Man Bath

There is always room for the single self. I indulged myself in a rare treat, a long indulgent bath. This contemplative, cigar smoke filled and beery hermits cave produced a moment of sobriety in my world of responsibility, care and graft.

It's good to draw a line under your past, but not to detach completely so this blog is back! It will be my bath, alone, different to my most pressing and immediate demands

I'm not religous. I'm not 'beffuddled by faith' as Dawkins would antagonisingly put it, but I need to brick up the windows and make discoveries in unconventional ways. Here is one of many ways I do it, I offer it to the Universe whatever that may be (google in this case which is effectively the universe that contains the internet).

Man Bath

Ingredients

1. Indulgences of choice (mine are beer and cigars, keep it male folks. Chocolate fancy shit and wine will result in karmic drowning and removal from the man pool, like the worthless girlie gender confused tosspiece you are)
2. Endless supply of hot water
3. Radox, like Grandad used to have
4. A good read (I like Sunday Times)
5. A good quality cigar (Cuban, shell out you cheap swine!)
6. Ambient noise. I like the noise of outside in the Spring/Summer. The less you have to deal with, the better, unless you make a long playlist you can endure without it intruding on your experience

Method

Laws and rules are for committees. There are fundamentals however;

1. When you get out of the bath, the Man Bath us over. Trust me, the mood, the moment, the delicious self gratifying and ponderous continuum of the Man Bath is finished. Be Prepared
2. Ensure isolation. Doors locked, respond to no-one, knockers, phone calls. Nothing. Go look up solipsism
3. Wash, you stinking ball bag

That's it. Forget spas, away breaks, fucking tai chi, all of it. Be proud of the home, life and bathing room you have chosen for yourself and enjoy it, make it your sanctuary.

Drinking beer in the bath presents an obvious problem for Fundamental 1. I have a solution I call the Water Swap. Unplug, and point yourself very near the plughole and enjoy the unique experience of zero gravity bladder relief. Top up with hot water

Inspired by Tank Girl, a long time ago

The last post

Much has changed over the last month, and I see this blog as part of my old life so I'm going to leave it as it is and start a new one.

Email me for the new address

Wine Review #10

Gavi
Cortese 2005 12.5%
Cossano Belbi, Italy

Smell
Smashed up Skittles left in a hot car

Taste
A languid, persistant acridness, not unlike licking a lemon, then orange Starburst for a full 10 minutes

Whippets factor
2/10. My efforts to buzz off the slowly evaporating but highly chilled and pathetically ABV'd booze left me with my nasal cavities full of wine

Top Trumps
Cooking - 9
Name - 4
Buy a case - To leave it for kidnappers instead of cash
Hand to hand combat - 9
Charisma - 2

Not dead, just sleeping

I'm on holiday, done plenty but difficult to convey without the convenience of a digital camera. Use the blog links to have a see what I've been up to.

Now, where is that cheap supermarket piss I got to watch Fear and Loathing to?

Star of the West by the Sea

Or Hesperia del Mar, my hotel in Barcelona. An interesting place, while I have been typing, water has starting pouring through a light fitting and killed the power to the whole restaurant, better move to my room

Now then, what do you make of this menu, I'm starving, but I think I need to choose carefully, otherwise I might be ordering myself a kicking. These more humorous items are quoted exactly from the English language menu, I really am not kidding.

Entrants
Cesar Salad
Rosbeef, foam of cheese, compote of pear cardemomo and sweet fresh quince
Fresh tagliatelis and octopuses in sauce of handle

Fish
Tuna, creamy rice, broth of noras and cloud of idiazabal

Meats
Tail of stewed bull and noodles of sepia
Carre of lechazo roast, shitake, peas yoghurt and reduction of modena

Hmm, not sure what any of that is, so what about the Executive Menu?

First Dish
Salad of outbreaks with shitake and vinaigrette of honey
Artichokes attacked with mash of rucula and powder of ham

Second Dish
Chinstraps of veal with with tortilla of chocolate and Chinese noodles
Loin of cod with vegetables, creaking of leek and green oil

Well, this all sounds very mysterious and not entirely edible, err, Sandwiches?

Sandwich Mixo
Toasted of back with cheese brie
Tortilla to the pleasure

Starvation it is then. By the way, Spanish telly which I witnessed in my hotel during my last week in Redmond is in places EXACTLY how the Fast Show parodies it, especially the quiz shows. Chicks in hot pants and jiggling titties, stupid boinking sound effects, seemingly unachievable and worthless goals and very very stupid contestants. I laughed my nipples off, but not half as much as I laughed at this. There is a burger on the menu, but I can't keep a straight face to order it.

Ate it

Freak weather, the earliest snow at Crystal Mountain for 28 years, meant I was fortunate enough to enjoy a day's boarding on my last weekend in the US.

I learnt to board on artificial snow slopes which only usually had around a 5cm snow depth and made turning hard work, but starting out tough meant it was easy to get the balance, stops and turns right, because here I had about 25 - 30cm of snow to play with.

