February 17th: frosty crocuses, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 16th: Heath-Robinson in the kitchen, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

A Heath-Robinson stock-straining device. It worked, too!

February 15th: nose, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 13th: Rob's computer dies, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Rob's computer has died, so he can only see the screen if lit up like this. I'm not laughing, oh no.

February 12th: Willington Toll Bridge, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Feburary 11th: Baby R, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 10th: brownies, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

crocuses, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 8th: in the art gallery, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 7th: our house, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 6th: self-portrait, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

In response to this week's challenge: self-portrait with a difference

February 5th: never let your wife cut your hair, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Julia attacked Jerome with the clippers. It's like reverse sideburns.

February 4th: hanging elephant, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 3rd: planted broad beans, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

The first planting of the season

February 2nd: candle, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 1st: favourite boots, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

January's photo-a-day

January photo-a-day, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

January 31st: diary cover, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

January 30th: eyes, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

January 29th: baking bread, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Yum yum.

January 27th: walking in the Peaks, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Walking in the White Peak.

January 26th: spring has sprung, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Spring has sprung.

January 25th: Burns Night, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

It's Burns' Night.

Sorry.

January 24th: Arthur, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Arthur, looking like the fine beast she is.

January 22nd: bitch and sip, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

This is what Tuesday evenings are for.

January 21st: my blog resurrected, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Photo-editing, oh yes. Will have to renounce my Luddite status.

January 20th: ionic columns, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Ionic columns in Nottingham

Fish finger sandwich, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

Quick and dirty, but oh so tasty.

Favourite socks.

Rosie's nose.

It's clearly rained quite a lot.

The weather's rubbish today, although you wouldn't believe it looking at this photo!

It's been raining outside, and - in homage - the tap splish sploshed too.

We won the first match of the netball season yesterday, and I'm paying the price for it now. One too many pies over Christmas, methinks.

I got a remote control for the camera today, so I can rest the camera on top of a rubbish bin's curved lid and still use it as an effective tripod without wobbling the camera.

One of the best things about the photo-a-day challenge is getting to look at other flickr users' pictures on a daily basis. There's some real inspiration out there.

The chapel where I got married.

The chair has only been in the house 24 hours and My Cat has totally commandeered it. She's even worked out how to rock it. I don't know whether to be proud or cry.

My Our new gliding rocking chair. I eyed up a (pregnant) friend's glider chair enviously and - miracle of miracles - one magically arrived on the doorstep this morning. How DID it happen?!

My camera's new toy: a 50mm prime lens. It rocks!

Taken on a Sunday bimble to some local caves. (Sad confession: I love cooling towers)

This is next to my parents' house (it was a good chance to play with my new polarizing filter!)

Your Cat, looking pissed off. I tried to take a photo of a mug of tea, but managed to delete it before getting it onto flickr. I'm such a luddite.

RIP Mabel (on the left of the picture)

The bloody fox got another chicken. Even worse, she'd just started to lay the oddest blue-green eggs you've ever seen, and I was most excited about them. She'd broken her way out of the run and got caught this morning. Much sadness.

New kettle (hopefully won't melt the tile grouting this time!)

Photo-a-day challenge, laid down by a web forum that I read: throughout the whole of 2008, take one photograph every day (or maybe one each week if time's precious). I reckon that this is a safe enough way of resurrecting Planet Mad without incurring the wroth of the powers that be.

Oh yeah, nd I am thbe Dalai Lama in terms of myu policiatlal compas.. Here .

well, the boy rb's aay and I'm sl.oightly drubk. hope your qweelens'd gppd too.

Edited to add: "qweelens'd" can be loosely translated as "evening's". You wouldn't believe it, but it is.

Advice: when reading a recipe, be very careful not to confuse the words "chill" and "chilli".

Last night we had pancakes for pudding: half a pint of milk, 4oz of plain flour and a freshly-laid egg. Simple and tasty, and relatively healthy.

