Housewarming and Birthday party, Afternoon and Evening Sat 5th Jan

To celebrate my living in a house with NO MOLD in it, and my incipient ascension into post-epic levels (my 31ST BIRTHDAY), there will be a combined housewarming-cum-birthday PARTY:

* During the AFTERNOON and EVENING, commencing from about 2pm
* During the afternoon there will be tea, and probably cake/toddlers/board-games, etc
* During the evening there will be alcohol and loud conversation
* In between, there will be take away food of a democratically determined culture.

This will take place in my new abode on Peverel Road, a bit along Newmarket Road (address and map: http://jack.dreamwidth.org/813381.html http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/809012.html)

If you are reading this, you are very welcome. Message me if you can't see the contact details post.

Other halves, friends, etc are very welcome.

What should I say

My "things I vaguely want to spod about" file has been going fairly well. It's got a mix of random thoughts, life snippets, etc, and prompts for longer posts. I've good about ruthlessly pruning out stuff that sounded interesting but I no longer really think I have anything interesting to say.

That's worked better than previous incarnations of the file, which have had a tendency to get taken over by stuff I didn't want to say anything about, but didn't want to delete because it was a cool idea when I wrote it down, so I ended up putting stuff in them, but not using stuff up.

This is working a bit better as a buffer between my brain and my keyboard, such that a spate of "ooh, I should post that Deep Thought on dreamwidth" thoughts at work can go straight in the file, and not need to be blogged right then, but when I want to exercise my typing muscles, I can pull out a prompt and write 500 words on it.

However, now it's actually got pruned of all the quotidian things, and is full of things I want to say something complicated about but aren't sure what yet.

So, what should I randomly blog about? However silly, however serious?

Are there any "do N things" memes I asked someone for but didn't finish?

Dwarves in Tolkien

Someone recently linked to a helpful flowchart for visually recognising the different dwarves in the Hobbit movie. Although it was more like O(N/2) than O(log(N)), and I doubt it's very easy to refer to in the middle of an action scene.

However, they were never very differentiated from each other in the book, either. I remember:

Thorin was the in-charge one and had a surname.
Balin occasionally acted as a back-up to Thorin?
Bombur was the stereotypically fat one.
Dori got roped into carrying Bilbo
Fili and Kili were the young ones
Bifur, Bofur, Nori, Ori, Dwalin, Oin and Gloin seem to only be distinguished by being someone's brother or father.

Are there any distinguishing features between the dwarves I've missed? I can even remember which of Mablung and Damrod is which, but I never noticed anything particular about the dwarves.

Driven for a year without an accident

Driven for a year without an accident ✓

OK, this should really, really be automatic, not something to be proud of, but it's still a good thing.