New Toy - Peg Loom

This week I got a new toy - a peg loom. I think you must call it something else in the USA because the only sites I've seen with a peg loom like this are British. It is a strip of wood with holes in it, into which sit a number of pegs. The pegs are weaving sticks, with holes at the end, a bit like blunt wooden needles.



You warp it up by threading the warp yarn through the holes at the end of the pegs and then standing the pegs up in the loom. My loom has a warp anchor bar to keep the warp yarn untangled, I threaded the pairs of threads through the bar and tied it off.



You weave your weft yarn (or rags or even raw fleece!) in and out the pegs until you have filled the pegs.



Then you lift out the pegs (a few at a time) and slide the fabric down the pegs onto the warp threads.



Then keep going, tie off the warp threads when you're all done and Voila!



Too small to be a blanket and too thick to be a table mat! Beautifully soft though and not bad for a first attempt. Now what can I turn it into?

Well I Found It Funny

More to be found here at xkcd.com

Health warning:
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

- and they're right about the maths!

Tesco Sucks

Tesco is a UK supermarket, and I believe is the third largest supermarket in the world, it's certainly the largest in the UK, has a presence absolutely everywhere and is popularly believed to be almost single handedly responsible for the decline of high streets throughout the UK. They certainly make plenty money. A large company like this is often a target for dissatisfied members of the public.

A protest sign on Blaikie's Hill, Galashiels
© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The farmer who erected this Tesco Sucks sign put it up because Tesco pulled down a beautiful 19th century red sandstone building to build their hideous excrescence and despite it being part of their planning permission that they rebuild it, after over 2 years of trading they haven't shown any sign of replacing it. He says they have ruined his view of the town and when you look below - you can see his point.

Galashiels Town Centre Redevelopment
© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The white splodge centre right is a massive three storey white block and it looks just as obtrusive close up. The slightly lower white splodge at the bottom left is another supermarket that opened at the same time as Tesco but it is an unashamed white shed, single storey and doesn't pretend to be anything else than a white shed, and it was built on the site of a former railway station so is no real loss. (If anyone's interested the long building 2/3 of the way up the right of the picture is my old school and until Gala became supermarket central I think it was the biggest building in Gala.) So that's why Tom Douglas thinks Tesco Sucks - but why do I agree with him?

My husband recently had a major operation and has been left rather weak, and lacking in the energy to trochle all the way around a huge supermarket. Today we decided to visit Tesco for a change, and I tried to get a key for a scooter.... After waiting at the customer service desk for the lone woman to deal with 2 customer complaints I asked for a key for a scooter, she grabbed one, glanced around and collared a security guard some way away, he said he would help once he had finished fiddling with something at his desk.... after a short period steam started coming out my ears and I grabbed my husband and plonked him on a chair in a display of patio furniture thinking to myself "these bloody scooters are for people who aren't able to stand around waiting for your convenience!" but being stoic and British I bit my tongue for a minute or two. Next thing I saw Mr Security Guard helping some other person with something or other, I watched in horror as he made a phone call and chatted away to the customer, then once he had finished with the call I walked up to him and said incredulously "Shall I take the key and just get it myself?" he said to me nicely "Oh that would be really helpful" and I stormed up the shop thinking "I'm the customer, you're supposed to be the helpful one!" Being such a disabled friendly store, Tesco keeps its scooters at the other end of the shop from the disabled lifts, and entrance. (I thought the days of hiding disabled people away were over but obviously not in Tesco-land) Having reached the 3 scooters I picked one, switched it on and nothing happened, I grabbed another tried it but it was obviously needing charged, I tried the third one thinking I was losing my mind and again not a sausage. I made my way back to the customer service desk, and told the girl I couldn't get it to work. She looked around in an anguished way but Mr Security Guard was deep in conversation with his customer who by this time was obviously his pal because they were chatting away like old buddies. He was far too busy blethering to help. She asked another 4 members of staff but none knew how to work the scooters although one did say she would come and try, having had comprehensive instructions from Ms Customer Services. Put the key in, turn it and press the lever. I told Ms Checkout Girl I had already tried that. The two of us spent several minutes fiddling about with the scooters and guess what? Nothing worked. Then another checkout operator who also had no idea how to work it came over and couldn't get any of them to go. By this time I noticed the time and realised my husband had been sitting like a lemon in the patio furniture display for over 15 minutes and my blood pressure was going through the roof. I stomped off in disgust leaving the girls to it and would like to say that I left the shop without buying anything but we had come for something that couldn't be got anywhere else. We did however, for the first time in recorded history buy only the items we came for and made not a single impulse purchase. I think if I had followed my impulses at the time I would have left the shop on a policeman's arm, not my husbands!

So yes, I fully agree with Tom Douglas, more power to your elbow Tom - Tesco definitely Sucks, and so does Scottish Borders Council for trying to get you to take your Tesco Sucks sign down.

Neighbours

...everybody needs good neighbours!!!

But do your neighbours lean over the wall and nibble on your roses?

Here he is wandering over for a snack -




and with a few members of his harem

BBC Books people lie about having read

The BBC figures most people will have on average read about 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
Copy and paste into notes. Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Tally your total below. Movies don't count!

