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By Kate, 9 July 2009 7:11 pm

What's goin' on over in this pen?

Over the past two weekends, we’ve seen a lot of animals. Two weeks ago, we went to the Royal Highland Show, where there were a lot of large, happy cows, curious goats, fluffy sheep, and gigantic Clydesdales, one of which tried to read Scott’s map, and another of which was hoping a lick of the grass design on my shirt would produce the taste of the real thing. Poor guy. I did give him a pat on the nose, but I don’t think it was any consolation.

Do you have an apple?

I also got to make a fool of myself as a volunteer in a demonstration called Quack Commandos, in which the awesomeness of sheepdogs is displayed by getting one of them to herd some Indian Running Ducks in all sorts of directions and then getting 6 humans to try and do the same job. Needless to say, the dog kind of kicked our asses. But how many people can say they’ve herded Indian Running Ducks? I bet you can’t.

Sheepdog: takin' care of bidness.

Humans: not so much.

In addition to the animals, there was a crapload of free food sampling going on, some scrumptious strawberries and cream, and various other snacking. I also saw a guy scale a 40 foot pole in 17 seconds. And Scott drooled over big boy toys like combine harvesters and tractors, forgetting completely that we don’t have any fields to mow and a combine harvester is about one and a half times the size of our flat.

Regardless of this, walking around looking at animals all day just makes me want a farm full of them even more. I could make a lot of cheese and ice cream.

We can't carry that home.

Ok, I realise this is actually quite important stuff in animal husbandry and all, but it's still funny.

Puffin proof.

More recently, this weekend, we headed out to South Queensferry far too early in the morning for a Sunday to catch an RSPB seabird cruise. There were seals! And puffins! And cormorants! And about ten billion different kinds of gulls! It was pretty good, and it only rained for about 15 minutes of the 3 hours. My camera was no match for some of the telephoto lenses on that boat, but I got a few decent pictures of the seals, and I managed to get some pictures that at least prove we saw puffins. They’re really small!

Seals!

After the boat trip was over, naturally, the sun came out in full and we walked around South Queensferry for a bit, had a mediocre sunday roast in one pub and a pint in another before heading home. Lovely way to spend a day.

Sunny South Queensferry.

Somewhere in between these animal excursions, I went shopping for clothes, which I desperately need. Unfortunately, after failing to find anything I liked or deemed appropriate, I gave up and instead came home with three new CDs (M.I.A., Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Coldplay. Hooray new music!), a bottle of Cava (It was hot and I wanted something cold and fizzy.), and a new Tefal Jamie Oliver Professional Series stainless steel 30cm nonstick omlette pan. YES.

Retired (but still pretty hot).

Sex-ehhhhh.

To put this in perspective, I used this pan’s predecessor, a similar one, hard anodized instead of stainless steel,  just about every day for two and a half years. I don’t drive anymore because I live in a city, but I do cook all the time. So this is kind of like the equivalent of buying a new car. It will be used and used well. And DAMN it is nice. I like when cookware goes on sale.

Unfortunately, I still need clothes. This ‘no clothes, so let’s buy food/something for the kitchen’ thing is all too common of an occurance. I blame the fashion industry. But that’s another post.

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By Kate, 2 April 2009 11:50 am

About a bajillion years ago (or 3 months, depending on how you look at time), I decided that the most awesome way to celebrate our 3-year anniversary would be to go to the Glasgow Science Centre and then to Wagamama to stuff ourselves full of tasty, tasty noodles. Because we’re stupidly busy with DIY and, you know, life, we had to put off the actual date of this excursion to two weeks past our actual anniversary. But no matter. I can become a zen master when there are noodles at the end of the tunnel.

So, Saturday, we got up and went for a full Scottish breakfast. According to something I’d just seen on TV, this put us way over our recommended salt intake for the day. But man! Was it tasty. Bacon, egg, sausage, haggis, black pudding, mushrooms, and a tattie scone. I don’t do that baked beans thing they love so much in this country. We don’t go for the full breakfast very often. In fact, usually we don’t eat breakfast like that unless we’re on vacation. So it wasn’t exactly a guilt-laden meal.