Tonight, in the supermarket, I found pancake mix. In a bottle. You simply pour in milk (up to the line on the bottle), replace the lid, and shake. The bottle contains a dry mixture that includes flour, dried egg white, dried fermented egg yolk, salt and two flavour enhancers. Wrong, wrongity wrong. I ranted for a good five minutes about it. No wonder people can't cook these days. As Rob said, it's like oven-ready jacket potatoes. Grrrr. I think I'm becoming more of a food fascist.

This weekend just gone, after a late finish at work on Saturday, I jumped onto a train and headed off for Reading for a goodbye party. The trains worked out fine, but the taxi driver looked very confused when I gave him the instructions carefully passed to me by Rob: the King's Tavern on London Road. It eventually transpired that the King's Tavern is on King's Road, but - that minor mishap over - the rest of the evening passed in a blur of booze, pies and drunken staggering. 'Twas grand. We've been off the meat and cheese since the beginning of January but both independently managed to eat both meat and cheese as part of the drunken festivities - I'd be a rubbish vegan.
Back on the wagon today, though. Can't wait to have a steak...

It's amazing the things that cause marital disagreements.

(Rob was the one who correctly identified the one belonging to Jesus)

Late last night, or maybe early this morning, I was fast asleep in bed when My Cat jumped onto the bed. She landed on my head. This morning, I looked in the mirror and saw that I have been branded by her claws. I now have the Nike Swoosh across the bridge of my nose. If only I could work out a way to get sponsorship for it.

I've just been sitting out on the garden wall having a tin of sweetcorn for pre-lunch (in other words, the food that you eat while you decide what to have for lunch). The chickens all came running down the garden, very excited and doing their best aeroplane impressions (they hold their wings out horizontal to the ground but never manage to take off, mostly because of the effectiveness of Julia's chicken wrangling back at the beginning of the holidays, where we caught them and clipped their wings). It turns out that chickens like tinned sweetcorn. In fact, they love it. They even do tricks for it. Mind you, today was a two-egg day, so they've deserved it.

I haven't played my viola since our Christmas concert last month. It felt slightly odd and unfamiliar opening my case at orchestra last night but, as I was running late, I just grabbed my stuff, pushed my way to the front of the section and sat down. It was only when I came to put my viola under my chin that I realised something wasn't right. I had forgotten to take my bow out of the case. D'oh!

Curry. Yum. Must remember to chew next time, though.

I've really spannered things up this time. Disorganisation has reached an all time low here. I spent an hour or so going through old paperwork last night - bills, bank statements, and the like - and putting it all through the shredder. Such fun! Imagine my gloom just now when I discovered that I'd managed to shred my current certificate of motor insurance. Pants. What's worse is that I'd forgotten to do the car tax last week, so REALLY needed that certificate TODAY. Granny pants. AND the MOT runs out on Thursday, so the replacement insurance documents might not be here in time to do the renewal before that's up. BIG BAGGY SAGGY GRANNY PANTS. GOING GREY ROUND THE EDGES.

The thing that's upsetting me most about all this, though, is that we're meant to be driving to Brum tomorrow night for a curry, and I might not get my popadom fix. Waaaah.

Updated: CMT has solved the crisis! She's a star!! OK, using online renewal means the tax disk may not arrive for five working days, but I'm going to have to wait potentially five days for them to reissue my insurance documents anyway. Hurrah! Things are looking more promising. Those granny pants are shrinking back to temptress thongs once again.

We've been getting one egg every other day or so for a couple of weeks (courtesy of Gwhenivere) but today was our first TWO EGG day! Let's hope it carries on...

I've been to a bona fide beer festival twice before. I can hardly remember the first (something to do with the continued drinking afterwards and falling bodily out of a pub, and I know exactly who to blame for that), but the second was far more staid, even if they did have morris dancers and a bloke playing the Wurlitzer. On Friday we headed to Derby for another attempt at beer-festival madness.

