Wednesday 31 May 2006

Cup final tickets!

First come, first served - two tickets for the World Cup final! Click here to see the seats!

Food and HIV

Looking for a special recipe? Got a friend who is lactose or wheat intolerant? Well here's yer answer! My friend Dame Fandango is very close to finishing her website - Dame Fandango's Healthy Inclusive Recipes - selling a book with recipes for people who want dairy and gluten-free food - also some recipes available for free on the site. The link to HIV? Money from each sale is being given to the Ukuthasa charity in South Africa (right now the site doesn't say this as the news has just broken). Check out both and hit the contact link on the Dame's site to wish the team luck!

Monday 29 May 2006

Anniversary

It's been a year since I started this blog and what a tumbledown, rumbledown rockabilly year it's been! To quote The Beach Boys - "Lenin has lived and Jehovah has died..............", my world has taken a few turns and changes too! People now stop me in the pub and ask why this blog hasn't been updated - hiya JW and Clerky and others!

Right now I'm assailed (good word for this time of night) by the sound of deadlines flying past and I'm wondering when we can adopt the metric week - I really need ten days each week and a hundred hours each day. Tennis elbow restricts the amount of typing I can do and sciatica make life a tad stressful and so I'm trying to concentrate on what I have to do rather than what I want to do. On the upside, I've found another City fan in the village and we're talking about starting a Bishopsbourne City Fan Club!

You'll have noticed a new link on the right, Amnesty International are looking at Internet censorship and it's worth checking out this new initiative - those of us who rely on the web need to make sure that we know who controls it. We've discussed censorship in the classroom but we need to be aware of how it impacts the wider world.

All up things are good in the world of Gibson and the courses I teach are drawing to a close so life should become a little easier soon - I can but hope.

Greetings to everyone and happy anniversary to me :-)

Saturday 13 May 2006

Alive!

Yes I'm still alive (I'll reply separately Anne :-)) but it's hectic here at Gibson Towers in bijou Bishopsbourne. The ongoing car saga continues with more exhaust work being needed this week (I'm waiting for the Kwik Fit area manager to investigate my complaint before going into further details but suffice to say I'm not a happy teddy). Work is cool but I still have legacy stuff to sort so I feel as though I'm doing 8 day weeks all the time right now. Things might get calmer once the next assignment is submitted and the courses I'm tutoring are finished for this year (June) but there are a few more mountains to climb before I get there.

Local stuff - this is the school child 2 attends. No end of problems with her tablet PC and I'm on standy-by to pop into the school to have a high level discussion about the technical incompetence of their IT team or a low level discussion where I extend their vocabulary and show them why upsetting stressed Mancunians is a bad plan in the whole scheme of things. For my children I will forget my Buddhist leanings and tear someone a new face.

Many of you know that I host some photos of Bishopsbourne (playground of the glitterati) on my site and that I occasionally attract mails from people who have lived here. The latest has led to a dialogue between Mark and someone who was in the Barnados home during the war. To hack a long story into a manageable size - during the war a Spitfire was shot down near the village and Mark has researched the event so now we have the name and details of the pilot. Eventually I hope to have the details of the discussion and the story of the Spitfire on some web space somewhere.

The new cricket season has started but I still don't have the fixture list so I can't update the site - the first two games were called off, one because the other side couldn't field a team and last weekend the weather conspired against Bish. Maybe this Sunday the bank manager can convene a meeting.

Thursday 4 May 2006

Stuff

Loads of stuff to try and cram in so here goes.

Car stuff first - the bodywork will take a week to fix and just to add to the fun the exhaust fell apart on Sunday while driving across a field at Lydden Hill.

England Manager - McClaren got it for one reason and one reason only - my mum is Scottish and was thus disbarred, otherwise she has similar credentials in that she's not won anything as a football manager.

If you want to see what happens when you and yours are out and about, gadding, you need only invest in the Pupillo and a 3G phone. How good is that? Hook your phone up to a webcam, using a video call, to show your empty home and fill those awkward silences between the visit of the waitress while enjoying the latest special at Pizza Express.