The house hunt has jumped into life now, we viewed a property last night and have three lined up tonight. I am hopeful that one of these will be the one as they all look very good on paper… They would also reduce the amount I have to walk to the station by about %40. I want to point out that this is an estimate and I have not used a map, before Jessica accuses me of geekiness.

Sadly tomorrow I am going to a funeral – I have never been to one before and considered myself quite lucky. It is for my Grandad and I’d like to write something to remember him here but I haven’t yet thought of the words… perhaps I will think of some tomorrow. I think the thing I remember most is how he always seemed so proud of me, it always made me feel that I’d acheived loads in my life. He will be missed.

Me and Jessica have been waiting until May to start our house hunt. So, today being May the 1st…. Unfortunately all the estate agents were closed so we could only gaze into their windows and look at the pictures. There are quite a few in our price range and we decided to have a walk around the neighbourhood to see the outside of some of those we had shortlisted. By fluke we found a house where the landlady was doing some cleaning so we got our first viewing! Unfortunately the house needed a bit of work doing to it and we are not looking for that kind of property. Now at least we won’t be jumping on the first property we see as we have already dismissed one.

Not much else happening at the moment. I have been suffering from a sore-throat for the past week so have been being lazy. Hopefully it will be gone tomorrow and things can speed up again.

Some people have complained that there is technical stuff in this blog so from now on you can find all that in my other blog…. Fuzzy Tech. This page will now be purely social stuff – hope this works.

An email made me realise that I had not posted the result of my Taekwondo grading here. I passed and am now a 5th Kup (blue stripe). Chris passed as well.

Today me a Jessica have been going out for 15 months! We celebrated yesterday as today is Matt’s birthday and we returned to Croydon to make him a cake. Cake making is now complete, and its huge! I will add pictures of the cake to the 15 months section of the photo gallery.

Yesterday we went to Syon park which is close to Jessica’s house. It is a really nice place, there is an old house, conservatory, garden centre, butterfly house and a tropical house. We visited the last two. The butterfly house was fun but also a bit unnerving as the butterflies had a tendency to land on my head. Jessica managed to shelve the memory of her mum crushing a large butterfly in the same butterfly house and I think she enjoyed herself. There were also some leaf-cutter ants parading along a rope and a separate section with some exotic birds. One bird looked like a robin but was the size of a blackbird – I tried to capture this mutant robin on my camera but the picture does not portray the scale.

The tropical house had a lot of terrapins along with a big crocodile and a caiman. Outside there were some parrots, one of which was allowed to fly free… thankfully it seemed to enjoy its perch and there were no parrot related incidents. We were just in time for an “encounter” session which let you get up close with some of the animals. The first one was a red tarantula from the desert but thankfully it is an itchy beast and we could not touch it. All the other animals could be petted to a degree so we saw (and felt) a Thai water dragon, a small caiman and a corn snake. The snake was a constrictor which I bravely wore around my neck – Jessica declined.

For our evening meal we finally got round to visiting “Fat Boy’s” in Richmond. This is a Thai restaurant and the food is very nice… I prefer Anna’s in Croydon purely because they serve my favourite dish (Sweet battered chicken in a Kikkoman sauce) MMmmmmm! The waitress seemed alarmed when we ordered a whole bottle of wine to share – it was a Thai wine called “Monsoon valley” – will have to look for it in the supermarket.

Hopefully the cake will go down well later.

The recent cake competition at work got a mention in the BBC’s in-house paper Ariel. There was a picture of our cake along with two others from the competition.

“Green room’s favourites include Richard and Matt’s effort, The Pool, an allusion to the new ‘technology pool’, into which staff have been subsumed (or ‘thrown in’ depending on where you stand).”

It was in the green room section and above is a brief quote with some information edited out. I am always a bit cautious when talking about work in my blog hence the sanitised quote.

In other news, the picture library section of Fuzzyfelt has been modified again. Now the thumbnails are sorted in chronological order and there is some information about each image when you look at the larger version. I hope to expand on the available information when I work out how to get the exif data using PHP. Easter photos will be added soon.

+ A quick plug for Jessica’s blog which has expanded recently – thankfully there is no new daftness 🙂

Happy Easter!

I have been catching up with friends this long weekend, visiting Jessica’s sister on Friday and out in London with Zig and Liz today. Me and Jessica are just about to open our (expensive) Hotel Chocolat eggs…

Whilst in London we stumbled on what we think is the park from the film “Closer”. I will put the photos from there in the gallery tomorrow.

After a particularly strange dream, I got to thinking about dreams and how you never sleep in them. What I mean is you never dream that you are asleep – I have experienced waking into a dream but everything in the dream takes place in a strange TV style with events happening without any real concept of time. This all seems a bit confusing and I promised Jessica I would keep this bit brief….. is it possible to dream you are asleep? Then you could have nested dreams!

Jessica has just read the write-up of the dream conversation I had with her this morning. She tells me “You are a special person and do not let anyone tell you differently.” I am taking this as an insult. I did not put the full transcript of the conversation (which involved multi-core brains) and still I am subject to this abuse.

I’m back from the grading now and I think it went well (same for Chris too). I didn’t make any mistakes so the belt should be assured, the quality of the pass is down to how good my stances were etc.

The seminar before the grading was very interesting. Right from the start it was obvious that the 7th Dan taking the class could easily make a grown man cry. Me and Chris had the dubious honour of being used for the majority of the demonstrations. We would be shown how to execute the moves (usually evading a grab or punch) correctly and then everyone got to practice them in pairs.

All the moves were like the self-defense ones we sometimes practice in class. The only difference here was that there were usually extra moves tacked on the end for generally hurting your opponent. One talk about “not needing power, just skill and timing” involved the instructor hitting Chris in the groin whilst everyone around the room laughed – it was funny because it wasn’t them. I was also the happy recipient of a demonstration groin blow (this time from a kick) but I didn’t have long to think about it before I was elbowed in the nose.

There was no permanent damage to any of us and we all learnt some new moves. Why me and Chris were the lucky demonstrators most of the time I don’t know… either he thought we were useless or he thought we looked tough enough to take it – I am choosing to go with the latter 😉 Yeah right!

The desk-toy war that began a few weeks ago has now gained momentum.

Tonight is my blue-stripe Taekwondo grading. I am nervous about that and hope it doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the self-defense class which is directly before it.

More news this evening/tomorrow.

Mostly random stuff today.

I have created a flickr page as I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. All my personal photos will still be stored at fuzzyfelt.net but I will probably put my weirder ones on flickr. At first I couldn’t understand why people were raving about del.icio.us but now I’m a convert… I am hoping the same will be true of flickr.

As I am still getting rid of the last remnants of man-flu… I was thinking what a good word phlegm is – it sounds exactly like it feels 🙂

Also, I run a site talking about the Alien films but am considering winding it down now. I was sent this link by Dan. If you have seen the special edition version of Aliens you will recognise this old bit of kit as the remote terminal for the sentry guns. I found it interesting anyway… particularly the bit about the military use:

“It was told to me that some of these were made for military use and included a built-in hard drive. A big thick X was pressed into the case over the hard drive. The purpose of this was to show the user where to shoot in case the computer was in danger of falling into enemy hands.”

Finally, have a look at opentopia you could spend hours here! Webcams seem to have got a lot better since I last had a look – they now seem to update every second.