I’ve been to Scotchland! Up to the West Highlands on the Ardnamurchan Peninsular where I visited Mr Garfer. It’s always odd meeting somebody who you’ve known for a while, and meeting Mr Cake Face was no different I suppose.

Anyway, it’s a stunningly beautiful part of the world where you can go and lose yourself, something that everybody should do on occasion to bring them back down to earth. It’s not that easy to get lost unless you’re on foot, doing a Tinker’s Rucksack, but since there are only about 4 roads on the peninsula, it’d be pretty hard to get lost while driving.

The people speak with that beautiful sing-songy voice and accent and are most accommodating, even to the English.

The only shame was that my visit was way too brief to get anything like a full flavour of the places to visit and things to do there. Hopefully one day, I’ll find myself back there, overlooking Loch Sunart as the sun sets out towards the Atlantic.

Yay! On our way! by cakesniffer

Beach goat by cakesniffer

Garfer by cakesniffer

Eig and Muck from Ardnamurchan by cakesniffer

2010_03_386 by cakesniffer

2010_03_305 by cakesniffer

2010_03_304 by cakesniffer

2010_03_294 by cakesniffer

Loch Sunart at night by cakesniffer

2010_03_163 by cakesniffer

Ardnamurchan lighthouse by cakesniffer

Ardnamurchan point by cakesniffer

2010_03_107 by cakesniffer

2010_03_084 by cakesniffer

Loch Sunart by cakesniffer

Loch Sunart by cakesniffer

Sniffy never really went away, but Sniffytastic took a break for a while until life started to sort itself out.

Things are OK: I moved out of the (if I had a) Hammer House of Horror; found myself in love with the most fantastic woman I’ve ever met; kept the little dog all to myself.

So now that’s been established, I can get back to what I like doing – playing with gadgets, spending time with my lady, chilling out with my little dog…. oh, and writing the odd bit of bile here back in good old blog world.

The appearance of “New!” Sniffytastic will change first, then I’ll dredge my memory banks and start spilling out verbal garbage here.

Ci vediamo!

I didn’t mean it!

Anyway, I’m back.  At last.

But this is just a short note for now as:

A) I need to get dressed and take Rocky out so he can embarrass me for an hour

B) I’m cooking beans and I need to keep an eye on the pot (and that’s not a metaphor for anything toilet-related – yet)

So yes, nothing has happened:  Vegas looms (YAY!); the weather is slightly warmer but wetter; I hope to be enjoying new living arrangements within the next couple of months (YAY FUCKING YAY!).

Oh, and Rocky has had a haircut at last.  Ain’t he beautiful?

Love still eludes and baffles me.  Perhaps I’m just not right for anybody.  But perhaps it’s not me, it’s them.  Keep telling myself that and it’ll all be OK.

I need to quit my Facebook habit and learn how to write in structured paragraphs again.

Sniffy is taking her ball with her and moving the Cakesniffing experience to a new home.

Things are being tidied up at the moment, but I’ll hopefully be able to shut down Cakesniffers in a few days and reopen elsewhere.

Anybody wanting a sneak preview (don’t get excited) of my miserable take on my miserable world can drop me a line and I’ll tell them where I’m going.

Adios, amigos.

But before then, check this out

TO: MR. JAMES THATCHER

BRAND MANAGER, PROCTER & GAMBLE

Dear Mr. Thatcher

I have been a loyal user of your Always maxi pads for over 20 years, and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core^(tm) or Dri-Weave^(tm)absorbency, I’d probably never go horse riding or salsa dancing, and I’d certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favourite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can’t tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there’s a little F-16 in my pants.

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? Ever suffered from ‘the curse’? I’m guessing you haven’t. Well, my ‘time of the month’ is starting right now. As I type, I can already feel hormonal forces violently surging through my body. Just a few minutes from now, my body will adjust and I’ll be transformed into what my husband likes to call ‘an inbred hillbilly with knife skills.’ Isn’t the human body amazing?

