ceb, posts by tag: 101 things - LiveJournal

Because I feel kind of at a loose end, masters project notwithstanding.

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(Which technically gives me a few days' grace, but this way I end at a weekend which is better for tidying up.)

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For my birthday, BT dug me a hole! This was very exciting, no-one has ever dug me a hole before (though the number of people who have offered since is quite alarming).

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In more digging news, today I emptied the remaining dalek so I can freecycle it, and spent 20 mins moving all the resulting compost away from the shed, and then got rid of a large pile of brambles. All before breakfast. I could not have done this six months ago.

It's good decluttering progress too, as is passing along a large pile of tapes to davefish. Who I will shortly see in Whitby, yay! There will be much bouncing. I am going through a big, enthusiastic music phase at present.

Speaking of which, WGT have started announcing bands! I have defeated both the French and German train systems to get sleeper tickets (and I. helped me defeat Eurostar too). As a bonus we get a couple of days of messing round in Berlin too :-)

I have achieved 51 of the things on my 101 things list, with notable successes in the areas of food/exercise, Christmas, and Sorting Things Out, and less success in the area of gardening (I am hoping motivation will improve now it is spring) and photo sorting.

I cannot finish my list of happy things without mention of the new version of DoomRL, which looks beautiful and literally made me jump out of my seat yesterday, not something I thought a roguelike would ever achieve...

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(List: http://ceb.dreamwidth.org/140283.html)

'Recently' completed:
#6 Not-Christmas dinner
#54 Make something else out of fabric
Featuring even more gingerbread than usual and a home-made blanket - pictures to follow.

#46 Plant raspberries
Though how well we are doing on #47 after all the snow I cannot say...

#55 Investigate Weald Down courses
#56 Decide on an evening class
Decided no to both of these this time round.

#58 Go to the RA Soviet Art & Architecture exhibition
I'm glad we went to this though it wasn't the best RA exhibition I've been to by a long way. It was in the smaller gallery so a bit cramped, and would have benefited from more of the surrounding cultural and artistic context. On the way back we read ancient writing in the British Museum and found that the Wellcome Collection was having an exhibition of small things, so oohed and aahed at bonsai forests and flea circuses.

#65 Visit parents - 6-9 Jan
#67 Go on Anke's birthday trip
Both families visited, may have some pictures of space rockets and monkeys from the latter.

#72 Go to 3 gigs
The first of these was The Brains in a bowling alley in Bloomsbury. It's a very nice bowling alley with a 1950s theme and an excellent pizza-providing diner. In keeping with this, they quite often hold 1950s nights with swing or rockabilly bands, andoccasionally spill over into psychobilly.
The second was Thomas Dolby, a free gig for winning an online game which I should talk about some other time...
The third is covered here: http://ceb.dreamwidth.org/144697.html

#78 Eat packed lunches 10 other days
#80 Go to the gym 10 times
#81 Try aquafit
These are now habits, good good.

#91 Give blood
This did not take nearly as long as I expected!

#99 Get old films processed
I have found and had processed half a dozen old films from when I had an APS camera (so the photos are predictably rubbish). However they do include pictures of Col & Kirsten's wedding cake, which I should post for posterity.

#15 Wash reflective hat
#20 Tidy fabric away
#22 Get rid of the irritating things hanging round on our dining room shelves
#23 Tidy up the games
#30 Polyfilla the kitchen hooks
#33 Put up the zeppelin poster
#84 Watch 12 lovefilm films
#92 Sort out bank payments problem and renew overdraft
Category: assorted things.


Good progress on:
#19 Give away 20 other things - 6/20
I am well-disposed to Freecycle at the moment as everything I posted on it has gone. Aside: every time I freecycle things, I end up picking the most literate respondent. Sometimes I feel bad about this and use some other criterion, e.g. person who replied first, and then I rapidly discover that literacy is strongly correlated with whether they turn up when they said they would (or at all).

#27 Get the damp bathroom investigated
Progress. It is being made. We have one fewer dripping pipe.

#51 Research art exhibitions
Got a couple of leads for things to apply to. Will cross this one off when I have applied.

#57 Think about OU courses
This is coming along. I think I will be studying *something* but it may not be with the OU.

