Trick or, eerr trick!

Anyone else been sitting in the dark for the last hour?  Of course you have, its Halloween.

USA you have a lot to answer for, “trick or treat” in this case. WHY!

Of course, its different over here where it just seems to be packs of teenagers, roaming the streets without even having tried to dress up properly. If you do answer the door most of them are really wanting cash, not candy anyway. Not really in the spirit of things in my opinion.

Well, its gone quiet for now so I think its mostly over, I might even venture into the kitchen for another can of Beer 🙂

Sit back and relax

Hehe, this tickled me. I’ve been on some flights where the cabin crew have livened up the safety talk with a bit of humor, but nothing quite like this.

http://www.liveleak.com/player.swf

 “sit back, relax, or lean forwards all twisted up, the choice is really yours….”

Destination AndyLand

I’ve been considering a change of name for this blog “thing” for a while now. I suppose that using the URL as the title makes it easy to remember how to get here but it doesn’t say much about what you’ll find once you’re here.

The tricky part is choosing a name, something snappy, not too long, nothing pretentious and hopefully something fairly original, not an easy task really!

You name it, I considered it and then decided to leave it as it was, then considered some other title. I’ll not bore you with the discounted possibilities.

 So, I give you “Destination AndyLand”

In AndyLand you can expect to find all the things that irk, delight, annoy, perplex, mystify, uplift, baffle and just possibly some random stuff that makes me think!  Oh, and probably some photos. Oh yeah, and news about our holidays. You get the idea, stuff, stuff and more stuff 🙂

 What do you think?

Can I keep him?

I had a visitor on the Allotment last week. Say hello to Mr Newt.

Well, that is to say I think its a Newt. I’m not some sort of amphibian expert you know!

Frustration

If you know me at all, you’ll know I’m a naturally curious person, I like to know whats going on around me.

Can you imagine my frustration upon opening this newspaper, only to find this??

 

I know!

 The worst part is, I still have no clue what it was!!

Desktop Freeview Meme

Ms Mac tagged me for a meme with specific instructions.

Here’s what you need to do :

A. Upon receiving this tag, immediately perform a screen capture of your desktop. It is best that no icons be deleted before the screen capture so as to add to the element of fun.

You can do a screen capture by going to your desktop and pressing the Print Scrn key (located on the right side of the F12 key). For Macs, press shift-option-3 then look for the .png file on your desktop. Open a graphics program (like Picture Manager, Paint, or Photoshop) and do a Paste (CTRL + V). If you wish, you can “edit” the image, before saving it.

B. Post the picture in your blog. You can also give a short explanation on the look of your desktop just below it if you want. You can explain why you preferred such look or why is it full of icons. Things like that.

C. Tag five of your friends and ask them to give you a Free View of their desktop as well.

D. Add your name to the list of Free Viewers below with a link pointing directly to your Desktop Free View post to promote it to succeeding participants.

The list of Free Viewers so far is:

iRonnie – I Set No Corner

Thess– Thesserie

Rebecca – Skippy Heart

Knoizki – A Dialogue With K

Beng– Kauderwelch

Tina – My Good Finds

Rachel – Heart of Rachel

Alice – Hello, My Name Is Alice

Julia – Julia’s Books Corner!

Darla– Nichtszusagen

Marg – Reading Adventures

Holly – What Were you Expecting?

Ames – Thrifty Reader

Dev – Good Reads

Rosie – Nobody asked me…

Gabrielle – Diary of an Adult Runaway

Jo– Chez le laquet!

Ms Mac – Ms Mac

Andy– andy.2boyz.co.uk

So.

A) Done!

B)

Oh god, it’s so boring isn’t it? I cant even claim its because of my recent re-install of Windows. Its always like that, well, I VERY occasionally add a wallpaper if I’m really into something. I picked up this minimalist habit way back in the days of 486 CPU’s. This was when every ounce of performance was needed and cosmetic touches like wallpapers and shadows under mouse pointers were deffo not needed. Maybe in these days of mega CPU horsepower I could relax a little 😉 

Stuff.txt is a little file that I’ve been using for a 5 years. Its a sort of scratchpad/jotter thing,  ideas for blog posts, stolen memes, addresses for people that I send birthday and Christmas cards to, all kinds of junk really. In fact I just found this in there 🙂

´*•.¸(´*•.¸ ¸.•*´)¸.•*´
«´¨`•°   Andy    °•´¨`»
¸.•*´(¸.•*´ `*•.¸)`*•.¸ 
 

Yeah, I know, its a bit lame really but I must have liked it whenever I copied it from somewhere.

