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Nov. 4th, 2008 @ 04:15 pm
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- Your footprint is 3.56 tonnes per year
- The average footprint for people in United Kingdom is 9.80 tonnes
- The average for the industrial nations is about 11 tonnes
- The average worldwide carbon footprint is about 4 tonnes
- The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 tonnes
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
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I sold my car for financial reasons so that's the biggie really, although it's a coincidental thing rather than a conscious effort to be environmentally aware ("environmentally friendly" sounds a bit too Blue Peter). If I want to get somewhere, I'll either be walking or using public transport. I have energy-saving lightbulbs, mainly because my electricity company seem to send me three free ones a year and they last for ages so pretty much every bulb in my flat is energy saving. I turn off my TV at the switch rather than putting it on standby at the remote. Louise leaves everything on standby, and it annoys me almost as much as my obsessive switching-everything-off annoys her. I tend to take showers rather than baths, which I'll be doing more consciously as soon as my water-meter is installed. I really should recycle, but it is a hassle to bag up all my junk and walk ten minutes into the village to the recycle point, when I can just stick it in the bins downstairs. The only thing I actually recycle at the moment is paper and card, because that's all we have a seperate bin for. My fridge and freezer and stuff are pretty old and probably very ineffecient in terms of energy (the seals on their doors are both a bit knackered - if I've had the freezer open for a while I have to prop the door closed with my kitchen bin until the vacuum kicks in), but I can't afford to replace them right now anyway.
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1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you really like.
4) Put a star next to those you've only partially read.
5) Add a frowny emoticon by ones you REALLY hated.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen :(
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare :(
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger :( :( :(
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen :(
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen :(
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini*
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Not read, but :( anyway.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - read this one in French, no less. That was when my French was less rusty, o'course.
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare :(
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo |
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Four Jobs you’ve had in your life:
1. Cleaner in an old peoples' home
2. Junior Care Assistant ditto
3. Working in a Toy Shop
4. Civil Servants of various flavours.
Four Movies you can watch over and over again:
1. Withnail and I
2. The BFG
3. Sister Act
4. Braindead
Four Cities you’ve lived in:
1. Eastbourne (not a city)
2. Hastings/ St Leonards (not cities)
3. Doncaster (application for city status ongoing)
4. Sheffield (a real city)
Four TV Shows you love to watch: I'll limit myself to current ones, I think.
1. The Apprentice
2. Masterchef
3. Love Soup
4. Mock the Week
Four Places you’ve been on vacation:
1. Spain (been to lots of different parts of Spain)
2. Denmark
3. Italy
4. Ireland
Four websites you visit daily
1. www.facebook.com
2. www.gmail.com
3. www.kingdomofloathing.com
4. www.tiscali.co.uk
Four of your all time favorite restaurants:
1. The Fat Cat (yeah, it's a pub, but it does great veggie food)
2. Woodhouse Spice, my local Indian
3. The restaurant in the Guinness storehouse in Dublin
4. Kumquat Mai (a vegetarian restaurant in Sheffield)
Four of your favorite foods:
1. Lasagne
2. Pizza
3. Chocolate
4. Salad (yeah, really, but it has to be *nice* salad).
Four schools you’ve attended: OK, the first four in order. There are two others.
1. Moira House Girls' school
2. St Thomas a Beckett RC Primary School
3. The Cavendish School
4. Lewes Tertiary College
Four places I’d rather be right now:
1. Anywhere else but here today
2. On holiday
3. Yup
4. ditto
Four things you’ve done today:
1. Been to work
2. Tidied my flat
3. Stopped off at the co-op to buy veggies
4. Called an electrician to come and fix my lights
Four things you did yesterday:
1. Watched TV
2. Played bingo at the club with Louise and her mum and stepdad
3. Lurked on the internet
4. Fiddled with my lights to try and get them to work. |
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Someone, somewhere, is utterly convinced of my need for a Capital One no hassle platinum card. Indeed, they are so utterly convinced that I shall inevitably succumb to my obvious yearning for the thing that they have decided, for my convenience, that I should never have to wait more than 48 hours between application forms. This is presumably so that, the moment the mood strikes me to apply (I am undecided - Tigers or Dolphins on the card? This is much more important than interest rates.), I shall have a form there, ready and waiting. I have been preapproved! So the application process is easy and convenient! I only need to have a teensy little credit check (won't hurt a bit) and I can be the proud possessor of this shiny thing of absolute beauty, which lets me buy stuff with (this is the good bit) money I don't even have (pay nothing until 2008!). I am reluctant, in these days of identity theft, to bin the letters. And it would be tantamount to binning about ten trees a year. I like the habit they have of illustrating the cards with the creature whose habitat they have destroyed to print the forms. So pretty! "Today, your junk mail is provided with the help of Fernando the flying squirrel, who has so generously given his tree to further the Capital One cause." So I have started a collection. When the collection of unopened envelopes reaches critical mass and starts to jam the drawer, I shall take it into work and dispose of it in the shred-it recycle bin.
But why, since I acquired a mortgage and a habit of going overdrawn towards the end of the month, have these companies suddenly decided I am the ideal candidate for further credit? My finances are surely precarious enough as it is. Just one more example, I guess, of the fact that banks are complete bastards who want you to default on your credit agreements so they can take everything you own. While I was the model bank customer, with a modest savings account and a current account which never ever went overdrawn, nobody had any interest whatsoever. Bastards.
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I was listening to some blokes talking at work. I should stress they were customers and not colleagues. It seems they actually treat dating as an investment. As in, they weigh up the cost of simply paying for sex (with a 100% chance of a return on the investment) versus the cost of a romantic meal for two and a taxi, with approximately 50% chance of return on the investment. They also make allowances for extra hassles like conversation which are considered pitfalls of the latter option. I was however gratified to learn that dating is still considered to be a pretty good deal, considering (the cost of paying for sex is apparently pretty extortionate) provided the meal isn't too expensive ("never date a fat bird. Costs a fucking fortune mate, innit?") So there you go. |
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happy christmas everyone!
Dec. 25th, 2005 @ 07:07 am
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I PASSED
*ahem*
7 minors, the majority of which were bloody stupid mistakes because of nerves. I got the two maneuvers i hate (bay parking and reversing round a corner) and they were both fine and spiffy.
so yay.
Oct. 25th, 2005 @ 02:49 pm
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| » Tidyness |
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In lieu of actually tidying this place (ie. my room, not the internet) up a bit, I thought I'd google for a site which told me how to tidy up. In doing so, I found this wonderful site which tells me "How to tidy, launder and stow your cheongsam." In my ignorance, I know not what a cheongsam is, nor if I possess one, but found the site to be generally applicable in life nevertheless. Unfortunately, none of the links on the site seem to work, so my quest to find out what a cheongsam is was early thwarted.
A. Tidying your cheongsam
Most of the present cheongsams are made of broche material that is not washable. So you'd better take care when you wear your cheongsam, especially, don't besmirch it with oil, cola or lipstick because they are difficult to be cleaned even if the dry cleaner.
Therefore, we suggest:
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Don't wear the same cheongsam for long;
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Watch out the cuspidate lest it would damage your cheongsam;
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You'd better keep the sleeves natural rather than roll up them;
B. Laundering your cheongsam
If you dirty it with incaution, you can cover the blot with a piece of moist rag and then iron. Thus, the rag can absorb some dust so that not only the cheongsam is cleaned but it is ironed as well.
C. Stowing your cheongsam
If you want to stow it for long, make sure that it is hung up by the clothes rack, especially, the shoulder is crutched properly. Remember to moth your cheongsam before you put it into the clothespress.
Apr. 18th, 2005 @ 01:59 pm
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| » Levelling the land |
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Just got back from Lisa's house where I spent the night on her sofa following another fantastic Levellers gig at the Winding Wheel in Chesterfield. The guys have never failed me yet. I'm a bit bruised and battered, but this is to be expected since the venue was full above capacity and since I was in the front row right in the very centre. Couple of people seemed to cut their heads open pretty badly crowdsurfing, but otherwise a good night was had by all.
The support band, McDermott's 2 Hours, were good but not as great as I was expecting. I saw Nick Burbridge (lead singer of McDermott's 2 Hours) on the way in (I think). I went 'ooh' and pointed and everyone else thought I was mad and he frowned at me, so I'm guessing it was him. I think that McDermott's 2 Hours really good when they concentrate on gentler, more folky acoustic stuff because their lyrics are shit hot, but last night they played a set which was a bit louder and more up-tempo than I thought they seemed comfortable with. Their best bits were Bloody Sunday and Dirty Davey, though, by far. It's a shame that they don't have the energy or showmanship of the levellers live. Nick Burbridge was just standing in one place looking down with his eyes closed for most of the set which seemed a bit of a let-down. Unfortunately, the acoustics or the PA or both weren't great, and both bands got a bit muddied and garbled. A few times, it took me until halfway through the song to work out what the hell they were singing. Great crowd, though, except for the whiny little bitch just to my right who clearly had never been to see a band before ever. She kept having a go at the people around her for pushing into her, and I think both me and Lisa at one point told her to fuck off to the back if she didn't want to get shoved a bit.
There was a bit of a long gap between the supporting band and the Levellers. Long enough for Lisa to fight her way to the bar and get drinks, and me to go spend a penny (not that I'd been drinking, of course...) and still get back to our places right at the front in the middle. Don't ask me how we did it, because nobody was saving the places and the venue was packed right to the back, not just for a couple of rows at the front as is customary when they play sheffield uni. I heard they'd sold 1700 tickets, and it is a tiny venue. Well, anyway, the levellers were kickass and shithot and so forth. Lovely lovely lovely levellers. They played a couple of tracks from their new album which is coming out soon, I think (or maybe they were older tracks but the sound was so shit I couldn't tell). Seemed good, anyway. They plugged beautiful days, and told us we were too rowdy to go. I'm considering going anyway, so if anyone fancies a bit of festivalgoing this summer, then let me know sooner rather than later.
It was a good good night, and I'm not hungover so I couldn't have drunk that much. And I got another lovely lovely levellers t-shirt to add to my collection (this brings my total to 6, now, I think). Then this morning I got a train back to Doncaster and now I'm at home. About to fill in an application form for a job I actually want. Sort of. Insofar as I want any job at all.
Apr. 9th, 2005 @ 01:15 pm
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Recommend to me:
1. a movie
2. a book
3. a musical artist, song, or album
4. a LiveJournal user not on my friends list
5. what I should have for dinner
6. a website
7. a quote
Then put this in your LiveJournal and I'll do the same for you.
Jan. 27th, 2005 @ 10:17 pm
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