Lefty loosey, righty tighty. The simple rule of screwing. This applies to removing and putting on bottle tops, screwing in screws and turn taps on and off.

Taps with vertical threads and valves, or whatever the hell it is that makes them work, and horizontal taps, this is no problem. You get used to this at an early age. Same goes for radiator valves. However, how many times, and how many soakings does it take to learn how to use these:

Every time I use these friggin’ things, I end up turning the water to full flow instead of turning it off. You end up getting blasted with a Niagara Falls like jet of water. If you’re quick enough to react, you can sometimes jump out of the way, but this is rarely the case and you end up with embarrassing wet patches.

Brain does not compute sideways taps. Why, therefore, does every fucker insist on having them installed in their kitchens and bathrooms these days?

Tsk.

Hospital drama
Oh my word, look at this people!
Killers in NHS hospital anaesthetic room!

Just think, three weeks ago, they could’ve got me afterall!

Pussy humour

Apologies
I am a little distracted at the mo.
I forgot Piggy’s rock and sweeties.
I still haven’t prepared that presentation for Wednesday and I’m not in work tomorrow and I’m out tomorrow evening. Fuck.

I am returned from the beautiful island of Anglesey. It was top notch.

Hotel – ace
Food – fuckin’ delish
People – really nice (the English ones at least ;))
Weather – mad
Conference – not bad
Journey – brilliant
Price – free

Some photos of my visit:

Bedroom

Ready for (in)action

View from conference venue

Another view from conference venue

Some rocks and stuff

South Stack, Holy Island

I joke about the Welsh hating the English, although some can still be a bit radical. One eminent ex-politician opened the conference, but I understand that he complained about the conference literature being written in English alone. The organisers pointed out that all delegates spoke English, some only spoke English and that the printing costs for bilingual literature would be prohibitively expensive.

I told this story to my friend who I stayed with last night. She told me that this was the same chap whose wife told a neighbour that she didn’t want the neighbour’s English children associating with hers because she wanted her children to speak Welsh alone. That’ll get them far.

Anyway, North Wales is a lovely part of the world and the folk are great. Get your arses over there if you get the chance.

Before I set off for Ynys Môn (that’s Anglesey to us English-speaking pig dogs), here’s a little bit about that wonderful thing called “Mum logic”.

Mother (aaaawwwww, bless her) phoned me up at work yesterday: “Did you go in the shed last night?”

“No, not at all, why?” Oh gawd, has something been stolen from the shed again??

“Did you go in there this morning before going to work?”

“No, why????”

“Well, we can’t find the shed keys anywhere”

Ahhhhhhhh, it suddenly dawned on me that the subject of her query wasn’t the shed, but the keys to the padlocks on the shed. Moreover, the keyring that contains the shed keys, but also holds various other keys, including the one to the padlock that locks the gate over the drive. Yes, I’d had the keys. Why didn’t she just ask if I’d had the keys?

“Oh, I used the keys to unlock the gate padlock last night, but I thought I put them on the worktop in the kitchen. Try the pocket of my hooded top” Etc, etc, etc. No success, so I left her to her panic and got back to my staring into space very hard work.

She phoned 20 minutes later. “Why did you put them in my handbag?”

“I didn’t”

“But you must have, because that’s where I’ve just found them”

“I probably left them on the worktop and you must’ve picked them up with your car keys before going to bed”.

“Why would I do that?”

Bugger only knows!

She still insists that I drank tea until I was ten and that I had both little toes (not just the one) operated on when I was 12. She also insists that both of the offending toes had pins in them. I think I’d have noticed that somehow.

I’m waiting for her to exaggerate the story of my totally benign, totally nothing to worry about and never was, breast lump into second stage breast cancer for which I’m receiving the most terrible chemotherapy and for which I am engaged in a high-court battle to be given Herceptin.

Em pee three
Just bought myself a little MP3 player for while I’m in Wales. It’s just a simple little Creative Muvo thing that only plays MP3s and uses drag and drop via the USB port. Fab. If I find that I use it lots, I may consider getting a proper grown up, all singing, all dancing thing, but this’ll do the trick for now.

I’m going to Trearddur Bay, which is on Holy Island. The hotel overlooks the sea. Shame that I have to do conference things really as Anglesey really is beautiful and I’d like the opportunity to explore it a bit.

