Author: jane

Adult Cereals

We were in the new look Sainsbury’s in West Hove yesterday, browsing along the cereal aisle, and then we spotted it – “Adult Cereals”. This isn’t really a term I’ve ever come across before, I’d considered Cereals as a whole category, or maybe with sub-categories, such as muesli or cornflakes or whatever. So, does this mean that to differentiate the regular, every-day kind of cereal they need to be rebranded as adult cereal?

For the interested, the cereal offered in “Adult Cereals” were things like Fruit and Fibre and All Bran. Definitely NOT more interesting than frosties, cocoa pops or rice crispies.

Sunday bike ride – 24.5 miles!

Clouds and South Downs Way

We headed off for a quick bike ride today, and ended up getting home 4 hours later after a catalogue of missed turns and optimism that resulted in a 24.5 mile ride. Our first obstacle was getting through the cyclists and spectactors watching the Triathlon, from then on we were aiming to do a route we used to do quite often, but somewhere along the way we missed our turn and so ended up heading along the South Downs Way for a while. We took a look on the OS map and decided to head towards Southease railway station and catch a train back to Brighton – we even used the power of mobile internet to check that they run on a Sunday. We rolled up at the station (after heading off down the wrong road to Piddinghoe for a mile or so) about 5 minutes before the train was due only to discover that there were maintenance works on the line and they were running a replacement bus service. We didn’t think the bus would like us and our bikes very much and so turned around and headed via Telscombe and back to Brighton stopping at Ovingdean for a slice of cake and a can of fizzy pop.

The Undercliff walk

We tracked our route using the GPS unit on my Nokia 6110 navigator, and have added it to our collection of GPS routes.

World Beard and Moustache Championships


Musketeer bear
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

On Saturday, the World Beard and Moustache Championships were held at the Brighton Centre.

The event started, for the public (and for us thanks to a tip off from Andy) with a parade from the town hall, through the lanes to the Brighton Centre before starting for proper an hour or so later. Prior to the event starting, I thought it would all be a bit of a joke, but I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer amount of effort that people had gone to, especially their costumes. As if growing a large amount of facial fur wasn’t enough, at least one guy had painted himself silver for the occasion.

We met up with friends and headed off and the girls watched the ‘tache competition whilst the boys spend an hour (yes really) queueing for beer at the bar (which had 5 members of staff serving for 2,300 people – nice). After finally getting our beer we sat down in comfort for the freestyle moustache and the partial beard categories. Jeremy, Kirsty and Rory headed home mid way through partial beards, and we spotted Dom, Fiona and Amelia and so went and watched a few more rounds with them before deciding we were all bearded out and needed to head home.

There are, of course, more photos to be perused. The next championships is in 2 years time in Alaska, somehow I don’t expect we’ll be attending.

Dosas


Dosa at Waves
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

Many thanks to Andy for telling us about Waves in Hove. They are a Dosa Diner, and carry dosas as well as idli, pooris and other indian “street food”.

We headed out there this evening and gave them a try, and we’ll be back having had a most satisfying eat on dhai poori, masala dosa for me and a spring dosa for Richard. All washed down with a glass of red for Richard, and a couple of sweet lassis for me.

More snowboarding news

Further to my blog after our Performance course, I’ve since learnt about The Snowboard Show being held at the Tamworth snowdome in September. Amongst the demos and talks there are also some free coaching sessions, 2 of which are Freeride technique with the instructor from the Performance course, Ash Newnes. All you have to do to get on one of the sessions is to register by sending an email to the address at the bottom of this page. We’ve booked on to the Rail Technique session to see what we can learn.

In other news we’re looking at places to go for snowboarding over New Year. In recent years we’ve been to Avoriaz, Meribel and Utah. Ideally we want somewhere reasonably high up to make sure that there is some chance of snow, somewhere an hour or two from the airport, and most importantly somewhere that hasn’t got a minimum stay of less than 4 nights. Any suggestions? Or do you know of someone with an appartment to rent? Leave us a comment

Planning our big trip

We’ve also started planning our big trip for next year – a month long snowboarding adventure. At the moment it is looking like being based around Montana, Idaho and Portland, and making use of the Alaska Airlines schedule to get around, but all that could change. I’m hoping that the Off the Beaten Path USA trip report will offer some more insights as the guy who wrote that had some good suggestions for our Utah trip. Again, any suggestions? leave us a comment.

