The Goddess Shop

Questions I remembered to ask my mechanic before it was too late:

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 07:32:30 GMT

"Last time I was in you asked if my car's timing belt had been replaced yet. I said no. I'm thinking of going on a driving holiday in spring. Should I get the timing belt fixed first?"

"Yes, you should."

"Thanks!"

The occasion? My car had died. That is to say, it needed the attention of a mechanically-minded person who was able to administer electricity to the appropriate place. I had intended to wait until Saturday, when I would not be at work and therefore at liberty to wait for the NRMA to come and get me started so that I could drive my mechanical baby in to get some much needed TLC. I popped in in advance and was told that this weekend coming was the one weekend of the year that he wasn't coming in. (I'm not even going to jokingly accuse him of being a selfish so-and-so, I like him too much. Besides, it's his birthday on Saturday.) I must have put on a disgruntled expression, though, because the mechanic who talked to me then asked me what suburb I lived in - and offered to drive out there and get the car started for me and bring it in. (It was only two suburbs away.)

I said "Yes please."

It was done today. What's more, it turned out to be the battery that was bad. It had been replaced only 6 months earlier, which means that it was still under warranty. So the whole episode cost me nothing more than the aggravation of having to go grocery shopping by bus this Saturday just gone!

And the lovely mechanic? His name's Gordon, and he runs Mechanical Care in Belconnen, Canberra. And he bloody well deserves a plug from me.

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Australian politics disgust me

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 07:20:30 GMT

I've never really cared all that much about Australian politics - when it came down to it, I could never quite bring myself to vote for anybody who had any real chance of getting in. But now? That's just changed.

I don't know what's been happening behind closed doors in the Labor Party, and I'm not sure I really care all that much. All I really know is that the way they've treated Julia Gillard is really bad. And the public comments from the Labor Party politicians disgust me. You can see a selection of quotes here. I've never been so emotional about politics in my life, and the fact that it has manifested itself as intense disgust at the behaviour of one party makes me feel really angry.

I don't like Tony Abbott at all. But if the election was held tomorrow, I'd vote for him.

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Crap. I've drunk too mucvh.

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 06:42:03 GMT

Michael Buble, cocktails, and the internet is a combination that should be banned. By law. I'm on my second cocktail (what???? I've just realised that it's time to change my evening prescription. Which means that I'm on my second cocktail for the evening instead of the first.). So I'm a little bit tipsy. And I'm drunk-posting. Oh, well. I'm sure it happens to most people.

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Baking time

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 03:55:58 GMT

I stumbled across a recipe for Yorkshire Parkin whilst leafing idly through the cake section of my Cordon Bleu cookbooks recently, and decided that I really ought to give it a go. I had to "grind" my own oatmeal flour (for which you can read "put it in my trusty electric coffee grinder" - so far, the only thing I have never asked it to grind up is coffee beans), and buy treacle, which, believe it or not, I've never actually baked wit before, but otherwise, it was all go.

The best thing about this recipe is that it is perfect winter fodder. It is rich and spicy and sweet and you melt the butter with the sweet ingredients instead of putting it in unmelted (the way you do with shortbread), which means that I can make it in winter without having to heat the kitchen for a week beforehand (yes, I am exaggerating) to soften the butter.

The only irritating thing about making this recipe was the fact that my battery-powered kitchen scales didn't want to tell me how much golden syrup I was putting in. Still, the batter tastes pretty good, so I reckon the results are going to be pretty nice. I am definitely looking forward to eating the results.

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Fanfic: A Mammoth of a Venue

Wed, 29 May 2013 10:21:00 GMT

Title: A Mammoth of a Venue.

Series: Edge of Reality

Author: Cyber Moggy

Rating: G

Fandoms: Death in Paradise, Red Dward, Primeval, Top Gear

Disclaimer: Alphonse is my own creation. The others are all clones of other people's creations, and do not belong to me.

Author's notes: Edge of Reality first came about when I was writing Top Gear fanfic. Hence the presence of a collection of individuals who are definitely entirely fictional represenations of real people.

( Read more... )

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Chew toys

Sat, 25 May 2013 05:51:44 GMT

So. I've watched the first two episodes of Primeval, and one thing is very clear: Stephen is, quite obviously, the series chew toy. Poor sod. It's a wonder he survived as long as he did, if things continue on like this.

