New Car

I got a new car yesterday - it's a Honda Civic and I love it. We decided to offer my old car to my friend Sarah, and she came down from Stockton on Wednesday to drive it home on Thursday. She managed to lock me out of my house in the process of loading up the car to leave, but apart from that, the handover went without a hitch ;). Here we are just before I said goodbye to Sarah and the car.

Sarah told her fiance that she was bring my car back with her, and asked him what kind of car he might like. He said a blue Peugeot 206, which was handy as that's exactly what she got :).

Jill and I had an early lunch with Clare (on account of the fact that I was locked out so I had to get Jill to take me to the office to get Rob's house key anyway), then I cycled to the gym on Thursday afternoon as I didn't pick up my car till this morning. The last thing on my gym programme for Thursday was 10 minutes on the bike, so I just cycled home and counted that instead.

Yesterday morning Jill drove me up to Winchester to pick up this little lovely:

So far, I'm really pleased with it. It's got a leather interior and looks gorgeous. It's very comfortable and a really easy drive. I'm actually looking forward to driving the 500 miles round trip to Manchester next weekend!

7,000 Grains So Far

Mum sent me an e-mail yesterday with a link to a website called www.freerice.com. You answer questions on various subjects and for every question you get right, the company behind the website donates 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme. How cool is that? I managed to rack up 2,000 grains relatively quickly this morning by answering the Italian vocabulary questions, then I did the same with the French vocab, then 1,000 each on capital cities, identify the country and basic maths.

So if you're looking for a quiz to pass the time, this one does just that AND helps the hungry!

I'm off to answer some questions on English grammar...

Belated Valentine's Weekend

As Rob had only just got back from Sudan last weekend and anticipated that he would need a weekend of not doing much to recover, we postponed our Valentine's Day plans until this weekend, which were to go to London to buy wedding rings. Not actually doing this on Valentine's Day also meant that we didn't have to pay inflated Valentine's Day hotel prices :).

So we went to London yesterday morning on the train. Ben and Jill had gone up to London on Friday night, and had spent yesterday morning at Tower Bridge. They met us off the train and after we checked into our hotel (it doesn't take long to type it, or read it, but the actual act of doing it took ages), we went for a late lunch at a great Italian restaurant nearby. Then we walked across Westminster Bridge (crazy packed with tourists taking pictures of the London Eye/Houses of Parliament), past St James's Park and round the back of Horseguards Parade, pointing out the sights on the way. Then we bought our wedding rings, which took all of about 5 minutes. We walked back to our respective hotels via The Mall, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, then met up again an hour or so later at the Old Vic theatre where we had tickets to see the last night of Complicit, starring Richard Dreyfuss and David Suchet.

I enjoyed the play, although I had to get Rob to go over the plot with me afterwards to make sure I'd got it all :). The play is 'in the round' (seats on all sides of the stage), which was a novelty for me, and although it was quite short - 45 minutes each Act - that was actually a good thing because we were in the Gods and it was boiling up there. I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved one and had to go to the toilets at the interval to take the long-sleeved one off...

This morning we went to Holy Trinity Church Brompton, affectionately known as HTB, for their 09:30 service, which was ace - lots of friendly people, free food, a really well rehearsed band (always something I look for) and a great talk. After we left there we met Ben and Jill for lunch at Giraffe on the South Bank (no Giraffe restaurants in Southampton; I miss them!), then we got the train back home. Which was easier said than done, because they were doing maintenance on the line between Eastleigh and Southampton Central today so we had to get a bus from Eastleigh to Parkway, but it was only a minor glitch. What a great weekend!

Option 3 Won...

I found someone with an ink-jet printer - the black ink had run out so I had to buy a new cartridge, but that was much cheaper than buying a printer of our own. I also downloaded a 60-day trial of MS Office (which took 4 hours, but at least it was free) and printed my now-correct directions yesterday, then I cut them all to size and swapped the old directions for the new directions this morning.

Crisis - and also potential arrest for defacing public property - averted.

Google Maps - Grrrrr...

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I spent much of the weekend before last making wedding invitations. A few weeks ago as we were on the way to church I made a mental note of the route, so that I could turn it into directions to put in the invitations. One of the instructions was 'turn onto the B3335 St Cross Road'. Before we printed all the invitations the other weekend I thought I had better just check that the route as I'd remembered it was correct, so I looked on Google Maps. I found that the B3335 was actually marked as the B3355 - I figured that as the numbers were all 3s and 5s, I had probably remembered it wrongly, and changed the third 3 to a 5, remarking to Mum that it was a good job I'd double-checked before printing out 80 invitations.

Can you guess where I'm going with this? On the way to church last Sunday I had another look at the road signs, and it turns out that the road is, in fact, the B3335 and not the B3355 as designated on Google Maps.

So I have 80 bits of card with the wrong directions on them. I've been to buy new card and the options now are: -

1. Post card to Dad, get him to print off more directions, cut them to size and post them back to me;
2. Buy an ink-jet printer and re-print them all myself;
3. Find someone with an ink-jet printer and persuade them to let me borrow it for a couple of hours;
4. Amend all the cards by hand;
5. Buy a can of black paint, go to Winchester in the middle of the night and change all the road signs to B3355.

