Ginger DJ Rob

We celebrated Sarah's birthday on Saturday, and with her feet still recovering from the operation, we could only walk as far as Wagamama (how unfortunate for us!) for another tasty katsu curry (described by James as addictive as curried KFC). We returned to Paul and Sarah's swapping gross-out slang meanings and checking out some urban legends and other slang meanings on the Urban Dictionary . The verbs, ' seagull ' and to ' donkey punch ' were explained. I've since remembered a couple more - ' Bakerloo ' and ' stroke the dog through the letterbox '. On Sunday, I managed to persuade Kerry into some training for Peru with 6 mile round walk to the cinema. Okay, so the journey didn't test us for steepness and altitude sickness but there's some long hills near where we live. Bolt 3D , the latest Pixar animation was preceded by an interesting trailer for Coraline (YouTube link), a stop-motion 3D film. It had a similar look to Nightmare be...

HD heaven Last week was a shock to the bank balance. I took the plunge to buy our new HD television, getting the Sony Bavia 40" KDL-40Z4500 from the Electro-Centre . I realised that prices at some places were going up after the January promotions, other places were running out of stock, plus I figured prices would only go down in the summer when they're about to replace the model. Having ordered it Tuesday night we received it Friday afternoon. Friday evening was setting up the 40" monster connecting the Sky box, PS3, Wii and DVD/HD recorder. Watching Blade Runner Blu-Ray was amazing picking up details I'd never seen before and colours so rich, it was like a different film. The demo of Resident Evil 5 looked amazing as well with a deeper level of detail. I tried a normal DVD connecting via the HDMI lead and the picture quality again impressed. A couple of disappointments though with one of them almost rectified. The Wii image was a little blocky but this was through ...

The main reason for our Norfolk visit was my nan's funeral. We'd left plenty of time for our journey arriving in generous time. My cousin flew over from Ireland but had to drive the rest from Stansted and arrived literally two minutes into the 'we are gathered here today' speech. It was a traditional service with a nice auto-biographic written when my nan turned 90. Otherwise it was trying to sing the chosen hymns getting the up and down notes wrong with the lyrics. At the wake, I was introduced to a new generation of family never seen before, including 14 year old twins are going to Shanghai for a school exchange and 17 year old thinking about Brighton Uni. My uncle, always one for coming up with good conversation and a knack for genealogy, had traced the family back to 1620 with possible links to a famous local witch in Derbyshire. Returning back to my dad's house and the snow fell, and fell, and fell. It was starting to settle at a disturbing rate and worries sta...

Image by Ginger DJ via Flickr Working at home is not good for me as there are far too many distractions. Although this helped ensure the boiler got repaired, the same day we had our new wardrobe and drawers delivered (a half-priced, ex-display Habitat bargain bought the previous weekend). The problem was that the delivery men couldn't lift it anywhere near our front door as it was too heavy. Whilst one of them had to deliver something else, his mate and I dismantled the wardrobe on the street. This took nearly an hour though once in, I was constantly moving the parts upstairs and putting them together again. By 5pm I had completely put the mammoth wardrobe (big enough to house the whole of Narnia) together with very little progress made on a major project I'm doing. Not strictly working from home, but that was the excuse, was a trip to the vet the next day. Sasha, our feline friend has developed a lump on the side of his neck. Its the equivalent to a human having a growth t...

It's not been the best of weeks. Admittedly, last Monday was quite fun with the snow madness though with today's technology I worked at home without any excuse and had my boss keeping me busy. Lunchtime was a strong dose of making snowmen and playing snowballs. We even tried towing each other with our tin drinks tray as a sledge but failed. Brighton had been well and truly caught out with buses and trains canceled and the university campus completely shut. By Tuesday, most main route buses were working. This didn't stop some of my work colleagues having more excuses on not coming in - 'it's too icy' doesn't cut it for me. I was rewarded with a very quiet office. Although the snow had gone, the icy winds and cold rain made the week without heating a living hell. It started with an electrical burning smell then a loud pop from the boiler on Tuesday night. Wednesday, the boiler repairman came but left saying three parts were needed. By the weekend they reported...