Birthday Pics (at last!)

This was a post that was meant to appear on my birthday, but was tragically gobbled up by the internet gremlins. They hate me. I hate them. It has taken me a long time to regroup from the loss, but Andrew is heckling me, so here I (resentfully) (stupid gremlins) go:


My new home is at 6a Raven Road in Sheffield.



This is my street. The houses are all joined together. This is a really great idea in principle. Unfortunately there is an unemployed singing teenager living next to my bedroom (I put him in the same box as the gremlins... I hope they enjoy each other).



Lavender grows right outside of my house! A really big bush! With bumblebees. I like it a lot.



There are these little alleys between the joined up houses. If you walk down this one and look left, you will see my front door. If you go through that gate, you'll get to my garden, where we keep the bikes and the herbs that we steal from the neighbors.




C'mon in! (Careful, the stairs are steep!)



Downstairs, we have the kitchen (now thankfully sans Buddhists),



and the lounge, complete with fire place,



comfy chairs, and sheep. If you go upstairs,



and along the hall,



you'll get to my favourite room in the house. I love the bath. It loves me. No gremlins allowed.



I guess that just leaves my bedroom (OUR bedroom, Ed.), where I sleep and work. It looks pretty different now; a lot can happen in six months. We have new furniture, including a desk for me, which means that I can't work in bed any more. I blame the gremlins. Stupid gremlins.

Anyway, this is my house. I like living here. I like my housemates (I like them now, a lot has changed in six months). I like most of my neighbors (except the singing gremlin boy), I like the neighborhood (I can run around and there is a bakery and a green grocer and a scuba diving shop). So all that's missing is you.

Laura's New Haircut & Wedding Rumours

(Here is Laura talking about her new haircut...)

So most of you (who had a chance) didn't even notice. But I DID actually cut seven inches off of my hair. It was really fun. I haven't been to a hair salon in years, because my lovely and talented sister Sarah has been my hairdresser extraordinaire. However, Sarah has been temporarily replaced by Emma, my new friend at the Toni & Guy salon in Sheffield. I was a little uncertain about making my appointment, as Toni&Guy have levels of stylists, and I had no idea which level to choose. (i chose the cheapest one, in the end.) Thank goodness, as Emma was just about as much stylist as I could handle. The higher level ladies and gentlemen would have had no idea what to do with me. And vice versa. Emma had a kind of mod Marie-Antoinette thing going on, with a bouffant hair-do, very pink cheeks, big fake eyelashes and a fake mole. She was cool. I am still not quite cool, but here is what Emma and I came up with:




(this one is my favorite, as it obscures most of ME and just puts Emma's handiwork on display)



Oh well. Maybe if I keep this stylist thing going... I won't always look like a potato.
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Okay, I'm signing on to talk briefly about wedding stuff. Obviously a lot of conversations are taking place at the moment on what may or may not happen wedding-wise, and I'm sure everyone is excited to hear about our plans. Well, here's all we can tell you right now.

One, we don't have any definite plans yet, and we won't have any definite plans (not even a definite time frame) until April at the earliest - that is, once we know where Laura intends to research her PhD. Once we know that we'll be in a better position to discuss where a ceremony and reception might take place (viz. which side of the Atlantic) and when (viz. a time when we are both living on the same side of said ocean). Two, we're happy to hear people's suggestions of what you would like to see/hear/eat/do during our wedding. The Big Day is all about us sharing our happiness with all of you, so naturally we'd like to know how you think we might best do this. Three, the only thing we're pretty sure we don't want is something heavily traditional. It is unlikely to be a ceremony in a church, followed by a reception in a hotel or a castle or anything. We want the focus of attention to be our friends and family getting together to have fun and get to know each other, so we'll be focusing our efforts on creating a happy, fun and relaxed environment in which that can take place.

We look forward to hearing any suggestions that you might have. Nothing is too outlandish! Let your imagination run wild.

The Good News

Something wonderful happened on Saturday, January 13th: Andrew proposed, and I accepted.


