An episode that requires a “Previously on Doctor Who…” It was a bit weird. I’ve always felt that the new Who references so much stuff that you either know or you don’t, but each episode/double episode is standalone anyway. I love the domesticity of this episode, because although it could be boring to just watch a couple of people go on a couple of dates, there are a lot of darker undertones to the entire thing.

When I was putting my Life List together, I added a vague “photo a day” item. In my head, it was the idea of making one of those videos where you take a picture of yourself every day, and see how you change over the course of a year. Then I thought about it a bit more and realised I’m unlikely to remember to take a picture every day, I don’t really like looking at myself that much, and I can’t imagine anyone else would either, so it was a silly idea.

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered a new iPod game called Land-a-panda. The premise is simple, but it gets complicated quickly. You have a panda on one side of the course and he is keen to get to his lady friend on the other side of the course (they must be in that magical 12 hours of a 365 period when they’re attracted to each other).

I remember when Goji berries were the brand new health craze and all the serious doctors were coming out and saying there was nothing proven about the health benefits. I’ve never had them before but figured it couldn’t hurt to try, and I found a pack of dried berries. Initially, it was like eating raisins with no flavour, but then the aftertaste kicked in and it was like soap. Gross. I tried two and then threw them away, I don’t care how healthy they are.

Moving on to the sixth week of this 10k programme, I was in two minds whether to do the scheduled 10 minutes run/1 minute walk, or stretch it to 11 minutes jogging. I felt like I could probably manage the extra distance and that would accelerate the process a little. I couldn’t decide right up until I started running, so I figured I would wait and see how I felt when I got to the 10th minute.

It was a long, old race. 12 hours, I suppose. The challenge from Audi fell by the wayside quite early on as a coming together between Marc Gene and Allan McNish, plus some reliability issues, meant they fell far down the order and had to make their way back up. Meanwhile, Montagny, Sarrazin and Lamy spent a good while leading the race, swapping between the other Peugeot and the Highcroft car, but a few mistakes cost them dearly. Lamy (who I am not a fan of anymore) spun after a pit stop left him with cold tyres (mini picture here), and then one of the last pit stops of the race took far too long.

This weekend, Mr C and I ventured into the outside world, and not only did we escape from the office but we also decided to go to shops. Actual brick and mortar retail establishments. This was never a big pastime for us, and particularly not now the internets is so useful. However, a day away from the screens called, and we headed to Currys. (As an aside, did I ever tell you about the time I went to PC World - ugh - looking for a particular piece of Mac equipment. I wouldn’t normally, you understand, but it was a late night, last ditch effort. The man shrugged. I went next door to Currys, owned by the same people, and the man said they had sold out but pointed me to the nearest Mac place (which was shut but he wasn’t to know I was in a rush) and gave me a card for out-of-hours supplier type people. Amazing the difference. PC World. Ugh.)

Stephane Sarrazin did the business in qualifying for the 12 hours of Sebring, putting the Peugeot on pole position ahead of the race today. Talking about his day, Sarrazin said: We arrived here with new car and new rules so it was hard for us this week. We have been improving the balance of the car. Things were much better in qualifying than free practice because of the traffic. I did my lap without a mistake and it was very good.

Despite the fact I accidentally started week five at the end of the last week, I decided to repeat the run for the legitimate week five. Week 5, Day 1 Run 9 min/walk 1 min. Repeat x 4. So, this was the first run after a bit of a break. It was appalling and I was disappointed. I wasn’t bitter about the run, really, I chalked it up to one of those bad days, but I had so been looking forward to it.

The BBC have a cute little clip of baby panda Po, introduced at Atlanta Zoo. A while back, I thought the Beeb were doing better at allowing videos for embeds, but it appears not, so I will have to settle for just linking and hoping for the best. I did take a cheeky screenshot though.

Following on from the better-than-expected Empty Child, we have the conclusion of the two-parter. Last we saw, the Doctor was trapped in a corner, surrounded by the worrying gas mask people. “GO TO YOUR ROOM!” And just like that, the tension is over and we can get on with the rest of the story. I love the terrible last words line though.

I find it very tricky to follow the build-up to Sebring, so I will just leave it to Autosport to tell you how it is: Only one of the latest generation Peugeots ran today, but the Franck Montagny/Stephane Sarrazin/Pedro Lamy car set the quickest time of the opening day in the morning session with a 1m47.678s. Having said that, I am attempting to fire up the Factbyte Factbox (our live blog) for Sebring, so if you’re around this weekend - keep your eyes peeled.

Overall things are going well. I had a bit of a setback at the end of this “week” but I’ll tell you more about that at the end of the post. I’m starting to ponder if I really do want to go all the way to 10k, or if I’d rather start looking at improving speed and fitness and all that stuff. I know I’m not ever going to be fast but if I keep on pushing the distance, I’m not going to have a chance to focus on other things. I’m still in two minds on that front.

