I’m tired today. My sleep was disturbed for the second consecutive night last night and I’m not happy about it. That feeling that you get when you’re tired; it seems as if somebody has got their hands around your brain giving it a Chinese burn, sort of pulls your eyes together so you can’t focus too.

And then you have to be able to string words into sentences because you’re at work. Bastards.

But why is Sniffy so tired? Well, I was woken a few times on Sunday night by the sack of screaming – moreso by Bomb who insisted on bringing her downstairs to change her nappy. Nice of her, considering I’d given up my bedroom for the both of them because it’s bigger than the downstairs spare room with the tiny bed and ridiculously bouncy mattress!

So last night I went to Trump’s as planned. Thank goodness for an early night and 7 hours sleep! Or so I thought…

As Trump finished her dealings on the internet, I drifted into sleep.

10.30: Theme from Wonder Woman on my mobile. Big Connie wanting to know how to change the timing on the central heating because Anna was going to sleep downstairs that night. Half asleep, I had to talk her through the not-difficult process, but not without me getting annoyed at her lack of comprehension, common sense, attention.

10.40: Drop off with some programme about sleep disorders wittering on in the background. Brrrr… chilly tonight!

Don’t know what time it was but: Woken up by Trump dropping VERY COLD all-in-one remote control on my bear arm. “Nnnnnnooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!! I’m sleeeeeeeeeeeeping”

It was almost a tantrum, but not as big as the one I threw when she wanted a cuddle with her freezing cold limbs on my toasty body.

“Why are you doing this? I need some sleep! I’m so tired!!!”

“But I’m cold and I want a cuddle”

Drifted off to sleep again…

11.58: “Phar-phaaar-phar-phaaaaaaaaaaar… And that’s all that happened in Parliament today, now it’s time for the news at midnight on Radio 4. Peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peeeeeeeep”

For fuck’s sake.

4.44: Inside my head “All my life, watching America. All my life, there’s panic in America…” Visions of Razorlight’s weird-looking singer scare me further from my sleep. I am awake an hour before getting up time.

What the fuck is going on? Why the hell am I waking up before 5am with that awful song going through my head? What sort of evil tricks is my mind playing on me?

It’s no wonder I’m mental.

Use the force, Skywalker
Well, would you?

Four thousand feet above ground on a platform of glass above the spectacular Grand Canyon. Yes, it’s the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

Even crawling on all-fours, I’d get that awful feeling of the ground coming up to meet my eyebrows, bringing my stomach with it. Followed by nausea and blind panic.

So despite my strong desires to visit the Grand Canyon, I think an invitation to walk the Skywalk would be met with a firm “Hell no!” from Sniffy.

What is the first thing that comes into your head when you are dragged from slumber by the alarm clock? I get a fuzzy and groaning “Oh fuck” and try to ignore it. But it’s difficult to ignore the most irritating alarm clock on the planet and its shrill BEEP! when it first goes off at Oh Christ O’clock.

I am referring to Trump’s alarm clock, which has its time set twenty minutes fast for some reason. When it doesn’t beep at us, the alternative wake up is the radio, which comes on set to Radio Four. All I hear with Radio Four is the teacher from the Peanuts cartoon, just voices, nothing worth tuning my mind in to. “And now we hand over to phar-phaaar-phar-pharrrr who will be discussing mumphthth and muuuumphthth after a visit to Keeenya”. That’s all there ever is on Radio 4. Pile of crap. People only listen to Radio 4 so they can sound clever when they come into work and talk about what they’ve just heard on the Today Programme. Wankers. He hasn’t posted for AGES, but Herge Smith once beautifully summed up all that is Radio 4 in the wonderful Angry Chimp blog. I wish Herge would come back to us, I miss him.

Dateline Salford… 17th March 2007
Headlines today:
Boing! Sniffy changes a shitty nappy!

Yep, I changed Connie’s nappy this evening – baby Connie, not mother Connie. It was fine, I’m a natural.

The baby is great; sleeps alot and doesn’t whinge unless I take flash photos of her. She has eyes now too, which are always useful.

She also has a deformity. Nothing serious, but something that has been passed down through generations on Papa Sniff’s side. She has “Sniffy toe”:

It may seem trivial at this tender age, but that’ll be really painful when she tries to use a cross trainer later on in life!

Having virtually been at the conception of Bomb’s baby, the day finally arrived for her to give birth.

She was booked in for an elective caesarian, but with one thing or another, she found herself hanging on past 3pm yesterday. Tempers were becoming frayed and Connie decided to take things into her own hands. “I’ve seen loads of these things, I can do it myself. Wait here and I’ll be back…”

I waited in the room next door and after about half an hour, I heard some squeals, which were quickly followed by Connie coming in to show me this:

Yes, this is my little niece, who is also called Connie.

She is tiny, but pretty cute. More importantly, she’s healthy and seems to have a good appetite.

So that’s me for you, Auntie Sniff. I’m going to have lots of fun helping her grow up.

I have a list of things that she must do:

• Be happy and confident (but not gobby like her mum)
• Be healthy
• Learn to speak Italian
• Learn to play a musical instrument, preferably the piano, but drums would be fun
• Like animals
• Respect her elders
• Do as she’s told

That’ll do I reckon.

I just wish she could’ve waited to be born after the weekend. I’ve had to buy two mother’s day cards now!

I ache. I am very tired too.

Today was “sort the back bedroom out” day at Trump’s and this involved:

• Clearing out the back bedroom
• Painting it
• Assembling a huge fucking flatpack wardrobe that had been delivered at 7.30 in the morning
• Being shouted at because it was bigger than we both expected and we couldn’t get it to stand up because there wasn’t enough room.
• Assembling a flatpack desk – again huge
• Putting stuff back in the room

My back hurts and I have carpet burns.

The assembly of flatpack furniture is sometimes quite a challenge. This is particularly the case when the item you are putting together is about 50% bigger than you’d anticipated. It was OK putting the main frame together, but getting it from a lying to a standing position was something of a challenge. She kept shouting at me and shuffling the offending bits of badly joined chipboard around.

“Will you just stop shuffling the fucking thing around the floor and explain to me what it is you’re trying to do!”

I snapped. Me!

Would my wonderful relationship with Trump end with me ramming a screwdriver into her head?….

Nah, of course not. We calmed down and got it sorted.

It is fucking massive and I don’t think it’ll ever come out of that room again. I’m already having wicked thoughts about attacking it with an axe.

Anyway, what else? Ikea is annoying. It attracts annoying people and annoying families. The problem is that you’re kind of herded around the recommended walk way and you always get stuck with the same groups of people are you navigate the store. Last night, not wanting to seem anti-semitic – because I’m not, we were accompanied on our trek around the Ashton store by the cast of Fiddler on the roof. Well, not the entire cast, just the annoying fucking children who kept barging into us.

We were also plagued by some chav cow who shuffled her way through life with a sullen expression on her over made-up face. Why can’t people pick their feet up when they walk? She was with her mother. If I’d have shuffled about like that with my mum, I’d have been told off.

And of course, there was the obligatory large Asian family with small toddler. It was gone 8pm. Noticing my despair, Trump said “Oh be fair, it looks happy enough.”

“Yes, it does now. But it’ll be getting tired and all it will take is one tiny thing and it’ll kick off and scream round the rest of the store.”

Count to five…

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!”

True to form, the little bastard ran into something, bashed itself and then spent the rest of its time there crying its head off.

And Ikea are fuckers. I’d checked their website for the availability of the desk we’d gone to buy and it claimed to have it in stock, but there were none. So this meant a trip to the Warrington store in a panic with my petrol light on. I’ve never had a petrol light come on before; it was exciting, but quite stressful.

Got to get rest now. Tomorrow promises more stress and excitement. Report to follow.

Yes, I have a large and unsightly mole on the side of my face. I’d rather it wasn’t there, Trump would rather it wasn’t there too. It is horrible and lumpy and it has nasty hairs growing out of it.

I’m sure it’s grown since that photo was taken.

Fate has it that Trump sits to my left on the sofa, in the car and she lies to my left in bed. We will be chatting and I’ll notice her gaze divert to His Hairiness Lord Mole. It’s a lot to put up with and I understand how disturbing it must be for her. Even her Wii has noticed; the baseball teams now have at least four players with huge moles on their faces. Hairy moles are spreading in epidemic proportions it seems.

If I thought the NHS didn’t have anything better to do than needless cosmetic operations, I’d go and get it sorted. My GP would probably refer me to an appropriate surgeon if I went and asked, but it seems that I only ever go to my GP when I want lumps removing from various bits of my body.

But my reluctance to go to my doctor waned a little on Friday after a meeting I had at work. I was helping a young medic with a research proposal, she was sat in my office on the chair on the left of mine. As we conversed, I noticed that, on a number of occasions, her eyes were drawn to the left side of my face. I should’ve asked her if any of her colleagues could sort it out for me, but I didn’t want to make it obvious that I’d noticed her gawping at my hideous disfigurement.

So, I feel it’s time for a special….

Should Sniffy go and see poor old Dr Williams about getting her hideous mole surgically removed?

Lesbian shoes
I’d had my eye on a pair of shoes for a while. They were pretty funky and they looked really comfortable. The only drawback was their price. At £80 a pair, I found it hard to justify buying them. That was until I was down in the dumps last weekend; in such circumstances, retail therapy resulting in the purchase of £80 shoes is entirely justified.

