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I really must have an utterly shit immune system.  I’ve come down with a cold, that’s turned to an infection, that means I’ve got antibiotics (that don’t work) and now steroids.  All because I can’t breath nor can I stop coughing.  I just get worse with every day.  I’m off back to the Dr’s tomorrow to get different Antibiotics.

Anyway, I’ve been taking the time to catch up on the new season of House and Grey’s Anatomy (along with reading and watching DVD’s, well what else is there to do when you’re too ill to leave the sofa?).  Anyway, how is it possible that Denny Duquette appears at the end of the second episode and I’m blubbing like a big girl’s blouse??

House appears to have lost it’s oompf.  I mean the last few episodes of season 4 were good, but it just doesn’t seem to have anything to make it stand out as much anymore.  Bones also doesn’t seem to be that good, I think it’s because Hodgins and Angela split up, and Zack has been commited to a mental institution.

Ah well… hopefully something will liven up at some point.  Grey’s hasn’t let me down so far.  Although the first few minutes of the first episode had my heart going a little bit!

Finally got around to watching the last six episodes of House Season 4.  Interesting to say the least.  Before you read any further, this post will contain spoilers, so suggest you read something else if you haven’t watched the end of Season 4.

OK, so the last half of the season was infinately better than the first half.  Seriously, what a pointless exercise to have the recruitment drive the way House did.  Yes I REALLY hated Amber (AKA cut-throat bitch), more of that later.  The second half, much, much better.  It was interesting to see Mira Sorvino and Jason Lewis in two episodes.  Certainly spiced it up a little bit.  Nice to see House is still his neurotic self.

The last two episodes… well.  Firstly I was sitting there thinking “they can’t kill house… again” but they sort of did, didn’t they?  As for throwing in the woman on the bus, who was also in Casino Royale (with blonde hair and Le Chifre’s girlfriend) and also Chuck (as a French assasin)… I knew she had to be someone important.  I was kicking myself the minute she started asking “what’s my necklace made of?”.  I missed all the signs.

So, why did I cry at the end?  When I really didn’t like Amber at all.  Perhaps because the writers had turned her around and she was reasonably nice as a person dating Wilson.  Perhaps I thought Wilson deserved a break.  It was very sad, she knew she was effectively dead when she woke up.  I guess I don’t like seeing people dying… it really gets to me.  Still it was nowhere near as bad as Denny Duquette dying in Grey’s Anatomy.  I was blubbing like a big girl when that happened.  I think that had a lot to do with the music they chose to play as well.

Intrigued to see what happens next season.  Will Wilson ever forgive House?  What will 13 / 31 do about her diagnosis?  Will everyone go back to working for House?  Will House change?  His sub-concious obviously feels bereft for hurting his friend.  Clearly he does need a friend and he’s going to feel awful for being responsible for Amber’s death.

OK so technically I skipped to the end, but even so… why does Grey’s Anatomy always have the ability to make me cry?  Seriously, blubbing my eyes out.

I’m not going to give the game away for those who haven’t even started watching Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s finally as though it’s getting somewhere with Meredith and Derek.  All kinds of complicated relationships seem to have found a climax that they have sorely needed for some time.  I should also really watch the episode of Heroes that I’ve not watched yet.  That’d be a good idea.

Anyway… I think I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon watching all the episodes I didn’t watch, and taking pupzilla for a walk.  She seems to be liking walking now.

We have Lily… she’s currently sleeping, which is exactly what she has been doing for the last four hours.  Oh to be a puppy and sleep that much.  I slept really badly last night and could do with another four hours sleep.  Oh well I guess she’ll be up and about later.

She’s gotten loads bigger, she has big floppy ears and huge paws.  She didn’t get car sick and she likes eating my fingers.

Right, going back to watching really bad film on ITV.

Just downloaded (legally, but I’ll get to that in a moment) the first episode of Pushing Daises (links to the IMDb page for Pushing Daises if you’re interested).  Firstly absolutely hilarious, and impressive American accent from Anna Freil.  Secondly, it’s a tad on the sickly side of things but it does make me think about Dead Like Me.

Well you’ve got a girl, in both cases, who died and was essentially brought back to life.  Although in Dead Like Me George was hit by a toilet seat falling from the international space station, and when I say brought back to life she was still dead, and now a “reaper”.  She took life from others.  In Pushing Daises, Chuck (Anna Freil) gets strangled and is brought back to life by Ned who can apparently bring people back to life.

