Category Archives: Shite

These dreams

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As predicted the other day, wearing a 24hr nicotine patch has resulted in four nights of sleep that have been disturbed by vivid dreams.  I’m knackered.  In addition to this, the first few hours of wearing a new patch each day bring unwanted physiological effects, mainly nausea.  Still I suppose it’ll be worth it once I can do without both fags and patches in a couple of weeks’ time.

But back to the dreams, they’ve been quite odd.  Perhaps all dreams are; I don’t usually have or remember them, but these ones have been odd.  Here’s what I can remember of a few of them:

Night 1

Hovel

Jo had forced me to move out.  She’d identified a lovely little bedsit that was a bedroom and a sink to have a stand up wash in and was showing me around, very proud of herself.  I can’t remember much else, other than complaining that there was no Coffeemate – not that there was a kitchen or a kettle or anything.

I woke up annoyed.

Ireland and the magic fag packet

The second dream that night found me in Ireland of all places.  It was Ireland, but it looked more mediterranean.  I think there was a castle, a shopping centre, a monorail, some chips, the obligatory argument with my sister that resulted me dropping the empty duty free Marlboro Lights carton (you know the big cartons that hold ten packets, but look like a big fag packet?).  I’d been carrying this huge empty fag packet around with me and dropped it at the table of a cafe after the chips (I think this is where the chips came in – no gravy, just ketchup).  I went back to pick it up from the floor and found that it had come open to reveal a solitary cigarette inside it.

I decided to save the cigarette until later, but as the dream progressed (probably about a millisecond in real time), more and more fags found their way into the once empty carton until it was nearly full by the time I woke up at 5am.

At that very moment of hazy waking, I remember being really happy that there was a full packet of cigarettes in the house, only to realise a second later that a) there wasn’t, b) I’d been dreaming and c) I was supposed to have stopped.

Bummer.

I spent the day completely shattered and slept relatively well that night, and the night after… I think, can’t quite remember.

Last night

The stroll, the sneaky fag and the curious incident with the BMW

I’d been at my parents’ and it was getting a bit too much for me, so I found myself taking a walk and having a fag.  The top road had somehow turned into a motorway, so it took a while for me to buck up the courage (and speed, and ability to assess distance and speed of oncoming vehicles) to get across.  For some reason, when I’d got to the safety of the other side, I stopped behind a stationary BMW, which then reversed over me.  I think it was a BMW, it might have been my old car that I wrote off  – it was black anyway.  While I was nursing my bruises and being told off by the driver of the offending vehicle (a fifty-something bint with blonde hair), my sister turned up and got run over too.  She complained for a bit and blamed me… and then I woke up… at 2.39am.

An argument over a washing up bowl

After recovering I was back in the kitchen at my mum and dad’s.  Dad was doing something in the sink; he was messing about, washing something in the washing up bowl – orange bits of plastic.  He got into a strop when I told him he wasn’t doing it right, so he took the bowl out and put it on the kitchen floor.

Actually, that might’ve happened in real life a few times too.

Bette from the L Word falls in love with me

This was the best one so far.  I don’t know how it happened, but I met Bette (Jennifer Beals) from the L Word and started doing really dirty things with me.  And then she told me she loved me.   And then I woke up.

So the dreams you get with nicotine patches aren’t all that bad.  I think everyone should try wearing a 21mg patch for a few days and then tell me what dreams they’ve been having.  I don’t want to know about dreams where Bette tells other people she loves them though.

Out

I’m going out tonight, round to some friends who I’ve known forever.  It should be good, but I need to go through the rigmarole of getting ready.  In terms of outfit, this never presents much of a problem because I always wear the same thing – jeans, blouse/shirt, jumper.

The thing I’m looking forward to least is plucking my face.  Eyebrows, moustache, beard, hairy moles – they all need attention.  This will bring about much pain and much sneezing.  And lots of frustration too, as the lighting in the bathroom doesn’t favour such detailed activities.

It’s not as if there’s the chance of pulling anyone while I’m out since they’re all straight.  Then again, I have this thing about flirting with straights… and that’s probably why I’m still single.  But it’s just that knowledge that most straight women are probably curious, some have tried a bit of ladylove, so it’s nice to play on that curiosity and see how far it gets you.  In my case, nowhere, but there’s always a first time.