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Fandom hell

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:31:38 GMT

I recently admitted to my old friend kristen_mara that I rather like Ben Miller, whom I have been watching in Death in Paradise, with the little baby angels of shippiness showing up and shooting their little arrows into my heart. This is both exciting and dangerous, to my way of thinking, because I am now going to go out and buy at least the first two seasons of Primeval, and I know myself well enough to know that it isn't going to matter at all whether or not I can find it at my local second hand DVD shop. I can always buy it new.

The really tricky bit is, of course, the action figures. I will /not/ go online and find Lester and Dave the Future Predator. I have a small(ish) collection that don't get used as it is. Books I can (and will) read. DVDs I can (and will) watch. Action figures are nothing more than stuff that I promise myself I will play with and then forget I ever said such a thing. I don't /need/ more of them!

I'm just having real problems believing myself at the moment.

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My main loves

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:26:52 GMT

I seem to have two major hobbies in life: playing with my computers (yes - time to own up. There's more than one.) and baking.

I'd like to say "I've been talking alot about my computer recently," but it's been more than just recently. And it's probably time to mention another of my favourite activities: baking.

I've been getting that magazine series "Baked and Delicious" (and would dearly like to know how much more of it there is going to be, and how much silicone/plastic bakeware they think that my kitchen can contain), and one of my recent issues contained a recipe for what they called Pepper Nut Biscuits which is really just shortbread sweetened with honey instead of sugar, and has added spices. Including pepper, which was really interesting. I call them "pfeffernusse," because my family background is German and that is what they seem like to me. I thought they were delicious.

Having eaten the last of them yesterday, I went looking for a cake recipe that would be interesting, since I haven't made one for ages. Leafing through my Cordon Bleu cookbooks, I found a carrot cake recipe. Not having that many carrots, but having plenty of apples floating around that are right on the edge of being too old to eat, I substituted the apples for the carrots and added a few twists of clove. The results are super-soft and moist. This is probably only to be expected, since it is a dairy free cake. (Seriously. It was intended for carrots, and uses vege oil - I used canola oil - instead of butter. Plus, the apples/carrots are definately moist enough to not require any extra liquid, so there's no milk, either.)

Does it taste like a traditional cake? No. Does that matter? No. It's yummy, full stop.

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IT Win!

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:48:21 GMT

I've just had a win with Linux Mint. I bought a bu-ray player for my computer and have spent several days (well - evenings) trying to install it, with the usual dubious assistance from the linux communities online. For the record, they usually have the right answer, but they inevitably leave out certain important information. They tell you that you have to copy a couple of files into a couple of folders - but don't bother to explain to you exactly where those folders are, or that they are hidden. Leaving you (or me) wandering around vaguely wondering why nobody will tell you how to get permission to create a folder that doesn't exist, in a location that is completely irrelevant.

This evening, I have finally stumbled across the information I need, and have persuaded a blu-ray disc to play. I still have issues - the image is very jerky, although the sound is perfect. But that's okay. I'll find the answers. I've got the thing playing. That's the important bit.

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Obsessive George Update

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:55:03 GMT

I might be developing a bit of an obsession with George, my new worm farm. I flipped through the manual that came with him, and found something about his preferred operating temperature. George was a bit sluggish when I pulled the lid off this morning and had a bit of a poke, and it seems that Canberra nights are already a little bit cool for the poor chap. So I've moved him inside. It was inevitable, really, given what kinds of temperatures Canberra generates when things cool down. (Okay, so it's not as bad as it gets in the northern hemisphere, but Canberra's climate is still Cool, not Temperate.)

He is sitting on the lino next to the kitchen, where he periodically dribbles out some more wormy goodness for my pot plants and makes me smile again.

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Gardening with the anti-guru

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:33:26 GMT

My garden and I have been carrying on an on-and-off relationship for years now, mostly thanks to my own unwillingness to commit. I come out with comments like "I haven't got time" and so forth, but those are meaningless, really. The ultimate reality is that I have a garden, and it is a bloody shambles.

Now, I have brought on myself another garden commitment - I have bought myself a worm farm. Why? Because I can't keep the rats and mice out of my compost bin, and I refuse to feed perfectly good kitchen scraps to bloody not-at-all-mangy rodents. For the last week or two, kitchen scraps have been going into the bin. But that is something that deeply offends my ecological soul. I couldn't keep doing it.

