A couple of Mormon missionaries just came to my door. I surprised them by telling them that yes, I do have a copy of The Book of Mormon, and I bought it in Salt Lake City from the shop at the museum of Mormon.

They were a little upset that I had already made my mind up to be an atheist, and they tried three times to see if I would let them in. I kept saying no, but they kept on talking. I was very polite though, despite the fact that I wanted to challenge them!

Everyone’s probably heard a little bit in the news recently about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They’re locked in a silly political scrap with each other over the democratic nomination. The problem I have with this is that they’re on the same fricking team!

Personally I can’t see how Hillary can win the nomination at this point. Assuming she does, somehow, it won’t be good. She’s made herself look like a desperate “liar”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7313117.stm by claiming she and her daughter landed under sniper fire in Tuzla, Bosnia. Why even make up something like that anyway?

So yeah, even if she wins the nomination there will be a whole selection of people who were going to vote for Barack Obama who don’t want to just switch to the other democratic candidate. Some people who couldn’t make their mind up between republican and democrat will have gone for republican because McCain has been left out of this whole bickering mess between the democratic candidates.

ARGH! It’s so stupid. At this point it’s so obvious who is going to win that Hillary should just back down and stop picking faults with Barack. The party needs consolidation and team work to win. The political system shouldn’t drag this on so long. The party members should stick to their values and not to bitching about the failures of others.

All America, and the rest of the world, get lumbered with is the candidate who hid their shady past the best. That’s not really good enough.

Lizz bought a new car today. We spent hours looking around garages for a new one yesterday. She’s settled on a Fiat Brava after much deliberation. It’s really nice. A silvery blue-ish colour, very sexy. 5-doors, electric windows, power steering. A big improvement on the previous car. The only issue is that it won’t be available until Wednesday. 🙁 Oh well. That’s not too long, I guess. Oh wait, there is another issue. It’s about £2000! that’s quite a bit of money.

Lizz, Dave, JonP, Emma, Peter, Bev, Neil, and I went to the Ravensdale pub to do the quiz. we used the 4 pints we won previously. Guess what… We won another 4 pints, _and_ we won £18 by winning the quiz overall. Perhaps if we do that more often the car will be paid for quite quickly! 😀

Dave, Phil, Lizz and I went to Alton Towers yesterday. We got there really early and went straight to Nemesis. After a ride on there we were all hungry for breakfast so we started walking to Burger King. On the way we doubled back to go to a ghost ride where you have to shoot things with a laser gun. That was pretty cool. Lizz got 50700 points, I got 39000 or so, Phil got 37000 and something, and Dave said his gun broke so he only got about 6 points. 😉

We had some food at BK and then went to go on more rides. We went on Spinball Whizzer a couple of time, which were both great. The whole carriage spins around while the ride’s going around. We then went on Oblivion and it was absolutely awesome! The drop is ridiculous. You don’t really know what to expect if you’ve not been on it before. There’s no reaction time to pull a funny face for the camera. You’re just falling, very quickly. We went on Hex, which was a bit crap, really. The first few minutes were what spoiled it. Mostly it was the fault of a few moronic people who decided to go on it at the same time as us. They kept shouting random things and ruining the atmosphere. The end of the ride was done quite well though. 🙂 From there we went on Rita. That ride has the fastest accelleration imaginable. One second you’re sitting there, the next you’ve had your picture taken and you’re going around a really tight corner at top speed. Amazing.

The water rides are what came next. We all went down the rapids and posed for a silly picture that I’ll upload at some point. 🙂 Dave and Phil went on the log flume and both got themselves totally soaking wet.

After some donuts we decided it was about home time.

On the way home we nearly ran out of petrol before we managed to find a garage. We also helped a person from the Netherlands not to crash by warning her that she was driving on the wrong side of the road. After we’d gone through Derby we were on the A38 when suddenly Lizz’s car decided it couldn’t be bothered any more. She’d only got it back the day before with a £150 gear box put in it. 🙁 A police officer driving in the opposite direction put his lights on and went flying off to turn around and come back to help us. There was no real hard shoulder for us to pull into. We’d had to stop about 100 metres short of the nearest parking layby, too. The police officer got another police officer to slow down traffic on that section to 40mph so that it was safe for Dave and I to push the car along the A38 to the parking layby. After what seemed like forever a man arrived in a tow truck to take us back to Mansfield. That cost £122. Luckily Lizz has breakdown cover, so that’ll be refunded soon enough.

Lizz’s grandad gave us a lift home from his house near the garage. That was very nice, otherwise it would have taken another 15-20 minutes of walking.

I called the garage this morning to see what was going on. Unfortunately it seems the engine ran out of oil and the thing is now knackered beyond use. The oil light only came on just as the car was breaking down. What kind of a warning light is that? It’s the equivalent of throwing something at someone and warning them afterwards.