As brand manager in the feminine-hygiene division, you’ve no doubt seen quite a bit of research on what exactly happens during your customers’ monthly visits from Aunt Flo. Therefore, you must know about the bloating, puffiness, and cramping we endure, and about our intense mood swings, crying and out-of-control behaviour. You surely realise it’s a tough time for most women. In fact, only last week, my friend Jennifer fought the violent urge to shove her boyfriend’s testicles into a George Foreman Grill just because he told her he thought Grey’s Anatomy was written by drunken chimps.

Crazy! The point is, sir, you of all people must realize that the UK is just crawling with homicidal maniacs in Capri pants. Which brings me to the reason for my letter.

Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: ‘Have a Happy Period.’

Are you *+*#*ing kidding me?

What I mean is, does any part of your tiny middle-manager brain really think happiness – actual smiling, laughing happiness – is possible during a menstrual period? Did anything mentioned above sound the least bit pleasurable?

Well, did it, James? FYI, unless you’re some kind of sick S&M freak girl, there will never be anything ‘happy’ about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Nurofen and Kahlúa and lock yourself in your house just so you don’t march down to the local Tesco’s armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory. For the love of God, pull your head out, man. If you just have to slap a moronic message on a maxi pad, wouldn’t it make more sense to say something that’s actually pertinent, like ‘Put Down the Hammer’ or ‘Vehicular Manslaughter Is Wrong’?- Or are you just picking on us?

Sir, please inform your accounting department that, effective immediately, there will be an £8 drop in monthly profits, for I have chosen to take my maxi-pad business elsewhere. And though I will certainly miss your Flexi-Wings, I will not for one minute miss your brand of condescending bullshit. And that’s a promise I will keep. Always.

Best,

Wendi Aarons

I’m a twat. I’m a twat. I’m a twat.

A couple of swigs of cheap plonk on an empty stomach and I go completely off my tits.

Arsehole.

Anyway, to save me getting into further trouble, I thought it best to post some photos. Aaaahhh, I feel myself stepping back into the light.

The Grand Canyon
It’s a deep long hole with a river running through it. One… two… three…. JUMP!

Wonder Woman’s Helicopter
Yes, the delish superheroine is alive and living at the Grand Canyon shuttle site. She was off doing dirty bitch things with her truth lasso, so I didn’t actually see her unfortunately, but she’d left her helicopter parked there.

Yeeeeeeeee-Haaaaaaaaaaw Cowgirl
I had a strange experience with a card trickster at this ranch, but this cowgirl made me go a bit whatsit when she beckoned me over as I took this photo. She thought I was taking a picture of the horse, for fuck’s sake. The horse is called Jackson, and he smells a bit like a horse. I’m sure the cowgirl did too, but you’d let her off for that.

Actually, she looks a bit rough on this photo, but it wasn’t her teeth I was looking at.

Fremont Street Experience
Look at these nasty pieces of work!

Imagine coming across any of these on a dark night. What a thought, or several…

There comes a time in everyone’s lives where something impacts on them badly and they need to take time out to regroup and sort themselves out.

Circumstances chez Trumpsniffer are in terminal decline, dead in fact. A couple of months after moving in, before we’d got started on moving to the next phase of our lives together, Trump decided – with an impeccable sense of timing – that it is over for us.

Sniffy has been left in a state of devastation and confusion that is impossible to describe. Having the world collapse around a person doesn’t leave them in the best state of mind for anything other than alternating between various emotional states, none of which are conducive to any activity resembling what might be normal for a person. The need for self preservation might include the occasional outpouring of hurt, grief, anger in a blog, but I think I need to concentrate on doing things like getting out of bed in the morning, getting a shower, eating, etc, etc.

Pretending things are ok for the timebeing. That’ll be fun. It won’t leave much energy for blogging.

Cheerio for now. I’ll be back soon when things have started to heal a bit.

FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
Fuckety fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

And that just about sums it all up.

I had to interview some candidates for a job in our department yesterday.

Could you imagine being interviewed by me? Those poor, poor people. Most of them were really nice, one was a bit odd, one we just didn’t like, and one, I really threw with a stupid jokey question:

“I’ll run through the job, then ask you a couple of questions before my colleagues ask theirs and then I’ll finish off by going through your criminal record”, meaning, we’ll go through the mandatory questions, one of which asks about convictions, cautions, etc. Having never been to an interview before, she didn’t know about “mandatory questions” and was completely thrown by it.

