Just to say that there will be no more blog posts until after September 7th at the earliest, because I am going on holiday to Switzerland with my family tomorrow morning. After flying to Zurich, we’re travelling by an assortment of trains to the mountain village of Grindelwald where we’ve hired what will hopefully be a rather posh chalet. I’ve been to Grindelwald before but never in summer so it’s really quite exciting and when I get back there will probably be very many posts indeed!

Sunday turned out to be a truly amazing day It may not have got off to the best of starts, but after a delicious breakfast at Babel’s house we set off for Rutland Water in the car. Although we’d been there once before for an afternoon, it turned out to be a bit further than Babel had expected, but luckily he had brought along an Esperanto CD to pass the time. There was John Well’s explanation about why people should learn Esperanto, as well as some rather difficult to hear excerpts from radio broadcasts and a version of Clementine which made me laugh (more…)

I have a new friend called Geoffrey I’m not quite sure where he came from; he seems to have been living in a rather unpleasant shed at the back of the building where my boyfriend works. For reasons I don’t quite understand, this construction appears to be called “the glove box” or some such, and there was a rather hairy incident yesterday afternoon when my boyfriend and I went in to retrieve Geoffrey and I accidentally closed the door whilst leaving the key on the outside. That is to say, I closed the door deliberately, because it looked like otherwise it was going to make a loud banging noise, but I hadn’t realised that the key was on the wrong side There was a horrible few seconds where I thought we were going to be stuck in the shed all night, or possibly even until after the Bank Holiday when people came back to work and opened it, but fortunately it turned out not to have locked (more…)

A friend just sent me a link to some footage of a rather evil duck. Watch and be afraid, very afraid

In some happier duck news, Babel recently linked me to an exceptionally cool duck game.

I want to tell a story of amazing honesty, but in order to do so I first have to confess to a secret vice of mine; I’ve become addicted to the Caffe Nero Frappe Latte In my opinion, this is far superior to any other chilled coffee product available on the market right now; I refuse to drink at Starbucks since the fiasco detailed in this post, and whilst Costa’s Iced Latte is okay every once in a while, I don’t set much store by their Frescatos – last time I had one, the ice wasn’t properly blended and the resultant mush was almost too thick and lumpy to drink. Caffe Nero, in comparison, have a perfect drink, which tastes delicious and at £2.80 is no more expensive than its competitors. (more…)

I was struggling for ideas as to what to do this weekend, as every single forecast I had seen informed me that I was going to be subjected to two whole days of relentless, torrential rain. Well, that’s the last time I ever trust a BBC weather forecast again. Saturday was a reasonable day and Sunday was a lovely day, so Babel and I could actually have done something much more exciting than we actually did, but notwithstanding the lies of the Met Office, we did manage to have rather a pleasant afternoon in Stratford-upon-Avon. (more…)

I got this over at Damon’s blog.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you love.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them. (more…)

I remember quite a long time ago that someone I know posted a link to a quiz about sexuality in the JEB forums. At the time at which I took it, I was still at the stage when I wanted not only for everyone to think that I was straight, but also to be straight, and so it struck me that it might be quite cool to take it again now that I’ve relaxed a little bit

Also, I wanted a distraction because I have mislaid a French death certificate. I cannot for the life of me think what I have done with it If you saw my desk right now, you would actually struggle to see me, because I am being swallowed up by growing mountains of paper. I only have five files on the desk, which is by no means excessive, but my client has sent through printed information which is equivalent to several packets of printer paper and it’s just sort of swamping me. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I swear that yesterday I came across a French death certificate and an Italian death certificate. Now, I know they were there because I looked at them quite particularly to make sure they were death certificates, and because there were a couple of details I was initially unsure of, I contemplated whether it would be unethical to scan them in an send a copy to Babel for him to help me out. I didn’t reference them up and put them on file, however, because at that point in time I wasn’t auditing death benefits. And now that I am auditing death benefits, they have disappeared so completely that I would be tempted to believe they never existed, were it not for the fact that that would mean I had been hallucinating about foreign death certificates… Having been through all the paper on my desk once this morning, I am starting to get a little stressed about it, so the idea is that if I spend ten minutes doing something else I will calm down and then hopefully remember what I’ve done with them. So, erm, how straight am I?! (more…)

Having greatly enjoyed Kate Morton’s debut novel, ‘The House at Riverton’, earlier in the year, I was greatly excited a few months back when Babel very kindly bought me a copy of her second; ‘The Forgotten Garden’. It being quite a large book, I didn’t get around to starting it for some weeks, but when I was packing to go to Szombathely it struck me that it would be an ideal book to bring. No one wants to read something too heavy when they are on holiday, and whilst the size of the paperback meant it was actually quite heavy for packing, nevertheless I knew the content would be pretty light. The upside of the size meant I thought it would probably last me all week, although I did take the precaution of packing a few other books in case it turned out to be horrendously bad (more…)

People who are shockingly rude in work emails.

I’m not talking about insults. Rather, people who through either personality defects or sheer laziness insist on firing off a dozen one-line emails to you every day, despite the fact you are actually sitting in the same room.

There is one manager in my office who completely lacks communication skills of any sort. Unfortunately I end up working for her on pension scheme audits reasonably often, and instead of coming to speak to me and tell me what she would like me to do, she emails me with instructions, regardless of the fact that I may even be sitting next to her at the time. This creates a problem for me, because I have been told off in my appraisal for communicating with managers via email, but I feel I have to cover my own back by responding in an email also. If I don’t, I leave myself in a dangerous situation where she has a written record that she asked me to do something and I have no written record of the fact that I told her I’d done it, or hadn’t done it because there was some sort of problem. (more…)