Bomb scare over

We've just been told to evacuate the Lloyd's building only to be told 30 seconds later not to. Damn! I could have gone home.

2014 beerathon

After going to the last 6 or 7 Great British Beer Festivals we decided to give this year's a miss. It's good fun but after about 4pm it just gets far too busy and it's all the way over in Olympia which is a real hassle to get too.

This year we decided to just do some beer tasting of our own and just did a pub crawl around Soho. I was home by 8 but we had good fun.

Where to next year?

Laser cats

From Hasbo, available in all good pet stores.

Stupid animal

She's not done this for a while. But still makes me laugh.

Busy day

The cats woke us up at around 5 this morning but it was okay as we got loads done.

We ripped out all the carpet from the stairs and landings then took it to the tip. There's a shed load of spiky carpet grip that also needed pulling up so got the majority of that up.

Then we picked up some logs for the fire.

We also went to a second hand charity store to find furniture for some of our rooms. Didn't find anything though.

We picked up a new lock / catch for our bedroom door (to keep the cats out and to stop them waking us up).

We popped into Majestic to stock up on beer and wine.

After that we popped over to a recently done up garden centre for lunch and to pick up some plants for our hanging baskets.

Tonight we're off to a friend's for a bbq before heading over to our old local.

Loads on tomorrow too. Urgh. I'm going to need another weekend at this rate.

Jeez, that's a bloody big dragonfly

Or at least I hope it is. If you listen closely you can hear Biscuit meowing.

Feel the power

It gets pretty hot at work in the summer so splashed out on a new usb desk fan.

Excellent. Until I turned out on. They're not much friction between the desk surface and the fan so it's started to move on its own.

Not to worry. I've celotaped it to the desk.

Happy birthday to you

My weather spreadsheet is 10 years old today!

Ha, ha, ha. What a loser.

Memories

I had a look down a corridor at work yesterday and found some of the paintings that used to be in and around my first office at Lloyd's 12 years ago. All part of the Lloyd's collection.

Back to the grindstone

I've just finished 2 days of SQL training but back to the day job now. It wasn't the most fun as half of the course was typing out code from a book onto the screen and clicking go but it was nice to have a break from real work.

I'm sure there'll be lots to do once I get back in the office.

Hot cat

Not sure how they cope in this weather when they can't take off their coats.

I've always wanted one of these

Potato gratin here I come. Yum, yum, yum. And before anyone says anything.

Yes, I know that's a cucumber.

Lightning photo attempts

I wouldn't make a good photographer. No patience. Amazing storm this past 12 hours though. It won't stop. Perhaps we've done something to upset the gods.

Ding-ding-ding!

Jack pot! 3 Audi TTs in a row. Equivalent to 3 cherries on a car parking fruit machine.

I wonder what I win.

Yum, yum

What better way to start your day. Extra sour, liquid filled camel balls. Look what I found when buying a bottle of water on the way into work. Yum, yum.

A big cat hug

Biscuit's giving me a big cat hug. Lovely.

A long hard slog

I started to backup my network storage device on Saturday morning. It's still going strong now! It claims 20 hours to go.

5mb/s over the house network.

What does this say about my street?

That there are a lot of hairdressers.

Picture from last night's gig

The Cat Empire. They sound as if they are my kind of band, but not really. They had a couple of songs that I know which were good but the rest were not really my thing. Plus I had to miss the second half of the football. Boo!

Quizzy rascal

Saturday night we were roped into taking part in a charity quiz. It was a great night and we ended up coming second. Our table did win 4 prizes on the raffle though. I won 2 bottles of Biddenden cider so left quite happy.

Some photos from Sonisphere

It's been a little over a week since we all went to Sonisphere and I think I'm still recovering. Excellent fun with great music, friends and beer. Lots of beer.

As a venue I couldn't fault it. 50k  people rather than Reading's 100k plus made all the difference. I didn't need to queue for the toilet our for a beer once.

Pre beer festival beers

A friend who's wedding we went to a couple of weeks ago had a spare beer barrel and a keg of cider left ovet so dropped it round mine before we headed off to a beer festival at my rugby club.

Pretty cheap night as half of the bar men were other players so got loads of free beer on top of the free beer before.

Really?

People will buy anything.

It's going to be a late one

It's 8pm and we still haven't finished. I have, but the team hasn't so I have to hang around just in case.

It'll be all over tomorrow. Thankfully.

Game 2

Won 1
Tsuro, for some reason I've won every game of this I've played (1 game was joint 1st). This game was pretty much luck as we were both down to about 3 cards in the end

Game 1

Won 0.

April kicked my ass at ticket to ride. It's the map German edition, I accidentally ordered that on eBay. Oops!

It's got a few extra rules (which we didn't use) but was good fun.

When will it end?

Thursday at noon. I've been doing longer hours at work recently, the whole team has. We've got a deadline for a Lloyd's capital return and there's been loads of work to get done so 12 hour + days have become a bit of the norm.

I don't mind getting in early and staying in late when there's work to do but some of the team are there just to show face.

Bloody neighbour's cat

That bloody cat came in again this morning (4am), so I've blocked off the cat flap again.  I'm pretty sure that's the one that's ruined the carpets. Fucker!

Microchip cat flap entry system will get ordered today.