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Hearken to so that this century's injection.

Pass upon the podcast in favor of iTunes chevron your well-thought-of podcatcher. Assume't shrug off on route to get on us excellent iTunes quality loop.

In the main I think it's a brilliant idea.  I review all the books I read anyway (I am currently bobbing away at number 88 in their list of top gazillion reviewers. Smirk), and I like getting free stuff.  So far the offerings have been patchy and there have only been a couple of things I've really been pleased to get, but it's always entertaining and I'm never one to turn down the offer of books.

There have been a few glitches in the system, most of which get sorted out fairly promptly, and it is, it seems, still very much a work in progress.  Fair enough.

I did have an unfortunate issue this week though, which has cheesed me off and which I am feeling the need to let off a little steam about.  Hence another blog and an amusing pun on my title page (d'you get it, eh? Ha! Ha! Ha!)

Basically they have now started offering us two lots of stuff per month.  The first newsletter we get is one which is supposed to be tailored more to our needs, which they work out by reading our wish list, looking at our buying records and reviews etc.  The second is whatever is left over as a giant free for all.  We can, if we wish, order two things from each newsletter.  I always do because a) I am greedy and b) I like to review things because I love to see myself in print, because I am an egotistical, narcissistic swine.

The first newsletter of the month came out on Thursday.  It wasn't a great one, but there were a couple of things I was half-heartedly interested in, out of about nine items.  I tried to order them and it came up saying: 'Sorry.  This item is out of stock.' Fair enough.  I went through everything on the list systematically, and ended up only being able to order one thing, a book I really didn't like the sound of.  Everything else, it seemed was already sold out, despite the fact that the newsletter had only been out for about twenty minutes, and the fact that this was the tailored one, so less people would have been offered the things on my list, theoretically making things more available.  I reasoned that perhaps they had just been given less free stuff this month and one thing wasn't so bad.

Later on I went to visit the dedicated Amazon Vine pages, on which they have discussion forums for members.  It turned out when I read the discussion threads that this lack of availability thing had come up for some members but not others.  Some people were freely able to order things, and were still ordering things that my newsletter had said were no longer available.  I didn't think this was fair.

I wrote an e-mail to the dedicated Amazon Vine Help Desk asking why this was the case and if it was a glitch on the system, when it would be rectified.  I got a reply next morning which was clearly a pro forma mail shot.  It said: 'Don't worry.  Sometimes things are out of stock.  Better luck next week.' or words to that effect.  It basically surmised that I was a greedy bastard, complaining that there weren't enough toys for me and if I was just a patient little grabber I could have some new things to play with next week.  Unfair. Obviously they said it in a nice way, because they don't want me to stop ordering the thousands of pounds worth of things I buy from them every year, and they're afraid I might be a mad stalker type who would work out where they live and come round to their house to read them A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu as a punishment (in the original French, naturellement)

I wrote back and said: 'You have not answered my question.  Your stuff is not out of stock, so why can't I order it?'

I went back to the forums. People were posting that the glitch had obviously been fixed.  I tried again.  Everything was now in stock, and I was able to order one of the items I wanted.  I thought no more of it, and didn't hear back from the Help Desk.

This evening I did finally hear back from the Help Desk.  Their reply said something along the lines of: 'My! You are a greedy little bitch aren't you? Didn't you hear me when I said that everything was out of stock.  That's what happens sometimes.  Deal with the disappointment and we'll send you some stuff next week.'  In a nice way, obviously.  They would never be rude, due to the overhanging threat of Proust.

I was quite cross.  I was even more cross when they asked me if this mail had answered my question for me:

Here is the reply I posted:

NO

THE ITEMS WERE NOT OUT OF STOCK. THE ITEMS WERE NEVER OUT OF STOCK. THAT IS THE POINT.

AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID IN MY MAIL. WHICH YOU CLEARLY DIDN'T READ

PROPERLY: FOR THE SECOND TIME - OTHER PEOPLE WERE ABLE TO ORDER THE STOCK BUT I WAS NOT.

IF THE STUFF WAS JUST ORDINARILY OUT OF STOCK THEN THAT WOULD BE NORMAL AND I WOULDN'T HAVE TO MAIL THE HELP DESK ABOUT IT WOULD I? I'M NOT GETTING STROPPY BECAUSE THINGS GO OUT OF STOCK. THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS TO STOCK WHEN PEOPLE ORDER IT.

