Bone Paperclip

Jo brought home a packet of promotional paperclips, that are in the sape of bones. Which is fair enough, and a pretty cute idea.



Hovever, when you actually use the thing as a paperclip which is afterall its purpose, then this happens:

Spring '08

I've been neglecting this blog a little - the updates are spread further and further apart. Maybe that comes from having a new job that makes me work longer hours, or maybe Facebook updates make having a blog a little less needed.

Anyway, here are a few highlight of what I've been up to for the past few months:

Christmas was nice - visited home and spent a family christmas with my new niece and Jo's mum visited too. We watched the burning of the clocks on brighton beach again.






Omid Djali at the Brighton Dome - we'd been watching his TV show and seen his stand up on other shows, but his live show was a little meh.

My 30th Birthday - had a big meal at Iguanas (16 people on our table). I love that place, nice food, but especially their 2 for one coctails. Sumit did me an amazing picture for my present - online here.



Then I also had a mini celebration at home.



Always like to take some baby photos when I'm visiting my nieces. Grace has grown so much bigger already!




Mark Ronson at Brighton Dome was one of the best gigs I've ever been to - excellent guest vocalists, string section and horns.



Had to use up my year's holiday allocation and didn't have time or cash to do anything too fancy so we went to Devon. A highlight was a visit to Buckfast Butterflies and Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary.



Jo's colleague had a wedding up north - we combined that with a visit to Cotswolds & Oxford.




For Christmas, Jo had bought me a Raclette set - basically a hotplate that you can cook your food on while you eat. As an excuse to finally use it we had a Raclette Party, and it went really well - lots of nice food and melted cheese.



April brought snow to Brighton, loads of people built snowmen - and even the beach was coated in snow. I took som cool snow photos.



More recently we visited our friends Linda & Kris and their new baby, William. In a bizzare coincidence, Kris said a google search turned up my blog when he did a seach trying to find out the difference between tangarines and clementines.

And just this week we saw Havana Rakatan at the Brighton Dome for an evening of salsa dancing an music. They were very good and we had front row tickets - quite strange to be quite so close to the performers!

So, there we go, all up to date!

General likes at the moment:
TV: still Flight of the Conchords, Lost (the episode with Desmond is brilliant), Terminator

Films: Enchanted, Stardust, Shoot Em Up
Music: Best of Bootie, Mark Ronson, other cover versions, Regina Spektor

Radio: Russell Brand, Aneas Faversham

I got ham, but I'm not a Hamster

Just this week we saw Bill Bailey on his Tinselworm tour. The title of this post refers to his reworking of The Killer's lyric "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier".



Aaaaaanyway, traveling back in time to my previous post, the same night of our finance conference, my sister had her second baby, also my second Niece, Grace.





Other things of recent note:

I went for a visit to a powerstation up north with work. Quite interesting.

I cleared some scrubland for a volunteering day out with work. And burnt all the gauze on a nice big bonfire.

I saw my ex-radio partner Tom Davies on stage in Brighton performing Victorian flavoured sketch show "Aneas Faversham" with the Penny Dreadfuls. It was very funny stuff, reminding me a little of the early League of Gentlemen.

I saw the fantastic Slava's Snowshow at the Theatre Royal, Brighton - an incredible clowning performance, with lovely methods of interacting with the audience.



I got free tickets to see Comedian Shaun Hughes, who was performing as part of the Brighton comedy festival.

My friend Sumit had his 30th birthday in London at a pub in North London where I met some old school contempories who I've not seen in 11 years. I found out that another bloke in my year is in the England rugby squad. The next day I saw Transformers with Sumit at the Imax cinema. The fast moving kinetic pace of the film hurt my eyes, trying to take it all in on such a vast screen.

We stayed in on 5th November to watch the fireworks from Hove Cricket ground (the largest local display). We had great views and were able to enjoy them from the comfort of a nice warm comfy chair with nibbles! (Jo and Ben came to visit for that).

And last weekend I met up with Tom again, to see his girlfriend perform at the Komedia, as one half of the very funny Girl and Dean.


These are my current diversions:

TV: Flight of the Conchords
DVD: Deadwood season 3
Music: Nouvelle Vague

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, its someone who finds out that he has to present the ice-breaker activity at his work's annual conference in front of 120 ish people, with only half an hours notice.

I was on the organising committee, and had prepared this fun activity based on "Top Trumps" - on my powerpoint slide are photos of two members of the finance team with various categories underneath. The audience have to guess who has the highest score in a selected category, before it is revealed. The compere for the day was supposed to present all this, and had (apparently, though there is no evidence of this) been practicing his timing etc. Then on the morning of the conference he phones to say he was ill and won't be coming... So as the person who prepared the slides, I have to step up and present the slides...



With no practice of presenting the slides (apart from checking they didn't have any errors or anything) I hadn't practiced the timing, so I rushed through them a wee bit, but the audience seemed to enjoy it, and I got some nice feedback from people about it - attendees filled in a questionnaire for the day, and my activity got one of the highest ratings.

Then in the evening, we had a nice do - with a meal, a band and DJ, with Nintendo Wiis to play, and of course, fancy dress. The theme was "famous characters".


^
l
Me with the rest of the Justice League

I even made up this card as part of my costume: