We all went down to see Stephanie and Gary’s new baby today. We handed in a few presents and went for lunch in a nearby pub. I don’t know if its my health problems or what but these last few nights I’ve not really been sleeping well until last night when I slept like a log. I’m still shattered though and my chest is really tight which it hasn’t been for the last week or so. I had an enormous appetite though which I think has worked against me today.

So yeah the chicken… I got the kingsize chicken combo for lunch which consisted of 2 bits of corn, 2 chicken breast piripiri style, 2 chicken kebabs, 4 southern fried style strips and a big plate of chips. I think it worked out at about one and a half full chickens or there abouts. So not only was I tired but I was stuffed as well. If it wasn’t quite sunny today I’ve have thought it was christmas day and I was feeling the effects of having stuffed my face all lunchtime.

The whole house has been zombified because of that food this evening

Tags: food, tiredness

For the past few weeks people have been seeing the Google Streetview car driving around Glasgow and Edinburgh which you can understand. They are the countries two biggest cities and if you trying to get the main points in the UK onto Streetview it would be silly to miss them out. So when I walked to the bakers at the end of my street to pick up some bread rolls I was slightly confused to see teh Streetview camera car driving past me. Yes East Kilbride is quite a well know town in the UK, in fact I think it’s viaing with Paisley for teh biggest town in Scotland, but it just seems as if it’s either scraping the barrel a little or hinting at just how much information that Google aims to have available on the internet.

In other news I made chicken kebabs last night for dinner. Despite them being very simple and easy to make I was pleasantly surprised they were damn tasty!

Tags: food, Google, kebab, maps

So yeah we got a few more chickens the other day. One of them was a hen from Calderglen Country park that kept jumping out of its enclosure so they wanted to rehome her and the others were 3 Scots Grey hens and a cockerel. Unfortunately the cockerel didn’t go down to well with the neighbours or my sleep as you can imagine. With still being ill I’m not getting a good sleep anyway but to wake up every morning at 5am to the cockerel telling everyone in the neighborhood it was morning puts the icing on the cake.

We tried to rehome it at short notice but like most people looking to offload a cockerel we had no chance. So at 10pm on Monday night after trying to completely blackout the cockerels coop we decided that if that didn’t keep him quite to a reasonable hour that was it. So we went to sleep.

At 5.30am I woke up to the chickens morning call. By 6am I’d grabbed it mid crow and dispatched it. Its an awfully weird experience sitting on your back door step watching the sun come as you pluck a chicken. Especially when you live in a town as large as the one we live in! It was round about now that I realised that we never got any photos of Glen, as that was what we named him, before his run in with the broom handle. I’ll stick a LJ-cut style thing in here I think to spare those that may be squeamish from the pics.

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Tags: butcher, Calderglen Country park, chicken, Cockerel, food, roasting, slaughter

I last went on an overseas camping holiday 15 22 years ago. Nothings changed. And I do mean nothing. It’s the same tents, the same beds, the same appliances and the same people you meet. It’s the same reps you see over and over again and its the same meals you eat every night.

I really enjoyed it though

Apart from the weather, my bed and Vonnie’s health we done not to badly. We lost out by staying in the middle of nowhere with very little in the way of touristy things we could do in weather we had but what we did get up to I rather enjoyed.

We started off by running late as usual but actually ended up being several hours early for the campsite. Took me a couple of days to get my head around that one. Our plan was to leave yearly doors on Friday morning, camp overnight at Dover and get the ferry the next morning so that we arrived at the campsite around lunchtime. What ended up happening was we left here just before lunchtime, hit Dover just before midnight after realising the campsite would be shut, got on a night ferry and after a brief detour to Bologne we arrived at the campsite at about 5am local time. The kids were great on the entire journey which really surprised us.

Where we were staying was a campsite in the grounds of the Chateau de Drancourt which is about a 5 minute drive outside St-Valery-sur-Somme. Turn that into a 20 minute walk and add in that the nearest decent supermarket/shop is there and you realise just how awkward a place it is to get food. A 9″ basic pizza from the onsite pizzaria that you would pay £4 for in your local takeaway cost at least 10€! It was a lovely campsite mind you with what appeared on the surface to be lots of things to do.

