How often has the Christmas tree afforded me the greatest glee!

It was my birthday on Friday.  Thank-you, I did enjoy myself and got a good selection of books, chocolate and clothes, the latter two in larger sizes than the previous year.

Il Capo has a rule regarding the delineation between my birthday and Christmas.  She feels it is important to keep a separation between these two notable celebrations and therefore we do not decorate for Christmas until my birthday has passed.

Consequently, on Sunday we went looking for a Christmas tree.

I fancied the idea of cutting down our own tree.  I know this is normal American behaviour because I've seen it on Charlie Brown.  The more time I spend in America, the more I realise how true to life Peanuts is, for example the obsession with pumpkins that started in August and is still rumbling on.  I've even seen dogs that slept on the roofs of their kennels, although that was in Alaska.

I had a hunt around the Internet and found Wilkins Fruit and Fir Farm, a place where we could select our own tree and then mercilessly hack it down and drag it off to our home.

"This place will do, let's go here.  Wilkins Fruit and Fir Farm", said I.

"They do Christmas trees?", asked Il Capo?

"Yes, it's a fir farm.  It's only about ten miles away"

"OK... Um... Why do they sell Christmas trees at a fur farm?"

"What?"

"Do they keep the bears in them?"

"What???"

Eventually, we got our homophones in order and got in the car.

When we got there, I parked the PT Cruiser in a muddy field alongside the other cars.  I say cars, I mean trucks.  We were next to a Ford SUV which was a cross between a Humvee and a Greyhound bus.  It's what you get when the marketing department say they like the off-road ability of the Range Rover, so could you build the same thing, but with an extra row of seats and twice the luggage capacity.  All the Ford
4x4s
SUVs have names starting with "Ex".  In growing order of size there is the Extirpation, the Exsanguination and the Extermination.

From the car-park, we took a hay-ride to the tree plantation.  A quick word of explanation here to my British readers.  A hay-ride is when a tractor pulling a flatbed trailer draws up alongside you, and you and your precious children sit on the trailer, legs dangling while it takes you to your final destination.

As an impressionable youth, I used to watch "public information films" in England that showed 70s children riding on trailers, before one would fall over the side and under the wheels, resulting in a grisly mess of blood and brown cords.  The other thing I learnt not to do was throw a frisbee up into an electricity pylon then climb up to get it.  As I recall, that leads not to blood but to ashes floating gently in the breeze.

The film did its job - I clung to my youngest all the way, scanning the horizon for tornadoes or other possible hazards while silently calculating whether in the event that Son Number One began to slip, it would be better to grab him and risk his legs slipping under the wheels, or push him harder so he would fall away from this whirling machine of death.

As it happened the three mile an hour journey was uneventful.

At the plantation we roamed between the firs, looking for the perfect tree.  What is the perfect tree?  Well, the trees I liked were tall and conical, Il Capo likes trees that were symmetrical and Nanny wanted something without gaps in the foliage.  Son Number One's only criterion was that he could reach the label.  Bagpuss ignored the trees and looked for mud to walk in.  Working together we succesfully dismissed every candidate until Son Number One found our Douglas.  He was a little over seven feet tall and perfectly formed.  I found an itinerant teenager with a saw who happily laid on the frozen ground and sawed Douglas down, then carried him back to the trailer for the journey back.

After another non-fatal hay ride back, Douglas was placed in a shaking machine.  Ostensibly this was to allow dead needles to fall, but I think it was really to remove the spiders.  If they can hide in a bunch of bananas, how many can fit into a tree?  Then he was netted and two willing teenagers tied him to our PT Cruiser for which I thanked them with a picture of Abraham Lincoln mind-beaming them to share it with the lad stuck back in the trees with the saw.

While all this was happening to Douglas, we were receiving free mulled cider and buying a huge and delicious apple and cranberry pie.  Cider in America isn't the same as cider in Britain.  To the British, cider is an alcoholic drink made from fermented apples that is prized by teenagers for its easy drinkability and low cost.  To Americans, cider is a non-alcoholic drink, made from unpastuerised apple juice.  The mulled stuff was pretty good though.

Back at the ranch, Douglas was stood, watered and decorated and I think he looks pretty good.

Picture taken with a 2.5 second exposure without a tripod, so apologies for the blurring.

P.S.  I went hunting for the old UK public information films and found these.  They are not exactly as I remember, but the essential horror remains.  In fact, the trailer scene is one part of a long film which was shown in schools when I was small called Apaches.  Looking at it now, it's the Alien of public information films, almost 30 minutes long and with the theme of 80s horror films, except it was made before them.  A group of six children on a farm, one by one they meet grisly deaths until only one remains.  You might think that after one child has been crushed under a trailer, one drowned in a pit of slurry and one has drunk paraquat, the parents might think to take the other children away, but horror films don't work that way.  Remember, they made us watch this at school.

Part 1, The hay-ride scene is 4.30 in:


Part 2:


Part 3:


After that, the relatively mild frisbee film is here.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #12

Inflatable Horton is passing by with an inflatable clover and 56 wranglers below him.  Followed by the Care Bears.  A woman is miming something turgid about Christmas while bears ice-skate.  I need a beer.

Kermit is back, non-inflatable this time.  He's singing, but his voice is all wrong.  Bagpuss went to get her Fozzy Bear to wave at Kermit.  Meredith Vieria is announcing a group who aren't there.  The final band of the day are imminent, but first Andy Williams.

Andy is singing something Christmassy.  It's interesting how Christmas themed this Thanksgiving parade is.  There was one giant turkey, some over sized cranberries and about a dozen Christmas songs.  Perhaps someone should write more songs about pumpkin pie and sweet potatoes.  As I wrote that, the final band turned up and played Jingle Bells.

And here's Santa to wind up the parade.  He's a good Santery looking Father Christmas, with a thick but carefully groomed beard and is preceded by a long line of animatronic reindeer.

Matt Lauer is winding up, and Son Number One is reaching for the Wii remote.  The parade is over.

In conclusion, the whole thing was a little fraught - the Squeakers didn't enjoy it very much.  They would have loved it if they were there, but to see it we would have had to get up at oh-my-God-o-clock.  If we watch it on TV again, next time I'm turning off the commentators.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #11

There is now a steam-boat, populated by sailors, giant mice and a sixteen year old singer called Charice.  The captain has an eight foot head.  It represents Good Housekeeping.  I'm confused.

A marching band with a twist.  It's filled with octogenarians from Florida.  I think I just saw Lloyd Bridges playing a trumpet.

Spongebob Squarepants is floating past.

While watching Trace Adkins singing, Il Capo remarked, "Country Music's very big here, isn't it?"

Now there are traditional Iroquois dancers and singers performing - followed by inflatable Kermit.  The organisers have an interesting way of ordering this parade

They've hacked the head and shoulders off the Statue of Liberty and Miss USA is dragging it down the street!

Now this is unusual.  The Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team.

I think what is driving me nuts about the commercialism isn't that all the floats represent various shows or products - that's fair enough.  It's listening to Al Roker and Matt Lauer reading a paragraph from each company's marketing department every time a new float goes past.  Say, the float is from Build-A-Bear Workshop, but don't give me a hundred words on how turn children's dreams into nylon reality.

Andy Williams is coming up, but the Squeakers are beginning to rebel.  I may not make it...

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #10

Idina Menzel is singing on a float with the M&M men.  She's very well wrapped up with a big woolly hat.  Very energetic singing though.

Son Number One gazes adoringly at inflatable Pikachu.  Matt Lauer is explaining how Pikachu stores electricity in his cheeks.

Buzz Lightyear is floating over Broadway.  He's followed by a musical number from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends - which is interrupted by... RICK ASTLEY!  Il Capo is on her feet - she's dancing!

We've had to rewind so she can dance more... I'll be back when it's over.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #9

An Abby Cadabby inflatable, another marching band, and a giant Hello Kitty balloon. Bagpuss is happy again.

A giant pink castle is passing by. It has singing women on it.

Something that impresses Son Number One. Two jugglers juggling while one stands on the other's shoulders. They are from the Big Apple Circus.

Mr Peanut from Planters Peanuts arrives in his Nutmobile. Did you know Americans consume more than 600 million pounds of nuts every year? That's not much, they eat more turkey in one day!

The cast from Hair are here, singing Aquarius. Hair is on, needless to say, Broadway.



The huge horses of the NYC Parks Enforcement Mounted Patrol. Followed directly by an inflatable Ronald McDonald.

"Long Island's teen sensation" Push Play are singing on a cardboard bridge - someone forgot to turn off Matt Lauer's microphone. And another marching band are performing.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #8

I may be understating it, but there is a certain amount of product placement on the NBC broadcast of Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.

Now this is a little different.  Hawaiian dancers and singers all dressed in grass skirts and those flower garland things.

Shontelle is singing beside a huge rhino that people are abseiling rappelling  down...  I can't explain it.

An Inflatable Dora that waves!  The Squeakers are momentarily interested.  That is followed by a Harajuku Girls float with an inflatable Gwen Stefani and then a giant Energizer bunny.

Lots of girls in short skirts with huge skipping ropes.  They have sixty foot ropes perpendicular to each other and lines of jumping girls.  Hard to explain, think of the ropes as a grid.

Ooh, Sesame Street.  Bagpuss stops looking for a grape under the sofa to watch Elmo.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #7

Back to Harold Square outside Macy's.  The All-Star Baton Twirlers are twirling.  They each raised $2,000 dollars to appear - oh they've gone.

Peanuts characters, a giant inflatable Snoopy and normal sized Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus.

Il Capo's foot is better now.

Son Number One is asking to play on the Wii.

A marching band are now marching and playing.  More high-kicking from the band's majorettes.

The Bolt float is here.  Bolt is an upcoming film.  Miley Cyrus is miming to a song.  Miley Cyrus voices one of the characters.

Ah, now we have mounted police with a police band - oh, we are getting sponsors adverts over the top of them.  Obviously the police aren't paying NBC enough.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #6

The parade has now reached Macy's.  Possibly NBC were lacking cameras, as we finally get to see some of it.

Did you know that 675 million pounds of turkey is eaten every Thanksgiving in the USA?  That's a little over 32 ounces of turkey for every person.  That's what I enjoy about these long live events, the nuggets that the commentators produce from their crib-sheets.

The smurfs are passing by.  They've given pleasure to millions says Meredith Vieira... and Sony Pictures are bringing out a Smurfy movie next year.

James Taylor is singing America the Beautiful.  I think he's the first person not actually selling anything.

And we now pause as Il Capo soothes her foot where Bagpuss spilled hot tea.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #5

Interview with Ali Larter from NBC's Heroes.  Al Roker actually asked her about the parade, but then segued straight into Heroes, which you can catch Mondays at nine on NBC.

Now a performance of Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid, which is on... Broadway!  Ariel is wearing a pair of clam-shells in the street in November!

And now we have the Radio City Rockettes demonstrating their flexibility to a medley of Christmas tunes.  The Radio City Rockettes are appearing this Christmas at the Radio City Music Hall

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #4

Al Roker is fortunate to have Michael Flatley with him.  They're advertising a show on NBC.

Now it's lots of semi-naked sailors singing Nothing Like a Dame from South Pacific.  Apparently, South Pacific is on Broadway at the moment.  Who'da thunk it?

A quick recap.  We've seen a giant inflatable smurf and 600 cheerleaders from the parade, three promotions for Broadway shows and three interviews with people who are in NBC shows.

Now we have Harry Connick Junior in a helicopter over where the parade would be if he hadn't recorded it yesterday.

The Squeakers are starting to ask if it's over yet.

Interview with cast members from NBC's, The Office.  It's on Thursday nights at nine on NBC.

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #3

Uhhh, where was I?

There were six-hundred cheerleaders all jumping and wiggling.  Very hypnotic.

A giant Smurf just passed by - Al Roker got excited.

We now have a musical number from In The Heights , a musical on Broadway.

Al Roker has a special guest... It's David Hasselhoff!  Oh, no it's not.  He said Knight Rider and I got excited, but it's the star of the new Knight Rider advertising his show that isn't doing as well as hoped.  He just said a few words, gave the time and day of the show and then left, probably to go indoors.

Another musical number.  This is also from a Broadway show, a limited run of Irving Berlin's White Christmas.  I'm beginning to detect a theme here...

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #2

OK, NBC is on the television...

It's 37 degrees and Meredith Vieira really doesn't look happy to be outside in it.  A couple of statistics to start us off.  There are ten thousand parade participants and three and half million people watching on the streets of Manhattan.

NBC are going through all the performers that will be appearing.  It started off with Miley Cyrus and just kept going and going.  At one point he mentioned Rick Astley.  Got to stop typing, there are cheerleaders....

Live blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade #1

Thanksgiving is a unique holiday in the U.S.  It's the only American holiday where the event itself appears to have more significance than the plastic novelties you put in your front yard.  In fact, other than a few inflatable turkeys there is little in the way of humourous trash with which to adorn the day.  The purpose - spending time with people close to you and eating your own weight in one sitting - is sufficiently consuming to make any ancillery gimcrackery seem pointless - detrimental even - to the day's significance.

There is however, one Thanksgiving tradition that has absorbed all this missing gimmickry and razamatazz and it is discharged in one long New York parade.  I'm told it makes other parades look like a queue line at the post office.  Initially it was my plan for the whole Potarto family to go and see the parade.  I mean, we're a few miles away, staying at home and watching it on TV seemed a waste somehow.  But Il Capo convinced me that the trauma of enduring four hours standing in the street in November with the Squeakers was something we should save for next year.  So, how amazing is the parade?  We shall see with the second Mr Potarto live-blog session.

Strictly speaking, this is less a live-blog, more a TiVo-blog as the parade started 40 minutes ago and the TV's still off.  Anyone with a DVR will understand - once you become accustomed to jumping over adverts, live television holds a certain repulsion.

"All the leaves on the trees are falling to the sound of the breezes that blow..."

It's late October and Autumn is in free-fall.  There was a week at the end of September when it was in the 70s, then during the night a switch was thrown and the next day the temperature dropped 15 degrees.  Since then we've been bumping along in the 50s and high 40s.  Last night the news reported 12 inches of snow in New Jersey, which is south of here.  However, the arrival of Fall is obvious even without considering the temperature.  Just look at the trees, the women and the houses.

The trees are doing that thing that trees in the American North-East are meant to do and turning orange and red.  I'm sure Vermontians would say that New York tree colour is a tawdry brown compared to the spectacular firework display of their maples, but they look pretty good to me.

I took a few photos across the river to the Palisades, but I think the zoom may have washed out the tones a little.  Certainly this photo of less distant trees is more vibrant.

Note for Sopranos fans, the Palisades are a line of cliffs along the Western side of the Lower Hudson.  They get a mention in the New Jersey mob series when Tony Soprano suggests that his demented Uncle Junior can wander off the cliffs.  However, these photos are taken at the Northen end of the  Palisades, near my house but away from Tony and Paulie Walnuts.

The women have signalled the end of Summer by moving their rain boots to the front of the closet.  Whenever it rains, the commuting women of New York take to wearing what I would describe as welly boots.  Not the plain black or green welly boots of England, however.  All the welly boots here are patterned with flowers, or spots, or stripes or paisley.  Each pair as individual as any other item of clothing.  In England, these sort of boots are reserved for children, and it is a sign of increasing maturity that you outgrow your colourful wellies and accept the uniform dullness of the standard boot.  Americans don't seem to do uniform dullness.

UK boots                                                   US boots

As for the houses, well Americans are of course the World's greatest consumers and they embrace any holiday as an excuse to buy stuff and use it to decorate the front yard.  Halloween is not a holiday, but it is a great excuse to buy plastic ghosts, scarecrows and pumpkins and arrange them around the front of your house.  Like, um, this:

I knew Halloween was a popular event in America, but I didn't realise quite how popular.  In someways it's bigger than Christmas, as Christmas is a Christian holiday, whereas Halloween is celebrated by
pagans everybody.

Son Number One's school is holding a parade on Halloween.  All the children will bring a costume and then march around the school grounds in front of the parents.

Il Capo took the children to a party shop to choose costumes.  It was a kind of modern-day Argos, in that there were no pens or form-filling.  One long wall was covered in photos of the costumes.  When you have made your choice you tell an assistant and he radios the guys in the back room who bring it out to you.  Son Number One picked a Spiderman outfit and Bagpuss will be a spider.

