I caught this on my friend Johnny Laird’s Blog and it tugged at a heartstring. If you’re Scottish, and in ‘exile’ may it do the same for you.
It’s Thanksgiving weekend in the USA, and I thought it would be worth mentioning some things I’m thankful for:
My lovely wife, my three ace children, my blood families, my friends, my Twurch and my Church friends, the ability to play music, to sing, to listen to music, the Apple OS and various Macs, Mozilla Firefox, Blogo, Tweetdeck, Facebook, Twitter, fresh clean water, law and order, freedom to practise Christianity, having a job, the roof over my head, the iPhone, channel Dave, Broadband and wifi, the CD, my Mondeo Ghia, my Honda 550, the Kurzweil PC88 in our ’study’, having a ’study’, good health, the invention of the telephone, memories of departed friends and family, not having loads of investments, a comfy bed, central heating, carpets, nice neighbours, WordPress, people who create and distribute great free software, my car-share gang, my work colleagues, the Bible, a warm coat, Le Pas Opton, holidays, the Aberdeen Rowie, the Mars Bar, the life of Colin McRae, watching other people create art, the Glasgow accent, Bulmers’ Pear Cider, the electric bass guitar, Queen, the Scotch Pie, chips, bacon sandwiches, the PVR, Next jeans, Fat Fish clothes, the guitar strap, Ford Motor Co., the V8 engine, Chip Foose, the subwoofer, high-heeled women’s shoes (on a woman…), once owning a Subaru Legacy Turbo estate, the drive between Newcastle and Edinburgh over the A68, the A82 between Glasgow and Fort William, Scotland.
Oh, and that God Cares!
Anyone else tried Typealyzer for their blog? It gives you a Myers-Briggs style analysis of your blog. Mine came out as shown here.
It’s BabeG-T’s 19th birthday today. I’m seriously proud of her, as she’s a clever, mature woman who is making the most of life.
Congratulations sweetheart.
It’s a funny thing, electricity. You can’t see it but you can certainly see the meter spinning round when everything is on in our house. With all this Global Warming malarkey allegedly going on and, well, to be perfectly honest, purely because of the current price we recently switched suppliers. As part of the deal, our new company sent us a remote meter thingy which measures what’s going on in the house using a black 
box which you carefully affix to the main power cable at the fuse box, and then view the resulting readings on a white box in a warmer, lighter area of the house. The white box looks a bit like one of those weather stations that you can buy in Argos as you can see on the left.
If you look carefully you can see the normal power consumption in our house – 386 watts. That’s for all the background stuff like heating, alarm clocks, the PVR, stuff on standby etc. Not too horrible I think you’d have to agree.
As I monitored it for the first few weeks (including switching things on and off to see what happened to the readings) a couple of things became clear.
All that stuff about leaving your TV on standby is a bit of a red herring. Leaving ours on standby or switching it off made the princely difference of around 2 watts. That’s 2 watts. OK? Now, compare and contrast with the effect made by switching on our electric shower. See the picture below.
Note the total reading – 8.66 kilowatts. That’s 8,660 watts if my arithmetic teacher was on the money. Or, a difference of around 8,200 watts. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts per hour. So, if I had a shower for an hour I could have powered my TV on standby for 170 days! You can guess that I’m now minimising shower time. (No, not to the point where my co-workers and family don’t want to be around me.)
Other interestingly high-powered devices include the kettle, toaster, tumble drier, dishwasher and washing machine. And one thing we hadn’t realised about was the PIR-controlled outside light on the house. Every time the dog goes out into the garden the light fires up and burns at 500 watts for around five minutes. So that’s now switched off completely as I don’t believe it’s important that the dog sees where the grass is.
We’re now looking forward to a significantly lower electricity bill!
Test to see if I can send mixed image and text.
To see if I have remote blogging set up correctly!
My friend Tim has been organising the icons on his iPhone. I too have done this task
Mine is organised principally by how often I use the common ones, then a page of games and one of ’show-off’ applications. Tim’s is a lot more cool looking. Have a look for yourself!
This is all the stuff I just took out of the boot/trunk of MrsG-T’s 1996 Vauxhall Astra. I think you’d agree that she’s a whizz at packing!
I don’t think the fireplace and couch were in there, but I can’t be positive…
I didn’t write this (no, really) but I thought it was funny. Here are nine words women use and the definition. Men, memorise these…
1) Fine : This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
2) Five Minutes : If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
3) Nothing : This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.
4) Go Ahead : This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It!
5) Loud Sigh : This isn’t actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of nothing.)
6) That’s OK : This is one of the most dangerous statements a woman can make to a man. That’s OK means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.
7) Thanks : A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say “you’re welcome.”
Whatever : Is a women’s way of saying that you’re going to be in serious trouble later. Usually when you’ve completely forgotten whatever it is you’re currently talking about.
9) Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking ‘What’s wrong?’ For the woman’s response refer to #3.Then you RUN!