A Cinema for St Albans- URGENT!!!

For reasons best know to people who appear to not know much, the wonderful but derelict Art Deco cinema in St Albans has been ear marked for conversion into flats. Yet at the same time various pie in the sky schemes for pokey multiplexes on top of redeveloped car parks have come to naught.

Well, the owner of the absolutely fabulous Rex Cinema in Berkhampstead is trying to buy it and convert it into a proper cinema. You can read about it all here.

Yes, a commercial venture is trying to gather public money to do something, but lets face it, the Rex is awesome and its not as if the world of hard work and effort that James is attempting to take on is going to make him a mint in the short term. Or indeed the medium term.

The Tickin' Chicken Timebomb

Yesterday I accidentally managed to feed the whole family a seriously undercooked roast chicken. I don't know why I felt the need to put accidentally in the previous sentence, it should hopefully be fairly obvious I didn't do it on purpose. I'm just not the sort of person who wakes up and says, I know today it's my aim to poison all those I love the most.

I added half an hour to the cooking time, and cooked it at a higher temperature than the cooking guide recommended. I did the juice test and the breast I sliced off for wifey, M'laddo and the wee lass looked fine. Unfortunately I gave them theirs whilst I cut mine up and that's when it appeared I'd poisoned us all. To add insult to injury, I even cooked the roast spuds in the chickens roasting dish. You know, just to make sure I got everyone.

One call to the doctors later, I was assured all we could do was sit down and wait for the poisoning to occur. If it did. There's an outside chance we wont all puke our guts up and get terrible runs but lets face it, this is real life and that's not going to happen is it?

Still, wifey was very understanding, which was more than I'd have been in her place.

The wait then, continues. I am considering doing a full twitter-thon of the impending doom, so you might want to consider blocking me ;)

World Wednesday- The Perils of Fridge Magnets

Great ideas in the middle of the night

We were lying in bed last night, both knackered but too tired to get to sleep easily. Wifey said something that I now can't remember which was going to lead on to some points that I now can't visualise but rest assured, it would have been bloody funny.

This is probably a lesson or something in remembering to write stuff down or a case in point that parents are slightly insane and have the memory of one of those bowls with teeny tiny holes in it.

But what it is overall, is flipping irritating...

Oi, Review Up

Some of you might know I write for and do the backend for Mummy Reviews. Well I've shoved a review up on the Pogo Mini Printer today. I liked it, but if you want to know more, check out the review ;)

Hosting a website (rather than having it hosted for you on blogger or wordpress.com) is quite exciting. You get to play around with the layout and style a lot more, insert funky plugins that do cool stuff and generally have the feeling that you're doing more than just writing the content. Of course, content is king, and if you focus on making things look good, you'll lose out on the content.

But the feeling of satisfaction knowing you built it from the ground up is great :)

The End and the Beginning

Sunday evenings are a funny old time. I'm one of those old fashioned types that thinks Mondays are the first day of the week. And for me, that makes the waning of Sunday a bit of a funny one. The working week has finished two days past and the weekend has usually been a busy one.

What then does the next week have to offer?

• Monday- recover from the weekend
• Tuesday- catch up on the work that should have been done on Monday
• Wednesday- work hard til lunch time, that mentally celebrate that the half way point has happened
• Thursday- struggle to work as the last few days catch up
• Friday- mad rush of work in the morning, petering out to futility by about 3pm
• Saturday- groggy due to staying up to an ill advised hour and wrangling small children nocturnally, day of family excitement and fun, with me attempting not to be
• Sunday- reached some sort of equilibrium of tiredness and generally potter around in a satisfactory manner.

This week has been thrown a bit of course by a stinking cold I've developed that has seen me described as looking dreadful by more than one family member. Thanks for your words of support :)

A different perspective

When you have children you get used to seeing the top of their head a lot and looking down on them. It's interesting to see the perspective that they look at you from.

M'laddo has an old camera we gave him to use, and I recently cleared out 242 pictures he's taken since August. The one to the left shows M'laddos intimate knowledge of my knees.

As he's got a bit taller now, the knowledge has moved up a bit and I've had to have the "Don't punch Daddy in the willy." conversation several times. On one occasion it had to be delayed for some considerable time as I was wheezing and had tears in my eyes.