So now, I have a worm farm. They are my new pets. I will love them and I will feed them and I will call them George. And so forth. The worm farm is sitting in what I hope is the section of my back porch that they will like best. And they will reward me with worm castings and worm juice which will keep my pot plants happy. And so I have made my commitment and I am a happy woman.

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Bloody Rodents!

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:07:02 GMT

Okay. This is it. I refuse to waste any more compost on that bloody rat. It lives in my roof (which I can more or less put up with - mostly because I can't do anything to get the rotten thing out of there), and whenever I empty kitchen scraps into my compost bin, it thinks "Beauty! Dinner time!"

The whole idea of emptying kitchen scraps into the garbage bin, to go to landfill, offends my ecological soul. But dammit! At least it might go into a methane plant and contribute to electricity generation! But I want that rodent gone. Which means that the compost bin is for garden scraps only from now on.

Grump.

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I will not throw anything through a closed window this evening.

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:50:59 GMT

Usually, when I get home in the evenings, I get changed, do whatever minor job that can be done in a minute or two that needs to be done, pour myself a cocktail, and settle down at the computer to check my email, RSS feeds, and surf the net. Recently, however, there has been a change in my routine, and it is pissing me off to an increasingly large extent. You see, I discovered recently that Avery are selling DIY business cards. They come in a sheet of 8 in a small assortment of flavours (I went with "linen" - the most expensive), and you can download the template, make them look like whatever you want, and print them up as you wish.

My main problem with this is that, as the user of a Linux computer (running Linux Mint, before you ask) and a seriously out of date Canon printer (ie it is more than a year old), I am having real problems actually printing any of them up. My printer keeps crashing in the middle of printing them up. To the extent that I actually have to uninstall the damned thing to get it to dump its print queue, since it won't do so when I hit all the relevant buttons. I even tried buying myself a cheap Epson printer, in the vain hope that it will do the job instead. (For the record it's an XP-100, and the computer thinks it's a dot matrix printer, and I can't even print a test page on the damned thing.)

This evening, I deleted the avery template, and built my own from scratch. Result? Same as before. It crashes half way through the print job. Am I happy? Of course not! I don't even know what I should do next!

Yes, I know I will probably never use the damned business cards. That's not the point. I love the idea of being able to say "here's my card" whenever somebody wants my contact details. I love the idea that they can be made to look incredibly sophisticated. At least I was able to print up a few of them!

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Taking it one step at a time

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:55:24 GMT

Being an almost-home-owner (it's complicated), I am responsible for looking after the place. And that, unfortunately, includes the garden. These days, I consider it to be something of a drag. To be honest, though, that wasn't always the case. To borrow a food metaphor, when we got the place, my eyes were bigger than my stomach. I wanted a garden. I wanted it badly. Now, of course, I am struggling to chew it. What are the bits I have troubles chewing? Well, here's the list:

Roses
Trees that are dying and need to be professionally removed
Environmental Weeds that need to be professionally removed
More roses
Garden beds that I haven't got time to weed
Environmental weeds that I can take out
Yet more bloody roses

All of the above need to be removed. Yes, the roses have to go. Mostly because I hate roses. They are ridiculously showy, and the previous owner planted them en masse. I could be using all that space for other things. Like a herb garden, which is what I intend to plant in what is currently an overgrown and weedy rose garden.

Actually, I am in the process of sorting out all of the above. The dying trees and the large environmental weeds will take some time yet, because they will need professional attention, which is expensive. The rest will only require me to have enough time, energy, and enthusiasm to haul them out. Roses cannot be removed without poison if you don't cut out the entire root ball (which at the moment is encased in a heavy clay soil that is like concrete thanks to the lack of recent rain) - if you just cut off all the branches and hope for the best, they will sigh with relief and utter a thanks for the haircut by regrowing more thickly and beautifully than ever. As I learned the hard way some years back.

The best thing I have done for myself when it comes to the garden is that I have finally bought myself a new line trimmer. That not-so-little gadget is probably the most useful thing going in a garden. It means that I can clean up around the edges of the garden, and demolish another garden bed, and even clean up the paved courtyard out front.

The biggest problem of all, though, is probably the temperature. It is uncomfortably warm. (Well - it is summer.) It is draining me of all energy and making it very difficult for me to be willing to go out and actually do any of the above. Still, I'll get there in the end.

