Took Jack to the Carling Cup match at Leicester last night, his first away match and at five he has already been to more matches than I had. Absolutely cracking match, even when we fell apart during the second half and Leicester were playing really well. We didn't get back into the game until the last five/ten minutes of extra time, but we managed to pull it out of the hat in the end.

Barry is going to have to mix up where he aims at for his penalties as the second penalty he missed was the third penalty he has taken in a row that went to the exact same place.

The Villa fans were amazing last night, I think we managed to shut the Leicester fans up a fair few times. Speaking of Leicester fans I was on the way to the ground with Jack and we got followed and heckled (from about six inches away) by about eight Leicester fans, I don't think thats on when you are out by yourself when you are with your five year old son.

Well I've already fallen off the blog posting wagon as I've ran out of time due to excessive playing on my Xbox 360/DS.

Villa were mostly rubbish on Saturday, we should have been stuffing Fulham, heres hoping we don't have the same problem come Tuesday with LCFC.

Got up late today, didn't feel like getting up with Jack at 5:15am for some reason, and I went to bed early too. I guess its the onset of winter - can't wait for the clocks to change and make it worse.

I prepared some lovely Chicken Peri-Peri for the Bento boxes but my camera battery is flat and I can't find the charger :(

Lumines™ Live! is now available, I can see large chunks of my life being taken up with this game, I've already managed to fit in an hours play when I didn't have an hour to spare.

Well I prepared my first set of lunches for my new Bento boxes:



Seems to have gone ok, if a little plain. I plan on cooking some extra stir fry tonight and using that as the basis for tomorrows lunch.

Spent most of this morning getting my LibraryThing tags up to date and removing the duplicate books that were added as part of the import from Amazon. Not surprisingly Fantasy books make up most of my collection but I was surprised by just how many comic books I own.

I've started reading the Princess Bride and it seems that the film captured the knowing, smug tone of the book perfectly, which is one of the main things I liked about the film. That and it had Andre the Giant in it. Hopefully my next book order will turn up before I finish this one - I've ordered some hard SF books as I've never really read much Clarke or Asimov - something I want to fix before the year end.

Watched two very similar films yesterday, A City of Violence and Dragon Tiger Gate. Neither impressed me as much, the first was better but it looked like it was edited by two different people. The editing started off like Kill Bill and ended up in traditional Hong Kong action movie mode. Still, it had some decent fight sequences and these made up for the short falls in the film's plot as it was your usual best friend betrays everybody but nobody else sees it, complete with the heroes overcoming the the over whelming odds. I've heard that Dragon Tiger Gate is meant to be Asia's answer to X-Men. If that's the case then this is like the 3d X-Men film, rubbish. Its nothing more than a vehicle for Donnie Yen to show off his (impressive) martial arts skills. Plot wise it is more or less the same plot as A City of Violence (or just about any martial arts film to be fair) but it lacks the exposition needed for those unfamiliar with the series.

Today mine and the kids new Bento boxes finally turned up! What are Bento boxes I hear you ask? They are Japanese lunch boxes that have a varierty of sections to allow you to carry lots of different types of food without it mixing together. Check out Cooking Cute or My lunch can beat up your lunch . Cooking cute has lots of pictures of some amazing lunches.

Heres mine and the kids:



and here is the insides of one:



I'm looking forward to cooking some fillings for these tonight, I'll post pictures tomorrow.

Gah, its Monday already and I didn't want to get out of bed today but I really wanted to finish Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I really enjoyed reading it and I had to stop myself from starting from the beginning again. It'll be interesting to see what Susanna Clarke does next, I think The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories is meant to be next.

Jack has nearly finished Lego Star Wars on the Xbox 360, can't believe he has done that so quickly.

Well I just got back from the Villa and here is what I said on Avforums about it:

I think its time for somebody else (anybody else) to take over penalty duty from Angel, this time he wasn't as lucky as the one against the Scummers.

Still, he got on the end of more balls than Baros who couldn't get on the end of the balls Moore would have (not surprising really) and he kept drifting into the middle. We looked immediately better once Baros came off and we went 4-4-2 as we seemed to be getting over run in the mid field.

Hughes looked off as well, did he even have any successful passes today? If it was up to me I wouldn't be playing him based on the last two home performances I've seen, but do we have a right back to replace him?

So glad that the ref awarded the penalty and the sending off, it put right all the decisions that went against us and I nearly though he would just wave play on.

The ground was nearly full (less than 50 seats I think) but you couldn't hear a peep out of the Villa fans until the penalty, the fans were s**t today. Fair play to the Spurs fans, they were f**king loud as usual. Villa turned on the PA system right before kick off to counter the Spurs fans but the Villa fans didn't really sing along .

I'm on a roll with three posts in three days.

Thank god for the return of the fall TV schedule, what with The Wire, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, along with my two guilty pleasures - Smallville and Desperate Housewives I actually have some TV I want to watch. The Wire has to be the pick of the bunch at the moment although BSG is pushing hard - it'll be interesting to see if they can keep up the commentary on the Iraqi war going or if they will be forced to drop it.

After spending most of the summer listening to classical music as there wasn't much new indie music that I wanted to listen to there seems to have been some decent releases sneaking out. I really like the Decemberist's new album, that feel good sound always hits the spot after a hard day. I also found out that Beck has a new album out, I must be getting old because I used to know months in advance when a favourite artist was going to be releasing a new album. I blame the general crapness of music programs on TV (particularly anything on MTV2) and the deaths of Melody Maker/John Peel. I still really miss Mr Peel, his shows were a beacon of light in a sea of mediocrity and talentless drivel that is Radio 1. Still, at least Jooles Holland still has his show, and the BBC have been broadcasting every episode of the last 3 or 4 seasons in HD on BBC HD. The HD broadcasts have looked and sounded stunning, plus its been good to see bands I haven't heard of in a while like Arcade Fire, will they ever get another album out?

Off to the football tomorrow, hopefully to watch Villa stuff Spurs, but O'Neil has said that we are playing 4-4-2 instead of 4-3-3 so I hope the change doesn't bring about a disaster like it did for England. Mind you O'Neil is a great manager while McClaren struggles to prove he is anything other than average.

Unbelievable, two posts in two days!

I've started updating my Library thing and DVD Profiler lists , the DVD one is more or less complete apart from some obscure wrestling DVDs that nobody else seems to have. I thought I had more DVDs than that. still nearly 700 isn't that bad for the last six years. My Library thing list is far from complete, its got about a third of my books on it.

I wish that there was a practical, automated way of collating these things like Last.FM.

Now nobody will have an excuse as to not being able to work out what books and DVDs to buy me for Christmas!

Well its been a long time since my first post but I've decided to stay for now... We'll see if I stick at it.

Not really happy with the layout but I'll play with that as time goes on.