And this is them.

They are Art “Skyline in Adventure” shoes and I think they’re pretty cool. Bomb saw them last week and said “those shoes are so queer”. Shocked and appalled, I protested:

“They’re not queer, they’re cool!”

She shrugged a “whatever”.

Discussing this with Trump, I was shocked and horrified by her declaration, “Of course they’re lesbian shoes, what the fuck else are they?”. Jeez, shoes are shoes in my opinion, but there’s something about lesbians that they automatically zone in on a woman’s shoes, apparently. Out with a couple of gay friends yesterday, I shouted in excitement, “I’ve got new shoes!”, but they’d already clocked them as I walked into the coffee shop where we’d met.

Weirdos.

Let’s face it, I don’t know why a lesbian would need to look at another lesbian’s shoes because they’d fall into one of four categories:

• Utility (Docs, Cats, Timberland)
• Trainers (usually Converse All stars – because “that’s what Shane from the L Word wears”)
• SUV – Camper/Merrill
• Power sandals

I’m going to go and put mine on now. I wear them and think lesbian thoughts. Thoughts like, “I wonder if somebody is putting the kettle on”, “Can I justify eating a ginger biscuit?”, “How do people type with long fingernails?”

How DO people type with long fingernails?
Mine haven’t been clipped for a fortnight; they’re hardly Hollywood, but I’m typing with the dexterity of a gibbon today.

Excitement ahoy
And in the final section of what could be my last post for a few days I shall talk about the final preparations in la casa Sniffy as we await the arrival of il bombino. Actually, there’s nothing much to describe. My sister is coming here for few days after the birth to be looked after and that’s about it. It’s going to be exciting and new and very scary, but it’s nothing that millions of others haven’t experienced in much more challenging circumstances.

I bet it grows up to be a total shit.

Other excitement centres around plans to move me into Trump Towers. A wardrobe is being delivered on Wednesday morning. Tomorrow evening will be spent clearing the back bedroom (study) such that we can move around in there enough to give the walls a lick of paint before getting into an argument while assembling a variety of flatpack furniture.

Good times.

I take issue with quite a few things, although not to the point of becoming obsessive. Well that’s not true; once my knickers in a twist about something, I’m well and truly wedgied by it for the rest of my life.

One thing that I can’t reconcile myself with is things on PC keyboards. I’m currently using Trump’s computer as she takes a well-earned, post-dinner snooze. This is what I found on her keyboard:

Now, I know I shouldn’t really complain – especially since it’s not my PC – but why do people rest things on their keyboards in such a way? It just annoys me. It’s not so noticeable here, but tomorrow I’ll be using a PC at the Moonlighting Drugs Testing Agency and I can guarantee that there will be about three or four pens resting on the keyboard of the PC that I’ll be using to do number crunching and stuff. They just get in the way, and if I hit the keys hard enough, the pens and pencils bounce up and roll into the path of my rapidly dancing digits.

Grrrr.

Another “stuff” thing that I have well and truly decided that I dislike is peppers. You know those bell pepper things? More to the point I don’t like them: chopped small in things; raw in salads. I had some sushi for lunch and there were two tiny bits of red pepper in one of the fishy roll things. What the fuck for? They added nothing to the flavour, mainly because they fell out due to my poor chopstick control, but nonetheless, they contributed absolutely nothing to my £1.99 lunch. That’s £1.99 for something that looked like it had been cobbled together from the contents of the pig bin.

I know where I stand with my minestrone cup a soups and so I really should stick to what I know, even though they do contain far too much in the way of rehydrated red pepper.

Dangling
What is it with those fucktards who hang anything that can be hung from a lanyard around their necks? You see them wandering about town, looking “cool”, with a mobile phone, set of keys, MP3 player and shite dangling from a neck band. Nobs. The same is true for work colleagues who hang keys, nail clippers and pens from their ID card chain. I suppose the sound of them jangling along serves a similar purpose to the bells that lepers used to warn of their approach: “Cock alert! Heads down unless you want an hour long conversation with a fuckwit!”. They could always try wearing a collar and a bell like my cats have.

Of course, I do use one of these things myself for my work ID card. It looks like this:

Actually, I have two because I work for two places. I am blessed.

Anyway, you see the quick panic release bit that sits at the back of the neck for when your being throttled by an angry member of the public. You see, working with NHS staff members, I can fully understand why members of the public would want to strangle certain NHS employees.

So where have I been and why haven’t I been blogging?

