Heh, just woke up from an amusing dream. I dreamt that a gypsy woman was trying to sell me domain names. Glen was there too, and when her selling tactic didn’t work on him, she tried to get me to buy some. I kept replying with “No, not listening”, things link that telling her that I wasn’t interested. She tried to hold my hand, I told her to leave me alone, and that it was assault. I even went to one of the government websites to look up the laws of assault.

Eventually, she said that she was the worst person I’d met. In the end, I challenged her to a game of I Spy, while Glen stared out of the window and began counting a jar full of loose change.

Just before I woke up, I dreamt I’d left the house just in time to see her turquoise Volvo be towed away.

That’s it, I’m officially weird.

In other news, the demolition of Steetley Magenesite is resuming. The large oil container that has remained on the site is about to be pulled down. This means that there’s very little left remaining on the site still standing. Thanks to a series of amazing coincidences, I was able to take a trip around there.

It started off yesterday, as a Flickr user posted to my Steetley group stating that work had recommenced on the site.

The following day was a lovely summers day. The sun eventually managed to break through the clouds, and I was itching to go for a walk. I haven’t done any of my stupidly long walks for a while, as I’d lost the headset for my phone, but seeing as it turned up in the washer a few days ago, I decided to go on one.

A stiff breeze was blowing, which made visibility excellent, therefore I decided to head down to the Headland and collect a few more photos.

While I was taking this photo, a car pulled alongside me. By sheer coincidence, it was Phil! You may remember him being mentioned on the trip to Rievaulx Abbey last year.

He was down the headland too, dropping someone off. We both went our separate ways, and I carried on walking. Just as I headed onto Durham Street to take a stunningly interesting photo of my doctors’ surgery, Phil pulled alongside me again…

“I’ve got my camera with me, fancy going up to Steetley?”

Wild horses wouldn’t have stopped me. Despite the amount I talk about the place, I’ve never actually been up there and had a really good look round. Most of the photos I have of the place are actually from Chris, and not me. Also, seeing as they were pulling more of it down, it was probably one of my last opportunities to get up there.

The first thing clearly visible were the large chunks missing from the oil drum…

We then explored the site in detail, taking photos of the desolation and decay left behind. I found it highly amusing to see some of the stuff left behind in there, including parts of an old Dell 316SX

The specs of this machine make interesting reading. It dates from 1991ish.

I took pleasre in photographing all of the old, smashed up concrete streetlight columns that would have once illuminated the roadway through the complex.

It was at that point we headed back to the car. Phil dropped me off at home, and I began the process of uploading all of the photos I’ve yet to see his photos, but they’ll probably be better than mine!

Technorati Tags: dream, flickr, hartlepool, headland, Photos, steetley, walk

Several weeks ago, Daddykins planted some potatoes. It’s something he often does. If there’s a vegetable in the kitchen that looks slightly off, or if he finds a poor seed wedged between his ever decaying teeth, he will take it out into the back garden, and plant it to see if it’ll grow.

I can’t remember when it started. I just remember being informed of a large, white bucket placed on the garden bench. This bucket contained several potatoes which were long past their use-by date, and already had the little white sprouts coming from it. Naturally, these potatoes were covered in soil. He wanted to see if they’d actually grow. Of course, thanks to the laws set by Mother Nature, any root vegetable placed in enough soil to sufficiently feed the plant, will grow.

And it did.

I took photos of the plant during the whole growing pictures. Unfortunately, thanks to my utter incompetence, I appear to have deleted all photos I took of it, so you won’t be able to see them. They were awesome. Well, actually, they weren’t that good, but I have to keep the suspense.

The plants grew and grew, and unfortunately, thanks to the utterly shit weather we’ve had so far this “summer”, the plants themsevles became damaged and started to die off.

Daddykins announced this afternoon that he’d be interested in seeing how his experiment went, and that we would empty the afore-mentioned bucket of its vegetable matter.

Unfortunately, the first one picked out wasn’t exactly going to feed a starving family.

Delicious as it may have been, it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing we were hoping for. It ended up being discarded. My heart sank, I was hoping for a crop of golden potatoes. Instead, it looked like we’d grown a bag of slightly soft and mushy marbles. Groan.

It only took a short dig of a few centimetres before we began to get potatoes of slightly higher value, and they actually looked quite nice.

Occasionally, we’d discover the mushy remains of the “parent” potato, which had degraded to a soft paste. These were also discarded, though the dogs seemed to take a great interest in them before I shooed them away.

The more we dug, the more the potatoes kept coming. From a small experiment, we gathered enough to be actually useful.

Now that’s some good eatin’.

Originally, the plan was to boil them, with the skins on. A simple enough affair, until the idea of making them into chips (or at least the biggest ones) came into the mind of Daddykins. I simply laughed at the idea, thinking that no matter how large the crop was, there’d be no potato big enough to be a “chippy” potato.

I disappear upstairs, and download the photos off the camera card, or do something equally as inane. Several minutes later, I am summonsed to the kitchen, to see a great big pile of chips in the fryer. I am awestruck.

Needless to say, I piled the whole lot on the plate, slapped on a small amount of salt, and enjoyed them like I’ve never enjoyed a plate of chips in my whole life. They were just awesome.

Damn. It almost makes me want to take up gardening.

Technorati Tags: awesome, chips, Food, home grown, potato

Glen has switched from his old bespoke weblog software to Wordpress. Hurrah!. In other news, there isn’t any. The weather is crap, so I haven’t taken any photos. Lewis Hamilton’s doing crap in the grand prix, and the dog is asleep on the chair next to me.

Technorati Tags: asleep wather, blog, crap, dog, glen, lewis hamilton, update, wordpress

You may remember that a few weeks ago, I got given a huge bag of records, some of which were in a bad state. On flickr, there was a small discussion on the best way to clean records. Below is my response. I thought it was too long-winded to leave it rotting in the middle of a flickr discussion, so here it is. Hopefully, someone might make use out of it.

I recently got given a huge pile of records, and these were in absolute states. No covers, records dating from 1962, in a smokers house. I discarded a selection where the owners dog had chewed through the pile. You get the type of condition.

I probably wouldn’t recommend this technique for only lightly soiled records, but when it comes to neglect + nicotine + dog, this procedure worked remarkably well.

Your mileage may vary with this one…

Technorati Tags: cleaning, cleansing, detergent, fingerprints, fix, groove, Music, record, tip, vinyl, washing up liquid

Two hours and 12 minutes after release, I finally have the latest version of Firefox installed….

The navigation bar looks a little different. That’s all I can see for now. If that’s the only change they’ve made after all this, I’ll be really pissed off.

Technorati Tags: firefox, latest version, mozilla, updated