WHAT DOESN'T HAPPEN IS STUFF BEING OUT OF STOCK FOR ONE PERSON AND NOT FOR OTHER PEOPLE WHEN IT'S THE SAME STOCK AT THE SAME TIME AND FOR THE SAME PROGRAMME. THAT MEANS THAT THERE IS AN ERROR ON THE SYSTEM AND I'M SUFFERING FOR YOUR FAILURE TO ADDRESS IT.

WHILE YOU HAVE FAILED FOR SEVERAL DAYS NOW TO READ AND ANSWER MY QUERY CORRECTLY AND WITH ANY LEVEL OF ATTENTION AND/OR INTELLIGENCE THE PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED.

SOMEONE ON THE VINE FORUMS MAILED ME TO SAY THAT THE STOCK, WHICH YOU HAVE SPENT THREE DAYS TELLING ME IS UNAVAILABLE TO ME, IS NOW AVAILABLE, NOT BECAUSE IT WAS OUT OF STOCK, BUT BECAUSE SOMEONE IN CHARGE OF PROGRAMMING THE SYSTEM HAD MESSED UP.

NOW SOMEONE HAS FIXED THE PROBLEM AND I CAN ORDER WHAT I WANT.

DID YOU HELP ME? NO

IS MY PROBLEM RESOLVED? YES - NO THANKS TO YOU

PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME A JOLLY PRO FORMA E-MAIL ABOUT HOW HAPPY YOU ARE THAT MY PROBLEM IS RESOLVED.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME A MAIL SAYING HOW SORRY YOU ARE THAT YOU FAILED ON BOTH OCCASIONS TO ACTUALLY READ CORRECTLY WHAT MY PROBLEM WAS OR SOLVE IT FOR ME.

IT WOULD JUST BE NICE IF YOU COULD ACTUALLY DO YOUR JOB INSTEAD OF RELYING ON MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC TO DO IT FOR YOU.

 I dithered about sending it.  Writing it did me the power of good.  Particularly writing in block capitals.  I found it incredibly therapeutic.  Then I thought: 'Fuck it! I will send it, because it's not my fault is it? And how will they ever learn to help anyone if someone doesn't tell them when they're not helping?'  So I sent it.

About ten minutes later I received this reply:

Thank you for your interest in Amazon Shorts, a new program featuring previously unpublished short-form literature. Each piece is available exclusively at Amazon.com, is transmitted in a digital format, and costs only $0.49. It's a great way for authors to promote their new books, keep backlist titles mover visible, and reach a broad audience of millions of Amazon.com customers.

We are currently accepting author submissions for Amazon Shorts. At this time, program eligibility is open to only those authors with product listed on Amazon.com. You will receive a response via e-mail or phone within two weeks.

Again, thank you for your interest in Amazon Shorts. We look forward to speaking with you soon.

Amazon Shorts

 As I replied to the person who sent me the mail about my problem I am completely baffled as to why this came back.  I am so baffled I have decided to give up on the Amazon Vine Help Desk Team, who are clearly all smacked out of their minds and running around swinging from the trees somewhere having a high old time.  I am just going to carry on posting my reviews as normal and hoping that next week I will actually be able to order the things I want and not receive an old tea pot, a shoe and a lemon, and that I don't get thrown off the programme because I have shown a non existent interest in a short story competition that I didn't even know was happening.

It’s not that things are any more interesting than usual.  Maybe it’s that I’m more interested than usual.  The kids are also making me laugh quite a lot and as I don’t do photos (see previous blog about my prowess with a camera) I do verbal snapshots instead, which means I wander round with a notebook a lot taking cryptic notes about the stupid stuff they do and say.  The problem is that my notes are so cryptic that if I don’t write them up fairly promptly I have no idea what it was that made me nearly die with laughter and valuable ammunition is lost for the time they get boy and girlfriends and I produce all this as evidence before demanding genetic testing and insanity clauses in the pre nup.

So.  I posted earlier about their collecting and disco dancing with pants on their head.  Shortly after that we decided to go out and meet my friend Saj at Borders.  Saj is a serial dumper in our friendship.  She frequently promises to come round and then invariably gets side tracked and doesn’t.  It has been six months and about fifteen promises since we last saw her.  As she was definitely within geographical range today, having a pathological need to shop at the shopping centre near our house we decided it was too good an opportunity to miss and went to capture her and bring her to our king.  To be fair to her, I never go to see her.  This is partly because she lives in Loughborough and I have a pathological hatred of Loughborough based on the fact that it is mostly full of physical education students running around in purple tracksuits and looking healthy.  It is also because she lives a student type life style in a shared house and I have three small children in tow.  The two lifestyles are not really compatible and never the twain shall meet.