Sickly and sweet, not a bad combination, and also reasonably watchable.  The bit where the waitress at the beginning talks about getting words confused and says “I used to think the word Masturbate meant chewing food… obviously I don’t think that now” did have me laughing for a bit.

I did find it amusing that ITV (who are showing this) are not showing episode two because the full run would interfere with the bloody football.  What a bunch of tossers.  Anyway, I bought it and downloaded it from iTunes.  First time I’ve bought a TV episode from iTunes.  Felt good to do it legally, until I watched it.  Maybe it would play faster on my G5 but on my PowerBook, it was slow and juddery, don’t get that with anything else.  Most annoying.  Will have to try it on my G5.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of Dead Like Me, then you’re sure to enjoy this, it’s a bit more girly than Heroes, but equally enjoyable.  Looking forward to the next episode.

Well it’s definitely snowing out there today.  It started not long after the Grand Prix, and to be honest, the snow is much more interesting to watch than the Grand Prix.

It helps that the sofa is now facing not only the TV but the patio doors so we can see out beyond the conservatory to the weather outside.  It’s rather relaxing watching snow, which I’m sure I’ve said on more than one occasion.

My dad is coming for lunch today.  So I’m cooking slow cooked lamb.  Got a nice leg of lamb from the amazing butchers in the village, if it’s as nice as the last one, we’re in for a lovely lunch today. 

Grand Prix almost finished… barely noticed it was on.

Now isn’t that telling? The BBC news website uses Movable Type as it’s blog engine… Now if only they’d do something about the load time so I could post a comment… if I can’t get it to post, and anybody is interest, the blog entry can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/03/talking_to_sir_tim.html.  The comment I was about to post is basically “Tor of Cism” is an anagram of “Microsoft”…

Reading between the lines, Tim Berners Lee uses a Mac Laptop, he sees Microsoft as part of the problem, not the solution and that we’re heading for an impase on the internet in less it becomes a lot more open.  Well that’s just my take on what the blog post said.

I wish the post had been a bit longer, and I’m bound to miss the TV segment. 

Somebody please remind me to post something about Google spidering information, for some reason I’m getting tons of hits (quality over quantity here), following this post (over 70 in an hour is un-heard of on this blog) and the one about Huf Haus… You lot (yes the ones that read down beyond the first paragraph), are probably thinking I’m another boring blogger… you’d probably be right there.

UPDATE If you would like to see the map in full, please go to this link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/17_03_08_webmap.pdf When printed out, one of the commenters on the BBC blog is absolutely right, the Tor of Cism is right in the middle of Mordor, exactly where it belongs I would imagine.

Feeling better, whatever is in the yuky stuff the doctor gave me it’s working, and believe me, it’s really yucky, the taste isn’t even made better by the addition of squash.  You have to gulp it down in one go, then take a swig of something nicer.  Bleurgh.

We finally unpacked the living room today, got tired of two TV’s in the living room and the TV being so close to us that it made our eyes hurt when we looked at the TV guide.  So now it’s further away and there is tons of room.  We can even see out of the conservatory to the garden beyond, well not now as it’s rather black out there.  Apparently there’s a storm coming so we’ll see what blows off first, the other week it was the recycle bins at one thirty in the morning.  I’m guessing it’ll be most of next door’s newly built shed, I’m sure we’ll chuckle no end at that one.  Considering, it was them, rather than the birds who woke me up yesterday morning. 

Was lying in bed this morning wondering if the birds were in the loft or in the chimney.  I gave up, the incessant chirping and clipping was getting on my nerves, also the sun had risen enough not to burn my corneas out of my head so I decided to get out of bed.  Still it was nice coming downstairs to a nice clean living room instead of the leaning towers of magazines and empty boxes that surrounded me. 

We spent most of the day, read all of today, looking for somewhere to stay on holiday.  It was a somewhat fruitless exercise as we need to check with our friends where they actually want to go and what their budget is.  Fun fun fun!! My eyes hurt from the exertion.

Read the Observer top 50 blogs today, was gutted to find one of them was a blog I was supposed to be involved in, but by the time it got off the ground (it took a year of planning), I’d lost the will to contribute.  This blog is a lot less successful, nobody reads the damn thing, who could blame them.

