This old lady's most endearing physical characteristic was the two little head-mounted leathery wontons that she calls ears. Her most endearing personality trait was her slightly grudging and undemonstrative affection; I lay on my stomach at one point to take some dogs-eye view shots and Jade walked straight towards me, tucked her head against my shoulder, and just stood there leaning against me.

Note, we'd have to change her name if she was ours. We'd go with ‘Gloria’.

Remind me never again to suggest a feature that requires dozens of pieces of kit and four on-location photoshoots. Remind me particularly to schedule a heavy cold for a different couple of days. Enjoyed mucking about with my camera in the Blue Rooms today, though. Got a few interesting shots when my longer exposures, metered for the dim light, synced with Jesse's flash that was being used for the shoot proper.

A big shout out to my brother-in-law for supplying so many of the stickers that make an appearance on my MacBook; I thought it was about time I posted pics since it's getting pretty complete and since the old iBook got so many positive comments. More stickers, as always, gratefully received.

The line between genius and insanity is very fine.

Yes, she's wearing slippers inside my sandals. Also, have we told you about our poringe* carpet? We should really tell Pantone about it in any case; I don't believe anyone has ever isolated this colour outside the lab.

* purple + orange = poringe

Mrs P and I slipped smoothly into roaring twenties mode at the weekend, courtesy of a parental-sponsored weekend away at Bibury Court Hotel. I was born to order afternoon tea in the drawing room of a quietly mouldering country pile, and I did it with aplomb. I also filled my memory card with shots of the achingly-picturesque Cotswolds landscape, though unfortunately the weather only started to pick up once we were on our way home. There are a few below, and there are more on Flickr. I apologise in advance for my floral, depth-of-field-ey macro obsession.

May 14 marks my one year anniversary at MacFormat. Yes, it really has been a year. No, seriously, dude; I know it seems like just yesterday, but it has been a full twelve months since I moved from the rat race to the dormouse race† so to celebrate here are some vital a-year-at-MacFormat numbers for you stat-monkeys.

107,423 Total words written
≈366 Average wordcount per day
612KB* Words generated
114.3MB Screenshots generated
607 Number of times I've written ‘Mac’
13 & 55 Favourite Future machine drinks

† Remarkably similar to the rat race and with just as much squeaking, but decidedly cuter. And with less Yersinia pestis.
* Aaaaaargh – a year's work! 600K! It would fit on a pissing floppy disk. Twice!

Yeah, so I'm writing a piece for one of our sister titles (it's all a bit incestuous) and asked Mrs P to cast her deliberately untechnical eye over it to make sure it read OK to the n00b. I showed her how to use Track Changes, which is just as well as I discovered when I opened her draft that she had – in an act of undeserved subversion – changed defragging to defraggling.

Funny.

Things we've learned about Big Dogs from Fraser, today's walking companion:

1. We lack upper body strength.
2. Big Dogs do Big Shits.
3. Some dogs don't really care much about hoomans; Buster and Fraser were more disdainful towards our presence than any cat we've ever been snubbed by.
4. We really want to walk – and photograph – a dog that doesn't need any sort of face furniture; we completely understand why Buster had a muzzle and Fraser had his face-strappy second lead arrangement, but you can't help but feel sorry for the little guys.

In other news, I appear to be unable to post a photograph without trying new ways to create a subtle vignette effect, a thing photographers have been trying to eradicate with better optics for years. I wonder if there are support groups I can go to; “Hi, my name's Chris and I put an archaic low-end photography effect on any picture I take with my expensive semi-pro camera.”

How many Newton users does it take to change a light bulb?
Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

(Apologies for this gag's vintage; I've just read it for the first time and it made me giggle.)

So you're walking along and you notice that one of your shoelaces feels a bit loose. So you bend down and retie it nice and tight. Straighten up, and then three steps later you realise that the other shoe, which until you retied its mate felt perfectly snug, now feels ridiculously flappy-aroundey. God, I hate that.

* Whenever I get irritated about inconsequential stuff like this, the image of Mr Brennan, looking on with a mixture of pity and wonder that any one man can contain so much petty anger, comes unbidden into my mind.

I can't get a chance remark of Jenny's out of my head; yesterday she observed that roses are at their most beautiful just before they die. It sounds incredibly trite but it's no less true because of that, and the vase on our windowsill is just on that cusp of bloated, straining beauty she's talking about. It sounds like a great lyric; now I only need the talent, time and money to turn it into a song.

But it would probably end up sounding like Phil Collins.

There are seaside towns populated by clean-limbed and bronzed Adonises. There are seaside towns that have a faded Victorian charm, all peeling paint and rusting iron railings. There are seaside towns that slumber quietly, nestling up against the crook of an inlet.

And then there's Weston-super-Mare. Which is as depressing a fly-ridden cesspit of a town are you're likely to visit before making your one-way trip to the nethermost reaches of hell. And so this is a public service announcement: under no circumstances think "Oh, I know what would make a nice bank holiday Monday day out: Weston-super-Mare!" It will only end in tears. And a possible car-wide suicide pact.

Blargh. Here's the equation of my life at the moment:

One dead hard disk + One chipped front tooth + One inexplicably painful y-ligament + Piss-poor + (Long nails + showering quickly + a painful nip in a surprisingly intimate area) / (Walking a dog + Making two huge lasagnes) = Meh.

So yes, not sure what's going to happen with my chipped tooth (and no, I have no idea how it happened) as I'm having a hellish time finding a dentist in Bath. The hard disk has been swapped for a rather lovely 250GB Western Digital Scorpio, so that's a bit of all right. There's bugger all I can do about the cash situation – apart from whoring myself out to sister Future titles for freelance – and the lens from Mrs P's glasses spontaneously popped out today while watching telly.

Never mind. Today we went up to the Bath Cats and Dogs Home and walked a long-legged Jack Russell cross called Buster. He was a cute little thing, though he had to wear a muzzle as he's 'dog-aggressive'. I refused to go and see the cats as I'd have been unable to walk away without secreting some old and mouldering puss somewhere about my person. More dog-walking is in order, I reckon, and I have a horrible feeling that we're on the brink of physically threatening our octogenarian neighbour-landlord until she agrees that we can keep a bugfuck crazy retirement-age pet.

We do also, however, have some fun things planned. We're signed up for Crowded House at the arboretum, Ben Folds at the academy in Bristol and, perhaps best of all, a hot air balloon flight at the end of May courtesy of an almost year-old housewarming present from my folks.

Oh, and my lasagnes promise to be fucking epic.