A real post for once
After being amused enough by Dalek porn this morning to devote an entire post to it, I thought I would follow up with a real post detailing what I've been up to. Aren't you all lucky?
Let's see now. Friday saw me in an increasingly irate mood, getting more and more panicked as the day went on, as I had Important Stuff To Do and a rapidly decreasing amount of time to do it in. Eventually I managed to escape from work and had just enough time to get to the Queen's Head, meet my friend Anne (who is not on LJ and I'm sure never will be), have a quick pint of Thwaite's Liberation and then head down to the train station to get a train to London. These aren't merely elaborate steps to get away from the office, it's just that I was visiting friends in Kent over the weekend. There had been problems on the Northern Picadilly line of the tube between King's Cross and Arnos Grove earlier in the day, when a suspicious package had disrupted services quite badly, but by the time we got to London this had all blown over (as opposed to 'up') and we sailed through quite happily. We finally arrived at our destination (my old housemate Helen's mother's house in Tunbridge Wells) at around 11 in the evening. By the time I had washed, changed and fed Evie it was about half-midnight and everyone else had gone to bed, but it was probably for the best as I was shattered.
On Saturday we ate a good breakfast and then went out to Glazy Daisy, a ceramics studio where you can paint your own plates, mugs, etc. etc. They're then glazed and you can pick them up a few days later. Evie put some foot prints on a bauble which we then wrote "Evie's first Christmas 2005" on, Helen and Bob are going to send it up if they're not up before Christmas. I'd completely forgotten we were doing this, so I hadn't planned what I wanted to do so ended up painting a wyvern on the side of a mug, with some knotwork on the inside. Hopefully it won't look like a complete piece of poo when it's glazed and cooked.
We then retired back to the house to exchange presents, drink large amounts of sherry and sit down to a very, very nice dinner of roast turkey with all the trimmings, then a few more trimmings, then some bread and pate, then some more trimmings, washed down with some very nice wine from our hosts' copious cellar.
Sunday was the trip back to Sheffield. After a filling brunch (we ate very well this last weekend) we took a relatively uneventful trip back to Sheffield, stopped at the AMT in St Pancras for a chai steamer (it's been too long since I've had one of those) then hopped on the 5.30 train back to Sheffield, passing the time by doing the crossword and sudoku in the in-train magazine and taking cute photos of Evie sat up in one of the seats (which I will post soonish).
Yesterday I stopped into the college only briefly, as I didn't have any films to process or prints to make. John showed me how to load a 120 film into the old Hawkeye box camera I inherited from my great-aunt Nelly when she died in 2001. I'd always assumed it was a museum piece but amazingly after a bit of poking around I have discovered that it still works. It's sat at home and waiting to be used. It should be interesting to see what any photos I take with it come out like. The good news is that I will be able to process and print them at the college and the enormous negative size should make for some good detailed images. I have to admit, I've a rather sentimental attachment to this camera as it's really quite old, has been in the family for a while and I have a sneaking suspicion that it was used to take some of the 1940s family photos I have at home. Which is a strange thought.
Let's see now. Friday saw me in an increasingly irate mood, getting more and more panicked as the day went on, as I had Important Stuff To Do and a rapidly decreasing amount of time to do it in. Eventually I managed to escape from work and had just enough time to get to the Queen's Head, meet my friend Anne (who is not on LJ and I'm sure never will be), have a quick pint of Thwaite's Liberation and then head down to the train station to get a train to London. These aren't merely elaborate steps to get away from the office, it's just that I was visiting friends in Kent over the weekend. There had been problems on the Northern Picadilly line of the tube between King's Cross and Arnos Grove earlier in the day, when a suspicious package had disrupted services quite badly, but by the time we got to London this had all blown over (as opposed to 'up') and we sailed through quite happily. We finally arrived at our destination (my old housemate Helen's mother's house in Tunbridge Wells) at around 11 in the evening. By the time I had washed, changed and fed Evie it was about half-midnight and everyone else had gone to bed, but it was probably for the best as I was shattered.
On Saturday we ate a good breakfast and then went out to Glazy Daisy, a ceramics studio where you can paint your own plates, mugs, etc. etc. They're then glazed and you can pick them up a few days later. Evie put some foot prints on a bauble which we then wrote "Evie's first Christmas 2005" on, Helen and Bob are going to send it up if they're not up before Christmas. I'd completely forgotten we were doing this, so I hadn't planned what I wanted to do so ended up painting a wyvern on the side of a mug, with some knotwork on the inside. Hopefully it won't look like a complete piece of poo when it's glazed and cooked.
We then retired back to the house to exchange presents, drink large amounts of sherry and sit down to a very, very nice dinner of roast turkey with all the trimmings, then a few more trimmings, then some bread and pate, then some more trimmings, washed down with some very nice wine from our hosts' copious cellar.
Sunday was the trip back to Sheffield. After a filling brunch (we ate very well this last weekend) we took a relatively uneventful trip back to Sheffield, stopped at the AMT in St Pancras for a chai steamer (it's been too long since I've had one of those) then hopped on the 5.30 train back to Sheffield, passing the time by doing the crossword and sudoku in the in-train magazine and taking cute photos of Evie sat up in one of the seats (which I will post soonish).
Yesterday I stopped into the college only briefly, as I didn't have any films to process or prints to make. John showed me how to load a 120 film into the old Hawkeye box camera I inherited from my great-aunt Nelly when she died in 2001. I'd always assumed it was a museum piece but amazingly after a bit of poking around I have discovered that it still works. It's sat at home and waiting to be used. It should be interesting to see what any photos I take with it come out like. The good news is that I will be able to process and print them at the college and the enormous negative size should make for some good detailed images. I have to admit, I've a rather sentimental attachment to this camera as it's really quite old, has been in the family for a while and I have a sneaking suspicion that it was used to take some of the 1940s family photos I have at home. Which is a strange thought.