Rich of March House

It looks like our house purchase has fallen through due to a number of things that the current owner neglected to tell us about.

That's at least £800 and six months invested so far down the pan. Great.

The strangest CD in our collection appears to be The Statistics Canada Choir (La chorale de Statistique Canada) doing Music for the Christmas Season (Musique pour la saison du temps des fetes), Christmas Selections by Canadian Composers (Chants de Noel de compositeurs canadiens) and Selections for Hanukkah (Chants pour lat fete des lumieres (Hanoukkah)).

Can anyone beat a bunch of Canadian statisticians singing Chistmas songs for the weirdest CD in their collection?

In case you haven't seen it, local.live.com is a great website for viewing where you live. It's a bit like Google Earth, except for selected locations around the country you can get a "birds eye" of the location, which means you can view your house from all four sides if you're lucky like us.

Down the road from us is a Holiday Inn and you can see it here. What's really interesting is that if you view this in "birds eye" view you can see that after the the East, South and West view photos were taken, but before the North view was photo taken the hotel was struck by lightning and burned down. The repairs can be seen being carried out on the latter.

My only quibble with local.live.com is that the URL is local.live.com but the pages are titled "Windows Live Local" which means I can never remember whether it's local.live or live.local for the correct URL.

For some totally irrational reason Claire is petrified of spiders. Therefore, when she awoke this morning to find she had ground a MASSIVE spider into the matress overnight she was just a little freaked out. It was horrific - there were hairy spider legs and bits of spider body and spider juice all over the sheet. Mmmm. Nice.

While I was busy in the kitchen cooking a yummy smoked haddock and salmon fish pie (invented recipe) this evening Claire came rushing in to tell me there was a megaflock of birds on the grapevine I have lovingly cultivated at the bottom of our garden.

This could mean only one thing - the grapes were ripe enough and sweet enough for birds to enjoy scoffing and so therefore they were also ripe enough and sweet enough for people to scoff. Harvest time is nigh! I grabbed a bowl and dashed out, doing my best scarecrow impression as I went, and scaring the scavenging sparrows so they scarpered South (look out! Alliteration!). Click pic for bigness.

It turns out that the birds must have been brought up sucking lemons because the grapes are actually pretty sour. Far too sour to eat as dessert grapes.

So, now all I need is a recipe for grape jelly or fine wine, lots of sugar, a pair of willing feet with which to do squashing, a fine seive with which to filter out the earwigs and weird beetles, and some jars and/or bottles with which to hold the resulting produce. Anyone got any reccommended recipes?