To generate a little ectoplasmic spirit we went to a couple of local events the last two weekends.  First was Legends at Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, which is the setting for Washington Irving's story about the Headless Horseman - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  We all wandered around the grounds in the dark and met various period characters.  There was a story-teller who talked about local ghosts and tales of Ichabod Crane.  We listened to him for twenty minutes before Bagpuss began to rebel against the enforced silence so we moved on.  When we left he was showing no signs of flagging or repeating himself.  There was also a musician singing songs of murder and a few of the ghouls mentioned by the story-teller were wandering around, including the Horseman himself.  He was headless, and for reasons that slipped by me, waving a pumpkin.

We followed that up last week by visiting Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor .  This is simply a display of carved pumpkins.  The interest comes from the quantity of pumpkins - there were over 4,000 - and the quality of the carving.  The images were created by not just cutting holes, but by also by leaving varying thicknesses of pumpkin skin to alter the amount of light that shone through.  Again we wandered the grounds of an old house in the dark, this time moving from tableaux to tableaux, each rendered in orange fleshy vegetables.  It's kind of hard to explain, but basically there were dinosaurs, pirates and fairies as well as a scene from Thriller all made from piled pumpkins.

Suitably inspired, the next day we took our knives to our own brace of 25 pounders and created the works of art in the photo above which I think all will agree would not look out of place in the Louvre.

When CSIs stray too close to home

I remember an interview with Emma Thompson way back when she was in The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum.

"You play a nurse, did you spend time at a hospital to observe how nurses work?" she was asked.

"No." She replied, "I'm an actress, I acted being a nurse."

I loved that response, skewering in a few words a legion of method actors and the interviewer into the bargain.

Yet, how many of us have watched our profession portrayed in film or on TV by some walking cosmetic-surgery commercial and cried, "No one buffs nipple-gimlets like that!"  (or words to that effect).

Well, I was enjoying an episode of CSI:NY the other day - it told the story of the Cabbie Killer, an evil taxi driver who kidnapped and gassed his passengers.  The idea of a killer cabbie is ironic as most of them seem to be trying to kill themselves and everyone within side-swiping distance anyway.  Anyway, the Cabbie Killer had kidnapped some irritating blogger (bloody bloggers) and was forcing him to live-blog the killer's moments with his current corpse.  Our hero, Mac Taylor and his attractive but useless sidekick, Montana were reading the web-site with distate.  On recognising that the page was being updated in real-time, Montana turned to Mac and said...

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual BASIC and see if I can track an IP address"

WHAT????

Ignoring the fact that no-one except the Goateed Bassman writes anything in VB, it doesn't make any sense.  She may as well

Write a Java app that connects to the domain using ASP.

or

Prototype a Ruby executable that will decode the URL.

or

Create an extreme program with DSDM that derives the TCP/IP.

Developers don't really sound like that!

Do we?

Where nuts come from

I am typing this with fingers that are stained black.

We have a walnut tree in our garden yard and it is laden with fruit.  Walnuts are one of those things where I was a little vague about how exactly they grew.  Il Capo's father was from the Welsh valleys and he used to talk about the evacuees* that came to his village from Liverpool.  These young city children knew milk came from a cow, but they couldn't work out which part of the cow the bottle came out of.  Same with me and walnuts.  I knew they came from a tree, but after that it got a bit vague.

The walnut that you see in a bag in the shop has an edible kernel and an outer shell, but on the tree this shell is surrounded by a green fleshy hull.  To prepare walnuts you have to remove the hull then leave them somewhere cool and dark to cure for a couple of weeks.  That sounds easy, doesn't it?

Our tree is a black walnut tree, so named (according to my cub scout book of trees) because of its black bark.  Well, our tree's bark is grey, but having hulled an experimental 21 walnuts my fingers are definitely black.  The problem is that the hull doesn't want to come off the shell unless you hit it with a hammer.  And when you hit it with a hammer it sprays out this dark green juice that dries into a black dye.

So a couple of days ago I was out on the deck, hitting these lime-like fruit with a hammer and making my hands look like I'd just stepped out of the cellars of 50s Fleet Street.

I tried cleaning them with alternating washes of soap, lemon juice and a combination of vinegar and baking soda, but none of these had any significant effect.  Il Capo suggested bleach and I couldn't quite tell if she was serious.  After I admitted defeat, Il Capo took me into the kitchen and showed me where "we" keep the gloves.  You can imagine how much I appreciated that.