Template

I’ve changed my template.  What do you think, does it need a bit of colour?

Crunched

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I’ve been shocked and appalled by the price of things these days. After not really eating for three months, and not buying groceries during this period, I have returned to the world of supermarket shopping to be truly horrified by the escalating cost of living.

Here are some frexamples:

Antiperspirant: was £1.96, now £2.96

Chopped tomatoes: were 24p a can, now 33p a can

Lean minced steak (250g): was £2.19, now £2.69

I can’t think of anything else, I never really look at the price of stuff, but those things really stick out.

All I can say is, fucking hell, things were much cheaper when I was starving myself.  But not as much fun, obviously.

I’ve now rekindled my fondness for messing about in the kitchen and seeing what I can make from my cupboard that includes the staples: onions, garlic, chilli, ginger, chopped tomatoes, chick peas, olive oil, herbs, spices, pasta (a variety), rice.  It’s not surprising that I’m a whiz at dishing up a red sauce for pasta and chick pea curry.  Nice though.

I should be more adventurous, I have the skills.  I’ve threatened my good friends Taz and Pig with a lasagne.  It’s not really a threat, my lasagne is usually fuckin’ delish, even if I do say so myself.  Based on Mum’s recipe, which she stole from a genuine Italian woman, so it’s authentic and everything.  I even do a veggie version for my friends that uses Quorn instead of minced steak and it goes down a treat with them, and me.  Apart from the first time I made it….

Take yourselves back to the summer of 2000.  I was having a bit of a rough time of things for one reason or another and my dear friends opened their home in Leeds to me most weekends so I could spend some time away from the solitude of my life in Sheffield.  We did normal, boring things, like doing a bit of gardening, sitting in the sunshine, cooking, watching TV, smoking… lots of smoking.

One day me and David decided to make a lasagne together.  The red sauce was made and it was time to get on with the bechemel – easy peasy, I’d seen my mum do this a million times and it looked a doddle.  Using her method, I warmed milk in a pan and made an emulsion from cornflour and cold milk.  At least I thought it was cornflour, but I couldn’t be sure because David had a habit of taking the labels off everything, it had the right powdery consistency, so I went with it.  The warmed milk was added to the flour/milk emulsion and returned to the heat to thicken.  Only it didn’t.  So more flour emulsion was added without much success.  I found some different flour and tried that and it thickened a little bit, so I went with it – adding grated nutmeg, salt, pepper, mozzarella, parmesan, etc, etc.  The dish was assembled and cooked and we sat down to eat with the summer sun still relatively high in the evening sky, shining through their dining room window where it emanated a warming yellow glow.

We each took a mouthful of our meal, paused simultaneously and looked at each other with puzzled expressions on our faces.  Speaking over each other, the three of us uttered the words “Does this taste a bit sweet to you?”.

So the moral of this story: don’t take the labels off things in your store cupboard; icing sugar doesn’t half look like cornflour to the clinically depressed.

Fag patches

Following my short-lived attempt to give up smoking back in October, I have decided that the time is right to make a proper effort at weening myself off the delightful weed and today, I am wearing a fag patch.

Apart from itching like a bastard and nearly falling off after just ten minutes, things have settled down and I’ve been OK today.  On a day when I have been looking at spreadsheets from the comfort of my own home, a day when normally I’d have been chain smoking to get me through the boredom, I’ve not wanted one.  Well, of course I’ve wanted a cigarette, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to have one, so I’ve been OK.

The problem with being a bored smoker as opposed to an addicted smoker is that nicotine patches don’t really do much to substitute the punctutation of your day that smoking a cigarette affords.  Instead though, the slow and constant release of nicotine provides a different type of punctutation in that you find that you nearly shit yourself every hour, on the hour.

I’m looking forward to going to bed wearing my 24hr patch.  It’ll bring nightmares and much grinding of teeth, and possibly a few emergency trips to the en suite.

All part of life’s rich tapestry.

Yackety Yack

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Haggis power

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I had a run in with my energy company, Scottish Power, this week. They provide both gas and electricity and the bill they sent out for the winter quarter was a touch high, despite it being based on an actual meter reading, rather than an estimate. At £200, the gas portion was relatively reasonable, considering that it’s been freezing for five months and the heating’s been on seemingly permanently for this period. And even though I can never be bothered to turn off electrical appliances at the plug when I’m not using them, I’m not that bad at turning off lights and not using power excessively, so when the electricity bill was £550, I was a little puzzled to say the least. A check of the meter reading and a phone call to the company rectified the problem – they’d fucked up and the electricity bill was actually only £150 for the quarter.

But how to stop a payment of £850 going out of my account?

“Oh, just cancel the direct debit, and when you get the new bill, set up another one, it’ll be fine.”

Fair enough, so the direct debit was cancelled and I waited for the correct bill to arrive.

On Tuesday, I got another correspondence from Scottish Power:

“Since you’ve cancelled your direct debit, you now have to go on a monthly payment plan and pay your bill for £850 over the next three months, starting with an instalment of £220 on 14th February, please set up a direct debit.”

Fucking numpties.

So I had to phone them up and this meant that I had to get embroiled in their automated answering system, with instructions being given to me in Scottish.

“Och nock nook, accoont numberrrrrr”

“Och nock aye the noo, date of birrrrth”

I could just about make out the important requests for input, but their system relies on voice recognition that doesn’t understand an accent unless it sounds like it’s from Take the High Road, so I ended up shouting at it, very slowly, the way you have to do when you’re trying to be understood by foreigners.

Eventually, I got through that bit and was put on hold because “All oor ooperatorrrrs are extrrreeemly buzzy at the mooment, yoor call is verrry impoortant te us” whatever the fuck that meant.

And then the “on hold” music started. For fuck’s sake. I can’t remember whether it was Vivaldi or Beethoven, but it was shite. I was in hell. There was the obligatory 20 seconds of music, which faded out momentarily while some Scottish words interrupted it; I don’t know what they were saying, some sort of recipe for root vegetables cooked in sick or something, then back to the music.

After a while, I got through the Tracy, who had had special training in speaking in English as part of a five day residential course on Summerisle. It’s the course where they learn to speak to English people on days one and two, then the rest of the week is spent learning how to build a huge wicker effigy of a man for burning English people and baby animals in while they all stand naked, swinging their arms and eating haggis.

I much prefer calling call centres in Bombay, or Mumbai, or whatever it’s called at the moment. Yes, yes, I know Bombay was the colonial name and we need to respect the Indian peoples’ name for their own city, but how come you don’t see Mumbai potatoes on the menu in Indian restaurants eh?

However, my favourite call centre is the Orange mobile phone one. They’re usually based in the north east of England, so this brings its own language barrier, but the people, “associates”, I think they’re called these days, are always brilliant. You phone up, get put on hold, but get to listen to chart music instead of Vivaldi (or Beethoven, whichever it was) and when you get through, the associates do anything to keep you as a customer, even if you have no intention of leaving the company.

“Hello, I’d like to know what my handset upgrade options are please?”

“Oh, are you thinking of leaving Orange?”

“No, I just want to know whether I can get a new handset and how much it’ll cost me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that Sniffy, we really value our customers and don’t want to see them leave. I’ll put you through to our customer retention department and tell them that you’re going to leave unless we give you the best handset possible for free.”

Eh?

Next weekend’s Mail on Sunday is actually giving away a free CD of all our on-hold music hits. Imagine that?

Implicit association
Because I’m not quite insecure enough about my personality, I visited Harvard’s Implicit Association Project website and had a look at the tests you can take there. Implicit association tests measure a person’s subconscious attitude to a variety of things: sexuality, race, gender, age, curly hair.

The tests work by measuring reaction times when images relating to, for example homosexuality, are associated with words relating to good (“glorious”, “joy”, “fabulous”, “dahling”) or bad (“awful”, “hate”, “whatthefuckareyouthinkingthat’shideous!”).

I took the race one and found that moderately favour white people over black people. I suppose this is understandable because of my cultural background and upbringing. I’m not a racialist, honest, no I love black people, honest!

