Samantha Erin Richards Sadler

Hey there,

I've realised for those sensible friends of ours who haven't joined the hordes on Facebook that there are no photos of my beautiful month old (month tomorrow, anyway) daughter.

View a slideshow here

Warm-up for Reebok Bristol Half Marathon

For the last month I've been working on the Bristol Half Marathon. On the day I was responsible for College Green, which meant that this was about as close to the race as I got. It was a great day and I got some really good feedback from the runners. Maybe next year I'll run.

SJ Esau - Under Certain Things

All flued out.

It's been a really beautiful February day here. Out the window, the drunks haven't been the only one's in the park for once, people from all over have been out picnicing and reading papers. My favourite park regular, the old Chinese lady who does evening Thai Chi on her own each night, has just left as the sun disappears and the day starts to cool. And us? We've all been indoors all day feeling rotten. I caught Amon's cold that he picked up at nursery - he's now started 2 days a week, and seems to be on course for picking up every bug one by one - and Rosa's got a hyperactive thyroid. According to Wikipedia and her, this sucks. It means at night when she should by all rights be asleep she's lying there with her heart going like the clappers trying to sleep. She's really exhausted now, and can't even sleep in the moments she should be able to. This coincides badly with her return to work after maternity leave and now Amon's had to move onto formula milk for fear of getting her medication through her milk.
We even failed to make it out to the back yard to start the gardening off afresh. I failed to get a job in the Council's allotments team recently, which only served to remind me that I should have been taking care of the garden over winter.
Feeling truly sorry for ourselves, I shall leave you with some good news: babies. Our friends Viv & Ali and Emily & Will have both had babies since I last wrote.

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust

This album is by one of my favourite artists in ages.
It's FREE or $5 (about £2.50) to download, depending on how much you want to pay.

It's also been produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame.

Have a listen, on me, go on. If you like it - have it - completely legally. It's yours (although obviously your a cheapskate if you don't pay £2.50, direct to the artist, no record label involved, to get your copy).

Have a listen

Back from holiday

We've been away to Budleigh Salterton, where we rented a cottage for a week.
It's a bit tricky getting anything done wit' baby, as you can tell by the plumetting number of posts in the last few months (this in no way correlates to the fact that work banned access to blogspot.com from our desks).

Sugar, talking of having no time, I gotta go, but before I do here's some pictures of Amon from a while ago:





This is from the Lake District earlier the year ...

... Amon no longer fits the bucket bath, being the weight of the avergae year and a half yearo old and the height of the average one year old.

The ol' family beer stick

I've been reading up on brewing over at this amazing (well informative, at the least, maybe you're not all as fascinated with the why and wherefores of beer) site

There was a time when the role of yeast in brewing was unknown. In the days of the Vikings, each family had their own brewing stick that they used for stirring the wort. These brewing sticks were regarded as family heirlooms because it was the use of that stick that guaranteed that the beer would turn out right. Obviously, those sticks retained the family yeast culture. The German Beer Purity Law of 1516 - The Reinheitsgebot, listed the only allowable materials for brewing as malt, hops, and water. With the discovery of yeast and its function in the late 1860's by Louis Pasteur, the law had to be amended.

Single Use Items

No, I'm not talking about disposables that get chucked once done with. I thought I'd share a secret and indulgent passion of mine ... I really love kitchen gadgets that serve one singular and niche purpose the more bizarre the better (although I have an irrational dislike of garlic crushers).

As you see in the little animation below, I bough an egg slicer the other day. To me they are the epitome of this kind of item.

But let us not forget the noble toothpick, or olive fork, or even better the pickle fork with spring action. My grandmother had one of these and I've wanted one ever since. I can't explain how they work but they are a marvel of victorian engineering akin to the canal system in my warped mind.

What other items bring joy to my heart when rummaging in the drawer for some tool or other?
Pizza cutters, mandolins, pestle and mortar, scone cutters, coffee makers, cheese slicers, flour dusters; God they're lovely.

The only problem is I have a perfectly good knife and my brand new egg slicer from Aldi makes the egg look like this: