Jamie told me that at the moment, Smyths were selling Lego minifigs and that possibly what I wanted (whatever it was for) could be got there. Except, they were mystery figs, and frankly, it was a bit of a lucky dip as to whether you got what you wanted. There were 16 to collect.

When I got to Smyths, someone suggested that just possibly, there might be some way of identifying them from the package to be found on the internet. I have an internet enabled smart phone. I had the code in as fast a time as a 3G connection would allow me to get it. And then set about going through the box of figures to see if I could find four snowboarders. For what I had in mind for the little figures, the pirate and racing driving ones weren’t really ideal.

30 minutes later, in the lobby of the Premier Inn hotel in Swords where I had knit night, my friend and I were cutting up the little packets to see if I had gotten them right. She could barely see the little dot matrix on the package that I had used to identify the packs I wanted. I had four. I initially wanted eight but after 3 boxes of them, I reckoned my plans could be adjusted to feature just four.

It was a bit like that game where you look behind boxes to see what was revealed. First a snowboarder. Then another snowboarder. Then a third snowboarder. Then a Fourth snowboarder. 100% hit rate. No need to go back through Smyths to trawl through packages looking for near invisible dots under a barcode.

Score. So much for that bit. When I told her what I wanted them for, instead of accusing me of total insanity, she said she’d meet me on Saturday morning with some supplies and a bit of technical documentation. But recommended a trip into Kitchen Complements. After I had recced Tesco and Superquinn, this turned out to be wise advice although I try to avoid KC at the best of times because I always, but always leave money in there.

I’ve only ever iced two cakes before. One was a catastrophen when I was 11 and the icing was so watery it soaked into the less than stellar Victoria sponge. The other was not a precision item. This, on the other hand was. With the memory of a mad failure 25 years ago plus, I elected to buy read to roll out sugar paste. The key word there is sugar. I have – and I have a record – I have never tasted anything so sweet in my entire life.

First I needed a cake too. So in addition to never icing a cake properly before, I hadn’t actually made a cake suitable to go under a pile of solid sugar either. Enter the Good Housekeeping Book and a recipe for Madeira which I adultrated with chocolate chips and put in the oven while I was watching Wonders of the Universe last week.

I’m not going to go into the details. But if you ever need to do anything similar, here is some useful information;

1. sugar paste is very sweet
2. unless it is rock solid, you can’t use those neat little pens to draw stuff on it.
3. blue edible paint goes everywhere. Everywhere.
4. silverballs go everywhere the blue edible paint does not
5. snowboarding lego figurines are girls. This is useful to know in advance if the cake is for a boy.
6. you need muscles to get stuff out of the Dr Oetker marginally less sweet icing
7. Kitchen Complements has all sorts of stuff you never knew you needed but now you have to have
8. so does Stock.
9. so does Great Outdoors although not necessarily for cake decorating (they’re just too close to Stock and KC)
10. sugar paste is very, very sweet.

For my kitesurfing figures, I used fairy cake cases (colouredy ones) and florist wire. They’re bad kitesurfers because they don’t actually have kitebars but I gotta say, after the whole saga involving the squeezy thing (if I ever have to do this again I’m getting a piping bag) I didn’t care too much for the finer points of kite safety.

This is what the cake looked like. I haven’t been proud of much I’ve done lately, but I’m proud of this.

altimeter cake

More Other >>

Love the song but it’s not currently on iTunes.

I’ve a bunch of watersports DVDs that I have, some of which came free with magazines and some of which I bought. Apart from the Whitelines snowboarding one which was average, I really like all of them, because they are pure escapism. When you’re sitting in a freezing cold Dublin, there’s a lot to be said for dragging out a Cabrinha DVD and watching Andre Philip ripping it up in Antigua, or the guys on Escape from Pressure ripping it up all over the world including the one place I really want to go which is the Cocos Islands. In the sunshine. You could be negative and feel jealous or you could be positive and say feckit, I’m going to go there.

