HO HO HO

I know it's late but here are some of my favourite holiday photos from Sam at Exploding Dog. Check it out, and HO HO HO!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Happy Christmas Everyone from me and my new Stig keychain, gifted to me from my Top Gear advent calender. It's been a lovely day, and I'm currently sitting in the living room waiting for our lovely roast, broccoli casserole, roasted vegetables, tofurky and home-made stuffing to cook. I will post more pictures later, but it's been wonderfully festive!

A Chilly Day Out

I spent a very chilly Tuesday in London this week, and that'll be it for days off in London until after Christmas I imagine. The plan was to take photos and aimlessly wander around, however, the weather turned quite chilly and my fingers got cold (yes, I know, boo hoo), so I decided to retreat indoors and do some Christmas shopping. I did snap a couple photos, and I hope you enjoy them.

They have finally put up the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. It's just as... well... Charlie Brown-esque as last years tree, but that's okay.

The tree is donated to London every year from the people of Oslo for Britain's assistance in the war 1940-1945. So the fact that it's straggly isn't important, I guess.

I also stopped by the Natural History museum to see their ice skating rink, as well as a stop near Covent Garden to see their Christmas decorations and festive cheer.

That's it for Christmas cheer, folks. I still have some odd photos to post, and I promise I'll take Christmas photos, but until then, it's selling DVDs and asking customers if they have their rewards card. Bah humbug.

Hah, i'm just kidding. I like work when it's this busy. I really do.

Snow

BBC, you'd better not be lying to me. I'd better wake up in the morning to some EFFIN SNOW!

YAY SNOW!

I hope it's enough to stick around. Because I want pictures of it, dammit.

We'll see, we'll see....

EDIT: WE GOT SNOW! OOOOOOH YEAH! Might just post pictures later. It wasn't all that impressive, but it was SNOW. WOOT!

Warning: Geek Alert!

Okay, if you care not for computers or anything of the sort, please advert your eyes. Because here comes a whole WHACK of it. Okay, maybe not a whack. A pinch. A pinch of nerd for you.

First, that picture there. No, I didn't take it. And no, it's not real, either. It was fabricated and I stole it off the internet to use as a background. I also rearranged my icons. And I'm quite proud of my little toolbar at the bottom. I like having all my icons down there.

As well, I finally got the SD card slot on my laptop to function! GOLD STAR FOR ME! I finally wormed my way into the device manager files and deleted a bunch to do with the SD reader and then downloaded the new driver software and TA-DA! Ooooooh yeah. Now at least I don't have to break out the card reader every time I want to import files. Ahhh.

I had to share that with someone. No one here seems to find it impressive when I organize my virtual desktop... Hmm.

That's all my nerd news for now. You can resume your regularly scheduled lives.

Ho Ho Ho

Whoo wee. It's been a while. Lordy. Oh well. Tis the season of neglected blogs I suppose. Well, Merry Festivus and Happy whatever to you all. I'm smack dab in the middle of the gift giving season, meaning that my hours at work are long, unproductive and good fun. There's a certain level of stress that makes everyone extra chummy at work, since we all know we're in the same barrel, so to speak, and I find it enjoyable. I find it even more enjoyable now that I have a set of managers keys and I can DO WHATEVER I WANT! No, not really. But at least I can process refunds and open the till without having to seek parental permission. I like that.

I'm not sure yet as to my future at the store - hard to say if they will get the permission to carry on any of the Christmas temps like last year. Who knows. If not, I'll have to plan accordingly. For now I'm trying to enjoy my time here with the wonderful people I work with. I'd really like to stay. Really really really. But we'll see. If I don't, I don't. And I'll survive. Without breaking into song. I will survive... oh as long as I know... Okay. Stopping now.

We had our Christmas party on Wednesday, and it was lots and lots of fun. I drank and was merry, and while some of our less-shameful colleagues did some rather shameful acts with each other, I'm pleased to announce that I took part in none of this, and instead went to a rather quiet afterparty with my 3 managers and Kevin, our loss prevention man, while the others carried onto a club.

And, although I'm not going to name any shameful names/deeds, I'd like to introduce you to some of the lovely people I work with:

On the left there is me (obviously), my lovely supervisor Tissa (who is moving to Serbia next year!) and Patrick, our in-house games and tech man. On the right is one of the other temps, Sam, who was a smidgen drunk, and Libby, the gal that counts all the money and keeps the safe... well... safe.

Joining Libby and Tissa on the left there is Mark, a full-timer with a permanent job. Bah. On the right is our store manager, Lindsey, and the aforementioned Loss Prevention man, Kevin.

Now that we've moved outside the bar so everyone can smoke, here's our back of store, all-around protection man Ronnie and one of the gals that works in the back, Joan. On the right is my new assistant manager Otto and the previously mentioned drunk, Sam.

I missed a couple people in those photos, mainly Dave and some of the other Christmas temps, but that's okay. I've got other, drunk, blurry pictures of them for another day.

That's that for now I think. I have tomorrow and Wednesday off, and I'm not sure yet what to do with them. The weather outside is frightful (but the fire is so delightful...), although not nearly as frightful as it is back home, so I might stay indoors and bake cookies. Who knows. Either way, hopefully I'll get out and take some more pictures soon. My poor camera is feeling rather neglected I think.

Plus, I need to finish of my Secret Santa gift for the house. Man alive Christmas is next FRIDAY!

WHAT HAPPENED TO DECEMBER? What will I do when I no longer get to wake up to chocolate and exciting facts about the Stig? My life will no longer be complete...

'Tis the season!

Photoshop

Here's another photo from my little photoshoot where I tried to photograph my eyes. Obviously for the picture in the next post, I had to crop it close on my eye, which is why it isn't in as much detail as I'd like. However, this means I got a lot of photos of my face that I have spent more of the afternoon playing with in photoshop.

I like the result. Below is the original photo, should you want to see just how much I actually did to it. Heh.

Eye-ball

I opted not to go outside today. I had a wonderful day filled with lazing about, watching too many YouTube videos, and, as you can clearly see, attempting to take a close-up photograph of my eye.

It worked, sort of. I fear my lens isn't a proper macro lens (of course it's not meant to be, being a compact super-zoom...), so this was as good as I can manage on my own. Really, a macro lens and someone else taking the photo would be of great assistance, but I'm here alone, so whaddagonnado?

Lately, though, I've come across a lot of really amazing photographs on the 'net of eyes. And it's not very often that you get that close up to someone else's or your own eyes, but there are a huge amount of colors smashed up in there.

Now, all I need is a friend with a macro lens...

Some say... there's five pictures!

I haven't posted my Top Gear advent calender facts for about 5 days now, so I though i'd share with you in one large post! Enjoy!

Some say... every boxing day, he really does have a massive fight.

Some say... he should not under any circumstances be allowed near tangerines and that he thinks a wreath on the front door means your house won a race.

Some say... he has a small electrical fault that makes one of his eyes flicker... and that giving him brandy butter would be a very bad idea for everyone.

December 3rd

Today's barely-legible fact about the Stig is as follows. Some say...

... He thinks tinsel is a snack.

Heh. These are getting better and better.

Back at work now for the long haul. Technically today is my Monday, as I now work 5 days straight until Tuesday. Today was remarkably slow, which was a nice break. Got some things done, sold lots of copies of both Twilight and Susan Boyle. Sigh. People are so predictable.

In lack of exciting photos to show you, and in light of my newly learned grasp of the "advanced" settings on my VLC player, I will instead, offer you some of my favorite clips from things I have watched over the past week.

First up, Bolt... and whose that on the phone?

Seriously. Rhino the hamster was the best part of that movie. Heh.