#85 Rip the remainder of my CDs
Not finished yet, but I have got about 2/3 of the way through the awkward pile so far, and worked out how to upload useful stuff to MusicBrainz.

#97 Cycle the other bit of the busway
I only got as far as Over before getting grumpy and coming back though, I should try again some other time with more company and sandwiches.

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Back from a gig in town, 2/3 good, 1/3 sigh.

I am glad I managed to walk past the Corn Exchange several hours in advance, as the posters gave a time half an hour earlier than the tickets and an hour earlier than the interwebs, and were true (I must remember this next time I go there).

So anyway, assorted things conspired such that I saw the first band, namely Triggerfinger, and I am glad I did. They are a smooth Belgian rock band (what sort of rock? just the rocky sort. *rock* rock.) who sound like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFyV_KVkJ4E . Good solid rocky songs with twisty melodies; live, when they start to sound like another band it's usually The Cult. They look like men in suits (this comes off variously as guitarist/singer: salesman, bassist: bouncer, drummer: competitor in Boris Johnson lookalike contest) and play like there's only an hour's lunchbreak before they have to get back to some serious office work and by god are they going to have some fun before then.

Nextly were Clutch, an American band who are the musical equivalent of Subnormality (typical comic: http://www.viruscomix.com/page561.html ). They write like someone has given them a job lot of words and they intend to use them all up before they go off. The results are songs like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1oSK-4e6Vo which have too many words and too many notes and yet are completely glorious. They play like they're lecturing on a subject particularly dear to them; the lead singer is a short amiable type with a big beard and a good range of explanatory gestures.

Finally, Thin Lizzy. Thin Lizzy play like someone is paying them money. My god they were dull. I can see how they were exciting in the 70s when the choice was a lot more limited, but good grief. I feel that if you're going to have three guitars and four singers then you have a moral obligation to do something more interesting than play the same song three times louder. Ricky Warwick makes a good substitute Phil Lynott, he's clearly been studying the intonation, but he could be singing slightly Scottish angry songs through a cloud of distorted guitars, and he isn't, and this makes me sad.

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(List: http://ceb.dreamwidth.org/140283.html)

Recently completed:
#2 Organise Blue Christmas dinner and secret santa
#26 Get the chimney swept
#77 Eat packed lunches for a week

I'm very pleased about #77. This was a bit cheaty in that I cycled out to Waitrose[*] to get lunch on the Monday, and whilst I was there realised that I could go mad and buy lunch ingredients for the rest of the week. So Monday doesn't technically count, but hey, if it works I'm not going to knock it. It's no cheaper than buying sandwiches (though it might be if I don't succumb to smoked salmon), but it is a lot healthier, tastier and more varied. Work sandwiches are irritating in that you have a choice between healthy and calorific. If you want vegetables, you must be on a diet (I cycle 10 miles a day; 250 calories is not going to cut it). If you want calories, you must want salty meat and a gallon of mayonnaise. How do you fit 40g of fat into a sandwich anyway?

Good progress on:
#4 Buy Christmas presents
#76 Keep a food diary for 2 weeks
#78 Eat packed lunches 10 other days
#79 Go lunchtime cycling 10 times
#80 Go to the gym 10 times

This fortnight is healthy fortnight! Except for yesterday, which had a big dinner (albeit mitigated by lots of dancing).


[*] Yes I know, but the only places in cycling distance are Waitrose and the small M&S at the station.

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Today I have made some things! Well, one of them is an unmade thing really.

We have pretty much finished the Stirling engine(#49). It's (mostly) made out of cardboard, from a kit we got from the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It runs for an hour on a mug of boiling water. I also made a video as proof!


Home-made Stirling engine from Clare Boothby on Vimeo.</p>

The other thing I did was to cut down the triffid in our front garden(#42). It's some climber which generates very long, whippy branches, which twine themselves around anything convenient. Say, phone cables. Very tightly. I have now extricated it from the cable, and the gutter, and several neighbouring plants, and it won't be doing that again for a while. About half of it is in the green bin now, but I've saved this piece:



Also I have made meatballs (no number), increased the speed of my laptop (thus ensuring continuing sanity, a prerequisite for any of the other numbers), photoshopped photos for family Christmas presents(#4), and posted this post(#39).

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