Obsessed with food

Just noticed all the pictures coming up in my Flickr widget feature food. I’m not obsessed… really.

Having just had to ‘help’ my teenage daughter make dozens of lemon curd tarts for a charity stall she is running as part of her Arts Management course at Exeter College – I’ve gone off food completely. Well pastry anyway.

Now what’s for tea…

Marketing madness

Our household is now the proud owner of a Peugeot 206 sw (the sw stands for station wagon I believe). Anyway it’s essentially a small estate car, so station wagon sounds a bit pretentious for a car of such diminutive stature.

It’s a dear little thing though, which promises to deliver nearly 60mph with its 1.4 hdi diesel engine, and apparently we’re only going to have to pay 30 pounds a year to the government to drive on our roads.

I would like to report that the purchase of this fine vehicle was a pleasant experience… but I would be lying. The main dealer we bought it from did nothing to sell the car, in fact I can honestly say if it wasn’t for the fact we’d been looking out for one if these little motoring gems for some time, we’d have walked away as soon as Paul, the salesman first embarked on his mechanical sales dribble. But it looked like a keeper so we stayed with it.

We already knew more about the car than Paul anyway. With just 21,000 miles on the clock it looked an attractive package so we were going to buy.

At this point we should have placed our fingers firmly in our ears and sung la, la, la, la, la. This way we wouldn’t have had to endure all the nonsense about how the full stop after the price denoted no room for negotiation in the deal. Yeh right!

So we purchased the vehicle, and apparently also an hpi check which was slapped on to our final invoice at the grand price of £80. Luckily we managed to dodge all the other extras like additional warranties and protective paint treatments, which could have easily added a whopping extra £2k to our purchase price.

Moral of tale, avoid Evans Hallshaw, Plymouth like the plague.  Incidentally their 3 month warranty was just as useless and we must have wasted at least £100 worth of fuel driving up and down the A38 between Exeter and Plymouth in an effort to sort out a few annoying problems with the car.

Nuff said.

Try Something New Today…Lidl?

Just popped to Sainsburys and guess what? Yep got it in one… no food – well not stuff I wanted anyway.

No duck legs (ok not your normal chicken drumsticks) but no surprises there really as they rarely have them. No spinach and ‘yes we have no bananas’! Is there a war on?

I asked the staff who told me I wasn’t the first to complain about the empty shelves. They suggested I shop at Lidl…

Empty shelves at Sainsburys, Alphington, Exeter

Last autumn our local Sainsburys store was extended and very exciting it was too. New lines, homewares, clothes, a new cafe, handy self-service tills all lovely!
Only trouble is since re-opening it has been distinctly lacking in… well, food actually.
First lines went awol. Provisions we’d been buying for years no longer stocked. Mysteriously disappearing overnight. Discontinued. Then there was ‘on expiry’ produce… you check the date, only to discover is on it’s last day of sale (or, worse still it was out of date two days ago). Even more unbelievable when it’s 9pm at night and you are confronted by a shelf of full of cream cakes – due to expire at the stroke of midnight. What do they do with them all? Have a custard pie and cream bun fight in the staff room? And now, even finding a shelf full of anything has become a bit of a novelty.
Perhaps I’m just shopping at the wrong time? Well no, my Sainsburys is literally on my doorstep, my corner shop, and I regularly pop in for provisions, bread a couple of pints of milk and the shelves remain well and truly empty, vacant, devoid of food.
So what’s going on? Is it a faulty stock management system, a supply and demand issue? A simple lack of staffing? I’m guessing there will be no extra staff to manage this supersized store with the new self-service technology. Perhaps we’re supposed to place the orders ourselves as well. Dunno… but I’m seriously considering switching to Tesco.

See below for pics on Flickr.

A (somewhat late) New Year Resolution

I promise to blog more regularly. Now what’s happened to all my widgets – there were loads here when I last looked. My links to Twitter and Flickr seem to have totally disappeared…

Abandoned blog – MkII

Feeling very guilty as I’ve not blogged for some time now.

In fairness I had a post in draft (basically moaning about the iPad of which I’m now a not so proud owner) – but it seems to have disappeared so guess either WordPress got fed up with waiting… Or more likely, I deleted it in error.

Anyway I’m pleased to report I’m getting used to it, the iPad that is, and am not feeling quite as disappointed as when I first got it.

So what have I been up to? Not much actually. Should have signed up for the next part of my OU course (I was supposed to be doing T226 this November) but things haven’t worked out quite as planned. We’ve lost 2 members of my team at work so it’s going to be difficult now to complete it (but hopefully not impossible). The course is only being offered until May next year (2011) so we’ll have to wait and see what happens come April.

The other thing that’s been taking my attention away from my blog is our kitchen project. Never had a new kitchen before so very excited about this. We’ve opted for a Wickes kitchen and install as the quality seemed better than some of the competitors (B&Q, home base etc) time will tell…

I could probably bore you for hours with my kitchen talk but I’m going to call it a night and publish this before I lose/delete yet another draft.

Oh, and if you were wondering what I didn’t like about the iPad – it’s because it’s pretty useless without a PC or Mac and it doesn’t even have Flash. I don’t call that ‘magical’.

Final Score

The results are finally in. Nope, nothing to do with football but my Open University mark.

I have passed T121! Got a respectable 76 for my OES (Overall Examination Score).

Now I figure if I was the England football team this would be cause for some celebration. A win which would undoubtedly warrant cracking open a few bottles, triumphant shouts of victory, perhaps even the odd street party. But instead it feels like … well a bit of an anti-climax to be honest.

Only 76! I got 88 for my OCAS. I’m sure it’s a perfectly respectable pass, probably equivalent to a B or C? So why do I feel somehow – cheated?

Hopefully when I receive feedback on my paper in a few weeks time I will feel better about my success. In the meanwhile – England pull your finger out!