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After this morning's mopey angst-fest of a posting, I've started taking Kalms again. Remarkably good results, so far...

I realised fairly early on that I had discussed with a friend the idea of popping down to Collectormania London, running at Olympia 2 this weekend. She'd forgotten as well but, assuming we're not all snowed in tomorrow, we may pop down then.

Of course, that means I have to reschedule popping over to my parents for the afternoon/evening, rather than lunch. Thankfully, since I'd be relying on buses to get there and home again, the impending Tube strike will have no effect on that plan.

So, what have I been doing with my 'today'?

Well, probably not a massive amount, in the grand scheme of things... But I did, on a whim, decide to finally bake the Betty Crocker brownie mix... with a couple of added ingredients. Of course, I didn't already have these 'in stock', so to speak, so I had to pop out into the cold and go on a hunt for some specific confectioneries. In this regard, I'm actually lucky enough to have an old style Confectioner on a corner down the road - shelves full of jars of sweets priced by the quarter, and everything!

Not being entirely certain of the name of the product I was hoping to find, I was glad to see exactly what I was after the moment I walked in the door. Except it wasn't quite exactly what I was after... Pop Rocks, yes... but not Cola flavour. I asked the girl at the counter if she knew whether they stocked any flavour other than Cola, and she replied in the negative so, having wiped out with the strongest contender, I picked out a Plan B (chocolate coated toffee bits) and went on my way to the Supermarkets. Tesco let me down completely (though I did pick up a copy of Total Film with a TRON Legacy mousemat as the cover-mounted freebie - adding further warm fuzziness to the ongoing geeky joygasm of expectation), Iceland had part of what I was after and Sainsbury's filled in the most significant gap in my nefarious plan.

The thought I'd had, you see, was that I could add something like Pop Rocks to the cake mixture prior to baking, and thereby and an element of surprise to the brownies. Going by the piece I've tried, it's barely noticeable, if at all - the stuff was popping like crazy as soon as it made contact with the moist brownie mixture - but I still have 24 pieces to take with me into work on Monday... Someone might get lucky. The mixture was also topped off with the 'Volcanic Popping Candy' Terry's Chocolate Orange, just to see how that turned out.

Well, turns out it adds at least five minutes to the cooking time... But I got there in the end.

There's still a frankly awesome pile of washing up to do... Not least from Friday night's efforts to make Sushi in my own kitchen, but I think I've cleared up the worst of it (or, at least prepared the way).

Fairly soon, I shall be settling down to watch a crappy horror movie about genetically engineered, man eating snakes... Crappy horror movies are cool... sometimes...