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Horray we have a breadmaker! It has taken us three goes to make a good loaf of bread in our Breville Auto Bake (VBM003) but we are finally there.

Now to write something that will help everyone who like us types something like ‘My breville breadmaker keeps failing’ into Google. Ignore the instructions…

We’ve found that the flour websites are normally a lot more accurate than the breadmaker instructions. We’re using the instructions here now – http://www.carrsbreadmaker.info/recipes/stong_white_flour.html and after two failed loafs with 180-odd ml of water we’ve found that some idiot made the manual. After changing it to 300ml the loaf has come out great.

Today everyone around me in Southampton city centre found out what my really annoys me. And that’s other people during a fire alarm.

Now I’m not a very shouty person but I nearly shouted at a good 50 idiots today in West Quay because they don’t seem to be able to follow this very easy set of rules for escaping during a fire alarm

1. When a fire alarm goes off with ‘wait for further instructions’ then listen
2. When the fire alarm goes off with ‘leave the area immediatly’ then find the quickest way out

Number 2 shouldn’t really be that difficult. If you’ve ever been in any public building you’ll see a little green man running towards an exit. This man will literally be running to wards an exit as there is an arrow telling you where to go. Just go in the f**king direction the arrow is pointing. It really isn’t that hard.

We have just walked through a fire exit from the main shopping walkway. The room is about 20 metres long and people are not moving. The people are trying to walk through a small walkway (we think because they’ve seen a member of staff going down there) when there is a giant two door exit with a fire escape sign above it straight in front of them.

48 people turn left (the walkway is actually the walkway above a road, if there was a fire they would all be trapped). We go through the fire exit, the people behind us go through the fire exit only because Amy says “This is the fire exit” to them. The 50 people behind us ignore everything.

I wish natural selection would work on these sheep.

So to re-iterate when you see this sign

You do not turn left. Easy. Stupid people…

Over the weekend I hit the first step in my little weight loss plan and got under 13 stone for the first time in ages. I started off at 13 stone 11 after my Lynmouth holiday and weighed in at 12 stone 13 on Satuday and today (six weeks).

I’ve been tracking it all on the healthy living chart (link is on the right) and have a nice graph. Everything is better as a graph.

For a company that I don’t have a contract with, nor intend to, TalkTalk have really annoyed me today.

It seems as though the flat we are going to move into has TalkTalk as its phone supplier. This in itself isn’t bad, but we don’t want it.

We intended to move with BT, taking our number with us. However when the current tenants cancel TalkTalk it seems as though the line just goes dead.

BT won’t automatically re-connect a number. There is a simple reason for this and that’s the £122.50 reconnection fee that muggins has to pay. Despite it being a TalkTalk line even TalkTalk will charge a £30 reconnection fee and force an 18 month contract on you.

We always intended to go to Sky for our Broadband and phone, but planned for it to be a BT landline underneath it all. But we’ve found out that Sky will charge a £39 reconnection fee (yesterday it was £25, but you can’t have everything). This gives us exactly what we want for £80 less than BT.

In actuality we can get

• A phone line reconnection
• Sky+ box
• Sky installation
• A months line rental

For about £115. And although it sounds a lot of money it is still £7.50 than BT just reconnecting the line.

I’m a typical Gym user. I occasionally think I’m overweight, go to the gym, remember how nice pies are and then stop going.

I’m trying to stop that cycle by making the gym part of my normal working day. I normally now get there each working day and have been marking down how I’m doing on a little spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet was on paper but I’ve moved it to Google Docs as it allows me to update it from anywhere and also show a public version on the Internet. I’ve placed a link on the right (under ‘Healthy Lifestyle’).

Also on the sheet is how well I’m eating. I’m not really dieting, but I am trying to keep track of it. I’m quite happy with my lunches now of lettuce, cucumber slices, carrot sticks and celery with low fat salad dip. On top of that I normally have baked crisps an apple and a go-ahead bar. Health-a-rific.