Another gardening success.....

.... in the Strawberry department.

After the success of the Pear crop, I let the Strawberry plants run a bit in the last month or so and have managed to get 20 new plants so far from the runners. I should have another 10 or so by the weekend, so a bumper crop should be had next year with 10 x 2nd year plants and 30+ of 1st year growth plants.

It's easy when you know how!

This weekend it is apple harvest time.

A day out in London....

..... was had today.

Just strolling around doing the tourist thing. Southbank first for breakfast in the excellent Le Pain Quotidien.

Just outside the Royal Festival Hall was this structure, made of paper tubes.

Then along the Southbank for a while, then over Westminster Bridge and a wander about Whitehall, Horseguards & St James's in time for lunch at Fortnum & Mason.

Then at 2pm I embarked on a guided walk - The Intelligence Trail. At 2.5 hours it's a bit longer than I expected, but a very interesting and informative time was had.

Tart....

... of the Pear variety, made by me. Pastry was a bit chunky, but I threw it together in 5 mins.

Pear puree in the base of a part blind baked pastry case, topped with half pears and filled with sugar\cream\egg\vanilla mix.

Twas very nice with a scoop of Green & Blacks Vanilla Ice Cream!

Underneath the seat of power...

Over lunchtime today, I had a tour of the Palace of Westminster, hugely interesting and many thanks to the friend who took me around. Wandering through both Houses was fascinating.... Underneath the palace though is this hidden gem.

St Mary Undercroft is just off St Stephens Hall.

The day got off to a bad start when the trains through Andover were disrupted as one had hit a car on a level crossing at 5.30AM. So I drove to Basingstoke in the hope of getting parked in the works car park and then a choice of trains. Sadly concrete repairs in the multi-storey works car park meant I had to squeeze the A8 into a teeny tiny space next to a fat arsed 911, which I did but with about an inch to spare either side. The trains were then ram packed full of grumpy, smelly & hung over commuters who were generally bemoaning the fact that interlopers had come onto their normally quiet Southampton Parkway to Waterloo train.

To add insult to injury the customer meeting today got cancelled when I was in the office just getting ready to go. So the morning chat to old friends from Lotus days in IBM Southbank, the tour of Westminster (with another old friend from Lotus days) & beer (with old friend from Lotus days + ex boss from Lotus days!) made my day rather better than it looked like being early on.

What a lovely pear.....

.... or really what a lovely glut of pears!

I harvested the cordoned pear tree today, best crop ever of juicy sweet perfect pears. I am convinced that the addition of a leaf cutter bee (or Mason bee) shelter for the last 2 years has paid dividends in the fruit tree pollenation stakes, all of the fruit trees have done so much better this year, providing an abundance of lovely apples & pears.

So tonight (and tomorrow) I have pears for my dessert. A stewed compote made from peeled, cored & diced pears, butter, sugar, a little lemon juice & a fat Madagascan vanilla pod. I've allowed that to cool & then beaten 2 egg yolks through it. Put into ramekins and topped with meringue and then baked until golden brown. The rest of the fruit will be eaten fresh or made into compote & frozen.

First day back and all that...

I snuck last week off to use up some leave, still have loads to fit in, so the occassional week will be had between now & March. So today felt like first day back at school (sort of - but without the preceeding 6 weeks off!)

TTT (Train To Town), interesting conversation on train with a Corporate Lawyer, amazing who you bump into - last month it was a private investigator who I twigged was following someone back to Basingstoke!? A quick Latte & Blueberry Muffin in Starbucks at Triton Square was had before a couple of meetings about things we can do together with potential Business Partner. Agreed to meet up at a conference next week and discuss more.

Diverted on way back to Waterloo to M&S Marble Arch as I thought they would have bigger range of suits than other branches - I was wrong - Hedge End has better selection\more stock. Yes, I still buy M&S suits for work, they last a year & then get thrown out, saving my better suits from the wear & tear of commuting to town too often.

In my mind....

.... tomorrow is the last day of summer. No more Bank Holidays until Christmas, a month of Q3, then the slog that is Q4 where more than a weeks vacation is frowned upon, plus the clocks going back on October 25th.

After a day of miserable grey skies and drizzle whilst working in the garden, I hope that tomorrow brings some sunshine at least.

The garden is almost ready for winter with most of the veg. harvested, nearly all the garden lights fixed, pots weeded and shuffled, bark renewed (20 bags worth!), trees pruned, lawn fed, watered, edged and weeded. Luckily haven't had to put BBQ away as it never came out this year! Just a few more odds & sods left to do outside plus a little tidying in the garage and it should all be finished.

It's just dawned on me.....

.... how small the world is now communications terms.

Phone calls, emails, Twitter & Facebook from all over the world this weekend. Brother in Sydney, friends in Boston, Abu Dhabi, Spain & France all been in [very easy] contact.

Plus the devices I'm using to stay in touch are many and varied too from Blackberry to PC with Skype or browser and best of all... apart from ISP costs all of what I am doing is FoC.

Slingbox is next on the technology acquisition list, then Internet enabled LCD TV for living room.

A weekend of nothingness.....

... I did the sum total of f*ck all this weekend. No gardening, no DIY, no retail therapy, nothing. I didn't even get to watch some DVD's that I had planned to view. Don't know where the weekend went....

Let's hope next week is more productive.

Life in a parallel universe?

Uncanny isn't it? It could be a scene from work.

I just wish I knew the girl in the red dress, as usual the secretary looks to be a bit bonkers.

Thanks to Cali & Carl for pointing me at the website to create these.

After staycation, been busy at work...

.... but good busy, rather than just busy or bad busy.

Loads going on, reviewed twice, but all went well. Customers are responding well to suggestions and ideas. Much the same next week, but without the reviews - so I can get more done.