At the moment, I'm thinking option 5 is the easiest. If I pick option 2 or 3 I'll need to get my hands on a copy of MS Office before I can do anything, or learn enough about desktop publishing to re-create the info in a different program.

After seeing that the road was marked wrongly on Google Maps, I checked Multimap and that was also wrong. Rob said as the map sites all get their data from Navteq, it was likely that Navteq's data was wrong, but I checked Navteq and it's correct on there, so I guess some feeb in a dark office somewhere has just copied the number down wrongly. And cost me quite a lot of time and money. No wonder there's a disclaimer attached to everything these days.

New Good Deed

Remember a while ago I said I wasn't allowed to give blood any more? Well I've finally signed up to a new good deed to replace that one. I went to the Royal Hampshire Hospital in Winchester to play the keyboard for the service at the chapel this morning. Actually I was meant to start before Christmas, but various things have prevented the chapel services from taking place - mainly the cold weather, which causes more illnesses, then when infection levels in the hospital get too high they don't move patients from their wards if they can help it, to minimise the risk of cross-infection.

So today was the first time there had been a chapel service for quite a few weeks. What I didn't know was that the time of the service had been moved from 10:30 to 11:00, so I got there ridiculously early at 10:00, but that was OK. The service is only short, but I played some music as people were being brought from their wards, then we sang two hymns, one of which was Amazing Grace and someone complained that the notes were too high so I had to do a quick on-the-spot transposition down a few keys to make it easier for people to sing.

It was amazing to see the chaplain and her assistants with the patients - they all made the patients feel so special and cared for, just by giving them their full attention, even if it was only for a few minutes each. I'll be playing approximately once a month at the chapel and I'm really looking forward to getting to know the people there.

He's Home!

Rob got back from Sudan this morning at around 08:15 - he and the three guys he was with flew from Yei in southern Sudan to Entebbe, just outside Kampala, yesterday morning. They managed to blag free entry visas into Uganda and spent the day sunbathing by the pool at the Windsor Lake Victoria Hotel (and getting sunburnt), then they flew from there to Nairobi last night, in time to catch their overnight connection to Heathrow.

I'm glad to have him home - even though I hardly spent much time at home myself while he was away; I only got back from my parents' yesterday afternoon - and it's been great listening to all his stories. If you haven't already heard them, mosey on over to Rob's blog for all the details. At his request, I had a mahoosive smoothie ready for him when he got home :).

Very jealous of all the stamps he's got in his passport now. I'll be able to add Singapore, Indonesia and Japan to mine in June (booked the honeymoon last week) but then again, so will he...

Production Line

I'm at my parents' house at the moment; I drove up on Wednesday and am going home on Tuesday, in time for Rob getting back from Sudan on Wednesday morning. Jen came up on Thursday after work and we've had a lovely weekend, mostly spent making wedding invitations.

Jen made the outsides of the invitations before she came, then we drafted, printed and inserted the invitation wording on the inside, and also made little cards to go in pockets inside the invitations with directions, hotel details and gift list information. Everyone was involved, even Dad, who cut all the little cards to size. Now all Rob and I have to do is fill in the names on the invitations and address the envelopes.

Tonight, Tonight...

... I went to the theatre with Clare and her sister Sarah. I guess we should have gone to see Buddy in London, given that today is the 50th anniversary of The Day the Music Died, but London apparently can't deal with a smattering of snow and has come to a standstill, so it was a good job that West Side Story was on in Southampton instead.

I really enjoyed this performance, despite other people's best efforts (see next paragraph). I'm not really one for soprano voices - I find them a bit squeaky - but the girl playing Maria had a beautiful voice, really pure on the top notes. As ever, the words of some of the songs were lost because the orchestra was too loud, but I've seen the show enough times in the past to know what was going on. I just think it's such a shame for people who haven't seen the show before to lose half the words.

The funniest moments of the evening, though, came from observing just how inconsiderate other people can be. The man sitting in front of me, for example, sat forward in his seat the entire show. If he had only sat back in his seat I would have been able to see round him and wouldn't have missed everything that went on in the left third of the stage. In his defence, however, I think the reason that he was sitting forward was so that he could see round the lady in front of him. This picture is terrible quality because I took it with my phone, but I hope it shows what I mean: -


The lady had really long hair, and she piled it ALL on the top of her head, making her at least 4 inches taller. Seriously? For the theatre??? People pay a lot of money to go to the theatre, and they know that their enjoyment is highly likely to be marred by the sound of phones going off and people unwrapping sweets at inopportune moments (tonight - check and check), and they also know there's a chance they'll be sitting behind a tall person (Clare was), but making yourself unnecessarily taller when you know there are going to be people sitting behind you? That's just rude.

Then we were going up the stairs to get out after the show and a group of 10 women just stopped at the top of the stairs, blocking everyone behind them from getting out. Why do people do that????

So apart from the idiocies of the general public (and let's face it, the woman with the hair was far more funny than she was annoying), we had a great night. And also, I saw our old car in the car park behind the theatre - I almost had kittens when I saw it, I thought someone had nicked it off our driveway, then I realised we traded it in a month ago...