Julie's Boggle

This coming Monday is the “Late Summer” Bank Holiday. The last of UK’s organised bank holidays for the year. *sniff*

Our dive club is making use of the opportunity to do a 3 day dive trip to Anglesey up in Wales – so lets hope the weather bucks up, it’s been raining on and off for almost a week now!

We’re driving up on Friday and staying at a B&B in the little village of “Llanfair PG” or to use its original name (the longest placename in the UK): Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which means “St Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave”. Hmmm.

(The folk at Wikipedia have a lot more to say about the village, including the fact that the name was an early example of a publicity stunt from the 1860′s!)

Last time we were in Anglesey we had a most exciting drift dive down the Menai Straits. Memorable for a number of reasons, including Tom’s head-on collision with a rock and my buddy’s feet first ascent. But I suspect we won’t be doing that one again this time, not least because some of the more conservative dive leaders are coming along too!

Till next week then.

I ventured back onto the online supermarkets for another round of grocery shopping last week. This time it was Tesco who got the business. They offer cheap (not free) delivery, but in their favour they stock some very specific items that we were after.

It all went swimmingly. Two days later, 15 minutes into the two hour delivery slot, two energetic blokes came bouncing down the stairs, with armfuls of bags, and created a massive grocery obstruction in the hallway. Sign here please and off they go.

I had put a couple of fresh veg items on the list to see how they coped with them. What I was expecting was several courgettes, two brown onions and two red onions. So you can possibly imagine my surprise when I got several courgettes, two brown onions and SIXTEEN red onions! They had an entire shopping bag all to themselves! (Quite necessary given their volume and the fact that they weighed in at 2.7kg!)

After negotiating a partial refund with Tesco’s phone support team, we then had to set about using the onions. Fortunately it was Delia to the rescue with her cool online site of great recipes – and a French onion soup one in particular. Mmmm.

We were never going to get even close to making stock using her recipe for this exercise, but in hindsight, something a little better than Knorr beef stock cubes would have been a ‘slim plan’ as they say in SA.

You can conclude from this that our onion soup had a bit more of the Oxo-type flavour than Delia’s might have had – but it was still very tasty – and the croutons that so elegantly float on top in her picture (ours didn’t look as pretty) – ah wow, these were DEE-licious. Heartily recommend the recipe, just buy some proper beef bouillon or classy stock cubes first.

Total so far: 4 onions in the soup, 5 given away – just seven to go! (Good thing that soup was so good…)

After suffering through quite a lot of low-key chafing about my slow computer, the Minister for Finance (aka Tom) eventually came round to the idea that we could start looking at upgrading my hardware!

In the past, we’ve always practised home computer engineering. Building new machines and upgrading old ones by buying individual components. But these days, the prices on complete boxes is competitive enough, and the strain of matching up the components is severe enough, that we just decided to go straight for an off-the-shelf machine.

So Sunday afternoon found us at the large Brentford branch of PCWorld. “Just looking”! Our primary target was their ‘Bargain Bin’, where PC’s that are ex-display or have damaged packaging go to be sold off cheaply.

The long and short of it was that we discovered NONE of the machines they had on offer came with XP Professional, which is the OS that I wanted. They were fairly explicit in their “no can do” on that one (all machines come with XP Home). :huh:

However, the enterprising sales guy was happy to direct us to their PCWorld “Business” (PCWB) arm – a purely online service aimed at businesses. We were clearly home users but that didn’t seem to be a problem.

Armed with a bundle of extra info, we trotted off home to do some more research. We were trying to stay fairly low-budget so Tom changed his sights from the AMD 64bit to a regular Pentium 4 which made a fair old saving. More looking around and it turned out that the one from PCWB was actually pretty good price-wise and met our specs fairly well.

So in the end, the reason that we actually bought the identical machine from their competitor DABS instead, is because PCWorld Business are completely inflexible! They won’t deliver to any address other than the credit card billing address (“to prevent fraud”). Unless you set up an account with them, for which you DO have to be a business.

So how on earth are we supposed to buy a machine with XP Pro on it from these guys then?!?

But all that is water under the bridge now. My new PC arrived the very next day from DABS.

Of course I then had to get the almighty 12kg box home with me on the Underground… And the only catch with that scheme was that scant hours before I left for the day, the Central Line became the “Extremities Only” Line when they closed all the stations in Zone 1 and 2. (“Person under a train” at Marble Arch.) Making the whole affair that much more entertaining…

I offer all that as my excuse for a lack of entries lately. The business of re-installing all my applications has been rather time-consuming and is still ongoing. But in the meanwhile, I am enjoying significant speed improvements!

It’s been a fairly relaxing 10 days since we got back to London. In between getting early nights during the week and catching up with our monthly DVD Rental subscription, I haven’t even managed to finish sorting all the photos we brought back from SA!

Today is another lovely day, and this morning I got in a pleasant hour or so of pottering about in the garden while it was still fresh and cool. For a change, the good weather has coincided with Tom’s aeroplane hire so we’re taking a little flip to visit Popham airfield later this afternoon.

About a week ago, I set off a stroppy reply to Elliott’s email quote for moving our stuff to London. Telling them all about how utterly un-amazed we were by the service on their international side and why we had opted not to use them at the last minute.

The very next day I had a phone call from the GM of the Durban branch offering me his personal apology for the service we received. Too bad we didn’t get hold of him sooner. He said they’d “learned some hard lessons” from this. Sounded encouraging. Just hope they put their learnings into practice!

In the meantime we still haven’t heard from our friends at Pickfords who got the job in Elliott’s place…