Sunday, 7 June 2009

Sunday 7h June




The two sides of Luca, contrasting in extremus! The pictures above were taken only seconds apart, but show to the extent his moods shift at the moment. Life with a two year old....

Yesterday started rather poorly - Carole was distinctly unimpressed with me. She'd had a night out with the girls from work on Friday night, and as such didn't get home until reasonably late (apres midnight, and moderately squiffy). However, despite this and my own early night I slept through Luca's morning alarm call, forcing Carole to do the honours.

She didn't have a cup of coffee and a full cooked breakfast waiting for me once I eventually came down funnily enough....

From there (obviously after the dogs daily pulling of my arms from their sockets during their morning constitutional) we all drove into Aberdeen mid-morning in order to get Carole to her class, and Luca and I to the supermarket, which was then immediately followed by a visit to the bi-annual "Taste of Grampian" festival at Thainstone. We attended this for the first time last year, and it was terrific, full of stalls and samples of local and rare food and drink. This years version was much the same, although with one problem added - word had spread. Despite our late arrival, and the ever worsening rain, there were thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) present, which made the whole experience frustrating and futile.

Despite this disappointment (allied to the fact a specialist baker no longer makes the aubergine cake which Carole so adored last year), we still came away with a couple of decent items which were quickly consumed on arrival home. Or in the case of the honeycomb fudge devoured during the car journey by a certain short legged and unruly imp!

Carole later popped round to her friend, leaving Luca and I to make dinner, a fully experimental butter bean and bacon concoction. What did I learn from this dish? Don't add copious amounts of salt to any dish containing bacon. We both still feel we've been gargling on ocean water.

Once the ragamuffin went down - full stomached after a particularly ravenous day - Carole and I watched another downloaded horror film, entitled "The Midnight Meat Train", which was about as subtle as the title suggests! We also watched a part of Northern Ireland's football match against Italy, purely to watch Partick Thistles goalkeeper Johnny Tuffey make his debut, Thistle's first full internationalist in almost 30 years. It didn't go too well for him, and he (perhaps predictably) conceded three goals.

This morning started with a rare, and ineffectual, excursion to the gym for me first thing. The only worthwhile element of which was that it reminded my diminishing memory that I'm as weak as a kitten before 10am! Carole then went to her fitness class, while Luca and I took a walk together, the "highlight" of which being Luca giving me a heart attack by hiding in the local shop we went into for our Sunday papers.

The rest of today will likely be quiet, as it's just started pouring with rain - that was a brief summer again - but it will be imbued by surprisingly excellent TV tonight, the most anticipated of which being the final of "The Apprentice". The clever money has to be the unflappable Kate winning the job, but Alan Sugar can be as unpredictable as an Israeli political election.

**Useless fact of the day - Capsaicin, which makes hot peppers "hot" to the human mouth, is best neutralized by casein, the main protein found in milk**

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