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My First Cardigan becomes My First Vest

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:49:54 GMT

I decided that the crochet projects that came after my sister's long-running Christmas Blanket were going to be for me. The first one - a freestyle, patternless tunic with short sleeves that look a bit like droopy flowers (because those are ridiculously easy to make - all you need is to make them really generous) - worked rather well. It wasn't perfect, and I learned quite a bit about what I can and can't get away with in a pullover, but it worked well enough that I wore it to lunch on Christmas Day.

The second one - a cardigan based on a vest worn by Annie Hall - came from a back issue of Crochet Today, and it hasn't been working at all well. I got the body made and sewn together (minus the edging), and one sleeve done. So, curious to see how it was all going to work (and if it was going to work - I'd already discovered that they'd got their mathematics rather badly wrong in the body and had made appropriate alterations to make it work better, so I didn't have high hopes for the sleeves), I sewed the sleeve on. It didn't fit without me stretching the sleeve and compressing the body like mad. Not a good sign. But I pulled it on and checked it out in the mirror. The fit was pretty horrible, and as I was walking back down the corridor the cardigan actually fell off me.

That was the end of that, as far as I was concerned. I took the sleeve back off the body of the cardigan, and went to fetch one of my Christmas Presents - a lazy daisy, which is basically something designed to make life easier when turning skeins of yarn into balls of yarn, and was perfect for winding unravelling yarn onto when I didn't have time to turn it back into a ball straight away. Whilst I was fetching it, it occurred to me to make the cardigan into a vest instead. I've never put fitted sleeves onto things before, you see, so I don't actually know how to fix the sleeves for that particular pattern. The pattern was based on a vest originally anyway, and I'm rather curious to see how that edging looks on the vest, and if it makes the fit as better as I think it will.

All I have to do now is to remember that I have plans for the evening that do not involve searching the internet for my first pullover with fitted sleeves, and actually shut this beast I'm using down.

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Doing pretty okay, actually.

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 06:19:44 GMT

I got dragged into my senior manager's office (I have a supervisor who is all but my manager, and he reports to a senior manager. It's complicated in the way that only a small business who can't afford to employ as many managers and support staff as it actually needs can do) today, for a very belated, somewhat hurried, and very off the cuff performance review. That said, I was not complaining. He said that I was one of only four of the people who reported to him who was performing above average. (He also mentioned in passing the existence of a number of underperforming staff members, without naming names, but I know which one exists in /my/ department.)

The bit that made me happiest was the bit where he acknowledged that I was second in command in the Packaging department, and that I'd been doing very well in that role. Not that I am going to be silly enough to relax after hearing that. A bit of confidence is a good thing, but one does need to /think/ about the decisions one makes.

Do I expect to get any bonuses out of this? To be honest, no. I don't. My senior manager has promised me that he will do his best to get me and the other above average employees some bonuses out of this, but I know better than to actually expect anything. After all, we are accountable to a parent company, and we aren't actually making a profit at the moment.

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Oh, the joys of it all!

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 06:11:05 GMT

So. Overtime today. Check.

Emergency call to NRMA to get my car going after discovering that there was so little battery power left that even the doors were unlocked. Check.

Battery replaced by my friendly mechanic who opens on a Saturday morning and is happy to help a damsel in distress for considerably less money than the NRMA would charge for a new car battery. Check.

New handbag purchased after discovery that the handle of my current one had pulled out of its mooring. Check.

Breakfast consumed at 10.30am instead of 8am thanks to car shenanigans. Check.

Oddly enough, I am more irritated about this last one than I was about any of the others.

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We all /hear/ about these things...

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:48:06 GMT

I had an interesting conversation with Slacker Kid this morning. He's been on holiday, and came back with a tattoo of his family crest on his back - a source of much merriment amongst the crew here because the initial version (of which he was foolish enough to post a picture on Facebook) had a helmet with three feathers on it which looked uncannily like three erect penises. He has since had it fixed so that it doesn't look quite so...suggestive. But thanks to Facebook we still got to see it. We've all had plenty of fun at his expense about it.

I got my dig in this morning. I was lagging a bit behind the others, all of whom gave him complete hell about it yesterday (to the extent that he actually stopped talking and concentrated hard on his work, instead of slacking off to gossip, which is always a sign that he's upset.). But unlike the others I actually stopped at one dig, and as a result got another story, which I haven't had the lack of heart to tell the others about.