It’s been quite hard to get the enthusiasm up to finish this series off. I’m desperate to get to David Tennant but finding time and motivation for these is hard. However, this two part is written by Steven Moffat, so already I’m convinced it’s going to be an improvement on what we’ve seen so far. The story begins with The Doctor and Rose being bounced around the TARDIS. Rose is a bit peeved at the lack of sci-fi-ness he is displaying. “Give me some Spock!”

I had some leftover oats from the apple trifles I attempt, and suddenly realised that the ideal way to use them up was to make some flapjack. Mr C is keen on flapjack and making sweet treats always makes me popular in the household. After perusing some recipes, I became aware how amazingly easy flapjack is. Equal quantities of sugar and butter, some golden syrup, throw in the oats and raisins, bake and cool.

I’ve been epically busy this week but Apple don’t seem to care very much about that. First they released the latest version of their mobile software which meant a dozen gadgets needed updating. The very next day, just as I thought I was going to be getting something done, Garageband became available on the iPad. Productivity = out the window. For an entire evening, I was all about the music.

It’s been officially confirmed that Franck will be the driver behind the wheel of the #8 Peugeot when the 12 Hours of Sebring race gets underway. Sharing duties with Stephane Sarrazin (who will be qualifying it) and Pedro Lamy (who will also be there), Frank will kick things off on the 19th March, which is not this Saturday but the one after. Technical director Bruno Famin reiterated what Peugeot have always said, that these races are always just a test for the real deal - Le Mans.

Panda toast! Credit: Equilibriax/Flickr

Remember when I completed the Rubik’s Cube? It’s not my proudest moment, so I don’t really want to bring it up again, but Steven left an interesting comment: I never managed to to get more than three side of the cube completed so well done. Now you need a new challenge you should try to find a Rubik clock. Mr C immediately piped up and said he had a Rubik’s Clock, and he wasn’t lying.

In the midst of our studio sort-out, we uncovered this little gem. This is the G3 Lombard from 1999. This was the first gadget that I stole from Mr C, in the early days of our relationship. It was also the first Mac I ever used, and it was a good one. Lovely keyboard, beautiful curviness, and little flaps to cover up all the ports and holes. Plus I do love black gadgets.

I’m not quite sure how it happens, but we keep being given big bits of meat. It was a huge piece of gammon over Christmas, and now an actual chicken. A terrifying, giant, whole chicken. Looks pretty sneaky, doesn’t it? I was definitely more concerned about the chicken than I was about the gammon. It just seems a million times more complicated, and there’s always a big stigma attached with cooking chicken properly.

Ambridge is not so much doom and gloom anymore, but there is tension all around and little to be joyous about. Except that Camilla visit, which was so hyped up and generally not very interesting. The Lynda business was a bit silly, and bless Ian for not going on and on about HRH. At Lower Loxley, it’s still tough. David keeps trying to escape but ends up doing more and more, including a trip up to Scotland to deliver a bull personally. It’s no wonder Ruth has finally lost her temper. I can’t believe she didn’t do it before. It took losing two milkings worth of product before she finally exploded at him properly. Even so, it doesn’t seem like there is a light at the end of the tunnel. David was almost convinced but then a quick chat with Jill, saying that poor Elizabeth with her poor heart would just take it all on herself, and he was right back to shouldering the burden himself.

Currently, Mr C and I are working through some redecorating, organising boxes of things that have been stored away, and generally trying to make our lives a bit simpler. Simplicity is always the goal. I stumbled across some old school books of mine. I didn’t keep many of them, but I did keep my English books, presumably because deep down I always knew I wanted to be a writer and that it would be important, even if I kept telling myself that numbers were my thing.

So, I reckon this could be the best header I’ve ever made. The idea came to me while I was in the middle of quite a lengthy drive, which was more than frustrating, but by the time I got my hands on Pixelmator, I was ready for the challenge. I found some creative commons photos, via vladdythephotogeek and used a tiny portion of this comic style tutorial. The font is Meiryo, and was possibly the toughest part of the whole thing. Everything I tried took away from the awesomeness of the pandas, until it became obvious that less is more.

A while back, I think perhaps over the Christmas break, Mr C and I discovered these crazy-cheap albums - 101 Running Songs and 101 Running Songs Lap 2. See what they did there? For less than a tenner, you’re getting 100 songs which is complete madness. You’re not going to like all of them, but who can argue with a price like that? On the sequel album, there’s five continuous mixes of about an hour each, and I thought I’d give them a whirl this week. I very much enjoyed there not being any gaps in the music so I didn’t have to hear my erratic breathing, although I must say the songs are not so much mixed as just smooshed together (wasn’t expecting too much at the price, though).