Given that there were thirty different beers on offer at any one time (and the barrels changed throughout the evening) "madness" is a bit strong a descriptor. Rob started with Beer No. 1, and dotted about drinking the stouts and porters. I started at Beer No. 30 and worked methodically downwards through the even numbers (although I did have two Beer No. 28 because they changed the barrel when I got to Beer No. 20, and I like the name of the new No 28). My favourite beer of the night was Ginger Helmet by the Leatherbritches Brewery: light, tasty and with a hint of - would you believe it - ginger.

Yesterday marked my last Saturday of freedom for a fair while and I spent most of it alseep. Rock and roll. And today? Who knows! The world is my mollusc...

Back from DOGS new year in the peak district. I'm going through my (ridiculously large number of) photos and have just rediscovered all sorts of things going on that I don't remember. Curse that demon drink!!

Christmas day was fab and, even though the eating was spread over six hours, I still ended up with a Christmas Dinner Baby. Actually, it felt more like twins. Luckily it's subsiding now, else I'll be in trouble when it comes to getting back into my work clothes!

Rob's taken holiday and is currently working on his dissertation. This leaves me free to slob around and play on the internet without distraction. Hurrah! I'm currently sitting in bed surrounded by cats: THIS is what holidays are for! (not to mention wireless internet connections).

The problem with not writing about work is that for weeks on end nothing else seems to happen in my life. Now, though, I am free of such drudgery and have finally got my brain to co-ordinate with my fingers to bring this (increasingly dusty) organ up to date.

We are spending Christmas day with friends, having a safari supper that starts in the pub and finishes with poker and silly games until late o'clock. We're doing the main course, so Rob has spent today preparing veg, weighing the goose and making minute-by-minute to-do lists. I made some chocolate cookies, which strictly speaking is nothing to do with tomorrow's food but seemed a good idea at the time. My contribution to Christmas has been a) making the sausages for pigs in blankets; and b) making mince pies. By the dozen. At the start of December I couldn't make pastry. It's taken several batches (all eaten by the long-suffering Rob, even the early attempts, bless him) but I think I've finally cracked it.

My normal, pre-Rob Christmas routine involved buying all presents on Christmas Eve. If it wasn't on offer in the local shopping centre, it wasn't good enough to be a gift for my nearest and dearest. This year, in growed-up adultness (seeing as I'm married and all that) I only had two presents to buy this Christmas Eve. I even started buying presents before the 20th December: something unheard of here on Planet Mad. Today's shopping excursion lead us into Sainsbury's, not because we needed to buy any foodstuffs but because we too wanted to join the ranks of panic-buyers: WE NEED EGGS. MILK. FROZEN CURRIES. A DUSTPAN AND BRUSH. SEVEN TYPES OF OLIVE OIL. QUICK. QUICK!! THE SHOPS ARE SHUTTING FOR A WHOLE DAY!!! WE MIGHT JUST STARVE TO DEATH IF WE DON'T STOCK UP ON THINGS WE DON'T NEED!!!!!

We left Sainsbury's with eggs, bread and a bunch of flowers. Sometimes peer pressure is too strong to resist.

I spoke too soon. Email collection is fine, email sending is not. Waaah. Will have to go and see the IT geeks tomorrow to get it fixed.

I finally got round to sorting out my email account (only coz Amy told me I was missing out on much gossip!). Having downloaded loads of emails that were out of date and - quite frankly - irrelevant, I've just deleted the lot of them! Welcome to the world of Extreme Decluttering: if only I could apply the same principles to my home!

After a weekend in which we made doughtnuts AND sausages from scratch, I'm feeling a tad on the bloated side. Why is healthy living never as tasty as 'bad' stuff?

Our boiler stopped working this weekend. Rob noticed this when I was at Guides on Friday, and we've been freezing ever since. The electrical display control thingy has given up the ghost, which may just been a blown fuse but might be signalling the need for a new heating system. Whichever it is, let's hope that it's fixed quickly - we're off to the pub this evening in an attempt to find somewhere to sit without wearing four layers of clothing.

