peppermint tea at my cousin’s

I’m spending loads and loads of time on social networking sites during office hours.

(Books and reader networking sites, of course. And — ugh — MySpace, too.)

It’s fun, dragging a publisher into the 21st century.

Also, TFIF. The weeks go by so damn quickly but there continues to be a huge, dynamic pile of ‘to dos’ on my list that never seems to go down.

I saw this being debated and speculated on prior to the rules being changed regarding organic food labelling. It’s now going to be harder for farmers who grow organic produce overseas (and fly them to the UK) to have their food labelled ‘organic’, because of the amount of carbon dioxide emissions air-freighting the food produces.

Hangonaminnit. From what I understand, organic in our trendy, PC world means food that hasn’t been treated / protected / grown with chemicals like pesticides and whatnot. Carbon dioxide emissions from cargo planes flying the food from (let’s say) Africa to the UK is a greenie issue. It’s also a convenient coincidence that making it harder for developing-world farmers protects UK organic food businesses.

I saw on the news this morning that they say African organic farmers should start selling to their neighbours, instead of freighting it halfway round the world. I’m sure the African farmers agree, as long as they can get a fair price. I somehow think their neighbours are a little more preoccupied with other matters (war, famine, crippling poverty — wee issues like that).

(You don’t get to see this, but Neil does. When news of this WTF? nature comes on, I sit there and bang the sides of my head with my palms.)

I’m a bit of a control freak and a bit of a perfectionist. But I’m not a workaholic. I have been known, however, to work for 12 hours straight and forget to eat or go to the loo (I didn’t wet myself or anything).

(I don’t own a Blackberry, although I have been seriously considering buying a mobile broadband modem so that I can bring my laptop and work on my own stuff while commuting to and from work.)

One of my photos of Edinburgh is on Schmap!! Edinburgh. They sent me a message a while ago on Flickr, announcing that my photo from the roof of the Camera Obsura building had been shortlisted.

There’s no payment involved. I am going to be inundated with highly-paid photography commissions and I can give up my day job, I can just see it. At some point I may even think about changing my camera (a half-decade old Sony Cybershot, thank you very much).

(Er, no.)

  • had dinner at Chop Chop with Mark, Kristen, Alexander, and Kristen’s mum (as recommended by Shauna — good food, but pricey for the size of the portions)
  • had a quick drink at a pub on William Street
  • went home and shared a bottle of wine with Neil while channel surfing before bed
  • finished sanding down the final panel of the chest of drawers (Neil was ripping out a kitchen cupboard — I helped later on by throwing the discarded wood onto a pile outside)
  • went to Livingston (B&Q for paint, varnish, and drawer handles; Neil ordered 30 rolls of loft insulation), dropped by Frankie & Benny’s for dinner (calamari and a mushroom pizza; Neil ordered potato skins and a 15-inch pizza that defeated him, although he made a really good effort) and would have done the weekly shop if we hadn’t then been invited to join Brian and Carene for the evening (when a quarter of your wardrobe is in the other house, half in Singapore, there isn’t much choice left when it comes to going out)
  • had a drink at the Solid Rock Cafe
  • was horrified at the Cathouse (the music was fine — there was one particular young lass who chose to wear a corset-type top and low-waisted pencil skirt, which would have been quite hot if her pot belly and love handles hadn’t been hanging out with a vengeance)
  • watched (and helped a tiny bit) Neil brick up the fireplace in the front bedroom (I supplied him with a drink and water for mixing the cement, and also looked for the right-sized bricks from the pile out the back that had come from the old chimney)
  • sat in the car and talked to my mum on the phone while Neil broke up the kitchen cupboard for disposal (it was pretty blowy outside)
  • had dessert and tea (Neil had coffee) at Livingston
  • did the weekly shop at Asda (we hear a new, 24-hour Asda will be opening soon)

Penguins apparently hang out in the same group to go fishing.

Skree!

One of my favourite programmes on the teevee is Who Do You Think You Are?, a documentary that traces a number of poms’ family histories. I did not get the chance to see all the episodes this season, but I really enjoyed the Alistair McGowan episode (where I knew he was Irish before he did). My favourite, by far, was last night’s final episode, tracing Matthew Pinsent‘s family history. I had no idea who he was, but now I know that he is a retired, multiple Olympic medal-winning rower, has twin boys, and is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror.

As Neil said, he has every right to go to Buckingham Palace, knock on the door, and say to the Queen, “Oi, Auntie Betty, this is my house.”

Life is pretty busy. I came into work this morning to find a cutting from the latest Harper’s Bazaar on my desk, called Caught in the Net. I’m obviously not going to reproduce it here, but here’s a summary: OMG! If you use Facebook and MySpace and Bebo, you friend all these people you don’t know and YOU COULD GET YOUR IDENTITY STOLEN! Or you could come across looking like a wanker!