This should be interesting....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X .....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible ^ .............well I've worked my way through the New Testament, so half a x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ..............uuurgh no!!!
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (poor tess)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X .......... hated the first couple of chapters then Loved it!
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare .........come onnnn!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks .......... no but Charlotte Gray was DIRE!
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ....... tried twice - never got past the first page.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (see 10)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (Capitalist tosh!)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X (Dear God yes - I hate Dickens for a reason you know)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X (all of em even Sanditon and the Watsons!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X (Must Read)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X (Utter Utter Sh*te)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Is this the druggy one that I fought my way through? nope that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (Tried several times aaargh!)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Life's too short - dried up before anything happened)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X (see 56)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X (Compulsory in the 70s)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X (at school so it must count)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Tally: 47 and a half

Mama

This is a fun facebook game that just uses a music player on random or shuffle to answer a set of questions:

1, 2 step Share

Today at 18:53

1. Put your iTunes, winamp, mp3-player etc. on shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name
5. Tag at least 10 friends
6. Anyone tagged has to do the same, because fun pointlessness spreads like a virus.


If someone says "Is this okay?" you say?
- Shake a Tail Feather

How would you describe yourself?
- Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head (which is why I'm so wet)

What do you like in a guy/girl?
- Funky Gibbon (well who wouldn't?)

How do you feel today?
- Seven Years

What is your life’s purpose?
- Naked

What is your motto?
- Do They Know It's Christmas?

What do your friends think of you?
- Merry Christmas Everybody (honest this is on random!)

What do you think of your parents?
- Ring Out Solstice Bells

What do you think about very often?
- One Flight Down

What is 2 + 2?
- Time Warp (an accountant's answer if ever I heard one)

What do you think of your best friend?
- All That Jazz

What do you think of the person you like?
- Yoam Wara Yoam (thank you Halla, translation - day after day)

What is your life story?
- Private Investigations

What do you want to be when you grow up?
- Little Saint Nick

What do you think of when you see the person you like?
- Canadian Barn Dance

What is your hobby/interest?
- The Christmas Song

What is your biggest fear?
- Driving Home For Christmas

What is your biggest secret?
- A Proper Chrimbo

What do you think of your friends?
- Deck The Halls

What will you post this as?
- Mama (how apt - I'm only on FB because of my children!)

25 Random Things About Heather

This is a facebook game that is interesting, the idea is to write 25 random things about yourself and in facebook you tag 25 friends as an invitation for them to follow suit. Here of course the famous Multiply Inbox does that for you ;)

1. Heather knows she's too old for all this facebook lark, and all those who agree can stop reading now.
2. Heather has been traced from Hmacca via H******bells to H******momo, so much for secret internet identities. I wonder if G****** is still safe?
3. Heather is disproportionately annoyed by friend rejections. I'm not planning to stalk C, in fact I'm not that interested! Still pissed off though.
4. Heather's secret power is Invisibility. (Actually it's not that amazing - all 'femmes d'un certain age' are invisible. It's still cool though)
5. Heather broke her arm when she was (about) 4 and distinctly remembers walking along a high wall, falling and breaking her arm. People who were there seem to think it was broken by her sister while carrying her up the stairs. False memory syndrome huh, how could all these people have got it so wrong?
6. The arm may well have been an accident but said sister used to bite Heather hard and then found it funny that she stopped crying when shushed and given a cuddle.
7. Actually while we're dredging up memories of sibling abuse, my sisters also used to find it hilarious to give me cold tea to drink and call it flat Coca Cola. (I still don't like Coca Cola)
8. Even so Heather still believes it is better to have siblings than to be an only child.
9. Heather spends 8 and a half hours a week sitting on buses travelling to work, and nearly 4 hours hanging around bus stops waiting for buses. That's more than nearly 4 weeks a year!
10. That I sat and worked that out says more about me than I want you to know
11. Heather has less patience than she needs
12. A week later and I am still less than halfway through ...
13. Heather once worked in a shoe shop
14. Heather hated the Brownies and had to be forced back there by her mother
15. Heather wanted to join the Guides but was too embarrassed to roll up in a Brownie uniform with no badges on it
16. Heather never had the wit to join the Guides anyway and pretend she had had a glorious Brownie career but had misplaced her uniform in the move
17. Heather scored a glorious 20/20 in the Guardian spelling quiz today link - go on, bet you can't equal that!
18. Heather has loathed Valentine's day all her life
19. The high point of my first day behind the perfume counter at Boots was when I swung round and sent a tall arrangement of glass shelves artfully stacked with exotic perfumes crashing to the floor
20. The low point of my Boots career was being dumped by Christmas card at the till. (This was before they invented text messages)
21. There was a dusky pink pair of shoes in the shoe shop I must have tried on a hundred times, but I left before I could decide whether to buy them. They were beautiful though.
22. When I was 22 I was often complimented on my 2 delightful little girls. (I wonder what happened to them?)
23. At 23 I passed my driving test.
24. Heather knows fine well that youngest children are favoured and has benefited from that all her life.
25. Heather is mightily relieved to have reached 25!

(According to the official instructions: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)