Yesterday was one of the biggest food challenges of recent months. My parents held a family lunch - three courses of big-portion-no-messing food - to mark their joint retirement. No sooner had the second pudding gone down (it would have been rude to refuse it) then we were back in the car to get back home, so I could go to a black tie dinner in the evening. Pate, lamb, chocolate mousse, cheese and port later and I was at least 10 inches bigger round the waist than I'd been at breakfast. Unsurprisingly, I've not been very hungry today.

Well that's it - my husband has just pushed firmly at the culinary boundaries. We've just had Roadkill Casserole for dinner, and yummy it was too.*

Other food things of note in the last couple of weeks include:
* home-made salty snacks - healthy pumpkin seeds, albeit drizzled in olive oil
* steak and kidney pudding, in suet pastry
* home-made pork pies - with proper jelly this time
* scones - two batches made on the same day, following different recipes, just to see which were best
* merengue - melty chewy crispy bliss. Eaten with fresh raspberries from the garden. Yup, we're still getting fruit off those suckers!

* To be fair, it was a pheasant that was hit by a car and was still warm when we got to it. Still technically roadkill, though!

It's gone all autumnal here and our new flat has single-glazed big windows throughout... the global condensation convention is happening right here in our front room. The boiler seems to be a tad binary: off or on at the switch, and no thermostat or timer device. All in all it's making things a tad chilly round the extremities. At least it's not as bad as last Saturday, when Rob realised that he could see his breath when sitting in the living room. Waaah!

In other news, we've harvested the mammoth pumpkin (which is very aptly named if mammoths are mishapen, pale orange squished ovals) so I suspect that there's a lot of pumpkin products just waiting to be made. Hurrah!

I refer my learned readers to here for a bit of a giggle.

I have been instructed to write nothing at all about my work on here and - at the risk of being dooced - I have no real alternative but to comply. It's a shame because I love my job and now I'm not allowed to share that, but hey - a job's a job and all that.

Holidays, however, aren't part of work, so I guess I can whitter at length about that. And about chickens. And cats. Maybe children too (not just yet though - my bigger waist is more to do with cakes than anything naughty). In fact I might just rename this "Holidays and other animals".

Or maybe not.

The excitement never stops here - Rob took delivery of our latest kitchen gadget yesterday: this. I was so excited I nearly snotted all over it. Cakes, breads and merengues a plenty!!

I have turned into the snot monster. Waaaah.

My husband is sick, mind and body, although mostly body today. It's not just manflu either. Bleugh.

We're cheesed to the max, and the proud foster family to a large stuffed chicken. It's been an interesting weekend!

Rob's away down to Cheltenham at the cheese festival. He left last night, straight from work, and as you know, while the cat's away, the mice will play. Actually, in our case, while the husband's away the wife will sleep and the cats will have to paw her face to wake her so she can feed them. Curse these early morning beasts! The chickens aren't much better. There was an almighty scrabble in the eglu as I went to let them out: the sooner they can start letting themselves out the better.

In other news, it's quite sunny here and I finish teaching at 11, then it's off to Cheese Land for me too! Hurrah!!!!

It was D of E expedition this weekend, which is the subject for another post at another time, including the (not as thrilling as it sounds) tale of late-night rescues from hillsides and roadsides. We got back here at 6ish, and I was talking to Rob in the kitchen when I noticed it:

Me: Eurm - what's that?
Rob: [innocent like] What?
Me: That's a chest freezer!
Rob: Oh, that, well...
Me: How long have you been planning this for?
Rob: A while.
Me: And were you going to tell me?
Rob: I was looking for an opportune time to install it
Me: An opportune time? In other words, waited for a weekend while I was away? I'll give you opportune!!

It's a good job that buying and installing kitchen appliances is all he does at such opportune times. Mind you, this time last year he'd come home with a ling, so obviously September is the Boy Rob's month for silly purchases!