(Thanks to Lucy for the photo!)

It was a wonderful, terrifying, completely surprising moment, and I am still recovering. We both walk around with silly grins. I am trying out the word 'fiancé' and calling everyone I know. (not calling them 'fiancé', of course...) Until we know more about where we will be living (due to jobs, PhDs, etc) we are trying our very hardest not to talk too much about plans and dates and practical things like that. But the reality check is made easier by my beautiful new ring...





(Andrew discovered that it's surprisingly difficult to take good pictures of a diamond ring!)

Sparkle, sparkle.

Hooray for the Local Government Association!

I sent them an email to express my support for the 'War on Waste' campaign they have just launched. The campaign involves proposals to tax people who do not recycle their household waste. I received the following interesting email, with more details about the scheme, in reply...

Dear Mr Howat
Thankyou for your comments regarding the launch of the Local Government Association 'War on Waste campaign' that was launched this week.

I will be passing on your comments to Cllr Bettison, and I am sure he will be delighted by your support. I also wanted to let you know a couple of the points of what the campaign is trying to do and say.

In terms of the 'save as you throw' proposals, we are very keen to stress that this would not be an extra tax. The way it would work is that there would be a cut in council tax and then you would pay for the rubbish you throw away. The UK is the only country in Europe (and indeed most of the western world) that doesn't have some sort of scheme like this. One argument that has been put forward to me is that we would not expect to pay, say, £300 for as much petrol as we wanted to drive our cars on the roads for the year - we have to pay for it by the gallon. In that respect why should rubbish be any different?

If I may, I would like to make a couple of other points. We are not calling for every council in the country to use these powers. If the local people and the council felt it was the best way forward to help cut the amount of rubbish thrown away then that would be up to them. As a country, we are facing some tough challenges in the long term. We are running out of landfill space and the UK is set to be hit with landfill fines by the European Union if it doesn't reduce its' reliance on simply throwing away our rubbish - which according to the National Audit Office, will mean that by 2013 councils, and therefore taxpayers, will be subjected to £205million in fines. Not only that, but the cost of throwing our rubbish away is going to almost double to £4.2billion by 2013.

We are anxious that council tax and bills that council taxpayers are kept as low as possible and therefore, by cutting the amount of waste we throw away each year, we can keep bills down.

On a final note, our campaign is not just about local people and throwing rubbish away and hopefully in the coming weeks you will see the LGA turn its attention away from what local people can do to what manufacturers can do. Over the coming weeks we will be targeting the producers of rubbish as well. From supermarkets who wrap their coconuts in clingfilm, to the amount of junk mail, to the amount of space taken up by disposable nappies, we will heap the pressure on those who make the waste in the first place to try and help them to help us keep council tax bills down and preserve the environment for future generations.

I hope this provides some information on what we are hoping to achieve.

Kind regards

Richard Stokoe
Chief Media Officer
Local Government Association

Organ Donation

This is for all the UK citizens (Scots) & subjects (the rest of you) among you,

this petition seems to me to be in favour of a worthy cause, those who agree can sign up by following this link, supplying a valid email address, then following the link they will shortly receive at that address...

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Organ-Donation/

Now all we need is for our attitudes to death and organ donation to shift in the same enlightened way they have in Spain. Luckily our housemate Jane is thinking of pursuing research into exactly this topic, so I'm sure she'll have a cultural sea change under way in no time.

Announcing the iPhone

You all know I'm a big Apple fan, and that I like to keep up to date with latest technology. It shouldn't therefore be that big a surprise to me when I read about next the next leap forward, and yet for some reason I find this thing rather jawdropping. It reminds me of the scene in Casino Royale when Bond is following a map to his Hawiian resort on his carefully product-placed, futuristic Sony Ericsson phone. Only now it turns out it's not only not futuristic, it's positively behind the times! Does anyone else suspect these will become the next must-have, flying-off-the-shelves e-accessory?

How Much Fun is This?

Check this out for hours of hypnotizing fun. My favourite is the one with the crank handle.