All set!
Leftover slice of pizza and blackberry and apple crumble for brunch.
Tomorrow’s veggies almost all done.
✅ Roasted carrots and parsnips.
✅ Mashed potatoes.
✅ Roasted potatoes.
Plan for tomorrow:
🥕 Prepare and cook veggies for xmas lunch
🍿 Watch Sonic 3 with kids at cinema
🛏️ Get kids off to bed and sleep early (haha)
🎅 Get my Santa outfit on and deliver presents (which this year are already wrapped)
Quite the confession.
Gabriel said the agency duped Hezbollah into buying the pagers, making advertising films and brochures, and sharing them on the internet.
“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad,” he said. “We make like [movie] Truman Show, everything is controlled by us behind the scene.”
Little kid sleeps in his own bed for about three or four hours before waking up crying and climbing into ours.
At least he now just goes straight back to sleep instead of wanting to be awake and playing for two hours.
The last three nights I’ve gone to bed very late and missed all the drama. I’ve slept so much better as a result.
Unfortunately, getting up at 8:30 in the morning isn’t sustainable when the kids go back to school.
Big kid has been enjoying CrossFit exercises at school and at home.
Big kid: “Hey Google! What’s an air squat?”
Google: “An escort is a call girl or a prostitute….”
Me: “Hey Google! STOP!!!”
After numerous attempts at therapising my toaster (“WTF is wrong with you, you stupid machine!") I realised that it was too depressed to talk.
I put myself in the toaster’s shoes and realised it was burnt out. It was full of crumbs (golden memories of bagels, crumpets, muffins and waffles past). Attempted arson was simply its way of communicating that it couldn’t take any more.
I unreservedly apologise to my toaster for this gross defamation.
Toast in the Machine davidmarsden.info
United losing 3-0 at home to Bournemouth with an hour gone.
Bring back baldie!
Anyone know why some of my blog posts have a “thumbnail” screenshot image of the post attached to them? Seems to be a micro.blog thing (a plug-in?). @help
Ten months on and bath night is getting easier.
Now all I have to do is say, “Who’s going to get in Eli’s bath first? Will it be Eli? Or will it be Dad?”
Quick as a flash he’s stripped and running to the bathroom to beat me.
Xmas pizza.
…what’s important (as everyone who writes always says), is simply to write (and publish). Nothing’s ever finished or perfect, and it doesn’t need to be.
That’s from my first year on micro.blog post.
I missed my two year micro.blog anniversary because I was too busy breathing.
At the heart of neoliberalism is the fantasy of escape: escape from taxation and regulation, escape from the European Union and international law, escape from social obligation, escape from democracy. Escape, eventually, to a starlit wonderland beyond politics and beyond people.
Currently reading: The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot 📚
Xmas Past.
I listen to Jamendo so you don’t have to
Nice tree, but it makes walking on the pavement almost impossible if you’re over five feet tall.
Xmas in Little India.
…streets were relatively clean, traffic lights and lamp-posts worked, and officers were present in the busiest areas. Simple things absent in other parts of Syria, and a source of pride here.
Traffic lights and lamp-posts usually work in Southall. Seems like Idlib is cleaner and safer?
All we need now is an authoritarian ethno-nationalist leader….
TOAST IN THE MACHINE
Some people seem to find the idea of machine intelligence frightening. And with good reason. Because from where I’m sitting at the breakfast table, the machines around me are mostly dumber than a rock (although that’s a bit unfair to rocks, who are actually very smart).
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My music player has forgotten my wifi name and password and refuses to reconnect.
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My wife’s work laptop is making all kinds of noises trying to attract her attention, oblivious to the fact that she’s not here, and hasn’t been for a good ten minutes.
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There’s our microwave. So many buttons, settings and options. We use it several times a day and only ever tell it to heat food or drink for x number of seconds or minutes. But it’s brainless, and if you don’t keep an eye on it like a small child it will spill your drink or chuck food everywhere.
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My kettle sits quietly now, but I know that when I go to boil water for my tea later it will keep on boiling the water until I manually switch it off, despite all its various settings for different bail temperatures and offers to the keep the water warm.
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And then there’s the expensive toaster. Another one like the kettle that promises to toast (or defrost) every possible variety of bread-based product on its own individual setting, and with six settings for how brown you want it. Wonderful! The grim reality is that there are just two settings. “Untoasted “and “Set the smoke alarm off”.
I’m showing my space-obsessed four year old pictures of Pluto taken by a telescope on a spaceship launched from Earth twenty years ago and I still can’t get a toaster that can do somewhere in between soft, cold bread and cremation.
We shouldn’t laugh. We think Al is dumb, but we elect dumber, and Al will only get less dumb (and more dangerous).
How long before The Mossad detonates my toaster?
In fact, eighteen years ago (I mean, really?) I bought the cheapest toaster I could find in Argos for £10. I plugged it in, put in my rounds of bread and pressed play. Two minutes later, the plastic surround had literally melted.
I would go back to holding a toasting fork over an open fire, but/as my kids point out every Xmas) we don’t have a chimney.
Perfect cheese omelette this morning.
Two eggs whisked lightly for two minutes into a hot pan with melted butter. Added some leftover Gouda sliced cheese and a sprinkling of grated mature cheddar and Double Gloucester, chives, cherry tomatoes quartered.
Served off with parsley, salt and pepper, and a spoonful of sweet, hot jalapenos, and two rounds of burnt toast.
They are reduced to playing a game of politics which lacks any substance, with their only reward (apart from those that might come when they have left office) being the dopamine hits that they get as a consequence of the appearance of their being in power.
Sounds like someone I know.
Via Richard Murphy.
A shame we only get to choose one.
THE LAST SUPPER
Work xmas lunch today was delicious, especially the spiced pear cake for dessert (albeit with the tiniest slice of pear I’ve ever seen).
Company was good, and highlighted how socially inept I am without a couple of pints inside me.
Service was excellent apart from the ridiculous length of time it took to pay the bill. They seemed to need to input each individual course into the till, but couldn’t work out why the total didn’t equal 13 x £16.95 - one of us didn’t order dessert.
Another one of our gathering is likely soon to be deported, which I felt uncomfortably aware of throughout.
This morning’s trees.
My lucky day (NSFW).