Lost a Budgie?

If you've lost a dozen or so Plain Parakeets recently, they were in my neighbour's garden earlier making a bit of a racket.

Last seen heading West by North West.



I know it's not a very good picture, so here's an identikit close-up...

My Day In Pictures

I've been working at home this week which means that apart from phone calls and 2 grocery trips I've not left the house or had much human contact.

I was getting a little stir-crazy last night so I decided to go for a walk today along Regent's Canal from Limehouse DLR to Kingsland Road.

I followed the canal towpath (and not the roads), but this is a rough route map:

http://snipurl.com/regents_canal [http://maps.google.com]

Here's some pictures I took along the way...

First off, I was amazed how quickly the noise and bustle of Commercial Road turned into this tranquil little haven. Literally, a staircase with about a dozen steps separated the main road from this.

A little park about 10 minutes along the canal. I found another staircase back to the smog, got a coffee and brought it here.

Some barges. There were a couple of dozen in total along the stretch of canal I walked. Most were up by Victoria Park though.

Some little duckies (Moorhens?). There were a fair few of these little chappies.

Big duckies. These were the only ones I saw.

Haggerston Gasworks.

One of the avenues running through Victoria Park. I didn't spend much time here, but there's a lake that probably has a nice view in winter. It's blocked by bull rushes at the moment.

Someone with a sense of humour has decorated a few of the mooring points like this.

A mural on the side of what is presumably Ron's Eel and Shell Fish Shop.

I'm feeling a lot more relaxed now as you can probably tell from my writing. I might keep this as one of my secret little happy places.

Unless I accidentally post the photos all over the the Internet. D'oh!

Halloween Cake, Part I

I know it's still 3-and-a-bit weeks to go, but I'm already planning Halloween. To be fair, it's not really that far in advance given that Christmas decorations are already on sale in supermarkets...

Anyway, I need to try and one-up my cakey offering from last year, which to remind you was the following (can you believe I've been here a year already?):



So here's the concept sketch for this year's effort. I'm thinking of two whole cakes stacked on top of each other to get the height and then cover it in royal icing or marzipan (or both). I might even put some of the rumtopf fruit in it for good measure.



Watch this space for progress...

Going too far

So you've probably all worked out by now that I have a bit of a geek streak running through me. I play to it sometimes and most people seem to know when I'm joking and when I'm serious.

I might have gone a bit too far today though. Someone at work asked me if it was my birthday last week (which it was) and I said yes. They asked how old I was and without batting an eyelid I replied:

"35. I'm really excited because it's a multiple of two primes, and next year is a square number."

To be honest *I'm* not sure if I was joking or not.


P.S. And the year after *that* is a prime, too, but then it goes downhill for a while...

Chocolate Brownies

Something I've been meaning to try for a while is to bake some brownies. I found a recipe on Thursday that looked pretty good so I gave it a go...

Ingredients. Strangely I couldn't find anywhere that sells Cookeen any more so I got some weird "Stork for Pastry". Whatever that is...

Melt the fat then add quite a lot of cocoa.

Mix!

Add sugar. I hope this is right - it looks a bit 'odd'.

Add some vanilla, eggs and a bit of salt. Mix again!

Bake. I made one batch with some chopped walnuts and one with chocolate chips. This is the walnut, but I think the chocolate one was better by a long way.

Architect's Conundrum

So you're designing a new building, but the one at the existing location has some sort Listed status / preservation order on the street-facing wall.

What to you do?

a) Find a different site to erect (pffft) your masterpiece.

b) Get the building de-Listed then tear it all down in one go.

c) Shore up the Listed wall with scaffolding and some serious steelwork, tear down the rest of the building and then tuck a new one in behind it.

The answer, of course, is (c).

Street view. Just another load of scaffolding in the City?

Side view.

Crazy stuff. (Click for bigger).

I saw this on the 149 on the way home from my brother's flat the other week and hopped off the bus to take these. You can see the monument at, er, Monument in the background of picture number 2 - it's also up in scaffolding while they clean it.

Smoke On!

No, not the cigarette sort of smoke. The sort that's trailed out of a canister strapped to the tail of a light aircraft flying at about 200mph, 20 metres above the River Thames.

I went to the Qualifying Day for the Red Bull Air Race, London leg today (well, Saturday), and "smoke on" is the instruction given to pilots to switch on the smoke trail at the start of their run.

It was a fab day - the planes were shockingly fast, and it's hard to describe just how amazing some of the flying was. I didn't get any photos, but there was a random guy there who had a camera with a zoom lens bigger than my forearm, so I asked him if he'd mind emailing me his flickr url once he's uploaded some pictures.

In the mean time, here's some from another flickr account I found from last year's London race. Last week's Rotterdam leg will also be on the Channel 4 Catch Up site for another 4 days (there's a bit at 03:30 that shows how fast it all is)...

http://www.channel4.com/video/brandless-catchup.jsp?vodBrand=red-bull-air-race-2008