I wrote a post last night about being on duty in the House, and how it's different now I don't live there. The internet died just as I was about to press publish, which is a shame, as it was the most coherent writing I've done in a while. Maybe I'll try again later...

Avast me hearties, aaaaarggghhhhh!!

(here)

We have an egg, fresh from a chicken's bottom (or "vent" if we're using technical terms!) That's lunch sorted out!

The chickens have landed! We headed off this morning at ungodly o'clock to meet one of Rob's colleagues and her blokey somewhere over near Tutbury, the other side of Burton. We met their alpacas (very fluffy!) and their chickens, discussed fields and land management, and then got to choose our own cluckers. Now, at the moment, a chicken is a chicken is a chicken, so it caused a few moments of indecision when they asked which three we wanted. Luckily, they saw our confusion and chose three for us - a white one (a Sussex White crossed with a Cream Legbar); and two brown ones (one is a Buff Orpington cross, and the other is a Rhode Island Red cross). Luckily they all look different, so we can tell them apart. The only one with a name so far is the white one, who is Gwehenivere:



The oldest, and most adventurous, is this one, the Rhode Island Red cross:



The other brown chicken is a Buff Orpington cross, and she's younger (not yet laying) so has the potential to get bigger:



Clucks away!

It's now C-12 hours. The eglu has been put up in the wilderness at the end of the garden, complete with run assembled, and we pick our chickens tomorrow morning. Woooo!!

The next dilemma is what to call them. Let's face it, our name choices for the cats are bad enough! We've been toying with an "Arthur and Camelot" theme (Gw-hen-ivere, Sir Layalot, Eggscaliber, Arthur Hendragon...) but Rob's just suggested Fatso 1, Fatso 2, and Fatso 3, as an homage to the hamsters. I think there's a lot of milage in that! Or maybe Duck, Duck, Goose (a game much beloved by the Rainbows in the village). Any better suggestions from the audience?

Nice things about not being in the boarding house #475

I now get to have my lunchtimes to myself, rather than having to eat with the kids. Our kids are nice and generally very pleasant company, but lunch in the house takes up the whole of lunch hour. Now I have time to come home, eat, sit outside AND geek, all in the time it would take me to get through the first course in the House. Bonus!

It's been a tad damp here - so much so that the sky looked green, just at the moment before the heavens opened and the doors leaked - and I've a start-of-term cold beginning to creep in round the edges. It's much like Freshers' Flu, and is inevitable in a school where the kids come from across the world with such a fine selection of germs and diseases. All in all, it's not my most favourite Thursday of term so far. Harrumph.

Wireless is now back in place, and I'm able to sit anywhere in the flat - and even at the house end of the garden - and geek away to my heart's content. In other news, our eglu arrived yesterday, so just layers pellets to buy and we're ready for chickens. Wahay!

This weekend just gone was the debrief from GOLD (Guiding overseas linked with development). We got together with the other project teams (Fiji, Belarus, and Madagascar) and spent the weekend sharing tales, memories and photos. We also got to do some personal development work about where to go from here... I just wish I had more time (and was younger - so many things are unavailable for over 25s. Pah!). Photos are drifting onto flickr, but my favourite of the lot is this one:

WHEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Broadband at home back up and running,* and I've made the discovery early enough in my lunch hour to make effective catch-up for all the hours and days and weeks of internet-free-ness that I've enjoyed. Well, tolerated. Just.

Much has happened, including moving house, painting, unpacking, painting, more painting, Guide camp for a week on a canalboat, painting, shopping in Nottingham, painting, more painting, unpacking, desperately trying to find my school clothes in time for the start of term, taking up a "give up drinking for a whole half term" challenge, teaching a few lessons, unpacking, gardening.... and this weekend I'm off to London for a debrief from my GOLD trip to South Africa. Life never stops.