I’m such a twat. Luckily, she recovered really well and gave a very good account of herself.

The problem with interviews is, there’s no real point to them. You’re not allowed to ask the questions you really want to ask, and you’re certainly not allowed to document the real decision process for picking your preferred candidate for the benefit of the Human Resources department.

We have to tell them our selection criteria and score each candidate against each one. Having the highest score doesn’t get you the job, but it helps. Getting the highest score against the official selection criteria doesn’t automatically get you the job because there are unwritten selection criteria such as:

1. Did we like them?
2. Are they normal, or a bit weird?
3. Do they have good social skills, or do they avoid eye contact and twitch alot?
4. Are their kids likely to keep them at home at short notice?
5. Would they be a pain in the arse?
6. Are they likely to fuck off and do something a lot more challenging?
7. Do they come from Stornoway?

Bloody employment law!

Anyway, Sniffy had to phone the unsuccessful candidates and give them the bad news… and feedback. Not a nice job, but it’s better than letting people hang on and not telling them at all.

In the night garden
Who’d have thought that this would work as an instant anxiolytic for baby throwing a tantrum?

Amazing.

How does it work? Is there a formula for tapping into a toddler’s mind other than a cattleprod to the head?

I think the formula must include things like a brightly coloured asexual “thing” – Iggle Piggle – that dances and sings, but not in any discernible language. Add some other companions that are also brightly coloured, but slightly different in shape; again without a defined sex, but clearly a different sex than the main character – Upsy Daisy. And they jump around, dance, play hide and seek, then sleep in a boat.

Hey presto! All the children calm down. Unless its something to do with all newborns being chipped at birth with a device that can be activated by a specific signal from CBeebies.

CBeebies is a government tool for controlling the minds our children, thus eventually giving the country a generation of numbed zombies who they can control at the push of a button!

I suppose they said the same thing when they introduced the National Lottery.

I’m fed up buying stuff that doesn’t work. Thanks very much Tesco for selling the following pile of shite items:

• Texet cross cut shredder
• Crappy battery powered water pistol

Bollocks, the pair of them.

The cross cut shredder is great so long as you use for no more than 30 seconds in any one time, giving it half an hour’s rest before even thinking of attempting to shred another single piece of paper.

We’ve had two of these now. Both rubbish.

The water pistol was bought to train Rocky to walk on his lead properly. The original super power soaker merely dribbled, so I took it apart, tried to fix it, and then it leaked. That ended up in the bin.

We bought another this evening, it didn’t work at all, not even a dribble of water.

Fucking rubbish.

Don’t Tesco check these things before they sell them? What do they pay their buyers to do? Pick things that they know that are rubbish that people will buy, but won’t bother to return?

I don’t know, I really don’t.

Adios, Fucktards!
One thing I’ve kept quiet about since moving here to Bellend Towers has been our neighbours. Not the fellers next door, not the family next door but one, but the scratbag tenants in the flat around the back.

Day one – Awww how lovely! The day we moved in, I saw “Sam”, the female, leaving the flat with a very cute puppy. Strange… I’d seen the advert for the lease and it said no smokers, no DSS, no pets. Hrrrm.

Day three – What the fuck? Got home from work and found one of their visitors had parked in my parking space in front of my garage. Cocks. I blocked them in. They wouldn’t do that again, but it didn’t stop their visitors parking in the residents only parking area or in other residents’ parking spaces. Grassed them in to Carol, the marketing woman, who informed us that Simon, their landlord, lives just round the corner “I’ll tell him!” I happened to mention the dog too, and the cig butts all over the parking spaces that they dropped from their window “I saw the advert for the lease and they’re not supposed to have a dog or smoke.”

Week one – Eezer Good. It was obvious in our first week of being here that the young occupants of the flat were dealing drugs. And endless stream of vehicles would come each evening, visit the flat clutching bundles of cash, leave no more than a couple of minutes later stuffing things in their pockets.