Well firstly, I had a weekend away seeing Her Majesty and all the happy residents of London on Thames. Actually, I only spent one day in London, followed by one in Brighton, followed by a travelling home in torrential rain day. But here are some photos:

When I got back from my jaunt darn sarf, I had to prepare for a job interview. I wasn’t successful, which is a shitter, but I wasn’t successful because they were looking for somebody “more dynamic and exciting”. I didn’t realise they were interviewing for a children’s party entertainer, or I’d have worn my red nose (no need for the curly wig). I just can’t win: I act friendly and well-humoured and I’m not serious enough; I tone myself down and act professionally and I’m not dynamic or exciting. Bastards. I’ll give them exciting when I take pot shots at them with an AK47 from the top of a clock tower! Before ending the telephone rejection conversation, the woman said to me “I’m sure our paths will cross again”. Yeah, just watch it’s not down a dark alley.

So it’s back to the drawing board. I need a new job, I’m desperate. I can’t think of what I can do.

I knew I should’ve done the “girl power” v-sign thing at the end of my interview!

Ground control to Major Bomb
Perhaps I should invest in a red nose and do the children’s party thing afterall. All being well, and with all things crossed, the Bombino will be with us on the 15th of March. It will be undocking from mothership Bomb via caesarian because it’s being an awkward little sod and not turning over. This is despite manipulation at the hands of medics and also some weird Buddhist witchcraft at the hands of Connie.

Initially, Bomb’s obstetrician wanted to do the section on the 14th, but she refused to have her baby born on that date because it’s a Wednesday – Wednesday’s child is full of woe and all that; and she should know, the miserable bastard. Let’s face it, there isn’t room – or soundproofing – for Bomb and Spawn of Bomb as it is, let alone having both of them being born on the most miserable day of the week.

It’s so nice to know that the child’s life will be tarnished by the superstitions of her eco-warrior earth mother. She was showing me how to do a nappy the other day; she wants to go for the terry ones that you wash. If I’m looking after it, I’ll be using Pampers disposables, thankyouverymuch.

I’m actually looking forward to being an auntie, although I’m holding back on my excitement until I know that they’re both safe and well. And when I know the Bombino is safe and well, I will spend as much time as possible corrupting it in the ways of Sniffy (and Trump of course).

A few months ago, I posted a link to the Prime Minister’s e-petition page where there was a petition for people to sign if they wanted the PM to know that they disagreed with the Government’s proposals to introduce road charging in the UK. One of the proposals is to introduce a sophisticated tracking system whereby all motorists would have a box fitted in their cars that would enable some computer to calculate how much they drove, where they drove to, how much time they spent in traffic jams, average speeds, etc. Essentially, a spying device that we would have to pay for to penalise us for sitting in traffic jams that are created by Left Wing councils pissing about with roads and traffic light sequences. Their only answer to the congestion their policies contribute to is to remove road space and hammer the motorist.

The petition closed last night and everybody who signed it got an e-mail response from the PM. I just replied to it and I hope everyone else does too. Let’s all spam the cunt and tell him what we think.

Then let’s have a revolution and charge anybody who voted for Labour at the last election with treason. Idiots.

I know I shouldn’t, but HA!
Apparently a couple of clowns have been shot dead in the Big Top during there performance at a circus in Colombia.

Now I know this is tragic, but clowns are so fucking scary and nasty that I can’t really feel any sorrow when I hear of one being taken out.

And we all forgot. So Connie is whipping up her batter for la famiglia Sniffola next week instead. I may be whipping up some batter myself next time I see Trump, but that’s a private matter.

Boom boom!

While on the subject, of pancakes, not the other, that decayed and sunburnt woman talked through a breakfast the she provided for her daughter yesterday:

“Miss Peanut requested pancakes and sausage. I pulled pancakes out of the freezer…”

Firstly, pancakes and sausage – fucking wrong almighty. What is it with North Americans and this weird pudding on your breakfast plate business? So odd, so very wrong.

Frozen pancakes? Need I say more.

I’m hoping Bronwen offers some explanation for committing these heinous crimes.

The Shining
I can still smell cigarette smoke. I am now convinced that I have a special gift and that I can sense things going on in the Spirit World.

I’ll be the new Derek Acorah, being all dramatic in night-vision in some so-called Most Haunted venue.

The thing I love about Most Haunted is the hysteria generated by the host’s jumpiness in the dark: “Oh my God, did you hear/feel/see that?” Within no time, and with accompanying drama from the guest psychic medium, things are flying off shelves, stuff being thrown, and tapping noises emanate from all the dark, scary corners of the old asylum/workhouse/stately home that they’re investigating that week.

“I can sense I’m wearing a corset, so that rules out Edward the Seventh”; the mediums come out with this sort of thing all the time as they move dramatically through the premises. “There’s a little girl in a uniform, she’s crying!”. No shit, Sherlock, you’re in an old school house.

But despite the programme and accompanying melodrama being laughingly bad, it’s such a fantastic show.