Well it’s back to the grind stone tomorrow.  I need to arrange travel and hotel for the course my boss and I are attending at the end of May.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to going back into London for two days, the course looks interesting though.

Firstly can I just say, if the RIAA and other nazi money grabbers want people to stop downloading things illegally, they should make more things available through legal channels to download.  I downloaded Emotional Technology by BT a couple of weeks ago, and have listened to it non-stop for the last two weeks, it has everything I need to keep me focused at work.  So I thought, what else has this guy done? ’cause I knew I had a couple of his tracks on some old Gatecrasher and Cream CD’s.

So off to Amazon I go, just to see if there’s anything on there that I had missed, and I found a whole cache of CD’s.  Only they weren’t cheap.  I know that iTunes, my download engine of choice, had very few BT albums available for download, practically none in fact. So what is a girl to do? If I want music, I want it pretty immediately, not have to wait almost a week for Amazon or Play to cough up my CD’s.  Play’s now doing a download service but theirs had less of a selection than iTunes did. 

So I ended up getting one of the albums through another site, I question it’s legallity, although I have paid for the music, and downloaded it through proper channels, I suspect it’s probably dubious.  So far it hasn’t let me down on the ability to download music I haven’t been able to find through iTunes. 

I like some odd music, I’ll openly admit that a large chunk of what I like cannot be found through mainstream channels, I use Audio Jelly occasionally to find what I’m looking for, but my tastes are normally a bit too mainstream for it.  Can you see the irony? To eclectic for iTunes, too main stream for Audio Jelly.  I’m sure that if I were able to buy music from iTunes in the US I’d have no problems whatsoever in getting what I want most of the time.  However just like most things I’m unable to purchase and download stuff from US sites.

You would think with the Internet being a global phenominon that the TV stations and music distributors would do more to open up their boarders.  What do they want 17 pieces of identification before you can pay and download something that you would otherwise be forced to download illegally?  I read the other day that BBC is opening up it’s iPlayer to a global audience, well I think I did, I hope I wasn’t dreaming it, so why can’t the US stations do the same?  There’s a demand, so why can’t these people supply, rather than jumping up and down about people downloading illegally.

I would happily pay a season pass fee to download what I want, at the end of the day, it either doesn’t get shown, or I get moaned at for watching what I want occasionally.  So to download it and watch it from the privacy of my Mac would be fine for me. 

Anyway, I had orginially intended for this post to be about the BT album I downloaded over the weekend, it’s brilliant, not quite as good as Emotional Technology, but still as mellow and uplifting as it.  It’s called ECSM in case any of you are interested.  I have to say I love the first track, it reminds me of some of the Spy Game sound track, haunting vocals with an ethnic twist to them that are chilling yet also soothing at the same time.

They’ve packed up and gone.  They weren’t supposed to be here yesterday, but now they’ve gone and won’t be back until the new front and back doors are put in.  Only now we have a pantry with no shelves… not sure what’s worse, shelves that were a death trap or no shelves and nowhere to put anything… still haven’t unpacked.  The conservatory is a pig sty.  Still I shunted furniture around in the bedroom today and as a result I can get into the spare room… I say I can get in there, I can get to the clothes airer and the temporary wardrobe solution that’ll probably be more permanent than temporary.  I sense more house work tomorrow…

As you can see I lead a rather enthralling life, the highlight of which would probably be seeing a TV chef in Waitrose in Marlborough.  Still it’s nice to have to drive down country lanes to get to the supermarket instead of through an industrial wasteland and under a river to get there. 

Anyway, in between shunting stuff we don’t need from room to room to make the place look a little less messy, I shall be trying to tidy up my blog… I think I like using tags more than using categories, I honestly can’t see that cross referencing on both is a good idea, I’ve never really liked having categories, they’re a pain to manage on the backend, and require me to come up with an IA.  I’m not too bad at IA as, well, I kinda have to do it for work from time to time, but this blog just defies my own logic.  So perhaps tagging is the way to go.  Anyhoo… watch this space.

I’m thinking of adding housework to my list of hobbies as it’s all I seem to do.  I wouldn’t mind if I got paid for it, but I get no thanks for it… You lot probably wouldn’t notice if I hoovered and dusted on here now would you?