I'll let you know how the walnuts turn out after curing.

I wonder if walnutsdirect.com is still available.

* In the first couple of years of World War Two, Britain was under continual bombardment from the Luftwaffe.

A decision was taken to evacuate city children to the countryside, where they lived with those who volunteered to take them.  For the children this meant saying goodbye to mother and father (if he wasn't already fighting abroad) and getting on a train with a suitcase and a name-tag around their neck.  Once at the destination station, a coordinator with a clipboard would allocate them to whomever they could find to take them in.

I don't know what the general opinion of this policy was, but my Dad was six when he was evacuated with his older sister and he hated it.  Suffice to say that times were hard, people were forced to accept children they didn't want and the outcome in his case wasn't good.

We Fat

When I was young and single, I was lithe.  I was lanky.  I was, let's face it, skinny.  I'm six feet one inch and in my early 20s I weighed eleven stone, which is 152 pounds.  Then I met Il Capo and started visiting her family for meals.  Her Mother, now known as Nanny, resolved to rectify my problem.  Over the next year I gained 20 pounds.  Today I notice I've gained 15 pounds since we arrived in America exactly eight months ago, which puts me two pounds shy of 200.

Luckily, it's attractive fat.

With obvious concern for the structural integrity of the house, last week I ordered a Wii and accompanying Wii Fit.  If you haven't heard of a Wii Fit, have a look at this video.  Or um, this one.

Today it arrived!  Having ushered the Squeakers off to bed, I plugged it in and it measured our BMI and then announced our Wii Fit Ages.  This is the machine's opinion of a person's fitness.  My Wii Fit Age is ten years above my actual age.  Nanny's Wii Fit Age is seven years below her actual age.  Il Capo's Wii Fit Age is... (whisper it) 18 years above her real age!!!

We've spent the evening jogging, stepping, balancing and dodging football boots.  It's a lot of fun, but will we keep it up?

The real test of the machine comes tomorrow.  Son Number One will wake and he will want to try it.  And anything he does, Bagpuss will demand doing also.

Did Nintendo design Wii Fit to survive SNO and Bagpuss fighting over who gets to do Yoga?  We will see tomorrow...

Sneaking out

I snuck out the office early this evening to catch Federer versus Murray in the US Open Final.  With luck I would be home by 6pm, one hour into the match.

Well it's 6pm now and I'm in a train stationary in The Bronx.  An earlier train has broken down and is blocking the track.  We've been here 30 minutes so far.

To be honest, I can only remember three other incidents that have caused delays greater than five minutes (and that includes a building collapsing beside the track) so that's about a 1/80 chance of such a delay on a particular trip.  I just hope Murray doesn't wrap it up in three quick sets...

Aftermath

Hanna has left us and is heading for Nova Scotia.  We're all still here, though the beer took a battering.  Last night four inches of rainfall had turned the house into waterfront property, but that has all seeped away now.

To be honest, even as little Hanna was passing, a lot of attention was being focussed on her big brother Ike, who is a category 4 hurricane with average speeds near the eye of 135 mph.  Ike is about to hit Cuba then pass into the Gulf of Mexico towards Texas.

In September 2005 I was in Connecticut doing the work of colleagues who had travelled to Houston for some performance testing of our software.  When I did some testing in Houston myself, I remember our dedication to sampling the local culture, especially the Margaritas they make down there.  Anyway, they had only been there a couple of days when they evacuated from impending Hurricane Rita.  This was a month after Hurricane Katrina, so everyone was jumpy. 

When they came back, they reported the attitude of the Houstonians was exemplified by the signs displayed at the bars - The only good Rita is a Margarita!

Hanna drops a spanner

I am writing this from under the table.

Tropical Storm Hanna is heading our way (you can track her course here) and I am enacting my emergency plan which is to find a safe place and retreat there with a cache of beer.

Sustained winds of 50mph doesn't sound too scary to me,  but the gusts could be a lot higher for all I know.  Plus, the accompanying rain is forecast to be 3-6 inches.

Anyway, if we lose water I have my beer.  I we lose power I'll have to play Uno with Son Number One until it's restored.

Pray we don't lose power!