Saj shops more than me.  Saj’s hobby is shopping.  Last time she came to my house she was three hours late because she was canoodling with a personal shopper in Monsoon.  She is unable to resist the siren’s call to go to the shops as often as possible.  Saj shops more than a personal shopper.  This is frequently why Saj fails to come and see us.  She is too busy maxing out her credit card.  To be fair to her she is also young, free and single and has a social life that put mine to shame even when I was young free and single myself.  She is often too partied out to come and see us too.  And who can blame her? Who wants to be surrounded by three hyperactive midgets all clamouring for attention when their head is pounding to the rhythm of the previous night’s pumping bass tunes and their handbag is full of sick? Not me, and I’m related to them.

Anyway, she was at Fosse Park shopping today, so we knew we could creep up on her.  We met her in Borders for cake and coffee.  Saj doesn’t usually shop at Borders so it was virgin territory for her, but due to the cake and children who threw themselves at her, squeaking with delight she liked it, although she was quite perturbed that Jason bought a book, particularly because it was 1984.  Saj had to read it for GCSE English and apparently it made her sick with boredom and frightened the pants off her.  Not a winning combination then really.  Still, she should have been glad that we didn’t buy it for her.  And Tilly did a picture of some Jimmy Choos for her, so all was not lost. 

Saj’s fatal weakness in the grand scheme of shopping is the sub category of shoes.  She has been known to offer workshops to men on the subject of how to judge women and relationships by the qualities of the shoes of both parties involved.  It is a serious subject.  She loves shoes, shoes, clothes and makeup, but mainly shoes.  She’s also been known to walk a mile over hot coals for a handbag, but only if it will match her shoes.  She doesn’t envy me any of my pairs of shoes, although she doesn’t know that my mum bought me a pair of Gina shoes the other day, so she might now.  She does envy me my Ghost handbag though.  Unfortunately my Gina shoes don’t go with my Ghost handbag.  I still love my handbag best.  It is the nicest handbag in the world and luckily for me it is so big I could fit a child in it, or enough things so that I can keep a fractious child amused for several days.

When Saj went to America for four months before Oscar was born I had to babysit a hamper full of shoes that she couldn’t be parted from so that nobody would steal them away while she was gone.  She also brought the girls two carrier bags full of killer heels for their dressing up box and deposited several more hampers with other kind people with shoe shaped spare rooms.  It is a serious addiction.  She favours Choos.  I prefer Manolos and Louboutins.  I don’t have either.  Saj does have Choos and killer Armani heels which look like weaponry.  She goes out dancing in these things.  Much kudos to her.  My dancing days involved Doc Martens or Mary Janes.  A lot, lot easier to dance in than four inch spikes.  Just the thought makes me want to cry.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was not the delights of our visit with her, because it was indeed delightful and I did promise her that I would write about her in the blog, hence the preamble.  What I really wanted to write about was what happened with the children both before and after we met up with her.

Before we met her we had to get out the door, and with three kids it’s no easy matter. The shoe cupboard has become a midden and is full of things that nobody wants to wear any more, or which the kids have grown out of, but which we haven’t gotten round to throwing away yet.  It also seems to contain three kites, two water pistols and a broken umbrella which I’m still puzzling over.  The forage through the shoe cupboard takes twenty minutes and a miner’s lamp and that’s before they have to have a wee, find their coats, argue over who is sitting next to who and then realise they need another wee because they’ve spent so long doing all the other things. 

Now, we have to keep all the bathroom doors firmly shut at the moment because Oscar has taken to turning on all the bath taps and dropping various crucial items down the toilet.  Ironically one of his favourite things to drop down the toilet is the wooden toilet from Tallulah’s dolls house.  It’s all very quantum. 

So, Tilly was rummaging in the shoe cupboard while Jason directed her with a torch and an ordnance survey map, I was doing something complicated in the study and keeping half an eye on Oscar, and Tallulah was in the toilet having her wee.  Tallulah came out of the toilet and unbeknownst to me, forgot to shut the door.  I turned to find my purse and Oscar toddled into the toilet and grabbed the first thing he could see which happened to be the toilet brush.  He then appeared round the study door, waving the toilet brush triumphantly and looking extraordinarily happy with himself.  He shouted ‘Teef! Clean!’ and shoved the dripping end of the toilet brush into his mouth before I could a) scream or b) run towards him.  He did not look very impressed with himself after he had lowered the brush, nor when I wrenched it out of his hot little grip.  Tallulah didn’t look very impressed with herself when she got a firm reprimand for not shutting the door, and I was not very impressed with myself for not having Zola Budd’s sprinting abilities.