Trump mentioned it to our neighbours, who may well have told the coppers. Whether this resulted in anything or not, I don’t know, but the activities stopped after a couple of weeks when they must’ve cottoned on that they were very conspciuous now that other residents had moved in.

Week three – “Gizmooooooo!”. Did I mention that their puppy is a St Bernard? In a small flat? Gizmo was left to roam the parking lot and crap all over the place, including on our parking space. Gizmo was left out at all times of day and night and frequently our sleep would be disturbed in the early hours by Sam shouting him, “Gizmooooooooooo!”. Fucking cunt.

Week four – The sound of music. Not only was our sleep disturbed by “Gizmooooooo!”. Sam and Jason (for that is his name) had a delightful habit of playing their music ever so loudly at all times of day, but especially in the early hours.

Week four and half – A knock on the door. One evening I saw their landlord trying to get them to answer the door. They had a habit of not bothering to answer it and he ended up having a conversation from the doorway up through the open lounge window. He’d return the next day. He did.

Week five – Thank you for the music. Gizmo was getting bigger, his poos bigger, the music was getting louder. I was on the verge of putting a note through the landlord’s door, telling him to get rid of his scumbag tenants, but I held off. The blokes from next door joined us for an evening of merriment and we found the experience therapeutic, airing our displeasures and plotting ways of getting rid of them.

Week six – Gone. They’ve gone. They moved out last night.

Can’t wait to see what we get next.

Fucking buy to let bastards, allowing any fucking scumbag into a place without worrying about their neighbours. I suppose we’re lucky in that we know who the landlord is and where he lives, but bugger me, you shouldn’t have to be plotting to burn somebody’s house down within days of moving into a place!

Isn’t the weather shit?

At least that’s how I hope it’s going to pan out – I’ve had a busy week or so and I could do with putting my feet up.

It all started with looking after Casa Cakesniffer and the Mousesniffer family of moggies while the venerable ones were away on holiday.

Those bloody cats are such hard work. Only Max does his toilets outside so this means twice daily litter changes. Then there are constant demands for food and biscuits, although I couldn’t find the cat biscuits in the disaster zone that is my dad’s shed, so the cats followed me round whinging for four days until I finally discovered the bag of biscuits behind a chemical toilet.

Then there’s Max. Dear, lovely Max with his seemingly ever-growing ears. He has a habit of demanding to go out at 10pm, but he always likes to sleep inside overnight, so he has to be called back in at bed time. Only he doesn’t come in unless you play the “come and get me” game. This involves me going out onto the main road an calling him (generally after midnight) until he appears from his hiding place to follow me back home.

And my long term back problems were exacerbated by all four cats insisting on sleeping on my bed overnight.

But they’re lovely and it’s nice to be able to look after them.

TUESDAY brought the fabulous B52s to Manchester. They were wonderful. Approaching their sixties, I’m quite certain that there’s a fair bit of botox been injected into those faces (esp Fred and Keith) and I think Fred even left the stage for an emergency top up while the girls were singing Roam.

However, this was probably my last chance to see my favourite band live and I’m so glad I did. They played a good selection of tracks from their latest album Funplex, but a good few of their classics too, including:

Mesopotamia (I think this was a bit political, Mesopotamia being today’s Iraq)
Give me back my man
Private Idaho
Strobe light
Party out of bounds
Roam
Love shack

Finishing with
Channel Z
and the fabulous Rock Lobster

Apparently they did Planet Claire as a second encore. What were they thinking of?

Yesterday
Yesterday was our local Pride event that Trump helps to organise. It’s OK these big cities having their Pride Parades and using the whole thing as an excuse to milk the queers for all their commercial worth, but smaller towns really need to get the message out that gay people exist there too.

So well done Trump and her colleagues.

We went out to the town’s only gay pub last night, Trump’s mum came too. It was full of people who would never be allowed into any of the bars on Canal Street, with the exception of Paddy’s Goose perhaps.

Today
Don’t know, but sun is shining and it’s warm. Enjoying this rare event is what’s on the cards today.