alexist

I have a cold. It's at that point where you don't feel ill enough to be in bed when you ARE in bed, but the minute you get up and try to do anything, you feel like crap.

I would rather like to lie in bed (which is warm and cosy and has lovely clean sheets I put on last night) and watch something mindless. However:

1) Our Freeview box appears to have died (again). (For the non-Brits, Freeview is a system that lets you watch extra digital channels over your regular aerial for free. As opposed to Sky, which lets you watch everything on satellite for £41 a month to Mr Rupert Murdoch.) This means I can only watch the bog standard five channels, none of which show anything remotely worth watching at 9:15am. Unless you're under the age of 5, in which case, you've got 45 minutes of kids telly left on BBC2.

2) alternatively, I could watch a DVD, as we have quite a few in the flat. However this would involve working out how to play them from the PS2, and I believe we need some kind of dongle so it can be controlled by remote. Or I could hook my laptop up to the TV. I have an S-Video cable, but I'm ill (ish), I don't want to fiddle!

I don't want to contemplate the dinner problem. Suffice it to say that shopping is required and I don't want to trudge to Waitrose in the cold. I am SO booking driving lessons after New Year. I've been putting it off for financial reasons (as well as the cost of the lessons, I can't do them until I've been to the opticians; I'm not fit to drive in the dark with my current prescription and that's most of the day at the moment). I shouldn't need that many lessons to pass the test, I think, and I could probably get away with short trips on my US licence once I've learnt stick (not really supposed to drive on it. Bad girl.) It would probably make Neil happy; he wouldn't have to drive me to do the shopping any more. ;)

Chicken soup would be lovely; shame I've not got the stuff in... mmm hot soup with knaidlach.

thanks to rainfx and anam_uk for telling me that DVDs can be played using the PS2 controllers :) It all worked swimmingly once I realised that the reason the PS2 wasn't playing was because it was linked up through the dead freeview box. Moved some wires around and off we went!

Got the laptop in bed too. :)

Good thing I bought a litre of fresh orange juice yesterday...

ETA: Except it's insisting on playing DVDs in a lurid shade of green. Games are fine. I bet I've fucked up with all the wires.... just tried to eliminate the freeview box from the daisy chain, more or less. I can't work out what other wires there should be. fuck it. simpsons on laptop.

ETA2: Apparently not, it's evil Sony copy protection. I need http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005MFQ7/ref=ase_ps2home-21/202-7672743-0176614 to watch DVDs. Or some other dodge. *mutter* At any rate, can't watch DVDs over RGB, according to http://www.ps2home.co.uk/dvd.htm (look for "DVD Green Screen").

I also have a portable DVD player I could hook up, but it's R1 only and I don't know where we've got the right power supply (the kind with a round pin--DC-IN I assume). The one that came with it is, naturally, 120/60 not 230/50.

I was hoping that Neil would be able to pop to the supermarket and get something for dinner. Unfortunately, he 1) left work lateish and 2) rang 15 minutes ago to say that there are no High Barnet trains. (Have looked on TfL's site: service suspended Camden to Mill Hill East because of defective train at East Finchley.) So he'll either have to go to Golders Green and get a bus, or Bounds Green and a bus. Don't know which he'll do.

Damn my local supermarkets for closing at 20:00!

I had a recipe that called for unrefined icing sugar. Now, normally I'd say fuck it and use my regular, evil, refined Tate & Lyle (recipients of millions in CAP money) but given the recipe I thought the molasses in unrefined sugar might make a difference in taste.

On the back, it says "Why Unrefined Sugar?" and gives a list of the following reasons:

- More flavour
(fair enough)
- Natural sugar
(So is the refined stuff, it's still from cane/beet, not a lab)
- Minimally processed
(true)
- Fairly and responsibly traded
(A property not intrinsic to unrefined sugar; there's no reason you can't have fairly traded white sugar)
- non-GM
(this pissed me off: it's feeding the frankenfood fear. AFAIK there is no GM sugar.)
- Suitable for vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, low-fat and low salt diets
(Some cane sugar is still processed using bone char, so vegans are divided about it. Still, the last 3 are applicable to all sugar.)