When I took the sexuality test, I found out that I have a strong preference for straight people. That’s because most queers (well, lesbians) are self obsessed, mental, Guardian-reading, lentil-knitting, duplicitous, selfish fucking cunts, that’s why.

Waiting for Aslan

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I know it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s still wintery in February, but I was kind of hoping that the new month would bring some sign that spring was coming. Certainly, it’s getting lighter earlier in the mornings and taking longer before darkness descends in the evening.  In addition, the green shoots of the bulbs I planted in the autumn are showing through; the shrubs that I thought had died over winter are also sprouting new buds of leaves.  Where there is broken bark, there is hope.

And then the snow came again.  The east and south of England were worst hit, but here in Rochdale, we got a nice covering… along with gale force winds and freezing temperatures that made the -1°C temperature feel more like -5°C.

Here are some photos:

February snowfall

February snowfall 2

Rocky really loves the snow.  I really love the way the snow sticks to him and then leaves little puddles of water all over the house as it melts.

Rocky snowdog

Rocky snowball toes

But as usual, it seems to have been winter forever, and there’s still at least two months of it to go.  And summer never, ever, follows.  It’s like living in Narnia under the spell of the White Witch.  Always winter and never Christmas.  And even though we do have Christmas, that was crap this time.

At least the sun is shining.  We certainly won’t see that between June and September, so I should be thankful for it now, even with the freezing temperatures.

Blind in one eye

Anyway, things aren’t that bad and the prospect of spring and sunshine has prompted me to start wearing my contact lenses again.  Why, when I can’t see out of my right eye with them, I don’t know, but being able to see is a small price to pay to be able to wear sunglasses.  Sunglasses are the most fantastic addition to any outfit (apart from a beige jumper of course).  Unfortunately, I always look a total twat when I’m wearing them, but I look a twat whether I’m wearing sunglasses or not.  The best thing about them is the way they hide the dark circles and bags under my eyes…. oh and the way they protect my eyesight from harmful UV rays of course.

Working from home

I’ve been working from home these past couple of days. Aware that the weather might turn and delay my journey home from work and being worried about getting home for the dog, I thought it sensible to stay here and be very productive indeed.  It’s OK working from home, coffee on tap, warmth (compared to my office at work), saving on petrol… Rocky.

Rocky is a lovely little beast, but he won’t leave me alone while I’m trying to work.  Always insisting on sitting on me, jealous that my fingers are tapping the keyboard and not tickling his ears, he has a habit of nudging my hand away from the keys.  It’s quite irritating, but kind of lovely.

Here he is on my knee:

Rocky suspects

Awwww.

Better get back to work and send some very stern e-mails to people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Black jeans

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My favourite outfit invariably includes a pair of jeans.  Sturdy, always in fashion, often comfortable, denim jeans worn in conjunction with the correct items of clothing can be smart, casual, scruffy, useful; they’re fantastic.

I’ve enjoyed a variety of styles of jeans over the years: (distress) flares during the seventies; skinny fit in the early eighties; pin-striped (horrendous); stone-washed; snow-washed (ohmygawdhowfuckinghorrible); baggy; slouch; bootcut; low-rise; boyfriend fit; with or without patch pockets, button pockets, buckles, turn-ups, holes.

The fabric can be hard-wearing utility-type denim, or softer cotton (generally in cheaper supermarket jeans), even corduroy, which – with my thunderous thighs – gives that odd rubbing sound as you walk along.

They come in a variety of colours too.  Even classic blue jeans can be dark blue, blue-black, faded.  But I have recently come to one conclusion, denim jeans must always come in blue and never, EVER black.

Oh for fuck’s sake, Derek Acorah on Most Haunted is such a fucking drama queen fraud.  Jesus H Christ on a fucking bike.

Anyway, back to black jeans.  They’re awful.  Even the smartest, most expensive pair of black jeans always a) looks shite straight away, or b) fades into a dull grey that just looks scruffy and horrible, reminiscent of something a stinking student should be wearing with a baggy jumper and Doc Marten boots.

Obviously, students these days are much more fashion-savvy than they were in my day.  Or perhaps it was just me, always too nerdy to even notice what was fashionable or even looked good.  I can’t even tell what colours are supposed to go together, or what colour combinations you can get away with, and those that should be avoided at all costs.  Does a navy blue jumper go with brown trousers?  Who knows?  I don’t. I love navy blue, but I’m never too sure as to what it goes with.  Certainly not black, but grey?  I don’t know.

