Crawley

I'm far too happy these days to write a blog. See, I even wrote one last week, but had some network problem and couldn't get it to publish itself properly. But I was so loved up that I just left it. Here it is again, posted as an embedded blog entry:

I got my girlfriend back, date, like, Monday 18th May 2009.

It was my girlfriend's birthday on Wednesday, and to celebrate we took ourselves away on a short trip to Birmingham, the UK's second city. We did Hurst Street (the gay village) on Friday night, then (after a long cuddle in bed) spent Saturday morning in the city centre shopping, and in the city museum.

We'd gone to Brum to visit the annual show of the British Tarantula society - my girl being an aficionado of invertebrates. We did that on Sunday, and came back with a lot more creepy-crawlies than planned: 3 tarantulas, 2 scorpions, 3 mantids and 11 stick insects. We're such nerds.

^{Pandimus cavimanus, the Tanzanian Red-Claw. You probably shouldn't use flash photography on scorpions.}

It was a great weekend otherwise. My girl has been on a course of medicine which has made her seem pretty distant, and the last month has not been easy. But that's over now, and it's like a new relationship again, except better because we know each other better.

It's probably really stupid to embed a blog entry inside another blog entry like that, but I don't care. I'm too loved up to worry about that.

This weekend we were at my place. We spent saturday working in the garden with friends, mostly knocking walls down and clearing up rubble. Had a barbecue, drank a beer or two, that kind of thing.

The poor girl is not used to an honest day's work.
<-

That was Saturday. The rest of one's weekend was pretty productive as well: on the Sunday the girl and I went for a long walk with the dog – romantic, good for the dog, and good for the mantid too – it didn't come with us, but I picked up it's breakfast from there. In the afternoon we whizzed round a nearby leading Swedish furniture store, and cooked up another barbecue in the afternoon. We've perfected the following bits of cooking, well, maybe not perfected but they were nice:

BBQ Bananas with flake
BBQ Popcorn

Recipes available upon request

Monday was a Bank Holiday. Made breakfast for my girl and packed her off to work , then took my bike around Tilgate Forest for the first time this year. It was fun, and I've missed it a bit.

^{Tilgate Forest just before it gets too overgrown to see anything.}

Spent the afternoon working on a puter which I'm trying to get working right (long story) watching a movie (Loving Annabelle, v. cute but slightly disturbing in a teenage-girl-meets-older-woman kind of way), playing with my Pandinus cavimanus* and other invertebrates, and generally doing things. Nothing exciting, but made me happy.



*not literally playing with it - it's a frakking scorpion, for frak's sake.