Gingerjo’s Blog

Phew, just got back from day 1 of the Manchester HE Fair. I reckon we gave out about 900 prospectuses so far, which isn’t bad going.  That’s a lot of saying ‘Are there any particular subjects you’re interested in?’.  As usual the most popular were Psychology, Law, Sports Science, Accountancy, Nursing, and Teaching with a good measure of Games and Computing, Life Sciences, History, Business.  There were a larger than usual number of requests for Engineering as well which is great.  Strangely, I don’t remember as many Social Work requests as normal - perhaps it’s popularity is waning.

Got soaked to the skin walking back fom the Metro station though - uggh.  I really hope it’s not raining tomorrow.

Tonight I watched Panorama on GBH in the NHS.  It turns out that if you punch a doctor in the face while in A&E you’ll only get 6 months at the most. Threaten and menace enough nurses and they’ll give you your own treatment room.  Racially abuse a member of staff and it probably won’t even get reported.  Obviously this is where you should go next time you have PMT. Don’t throw things at your boyfriend - beat up a nurse instead. It’ll have far fewer consequences.

I’ve been experimenting in the kitchen in an attempt to find a tasty low fat way to turn spinach into a soup that doesn’t involve cream.  It’s my latest fad spinach - I can’t get enough of it. I’ve looked up lots of spinach soups on the internet but they all seem to involve cream which may taste yummy, but kind of defeats the object. The result was Kermit Soup…

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Mark’s ordered himself a Nintendo Wii from dabs.com.  We have no idea how long it will be before they get them in stock or how many folk are in the queue ahead of us, but at least I won’t get dragged into every Game, Woolworths, Argos, Currys, Comet, and Gamestation store we walk past anymore.  Besides I’m looking forward to playing this tennis game everyone keeps going on about.

I’m ashamed to say it, but I’ve been losing my ginger for some time now.  My hair has slowly been getting darker and darker each year so I’ve finally had to resort to getting my hair highlighted to put the ginger back.  Drastic action I know but it seems the only way - otherwise I’ll have to change my name to ‘brownjo’ or possibly ‘plumpjo’ (although that wayward attribute is also on my hit list). Either way it just won’t do.

It’s blended in very nicely, but because this was only the first treatment I’m still verging on brown (or dark auburn as I keep telling myself).  My hairdresser promises me it will ginger-up significantly next time on the second treatment.  It should also thicken my fine, flyaway mop making it easier to command and less lifeless and flat. That’ll be nice.

For our Saturday activity it was a choice between a day trip to York or Scarborough.  Mark fancied having a nosey at Robin Hood’s Bay which is only a few miles from Whitby on the way to Scarborough, so Scarborough it was. 

To read about our day trip to Scarborough please visit www.gingerjo.me.uk/daytrips/scarborough.html.

For Thursday and Friday of our half term break we decided to visit Whitby.  Mark fancied some bracing sea air and decent fish and chips.

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We went to an advance screening of Hot Fuzz today. Simon Pegg plays a super-cop transferred to the safest village in England by the Met for embarrassing his colleagues by being too damn good at fighting crime. Put simply the plot revolves around his seeing murder where the rest of Sandford Constabulary sees tragic accidents. Populating the village is an impressive Brit cast including Edward Woodwood, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton who plays the smarmy Somerfield manager to perfection.

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Some of Mark’s ancestors must have been miners, or perhaps it’s his caveman instincts coming out, but he seems to want to go down every hole in Wales (steady on).  Last year we visited the National Show Caves (Dan Yr Ogof), the Dolaucothi Gold Mines, the Big Pit National Coal Museum, Electric Mountain at Llanberis, the Sygun Copper Mine near Beddgelert and finally the cave underneath Carreg Cennan Castle near Llandeilo. We also visited the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire as well.

This year’s first underground excursion took us to the Llechwedd Slate Caverns in Blaenau Ffestiniog. (more…)

Now since we were off to see my Mum and Dad in North Wales and Mark always wants to go to Rhyl for it’s …, well, I’m not sure why really, he just does, I finally relented and took a detour on the pretence of visiting Rhuddlan Castle.  Since we have CADW (Welsh Historic Monuments) membership until October we may as well take every opportunity to use our cards even on minor, out of the way, monuments.

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