Starting out on the shallow trainer slopes was a great warm up. Despite me investing in some decent goggles, the snow was coming in fast meaning frequents stops to clean them and whiteouts once I got to the higher, colder slopes. I had to follow a few people down to guide me back to base. I also made it off piste, thanks to some sloppy steering and screamed into a snow drift, landing on my front, looking like a toy soldier clamped in polystyrene. Pinned into the drift by my body weight on the soft, giving snow, I spent 10 minutes trying to reach down my inconveniently long gangly body to my bindings to release the board. Exhausted, I got hold of the board and dragged myself out of the drift. Had a small heart attack, then wrestled with the accursed rental boards quick release mechanism to get back on. Had to spend another 5 minutes digging out compressed snow from the machinery. Avoid these unless you've road tested them.

I ache all over and will be walking like a cowboy for a week or so, but it was all worth it for the 60 seconds where it all came together and I got to shoot down a real mountain at huge speed without tumbling.

Cool Hand Texas No Name Neil the Kid 2 - Rewenge!

Us poker sharks were foolishly invited to a Microsoft colleague's beautiful house for an evening of poker education from her son and his croupier young friends. This is much faster poker that I was used to, with doubling blinds every 15 minutes. Games tended not to last too long and unless you held your nerves and tells in check, you were plundered. Which I was, big fat loser first off the table.

Scorned, I vowed revenge. I inherited another players chips and made a nice stash out of them, before being plundered again, gaaah! So the young 'uns, engorged with success and all my money retired upstairs to continue the game. M'colleague and I played them again, and I carefully danced my way into a healthy looking pot. He tried to make me flap with an all in, but I just caught the tiniest twitch of his little finger as he drew his hand away from his chips and decided to call him. He had nowt, and I smugly retired him from the table. My thirst was up for more casualties, and shooed another guy off the game with the most outrageous bluff, so it was one on one with the last kid on the table. After the river, he called all in, and I couldn't refuse as I was looking at getting an ace high flush, the turn card took me one step closer, then the river card...! Aaaagh! Exactly the wrong card for me and just what my remaining opponent needed. We split the game cash 70\30 so I at least only came away $5 down instead of $20.

Not a bad poker night, but it was a little serious for what was a casual social evening. I reckon I'm ready to hit the high roller tables now.

Nita comes to visit!

I had the pleasure of my girl's company for a week, my company kindly granting my request for conjugal visits while imprisoned in this lab. It was exciting meeting her at the airport, and she took her sweet time getting through customs, having mislaid my address and claiming to have no money on her. US Customs are very officious so she must have charmed her way in, she was very excited to be here.

It was strange having her here as a guest in the apartment, so I had to fetch after her the whole time instead of arguing about who's going to wash the pots. Plus having hardly seen her in 3 months meant we had to get used to each other again as well as show her around this other life I've been living here in the US.

The Sunday after she arrived, we and m'colleague went whale watching with a touring company from Anacortes, about 2 hours drive north of Seattle. It is a good time of year to spot humpback whales but we came across killer whales first, they are not shy creatures, and this took up our time. The whale pods like to hang around at San Juan island (red is where we found them)













Oh look, an eagle!




There was work still to be done here, so while I toiled, Ms Nita explored Redmond, Bellevue and Seattle and then we went on a trip into the enormous countryside. The weather was great to start with at Snoqualmie













We tried to make it to Sunrise to get a good look at Mt Rainer so I could convince mah'aam that it actually existed. By the time we got there, it had wrapped itself up in a huge bank of fog and clouds. Bah!

But it did come out the next day and the only place to view it in a hurry is the Space Needle.








Our chums on Bainbridge Island invited us to a pumpkin party for the Saturday before m'lady had to leave. M'colleague and I had stocked up on tools and practiced on a couple of pumpkins so we went all out and decided to carve a pumpkin inside a pumpkin. We had in mind that if there are all these tools and websites, that these parties are an excuse to compete with your skills, but we were the only ones doing this and it took ages. First of all, we had to go to the pumpkin patch













This is wild corn, very pretty and sadly inedible





And here's what we carved, mine is in the middle and is meant to be a flaming monsters eye behind some trees, and m'colleagues is on the left, a graverobber scene. The one on the right is by Gus, the sarcastic preacher. He provided many good giggles that night.









Here's a whole mess of them. third from the left is Nita's.



I had to drive so it was fun watching everyone stagger to and from the excellent warm cider and rum bowl. We drank this and tea for me around an enormous bonfire, swapping stories of drunken depravity. Despite my best efforts, the preachers story was the grossest, and he wasn't even drunk!


Then the next day, I had to take her to the airport for home, and these next two weeks here are really going to feel long. I've missed family, friends, my house and my girl and I'm getting weary of being here working this hard for this long. I've found a couple of old friends hunting around on the internet that I've not heard from for years which really cheered me up.

M'Colleague and I finally found some drinking buddies, on our last weekend here! Bah, but they will keep for when we come back.

Autumn falls

Autumn in very dramatic here, I think the vegatation was very water starved this summer, despite the Doozers hosing the place down every three days, so there are fireworks on the ground and Turner in the sky.

John Peel Day

Today is one year since my favourite broadcaster threw a seven, so I'm listening to my playlist

Hope you in the UK had a chance to see a band playing today

Hallowe'en soon










Mine is on the right, m'colleague posed, good likeness?