Everything costs money though. Gone are the days of just getting your name on a list to get a game of tennis. Now your paying 8€ for an hours game. About the only free thing there were the pools. When you seen the blurb it stated that one of them was heated. What they actually meant was that one of them had a hose from the toilet block that ran hot water into the pool as and when they remembered to keep the tap on. That was a bit of a let down. Thoroughly enjoyed the pools though, especially the races from the top of the slide to the gates we’d do once we got the kids all dried and in their pram at the end of the day

It wasn’t just the site shops that were expensive though. You don’t get cheap restaurants in France. We spent 40€ on crepes and soft drinks for lunch one day and easily spent that on 2 omelette’s and 2 cheeseburgers with drinks as well. This meant we spent our evenings enjoying either home tent cooked pasta or BBQ’s. As you can guess I really enjoyed the BBQ’s seeing as the first one I made with only charcoal and nothing other than a couple of matches to get it going. We finally managed to get firelighters but sill it took a good 20 minutes to get the damn thing going each time! We soon got fed up of kebabs and burnt burgers though.

We did do something other than complain though

The region we were staying in has a narrow gauge railway that links up the entire bay with the national rail network. The link from St Valery to Cayeux-sur-mer is a separate line but is run by a diesel train so we went on the longer journey on steam train to Le Crotoy on the other side of the bay. It took us an hour each way and the kids loved every second of it. In fact I loved it as well. Theres something about standing on the kickplate at the end of a carriage or hanging out a window as the steam train takes you through the countryside that just makes you smile no matter how old you are.

We also went to Nausica in Bologne on our last day. Take the Sealife centres in the UK and make them about 10 times bigger and you’ve got this place. You don’t have as large a shark tank as the one on the Firth of Forth but everything else is bigger. It was also about half the price of that Sealife centre as well!

The journey home was interesting. We weren’t supposed to get the ferry until Wednesday night but after chancing our arms again we got on the 5pm ferry to Dover and drove through the night getting home at about 5am. That was some drive on Vonnie’s part with only a wee stop over at Stratford Services for a wee rest.

There are far more photos (we only just finished uploading all 800 odd of them to Flickr yesterday) but I need to dig through them and delete those that are either crap or embarrassing. Theres also a few I’d like to hit with Lightroom/Photoshop before to many folk see them as well. Those that are interested will get to see them soon though… I promise.

Tags: food, France, GBP, rail network, United Kingdom

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Two years ago tonight Nairn was born. In fact despite what the birth certificate says half an hour ago at 9:43pm he was born. I think I mentioned this before but my whole world changed

This last year has been huge for him. From taking his first unaided steps across the livingroom on his first birthday whilst I was preparing food in the kitchen to him picking up sign langauge and being able to hold an actual conversation with him and get intelligable replies.

The fact that I can say to him, “Nairn can you get daddy that train over there, no not the green one but the blue one” and have him pick it up and bring me it over astounds me. That and his facination with his younger sister. He gets visably upset if you seperate them and now thatthey are sharing a room for the next wee while they both seem to be loving it. In fact I noticed something today that surprised me. Nairns elder brother used to take toys from him and dace about in front of him waving it about and acting all silly. He hasn’t done that for about 6 months that I’m aware of and yet Nairn is doing the exact same thing for his sister. Even down to the same facial expressions and dance.

He’s amazing.

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Tags: food

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Why is it everytime I cook Lasagna there’s something missing?

The first few times I tried it I followed recipes from chefs that I trust and it just wasn’t right. Last night I tried to mix and match a few to see if that would help. It did to an extent as I realised red wine would have helped me out in the past but even then it wasn’t quite what was needed. I ended up adding a bit of chilli powder on Vonnie’s orders which to me goes against the spirit of Italian food. Its all about the taste and not the heat

My, quite literally, blood sweat and tears went into making last nights and it was nice but I’ll need to hunt for that missing ingrediant. As for the blood I managed to almost slice my fingertip off as I was chopping the onions. Trying to hold the onion together as I sliced and I hit a mini onion in the middle. The wee swirly bits always catch me out as you think the momentum of th eknife will carry it through but oh no. It’ll either stick or slide to the side. In this case it slid and caught my finger with the momentum. It took a bit to stop bleeding but I’m fine now thanks

Oh and I finally got round to proposing last night. I’ll post about that over the weekend probably when Ive got the time to do the entry justice :p

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Tags: food

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday in work was hell but I wont go into it. Suffice it to say I got a migraine by 10am and I’d ran out of painkillers by 10:01am.

Left work at the back of four and headed out with Vonnie and the kids for a drive. We were supposed to head out to a place near Stewarton and Vonnie had got the directions from the AA routefinder. We hit Stewarton and one of the next instructiosn was “Entering Kilmarnock” so when sitting at a junction that had no street names or road signs worth anything we followed the sign for Kilmarnock. We ended up in the arse end of nowhere. And the worst of it is that were we had stopped at that junction was literally a 5 minutes drive from where we were going.

I then proceeeded to get us lost as I wanted to come back over the moors road from the Fenwick Hotel but coul we find the bloody thing from the M77. Eventually we did find it though and made it back to EK in time to pick up some nappies for Nairn and to head down to Cambuslang to go for dinner at Fratelli’s. As always the food is amazing and the service was great. It seems Erica is following in Nairns footsteps and can make friends with almost anyone! It was a late night getting back home but it was worth it

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Tags: Fenwick Hotel, food, migraine

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

This is doing my head in. Just whenever I start to feel better and think ‘hey I’ve got my appetite back’ and get some food in me my body decides to give me that warning of ‘You aint going anywhere pal. I you think you’re going more than 5 yards from a toilet in the next 2 hours your a braver man that I!’

Went to the docs today and I’ve to get a few things looked at at the lab and see what that comes back as. So in other words I’m ill for the next few days at least

My super dead good news of the day is though that we bought a shoe rack the other day and I built it up this afternoon. The hall looks fairly tidy now. By god I’m boring.

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Tags: food

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Friday

We set off a bit later that I thought we were going to but as I was last to be picked up it was sort of expected. We made good time up to Glen Coe and despite a mix up with where Willie thought Glen Etive was we headed up to Fort William to get a few supplies and stopped in Ballaculish (or was it Glen Coe?) on the way back down to pick up a couple of bags of fire wood. The weather was holding well despite not knowing wether it was wanting to rain or shine earlier in the day and we eventually made it down to the lochside for about 5pm. The glen was dead with about 3 tents the entire way down and we managed to get one of the better spots to pitch our tents. The midges were horrendous until the sun went down but meanwhile we managed to get the campsite organised and some wood for the fire.

We’d worked out that we’d need more wood to see us through the evening but as I didn’t buy the hatchet I was looking at in Fort William and I’d forgotten my saw which I was intent on bringing this time we struggled to find any wood bigger than kindling for teh fire. That was until willie found a tree that was still standing but could be chopped down with his knife. It took all four of us working at it but we got it down and surprisingly enough that tree along with the wood we had bought worked out almost perfectly for burn time. It was nice to be back down in Glen Etive and was good to see my thinking stone and not to actually use it. The old campfire seemed to have not moved from where I last used it and unless someone had used a similar rock in its place the huge rock that cracked on us last time was still there.

Saturday
Saturday morning we all got up relatively early to find out food had been raided during the night by what looked like a wee mouse or two. Most of it was untouched but we all lost a few rolls and they even had a go at Willie’s Mars Bars! I think between us we had brought a full pig to cook for breakfast so there were plenty of bacon rolls to go about. We broke camp and headed up to the campsite that we were going to be based in for the next day. I’d heard of it before but I’d never been to the Red Squirral Campsite and was pleasantly surprised. Willie had described it as very laid back but we werent expecting the stoned dutch guy that seemed to be running it!