What I do know is that beige goes with EVERYTHING.  It’s the most fantastic colour for a jumper or a cardigan, that I always have at least one beige v-neck jumper and a cardigan in my wardrobe.  The beige v neck can be worn with a navy or black t shirt, or a white one, or a dark brown one, or, errm a green one?  The same beige v neck can provide the perfect accompaniment for any colour of open-necked shirt.  I think.

My gallery of beige:

Oh the fucking WordPress gallery has cocked it up again.  Bollocks to it.

But you see how my relationship with the beige jumper tailed off from 2006 onwards?  Well, I think that’s because I thought I should get down with the kids (Jo) and try other colours.  I tried jumpers blue, maroon, black, pink, brown, errrm, that’s about it really, I’m not that adventurous.  And it was during this period that my love of hooded tops developed.  Remember the hooded tops?

Hoodie

I think I have another four in addition to those ones.  God, I was skinny back then.  And happy.

Fucking wimmin.

Bring on the trumpets!

It’s the final countdown

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Well, in ten hours time, I’ll be packing up my car and heading off to north Wales.  I have bought provisions; I have responsibility for coffee (instant and ground), but I’m also taking Coffeemate and sugar, without which I’ll be in a REALLY bad mood while I’m there.  I’ve also had the forsight to buy toilet paper and handsoap.

I don’t know whether I’m looking forward to it or not.  On the whole, not, I think.  I mean, come on, getting up early on a Sunday and driving for over 2 hours so I can spend two days with people from work, in a shared house, sharing a bedroom with somebody – would you?

I’ve been trying to think of a happy place that I can escape to in my head for if it gets really bad.  I can’t think of one off the top of my head.  Perhaps I could go for the eight hour  trip over the Cascades in Washington with April and her three year old?  “I want my daddy, I want my daddy, I want my daddy, I want my daddy.  Are we seeing daddy soon?  Can we see the boys tomorrow?  And then you saw me dead”.

Or perhaps I could relive the three months after Jo split up with me?

Maybe I could take myself back to the most excrutiating pain I’ve ever experienced.

Of course, such pain would either come from sickening stomach ache that once rendered me doubled-up in pain in bed for eight ours once, or the alternative is the back ache that cripples me on occasion.  Like today for instance.  It always gets me at the weekend.  I don’t know whether it’s related to having a couple of extra hours in bed on Saturday morning, or the fact that I’m not up and at them straight away like on school days, but always at the weekend  I find myself unable to walk because of back pain.

Today’s experience was made doubly worse because it coincided with a trip to the local Netto.  I’d only gone in there for a quick browse, but once inside, I realised that there was no escape without going through a till – the tills are only wide enough to get one person through at a time too.  Why do these horrible povvy shops trap their customers inside?  They have those stupid entry barriers that only open inwards into the shop and the only way out is through the till.   Fucking cunts.  Then again, my limping, groaning under my breath and grimmacing helped me fit in perfectly with the rest of the shoppers in there, all of whom were a pretty good representative cross-section of Rochdale’s finest citizens.

Returning home meant me crossing over the main road.  There isn’t a pedestrian crossing to use, so you just have to wait for a gap in the traffic and hope for the best.  I’d made it half way across to the safety of a hatched area of the carriageway when a kindly car driver slowed down and flashed his headlamps to indicate that I could go.  So as not to cause undue delay to him, I tried to run.  My left knee and lower back simultaneously emitted agonising thrusts of pain and I kind of ran, kind of lumbered forward a la Hunchback of Notre Dame, making it to the other side of the road, but almost unable to lift my foot onto the kerb.

I’m a wreck.

On the subject of scumbag supermarkets and scumbags in general, what about that Karen Matthews eh?  She’s the woman from Dewsbury in Yorkshire who arranged for her own daughter to be kidnapped so she could get a load of media attention and sell her story for £50,000 to whoever would pay.

