Driving home tonight, pulling off the M1 at junction 26 at about 0:20 this morning, a critter ran out in front of my car as I was stopped at traffic lights.

I don’t know what it was.  It didn’t look like a rat, although in size terms it would have been big for a rat.  Certainly much much too big to be a mouse. It was somehow more tubular and rounder than rats are.  It almost looked like a raccoon, but that would be a strange thing to see running around a Nottinghamshire road at night.  Its tail was darker than its body, and it looked like it was a sort of brown colour.
Whatever it was, it was fairly bright.  It knew to run off the road when the lights changed, without even needing me to hoot or rev to scare it off.  It scampered off into a drain hole in the kerb, and I continued on home.

Cor, I even beat Etrigan’s 87%

Was partly guessing through that, although I did know a fair bit of it.

Manda’s post from the end of January says she’s starting her chillies off already. I didn’t realise you could get going so quickly!

I didn’t do too well with chillies last year: I germinated some in about February, and then completely failed to repot them during the year.  I put them in the lean to, where they seemed to like the summer heat.  They got very leggy, and wilted on hot days, but I managed to keep them watered.

Not that that did much good by the end of the year when they were still in seed trays and they needed 8″ pots.

Come October, the Scotch bonnet plant made a valliant attempt at setting fruit, in some desperate, Darwinian bid for posterity (it didn’t know I had more or less a full packet of its  sibling seeds waiting to be sown in subsequent years.) It grew a wrinkled little green fruit about the size of a thumbnail.

I think the cold weather in the lean to has seen for the plants, and they certainly haven’t been watered in 2007.

Not good.  My track record on growing food is awful.  I quite like the idea, and I often put seeds in, but I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything through and eaten something I’ve grown.

I plan to be better this year (have I heard that before?)

A colleague has a big square garden with two old apple trees in. His approach to gardening is to clear the neck-high brambles every fifteen years.  He’s just done it, and I was vaguely thinking of cultivating the bare earth he’s left behind.

Obviously, yerakshual gardening before the elections in May is a bit of a no-no. But nothing stopping me getting some seeds going of an evening all ready for a grand plant out in May.

Any suggestions for seeds, and post May planting?

Another day, another odd challenge in Zelda.

I survived my endeavours in the monkey dungeon, and came through with flying colours, with only a little help from a walkthrough on IGN.

After that there was another wolf level, more wandering around digging things up and killing funny spider bugs you can smell but not see. When you’re a wolf in Zelda, there’s a button for “sense” – you can see scents and you see little things that tell you where to dig and where to sniff. It’s very well thought out and good fun to play. Since then I’ve turned back into a person and acquired exciting new tools and weapons like the famous boomerang. I’ve also learnt sumo wrestling.

And then out of no-where another frustrating challenge that’s tricky on the wrists. A hobgoblin has kidnapped one of the extremely annoying children that infest the game, and for some reason, it’s up to me to rescue the blighter. There’s no button for “Oh, grief, he’s far too annoying. Let him die!”

And so on to the baddies who cheat. No matter how many henchmen you kill the baddy can just pull out his horn and holler for more help. No such backup for me! I have to chase the main baddy whil his henchmen try and knock me off my horse. All the while there’s “hurry, panic argh!” music in the background and increasingly atmospheric weather. Grr. No further attempts this evening. My hands hurt!

I’ve been feeling vaguely uneasy about the Catholic / gay adoption issue that’s been raging around blogs and in the media for days.

There are loads of really good posts on the issue. Will Howells. Everyone’s favourite elephant (“Did Jade die in vain?) as well as his other daddy, who went at it twice three times. Jock Coats. Paul Walters.

Why don’t they have people like Alex Wilcock on the Today programme? He’s really helped me make my mind up on the issue.

The issue is ripe for ironic inversions. Turn the categories around, and you get nonsense – probably a sure sign that hypocrisy is involved.  “They can’t help it. They were born that way.  No-one chooses to be Catholic.”  Can you imagine what would happen if gay providers of services could choose not to work with Catholics?

Those cute librarian cartoons someone pointed me at a few weeks ago have come up trumps with their latest competition – “Pimp My Bookcart” – where librarians give book trolleys the treatment MTV reserve for cars.

Pictures of the winners are here and here. Some funnier than others, but the ones with beefed up wheels and undercarriage lighting made me laugh, at least.

It’s been snowing for a few hours – the road outside is covered. The foxes didn’t look chuffed.

After my chilly leafleting, I’ve got the major sniffles and I’ve been sneezing.

I think the heating is staying on tonight.

Off and on over the weekend and the last few evenings, I’ve been getting to grips with my new toy. It is good, but I am fast coming up against the limits of my skills.

I am very good at the bowling game in Wii Sports, with my top score being something ridiculous like 207. I knew that if you bowled three strikes in a row, it gets called a turkey. Apparently if you keep on bowling strikes they’re just called “fourth” and “fifth.” I’m not too bad at golf, and quite enjoy the various mini-golf games. The controls shout at me a lot and have a red wiggly line that is obviously somehow bad but I can’t find anywhere a help menu or a written thing to tell me what I’m doing wrong.

So much for the easy games that came with it.

On to the Rabbids and Zelda. I seem to be stuck on both of them. Rabbids is an unbelievably stupid, but entertaining game where you have to kill nasty rabbits in various daft ways. I’ve got 12% through the game, it tells me, but I just can’t make the various controls launch Superbunny, or slap toilet doors shut, fast enough.

And Zelda. Well, Zelda is pretty good. Detailed landscapes, lots to see and do. You’re not restricted to the game’s challenges, you can wander around the world doing various other things as well. I got through the two prologues without too much trouble, although I did die a lot. The game very helpfully details exactly how much of your life you have spent pretending to be a pointy-eared teenage horse-freak. So far, nine hours and seven minutes.

And now, I’m rescuing monkeys from a dungeon. Or I would be if I could actually make the thing on screen do what I want. I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be throwing various spider-bomb things into lethal plants. But I’ve spent about the last hour throwing spider-bomb things near lethal plants with no sign in the last hour or so that I’m getting any closer.

And this is supposed to be the first, easiest dungeon. Grr. This is what I worried: my hands just aren’t sufficiently deft to control the more complicated games. With Tombraider, so long as you stand in the right place, you can usually manage most things, and if you really get stuck, Stella will let you download a savegame. I don’t think that’s going to be an option on the Wii.

I’d better get back to throwing spider-bombs at monkeys.

OK, so yesterday, the Wii did arrive, early on, at 9.30am. Before I would normally have set out for the office, so I plugged it in and had a brief play. Got it working with no probs at all, created a few Miis, various things like that. Bowled a 166.

Then, just after 1.45pm, set out for work.

Not having heard a weather forecast.

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You get a lot of information out of a Parcelforce tracking code:

Date	Time	Location	Tracking Event
17-01-2007	23:46	Nottingham Central Depot	Out for delivery
17-01-2007	22:53	Nottingham Central Depot	Arrived at delivery depot
17-01-2007	18:46	National Hub	Sorted in hub