And finally, we all know that season G of QI started last week and filled us all with lots of joy. Well, it filled me with joy. And I'd like to share some of that joy with you in the form of the following clips: (Spoiler warning for those of you who still want to watch the whole episode... can you do spoilers on an informational show?).

I'm still working on this "record" function, so I apologize if there's bits and pieces missing from the beginning and/or ends of the videos. Either way, you get the point. And the humor, I hope.

I'm currently sitting around waiting for the newest episode to air at 9:30 p.m. I'm started to get sleepy, though, and may retreat to bed before QI airs. What a travesty that'll be.

In other news, I've taken quite a liking to mushrooms recently, and have included them in almost every meal I've eaten in the past week. Portobello mushrooms are quickly becoming my favorite, although the "exotic mushroom selection" at Sainsbury's will also hold a dear (yet very expensive) place in my heart.

I also successfully made pizza this week. Last time I tried to make the dough and everything it was too dough... y. This time I cooked it just right and it was yummy. I will need to stock up on tomato paste and start making pizza with any kind of leftovers I have kicking about.

I also went a bit crazy on the baking yesterday and made jam cookies (which I messed up on the icing a bit...), pineapple upside-down cake and two loaves of banana bread. Odd that now that I've got all this tasty sweet food around me all I want to do is eat vegetables and meat. Heh.

The weather here has been miserable. Yes I know I shouldn't complain, but it was chilly enough today to cause my Canadian flatmate to say "It's Canadian cold outside!". So it's got to be quite cold, then.

That's about all the news I've got to share with you today. I'm back at work bright and early tomorrow morning at 8, so won't be waiting around long. Might just rely on the BBC iplayer to watch QI in the morning. I'm sleepy now...

ZZzzZzZZZZzzzz

December 2nd

Some say... he likes it when The Great Escape is on. But only because he's in it.

There's today's Stig advent calender fact for you. The chocolate was angel-shaped this time.

Frost, Traffic Lights and Charles Dickens

For a lack of better things to do yesterday in London, I decided to just see some random stuff that had been sitting on my list for a while now.

But first, frost. We got frost overnight. Probably the closest London will get to snow in the whole of December.

For my first stop I trekked all the way into East London to see a work of 'art' that I had been meaning to see for a long time. It's a tree made of traffic lights. You can see it on the top right-hand picture above. On the left was a sun dog that I happened to notice in the sky. More about sun dogs here on Wikipedia.

You can see the whole of the 'traffic light tree' on the right. I find it amusing because it is situated in the middle of a traffic circle in the Docklands. I just wonder if there are any tourists that show up to the traffic circle and freak out thinking that they will have to pay attention to these randomly changing signals... not understanding how a traffic circle works. Heh.

On the left is the Old Curiosity Shop, made famous by Charles Dickens. It is located near the London School of Economics in Holborn, and is now sadly a shoe shop. Pity.

That's about all I have to share with you this week, I'm afraid. While it was sunny outside, the wind was whippingly cold and miserable, and I started to get chilly and therefore retired to head home by about 2 p.m. Today is reserved for laundry and a fair amount of baking. Might throw in a visit to the ducks in the park later today if I feel like getting dressed.

Happy December!

It's December, everyone! And as much as we all agree that it snuck up rather quickly on us, I'm quite chuffed because it means that I get to open my ADVENT CALENDAR!!

And, with my advent calender comes one fun-fact-a-day about Stig. Today's is, if you can't read that rather blurry photo above, is that...

Some say... he thinks ten Lords-a-leaping is just too many...

Giggle.

I'm also munching on a bell-shaped chocolate... yes, for Breakfast. WHAT?!

Today the weather is supposed to be quite lovely (well, sunny... but not warm), so I'm up early and going to make the trek into London to snap some photos and generally be a bum. I'm trying desperately to find something new to do in London, but most of the exciting things happen on the weekends, so there isn't much to do during the week. I'm still researching, so I might yet still find something.

Either way, stay tuned and hopefully I'll have some photos to offer later!