It seemed that he and his mate got absolutely plastered whilst they were on holiday and, whilst plastered, wandered into one of the less salubrious tattoo parlours in town. When asked what it was that they wanted done, his mate said "I want his name tattooed on my arse." And Slacker Kid said "Me too!"

Luckily for them both, the person they asked told them that they were booked solid for the night (I honestly don't know if this was genuine or just a practiced line for coping with drunken idiots.). Needless to say, when they were both recovering the next morning, they remembered this incident with horror, and (as Slacker Kid said, "mate, I love you. But not that much.") were very, very grateful for their escape.

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Linux Mint mutter

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:26:22 GMT

Mint is making me play Moria in the terminal. It refuses to open except in the terminal.

I don't like using the terminal, even though when I was a kid you had to master the terminal before you could use the shell.

Using the terminal isn't as easy as using a mouse to click on things.

Hmph.

(I'll do it anyway, of course. Moria was the first game I lost an entire game playing. I like it too much.)

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Mirror mirror on the wall, who has the best OS of all?

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 06:33:20 GMT

I decided that, after reading a review in Linux Format pronouncing that the brand-new Ubuntu 12.10 needs some work done to it, that what I will tolerate in Windows (because 1 - the poor loves don't know any better and 2 - the rotten sods have made themselves largely indispensable as Bill Gates has somehow not become the Antichrist in my mind whilst Steve Jobs has. Goodness only knows why.) I will no longer tolerate in Linux, I have changed my computer's operating system from Ubuntu to Mint.

It's probably too early for me to give a proper verdict on how I feel about Mint. I should specify here that I chose it because a) it knows about Telstra and I don't know enough about the command line etc to be able to connect my prepaid wireless broadband without some nice, helpful wizards to show the way and b) it keeps getting good reviews from Linux Format.

It was a breeze to install, and took waaaay less time than Ubuntu did. I was actually a little surprised at how little time it took. (For the record, I don't care too much what the desktop looks like, as long as I can find, do, or install everything I want. I have never had any problems using any desktop, regardless of whether it was produced by Windows, Apple, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or Ubuntu. And I happen to like Unity, thanks. But I can live without it.)

That said, I opened Banshee (which comes prepackaged with Mint) once, fiddled with it a bit, and then ditched it in favour of Rhythmbox. I like Rhythmbox. Okay, so it let me down when I had it in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but I may have been farting around a bit too much with other media players, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

And when I tried to do a bulk-copy of my files from my memory stick to the computer, it quickly decided that it couldn't be arsed with all that work and tried to fob me off by making empty files with all the file-names intact, but I've seen computers do that before and definately know better than to delete my backups just because I think they're all good.

Also, I'm not going to install Google Chrome again. Sure, it was nice not having to remember all those passwords and suchlike, but the sheer volume of updates was ridiculous! It seemed like I was having to download 40MB worth of internet browser every other week! That's just stupid.

That's about it, really. Next time I have some opinions on the subject, I shall be sure to report in.

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Perhaps I'm psychic

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 06:23:45 GMT

Because I can see a part of my future very clearly right now: I can see that my liquor cabinet is about to make me wish it was five times bigger. Why? Because I'm beginning to get bored with my current favourite cocktail (the one I come back to when I've got fed up with experimenting), which involves a base spirit (which will be either gin or spiced rum, depending on how I feel, and triple sec from either Marie Brizard or Continental, depending on which bottle shop I have time to visit when I run out of something), and that inevitably means that I will start buying more sweet fruit-flavoured stuff to mix with them.

In this particular case, I have conceived of a desire to try a banana daiquiri. Which means two extras to add to the collection. And possibly the occasional mint julep will pass my lips as well, since I happen to have bourbon in the liquor cabinet (yes, I've run out of rum.).

All I have to do now is to either fit a trip to my local supplier into my schedule, or to be stern with myself until the weekend. Given that it's Monday, I really can't imagine the latter happening any time soon.

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The Virtuous Gardener

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 01:32:09 GMT

I have spent all winter doing my usual amount of gardening with my usual spirit - sweet f&%k all, and even that with great resentment. However, a garden will not be ignored, especially if one is, like myself, inclined to feel guilty about it.

I had spent some time muttering about the practicality of the two (yes, two) compost bins that I already had. One (a barrel-shaped affair with a lid and corrugations that had to be tied together) was given to me by my mother when I moved in (it was one that she was no longer using), and the other (another barrel-shaped affair, this time with shallow vertical fluting and no lid) was already a part of the garden furniture of the place. Both of these were tremendously good for putting stuff into, and absolutely dreadful for getting stuff out of again when it had transformed into good, useable soil.