Fully satisfied, we got on a train to Glasgow. Once we arrived, I decided the easiest way to get to the Science Centre was by subway. Seeing as how this was only my third ever trip to Glasgow, I could have been wrong, but it was easy enough save for the fact that I wouldn’t want to walk through the area between the station and the Centre in the dark.

The Glasgow subway system is the third oldest subway in the world, and it’s tiny. The trains have 3 carriages and they’re just about tall enough for me to stand in the very centre. It seems like you’re on more of a model than a real subway train, but then it doesn’t need to be very big anyway, as Glasgow is not the metropolis that London or New York is.

The system is just one line that runs in a loop (it’s nicknamed The Clockwork Orange). I suppose the advantage of this, from a tourist’s point of view anyway, is that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if you get on the wrong loop, because you’ll just come back around to the right place eventually. And a full circle only takes about 24 minutes, so you really can’t go wrong. It only took about 8 minutes to get to our stop.

As a lover of Bill Nye the Science Guy and all such make-science-fun things, science centres always initially excite me. I say ‘initially’ because there are a lot of science centres that cater almost exclusively to kids, which pisses me off, especially when I’ve spent the money to go in without any indication of this from the staff. I want to be able to play with just as many of the cool science toys that the kids can without people looking at me like I’m stealing their youngster’s chance at a happy day. I don’t want to get that feeling that other people are thinking ‘whyyyyy is she here?’ because fuck that! Science is for everyone, not just little Timmy, drooling on the buttons that control the giant magnet.

Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised. The Glasgow Science Centre caters for all. And while the place WAS crawling with some kind of scout group, they weren’t so numerous that you couldn’t get at any of the exhibits without tripping over someone under 12. In fact, we never really had to wait to do anything. And there was SO MUCH to do.

They had the usual stuff about how light and electricity works and how the human body is put together, but they also had a lot of things I’d never seen before. There was a music maker thing that worked using beams of light and an LED harp, there were a few games that tested your reaction time, there was a giant Soma cube to put together, there was a bunch of stuff on cloning and stem cell research (Scotland will not soon forget that they produced Dolly the sheep). There was even a thing where you put together a news report about stem cells, which was basically for kids, but it was teaching them that the news is supposed to be impartial to either view on the subject being reported so that people get the facts, which I think is a valuable lesson. I played a computer game that simulated how hard it is to save everyone who needs an organ from the donor list. And there was a whole special exhibit on DNA and the human genome where I got to compare myself to a duckbilled platypus. Apparently we’re not very similar.

When we had our fill of science (and our stomachs were starting to rumble) we ventured back into the city centre and went to Wagamama for an early dinner. When we ordered, I told the waitress that I was allergic to shellfish (because you’re supposed to tell them so they know). Regardless of this, when our Duck Gyoza came, it was actually Prawn Gyoza. I knew this because I took a bite and thought ‘this is not duck’. They apologised and switched it and I, being preemptively cautious, took a benadryl. I wasn’t going to have one piece of shrimp ruin my Wagamama! And to be fair, the Duck Gyoza looks exactly like the Prawn one on the outside. Next time I’ll get Scott to taste my food.

Crisis averted (I got a tingle of an itch, but I think the benadryl shot any other reactions down), we sipped our Asahi Premium Black Lager and ate our duck dumplings. Then the noodles arrived and the slurping commenced. Scott had Chicken Itame, which is a spicy coconut thing with rice noodles, and I had Salmon Ramen, in which there was an enormous piece of salmon involved.  Scott had never been to Wagamama before, so I was happy to hear that his dinner was the best chicken noodle soup he’d had in forever. I wish they would open a restaurant in Edinburgh because I would be in there all the time. Takeout noodles for lunch? I think so.

We don’t know much about Glasgow and the stores were about to close anyway, so we decided to head back to Edinburgh early where we ended up drinking wine, eating chocolate cheesecake, and watching some of my Long Way Round DVDs (further increasing my undying urge to get our asses to Russia and Mongolia). The perfect anniversary? I think so.