If people have surf/windsurf/kitesurf DVDs that they got free from the front of magazines that are functioning as coasters, gathering dust that they don’t want any more, send them my way. I’ll more than make use of them. Don’t really care how old they are provided they are predominantly action and not so much interview. The best surf DVD I own is probably the Customs DVD that came “free” with the Billabong Odyssey DVD. Yeah, the big waves were cool but still….

But I still wanted to do another piece for myself; better than the bathroom mirror was – yes it was my first work and yes, you’d know it, and I have most of the equipment to do it. So I’ve been thinking about it again. I can order the glass from Creative Glass in Bristol – they will deliver internationally, so it’s just a question of how to deal with avoiding glass splinters going all over the place. I think i’ll be laying out a big blanket in the kitchen and buying a black and decker foldable work bench. And I was looking at tables to put the work on.

There are two possible pieces I’d like to do; another surfing wave (that was the first one) or possibly a lighthouse. I was looking at putting it on a garden table so I was looking at what was available in the way of tables to abuse in this way in IKEA. I may yet just go for a plate of wood from a builder’s provider, one that I can put outside for preference, and put a lighthouse on it.

I don’t know why I am doing this though; it’s not like I have time, per se. I have a load of crochet on the go, tapestry, climbing and swimming. It’s just something I want to do I guess.

Give her a shot please. She merits it.

I spent money of course but you go to IKEA and somehow, a lot seems to come out for your money. I needed boring stuff like a dustbin for the kitchen (the one that came with the house sucks) and I wanted one for my bedroom as well. I wanted some stuff for the kitchen, like a ladle, and more of those wooden cooking implements that cost 69c but which are extremely useful. I now have four sets of them. And I wanted another standing lamp that cost 6.99 for the living room because the one I put in my bedroom worked out so well. Plus I needed a zillion plastic boxes to cater for bringing lunch/dinner to work.

IKEA rocks. All that set me back the grand total of 47E. The most expensive item was the standing lamp for 6.99E. It’s a really nice standing lamp (which is why I have two of them now). I like a lot of the things in there. Most of all I like that it was Saturday afternoon, very packed but I didn’t have to queue anywhere.

So I’m sitting here in my candlelit living room with nice cinnamon rolls also bought in IKEA listening to chillout music by Delirium, thinking there are worse places to be in my life.

In other news, I’m on the look out for a supply of Cypriot coffee grains in Dublin. I finished the first package today; I think I have another 4 but I’m drinking it a lot more often lately than during the summer (I don’t know why).

Normally I would look at going climbing tonight and in fact I still have time before the wall closes. However, courtesy of various problems that raised their ugly heads yesterday evening I didn’t get much sleep last night so will be going to bed early tonight to recover from the lack of sleep last night. If that makes sense. After being sick with the diving last week I doubt I have too much body strength right now anyway.

Pretty picture from Dun Laoghaire:

taken last Friday night, freezing and dying to go to the loo.

Bad things that happened today:

I appear to have run out of bananas for breakfast.

I’m not good at buying shoes, and specialist shoes – let’s be honest, from about March to November I wear flipflops. I hate wearing shoes. Hate them. And I don’t know much about climbing shoes and had no real desire to guess work it over the internet on this occasion at least. So, Great Outdoors then because they are closer to what used to be the least expensive carpark in town.

The girl who took care of me doesn’t climb. She does ski, and she did know what she was talking about with respect to climbing shoes. This compares very well to people in hifi shops who know nothing about hifi systems (voice of bitter experience there). She measured my feet, something which no one has done since I was about 9 and then we went trying on shoes and I wound up buying a midrange pair that were also slightly wider fitting (required for Missy here) that were reasonably within budget and off I went.

We don’t often praise good customer service, although we’re fast enough to whinge about bad customer service. So kudos to the girl in the Great Outdoors today and thanks for the help.