Sucky McSuck
1am. Can’t sleep. Not happy.
The meeting with Mum’s oncologist did not go well. How badly it went, we won’t know until she’s had a CT scan.
Just brain dumping so I can sleep.
Too much whirling around the old noggin right now.
Coffee Moment: the Caffé Nero cup
Thanks to a quick visit to Sutton town centre today, I had the rare chance to enjoy my favourite of the chain coffee sellers in the UK - Caffé Nero.
I find their Americanos a vast improvement on any of the others.
Vox Hunt: My Latest Download
Audio: Show us a song or album you've recently downloaded.
Holidays are Good
I'm back from my hols. We stayed in a lovely place:
And walked to some lovely places:
And now I'm back in London, with my batteries recharged and ready to go.
Why Your Coffee Sucks - And How To Make It Better
Your coffee sucks, apparently, and indeed, much of the coffee we consume does suck.
Some years ago, while I was working on a now-defunct magazine for the hotel and restaurant industry (called, prosaically, Hotel & Restaurant) I was treated to a presentation on how to prepare good coffee from a coffee distributor.
That meeting changed my attitude to coffee, which I'd only just started drinking in granule form. I quickly switched to "real" ground coffee, drunk quickly after grinding, and treated as a perishable foodstuff.
Now I have a hankering for more, better, newer coffee. There's some great starting points in the comments of that post.
Blast from the Past in my RSS
Ironically, the post is about the status of English private schools. And Dollar is very much in Scotland.
Ladies Love Leather (Apparently)
Now, I love a woman in a leather dress as much as the next straight man. So, the news that the above Marks & Spencer dress is flying off the shelves (it's out of stock only a week after it was launched) should be enough to put a smile on my face for weeks, or at least, for the rest of the autumn season.
The Daily Mail is busy singing its praises, and it was noticed by some bloggers weeks ago (and some commenters).
Well, for one thing, I really do fail to understand the "hit dress" idea. Every woman I know has a quiet horror of turning up at a "do" in the same dress as another woman. Surely the very notion of "hit dress" should be a big, flashing neon sign warning women away?
And, is it me, or does that dress looks a bit, well, cheap? Somehow, both the M&S image on the left, and the Daily Mail one on the right make a genuine leather dress look like pleather. And that can't be good.
Fleeing to the Country
This, or something very much like it, is my dream for the near future:
We are moving out of our two-bedroom flat and into a proper house with an upstairs, a garden and sheds. More than that, we are leaping from the edgy Islington/Holloway borders (within shouting distance of the Arsenal stadium and the prison) to a Surrey village with a lively parish council. I'm excited, but I'm also terrified we're making a huge mistake.
Blogathon: the Movie
Today was the RBI Charity Blogathon. Here's a quick bit of movie I grabbed on my phone towards the end of the day:
Horror of My Youth
A while ago, I replaced my few remaining tapes with iTunes downloads to tidy up my music collection a little.
Maybe I shoudl have listened to the tapes before I did so, because I ended up paying for this:
And it's rubbish.
What was I thinking when I was a kid?
The UK's First Log Built House?
Another one from the "press releases for my old job, but I'm still interested" file:
Uh, no. It's Norfolk.
Mike Balls of the Log House Company is building log houses in the UK, and this one is going up for a Norfolk family. The timber's locally sourced and it is, they claim, the UK's first log-built house.
I've not idea if you could get a mortgage on it, or what it would be like to live in, but my, it looks lovely, doesn't it?