What time of the day is Dinner?

My friend Stu said "Meet up at the pub at 7pm for tea"

Now, my view is that an evening meal is Dinner. So we have:

Breakfast
Brunch (a late morning larger breakfast that doubles up for lunch that day)
Lunch
Dinner
Supper (a really late in the day bite to eat, when you've missed Dinner)

Tea is a drink, or a nice afternoon tea with cakes. Cornwall and Devon are great for afternoon teas :-)

After all at work we have a 'lunch' hour in the middle of the day, and often say to colleagues we'll do something after 'lunch'. But, hang on schools have 'dinner ladies', and then restuarants have a lunch menu and a dinner menu. Oh, and then there are pubs that do Sunday lunch...

Confusing or what?

Locked Out

Interesting day yesterday. Got up, had some breakfast and then decide to go for a walk around Beacon Hill as it was a lovely sunny autumn day.

As we had some some gardening the previous weekend, we had some garden waste to take to the tip, so decided to take that before going to Beacon Hill.

Had a lovely walk around Beacon Hill, and then popped in to Tesco's for some potatoes for the roast we were having for dinner.

Arrived back at the house at about 1:30 but couldn't actually get into our house until 3:30!

The problem was we'd left the house via the garage, and I had forgotten to take the bolt off the front door before we left. We use the bolt to lock the door when we are in, and overnight. So when we returned, Kirsten unlocked the door with the key, but it wouldn't open due to it being bolted at the top.

A few phone calls later and an hour and a half wait the cavalry arrived in the form of a Locksmith. Fortunately we have a conservatory, so he set about drilling through the lock in the French doors. 30 mins later he's in and we can finally have some lunch...

After fitting replacement lock barrels everything was put right, apart from the £140 dent in my wallet!

Long walk...

Last week I was on holiday in Dartmoor with my wife and a few friends. We spent most of the week walking. On Thursday most of the group wanted a rest day, but Helen and myself thought it would be better to go out for a short walk.

In the morning we did a quick walk before we returned to the cottage for a nice brunch. We then decided to another longer circular walk in the afternoon as it was such a lovely sunny day.

The above is a picture of the route we took. It took us 5 hours, and I estimated it was about 10Km. However, I was wrong, it was actually 16Km or 10 miles! That probably explains why my legs were sore on the Friday morning. 

We did make one small route mistake. Annoyingly it was really close to the end, when the cottage was almost in sight.  

Highlight of the walk was crossing 4 rivers via stepping stones, oh and sitting on a rock in the sun drinking a can of cider each.

All in all a nice afternoon walking, and I even managed to keep up with Helen who is like a mountain goat with it seems like constant energy.

Magic

I've had an interest in magic since childhood. Earlier this year I saw David Copperfield live in Las Vegas and was completely amazed with his illusions whilst having no idea about how he does them.

Yesterday I found this amazing act whilst browsing through YouTube on my AppleTV...



I think you'll agree that they have got talent.

Please comment if you can tell me how it's done, especially the bit at the end with the confetti.

Dumb American blonde

Amazing how stupid some Americans are...

Wii Fit

This is the game that every Nintendo Wii owner should get...

Bad Apple

Some would say I am an Apple fan boy. Well not everything Apple does is good. Take blogging for example. I have the Apple iLife suite and this contains an application for Web site creation called iWeb (original name there Apple!).

Well I created a blog using it and I'm sorry to say it's rubbish. Firstly, it takes ages to display, so I'd expect most visitors to just give up. Secondly, on IE7 you get a page error, and finally the RSS and Search bits don't work. If you want to look at how bad it is check it out here Mac Blog

From an authoring point of view, it's not that good either, for example I can only edit the pages from one machine, and it takes quite a while to upload any new posts added.

So I've given up and switched over to blogger instead.

Goatee

Last weekend I was away camping for 4 days so didn’t shave. When I got back home I decided not to have a full shave, and leave a goatee.

It’s been almost a week now. What do you think, should I keep it, or shave it off?

Apple TV

I was fortunate to get an Apple TV for my birthday. My wife and family clubbed together to get me the 160Gb version. I really wanted one, but didn’t expect to get one for my birthday.

I set it up yesterday evening, and being an Apple product this was really easy. It’s is really simple to use, as the remote only has 5 buttons. Kirsten was really impressed by the YouTube integration and that she could watch her favourite clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno and search for other cute cat ones.

Overnight all my media was sync’ed from my desktop iMac. I thought it would take a lot longer as it was over 80Gb worth via WiFi.

One of my favourite features is being able to view my digital photos easily and see them from the comfort of the sofa on a large screen. Must sort my pictures out though, as I now have getting on for 11,000!

Now I need to find a new home for my Roku Soundbridge, as this is much better, and I don’t need to leave a machine on 24-7 serving up the music.

Cropredy

Our 5! man tent. I think they were exaggerating a bit, as 3 would be more like it.

More pictures from Cropredy are on my web gallery. Cropredy Web Gallery

Kirsten and I spent the last weekend, a long one :-) at the Cropredy music festival. Our friend Stu invited us, and Kirsten wanted to experience camping (sleeping in a tent etc.) as she’d never done that before.

I must admit I didn’t know what to expect. I’d been to a music festival before many years ago(1999 I think!). This was completely different. For starters it was quite a small festival, only 20,000 people. Next, the campsite organisation was great. You parked up in a field and pitched your tent next the car, so no lugging all the gear a few miles from the car park to the camping area. The facilities were amazing for what was a farmers field for 51 weeks of the year. Portacabin style toilets with hot and cold running water, which were checked and cleaned every hour or so, and shower units if you didn’t mind queuing for hours, and a mobile cash dispenser.

We met up with some of Stu’s friends from blogging and geocaching, and set up our tents in a group with a central seating area. They were lovely people and really generous with food and beer. We had home-made lamb burgers, a whole roast chicken and a sausage hot pot. Put our soup tins and pot noodles to shame...

The music... well it was Folk. I wasn’t sure about this before I got there, it’s not like my iTunes library contains any. But, I actually liked it as it was proper musicians playing real instruments. There is something about a guitar and a fiddle (violin). We didn’t see all the acts only the ones in the evening, as it was too sunny to sit in a open field all afternoon.

There was only one stage, so it was easy, just find a spot and stay there. The village of Cropredy gets into to the whole event, and the two pubs have fringe music festivals. We spent a few hours at ‘The Red Lion’ on the Friday, drinking, eating, and listening to some Blues.

Think we might go again next year...