Charlottealot

and I liked it.

AND it cost less than £11. If that isn't proof that money doesn't buy you happiness, I don't know what is.

Well. The temperature today is 4 degrees centigrade. I go to Fernie in Canada in a few weeks, where the temperature often drops to -30. I will be there for three months.

Oh dear.

I'm indoors right now, not too big a distance from a radiator, and I am shivering.

Am I even going to survive?

Oh dear. I'm rubbish at writing on this blog. It's probably something to do with the fact that I also blog in several other places. But when I saw the new penguin header I had to change it. And changing the header doesn't really count as much of an update does it?

I've recently decided that I heart penguins. Hence the header excitement. March of the Penguins is beautiful viewing, even if I did get upset about all the ickle ones that didn't make it. And now I've got Surf's Up and Happy Feet to look forward to. Everytime we go to Tesco I insist on making the Happy Feet penguin toy do a dance for me, James looks at the electrical stuff and I amuse myself with the penguin. (Rather like when we went to pc world and I spent some quality time with the Barbie laptop.)

Tescos has nothing on Morrisons though, they had a giant penguin, and I got to hug it! I do have a picture of me looking incredibly happy that I've found a lifesize stuffed penguin to be my friend, but it's still on James's phone for the time being, so you'll have to live without that visual imagery of my love for penguins. Instead, here's several wonderful stills from March of the Penguins. The second one down is where the male is freezing to death looking after the chick while the mum swans off to stuff her face. Nice, huh?

The Daily Mail is definitely my least favourite paper, I'd rather read any other paper, so I usually manage to avoid it and the utterly ridiculous stuff it prints and live my life obliviously.

Occasionally though, some stuff slips through the net and ignoring it isn't an option. Recently there was that 'bloggers and googlers' tripe that left me reeling for days and wondering why a national newspaper would print something so utterly incorrect it was ridiculous. In fact the words 'utterly' and 'ridiculous' are pretty much all I have to say when it comes to the Daily Mail.

Over the last few weeks I've been given several Daily Mails by my mum, who got them from one of the women she works for (just so you know I didn't hand over any money for them) and here's some of the things I've read...

An article about guns, in which there was actually a spread about which guns to buy. Sure they were for sport shooting, but still, guns!

An article where they claimed that more people will become vegetarians because soon they will have software to tell us what animals are thinking. Right. I'm a vegetarian, and it's nothing to do with what the animals are thinking.

A feature which talked about installing pink lights in areas prolific with 'yobs' which show up their spots so they won't want to stand there. Surely they'll just stand on the other side of the road then? And isn't this making a rather big assumption that all yobs are blessed with spots?

It's enough to send me into a lengthily Vox rant...

Something I found out lately really cheered me up though. News that my spoilt, opinionated housemate who spouted self-indulgent rubbish and who got her piss-all-over-our-bathroom-floor, phlegm-in-our-bath, get-twatted-on-coke-and-scale-our-house, take-pissed-up-2am-showers-in-our-shower loser of a boyfriend a key cut for our house, has got a job at, the Daily Mail.

So well done Laura*, you've found your perfect match.

*Her real name - the feelings were mutual.

Way ahead of schedule - it only took a whip round the village to find the nearest old lady to teach my mum how to crochet so she could teach me. Apparently there are advantages to living in the middle of nowhere. That's it though.

Also, I have computer blindness. Looking at my screen makes me feel dizzy and sick. So right now, my Vaio is really not my friend, only a month or two old and I got blue screen of death today. Not happy.

Today I made my first foray into a wool shop to get a ball of DK (double knitting whatever that means) wool and a crochet hook so I can begin my mission to make at least one hat in time to keep my noggin warm when I go to Canada. I've got until January 15th to complete my masterpiece and so far it's not going well.

I know Gemma, Jenni and Katie are crochet geniuses, so if you know of any idiot proof guides then please post the link. Even single crochet is aluding me - I can't work out which bit of the hole to put the hook through. Argh. Must perservere.

And I've already annoyed the wool shop lady when I kept saying knitting when I meant crochet, and asking for 'one of the stick things' in 5mm. I'm sure I'll learn.

The whole reason I'm so scared of spiders is because of three spider events...

1. Giant spider on my pillow.
2. Really giant spider on the wall right next to my face.
3. Giant spider in fell into my bath.

All these probably happened before I was ten and haven't ever got over my phobia. I thought I was doing ok at the moment what with the hundreds of OBESE spiders everywhere at the moment. Including at least 8 right outside my window. I'm pleased that the spiders are binge eating the fly population, but I wish they didn't have to be in my sight.

Just when I was congratulating myself about being blase about the spider infestation, on Sunday I ran through James's horrible spider filled garage to get to my car and nearly ran into a fattie in the middle of his nest. Needless to say I ran out of the garage screaming my head off while everybody laughed at me.

Then last night, there was another one on my pillow. Sob. Why won't they just leave me alone! Paul Mckenna is doing over the web hypnosis at the moment with gm.tv, but I don't want to be cured of my phobia. I don't want to be friends with spiders and happily let a tarantula wander over my hands, I just want them to leave me alone.

We're really going! Canada will be our new home for three months from January 2007. Snow, glorious snow!

Fernie trees

In no particular order:

1. Mould can actually grow on soap, who knew? (evidently not the person whose house we found it in - they thought it was actually part of the soap and had been merrily washing their hands with it).
2. Snowboarding really is wonderful, especially after two bottles of coke and a monster cup of coffee.
3. I don’t do mornings (but I knew that already).
4. Broken down cars can be fixed with my tweezers (although not by me, obviously).
5. The hard shoulder is a scary place.
6. That my computer game strategy of randomly bashing all the buttons is probably the reason I’m no good at them (not that I want to be, particularly, but I was drawn to the idea of being much better at snowboarding than I really am on Amped 3 - plus you gain the magical ability to ride uphill - no more evil lifts!).