Train Travel, Gaming and Gardens

As always I think that me and my friends could all do with shares in the train companies that we are all using on such a regular basis! :) Back from my Mum's now after a rather pleasant train journey, looking forward to catching up with people in the next week and a bit as they bounce around the country on the trains too.

I got the computer all up and running for my Mum in the end too, I just hope it stays running and she can make use of it now it no longer has the evil that is Vista on it! :) It was really good to be up there for a while and spend time with my little bro especially. Over the years I have not gone up there as much as I would have liked, always letting work get in the way. (A really silly thing to do at the end of the day as even though it was a job that I once liked - I should never have put it before seeing family - it was a crappy retail job at the end of the day!) Oh well that has all changed now, and I can't deny that the experience and time there was for nothing, made some good friends there and some good contacts to boot! :P

Anyway I spent a lot of time playing games with my little brother while I was there, he's still on the GameCube at the moment. (He appears to have a bit of a destructive side if his DS is anything to go by, so I think any newer console might not be the best of ideas just yet...) He loves the Sonic games though! I have played them a fair amount as well as I was on them non-stop on the Dreamcast, and then the GameCube when they first came out. There was something about raising the little Chao that made you carry on playing and overlook the annoying camera! However that's what he is doing at the moment and trying to raise a Chaos Chao, which looks something like this:

Image from: http://chao.hippotank.com

A little odd looking I know, and they are hard to raise but once you do they are great in the races and also immortal. It has tempted me to play about with the game again and go back to the Chao garden. I had quite a few powerful ones back in the day of the Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure 1. :) To think that they came about from an idea in NiGHTS with the Nightopian creatures (which looked rather simmilar to the normal Chao.) I'm sure it was one of the earliest ideas of this kind of gameplay - other than the Tamagotchi of course. I do remember being very curious as to why and how they were in the game to begin with. Yet these days there are whole games based on the idea of raising creatures like this - Spore being the first one to spring to mind.

Anyway it looks like I'll be dusting off the GameCube and trying to find my memory card as little bro seems keen to share Chao updates with me. :)

I do have to find the time first though...today was a fairly chilled day. I was supposed to be having dinner with my Dad and the other half of my family as it were. However plans fell through and I ended up having lunch with just my Dad. Which was nice as we got to have a good chat - which feels very adult to adult these days rather than parent to child. (Guess I am getting old after all!) :P We then came back to the house to find Mel in the garden so we joined in for a bit, Dad's been meaning to attack that grass and a few of the trees down there for a while. It is a big and never ending task! I meanwhile tried to encourage the climbing rose to stay on the trellis and not the privet bush and to attempt to get the honeysuckle to stay on it's own trellis and get the longer stems to start growing over the garage roof where they were intended to go...gotta keep and eye on that one methinks it's a troublemaker. :) However after picking some of the ripe blackberries from the rockery it was time for a cup of tea. I then stayed indoors as Dad was using the strimmer and Mel the cutting tools as they rained destruction down on the weeds - I thought best to stay out of the way at this point. Mainly as there isn't much room in the garden at the moment!

It did give me a chance to catch up with friends on Skype and make plans for some munter nights out in both cities that we inhabit. However the conversation got cut short when my Dad came in with an annoyed look on his face...there were wasps in the garden. At first I thought they were in the small tree that they had been taking down. (One that had seeded and started growing too close to the foundations of the house.) As it turned out these were ground bees and had been found under a rather large and overgrown area of grass. (This garden has been in need of love for a long time you see.) So Dad wanted to get rid of them - and thoughts best was to smoke them out for now - or at least that's what he's done in the past. However with three cats about the place there was an issue, as both me and Mel wanted to make sure that they were all accounted for indoors before a) a fire was lit in the garden b) a load of annoyed wasps/bees or whatever they are (no-one has gotten too close to the loud buzzing nest) come swarming out looking for something to sting.

Now herding cats is an expression that is most definitely true, it ain't easy! However with honey roast ham the job is made slightly easier. I was putting small pieces down in a path towards the door with the intention to lure them in and then close the door behind them. Mel's two cats followed suit, and aside from not getting two pieces of ham down fast enough at the same time so they had a small scuffle, they came in without much hassle. My cat, Pebbles, however was not as easy to lure. She is a fussy cat who has an air of Egyptian royalty about her. In other words she sits like the statues of old and has humans well trained to do her bidding as it were. :) She was out on the garage roof enjoying the evening sun, and was not coming in without a fight. She turned her nose up at the ham, came down for chicken but picked it up and walked off with it instead of following the trail. In the end she started to wonder towards the house when we were all in and the chicken was no longer being placed nearby, probably wondering where her food providing servants has gone. :) This gave me the opportunity to grab her and place her in doors, an action she will not forgive for a while. Well until she wanted me to open the tin of Whiskas for her. :D She is an adorable and affectionate cat and she was born in my kitchen around fourteen odd years ago now so is a little set in her ways.

Pebbles - Who didn't like me taking a photo as it meant I wasn't stroking her. :)

In the end all the cats were in doors and the windows were shut in the attempt to smoke the buzzing nest out. It looks like for the most part that is didn't work - so will have to try again tomorrow and I would also like to double check what they are, as if it's bees they need relocating, if it's wasps they are going to need disposing of and in the unlikely event it's hornets we'll have to call someone. The latter probably isn't true as we would know about it by now! But with that garden I experience has taught me never to rule anything out! :)

However tomorrow my fiancé is coming down for a visit and I don't think he wants to be around while a nest full of things that sting gets disturbed. So it may have to wait, but in the mean time I get to see him, which is a very good thing as it has been a while and we are overdue for a date and Toy Story 3 still hasn't been seen by either of us. :)