ineke.co.uk

This year, Walkers launched the World Cup Flavour Cup. They released 15 new flavours of crisps, though not necessarily competing countries, and I made it my aim to try them all. Last night, my housemate, Alana and I sat down and tried them all!
We scored them based on: appealingness of name, realisticness of taste, and actual enjoyment of taste. We took an average for ranking purposes, and the combined results are below!

= 1. American Cheeseburger
= 1. French Garlic Baguette
3. Argentinian Flame Grilled Steak
4. South African Sweet Chutney
5. English Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
= 6. Italian Spaghetti Bolognaise
= 6. Brazilian Salsa
= 8. Dutch Edam Cheese
= 8. Japanese Teriyaki Chicken
10. Welsh Rarebit
11. German Bratwurst Sausage
12. Irish Stew
13. Spanish Chicken Paella
14. Australian BBQ Kangaroo
15. Scottish Haggis

And here’s the Breakdown of our scoring. Obviously some of the flavours we’d never tried in real life, so couldn’t given them a “realistic” score.

Alana’s scores

Ineke’s scores

You know how sometimes you will walk out of a shop (or off of an internet page) and think, “Hey, that was really good service in there, I should really tell someone about it!” or “Well I’m never going there again!”. I thought this would be a good place for me to share a couple of my experiences with you all; giving credit where credit’s due, and maybe adding a bit of wariness with some other places.

I’m not sure though.

I’m definitely thinking it’s a good idea to hand out a few positive comments to places who’ve done really well, but I’m not sure about the negative stuff.
All I would put would be factual, but I don’t want to get in trouble, and don’t really want to offend (too much!)

Anyone any thoughts or advice?

In the last few weeks, Compassion has been putting up blogs with some gorgeous photo’s all themed around different colours. Please have a look and enjoy!

I’m hoping Compassion will have more of these in the weeks to come! If so, I’ll add them to the list below 🙂

So today at work I got an email from a colleague saying they’d found my blog on Compassion’s Blogroll.

I was pretty surprised. This is a personal blog, linked up with my personal email account – how on earth did they find me?! I’m not bothered by it at all, was just entirely curious!

It turns out a simple google search discovered my entry where I mentioned that I work for Compassion UK, and so I was bookmarked!

A simple reminder that nothing on the internet is as hidden as you assume it is!

So what with the long Easter weekend, and my brother Alan’s 20th birthday the Tuesday before, I decided to take Holy week off and head down south 🙂

Yesterday my brother and I did our bit for humanity and lost 470ml of blood for the first time. Seemed a nice thing for him to do on his birthday!

I was a little nervous, but knew they’d turn me down if I wasn’t healthy enough, so went in with a bit of confidence… the weirdest bit was probably feeling the warmth of the tube on my arm as it started, but other than that I didn’t feel anything!

Due to my history of slight panic attacks, I was a little lightheaded, and made the mistake of telling them this. It seems if you can’t confidently tell them you’re 100% A-OK then they have a procedure. They instantly put my bed flat, put a huge cushion thing under my feet, and the lady in charge came over and put a cool cloth on my face…. what a fuss – I was fine!! Nice to know they’re careful though I guess.

After plenty of squash and biscuits I headed back to the train station, to find that all trains to Romsey (just a 12minute journey away) were delayed “due to a vehicle hitting a bridge in the Romsey area”… again! Reminds me of that summer where I think 4 HGVs hit Greatbridge in a month? Though apparantly that bridge was clear this time, so we’re wondering if it was the bridge by Botley Road…. I’m sure this weeks Romsey Advertiser will reveal all…. it’s good to be home!

I knew that next month I start the long process of paying off my student loan.
I went on the student loans website, and used their calculator to work out what I will be paying back each month.
I put in my current debt of about £21,000 (for those of you who gasped, this is pretty standard for 3 years with the newish tuition fees) and my salary, and it came out with £57 a month for the next 300 months (25 years). This sounded pretty good until I read on…
After 25 years, the remaining balance of about £45,000 will be wiped. £45,000?! That’s double what I owe at the moment, even with paying £17,000 over those years. That’s a total debt of over TREBLE my initial borrowings…
There’s an option to voluntarily pay more back, but really, what is the point?!
Amusingly, what I borrowed to start with was about £19,000, which is closeish to what I’ll be paying back!