The start of term has been lovely - nice classes, a new classroom, not living in the House - and it has been bliss having a new house with a garden in which to relax. All we need now is a new wireless router (old one blown up by lightening!) and we'll be in geeky heaven.

That cats are both well and loving having a garden - My Cat has even been seen running, with stomach wobbling from side to side, in gleeful abandon. Your Cat has been spotted playing with furry squeaky things. They haven't even tried to run away home to the old place either. Wonders never cease!

Now, though, must go - blogs call (I've got weeks worth of people's lives to catch up on) and then teaching. Hurrah!

* But not email, not just yet. Soon, I tells ye, soon.

The move went fine, although it took a concerted effort on the part of my mum and Aims to get the painting done to a live-in-able standard (I was meant to be painting too but was too busy faffing round and opening boxes at random in search of things like toothbrushes, shampoo and clean pants - next time we move I'm packing an "essentials" bag that's easily recognisable!!) It's still nowhere near finished, but all of the rooms have had at least two coats (except the red spare room, which has been started but has a long way to go). The kitchen feels very much like home and, now I've unpacked the CDs and the curtains have been hung, the sitting room is feeling more homely too. The cats are loving having a garden, and the sight of them squeezing their fat arses through the small catflap has caused much amusement.

On a less good note*, though, we're still without internet at home and will be for at least another week if not more. To make matters worse, my ISP have cancelled my old account, so I can't even access my webmail via school. Grrrr. In fact, changing broadband from one address to another has been the most annoying and time-consuming bit of the whole house-moving thing. I suspect that the account cancellation means that all email sent to my demon address will bounce - sorry. Contact me for an alternative email address if you need one.

Off now to cut and stick wedding photos into an album. After all, there are UCAS references to write, lessons to plan and a classroom to get ready: why worry about school things when there are other activities in which to indulge?!

* Can you tell from my grammar that I've not been writing regularly or even having to form complete sentences? I've no idea how I'll cope next week when the kiddies come back and need teaching!!

Google says, "Major changes such as starting a new job, getting married or moving house can challenge our abilities to cope." Ah well, that explains a lot.

We move today. Everything is in boxes, apart from the computer (obviously, or I'd have to be in the box too, and they don't make removal boxes in my size), the cats and the kitchen. We ran out of time and into the "paint or pack?" dilemma: the kitchen was left to last because a) I don't know what's lurking in the depths of those cupboards; and b) there are more breakable things there that need packing properly, not just following the chaos technique of packing. All the stuff that Rob packed while I was in South Africa is neatly taped into boxes and labelled with its destination room. The boxes I've packe, on the other hand, were just filled with contents scooped off shelves at random and stuck in any available spot. No labelling either - I like to think of it as adding to the excitement!

Anyway, two nice mena nd a van are here - must go and pack.

So far I've painted two t-shirts, a pair of shorts, the bottom of both boots and the tops of my hands. I've also developed anti-freckles and have a far greater collections of grey hairs than I had at the beginning of the week. I ache like a bastard and I'm sure I'm hallucinating because of the paint fumes. All good clean fun, hey?!

(I've also painted a few walls and ceilings too)

The flat decorating is in full swing. Yesterday, two men from the maintenance department came to sort out the dodgy plaster; and my mum popped over to help paint. She also brought a stepladder for us to borrow, which is a good job or the new paintwork would only happen between ground level and six foot high. So far, the "completed" list consists of: the walls in the sitting room; and the bedroom ceiling. I've also given the bedroom a complete coat of Brilliant White - there's no way we're having a brilliant white bedroom, but no other colour would have covered up the garish yellow that was already on the walls. I think the builders have finished grinding bricks in our back yard, so my next job is to remove the brick dust from the kitchen and to give it a coat of brilliant white too. Before then, though, I deserve a bit of a sit down (I would have a nice cup of tea too, but the kettle's at the new flat - doh!) so I'm going to upload the photos from my phone... I've not done a phone-cam-dump since before the wedding, so goodness knows what's on there!!