Spent weekend in garden doing loads of stuff, wiring up patio heaters (pictured right), cutting hedge, mowing lawn (twice!), edging lawn, repairing wiring to garden lights (I cut through them with hedge trimmer!) even managed to get a bit of photography in around Longparish and saw 2 Herons, on way back I saw a Bugatti Veyron, 6 Lambo's an Aston and a Nissan Skyline all belting down the A303 at breakneck speed.

I enjoyed the staycation so much I've booked another at the end of the month for a week, so much holiday to use, so little time to use it in!? A little shooting, hunting and fishing is in order I think.

Moth!

It appears to be a Poplar Hawk-moth (Laothoe populi) common in Europe, and very large!

Noted by the front door light today.

Click on the image for better (full size) view.

Time off.....

.... for good behaviour?

I am taking 2 weeks staycation. Having travelled quite a bit in the past I have to say I liked the idea of staycations way before they became the thing to do in the credit crunch. It allows me to catch up on all the trivial things I never get round to doing, like getting little car niggles fixed, DIY, going shopping off the beaten track, lunching with friends and generally wandering about on day trips.

Various trips to car specialists to get things fixed or tweaked and maybe look at a different car - Bentley GT test drive perhaps? I'll go to Orvis to look at some fishing gear and clothing and maybe Harry Potter beckons on a rainy afternoon. I will also take the Sigmonster out for a walk or two.

Trainers...

... I have recently ordered and taken delivery of a new pair of trainers from NikeID. Starting with a base product of the Nike Zoom Structure Triax, I had the opportunity to customise the colour scheme of the component parts, and even add a personalised ID on them.

On some of the products you can even choose different widths, so very comfortable they are, and unique to me.

The Sigmonster cometh.....

..... done deal. On the way next week is a Sigmonster.

EF600mm has gone - not different enough to lighter EF500mm and the 1Ds Mk III had to go - it's a terrible camera - replaced with a 1D Mk III which will be happier stablemate to existing 1D Mk III.

free email.....

..... then outage.

It appears I have been receiving a free email service from my provider for a while now - I didn't realise this until my email stopped working overnight when they did a bit of an upgrade, so a quick online chat to Customer Support (where they very strangely asked for my credit card details in a web based online help chat session - they assured me it was quite secure - I declined!) the problem was fixed.

Of course there was a knock on effect to my Blackberry and email client from the Dark Side - as the email provider has changed password policy my numerical string password wasn't acceptable, so I had to change to a more complex one containing upper and lower case characters and at least 5 numerical characters!?

The upgrade by the service provider includes spam filters so good that very little is getting through..... sadly thats very little email at all is getting through.

UPDATE 29/06 : Further interupted service today, the upgrade appears to have had some effect on the ability of the email servers to stay up for any period of time. Fingers crossed they sort their lives out before I name and shame them...

UPDATE 07/07 : no email getting through since last week, I can mail out, but zero coming in. I've been onto Register.com support again & again - they are utterly crap and full of empty promises of it being fixed "tomorrow", "soon" and "in hours" - no-one will call me back despite numerous requests for someone to do so. They have several tag lines which are really quite wrong "Experience the difference great service can make" not with this lot & "Don't just make a website - make an impact" in my experience a detremental one.....

Rearrange the following - Insult....

.... Injury, Add to.... I wrote about Audi in May and how they wanted £837.20 to replace my cambelt "One of the hardest working components of the engine...." - oh set my mind off and scare me into replacing a part that doesn't present any symptoms why not!

Well, on the way to a meeting yesterday the car suspension started knocking on the front right whenever I went over anything like an uneven road surface. I took it into Audi on the way home and left it with them to investigate.

At least it is a problem that has presented itself and actually has a symptom, rather than the spectre of the unknown as with the cambelt.

Luckily it appears to be a control arm & rubber bush, so relatively cheap. I thought whilst the car is in I may as well have the cambelt done as well, get the whole lot done and dusted - then they tell me "we recommend that when you get the cambelt done that you replace the water pump at the same time as the renewal of the cambelt can put a strain on an old water pump..." - another £250 please!

Looks like the beer budget for the summer has just been blown away by Audi.

24/06 UPDATE : Picked up car today, and not as bad as I thought it might have been, in the end they didn't replace water pump and a few F.O.C. items appeared on bill, so a few beers can be had this summer! I will also probably be able to afford the Audi wheel that has appeared on ebay to replace the one I buckled earlier in the year! Hopefully getting car back to 100% as I want it.

ISIHAC - It's back!

Long awaited, with some feelings that it wouldn't be anything like as good as when Humph was at the helm. With Stephen Fry as guest chairman, it was no suprise that Samantha was otherwise occupied, so the rippling (if not somewhat effeminate perhaps?) Sven was sat on Mr Fry's left hand keeping score.

Overall very good, with the same writing team still in place, with quite a few laugh out loud moments in the 30 minute programme. I did miss the dead-pan delivery of Humph though.

My wheel man.....

.... has been.

A little bubble of corrosion on the two rear wheels and a small kerb mark (unusually for me) on the front left wheel on the Audi have been fixed by my wheel man.

He was gainfully employed all day on mine and my neighbours cars, restoring the alloys back to perfection. The cars always look so much better when the wheels are 100%. If you live in north Hampshire - I can highly recommend him.

Not quite as good as Springwatch footage....

.... but it will do as a start for me.

Seen over the airfield at Thruxton today, one of three Red Kite's in the summer sunshine, hunting on the abundant dead rabbit population, it was a nice sight to behold.

The place gets a bit congested sometimes, not with aircraft but with a huge number of raptors like the Red Kite & Buzzards galore.

I will re-visit and take a more prepared approach to photographing them soon.