Excitement in large chunks

Well, I've been away from blogging for just over a week and I've had a birthday, seen a rather tiddled cat, nearly got stuck in a snowbank and just missed seeing another Tuna Bake flambe!

It was my birthday last Wednesday (and yes I forgive all those who forgot!) and so on Tuesday I had a surprise party with Jim and Val, TJ, Jessie and Cody, Keith and Tina and their two little girls Julia and Hannah. Unfortunately nobody thought to get the camera out, so you can't see them all there, you can't see the 36 candles ablaze and you can't even see the whole cake, but here's what remained in the morning! Yum!

I had some nice gifts including two Muppet movie DVDs, obviously people realise that although I may be 36 in years, I'm still a big kid at heart. Val couldn't resist buying me the Mr Potato Head calendar where you can stick the arms and feet etc onto the blank potato. Here's Mr February...

Calm down ladies.

More fun

We had more excitement with Tuna Bake the other day! You may remember one of my earliest blog entries, when I was using MSN, and I described how the crisps on the tuna bake spectacularly caught on fire in the church cooker (http://spaces.msn.com/stevebelleguelle/blog/cns!4B64EDAE84127D4F!155.entry), well we had a repeat performance here at Val's! Heather used cheap crisps and up they went in flames, just like before - very exciting. Sadly I was upstairs at the time, but I certainly heard the excitement. After scraping the burnt crisp off the top we tried some Old Dutch chips and they behaved very properly. It just goes to show you can't use cheap chips for tuna bake and it also show how much grease is in those cheapie ones! Yuck!

Not content with causing that entertainment, Heather gave Yoda the juice from both cans of tuna. We're not sure whether he was drunk as a result or just feeling rather ill, but he sat on the heating vent for quite some time afterwards and his litter tray was rather wet a bit later - poor little thing! He just can't hold his drink!

Coming home from church on Sunday we had another exciting episode. It had been snowing quite a lot through the day and as we drove back toward the house we hit some heavy banks of snow on the road which caused us to slow down. Eventually we came to a halt and wondered if we were going to have to call Jim to come and rescue us about half a mile from the house. After a bit of driving back and forth we finally attained enough momentum to escape our little trap and made it back without embarrassment. Jim did laugh at us when we told him, but at least he was able to stay at home in the warm.

Monday we came out the bedroom and found it perishing cold downstairs - the heating seemed to have died - aaaaargh. I told Titus who said that the engineer had been out earlier and already fixed it. The ice forming on my nose seemed to tell a different story so after fiddling with the thermostat a bit I concluded my nose was right and the engineer had not quite done his job. I convinced Titus with my demonstrations of the furnace cutting out before any heat started coming from the vents so he rang his Uncle Dave who said he'd arrange for the engineer to come. I suspect the furnace overheard the conversation and so after about half an hour decided with great glee to start pumping out heat into the house again. Not totally happy, knowing how cantankerous such appliances can be, I rang Dave to tell him it seemed to be working okay and he may want to cancel the engineer. Of course, an hour or so after this, the furnace decided it was getting bored of heating air and so decided to see what would happen if it didn't do it any more. A further call, a wait for the engineer, some loud banging and the furnace was reminded that it could very easily end up in the scrap yard. Shortly afterwards it was happily spewing warmth into the house and our toes started defrosting. Hooray!

(Apologies to Jenny and Steve Mosher for copying what I wrote in my e-mails to you and plonking it on my blog! It just seemed too good to not publish!)

Well I'd better disappear, we have to visit the Post Office to post my two sisters', my brother-in-law's, and my niece's birthday cards, which will sadly be late - sorry! Can you believe my sisters share their birthday with Steve my brother-in-law and Sophie, my niece, has hers two days later! February is a busy month in my family.

God bless you.

Steve