How not to make a pot roast and other tales

This weekend was not, in all honesty, my finest weekend on the planet. It started off well enough with a visit to the Franklin Park conservatory, home of many pretty plants and such. I think the desert region was probably my favourite as the cactuses (cacti just seems too tarty) were very pretty. The fish and chips at The Old Bag of Nails pub were almost up to the standards I was used to from the Gloucester Road chippy, the name of which I have mislaid in my mind, which came as a bit of a surprise. Well to be honest the fish was very nice, but the chips fell a little short in comparison.

Saturday, however, was pretty much a disaster. With the exception of doing my laundry I would have been far better off if I'd just lain in bed all day. You see I, ahem cough cough, gambled, cough cough, a little bit of money on this weekend's college football. By a little bit I mean more than the price of a few beers and less than the price of a car, okay less than the price of a really cheap car. Sadly my record on the weekend was 2 right in 6 attempts, which equated to me losing all but 73 pence of my stake. Not entirely successful, I think you'll agree. To compound matters I watched the principal game on which I gambled, the Ohio State - Penn State game, with some of my work colleagues who were supporters of the opposing team. I was not an entirely happy bunny. Things actually managed to get worse after I'd lost all my money, and do to a combination of stupidity (mine), negligence (mine, COTA's and the taxi company's) and stubbornness (mine again) I ended up walking home the seven or eight miles from where I was watching the game to home. My shins still kind of hurt.

Sunday things went little better. The highlight, well low-light technically, was when I managed to make a casserole dish explode. At the time the dish contained the pot roast that I was cooking to eat on Sunday night. Apparently some casserole dishes don't like being placed on the hob. Mine has never minded in the past. Of course, I wasn't using mine when the explosion took place. I did successfully manage to pick out most, if not all, the pieces of glass and transfer things to one of my casserole dishes for the roasting part of the cooking. You'd be amazed, or not probably, how much mess a full casserole dish disintegrating on the stove top can create. Ho hum, back to the drawing board on that one.

I seem to recall I messed something else up this weekend. But I can't recall what, now that I think about it. Maybe it will come back to me. Probably not.

I did manage to finish Anansi Boys last week, and it was very, very good. I spent a lot of time smiling while I read it. Very clever and very cute, and now I really do want to hear Lenny Henry's reading of it — although possibly not enough to actually buy a copy. Right now, well not right now, I am spending a lot of time smiling while I read Terry Pratchett's Thud!. I do love Vimes. It's a manly kind of a love though, not the other kind.

For those of you on tenterhooks (fabulous word) regarding George and the carpet (I actually mistyped that crapet, which is kind of appropriate) she's still being decidedly anti-social in her choice of toilet location. The thing that I find confusing is that she has a litter box, and seems perfectly content to piss in it and will occasionally use it for a crap, but still in the middle of the night there has a strange desire to shit by the front door. We might have to adopt a multiple litter box approach to the problem.