February 24th: bear, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 22nd: tower, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 21st: after finishing duty, originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

February 19th: damn cold, it is., originally uploaded by Planet Mad.

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!