glittertigger

I've migrated to Dreamwidth under the same username. Hope to see some of you there.

There was lots of snow in Banbury this morning, so my employer closed up the site at midday and sent us all home. I had a couple of unnerving skids on the way, but am unharmed and the garage up the road just checked over the car which is fine too. So now I can relax and enjoy a long snowy weekend :-)

I've been trying to keep our garden wildlife friendly and am pleased with how it's going. We had a hibernating hedgehog, which has now wandered off somewhere. We have lots of bees. There are birds (coal tits I think) in the nestbox. The pond is full of frogs and their spawn, and I also found frogspawn in a puddle, which I have relocated to the pond. I haven't seen any field mice yet this year, but I doubt they've vanished. And the red kites hover hungrily overhead...

In a brief non-raining moment last weekend zandev took some photos of the garden, which are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zande…

I've just had lunch with some of the nice people from mySociety and they asked me to publicise that they are currently recruiting for several IT roles. Most of these are mainly home-based with occasional days in a London office.

http://www.mysociety.org/jobs/

I've had a bad cold all of this year so far (it almost goes away, leaving me just tired and sniffly for a couple of days, then slowly builds back to the feverish/achy/can't-sleep phase, then back round the cycle) so not having much physical energy, I've been spending lots of time reading. Inspired by triskellian posting a list of everything she read last year, here's what I've read so far this one. Non-fiction first (not much of it, as I haven't had the brainpower to tackle any science books) followed by fiction in alphabetical order, with a high trash quotient owing to the aforementioned feverish cold.

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I've just seen this awesome parody poster. I wish this muppet film really existed.

I spent Friday evening testing two new games from the Cambridge Games Factory. The first was Montana which uses poker hands to bid for control of areas on a map. We played with 3 and 4 players and the maps for different numbers of players seemed well-designed, and the scoring mechanism fairly simple and well-balanced. I didn't see the point of the custom five-suit pack of cards, although the pretty graphics were fine. I would have preferred a traditional pack, so that you didn't need to recalculate all the probabilities, which didn't add significantly to the game. I enjoyed it but I'm not sure I'd play it enough to justify the $23 dollar price tag.

The second game was Pala, based on bidding and trick-taking. The game has six suits based on colours - three primary and three secondary - and there is an interesting colour-mixing component. It's very simple to learn (my host confirmed that he's found it to work for children significantly younger than 11) but allows for plenty of sublety in play. It also supports up to six players (edit: up to five, my mistake) which is useful. At $13 it seems good value and I'll probably buy a copy when it's available over here.

I had good intentions for this morning, but it was raining and I felt lazy, so I spent it reading a Ben Elton book recently passed on to me by a friend. She did warn me it wasn't his best work - I must learn to listen to these warnings...

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Am now heading off to the Oxfam bookshop to play with some better books and do something useful with my day. Hope you are all having an enjoyable weekend.

I just left a book out in the rain and am feeling guilty, not least because it belongs to zandev (sorry!). Is there a special region of hell for people who drown books? Thankfully it's a hardback with a water-resistant cover and is still readable. It's a copy of Wireless, a collection of short stories by Charles Stross, which I started reading when mr_snips told me it contained a Wodehouse spoof involving sex robots in space. Which is true. However, he also warned me that the story was terrible, which is true too. Don't blame me if you read it anyway.

Today has gone well so I thought it was worth recording. I supervised getting electrical issues fixed in two staircases at the flats (two more to go tomorrow), watered both my garden and that of our downhill neighbours (they are lovely and do the same for us when we are away), got some housework done, recycled a big pile of old paperwork, found a fabulous purple hat in a charity shop, had a successful shift at the Oxfam bookshop (the fools left me and a_llusive to run it, and we did just fine) with the highest end-of-day total I've seen yet, and arrived home to the smell of sausages cooking and a gorgeous view of the sunset out of our back window. I'm now off to curl up with a glass of wine and a Pratchett book.