A few weeks ago, me and my sister took off for a walk down the local woods. I had planned to bludgeon her to death and throw her in the river Irwell, but the water levels were too low and she’d have just stuck to some reeds and been discovered before I could make my getaway.

Anyway, as we headed off towards the woods, we passed the entrance to the DIY place over the road and this bloke was parked a bit weird, just sat there:

And in close up…

When we got back an hour or so later, he was still there, being weird and freaky, so I snapped him. He must’ve been sat there a good 2 to 3 hours before he disappeared.

Then last night, look what I saw again:

He was there for at least an hour again last night? What the hell is he playing at? When he finally buggered off, he drove his car further up towards the goods received entrance and got out:

So I don’t know what he was up to, but I was still agitated about him when I got to bed. Then I was woken soon after dropping off by the sound of the police helicopter circling the house. I got a bit paranoid after that.

Why can’t people just be normal? Why do folk have to do weird stuff like parking their car the wrong way on the entrance corner of a road, then just sitting in there for hours on end? What is he up to????

I might start a new website called “Seen something weird”, where people can post photos of suspicious people or document their sightings of oddness, just in case something bad has coincided with it.

So anyway, if you hear that I’ve been murdered. Contact the coppers and tell them about Mr Weird. They may give you a crime number if they’re not too busy eating biscuits.

Wales
I’m going to Wales tomorrow: two day conference in a posh hotel in Anglesey. I’m just saying that in case of concern and false arrests of weird Ford Mondeo drivers due to my lack of blogging. Wait till the fucker actually does something before telling the coppers about him!

Headache

I have one, it’s a stinker. I blame Tony Blair. Why? Because there no spare capacity in the NHS to buffer things when somebody is sick and the knock-on effect on is that the clinics used to mop patients from cancelled appointments then run TWO HOURS behind. Hence my tea was delayed this evening and when I get hungry, I get a banging headache.

But anyway, I’ve had a cut and blow on my stitches and I’ve been discharged. YAY!

Don’t know what I’m yaying for, my bloody breast, yes grown up word breast, is murdering me. I won’t be doing star jumps for some time yet.

Infinite blogger
I’m being literally inundated with photographs as people wish to participate in the Infinite Blogger Project. I might actually get some with peoples’ faces in the shot eventually.

You know in years to come, Infinite Blogger is going to be one of the BIGGEST things to ever hit the internet. Imagine what it’ll be like to be part of the first series?

My gob will surely get me into terrible trouble one day. I’m sure it has been the main contributory factor in my general failure to climb the career ladder at work (but on a one-rung ladder, that’s not a great problem).

Skip to the end…
I have a terrible habit of taking people’s understanding of me for granted and making jokes. Today’s was throwing in a “skip to the end” as a colleague was telling us all a bit of a long-winded story. Not a boring story by any stretch of the imagination, but a touch convoluted. I wasn’t at all bored with what she was saying, but I couldn’t help interrupting with a “are we nearly there yet?” comment.

What is wrong with me? Luckily she knows I’m taking the piss, but I’m going to do that to the wrong person one day; like the Director when he’s telling us all something really important, droning in, “blah, blah, blah, blah …” like Charlie Brown’s teacher in Peanuts.

“And the really important thing for us is to ensure that we’re in the position to make a really good bid where we stand a chance of real success instead of expending our energis on lots of minor…..”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake man! What’s your fucking point???”

“My point, Tina, is that we won’t have enough funds to staff the department…”

“And…. we’re waiting….”

“…department at current levels and we’re going to have to be making redundancies based on a number of criteria!”

Ho hum.

Date
Some kind soul has suggested that I sign up to an online dating agency. Working in cahoots with Clicky, Whinger has come up with a profile to upload somewhere. Here it is:

Crazy Hair Seeks Non-Crazy
About Me, What I’m Looking For
I am a single professional with a biting wit. I am skeptical of true love, but am willing to give it a go for the sake of filling the nights. I am interested in finding someone who loves a good gripe about the everyday annoyances, and can hold her own in conversation. I am not interested in those who make life overly complicated: there is no need for a toaster when one has a broiler, there are correct ways of doing the dishes, and driving rules must be observed.

For fun:
Taking the piss out of others.

