Tried out Boneface’s entry for this year’s Burger Wellington competition – The Yorkie Dork.

It comprised roast beef with rocket and horseradish (the onion got extracted) along with roast potatoes and gravy.

It tasted quite nice but messed with my head – it for confused as to whether I was eating a burger or a roast dinner.

Our rugby teams might all be wallowing in the bottom half of the league but it’s still reet grand to be from God’s Own County!

Three

OK, so looks like Penny is getting a dog bath on the way home. She absolutely stinks!

It was The Duchess’s birthday last weekend and the first time in 3 years she hasn’t been laid up with an infection.

I got her a few pressies, including a Beeviver kit to feed any exhausted bees she comes across on her dog walks.

However nothing matched the lovely lemon tree our fab friends Chris and Holly got her, something The Duchess has wanted for years.

Not only that, Holly also baked us, I mean her, a chocolate cake bordered by mint Matchmakers!

The commute to work is getting pretty close to the car’s range on a cold day. Even after giving it a quick boost at the petrol station I still came down to single figures by the time I reached home.

Looks like a trade up is on the cards.

Exciting news – I’m going to get to watch a bunch of German pensioners hunched over some keyboards for a couple of hours!

My favourite synth band Kraftwerk have just announced a date in Wellington — which happens to be on my birthday — so I had to jump online and book a ticket before it sells out.

Two weeks into a new job and so far so good. Switching from contracting back to permy wasn’t on the roadmap but a combination of slow contracting market plus a particularly juicy role lured me back to a previous employer.

I’ve seen the writing on the wall for my old role in infrastructure support – it’s slowly morphing into a DevOps coding role, which I don’t find that interesting. I can cobble some PowerShell together when required but generally programming is not something I enjoy, and I don’t personally think DevOps works well in a Windows environment, especially smaller infrastructures of a few hundred servers where they’re all quite different.

So I’ve moved into an area of support I’ve long found to be the most interesting – security. It’s definitely a growing area and will continue to be a focus as hackers get smarter and keep finding ways to break into businesses and steal their data (or encrypt it and hold you to ransom).

My new Cybersecurity Engineer role will require at least a year of fairly intensive skilling up and a fairly daunting certificate to study for (CISSP) but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

The good thing is that it’s given me a new focus and energy to push myself again; in my old role I’d lost most of my enthusiasm and was coasting to retirement. Now I’ve had a minor career pivot it’s given me some fire in the belly and a thirst for study again. Bring it on!

Had another crack at cooking a Sunday roast at the weekend, and I have say that Aunt Bessie can do one!

Even The Duchess said mine turned out better than hers, which is a massive compliment. Still can’t poach an egg to save my life but the lessons are coming along.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to catch US musician Weyes Blood in concert at Wellington Opera House, and apart from an underwhelming support act and being surrounded by heavily pierced and tattooed twentysomethings that made me feel even more uncool than normal it was a great night.

Dressed in an elegant flowing white dress and cape, she glided around the stage like Kate Bush and possessing a beautiful voice reminiscent of Karen Carpenter, she played lots of lovely music like this :-

Her music is difficult to categorise, a sort of indie-folky-chillout vibe some term as “chamber pop” though I’ve never heard of it before. I would recommend giving her latest album “And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow” a listen, quite likely going to be my album of the year.

The Duchess has been passing on her repertoire of recipes to ensure that I eat properly once she’s karked it — hopefully not for some time! — with beef stew and dumplings being the latest lesson.

I made both types of dumpling; the crispy ones that The Duchess favours, plus some soft ones that my Mam used to make. Both tasted pretty good to me, the soft one tasting of childhood pleasures.

It took a surprising amount of work to make – almost as much as a full roast dinner – though partly because I went over the top with the volume, buying 2kg of beef and cutting it up fairly chunky so it took longer than anticipated in the slow cookers (we did so much it had to be split across two!) and left us with some extra portions I can be vacuum seal for her while I’m in the UK. Another one ticked off the list.

PS: Amusingly we’ve become so used to eating mostly Asian food that choosing British stodge is seen as exotic “forrin” food!