Performance Snowboard course

We spent the weekend taking the excellent SnowboardCoach.co.uk 2 day Performance Course at Xscape in Milton Keynes. We were a group of 8, and Ash managed to keep an eye on all of us giving feedback and advice – my main area to keep an eye on is not to use my upper body/shoulders to initiate turns. We did lots of drills, some designed to get us to understand the physics behind snowboarding, others to emphasise a point. An excellent course, which has really given me a desire to head off back to Milton Keynes soon and continue my practice.

Moo’s Hot and Sticky Party


Suits for stickering
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

On Thursday Richard and I headed off into London with a load of other Brighton geeks to Moo’s Hot and Sticky Party. Richard managed to attend another moo party earlier in the year in San Francisco and after hearing about that there was no way I was missing out on this one. This party was to launch another new product – sticker books and we got to take away samples (as well as stick them on each other, moo employees etc etc).

We met some new faces, put faces to names (especially Will and Tom who I’ve known of for years but weirdly never met) as well as catching up with someone I haven’t seen in over 5 years.

A great party put on by a company who obviously know how to celebrate! I even got 2 photos included in the moo blog post about the evening. More photos.

Tour de France

Our weekend revolved around the Tour de France. On Saturday we headed into London for the Prologue. We arrived at Victoria and wandered along to Hyde Park with the intention of soaking up the atmosphere, watching some of the time trials and investigating the People’s village.

Prologue - Warm up in front of a large audience

Our first observation was just how busy it was. The cyclists were out warming up around the route, and so as we walked along South Carriage Drive we watched the cyclists whoosh past. The last cycle race I saw was when I was a child and the milk race came to Hull. My memories from that day were just how fast the cyclists were, but I imagined I’d overestimated this in my memory. Not so, admittedly this was a time trial, but it was amazingly fast. We spent 2 or 3 hours in the park before heading back to Brighton, just in time to watch Fabian Cancellara’s winning ride.

On Sunday we headed off with friends into Kent to Iden Green and found ourselves a spot near the road by The Peacock. We arrived really early and watched more and more people arrive to watch both the caravane and the race later. The riders were amazing to watch (albeit briefly). The breakway group of 5 were followed by at least 10 vehicles, possibly more like 15. The main group came along 4 or 5 minutes later.

Stage One - Caravane

A great couple of days, and quite a spectacle. Looking forward to it coming back to the UK again soon but in the meantime I’ll have to make do with the ITV4 coverage and the ITV and BikeRadar podcasts. More photos

Family trees

I did quite a bit of work on my family tree years ago and bought a copy of Family Tree Maker at the time. Since then I’ve installed it on machine after machine until now, when I have a mac and don’t want to install parallels just to run a very old version of FTW. Instead I downloaded a copy of MacFamilyTree which is quite a pleasant application, and works well with the GED file exported from FTW, but seems to be short on a couple of useful features whilst still in demo mode, and until I know what those features are like I don’t particularly want to spend $50.

Yesterday Aral twittered about Geni and Richard quickly sent me the link. It looks like quite a nice way to get a quick visualisation of your family tree, and is very usable, allowing you to invite other members of your family to contribute. Unfortunately for me there is no way to import GEDCOM files yet and until then it won’t become a usable solution as I’m not about to retype 150 or so peoples data in. Sigh!

Recipe book index rant

I was looking in a recipe book for the recipe for moussaka. I knew I’d made moussaka before, and I was convinced that this was the correct book. I looked in the index and couldn’t find it listed, I flicked through the book and didn’t find it. Then I remembered, the recipe was called “red bean moussaka”. I looked in the index under red and there it was.

This isn’t the only recipe book to have this problem, in my experience recipe book indexes are often hopeless, in fact at least one recipe book doesn’t have one (preferring instead to list every recipe in the table of contents).

So, what should the index contain? I’m happy for the index not to divide food into sections – i.e. starters, main, vegetable etc as long as they do that in chapters or something. For me, the index should contain a list of food stuffs, and every recipe in which it is a major ingredient, so:

lamb
– moussaka
– rogan josh
– roast
etc
thus allowing me to find recipes based on what I have to hand.