Photo project.txt contains an idea I am working on for (you guessed) a photo project. I don’t want to say too much but its an idea to illustrate a song through photos, probably been done before but I (think) I have a twist.

Perhaps I ought to have done this meme on the laptop, it actually has wallpaper, albeit a pre-installed Vista one. 

C) I don’t really know the etiquette of tagging anyone but here goes, Michael , Rob7534 now that he is back from Camp and just to give him an excuse to blog, Jon.

D) Done and Done.

A year already?

I almost can’t believe it!

1 year has passed since me and Paul got CP’d on Saturday 21st Oct 2006.

Happy Anniversary Darlin’ its been a great year, here’s to many more.

We celebrated with family this evening at the local Tex-Mex followed by drinks 🙂

New and improved?

I was interested to see recently that my preferred* washing powder had downsized. Without warning or reason being given, it is now possible to do the same number of washing using over half a kilo less powder!

How is this possible? Surely some sort of magical breakthrough in detergent technology has been made. Why haven’t we heard about this?

They also took the opportunity to replace the boy on the box. The good wholesome, goes outdoors playing football character has been replaced by a lolly eating goody two shoes that keeps his shirt ever so white.

I wonder how you break news like that to a kid?

Please, no comments on the inside of my cupboard, I’ve cleaned it now, its mostly tea-bag splashes, where the boxes are on show is usually where the kitchen bin is kept. 

*Preferred meaning its just what I pick up in Aldi, I have no brand loyalty at all!

Thursday Tram Ride

Thursday was one long adventure, really it was, let me tell you a little about it. First of all, we were up really early, instead of 08:00, it was like 06:30! I know! It was like totally dark outside!

This was because we had to take the car in to the Dealer for some work doing. Saab wrote to us back in March, advising of a safety recall and asking us arrange for the work doing asap. Well to my shame I promptly forgot about it and then in August they sent a reminder. Apparently, under extreme conditions our fuel pump may drop off due to a faulty retaining tab. We dropped the car off and then headed towards town looking for a Taxi. Would you believe that we didn’t see a single black cab at all? Except, of course, the one parked 10 yards from the Tram stop!

So we decided on using the Tram, there is a stop a minutes walk from work and it would save a few quid 🙂 Paul got a single ticket for £2.20 and I bought an all-day ticket for £2.70. The journey was made all the more special by the scrote that sat on the seat facing us. He ate, coughed and belched his was through a triple-mega-cheese-mcburger thing with sides of hash-brown. I was amazed by his ability to keep his mouth open, not only while chewing, but while drinking too. That really must have taken some pretty special effort!

Thankfully we got to work without any further upset and it was just a case of waiting for the phone to go and pick up the car.

The call came at 4 and I set off on the reverse journey, armed with the return ticket I had been clever enough to purchase earlier. I remember thinking as I waited for the Tram “At least I wont have to watch anyone eat breakfast this time.”

I got a seat on the Tram and at the next stop a big fat guy sat next to me. Facing me was an old gent and facing my neighbour was a rather large young lady. At the next stop the old gent opposite me got off and would you believe, the guy next to my moved across into his seat. Now I found this very odd, if not a little disturbing. I was even more amazed to see that he was now jigging his leg up and down causing his large thigh to rub against the thigh of his neighbour. Her eyes grew wide as she realised what he was doing and so did mine as I saw that he was clearly enjoying himself. As soon as she realised what he was doing she jumped up and walked away down the tram.  It was surreal really, even now I wonder if its really what I saw!

Eventually I made it back to the car and was so pleased to see it! they had even washed it! That made me happy 🙂

So that was my little adventure on public transport this week, an experience I’ll not be in a rush to repeat. Unless you count the flight to Malaga on Sunday morning 🙂 

Been scammed?

The company I work for started using this “holiday pay fund” scheme in April this year. At the time, I was dubious and after Googling around I found some concerns about, if not its legality then certainly the morals of employing it in my case.

Sure enough, as you can see in the picture, barely 6 months later the Government want it stopped.

Now, I know you’re thinking, that this is an unusual thing for me to comment on, but did you spot the real reason?

Yes, that’s right!

A widespread scam* in which employers and staff avoided national insurance on holiday pay is been stopped.

Sheesh! A schoolboy error, or what?

If you go there now, you’ll find it has been fixed, though sadly they havent changed the “last updated” stamp or owned up to the error 🙂

*Scam is the BBC’s word, not mine, please don’t fire me!