You can have a look at Karen in this photostream from the Times online, but this particular image speaks a thousand words:

Karen Matthews shops at Asda

Karen Matthews shops at Asda

Just look at her, lugging her shopping back from Asda.  Typical of the sort of person you get at Asda.  And that’s exactly why I never shop there myself.

Big Brother

Depending on how things go in Wales, I might be tempted to audition for this summer’s Big Brother.  Imagine it, Sniffy trapped in a house for up to 12 weeks 10 or so other people, all of whom are utter freaks, their every moved covered on camera, broadcast to the nation on Channel 4.

Milk

I watched Milk this evening.  A very powerful film documenting the rise of San Francisco’s gay rights movement, led by Harvey Milk (Sean Penn).  Two words: watch it.

Au revoir, mes amis

So this is it for now.  I’m sure the next few days will fly by.  I will return with hopefully, nothing much to report.  Stuff to report will mean that I spent the duration in my happy place, whichever one I opt for.

Hell in the Big Brother House

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I have to go away to Wales on Sunday for an “away trip” with colleagues from work. The senior team members are staying in my boss’s second home there, the plebs are being put up in a holiday home nearby. Here’s the specification:

Situated at the top of the road that winds its way down to Nefyn’s magnificent sandy beach, its close proximity to the beach will, undoubtedly, make it a popular choice. The property is well maintained, but very simply furnished. The front of the house has recently had upvc double glazed windows fitted.

Sleeps 20 (+ cot) in 5 bedrooms

The ground floor comprises the main lounge, with French door opening onto the front garden, an electric fire & colour television; toilet; the ‘French Lounge’ with an assortment of games, TV and video player has French doors opening onto the drive at the side of the house, and is accessed from the dining room which has French doors onto the back patio. The kitchen, also off the dining room, is equipped with a catering size gas range, an urn and a fridge/freezer; the utility room, beyond the kitchen, has another fridge and freezer, washing machine tumble drier, 3 additional sinks and a door to the rear garden.

On the 1st floor are: 3 bedrooms (rooms 1 and 2, each sleeping 6 in purpose built bunks, room 3 with a double bed); Bathroom with shower and toilet; 2 toilets; Shower room

The 2nd floor at the top of the house contains a further 2 bedrooms (room 4 with 2 single beds and room 5 with 4 single beds), tucked under the eaves and enjoying sea views.

There is a enclosed garden at the back of the house with a patio outside the French doors from the dining room, and large & small grassed areas. Access is from the utility room, dining room or side gate opening onto the driveway.

All beds are provided with 2 pillows and a duvet. A cot may be available on request.
You must bring your own bedlinen (sheets, duvet covers, pillow cases) and towels.

Additional Information

  • Pets are welcome

  • Smoking is not permitted in the house.

  • Wheelchair access is limited to the ground floor.

  • Background heating is by night storage heaters.

  • Parking for up to 6 vehicles.

  • Gas and heating is included in the rental

  • Other electricity by £1 coin meter

I, at the tender age of 38, will be sleeping in a bunk bed, sharing a bedroom with two others, who I’ve never met. It’ll be freezing (storage heaters + Wales + cliff top = fucking freezing).Ten of us will be driving there, but there’s only parking for six cars. We’ll probably be made to eat seaweed and moss and take baths in used water in a tub in the yard.

But here’s the most dreadful aspect of it all: no internet access.  I figured I could use my mobile to connect my PC to the Orange 3G network, it usually works really well, however look at this:

Orange

Orange

What about using my 3 phone?  That could do the same thing – if it gets collected today and returned on time  (been waiting since 7am for Parceline to come and get it, it’s now 3.30pm).  What’s the 3 coverage like there?

3

3

Ok then, so they’re both non-starters? But maybe one of those mobile broadband dongles from the other networks might be useful anyway, perhaps it’d be worth investing in one of those?

Vodafone

Vodafone

T-mobile 2G

T-mobile 2G

T-mobile 3G

T-mobile 3G

O2

O2

So there you go.  Staying with a bunch of people from work, who are actually OK, in freezing cold Wales, in a single bed, in a shared bedroom, with shared bathroom facilities, eating seaweed… and no chance whatsoever of an internet connection… for over TWO FUCKING DAYS!