Favorite things:
My lovely felines (I swear, I SWEAR I’m not THAT lesbian), Pepsi products, my computer, and irritating the inbred neighbors.

Now, the question is, should I sign up for a dating thing and post a profile? Would blog world help identify my better attributes? How about holding some online auditions of potential dates right here?

Could you imagine me on a date? Bloody hell. I could imagine me eating some dates, but on a date? With like a real life person? What do you do if you’re not enjoying it and you need to get out of there? What if somebody you know sees you???

Oh God, I don’t think I can cope! Gets me all agitated.

It’s one of those days today. You know the made up days where the card shops, florists, restaurants and chocolatiers are rubbing their hands with absolute glee?

Yes, today is Mother’s Day, or Mothering Sunday or whatver. I’ve no idea what the tradition behind this is, but at least it is a “celebration” that has some tradition from way back – churches have special services so it must be sort of legit.

But Mother’s Day needn’t be expensive (having spent £30 on it myself – flowers from Marks’s that’ll be dead by tomorrow – I reckon I got off lightly, considering all the grief I give my mum) and Asda have produced a 6p Mother’s Day card. Six pence. Surely nobody would have the gall to give one of those things??? When I was skint a few years back, I used to take the time to make my mum a card, which she appreciated of course.

There are other stupid “Days” creeping into the calendar, no doubt directed by the hand of commerce. These are things like grandparent’s day, foster carers’ day, etc. Oh and I’ve no idea what’s going on with my apostrophes today, I blame sleep deprivation because of the clocks going forward. But yeah, all these crap “days” coming in, just so the needy can feel loved (or less loved). At least Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are legit.

In fact, Mother’s Day is so legit that primary schools have special assemblies to which all the mums are invited for the morning (on a FRIDAY) while the little angels sing with their horrid squeaky/whispering/lisping/out of tune voices and all the mums shed tears of joy and pride. One of my colleagues actually took Friday morning off to go to one of these things – without asking, without having to take annual leave, without ensuring that the people she is supposed to supervise were ok with it – she just did it then waltzed in at 11.30. Nice one.

So let’s celebrate all those wonderful, loving, caring mums out there today. If you still have yours, treat her special. Then again, she won’t be as good as Connie, but don’t tell her that.

And let’s celebrate all those skiving bitches who use any fucking excuse to take time out from work so they can go to school sports days, Nativity plays, Mother’s Day assemblies. Selfish fucking morons.

NHS job cuts scandal!
The NHS is the UK’s publicly-funded National Health System. It is the country’s largest employer. Despite having billions of pounds of tax payers’ money thrown at it, the NHS continues to slide further into debt – with not much value for money in terms of services.

Many hospitals are now in the position where they’re having to make staff redundant and the tabloids are shocked and appalled by this, with headlines such as “Hospital makes 200 nurses redundant and advertises for a £40,000 pa manager!”.

Shocking, but 200 nurses cost at least £4 million a year by my reckoning. And then when you take into account the cost of covering Mother’s Day assemblies, sports days, Nativity plays, kiddie sickness. And then you get the “professional mother” nurses, who simply see their job as a method of bankrolling their own propagation: they get pregnant, take mat leave for a year (paid for 6 months) – their job has to be covered by somebody, so that’s two salaries covering the one job; they come back, work for a year, get pregnant, etc, etc.

Ninety percent of the cost of the NHS is on workforce and it’d be interesting to see how much of that pays for sickness absence, recruitment and the cost of secondment and maternity cover.

So what am I saying, that women can’t be mothers and do a good job? Not really, because I’ve seen far more examples of women who are great at both. But there is a significant minority that is seriously taking the piss and this costs loads of money and affects morale in the workplace.

Think on and look sharp.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of those who qualify.

Oh bollocks, a PS
For those who haven’t seen it, take a look at this from The Cloned Corpse of Marcus Tal over at Marcus Tal is Dead. I’m not sure what to make of it (I don’t understand this sort of thing), but I’m honoured to have been included in this scheme… I think. Thank you.

Another PS: wound update
The plaster stitches came off the other night and the exposed ends of the internal stitches are playing merry Hamlet. To see why, click here.

Always happy to make people gag on their tea.

