Stuffin' With Muffin

Yes, Baking as a Theme Again.  And no, I'm not sorry!
     Over the past week or so I've baked about 40 muffins - only one remains, from the last batch.  There's no worry about them going mouldy or stale since they get et within days.  I shall try to do another batch tonight, blog and The Great British Bake Off permitting.
     I also realise where I went wrong with the Poppy Seed Roll.  When I next bake it, Conrad will cunningly use the muffin bread recipe, scaled down to 3/4, since that recipe has the correct ratio of yeast to liquid.

No photo of mine yet, but it wasn't this bad.

It's Tuesday evening, so it must be -
     Celebrate 1,000th Extrasolar Planet Day!
     In fact the tally stands at over 1,000, with 12 of those candidates being in the "Goldilocks Zone" where they are neither too hot nor too cold.  A total of 1.2% of exoplanets being possibly able to sustain life is quite a show-stopper, since there are 300 billion stars in our galaxy alone.  Not all those stars will have planets, but from Hubble and Keppler and Wasp, we know that most of them will.
     Kind of puts humans in perspective, what?

Our Galaxy, from above.  Yes, it is an artistic impression.  No, you can't see your house from here.

If It's Tuesday Evening it must be -
     The end of The Great British Bake-Off.  Our 3 finalists had to really pull the stops out tonight: picnic pie ("pay attention Conrad I want one of those" = Family chorus), pretzels and a three-tier wedding cake.  I shan't tell you who won, but it wasn't someone BOOJUM! manor had selected from the raffle basket.  We had an update of last year's entrants, and a vignette for each of this year's contestants.
     Having watched and loved it, NO! there is no way I am ever approaching it.

- unless you have one of these, in which case "Hello Mel, Sue, Paul and Mary!"

So - Tanks?

Nope, not coming to do your drains

    Meet the Trojan.  This is an engineering vehicle without any big nasty guns poking out all over the place.  It does have the rather ferocious mine-blades at the front, so you wouldn't be wise to try and stop it.  That giant bundle of tubing is a "fascine" - if other tanks encounter a wide ditch they can't cross, they whistle up a few Trojans, the fascines get placed in the ditch, the tanks drive over.  Plus, that giant mechanical arm holding the fascine in place is also an excavator, and a grapple.  Since it's a British armoured vehicle, it will also come with a facility for making brews - possibly the most important equipment in any AFV.

Got to go recruit some more messenger-mice - the mansion's previous occupants of this role have gone rogue and reverted to the wild.  Beware of talking mice!