Still, I get to go quad biking on Monday afternoon, so if I’m lucky, I might die or at least be hospitalised and then I won’t need internet access anyway.

Wasted days

Another day of decent weather has been wasted waiting in for those tossers to come and collect my mobile for repair.  Me and Rocky could’ve been having loads of fun, instead, I’ve been doing a bit of work.  Actually  I’ve had five attempts at burning a DVD of a avi file of a film.  The film plays fine in media player, the video burns to DVD OK, but there’s no sound.   I tried a different burning packages, and that just burns with the sound hopelessly out of sync.  I’m on my sixth try now, but I don’t hold out much hope.  It’s weird because I had no trouble burning the latest episode of the fabulous L Word the other night, but it’s now gone tits up.

Pissed off.

Second coming

The installation of President Obama is certainly a historic event.  It signals wonderful progress and brings a certain degree of hope to the Western World that we might actually stop being seen as evil.  Hope is one thing, action and results are another.  It does seem that an awful lot of hope has been pinned on him and, with a whole load of work to be done, it’s questionable that anything will actually be achieved.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and that.

Obama has almost been elevated to Messiah status – certainly by Auntie Beeb.  He’s just a bloke with a huge job to do, with a rather unfair weight of expectation placed on his shoulders.

And we in the UK have experienced something similar before with Tony Blair.  I never fell for the smooth talking back in 1997, I saw right through him and New Labour and knew damned well that they’d achieve absolutely fuck all while ruining the country – because that’s what Labour does.  It’s the lack of integrity, the lies, the erosion of values, the erosion of our civil liberties that hurt most from the past eleven… twelve years of Labour’s appalling governance.  We all knew they’d fuck up the economy (but perhaps not this badly), but the snooping on its people, the gradual introduction of a police state, and the sheer hopelessness that has been heaped on us all – not even I would have expected that from them. Then again, that’s what you get with a government that is out of control and afraid of its own people.

So long as Obama and his team demonstrate the utmost integrity and at least some degree of competence during their administration, then I will be satisfied.  There won’t be miracles.

Rocky takes time out

Rocky has a habit of kicking off and shouting his head off at the slightest noise outside.  I’ve had enough.  He goes for a time out in the kitchen as soon as he starts grumbling to himself.  It won’t stop him doing it, but it’ll keep him quiet for a bit while I’m trying to concentrate on my work blog.

Little shit.

Mayhem

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Bomb’s just left.  I’d invited her and Little Con over for the afternoon so we could all go for a little walk to the canal, say hello to the ducks and geese and stay for some food.

They arrived at 3.45pm, it was going dark, the sunshine of the morning and early afternoon had been eliminated by the heavy clouds that had been blown over by the winds that were increasing in intensity.  By this time, Rocky, whose walk I’d postponed, was climbing the walls with pent up energy.

After lots of bouncing from Rocky, after the street lights had come on, we finally got our coats on and left the house.  With the temperatures plummeting, Bomb gave up before we got to the end of the street and headed back.  I continued with Rocky, but aware that Bomb would be waiting, our walk was only short and we too made our way home.

I prepared our meal while Little Con ate hers, but not before Bomb had commented with astonishment at the absence of a microwave.  At the moment our food was ready, Bomb decided it was time to go and change Little Con’s nappy, thus allowing her own food to go cold while I ate mine on my own.  I’d prepared tuna with herb and olive salsa, new potatoes and curly kail.  I discovered that Bomb can’t eat kail; not only might it send her stomach off, it might actually send her to hospital!

Oh the fucking drama with her.  All the time, everything is a drama.  She complains that Con won’t let her do anything, but she won’t leave the child alone.  Since she was born, the slightest utterance from the baby has elicited attention and coddling from her mother. And she wonders why the child won’t leave her alone, always demanding attention from her.

One instruction that was absolutely critical – “Don’t let her go near the telly!”.  Connie ended up kissing the characters from Ice Age that was showing.

Why do people have children?  They need so much attention, cause so much hassle, ruin your lives and mess up your house.  Messy, messy little bags of snot, poo and sick.  And they make so much noise.  And they whinge and moan and misbehave.  This, in combination with a woman like my sister, is a recipe for much stress and shouting, and not a great deal of fun.  Ever.