An early-spring exchange with my sister the Waste Educator a few weeks ago as she was assembling her new worm farm and planning some garbage-bin vegetable pots to plant carrots and suchlike in made me wonder if a worm farm was more practical - and after thinking (yes, alright, proctrastinating) about it for some weeks, the weather kicked in and made up my mind for me.

This morning, with the grass in my garden threatening to obscure the house and thoughts of summer fire danger wafting through the back of my brain, I went out to Bunnings and purchased myself a new compost bin. Yes, a new one. A third compost bin. One would almost think I was collecting them. (Except that I need several of those dreadfully expensive tumbling jobs to complete the set.) This one, however, has a trap door at the base of it, so that I can scrape out the good soil and leave the stuff that is yet to finish composting to break down. I have also made it possible to walk to my front door without getting tickled behind the ears by gently waving grass.

The end of that particular job, however, was stomach churning. I have a small white bin with a lid sitting on my kitchen table to put vegetable scraps and used teabags into. I had filled it up and had then started to ignore it at about the time that I had decided I couldn't live with either of my other compost bins any more. When I finally got to it, the contents were partially liquefied, and were of great interest to the usual collection of small flying insects that always take interest in such things. And the smell was stomach churning. But I have now managed to empty the thing into the new compost bin (where flies are now taking great interest in it) and wash the kitchen bin. Nature will deal with that little situation quite effectively now.

And I am feeling virtuous.

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It's that time of the year at work again

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 06:18:06 GMT

The big event of the year at any medical manufacturer is its government audit. Okay, so some well-behaved companies who have lower risk businesses have them less often than once a year, but for a company whose product categorises as high-risk, like ours, it happens once a year. And we've got ours on at the moment.

We'd been expecting them in the packaging department for about a day and a half, which is fairly hard on the nerves, to be honest. But they rocked up mid-afternoon, and I got the task of talking to the Government Auditor. Which I'd been expecting, and I'd been doing a pretty good job of suppressing my nerves.

And I aced it! It went really well. I was appropriately confident and enthusiastic about showing off what I was doing, and the collection of QA personnel, managers, and offsiders who were hanging about in the background watching were all smiling and looking approving of my performance. Plus, the auditor herself was friendly and keen about what I was doing, and finally confessed that the peeks through the magnifiers that I gave her to the stuff I had found and rejected was in fact sheer curiosity on her behalf - she'd actually only wanted to be sure that we were segregating our rejects properly. Which, of course, we were.

As a result, I got praised by my supervisor, and I'm feeling upbeat and pleased with myself.

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I have finished something!

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 03:31:44 GMT

I recently frogged the black/grey/green poncho I made a while ago (because I forgot that I wasn't looking at an Australian or English pattern and made it using an Australian double crochet stitch instead of an American double crochet stitch), and last night I actually managed to finish remaking it. I'm feeling rather pleased with myself over that.

My next project? This one. I'll be making the short shawl, and I'm using a bamboo yarn that is really truly supersoft that I found in Lincraft, and if it goes well, it's going to be the basis for making summer shawls for all my family and friends over the next two or three years. And if it doesn't? I'll just have to have another go at it and try and make it work. :-)

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Well, there goes the last of the storage space - which I don't have already

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 07:14:16 GMT

I went into my local comic shop to pick up my latest orders (Watchmen and Flash Gordon, in case you're interested), and discovered that a company called Character Building (I assume, based on the packaging) have released a couple of series of Dr Who action figures that are compatible with lego.

As it happens, I left myself with a standing order, years ago, that I was /not/ to start buying lego. Seriously - no lego! I don't have the space for it. The promise of lego-compatible Dr Who figurines has completely blown that out of the water. I bought a couple of packets whilst I was there. It turns out there's one figurine in each packet (pot luck on the contents), and /naturally/ I got two Doctors. They're a bit bigger than your average little lego man (about twice the size), but still. I know exactly where I'll be visiting tomorrow morning before work: Kmart, who are open 24 hours a day (god knows what kind of business they get at 1am, but I'm not complaining). To buy myself a lego kit or two.

Perhaps I can work up an Evil Twin story with them - or one of them is the dippy one, or something.

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