Here are my two little boys - they just woke up so I got pics of them LOL

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The weather report said it would snow this week and it did start yesterday with 'dandruff' snow, very feeble and dry and powdery. It didn't settle, though in the Midlands Mum said it had settled there (the Midlands is much higher than East Yorkshire).


This morning I woke up and looked out of the window... and along with Naked Guy showering in the bathroom diagonally opposite me (he has frosted glass but you can still get a good look PMSL) - apart from him I saw SNOW!!!



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Vista is a pile of crap. I don't care how much the little geeky boys swoon over it, it's a steaming turd.


After a crappy day I decided to watch Musa The Warrior. I can't watch it on the old laptop as Amy is listening to Chris Moyles on it. So I moved the files across to Eason the Vista laptop. Windows Media Player will play the soundtrack but not show the picture (it's done this with all my vids ever since I bought it). To try and rectify the problem I reinstall Windows Media Player. Vista won't let me install anything less modern than the piece of crap version it's got pre-installed.


I have wasted over an hour trying to fix this and it's made me so angry I've got hives and stomach cramps. If Vista was a person I'd have kicked it in the bollocks and then hung, drawn and quartered it with a blunt, rusty spoon.


I also despise the latest version of Word, which is not intuitive or logical, makes me scroll its wanky top bar to get the functions I need when the old version had everything in one place, looks fugly, requires too much effort to switch off the corrections when it was automatic with the old version, and it's a bitch for compatability.


I hate Vista. I hate Word 07.


This post bought to you by someone royally fucked off >.<

THE BOILER JUST DIED AGAIN WTF

As in the instrument, not the dynasty.


I decided to find some pieces of qin music while eating my dinner. Yay for the wiki entry, which has several solo pieces! I've only heard it played with other instruments or as part of a full orchestra.


My favourite tune of the wiki pieces is called 神人暢 and funnily enough it was recorded in Birmingham. It seems to be a Ming Dynasty tune. I really like it, all those bass notes.


The qin is really a complex instrument. I'd glanced at info about it before but now Li Yan Nian is actually playing one I thought I should be better informed... even though 99% of what I've read won't go into the story LOL.


In other news, it is FREEZING today. Again. The hamsters refuse to come out of their beds and when I boiled the kettle and left it for only 5 minutes, it had gone cold @@ I managed to wash with the spell-water though. The landlady says she has an empty property on the marketplace that we can use for showers if the boiler can't be fixed tomorrow, so that's something at least. It's just annoying that we have one heater and so we have to huddle into one room to avoid freezing our arses off!


Could be worse, Mum and Dad have thick snow (by thick I mean 2 inches... a friend in the US has had 2 feet of snow! Wah!).

At 10.50am yesterday I saw a chap in a top hat ride past our window. I was very excited as it’s been years since I saw a hunt meet. When he was younger, my uncle rode to the hunt every Christmas and I remember all the pageantry that accompanied the Sussex hunt.


Traditionally, hunts take place either on Boxing Day or New Year’s Day. The Howdenshire Hunt rides at New Year and had about 25 horses and a pack of maybe 20 hounds.


Fox-hunting in the UK was declared illegal by an Act of Parliament in 2004. Hunts now follow a false trail and are strictly monitored. While I love foxes, I also love tradition, so it’s wonderful to be able to see a hunt, even a ‘false’ one.




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Here are the pics (including the grave!) of Fountains from last month. We will probably go again between Christmas and New Year, especially if we have a snowfall or heavy frost, as the gardens at Studley Royal are beautiful in the snow and ice.



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What's next?? List in no particular order:

Crossing Shadows – Kurama Tengu and the gender-bending maiko.

Rain from a Clear Sky – Heian period fox and nobleman love story.

The OeV series (4 books) – crazy paranormal adventures. Oh Skye.

Mirror – A demon haunts the mirrors at court. Seimei and Hiromasa investigate.

Blood Royal – sequel to Noble Blood. Vampires and D/s. Adam and Daniel take on Pope Alexander VI’s most dangerous creation.

Firebird – Byzantine mosaicist and a damaged/damaging mythological creature.

Black Hound – sequel to Silver Fox. Xing Guan’s past revealed.

Snow on Pines­ – onnagata and daimyo risk everything for identity and love.

To The Limit – rookie F1 driver and a veteran journalist get involved over the course of a season. Includes Chi Ming, Horishi and Izumi Masato from ‘Under Your Skin’. 

Puppet ­– epic wuxia tale of the elements and a tragic love triangle/quadrangle.

A Flight of Cranes­ ­– final part of The Ten Thousand Years trilogy.

The Fall of a State – Wu Di and Li Nian Yan.

Tales of Rain – sequel to Scent. Hiromasa chooses a wife. Seimei’s past comes back to haunt him.

Honour Amongst Thieves – art thief and cop, countdown to the handover of HK.

Human Traffic – rent boy and cop, vaguely Infernal Affairs and PTU-ish. Up for deletion.

Rearing Tigers – Northern Song dynasty general and a judge match wits with the general’s half-brother during the war with the Jin. Up for deletion.

Shadow Fox – Seimei loses his magic and wigs out. This only remains in the WIP folder because of some very cool lines; I think the best bits of the plot have been cannibalised for other things, so... up for deletion.

Okay, I went out and found Heat mag, I also got Closer mag as it advertised a celeb hunk calendar HAHAHA


Since the mags are printed on shiny paper, the camera flash bounces off it. So you'll have to make do with these pics until I get the scanner back next month. Also I'm running out of camera battery so I didn't take pics of all the hunks, you get the idea from the cover though LOL


ETA: The pics are too big to display on the blog, so here are the links instead.
Heat mag Torso of the Year runners-up
The winner! With shaved/waxed belly HAHAHA
Closer mag's hunks calendar cover

FEED ME!




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