Fuck, what a day. What a fucking day.

But now it’s peaceful…. ahhhhh.  Let’s have a look at some nice things, if I can find them to upload in this new-fangled file system.


Sonny
Unfortunately, this poor little feller had to be put down yesterday.  Wasn’t he handsome?  Such a big, strong, healthy animal, suddenly killed off by a cancer that we couldn’t do anything about.

Sonny

Hrrm, I think the other image is on the backup disk from before I wiped my machine and I can’t frigged to find it.


Threeeeeee
I have a pay as you go 3 Skypephone. I think it might be a bit dodgy because it just turns itself off and won’t power up again unless I take out the battery and put it back in again. Anyway, I went onto the 3 website and they have this really useful troubleshooter that takes you to a returns page if they can’t help you online. When it came to the pick up date option, I decided to change it from Monday to Wednesday, but you don’t get any information about the confirmed pick up date once you’ve booked the thing in. So bugger only knows when they’re coming for it. I’ll work from home on Wednesday, but if they come on Monday, they can go ninnies.

Nobheads.


Miss Congeniality
I took a personality tests, here is the overview of my character:

You are a leader – an independent thinker who approaches problems with a rigorous, rational and systematic mind. And with your curiosity, persistence, irreverence and logic, you tend to find innovative solutions to complex problems.

You tend to be bold, assertive and hard working. You are good with details, particularly technical details, and you enjoy talking about your work with others.

You are highly loyal to friends and family. You like nothing more than to share life’s little comforts you’ve earned, with those close to you.

Although you are good with people and enjoy being part of a stable and secure social network, you easily spend time alone, pursuing your own projects and goals.

You tend to be protective and pragmatic. And your friends and family find you innovative and interesting to be with.

So there you go. I’m going to hunt round for more online personality tests to see if they all give the same answer.

Oh look, another one!
Personality test



Pudding
I want some pudding, but there isn’t anything sweet in the house… other than fruit. For fuck’s sake. I want something like hot apple pie with warm custard. I’ll just have to have a fucking orange. I haven’t even got any bloody chocolate. Bollocks. Or biscuits. Tits.

Talking of tits, I taught Little Con to say “norks”, “knockers” and “bugger” today. It’s great, she just repeats everything you say. Oh, those sponge-like minds.

Pigswill

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19

I’m watching Hugh Fearnley-Pigswill on the telly.  He’s one of these organic foodie campaigner types who evangelises about stuff that grows in shit.  I can’t stand him.  Everything about him is nauseating: the way he looks; the way he talks; what he cooks.  But what I find most objectionable about him is the way he eats really noisily and talks to camera while doing so.

Pig of a man.

There is nothing more disgusting than the sound of people eating, smacking their lips noisily as they find it impossible to keep their mouths closed until they’ve finishing munching like normal people can.

When I was at university, me and my friends needed to find a housemate and we ended up with a bit of a headcase who watched the TV with the sound turned up to full blast.  She ate with her mouth open, smacking away and slurping till the end of the very last mouthful.  Every evening when she came back from college, she’d go straight to her room.  We’d time her, one, two, three, four, then it’d start, the thumping base of Alannah Myles’ Black Velvet.  But she was a right loon: occupying the attic bedroom, me and my fellow housemates could hear her talking to herself in different voices whenever we went to the bathroom, which was also located on the top floor of the house.  On the day of my last ever university exam, I’d gone upstairs for a shower at something ridiculous like 5am and, even at that time of day, I heard a sinister laugh coming from within her room.  Freaked out?  Most certainly.

Mississippi, the middle of a heatwave…

Wardrobe fun

I was at Mum and Dad’s earlier.  And I decided to go and have a look in my old wardrobe for a laugh.  There are still some clothes in there from my skinny days.  I can get into some of my old jeans and things, but let’s just say that I’m in between sizes, with my current clothes slightly too big and the next size down being slightly too small for me.  Irritating?  You betchya!  Why are there no odd sizes?  Why do they have to go from 14 to 16 to 18?  What’s wrong with a 15 or 17?

So what do I do, starve a bit to go to the next size down, or eat a few kebabs and get tubby?