It’s a Blog ! Not a Log !

Those of you who read my blog will no doubt have come across posts about our Cane Corso (Italian Mastiff) Blue, well I’m sad to say Blue’s been a little bit under the weather these past few weeks due to damage to her cruciate ligament in one of her hind legs.

She developed some lameness in her leg in May which was prescribed anti-inflammatories for and this seemed to do the trick, however at the end of June, beginning of July her symptoms came back, so after 2 visits to the vets and a set of x-rays we were told that she’d most likely torn her cruciate ligament and were referred to a Consultant Vet at North West Surgeons nr Frodsham.

So along came the appointed consultation where we were told that from what could be seen from the x-rays it appears that Blues ligament has indeed been torn, this was apparently obvious from the x-rays (not a vet myself, so have had to take his word for it), the next step we’ve been told is surgery and at present Blue is booked in to have the operation on the 13th August 2010.

We’ve been told the operation has a 96% success rate, but this all depends on how her recovery is managed, so for the first 6 weeks, Blue will be crated confined and only allowed out for her constitutionals and that’s it, then after the 6 weeks its a case of very slow, gentle exercise, which will gradually build up to a manageable 20 minute walk, and then over time hopefully build up to longer walks and fingers crossed semi-normality.

I can honestly say I am very nervous about Blue going under anethisia, as thats probably the most dangerous part of the whole operation, don’t know what we’d do if anything every happened to Blue, so fingers crossed, wood touched everything will go smoothly.

Will endeavour to keep you all updated on how our little Princess is getting on

you discover one of you ancestors was a former Ukrainian Vodka Distillary owner….

Well if your Dan Edelstyn, you get the next flight to the Ukraine to learn more about how his great-grandfather’s vodka distillery seized during the  Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, you hunt down the village that is home to this long lost distillery and along the way film the adventure.

But suppose that’s not enough, suppose you find that the distillery is still there but on the verge of closing, thus rendering a large chunk of the villages populace out of work, most people might just get on the next flight home with there curiosity about their family history satisfied, but then again those people aren’t Dan, who decides that maybe just maybe he can turn around the fortune of the village and the family’s former distillery, so how does he do this, he decides to start producing Vodka again, a vodka that resonates with  history Zorokovich 1917 Vodka . . . and so the adventure begins . .

First Dan has to find companies that are willing to believe like he does that there is a market out there for a new vodka, one of the earliest to take an interest is Babelgumwhich has helped finance the film he’s making about the distillery and is hosting it on there website, he also meets with one of the biggest Ad Agency’s Saatchi and Saatchi to discuss ways to market this new Vodka . .

Dan’s also set up a Vodka club, whereby members invest £50, which helps pay towards the filming costs, this little donation also gets you a credit on the eventual theatrical release of the film he’s making of his adventures, but not only that you also get  a pair of tickets to one of the premiers, and an actual bottle of  vodka from the distillery. . .  might have to see about investing myself come payday

But instead of me telling you how he’s progressing in his adventure why not follow him yourself on Babelgum, to start you off I’ve posted the first part of his adventure

If you enjoyed this episode of his adventure more can be found here http://www.babelgum.com/vodkaempire , a new one is posted every couple of day’s so keep checking back to see how Dan and his Vodka’s getting one, eventually the whole series of episode will be combined as a documentary that will be appearing on More4 later this year, so this is a chance to see the whole thing as its being made.

You can also follow Dan’s adventures via his blog My Vodka Empire & also his Twitter account danedelstyn.

I’ve managed to acquire some of the early samples of this family vodka and I can say its not a bad little number, though I’d recommend chilling it first as this seems to enhance the overall feeling you get from drinking it, which is a smooth sweet taste with a slight burn to the back of the throat, which you’d expect from a vodka, all in all its a very smooth drink and I’ll be watching out for it when it hits the shelves.

P1060571, originally uploaded by BagRat.

Well were now into the 4th day of our holiday and we’ve managed to cram in visits to :

Whitby Abbey, which was a pleasant couple of hours spent walking round the remains of what at one time must have been a very imposing structure (still is I suppose) for such a small coastal town of the times, the views from the hill its built on give you some very good panoramic views over Whitby and the surrounding area.

Filey which once you’ve seen it you’ve seen it

Goathland, again a pleasant little village which seems to be making a living off the back of Heartbeat, just about every shop there is a gift shop, which is a shame, as I’m sure it would be nicer/quainter if it actually had some proper shops.

Becks Hole, home of what must be Britains smallest Pub, The Birch Hall Inn, nice place to stop off in for a beer and one of their hearty sandwichs and home made Pork Pies, dogs are welcome as well.

Grosmont, the place where the steam engine line starts and home of the steam engine workshops, you can go for a ride on one of the locally restored Steam Engines and experience a time gone by, theres also a nice little pub there just by the railway crossings that serves a very nice Beer battered Cod and Chips.

Pickering, which is a quaint little Market Town and also the end of the line for Grosmonts Steam Railway, theres a rather nice little bakery there that does lots of home made sweet and savoury pies.
The day we went there was a flea market on which had quite a few nice antique stalls for those who like that sort of thing, you’ve also got the remains of Pickering Castle, which sadly we did’nt get to explore as it not open on a Monday or Tuesday.

Probably going to have a drive to Scarborough today as it looks like its gonna be a sunny day indeed . .

Today i got the most hits on my blog its ever had in one day let alone 6 months, all thanks to Phil Jupitus re-tweeting a picture I sent him of my Cane Corso Blue wearing a pair of glasses, I’d tweeted the nice man Mr Jupitus mentioning how in the photo Blue reminded me of him in his glasses and the next thing I know he’s re-tweeted it to his followers.

I actually only realised this when I went on my blog this evening to make a post and while there checked my stats out for the day and wondered why there was were no stats showing for the previous day, investigated a bit more and realised that there were stats there but they were so low compared to to-days that they were hardly showing in the stats graph, it was just a long line with one hell of a spike for today, checked out a bit more to see what everyone had been looking at and realised it was the picture of Blue.

Its amazing what a tweet on twitter can lead to . . .  So Phil were ever you are right now cheers matey

Oh and here’s the picture which started it

Phil Jupitus's Doggy Lookalike

Just got back from an afternoon walk with some friends, had a nice leisurly walk round Ivy Green, took a few photo’s then had a swift one at the Horse and Jockey, closely followed by Bangers & Mash at electriks Bar.

Luke turned up 1/2 way through the meal and got introduced to his younger brother Will and his missus, Will’s down here for a showdown sort of thing between the Cowdry brothers and the Frietags, so should be an interesting afternoon/evening for those attending the bar today.
Would have loved to have stayed, but its Sunday and got work tomorrow so it’s a definate no no I’m afriad, will no doubt see Luke twittering about it later.

Going to spend the rest of the evening watching some more of Cold Case Series 1, did’nt really watch it when it aired on TV, but now I’ve managed to watch a few of them back to back getting quite into it, anyway managed to get hold of  Series 1-4, so going to be some serious watching over the next week or so.

Picture 095, originally uploaded by BagRat.

Did’nt really post to much over the weekend as I spent quite alot of it in bed, due to being called out to an alarm call at my workplace, was there from midnight Friday till 5:30am Saturday morning, so spent quite a while in bed recovering.

So seeing as most of Saturday was spent in bed thought we#d better do something on Sunday, was’nt sure what to do or where to go, but in the end we decided on Chelford Car boot.

Got there for about 12:30 and spent a good hour or so just wondering round looking for bargain’s but think we missed most of them, so just ended up buying lots of quaility cheeses instead, more about those in another post.

After leaving we thought we’d best take Blue for a walk and on the way back we chanced upon Styal Estate a rather good dog walking place, we’d heard about it before but never actually bothered to go look for it, really wish we had cause its definatly a dog friendly walk, lost of paths and fields for Blue to galavant in, I’ll stick some photo & videos up this weekend so you can see for yourselfs.

Anyway its close to 8:00am and I’d better start making my way to work, cyas laters
.

Well at work today we were informed that one of our colleagues has been diagnosed with Swine Flu and he won’t be in work for at least a week or so, we were also told that if anyone was caught coughing or sneezing without covering there h/noses it would be a disciplinary matter.

The MD as far as we can tell was told around 9:00am by our colleagues partner, then all the managers were taken upstairs to a meeting where he obviously told them all about it, about 45 minutes later each Dept was informed by there Managers and told that the colleagues partner was being sent home, however before she was her Manager took all 8 members of the Dept into an enclosed small office to tell them, while the person was in the room with them, so which bright spark thought it would be a good idea to take a person who’s been in contact with a Swine Flu victim and stick them in a small enclosed office with 8 people without Swine Flu . . . . .

Anyway we’ve all been handed tissues for our desks and we’ve all wiped down the surfaces of our desk’s and we’re now awaiting some anti-bacteria wipes for our hands . .

Later on discussed how long the person would be off with and was told by my Manager that it would be 7 days and the same for his partner, so I said well what if she gets it won’t he be off for another 7 days

“Oh no says the manager you can’t catch it twice”

“yes but if his partner then gets swine flu, won’t there be the possibility that he could carry the germs into work from them . . .!”

We’ve also heard that someone asked about sick pay while we’re off and have been told it’s at the companies discretion . .