“It was a hot, steamy morning in Manchester as I drove along the Crescent, past Salford University and former Salford Royal Hospital (now luxury apartments) on my way to work…”

Let me introduce you to Temper Rants Brennan, a forensic anthropologist with anger management and alcohol issues. She works between two locations in the UK and has bases in the bustling city of Manchester and the sleepy back(ward)water of Runcorn. There, she analyses the bones and the bodies of the dead to discover the truth about their final moments alive.

She solves these riddles with the help of her assistant Otto, the psychic cat. He has a mystical ability to know when Temper is so much as thinking about tuna fish and comes running to be by her side in an instant. Despite his mysterious, higher plane-like consciousness of tuna availability, Otto has no capability in solving crime.

Of course, our heroine is not to be mistaken with Temperance Brennan, the forensic anthropologist with alcohol issues in the crime books penned by Kathy Reichs, who is, errrrm a forensic anthropologist.

I like the Tempe Brennan books; their plots and characters. I enjoy how the science can be made interesting and how the scientists are portrayed as heroes and not geeks.

Imagine my delight when I heard that a forensic anthropologist had been called in to identify a torso that was discovered as contractors worked to clear the burned-out rubble of a recent warehouse fire. Here in Salford of all places!

I can see it now, the latest in Salford City Council’s “IN Salford” advertising campaigns:

“Get shot at while down the boozer: IN Salford”
“Die in a horrible arson attack while sleeping rough: IN Salford”

Still, so long as we’ve got Temper Rants on our side, justice will always be the winner.

Yeah, right.

I’m taking to my bed for a while. My bosom hurts like a bastard today and gravitational pull isn’t being kind on my stitches.

Song of the week
This isn’t deserving of a post in itself (especially since Blogger couldn’t cope last time), so it’s being tagged on here. Have a listen to this and tell me what you think. I like it and I’m making it my song of the week.

Hrrrm, that’s odd. I may be contacting technical support about something… T&P???? T&P????

Here’s something special to thank Piggy for all his support…

Embedded it wrong indeed!

There’s some weird website, Infinite Cat, that displays hundreds of photos of cats looking at other cats that are displayed on a PC monitor. Here’s the synopsis: “It all began innocently enough when a user on an Apple help web site posted a picture of his cat, Frankie, contemplating the beauty of a flower. Shortly afterwards another user posted a picture of his cat bristling at the image of Frankie on the monitor. I decided this was too much fun and advanced the concept as The Infinite Cat Project which is, simply, cats regarding cats regarding cats in an electronic milieu. If you like this web site then thank your lucky stars that the world is populated with cats, Macs, and people with wayyyy too much time on their hands.”

Still don’t get it? Well here’s a screen shot:

So here’s an idea: why not try an Infinite Blogger Project? You know, I’ll post a picture of me, and then somebody can take a picture of themselves looking at the photo of me, and then somebody can take a photo of them looking at image of whoever’s looking at the photo of me, etc. You know, something sort of like this:

Does anybody fancy having a go at doing this? Of course, since most people don’t want their faces to be shown, it could be difficult, but perhaps a shot of the back of somebody’s head might be OK. Weirdos.

Shall I start?

Hang on a sec, I’ve done it wrong…

THIS one is the one I’m starting with:

And here is my first effort:

Note: It’s much easier and much better for your back if you can get somebody to take the photo for you. I’d have never been able to explain it so it took numerous aborted attempts with the tripod and self timer.

Take it away folks!

I’ve started a special new blog to host these things. It’ll just make it easier to keep track of them if the idea takes off, which it won’t, but if it did, it could get confusing. The link? Infinite blogger

People have been asking what “Yay!” means next to a blog title in my blogroll. It just means that there’s been an update within the last 12hrs. Blogrolling does it automatically from the RSS or atom feed or something like that. I used to have the Blogroll ordered according to most recent update, but this was confusing as the blogs weren’t listed alphabetically. Etc, etc, etc. For some reason, it doesn’t pick up feeds from WordPress, so they don’t appear to be updated.

Calvin and Hobbes
I discovered Calvin and Hobbes in 1989. A friend of mine lent me all of his collection of the books (Calvin and Hobbes, Something under the bed is drooling, Weirdos from another planet) on the night of a party where I got very drunk then walked home through a construction site. This was the night that I tried to start a mechanical digger….

The books survived and I bought my own copies and added to the collection as and when. I then lent my entire collection to somebody and never saw them again. Fuckers.

