Category Archives: Life

Pease Pudding

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So, another go at pease pudding last night – no photo this time.  Used a much smaller amount of split peas, an in general, it’s much better.  For a start, it tastes like the pease pudding my mam used to make, and it’s mostly smooth and creamy.  We had to push it through a sieve to get it like that though.  Need to cook the split peas for longer, and not quite so tightly packed together (the ones in the middle were still mostly raw).  But in general, we’re getting closer!

I’m considering just putting the gammon joint into water, with the split peas loose, and boiling it until the peas go soft, and then straining the water away (for stock), rather than putting the peas in muslin.

Tesco – Coke Zero – It’s back?

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So a friend reports Coke Zero in bottles is back in Tesco in Ipswich, and my wife told me it’s back in one Tesco in Nottingham as well.

Will we ever know what really happened?

Does anyone really care?

Anyway, good news for those of us who like the drink!

I’m British, let’s talk about the weather

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So we’ve crawled, wrapped in our fleece blankets and new hats, out of the freezing white bitter cold of December into the wet miserable damp grey cold of January.  We’ve managed to stay above freezing for a week or so, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant out there.  I’m no lover of sun, I don’t like bright lights and never have, but I’d rather have the white cold of snow than the grey murk of whatever-it-is-we-have now.  Soon though it’ll be spring (and as we get older, the seasons come and go faster, so it’ll be spring before we know it and autumn will be fast approaching with summer just a hint of heat in the middle), and hopefully we’ll get out and get the outside of the house sorted a bit.

Woodwork, holes in the walls, the garden – that’s this years focus I feel.

Tesco / Coke Zero

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So it seems to be true.  Tesco (in the UK) has decided to stop stocking Coke Zero.  We noticed they didn’t have any and asked customer service, and they couldn’t find a re-order entry.  A few days later a friend said their Tesco (completely different part of the country didn’t have any either).  I checked their online grocery website (tesco.com) and true enough, no Coke Zero available there.

I e-mailed and phoned, and eventually got a reply from a guy saying he’d spoken to their buying department, and they had decided to stop carrying Coke Zero.  He couldn’t explain why, and didn’t understand why, but there you have it.

So now we’re buying our Coke Zero from Asda, and we may end up shopping there more often as a result rather than going to do supermarkets.  Tesco fail?

Edit: Let me know (in the comments) if your local Tesco is / isn’t stocking Coke Zero and if you’ve been able to find out why.

The true measure of irony?

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I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).

Grete’s typing ..

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If you ever wonder why Grete stops talking to you while you’re on the phone, or maybe some online chat or game.

Here’s why.

Fizz on Grete's head

Fizz climbs onto the back of Grete’s chair and then onto her head.

Fast Fizz!

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Fizz hates the snow, she doesn’t like how it falls on her head without warning and how it looks on the ground.  I’m not sure she’s that bothered about the cold but the snow itself is a real issue.  She’s been out a few times, but she comes running back in.  I wanted a few shots of the garden (see previous post) and she wandered out.  While she was staring intently at the snow on the grass wondering if it was worth checking out, I managed to sneak up behind her.  These 5 shots are taken in the space of about 1.2 seconds.  She was a bit surprised, I love how in the fourth shot, her tail telegraphs the direction she’s about the head.

I was playing with the Picasa ‘movie’ stuff, because Grete suggested making an animated image, and as usual, it makes it too easy!  Here’s the youtube vid 😉

Garden – 2010

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It’s been a while since I bored you updated you on the state of the garden.  Since you can’t see any of it due to the snow, I thought now was a good time!

We’ve had a couple of decent snow falls over the last week or so, the first didn’t melt before the second arrived, although the skies have finally cleared so we might be okay for the rest of the day.  Here’s a long shot of the garden.

Garden - full shot

We bought a water tub / plant feature thing ages ago, it’s probably been in a few shots of the garden.  We take no care of it at all, and each year it grows a few plants from the bulbs which somehow survive.  We keep it mainly because the cats like drinking from it in the summer when the water is pretty clean.  At the moment, it’s an ice cube.

Fizz - and the water 'feature'

Much like the surface of the canal near here, which is now solid ice (kids have been cycling on it) except for a couple of areas of free flowing water where all the birds are hanging around.  Anyway, here’s two shots of our apple tree.

Apple Tree

Garden - past tree