Sunday night chit-chat

This is the bike I went to see at the Big Bike Show last weekend

And this is another bike that was in some kind of weird and wonderful section of the competition - I still can't figure out how it's supposed to work or what the keg is for

What are you:
Reading
I read The Silver Linings Playbook yesterday, after having finish Strumpet City during the week.  I feel like I'm on a roll.  I've got Christopher Hitchens' Arguably on the go on the kindel and today I picked up the Princess Bride again, too.  That's another one of the many books I started earlier in the year and never finished.

Watching
Not much.  Have been enjoying The Big C recently but have caught up now so just waiting for new episodes to air.

Listening to
Around my grave sing songs of joy, a Battenkill Ramblers album that I downloaded recently.  Lead singer is the amazingly talented Nicolette from clickclackgorilla, who not only sounds even better live than she does on cd but also built/refurbished her own house out of an old building wagon.  I should be practicing for choir but just haven't been able to get enthusiastic about our current program.  I think it's safe to say that I'm not a huge fan of Bach motets.

Cooking/baking
I made a giant amount of pasta salad for our annual barbeque in the building I live in on Friday night but although the rain stayed away it was fairly cool and not many showed up.  So I've been eating pasta salad all weekend to finish it up.  I wanted to make the chickpea salad which I've made before and always goes down well but when I went to steep the chickpeas on Thursday night, I discovered that I only had a small amount left.  I still left them to steep and added the remains of a packet of white beans as well, which I turned into a tomato and bean/chickpea casserole.  It was a nice break from the pasta salad and I'll finish it off tomorrow.  I just went ahead and made the dressing for that chickpea salad anyway and mixed it with some cooked pasta, dried tomatoes and mozzarella.  It worked pretty well in my opinion although the garlic I used really was very strong.  Delicious nonetheless.

Happy you accomplished this week
Today I swept the floors and did all the washing up.  It might not seem like much but for the week that was in it, it really was.  I also managed to get some filing down in work that wasn't much but made a big mental difference.  Oh, and I finally managed to bring my old mobile phone in to the shop to get it unlocked - I bought a sim card when I was in Ireland so that I could send it to my niece, who will be au-pairing there in June.  It'll be a rush to get it to her on time now because I kept forgetting to look for that old phone and then it didn't work but at least it's working now.

Looking forward to next week
It's a bank holiday tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to having another day off work.  Otherwise I'm looking forward to nothing other than having nothing but choir practice to get to on Wednesday evening - I need some evenings free before heading into a few weeks of being very busy.

Thankful for today
That the pain in my shoulder and neck has let up.  I really didn't like the woozy feeling from the pain drops the doctor gave me so I'm glad it isn't bad enough for me to have felt the need to take them.

Bonus question: do you like your name?  Would you change it if you could?
Never thought much about whether I liked it or not, which I suppose at least means that I don't hate it.  At this stage I'm old enough to have gotten pretty fond of it, I suppose.  Don't think I've ever wanted to change it either although the internet would have taken care of any leanings I had in that direction anyway.  Apart from the couple of made-up usernames I use in various places, there are a few more serious websites where I use an ordinary name, but not mine.

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