A couple of recent updates from ZooBorns.com have covered the world of baby pandas exceptionally well. Firstly, a baby panda at Zoo Atlanta has been sponsored by Dreamworks! Kinda weird, but they’re funding some conservation projects in exchange for calling the panda Po, which is apparently from the Kung Fu Panda film. It sort of doesn’t sit right, but at the same time, I’m sure the extra funding is very welcome! Then there’s the post about the progress of panda cubs in Madrid, and there are a gazillion pictures in this post, with my particular favourite being the final one.

My cooking adventures continue and I’ve had mixed results recently. Firstly, I’m going to have to find a better website than BBC Good Food. It worked fine for one day, but every other time I have tried to get into the kitchen and read a recipe off my iPad, it has failed loading. The site has been terribly slow, and just generally bad news. I even had to print out a recipe at one point. I was halfway through, it all died, and I had to scrabble around to try and get a cached version. Not great.

I remember watching some Back to the Future extra features where a guy was going around the set finding answers to viewer questions. The final question was from a little kid who went: “Is there ever going to be a Back to the Future 4?” And the guy said no, but Back to the Future would live on in the ride at Universal studios. I was always very disappointed at that answer.

In the ongoing quest to turn everything digital, there are still some cases where a paper and pencil just works. I’m the first to admit that every time I try an online or digital to-do list, I always end up right back with my notepad and pen. This is an interesting idea, then, the closest technology has come to being paper so far, I’d say - the NoteSlate. I can’t say I am a fan of the website, it’s hard to actually find any useful information. From what I gather, though, the pencil acts just like a pencil. You can save, share and clear your work with the buttons, and it comes in a variety of colours - like a chalkboard.

As briefly mentioned in my Film Watch post of Red, John Malkovich’s character Marvin is a bit paranoid about the world around him and he has a bunker. Rather than having a hatch like in LOST, or a big door highlighting where his bunker is, he is so paranoid that he’s hidden the entrance as well. It’s marvellous. Here’s a clip of Malkovich’s first scenes in the movie, and more importantly, how he gets into his bunker (ignore the bit about LSD).

“Your wish is my command, just be careful what you wish for.” This is the episode where Rose tries to change history, and finds out she can’t, even though that is what the Doctor does… quite a lot. After building her up to be something super special in the last episode, the Doctor is reduced to calling Rose “another stupid ape” after she messes up the space time continuum.

Had a bit of trouble with this “week”, thanks to a pretty awful January. Week 2, Day 1 Run 4 min/walk 1 min. Repeat x 5. First half was all good, the second half was really hard. Just ran out of energy, I think. (Note: You can almost hear the dramatic music here. “Just ran out of energy. Dun-dun-duuuuuuh.” Because then I came down with the flu and well, you know the rest.)

I’ve cooked lasagne for years but as I have got busier and spent less time in the kitchen, my version of lasagne has become lazy. Gradually, I swapped out all the separate ingredients for an easy version: a few veg, jar of red sauce, jar of white sauce, mince, pasta, go. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, I am a big fan of easy cooking, but now I have found a bit more time I thought it would be fun to go back to the ingredients version.

When the iPlayer stats first started appearing, they were a one-page document with just a few bits and bobs to take note of. Now, it’s a 20-page pdf full of fascinating figures and statistics. There were a few pages of January’s statistics that I found more interesting than others. Firstly, the average minutes consumed by users per week. That’s just over six months of data and it doesn’t seem to be getting much higher or lower. These people are clearly not like me, who consumes pretty much all my TV via the iPlayer… and that amounts to more than 75 minutes!

A couple of weekends ago, Premier League football had one of it’s best weekends. Record-breaking numbers of goals were scored, matches with eight goals altogether, penalties, men sent off, that kind of thing. Mr C and I figured that although our taste for football is still vague, we didn’t want to miss the highlights of an epic day. So, we sat and we watched Match of the Day, and it was good.

I went for my first run post-flu today and it did not go at all well. I’ll save the story for another post, because what it did inspire me to do was to decide how I’m going to blog this next phase of my running journey. As you can see, I have created a rather whimsical banner to highlight the running posts, and I intend to blog each “week” of the Ease into 10k app as and when they are completed.

It’s done! And yes, I totally cheated. My dad found this book in his attic, and it is the very same book that I used as a child. As I mentioned before, this is the book that we had sitting around the house and even with that in front of me, as a little kid I still couldn’t get the cube to work properly.

LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I’ve been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal. The third book in the Grace Harlowe series follows the girls as they face off against another enemy, only this time they create a sorority to make sure they are all on the same side. Grace Harlowe’s Junior Year at High School is another ride through a year at Oakdale High School and there’s plenty to be discussed!

