SpaCeMonKeY UK

Hooray, they've made my post permanent! And there was I thinking I might not have a job after March (I've been on a temporary contract for nearly 2 years now and it wasn't sounding all that positive). So I'm officially the Assistant Planning Archaeologist/Historic Environment Record Officer for Leicestershire County Council.

Hooray!

Well, we went to a place at Peterstow, near Ross on Wye, for Rob's birthday. Friday night we stayed in a cider farm! It's called Broome Farm. It was very nice - we were welcomed with a jug of cider and cider cake, and the breakfast was good too. Not bad at all. They were a bit preoccupied otherwise Rob would have had a look around the cider cellar I think. :)

Then on Saturday morning we drove to White Castle, then through Abergavenny, then home so that we were back in time to go to Phil's housewarming party (that's Phil whose old house we now live in). I posted some pics onto the blog - Picasa is one excellent piece of image handling software. Amazing that it's free and lets you post straight to your blog. It was putting some odd body tags in there though, weird...

Sunday we had a takeaway in the evening with Ali and her mum... I have to go and work out something to make with the remnants in a minute or two. Rob's been making horrible smoothies with his birthday blender. And playing the sax, which he's just started learning. I don't think I mentioned that.

Bye for now. And thanks for posting James. Hooray!

White Castle, Monmouthshire

View from the top of White Castle, Monmouthshire

I thought it was interesting to look at people's Google pageranks (who I link to) and see whose blog was the most highly ranked...

Double Fine Action News (6/10)
Grumpy Gamer (6/10)
AFK Gamer (5/10)
Kill Ten Rats (5/10)
Van Hemlock (4/10)
Dan Black from The Servant (3/10)
Geoff (3/10)
James (3/10)
Ali (2/10)
Mark (2/10)
Me (2/10)
Daisy (2/10)
Harriet (1/10)
Jonathan (0/10)

Thought that was interesting, and probably fair, though Daisy doesn't even have content on her web page at the moment! :p

What DO you have to blog about to get a higher pagerank? Hmmmmmmmmm.

Ooooh, Blogger doesn't support separate archive pages any more, just links on the main page! So that's why I can't find my template page.

Oh well, I kind of liked the separate page, guess I can't do little descriptions of the archived pages now. Not that I had done any for ages, hence not noticing that it wasn't working properly.

Scum.

At least it all works now. Maybe I should add more things to my template. Hmm.

You know, I never did figure out where my archives have gone. Oh well...

Happy Christmas/New Year etc to you all! Sorry I haven't blogged earlier, but having kept tabs on everyone else's blogs I see I'm not the only tardy one out there. Ha.

Christmas was good, though I was sad my parental units couldn't come to visit and stay in our lovely house. Mum pinched a nerve or something and couldn't sit in a car to make the journey. But she's okay now.

I received several excellent gifts, including an incredibly lifelike ceramic cat from my brother, a Nintendo DS from Rob, and Firefly from Ali. Now we can all watch the excellent series that preceded one of last year's best films, Serenity.

Talking of excellent films, on Saturday we headed off to the Phoenix Arts, the local 'art' cinema, and watched The Brothers Grimm. It was Terry Gilliam's last film and wasn't in the main cinemas for long but we managed to catch it. It was really good! Matt Damon's acting was so good that I didn't notice it was Matt Damon. I heartily recommend it to you all.

I've been playing World of Warcraft on and off still, as you can tell from my sidebar thingummy. My brother John bought it over Christmas so he's been playing too. I've hit upon a new problem now, though. I've had this problem with my laptop ever since I had it - every so often it locks up and I have to restart it. Now it's developed a regular locking up thing where it freezes, waits a while (sometimes 30 seconds or so), then starts again! Very odd, and if it happens in the middle of a fight, it usually means I'm dead when it starts working again. Boo!

Other things, hmm, found this Tripod video clip linked to on a website I frequent. Very funny, especially if you get addicted to games. I must be a fairly rare sort of wife to have the same gaming problem as many men seem to have (i.e. an inability to stop playing when I get into it!). Tripod are good. :)

I guess I could leave it here for now. I really should blog more often!