Sleeping Monkey

Sleeping Monkey Presents...

Out of the Frying Pan… and onto the floor

Aug 29 2006

Well it’s been a fairly eventful weekend! It started off fairly badly, Saturday morning was boring… But the afternoon was spent playing the Sims 2 (University) with Tessa and Suzie which proved to be entertaining when they decided to make themselves. In the evening Ineke came round from work and ate with us, then stayed the night.

During that evening, I dual booted my old computer with Windows XP Pro and Ubunutu Linux – it’s a very old computer, and only has a 20Gb harddrive, so each operating system only gets 10Gb to play with, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for it. I spent ages (with the help of Anthony, the local Linux genius) trying to get Ubunutu to connect to the network, but we eventually gave up and came to the conclusion that the wireless card just didn’t like me, and needed replacing.

Sunday morning, played bass at church, the person speaking was a missionary from Albania, Anne Roberts or somebody, and she had with her some Albanian woman who spoke in a funny accent. Albanian, I guess… Lovely sunday roast, followed by an afternoon of laziness! Well, Ineke and I drove to Tessa’s to fix a problem with her computer: they had brought a brand new graphics card but it still wouldn’t run Sims 2. Eventually found the root of the problem – it required changing one setting in the BIOS from “Allocate IRQ to PCI VGA – No” to “Allocate IRQ to PCI VGA – Yes” and it all worked smoothly.

Sunday evening, we decided to make pancakes. Now, that was a bad idea! We had these bottles of pancake mix where you fill the bottle up with milk, shake the mixture about, and you have instant pancake mix, ready to be cooked. So, out comes the frying pan, oil poured in, pancakes poured in and off we went! The first few went smoothly, until it came to one fateful pancake. I’m not too bad when it comes to flipping pancakes, and I usually manage it fine, but this time, I went to flip the pancake and the next thing I know, I’m left standing with nought but a frying pan handle in my hand, the frying pan is bouncing on the floor and the pancake is sticking to the floor… I quickly grabbed some oven gloves and picked up the frying pan, but not quick enough – it had melted a hole in our lino floor that looks strangely like a man with a flame thrower. I scooped up the pancake, and that ended that fiasco… However, we are left with a holey kitchen floor and are down one frying pan – it taught us the lesson never buy a frying pan from a French supermarket!

Monday was also an eventful day. Suzie, Mum and I took Ineke shopping in Southampton, with my credit card at her disposal… She’s a very reluctant shopper, to say the least! But we got her some clothes: a couple of vest top type things, a very nice blue shirt thingy, and a yellow t-shirt – and only one of them was from Primark! She also insisted on buying herself a winter coat and some pyjamas, and wouldn’t let me pay for them.

In the evening we went down the very nice restaurant the Oast and Squire, for a celebratory meal in celebration of Ineke’s, Suzie’s, and my A-level results. It proved to be a very funny meal, with Dad squashing a green monkey into a glass, and Ineke accidentally making Nazi gestures at Dad. Then it was make even more interesting by the absence of light, when there was a power cut… Emergency lights came on and we could vaguely see, but the waitress came out to say she had just made our puddings, but couldn’t bring them out because she couldn’t see where they were any more… So John lent her his phone, which has a light on it, so that she could bring us our puddings.

So, lessons learnt this weekend? Never buy a French frying pan, never take a Green Monkey to a restaurant, and let Ineke choose how much of my money she spends herself.