So it looks like we’re in the market for a replacement car. 🙁

Lizz and I went to see the Circus of Horrors with Chloe and Joe last night. It was really cool. I wasn’t entirely sure of what to expect, but it was great.

There was a guy hanging from hooks in his back, a woman climbing up a staircase of samurai swords, a really really bendy woman in skimpy clothing, people swinging from ropes way up in the air, people cracking whips, people on roller-skates, and a midget pulling a vacuum cleaner around with the clever use of suction and his penis. 😀 It’s definitely something I’d go back to again, but I’d like to be closer to the front next time so I could see more.

I’m off work all this week, it’s really nice not to have to get straight up when I wake up and get out of the house. It’s only a shame that Lizz still has to go. 🙁

It’s quite annoying that Lizz’s car still hasn’t been repaired. It’s taking much longer than expected because of a lack of decent gear boxes. The third one should hopefully work. If not then we’ll have to look at another car. There’s not much point spending a few hundred pounds on a car that only cost a few hundred in the first place.

Shortly after I finished writing the bookmarklet for the iPlayer the BBC patched that particular hole by making a slightly different one. That hole has already been discovered. Now there’s a ruby file you can download that was written by a nice person in London named Paul Battley.

It works very well and is much better than any pesky bookmarklet option that’s available. All you do is copy the regular viewing URL (such as http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00950p9.shtml for Eastenders) and run the command with that as input. It’ll download and name the file for you. 🙂

It’s very nice.

I went out with Dave and Lizz last night. We did the pub quiz at the Ravensdale. We won 4 pints by doing it. 🙂

I had too much to drink. I played on Guitar Hero III when I got home and I think the scrolling might have been what helped me on my way to throwing up. 🙁

I slept in the spare room so I didn’t bother Lizz. I had no idea where I was when I woke up. Can’t believe I came to work early. Can’t believe I came at all!

It’s Friday afternoon and I can’t wait to go kick a football around a bit!

The weeks are really flying by just recently. It’s amazing. Easter holidays should be good because I’m off work for an entire week.

It was my teaching course last night. When I got there Barbara asked if I could wait outside. I thought it had something to do with security because the whole place got broken into over the weekend and all the computers, laptops, and projectors got stolen. turned out to be because she wanted to set the room up first.

When I walked in the classroom was dark, candles were on the tables, biscuits and fig newtons were on plates, soothing music was playing on a CD player, and tea and coffee was available at the back of the room. It was a very nice beginning to the class. It really reminded me of the psychology classes I used to go to in California. They always began with meditation for a few minutes. It was very nice.

I handed in all of the work that I’d done voer the last couple of days only to find out I was the only one who bothered. Oh well. At least I’ll get some feedback from Barbara when it gets referred so I can make a few changes and (hopefully) pass.

We started our new unit on assessment. We’ll be being observed again shortly after Easter, which is quite soon. I’m hoping it’ll be possible to be observed in the ESOL class I help Vlad with. It’d be good to have an observation in a class where all the learners really want to be there.

We’re set to finish the course in the middle of June, which doesn’t actually seem like very long now. I just hope I pass after all this effort. I can’t imagine that I’ll fail though. 🙂

Lizz and I went to my mum’s house to pick up some of my shorts for playing football in on Friday. I ended up being there for about 20 minutes, and then we had to take a chest of drawers apart and take it to my sister’s.

At my sister’s I fitted some new RAM in her computer, and it didn’t work. According to Crucial and a few other websites the RAM should be totally fine, but no. So that was a waste of a couple of hours. I took my mum’s computer from my sister’s house to fix at some point over the next few days.

When we got home we had to go out to get some nice fast food for Lizz to eat. We went to Asda and spent a while getting things so Lizz can bake a cake tomorrow. After we’d been there for a while we found that they had no cooked chickens left, which was what Lizz wanted.

We noticed we were running low on gas, so we looked to see if we could buy more in Asda, but they don’t sell it.

On the way home Lizz pulled into the street beside the Co-op store, just after I pointed out that it was closed (over 2 hours early).

When we got back we parked off the street because there were no places near our house. I was carrying the shopping back to the house when a man walking by pointed out that someone had stolen the lead from the fron of our house where there’s a bit of a bay window type thingy. So that’s just fucking wonderful.

We got back into the house and Lizz started cooking something else, only to find that we’d actually run completely out of gas. I worked out how to enable the emergency gas, and Lizz put the food on. she went upstairs to shower while she waited, only to find that the water wouldn’t get hot. I eventually found that the boiler needs to be reset if the gas runs out, and got it sorted.

I’m so fucking tired!