After getting the tents up we got all our gear together for the climb and headed off to the hill. This is probably where the misunderstanding could have been ironed out but as we didn’t know this was the case we didnt. All the time we’d talked about this we’d said we’d go up the Pap of Glencoe and if the weather and time let us we’d go up the next mountain as well as its joined by a ridge. Willie had been up previously so his description of the accent didn’t seem that bad. As we understood it we’d walk up to the saddle with a few scrambles and then up onto the Pap before deciding what we were doing with regards to the other peak. What we actually did was go up Clachaig Gully which if you read up on it is generally thought of as a stupid way to get down off the ridge unless you really know what your doing and the conditions are right. I was expecting the hard walking but not the scrambling up rock faces. I was really stressed out by it all and had to breath out a panic attack once the wind and drizzle started to take its toll on us. The height was making me dizzy in places but it was only really because the paths were that narrow and it would have been more dangerous to go back down than it would have been to keep going. I was fine after that but my god it was tiring. You could see Mark was struggling with it before we got to the summit but it wasn’t until we stopped for our lunch at the top that you could see just how knackered he was.

The view from the summit was something else though and no it wasn’t because of what you could see its because of what you couldn’t. We had about 20′ of clear view until the mist/cloud swallowed everything up. All we could see was the summit, each other and everything else was grey. We could have been in the campsite car park for all we knew.

It was round about this time that we realised that we hadn’t actually went up the Pap but we had just been on the summit of Sgurr nam Fiannaidh. The weather was getting dodgy and after we started heading back down Willie stopped and confessed that the last time he was up there you could see loads of paths down and you just had to pick one. We could only find the one path so we stuck to that and in the end it turned out it took you to the same place as Willie went the last time anyway. The path down off the mountain was how I was expecting the path up to be but to be honest I think my body would have been done in alot more going up that way that the way we actually went up. On the way down though we came across two wee goth kids with their long blonde hair and black long sleeve teeshirts just waling straight up the hill. They weren’t even bothering about the path, they were just battering through the ferns and heather. Not quite sure what they were up to to be honest.

After we got back to the campsite we were ahead of schedule so Willie went off for a shower and we got ourselves sorted for going to the pub for dinner. I’d left my trainers in the car so I was stuck in my tent until then.
We made it to the pub and got our food order in barely ten minutes before they shut the kitchen I think. I had a venison burger which was about the cheapest thing on the menu but by god it was tasty. We had a few pints of Dark Island ale as well whilst we listened to the band and tried not to attract the attention of the hen night and the stag party that were living it up. All night it was pissing down outside and a phone signal was no existant almost so it seemed but I managed to get a few txts through to Vonnie and I got the pics she’d sent earlier of the kids which made me want to be in bed at home with them. We were shattered by about 10pm but Willie managed to keep Dave and myself out for another hour I think and Mark went up the road early as he needed as much rest as possible I think.

Sunday

I awoke to find my sleeping bag soaking and the tent ringing as the ground water was starting to get through and someone had removed the peg holding the back of the tent away from the inside so that was soaked through as well. Anyway we got up and despite attempting to make a midge free cup of tea for myself and Dave and failing we headed off early. Vonnie was coming up to meet me and I was dropped off at Tyndrum to wait for her. It was anice day and we drove back down to Luss for something to eat and to visit Vonnie’s father Eddie for a wee bit. Had a wee wander around Luss then drove back via Vonnie’s Nana’s and then was in bed for 8.30 I think.

All I can say is my muscles ache like hell and my midge bites itch like a very itchy thing. It was worth the climb though

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Tags: ache, ale, campsite car park, Dark Island, Eddie, food, food order, Fort William, Glen Coe, Glen Etive, panic attack

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

The groutings done and now all i need to do is put the splashguard on tomorrow and the showers set to go!

I made a honey and ginger cheesecake tonight and im hoping it tastes good. Unfortunately I cant try any of it as i think ill be sick at some point tonight and dont want to chance throwing any food into my stomach

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Tags: food