Having a look around yesterday, I discovered that you can buy a special boxed set: “The Complete Calvin and Hobbes”, for £70, so that should be nice.

“Do you want a paracetamol?”
Mentioning that I had a slight headache this morning, a caring colleague asked whether I’d like some paracetamol. Well no, not really, thank you. I’ve never known paracetamol to be much use for pain relief. In fact, they’re totally, 100% ineffective. Do they actually work for anybody? I think it is one of those conspiracies directed by The Mysterious They to try to kill off large sections of the population who accidentally overdose while trying desperately to get rid of a persistent headache.

That’s what I reckon.

Do you ever get days when you wish you could take to your bed? It used to be a perfectly acceptable thing to do in them days (don’t know which ones, but sometime back then). You’d give the staff their chores for the day, come over a little wan, then take to your bed for a day or two.

It’s called ME these days I think.

Well done, you did it!
I do find the people here at Base 2a wonderful. Yesterday was my first day back here after my sick leave – there was card waiting for me. I opened it up and was thrilled to see that it had been signed with amusing messages from well-wishers. Then I looked at the card itself. On the front, the message reads “Congratulations, hic! hic! hic!” and there’s a drawing of little puppies bouncing on upturned champagne corks, each enjoying a glass of bubbly. Inside, the card’s message reads “…Well done, you did it!”. How appropriate for somebody recovering from surgery.

This was quite funny:

Sometimes when I arrive at work, or home at the end of the working day, my throat is sore from all the shouting and rage that other motorists invite upon themselves because of their own stupidity. Gives me a headache too, so it does.

My particular favourite is when you’re on the motorway and somebody in the outside lane is trying to overtake another vehicle at something like 1mph faster than the vehicle they’re trying to overtake. Surely the point of overtaking somebody is getting past/passed them in a reasonable time? Wagons are usually the worst offenders, but you can have some degree of sympathy with them because of their nature. Somebody who does this in a new 2.0L Ford Mondeo deserves to be run off the road. Useless fuckers.

It was Budget day in the UK yesterday and as usual, normal working people got clobbered for yet more tax. Thieving bastards, this government. Their latest brainwave is to set road tax tariffs that are dependent on a vehicle’s CO₂ emissions. We also pay about 90% tax on petrol so this makes you question the logic of this decision: surely if you drive more, you produce more CO₂, and the more you drive, the more petrol you use, so the more tax you pay anyway.

This just means that Britain’s roads are now going to be overrun with annoying little shit cars being driven by annoying little shites. Annoying little shites that can’t go faster than 65mph, but still insist on trying to overtake on an uphill stretch of the motorway… pulling a fucking caravan.

Oh joy.

Past tense
Nothing causes me tension and anxiety more than the use of past/passed. I am always utterly confused by this and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get my head round it. Obviously there are easy situations, but others just leave me feeling bewildered and let down by my powers of logic and reason.

“It passed me by” – that’s OK
“I walked down the corridor; past the registrar’s office, past the display cabinet, past out” – no chance.

You see, we don’t get taught grammar over here. I’m just lucky that I wasn’t off the day we did apostrophes when I was eight. I think past/passed coincided with a few days off with a swollen knee following the horse incident.

It’s odd how certain things cause long-term hang ups. I can’t cope with statistics, probability or chance. I was once shouted at by my maths teacher because she thought I was taking the piss when, having sailed past/passed trig, calculus, algebra and all the other shite on the curriculum, I came severely unstuck with coin tossing.

If you toss a coin on ten occasions and on each of those occasions, it lands heads, what’s the probability that it will land tails on the 11th toss? Well, I know that it’s 50%, but things then get complicated by the chances of it landing heads in a certain square on a 8 by 8 grid when there’s a full moon.

I’ve also admitted to not knowing where to put full stops when it comes to quotation marks and I basically make commas up.

None of this is particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m trying to find another excuse for explaining why it sometimes take quite a long time for me to write reports that are delayed due to extensive ponderings around the probabilty of getting the correct past/passed choice.

Ho hum.

Doctor, doctor!
Was supposed to be seeing my consultant this afternoon for a post-op chat, but the appointment was cancelled due to illness. Bumholes. Anyway, the nurse phoned me up and it’s all OK as we thought. Sorry Piggy.