Wednesday, December 13, 2006

NT Social - Sherwood Energy Village

The Xmas Social last night was a success. The projector worked and Gordon had done a first rate job with his programme. There were some school-pupil howlers which purported to be genuine. Some were poetic , most were imaginative, all were good fun. Then he had done a Belvoir Castle slide show which went down well.

Y mastermind the raffle in her inimitable way and Gary organised a 'beetle' drive. Great laughs all round. A bit difficult for those with mobility problems but everyone was sympathetic and it did get people talking to people they don't usually. A good idea.

This morning I dropped Y at the tram because she has two granny-duty days this week and tonight is having a sleep-over at Burton Joyce. She does do extremely well for someone who has just celebrated their 70th, bt she loves doing it and that is all that matters. I then nipped round to Brian's to collect two prints I am entering in an EPS competition tomorrow evening. It was necessary for him to print them because the maximum size my Epson printer will cope with is A4 and I wanted A3. He's done a super job. I shall know tomorrow night how they fare.

Then over to Boughton so that Bungus and I could go for lunch at the new 'Bistro' in the Sherwood Energy Village HQ. The architecture is very interesting. Picture 1 is the main entrance to the HQ - the Bistro is on the left of the picture. The Bungus figure is there to give some idea of scale. You can probably see at the edges some terracotta colour, which I didn't like. When viewed from the other side, the building has, in my opinion, the look of a 1950s Odeon. Not a good day light-wise but record-shots were all I sought anyway.

They wouldn't let us go in to look at the reception area. So we had a coffee in the Bistro and decided to try The Snooty Fox down in the village. Picture 2 therefore, is through a double-glazed glass panel at the HQ. The reflections were unavoidable I'm afraid. It was necessary to focus manually because the auto-focus system naturally thought I wanted a picture of the glass 4 inches away. At least with the Nikon, manual-focus is straightforward.

The Snooty Fox had a table for two and I had Xmas turkey from the carvery. It outstripped the Duchess of Rutland's offering at Belvoir by a factor of at least 10. Bob had the beef which he pronounced to be v.good.

After lunch we went to Bob's to have a go at the 'create a Blog' problem. It took us some time to get onto the internet via Bob's Wi-Fi but eventually we succeeded. Then we created a new blog entitled Bungus. Unfortunately, it appeared in my own google account and as a second blog on my dashboard. I had to leave before 'sorting' it because of my uneasiness about driving in the dark. Just before I left poor Sandra was brought home from the Workshop having fallen off a chair and hurting herself pretty badly. I hope she hasn't damaged the base of her spine or anything. Like me she is a long-term back sufferer anyway.

I reached home in the gathering-gloom and after a pot of tea and a sandwich I tackled the double-blog syndrome and successfully deleted it. Bob e-mailed to say that he has succeeded in creating a new blog but couldn't access it. Ho Hum - as Ray would say.

Byeeeee..................

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

’They wouldn't let us go in to look at the reception area’. A reference to the atrium, which is rather impressive – certainly, to me, the best architectural feature of the building.
The reason for denying us access was ‘There are people working in there’. Well, it’s not MI5. And not counting the receptionist/border guard and the bistro attendant I saw 4, three of them in the bistro, which did not seem anything like busy enough to be economical (the food looked good and the coffee was OK, only £1 each, and seconds offered).
I hope I succeeded not only in expressing my disappointment at being debarred, but also in giving the impression, by pointing out that locking people out is not the way to obtain favourable publicity, that we were from a national newspaper. I feel that even without make-up I was looking scruffy and hard drinking enough to be taken for a veteran reporter and that Graham presented an adequately dishevelled but impressive figure, hung about with his SLR Nikon and support bags (a bit Orson Welles playing Donovan - that’s Terence, the photographer, not Mellow Yellow)...

The Snooty Fox carvery really is excellent value, esp at ‘pensioners’ rate’ on Wed and Fri (neither of us could manage the pudding which is part of the deal)

I actually managed to create TWO blogs last night(each time having to devise a new ‘password’ (or whatever). Unable to gain access to either of them on Wed night but I found the second one this morning (Thu) in ‘documents’ (when seeking ‘Graham 1’ Word doc). No idea why or how the blog ended up there or why the first one didn’t also. No sign of ‘dashboards’ or other terms purloined from different, more ancient, technologies.
I become more and more convinced that I waste far more time than I save with this IT lark – and get aereated at the same time. I can't stop now, though. As the man said when told a friend's wife had left home,
"What's he going to do for aggravation?"

I was a bit harsh on yesterday's photo. It is very good but I just don't like it.