How can you not love a country that has….

Snowflake shaped Ritz?

From super-user Bl…

Don’t ride your bike without gloves when there’s frost on the cars. It was so cold I could only stay out for a few minutes. By the time I got back to the car my hands could hardly open the car. It reminded me of cross country runs at school in the middle of winter.

Current weather : Clear Skys -1 C.

This should be a photo slideshow linked to picassa.

I got fed up with not beign able to find things I’d noted down here, so I added the ubiquitous tag cloud, using these instructions.

So it turns out that the best thing about American TV is that there are so many adverts (which are a special type of annoying) that you *really* have to want to watch something in order to put up with it. Even BBC America . On a lot of the minor channels where we sometimes watch college sport, the advertisers obviously don’t have a large marketing budget. So they JUST SHOUT and hope you’ll buy the product. I guess it must work. We don’t watch a lot of TV.

I heard from a bloke in the pub that a lot of people download their TV from usenet. I’m not surprised.

According to my favourite blog, Coding Horror the path to blog greatness is to set a schedule and stick to it. It has to be said that I am not the worlds best at sticking to things. Our bookshelf as at least three books that I started and never finished. Since nobody outside my family and friends really cares what I do on a day-to-day basis – unless I happen to win the lottery in the next year I don’thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif expect the readership to exceed… more than a handfull. However, I think it’s worth keeping a journal even if it’s only for myself. Lots of folks are currently using facebook – and once the novelty of the apps has worn off, the real interest in facebook – for me at least is to see what people are up to (Status updates) and seeing their photo’s. I don’t see why blogs and things like ‘twitter’ couldn’t do the same thing but using a more open platform. It will be interesting to see what happens with facebook during the coming year – it’s currently very hot.

We had a rare night out Ruth and I. My boss had given us a couple of spare tickets they had to the Hurricanes pre-season game. We had pretty good seats, normally these cost around $100 during the regular season – apparently. The ‘canes won 3-0 which was a pretty flattering scoreline. I am able to make this judgement given my high level of expertise in the game. We had a budweiser during the game so we were in the mood for booze and fags when we got home, I had half a cigarette and decided I didn’t want one after all. Before that, I took the babysitter confusingly named Erin to Franklin street which was packed with kids but nodobdy seemed to be doing anything cool so it was no shame to head home. We’re hitting the town next week so we’ll see what it has to offer.

From North Carolin…

Our stuff arrived last week, Thursday in fact. Although I was glad to get some things back; books, music my bike. A lot of it was junk. We’ve been without most of this stuff for 5 months or so since we sold our house in Aldershot. Now the house is full of the old junk, well actually the garage is full of junk. It’s a shame the garage is full of junk because we have one of those American garage clicker things so you can open the garage door without getting out of the car.

From Stuff arrives…

not yet. We found something we want to buy – it’s a pretty bizzarre vehicle, the Subaru ‘Baja’. Basically it’s an estate car that looks a bit like a pickup. If you remember the weird ‘mini-pickup’ you’re on the right track. We looked at some really fancy Jeep’s (full leather interior – those ‘memory seats’ and all that jazz). It was pretty powerful and quick which was quite impressive until I saw that it had a 4.7 V8 engine and did between 15-20 mpg :-( and since we want to do some longish distances we decided it was too heavy on gas^w petrol.