Robot Claw

In minutes we leave for the airport. I hop on my first plane at 1:20 pm, and 27 hours and 10 minutes later I shall land in Sydney.

The next blog entry will therefore be from Australia! Watch this space!

Well, maybe a big silver mouse. Since Yoss has gained weight, she can’t enjoy the tree as much as she once did 🙂

And this year, below the tree, we have a goblin!

I’m a bit of a picky eater, and there are a few foods I don’t like.

This list includes mushrooms, broccoli, carrots, garlic, cheesecake, non-vanilla ice cream, iced tea, root beer, pepsi, squid, parsley, sweet potato, cauliflower, peanut-butter based candy, most flavours of corn chip, beer, wine, alcohol in general, lots of eggy foods, rhubarb, virtually all baked goods including brownies, most cakes and most biscuits, quiche, meatloaf, alfredo sauce, most other types of pasta sauce, most mexican food, calzones, buffalo chicken flavouring, maple syrup, mayonnaise, hot sauce, coffee, cherry flavouring, eel, celery, brussel sprouts, french toast, oatmeal, mashed potato and (relevant to this story) cream cheese.

Sooooo… my good friend SFL made for KLS and I a cake for Christmas. She was a bit embarrassed about it; thought it overcooked and all, but I tucked into it with a vengeance and over the next 6 or 7 hours managed to eat about half of it. I was particularly enamoured of the icing, and commented numerous times how delicious it was, with such comments as “This icing makes the cake!” and “The best thing about the cake is the icing.” KLS thought the icing may have ever been a bit thick, but I’d have none of that and kept shovelling it into my mouth.

Cut to later that night, when KLS ventured the following: “I think there is cream cheese in that icing!”

This was like a frozen sword into my heart. I never, ever paused to consider what the icing was made of (aside from an obviously wrong delusion it was lemon based). I just ate and ate. And now the thought had been planted that this was a trojan cake, succeeding where so many had failed before to break my unbreakable wall of ‘foods I don’t eat’ defenses…

The next day, upon asking, SFL did indeed confirm (with a grin) that the icing did not only contain cream cheese, but was… like 185% cream cheese! Although she had no idea I didn’t like or eat (<- ie. had never tried) cream cheese, I strongly suspect she was pleased with her success to get me to eat it.

My epicurean world has been literally turned upside down by this event, and what reply can I possibly make when KLS intones “Who knows what else you like that you haven’t even tried?”

This past Saturday we watched the third-last David Tennant Doctor Who special, The Waters Of Mars and it was, well quite brilliant. A massive improvement from Planet Of The Dead. The Doctor was taken to a place he’d not been before and… certain things happened. And the final 2-part episode was foreshadowed quite well at the end.

And that end begins next Saturday with part one of The End Of Time. We will of course watch it live (in HD!) and I am looking forward to it tremendously (those who may have seen the trailer will be with me in celebrating the nod to the Deadly Assassin-era Master to be seen in this episode!). And then… the very next day… I’m off to Australia!

So I won’t be able to see part two, in which Doctor 10 regenerates into Doctor 11, until I get back. It screens on January 2, so KLS is going to tape it and keep it safe on our PVR until I return when I can watch it in glorious HD. And try really, really, really hard not to have it spoiled for me in the interim.

Unless (of course) it screens in Australia or AW obtains a good quality copy during my stay 🙂

I just finished grading my students exams. The second class had their yesterday, and grading the 51 exams took me the better part of about 5 hours today. One day I will learn to write questions that don’t lend themselves to long, difficult-to-grade solutions.

Tomorrow I shall enter the grades, and (hopefully) be done with school this semester. Of course that’s a lie, since I have to prepare a lecture for the day I get back (yes, I have to teach the day I get back). But that can be done at home.

The squirrels? Just a little something to make mum smile 😉