Matt's Journal

Shortly after our email, the chosen crisp flavours have been released. We bought a packet of Cajun Squirrel and they are nothing to rave about, very similar to variants on beef flavour crisps.

Photo taken on my iPhone.

Caught this during a riveting episode of Hollyoaks:

It tickles me, I have no idea why. Perhaps it was because I was the stuntman for the eyebrows.

You may remember a previous post about when Katie and I submitted new crisp flavours to the Walkers Crisp campaign, with suggestions like Pickled Onion and White Chocolate and Cajun Squirrel.

Well guess what……we got to the final. Sort of.

Katie received this email.

This was for the flavour: Cajun Squirrel

How many other people would have thought of that? Exactly. I call shenanigans.

This email basically let us know that we got as far as submitting a potentially winning entry, only to be stopped at the last minute because the photo submission accompanying the flavour wasn’t good enough.

We can be contented in the fact we get a personalised memento to remind us of how close we came!

One of the downsides of having images on your site is that it is very easy for other people to link to them instead of hosting it on their own website.

I have found time after time, a referrer that keeps popping up in my logs. Today I had a look who they were and what they were doing.

It turns out that some company/blog where hotlinking one of my Twitter images, not even bothering to host it on their free Blogger site. So, seeing as I can change the image to whatever I want and it reflects on their site, I had some fun:

Before

After

You can see the site by clicking here. I wonder how long it will take them to notice.

After Katie’s accident, we brought in the emergency plans and sought about making sure Katie could be a comfortable as possible. In the last four days alone, she visited the hospital three times to be told the initial examination had missed a fracture of the Fibula and that she should have been plastered on the day of the break. Chalk another one up for the NHS.

She returned yesterday and saw the physio and the doctor. This time she was given adequate feedback and a plaster cast that would secure all of her breaks. It looks like she will be in a cast for a couple of months at the very least, which makes her getting to work very difficult. At the moment, I am driving her 15 miles to work, then sprinting back to get into my work just before it’s too late.

We have drafted a complaint letter and are waiting on the next course of action, the the rail company will not be allowed to get away with it.

This weekend will be filled with washing, ironing and going to the Mother-In-Laws birthday party. I should hopefully be playing my first game of football since the Christmas break on Monday, but that’s all dependant on the weather.

So, today was the first day back at work. Being completely honest I had been dreading it, I could quite happily have stayed in bed this morning. That said, I did get up, looking out my window to find it had snowed at least three centimetres of snow.

Katie and I walked tentatively into work, making sure not to slip on the patches of ice, getting to the station so that I could see Katie off as I walked the remainder of my journey. I get into work pretty early as it is, I don’t mind it as I can relax, do a few bits online before I have to work.

At 8:45am I received a text, a message from Katie saying:

I’ve fallen over, I think I’ve broken my ankle.

My heart races, there’s nothing worse than hearing your loved one has hurt herself. I keep texting her and making sure she is ok, with her updating me on her journey to hospital in an ambulance.

Well, I didn’t have my car did I?! I text my mother, asked her if she could take me home to pick up my car or even take me to the hospital to meet my wife. Luckily she opted to take me to see Katie, luckily when we got there she was 75% of the way through the diagnosis. The physio had looked at her X-Ray’s and it turned out she had two fractures of her ankle and a torn ligament.

How did she do it? Well, the station employees hadn’t bothered to grit the station platforms, so when people walked snow into the station, pools of water and ice had collected on the marble (yes marble) floor inside the station. The station employees had then not bothered to put up “Wet Floor” signs, with one of them admitting that he had been told specifically not to get rid of the surface water.

We have managed to get hold of the station representatives and lodge a complaint, meanwhile Katie is laid up not being able to work at least for a couple of days.

Good start to 2009 eh?!