I haven’t quite worked out yet why people don’t treat the information they put on the Internet with the same care that they would when dealing with real life. As I’ve suggested before, sites like Facebook or MySpace should supplement, not replace, your offline interactions, i.e. only add real friends to your list.

(I have a couple of Internet friends on my list — I met them elsewhere.)

This only adds to my belief that journalists think / believe, rightly or wrongly, that the general public is pretty damn thick.

  • went over to the other house so Neil could start taking down the chimney breast (while I read The Tiger in the Well)
  • sniggered and giggled over the first episode of the new season of Have I Got News For You (woo — Robert Harris)
  • went back over to watch The Jonathon Ross Show, where I heard that Take That (squee) will be on the programme next week
  • sanded down a decades-old chest of drawers (I’m not very good at this, I’ve left one panel)
  • watched the telly with Rhona while Neil finished taking down the chimney breast and cleaned up (what a manly man!)
  • had a late dinner at China Blue (Hokkien mee was disappointing, but everything else was good — we got an orange at the end, which makes it a real Chinese restaurant)
  • did the weekly shop at Asda (and also bought new thermal socks because my woolly ones are developing holes)
  • walked around the Designer Outlet in Livingston (and did not buy anything besides a fruit juice and some Christmas card accessories)
  • had a turkey dinner
  • made Christmas cards (people who I’ve sent Christmas cards to before, please let me know if you want one this year and if your address has changed since the last time!)
  • watched The Big Lebowski on DVD
  • watched Medium (still not too taken with it)

Cool. ‘Turnable’ pages of Robert Hooke’s notebooks are online. I haven’t read the whole thing (although I’ve looked at all the pages), but what I’ve seen so far is pretty thrilling. Mainly because I’ve read the entire Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson and remember a lot of the real-life characters.

I wish Enoch Root was real…

Via New Scientist.

Before you start reading, just know that this is not meant to be an interesting post. It just illustrates how two little words, black tie, can make me extremely anxious.

Lip Service skin tight buckle dressI make that pact with myself, and Neil calls me a week later from work to ask if I want to go to the company Christmas party. In Reading. It’s black tie.

I’m no WAG wannabe, but as I said before, I’m not buying any new clothes. I spent all last night searching for second hand stuff on eBay, but I could only find very boring designs. If I was going to buy something new for this black-tie affair, I would go for something like this Lip Service dress (Neil’s response without even seeing the dress, but having heard my description: “Well, they’ll remember you.”), but alas, I have no spare patent veggie leather lying around, and I’m not that good at sewing anyway, so a call was made to my mummy in Singapore.

(Not a verbatim transcript, but reasonably close.)

“Mum, could you go through my clothes in the spare bedroom and see if I’ve kept any of my old dresses?”

“Hold on…”

(A few minutes pass. I really must persuade Mum to buy a cordless phone when her phones cark it.)

“Okay, I’m back. You’ve got a knee-length blue one, a knee-length black one, a long, asymmetric blue one, a slightly shorter asymmetric black one, and a knee-length red one.”

“Oh, the one in a snakeskin print?”

Ah. The dresses I’ve been wearing to weddings since the late Nineties. Seriously. I still wear loads of stuff that I bought while I was at Uni. People talk about buying a new black coat ‘this season’, I might consider it ‘this decade’, but only if the coat has started to fall apart* (it hasn’t. It’ll go for another decade, I reckon). I buy so few dresses I can remember them all**.

  • Knee-length blue one — Australia. Strange surf-y / girly shop in Fremantle. 1998.
  • Knee-length black one — Singapore. I suspect it’s a slip I bought at M&S to go under another blue one I bought in… Garden City mall in Booragoon (Australia). 1998.
  • Long, asymmetric blue one — Australia again. I think it was also at that shop in Fremantle. 1998.
  • Shorter asymmetric black one — Singapore. The newest one, purchased for Mark and Kristen’s wedding in 2003. From Chaos.
  • Knee-length red one — from Toronto when we went to my cousin’s wedding in 2000. Last worn in… gosh, 2003 to my friend’s wedding.

My mum promised to send three of them over to me, and offered to send me high heels, too. HA***! So I’ll be racking up carbon emissions by having clothes (and a bag) sent to me via airmail, but I won’t be buying something new that I don’t need. Oh the conflict.

* That said, I have a lot of coats. I’m referring to Old Reliable, my black wool coat purchased in Australia many moons ago.
** Yes. This is sad. I am so anally retentive.
*** No point.

It’ll make me self-conscious as well. All the wives and girlfriends will be glammed up to the nines, and I will be… me. With a dress on.

Southgate bans charity donation: I don’t know who’s lamer — the players for pledging a day’s pay then not ponying up, or the charity for trying to blackmail them.

(One wonders if the charity bullied them into pledging in the first place.)