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Yesterday evening saw myself and Jon enjoying a cosy evening at home. He had only the 25th and 26th off from work but had schlepped into London early on Thursday and Friday so that he could come home at a nice hour of the evening, 5:30 rather than 9:15.

We pottered off to Sainsbury’s to get the tuna and sweetcorn which we needed to my our usual Friday evening comfort meal of… Tuna and Sweetcorn Pasta. We do at the very least make our white sauce from scratch. He bought 4 bottles of Cobra beer for him, and 4 for me, mine sans alcohol of course. The supermarket was reasonably empty which allowed us to endulge in our our favourite evening out past-time - (yes going shopping is as much ‘an evening out’ that we usually manage) namely making remarks ranging from the snide through to the silly to the downright lewd (usually from me as I can be a complete gutter-bunny). Yesterday there wasn’t much to comment on other than the very cruddy looking surplus Christmas crackers and the interesting choice of wares out on display on the temporary shelves that they put at the end of the gondolas. Pringles, Condoms and Lube… that gave us something to snigger at.

Afterwards we came home to two annoyed cats who wanted food, attention in the shape of food, and reparations for our selfish abandonment of them in the form of food. We ignored them and put on the Now Show to start cooking.

Later on that evening we settled down to a perfect scene of domestic tranquility, Jon working with his new Arduino kit which had arrived earlier in the day. After about 10 minutes he disappeared up into the loft to bring down his ‘Boxes o’ Stuff’ which contain other electronics kits and the soldering iron which was the first present he ever bought me. So followed an evening of him soldering and poking code and stuff while I sat and knitted on the matinee jacket I’ve been working on for a few weeks from a vintage 1946 knitting book.

All while listing to audio books on the Slim Devices player… All in all, very geeky, even nerdy at times, and homey.

Saturday morning saw Jon and myself setting off from Dublin where we had spent the previous week eating our body weight in cooked breakfasts, and in my case in Mikados. It was a nice break, the cats didn’t spurn us, Jon managed to collect a handful more stars in Super Mario Galaxy, and we got to see a number of family friends and babies of many ages including a brand new 5 week old one ( a little boy, but Jon doesn’t consider him a threat to our still-bump of a girl quite yet)

Thankfully, for Jon and myself as navigator, the journey from my parent’s house in Templeouge (not Ballyboden, stupid Google) to Dublin Port was stress free - I can’t say it wasn’t uneventful because we had the radio on at the time.

There is something unique about Irish Radio, or at least that is how it seems to me and I don’t really listen to much other than Radio 4 and 7. I can recall waking up on Saturday mornings to adverts for sheep dip on RTE Radio 1. Although the most traumatic has to have been being woken up by my parent’s previous radio, which sounded awful as it had suffered greatly form being knocked over by a cat, vomiting out Bohemian Rhapsody.

What’s that you say? What’s wrong with Bohemian Rhapsody?

Well, nothing of course, it’s a cracking song, it is a seminal work. But I’m not talking about Queen’s recording, what I am talking about is a cover. By De Dannan with traditional Irish musical instruments. The effect is, well effecting, and that’s all I can say about it.

My general response was to lie on the futon in my room screaming ‘What the Fucking Hell is that God awful Shite?’

And I’m not generally prone to swearing, and not at 8am on a Saturday morning in my parents ‘house. My mother thought it was quaint, the music, she didn’t care about the screaming, and joyously informed me that the same band had done a cover of the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba in a similiar style. I laid my head on the table and wept for Handel.

Thankfully for me, Jon and my baby the radio this time didn’t illicit such violent outbursts, but we were left on two occasions with a ‘wtf’ moment.

Firstly as we drove through the KCR and through Harold’s Cross it was the fact of Songs Sung in the French Language, two of them. This amused me as a voracious Dorothy L Sayers reader.

Then not long after we were treated to The new Supergrass single. The choices of the presenter were ecelectic to say the least. But nothing can beat Jon’s reaction to the presenter’s statement after the single finished…

‘I love a good Polka’ and, sure enough, hard on the heels of an energetic Supergrass track came an equally energetic Polka.

We had arrived at the port at this stage so escaped from the Polka by going to get a cup tea. We then returned to the car to hear some odd tune followed by - in a rural Irish accent:

‘This tune is well known to all, but not to this girl, she’s never heard it before, and never will, because she is quite deaf’

Jon, who is also quite deaf, when he chooses to be, retorted that she was damn lucky. Still, it was the phrasing as much as the words that had us rolling about laughing, and then we had to pull ourselves together to get the car on the ferry to head home.

While on the ferry, in the very nice Stena Plus lounge we settled in for the 3 hour trip to Holyhead. Jon bought himself some wifi access and actually wrote his first blog post in over a year! He seems to have abandoned xanthein.net and is now over at www.jonstill.com . I’m not sure of the reason for the domain change, perhaps impending fatherhood is causing him to cast of to some extent his old irc screen name (and given that I met him on irc he was initially xanthein to me, I was sunbug but never had that as a domain ) and embrace the real world…

I don’t think its anything so deep. He’s been mucking around with a new WordPress theme for ages on the jonstill.com domain and likes it better. He can be so finnicky!

For lack of anything to do while catching up on laundry before we take the insane night crossing to Dublin on early Sunday morning - which means we will be driving to Holyhead on Saturday evening/night, I’ve started playing again with Widgets in OS X. I’ve resumed poking the mplayer controller widget I started a few months back - I was hoping it would stop me forgetting to record shows form BBC’s listen again (we do have MythTV but I’m told it needs more tweakage ;-p )
Today, I’ve started plugging it together using jQuery. I just can’t be doing with all that getElementById nonsense to be honest.. Hopefully I’ll have something vaguely working before the mad rush to pack starts. At least I have found out how to turn on the debug menu in Safari, since that’s the best browser for testing your widgets before releasing them to the wild it seems.

To turn it on (and it’s not a patch on FireBug, but what is?)

• Quit Safari
• Open a terminal window
• Type defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
• Relaunch  Safari

I did order the Visual Quick Start Widget book ages ago but it seems to be getting  delayed and delayed, at least that is what Amazon tells me. The same has been happening with the Ruby in a Nutshell book, which is most annoying. I had set myself the pre-birth/maternity leave project of learning Ruby, while my husband paints the nursery.