Petrichor (picking a word for the subject out of the air)

Okay, so I'm a bit late for this update, but never mind.

Some things have happened:

Garden

Earlier this year I planted broccoli, broad beans, rosemary and carrots. The broccoli bolted (the ladybirds and butterflies seem to be enjoying the flowers, at least) and the rosemary never germinated, but in the last couple of weeks I've harvested the broad beans (made a lovely pilaf) and the carrots (some huuuuge ones, mostly dinky; they will become carrot soup later this evening.) I've also planted some ailing basil out where the rosemary was going to be and have bought some thyme to join it.

Next I need to consider what to plant in the garden this autumn/winter.

Geocaching

I'm up to 70 caches found now! I need to find more worth using my few favourite points on, though. Made two more short Youtube videos, if you can stand to look at my FACE for a couple of minutes:

Ecotricity

My electricity and gas are now provided by Ecotricity, a green energy company that invests heavily in renewables, and I'm pretty impressed so far. They price match the major suppliers of electrickery and gas (although I'm paying a little more for the extra green package), and despite not having an online account management tool, their call centres where I spent all of about twenty seconds in the telephone queue and had a nice polite person on the other end of the line makes up for that. Anyway, I figured I'd just about squeezed all the energy savings out of my house, so this is the next thing.

Eating Out

My parents have taken me out for dinner twice this month, the first time with my brother to Brasserie Blanc in Portsmouth to meet my cousins who live there, and the latter for Dad's birthday at the Whitstable Oyster Company with my brother. At the former I had the most amazing fillet steak and a shared chocolate fondue with strawberries for dessert. Definitely worth going there if you're in Portsmouth. In Whitstable we were tempted by all the food tents at the yearly week-long Whitstable Oyster Festival, but in the end my parents had lobster, my brother had Cock Crab (huuuuge. *cough*.) and I had good ol' fish and chips (although I felt guilty after remembering that cod's one of the no-no fish at the moment).

Meeting and Eating

Last week I met up with Emily a few times.
On Tuesday we decided to get pizza from Lupa, a small chain in London that does AMAZING pizza, and eat it on the South Bank. We went past the place a couple of times before realising that this garage under the London Bridge railway arches happened to be the London Bridge outlet (Hampstead's actually has a shop front!) but fortunately they also took orders from there as well as just delivering. The pizza was proper italian pizza, not thick-crust deep-fried pizza hut stuff. South Bank was really pretty at night, it almost made me want to live in the city.
On Thursday we met up at Somerset House on the Strand where they had an open-air showing of Scott Pilgrim. Not a bad film, all in all, but I can see why it flopped. I thought sitting outside for watching a film would be odd, but it turned out to be a really good experience, and the weather held out for it too, which was useful!

Jam Jam Jam

I went blackberry picking on Friday night and got a half-kilo of blackberries from The Enchanted Woodland nearby. They turned into two jars of jam (and a few extra servings in a third) on Saturday. I tried it with my crumpets this morning and it's GREAT. Not as sweet as supermarket stuff (despite all the sugar that goes into it!) and much more obviously containing fruit.

Lovefilm

I'm ashamed to say I got DOOR-TO-DOOR-SALESPERSON'D!! on Friday by someone from Lovefilm (postal DVD rental) with an iPad. They had an offer of three months for £10 introductory price (normally £10/mo) and a free year's membership to Gourmet Society, which I was discussing with a friend earlier this year and is apparently worth having for discounts. If anyone fancies meeting me for dinner in London, let me know!

I've been promoted at work! I shall soon have a super-new job title, something along the lines of "Senior Search Developer" or "Lead Software Developer for Search" or something like that when my boss makes up his mind about it. My actual job hasn't actually changed, but bossman wanted to make it clear that I'm the man when it comes to working on the search engine. And we might be able to hire me a junior developer or year-in-industry student soon. Woo!