Franck!!! Taking part in a Peugeot press conference. And by taking part, I mean sitting looking a bit bored. Although he did get to speak for about ten seconds, so he was a bit less bored then. ♥

So far, 2011 hasn’t shaped up all that well. I started the year feeling a bit peaky, and I blogged it, thinking to myself - well, it’s been a while since I had a proper cold, perhaps I should mark the occasion so I can look back in three years when I next get one and remember it better. Silly girl. I even made the mistake of saying: I don’t mind being ill so much, because I always think no matter how bad I feel, it can never be as bad as those two weeks post-Silverstone.

Naturally, this month has been dominated by the repercussions from Nigel’s death - both in Ambridge, and in real life as well. The outpouring of indignation from Archers listeners is quite incredible, with some even going so far as to demand a rewrite for Nigel to be reinstated. I can understand some of the anger - previous Ambridge deaths have coincided with real-life, with the death of the actor playing Phil Archer, and the ill-health of the actor playing Sid Perks. Nigel’s untimely demise was specifically written in to the story, for no reason other than to shake up the village. On the other hand, it is a fictional village where everything is written anyway. Even if you have grown up listening to these characters for thirty years, that doesn’t change the fact that… well, change happens.

Mr C spotted the tutorial for this over on the Pixelmator site, and I was keen to give it a go. It certainly looked like a challenge, and it came right about the time we were talking all things space, and that programme was on the BBC and everything. I didn’t really like the clock bit in the middle, so I just replaced it with another planet. It kinda makes less sense now, but it’s just pretty planets anyway, so I like it more.

Sincere apologies for the delay in getting this final part up, I wasn’t trying to drag out the ending in a reality show results style, honest. Here’s how the last voting of this series went: Sometimes we like to play it safe, sometimes we like to take a risk. Mitch watched as both the cars in front of him peeled off the racing line. In his mirrors, he saw Bruno leaving it late, but then the Shuttleworth also jinked right and was heading towards the pit lane.

Can’t quite believe this is the penultimate part already. Time flies. As Ian mentioned in the comments, I am still chasing that second unanimous vote but it was not to be this time. Here’s a bumper edition to see us into the final part nicely. “Come on,” Pierre said, pushing Mitch back towards the car. “Do you want to give Mason more reason to consider Diaz?” “What?” “Get back out there. Now.”

As with most of my Life List items, if you’d told me I would be doing them a year ago, I would have thought you were crazy. On Saturday evening, I found myself in a stadium with more than 37,000 other people, cheering on Aston Villa as they scored the winning goal. Well, they might not all have been cheering for Villa, but you get what I’m saying.

I was secretly hoping for a repeat of the unanimous vote achievement, but this one was not quite so straight forward. A couple of people are concerned for Mitch’s welfare, but most want to see him back behind the wheel. “I’m in!” Mitch yelled, bursting back into the motorhome with glee. He stopped abruptly, when he realised a group of fans were being shown around. Melissa hurried over to him, grabbed at his arm and pulled him out of the room.

Twitter is a strange beast, isn’t it? Everyone uses it differently. For some, it is a means of promoting their work. For others, it is a place to follow comedians and laugh at jokes. Some use it as a replacement RSS feed, following those streams that are simple “new blog post” updates. Others use it as a way of keeping in touch with the family. A handful of people follow only celebrities. Some follow and don’t type, others type and don’t follow.

Here we go then. My attempt to get back into running. I’ve picked up the 10k app because I want to continue moving forward with help from the training app, not necessarily because I’m intending to run a 10k. I think my main aim is to complete a 5k in a better time than before. Previously, I have used the My Tracks app from Google, but the Runkeeper Pro app was free during January so I thought I would give that a try. I’m glad I did. The graphs are amazing, and it’s great at keeping track of your stats and letting you know your own personal records.

I thought I would throw this poll open as it was great fun when we did that last time. You guys didn’t disappoint. Sandro was the top answer, the obvious choice really, I suppose. I do love the options, although I’m not sure Mr C has a super-licence at the moment. Also, I’m quite intrigued by Mason’s cousin. Would that make him Uncle Mortimer’s son, and what kind of family dynamic would happen if he tried to move up to a new formula? Or is there another secret Mortimer brother, and does he bear any grudge to the sport? Interesting. All that is for another time, though.

Party people! It’s only right to celebrate, no matter what kind of a headache you’ve got! See? Let us see what a Mortimer celebration is like! Mitch sat at the hotel bar, watching the celebrations going on around him. Mason and Bella were entertaining a large group of mechanics, regular bursts of laughter drowning out any other chatter. He sipped at his orange juice. Melissa appeared at his side, and she hopped up onto the stool next to him. “How are you feeling?” she asked.