Brace yourselves for a nice long blog.

Picking up from where I left off on Friday ... I left work at 3:00pm and started the drive to Liz's. Everything seemed ok - reasonable road conditions and everything until I hit fog in South Wales. Nothing too drastic. Of course it meant there were the usual collection of morons who had their fog-lights on, despite the highway code and therefore UK law specifying that fog lights should not be used unless visibility is reduced to 100m or less. I chose not to slow down as I conisdered conditions to be safe. My thinking was this: "I can see to the next corner. Even if the roads were completely clear I wouldn't be able to see beyond the next corner." If you can stop within the distance that you can see then you're not overdoing it on the speed in my opinion. Well, you need to be able to take the corners too, of course :)

Things got a little worse when I hit the M4. The speed limit was lowered to 50mph for the first stretch of motorway because the rain was so heavy. On various occasions I tried to knock my wipers up another notch (BAM! *) and was shocked to find they were already ON the top setting. The road spray was the worst thing - especially passing lorries. Often I was having to guess where there were cars by the road spray they were kicking up, beause the cars themselves were lost in the rain. Driving in the dark and in rain so heavy that your wipers can't clear it fast enough with road spray rendering everyone invisible is quite a test of one's driving skills. Anyway I got there without incident.

On Saturday we got up fairly early in order to walk to Hungerford which turned out to be only approx. 8 miles rather than the 10-12 we had originally thought.

When we got back we got tarted up and went to the pub to start piling the calories back on. Well, I did. Liz was very well behaved. We were having a nice relaxing drink when, as Liz reports in her blog, two policemen walked in. Seeing as they were wearing uniform I knew they weren't there for a drink, and considering everything was quiet (no fights or the such) I knew they weren't there for an arrest. So that left one possibility - ID checks. Well after my past experiences with ID I make sure I always carry it. However they also chose to check Liz's ID - which was a problem. Having not been asked for a while she doesn't carry it anymore. Ah. Luckily they decided to let her get away with it. It'd have been interesting to see what they did if neither of us had ID on us. We are both of legal drinking age, and as of yet there are no laws requiring us to carry ID. They could hardly remove us from the pub - imagine the FUSS we could cause if they did. But then could they leave us there? What if we were actually underage, they couldn't just leave us in there. If they'd dragged me out there'd have been one hell of a fuss :)

On Sunday I took Liz shopping and then I left for Aber. Road conditions were better, except for road spray with the sun refracting in it. I was somewhat pleased to get all the way home without so much as one incident. Normally coming back on the A44 I get caught out by at least one ridiculously sharp bend hidden behind a dip, but I'm getting to know where they are now and also learning how to spot them.

Today I went to Brynamlwg for a pint of coke at lunch and to stare at my colleagues while they ate their lunches. This is the only down-side to having a packed lunch. Still it's a nice place and it was nice to be away from the radiation-emitting beast that rules my life. Yes that is the computer I am referring to.

On returning home I made a fairly nice but VERY hot chilli which I enjoyed but I suspect it may return to haunt me. Now I'm going to get a beer and start work on some CGI for Liz. She wants a web page that shows how far she has walked during the week, so should be a good opportunity for me to stretch my CGI muscles again.