What a system ey?

I’ve been re-listening to my old Narnia audio books lately (and realising I still know them word for word!), but a few things have struck me while listening, and it struck me, can such respected literature have plot faults?

In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the second time Lucy goes into the wardrobe, she is followed a couple of minutes later by Edmund. Now we’re told that no matter how much time one spends in Narnia, it never takes up any of “our time”. Therefore, should Lucy not have come back out of the wardrobe before Edmund had the chance to get in? That could have changed the entire plot!

In Prince Caspian, Professor Kirk tells the children that they can’t get to Narnia the same way twice. However, in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Lucy goes through the wardrobe to Narnia no less than three times!

Also, whenever the children go back to “our world” they always end up in the clothes they were wearing when they went into Narnia, however, when they head back to Narnia, they don’t suddenly change clothes to whatever they were last wearing there!

On a completely different note, this is the first time I’ve listened to the Chronicles in Narnia in quite a long time (I’ve seen the films – not as good, and it’s a good while since I read the books too) and I’m just picking up so much more from them. They are fantastic as children’s books, but they just teach so much about God too! I bought a little book a couple of years back going into the biblical links in Narnia but I never got past The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe… I may well go back to it and see what else I’ve been missing!

I’m hoping I won’t find any more points to irritate me, so I’ll publish this post now, and hope that I don’t need to do a sequel!

So yesterday I was discussing with someone what system the country uses. The Americans see us as a pretty Metric place, and the Europeans see us as Imperial in comparison with themselves, so I thought I’d think through what I use more!

• 1D Space
  On a long journey I’d give my distance in miles, but the length of a pencil I’d give in cm. I give my height in feet and inches, and the length of a cable in metres.
• 2D Space
  I’d guess in square metres for a room, people tend to use acres for large things like land, and I’d go with square cm for a bit of paper (or A3, A4 etc, not sure what that system is!).
• 3D Space
  I’d say mainly metric here. Most things in ml and litres, but then milk is always pints!
• Velocity
  Speed limits in this country are all mph, but speed records tend to be metres per second for more sciency things. I do think we’re more imperial in general here… unless anyone has a good counter example?
• Acceleration
  The standard car way of measuring this is “0-60 in x seconds” so this is actually imperial… again sciency things in metres per second squared… neither hugely common.
• Mass
  I’d give my weight (if I was sharing it!) in stone, pasta & rice in grams, and cake measurements in ounces. Baby weight in pounds, and big iron weights in cartoons in tons!
• Time!
  Time I would say is just it’s own scheme… I’d love a metric time system, but don’t see it EVER happening! …Or, as someone at work said a while ago, we should start using a base 12 number system for everything, this would make time metric, and we could put everything into this system!

Any other forms of measurement I’ve missed?

In July 2005, shortly after the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground I went through a phrase of getting really quite down about the state of the world that we live in. How miserable it is, all the war, all the poverty, the way we’re gradually destroying it.

Talking about this with friends at the time, we discussed how we can at least appreciate that this world is only temporary. One day, we who have put our hope in Christ will go to a place infinitely better! This cheered me up massively, and I tried to keep this my focus each time something else happened in the world that was ready to plummet my attitude back down to the depths.

The last couple of weeks though I’ve needed to relearn this.

The Haiti stuff has hit me pretty hard. A place with SO much poverty, a place that was so poor before any of this happened, gets struck in such a way that some articles are saying they will take DECADES to recover. Part of the reason for this is the poverty that they were already in, that they couldn’t afford for strong enough buildings, for strong enough equipment to rescue those who were trapped. It’s most probable that had this event happened in the UK, US or any other developed (or whatever today’s PC term is) country, that the devastation would be nothing in comparison.

And because of this, I forgot all that I learnt four and a half years ago.

I think partly because I’m so much more involved in it this time, and seeing the pain that people are suffering, when while I have confidence in going somewhere better after this, who knows if these people know God.

There have been some amazing videos on the news of those in Haiti singing praise to God even amidst this devastation, which is awesome, but so many out there don’t.

I think I need to relearn the lesson I learnt back in 2005, and learn another one on top of it. Not quite sure what it is yet, but I’m sure God will teach me in His timing…