So let me get this straight  . .  you get Swine Flu through no fault of your own, you do the safe thing to prevent it spreading and stay off work for 1-2 weeks and you don’t get paid , the alternative is you catch swine flu, through no fault of your own come into work to avoid losing 2 weeks pay and end up giving it to everyone you work with, thus rendering the companies workforce ill.

God and people wonder why I complain about my workplace so much

Been a slightly stressful day and a 1/2 at work for me, had to set up some PC’s in the office and transfer data onto them from the PC’s there replacing, now this may not seem very stressful I know, but when you spend 1/2 day trying to figure out why you cant load an operating system onto the PC’s even though you’ve contacted Dell’s Mumbai Support Centre 8 times and each of those 8 times they tell you that these instructions will resolve the matter and 8 times they don’t your bound to be a little stressed.

After finally giving up on getting any sort of help from Dell I eventually found a response on a forum detailing what was causing the problem (it was the SATA settings for the hard-drive in system setup) and resolving it I finally got round to installing Win XP on the 1st of the PC’s.

So I’ve the got the OS installed now all I need to do is back up the PST file from the PC its replacing, copy any files that the user has stored on their PC onto the Server and than replace the PC, copy all the data back onto the new PC, import the PST file into Outlook and Bob’s ya uncle so to speak . . . well again nothings ever easy. First off the PST file is nearly 4 Gig in size (seems the users kept every single email they’ve sent/received in the past 3-4 years, so after 40-60 min’s of exporting I finally start to look for the data files that the user wants me to copy across to the new PC, kindly enough the user has put them all into a folder on his desktop to make it easier for me, so I copy the move the PST file I’ve just exported and drop it inside the folder and prepare to copy it onto the server . . thinking that its not going to take real long, its 4 Gig file and some word/excel documents, surely that won’t take long, how wrong could I be, seems that the copying over the networks going to take 2hrs ! Upon investigating the folder with all the docs in he wants me to copy I find there’s 11 Gig of data in there even before I add the 4 Gig PST file (yep 15 Gig of data), this explains the long time to copy across the network.

So thats why its been a stressful  day and a 1/2 thus far, I’ve not even finished yet either, still got a shed load of windows updates to download and install yet and I’ve yet to copy the data back onto the users new PC . . oh joy.

You know whats really annoying about the whole thing . . . this could have been so much easier, for a start we have a server that gets backed up every night that this person could have been storing their 11 Gig of data on, which if they had would have saved me a good few hours of work, they could have even maybe occasionally gone through there emails and deleted any they don’t need anymore (we keep a backup of incoming/outgoing emails in MailMarshal so people can delete emails, but nobody does).  If they’d just done one of these it would have saved me at least a couple of hours work, but alas no such luck

Time to put away the bunting, yes the curtain has fallen on this years Giant Bradley Day…..

I arrived home early Saturday afternoon with Mel, Liam and Gemma, after we’d got Liam and Gemma settled in there little log cabin decided to take them for a quick scoot around York to do the touristy thing, though to be honest we did’nt have long there as it was at least 3pm when we got there, had a quick beer in the Roman Baths pub and then took them around the Shambles and such like.

Liam looking all Redneck

Arrived back in Weighton about 6:00pm and then met up with them both for a few drinks round Weighton, actually expected it to be a fairly busy day, but seems that most people were saving themselves for Sunday nights as the pubs were real empty, Bradley day itself was the usual stalls and street performers, was especially impressed by the guy doing the Falconary display, really entertaining and very enjoyable, did’nt see much of the Giant though.

Entered Blue in the Dog Show again this year though she was pipped at the post by a rescue Akita, in all she won 3 Rossetes:

1st Place for Most Looks Like Owner

2nd Place for Best Legs

2nd Place for Best in Show

But hey she cant be expected to win every year, got to give all the other dogs a chance, anyway after that we hung around for a few hours and then decided to head back to Manchester with Liam and Gemma and another Bradley Day was been and gone

Got back yesterda afternoon and went straight round to see  mum, got settled in then headed across to Kirkella to see my friend Lisa and catch up a abit on all the gossip, eventually got home around midnight after sharing  a bottle or wine, could’nt stay longer as had car-boots to attend today with mel and mum.

So did the carboot thing this morning, not very many bargains to catch m eye I’m afriad, but plenty of people’s eye’s were aught Blue, had lots of people enquiring after her breed, even had some ask us if we’d be at Crufts next weekend which we found amusing, especially as Blue’s breed the Cane Corso is’nt even recognised by the UK Kennel Club, then we headed to York, but decided against staying as it was just to busy with foriegn tourists.

Now me and mel are sat in one of Market Weightons wifi hotspots Bradleys Cafe/Bistro enjoying a beer and a mocha and of course updating my blog, as for the next 2 days  . . . no idea what we’ll be doing, but as soon as we know no doubt i’ll post about it on here so for now I’ll say ttfn