Month: February 2004

Thank you all for your generous offers to get me off work today.

Not.

In lieu of a sicknote then, does anyone have any motivation they can spare?

No?

Arse.

Well in that case all you’re getting for the meantime is this thought:

If only the good die young, what does that say about OAPs?

I know I’m leaving it a bit late to ask but…

Can someone write me a sick-note for tomorrow?

Well I thought I’d do a little research into this. Starting with Brian’s suggestion of “A quarter of..” I got no further. It was all I could do to stop myself ordering half the site!!!

And Texan’s… wow. Yum.

Ohh and to answer two questions:
1. Yes I’m supposed to be on a diet (‘Supposed’ being the operative word).
2. Chelsea Whoppers are a sort of chocolatey fudge bar coated in cocoa powder. They look like this:

I mentioned Biggar last week, but I neglected to mention the little olde fashioned shop selling all the sweets from our childhood. Flying saucers! Cinder candy! We spent the best part of 10 minutes oohhh-ing and ahhhh-ing over the display. Cherry Lips! ABC Letters! What fun we had, and from the expression on the shop owner’s face we weren’t the first people to react that way and I got the feeling that half the fun of the shop was taken from watching people’s reactions.

Then a long distance memory dredged itself up from the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain, I turned to the shop keeper and asked: “Do you sell Chelsea Whoppers?”

Alas, she didn’t. The mood was soured slightly, we made a few purchases and left.

This morning the doorbell rang. A parcel was delivered.

Ain’t my wife just the best!

(OK, the title is crap. This post is NOT about leaping Geraniums and Petunias, but it is about leaping…)

I just don’t know what to do with myself (top song that, scarily prophetic in this case). The weekend looms, and as usual for a Friday I’m already planning ahead.

Saturday will see us visiting family, and catching up on the movies we didn’t go and see last weekend, or during the week for that matter. There is rugby to be watched, despite how painful it may well be.

Sunday and Louise is off to a wedding fayre with a friend, leaving me with pretty much the whole day to myself. Do I tackle some gardening? Forecast is sunny but cold (-5C) and it badly needs a little T.L.C. at the moment. Or do I spend a few hours sorting out the garage? Or the loft? Or do I sit and watch more sport, surf the web, make a little more headway into the ‘projects’ I’ve got going at the moment? I think I’ll leave this Sunday to figure itself out to be honest.

Next Sunday is different though. It’s free. Free as in extra. Extra as in we don’t get a Sunday the 29th of February very often. The more astute of you will already be aware that this is a leap year, but I’ll admit that this little snippet of info hadn’t zipped across my radar yet. In fact it was never something I’d really bothered about, so I did a little digging so salve my own curiosity:

A leap year occurs every four years to help synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, or the length of time it takes the earth to complete its orbit about the sun, which is about 365¼ days.

The length of the solar year, however, is slightly less than 365¼ days?by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy, the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.
In other words, a century year cannot be a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. Thus 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.

Info courtesy of the ever useful Info Please.

So what to do, what to do. An extra day. A whole day. The possibilities are endless. I almost feel that I should get up in time for the sunrise, maybe watch it from a good vantage point? Or maybe I’ll partake in the Leap Day project. Suggestions please.

Over-Educated Nursery Rhyme:
Propel, propel, propel your craft,
Smoothly down the liquid solution,
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is merely an illusion.