My one consolation is that the toilet brush is much larger than his mouth and I am hoping that very little of it managed to wend its way into his gaping maw.  As it is I have been forcibly giving him lots of liquids ever since and praying a lot.  I really, really don’t want to spend the next few days trying to explain to the hospital how I let my child get dengue fever from the toilet brush.  As it is I nearly had to take him this evening because he tried to sit in his favourite bucket while he was having a shower and got his little fat bottom wedged in it.  Luckily he fell over because he was top heavy and that shunted it off his bum with a small pop!  Phew!  I spoke to my mum afterwards, and when she had finished picking herself up from the floor laughing she pointed out that it would have come off easily if I’d drilled a hole in the bottom of the  bucket to relieve the pressure.  A useful tip for the future no doubt.  She sounded very knowledgeable about it, so I presume that either me or my brother has been this way before.

After we got back from our trip out the girls were playing upstairs and Tilly came running to see me, trailed by Tallulah.  Tilly was in one of those breathlessly expectant states of excitement which meant that she had either discovered how to turn lead into gold or had found something which she thought was really going to get her sister into trouble.  The lead thing turned out to be a red herring and it was just the usual.  Tallulah is an avid collector of tea sets.  If you ever ask her what she wants for birthdays or Christmases a tea set will be somewhere on the list.  She has several.  One of her nicest ones is a really beautiful carved wooden one that my friend Rachel bought her. It comes complete with wooden tea bags on strings, lumps of wooden sugar and wooden cake.  It’s excellent.

As exhibit A for the prosecution Tilly had one of the tea cups in her hand.  She showed it to me wide eyed and bushy tailed, positively quivering for the kill.  In the bottom of the cup, in fact, half way up the sides of the cup was what looked like melted chocolate.  I enquired further.  It turns out that it was melted chocolate.  When I asked how come it was melted and how come it was in the bedroom, where they are not allowed to have any food of any kind, particularly not quantities of melted chocolate, it turned out that Tallulah had been smuggling portions of her sweetie time upstairs in her cheeks like a hamster.  Once it was sufficiently melted she was drooling it into her tea cups so that she could pretend it was coffee and play proper tea parties.  Yum yum.

I was a) disgusted, b) impressed at her ingenuity (we have discussed before how I find it much harder to get annoyed about naughty things which show some creative flair) and c) splitting my sides with laughter.  I tried to be cross, but unfortunately me falling about all over the floor and holding my sides put paid to that trip to the naughty step and I had to make her vow never to do it again before sending them both packing.  Tilly was quite disappointed that fireworks hadn’t erupted, but was forced into laughing along with everyone else, bless her scheming, black little heart.  We’ve scrubbed the cup, raided the giant tea set mountain to make sure there is no more evidence of chocolate based drool products and vowed never to speak of it again, except to you obviously….

Five things found in your bag:

1. A picture of Son.
2. My three small wallets (one holds money, the credit cards I use most and my insurance cards, one holds the rest of my credit cards and one holds discount and gift cards). Hey, it works for me.
3. Purell.
4. Halls Sugar Free Cough Drops.
5. Colonoscopy Preparation instructions. Aren't I lucky?

Okay, technically that's seven things, but whatever.

Five favorite things found in your room:

1. My grandmother's antique bedroom set. I love it, even thoguh the drawers stick and it's a bit banged up. When Husband moved in he couldn't sleep in Grandma's double bed, so it lives beneath the king bed we bought together.
2. My dog Jonah. He, or rather his ashes, reside in a box on my bookcase. I know it's morbid, but I loved him so very much that when I go I want us to be buried (or have our ashes spread) together.
3. My parents' wedding album. Even though they only stayed married for ten years it has pictures of them when they were young, and pictures of their parents, siblings, cousins, etc.
4. Bunny and Cubby. They are the only two toys from my childhood that survived the maybe-she's-allergic-to-stuffed-animals purge that preceded my tonsillectomy four days before my seventh birthday. Bunny was my first toy and my Mom let me keep it. Cubby was my first post-tonsillectomy stuffed animal/birthday present (no party for me that year), and I remember clearly going to the ToysRUs and buying it. Bunny and Cubby sit next to Jonah on the bookcase.
5. Husband.

Five things you have always wanted to do:

1. A cartwheel. Couldn't do one to save my life. Being able to do anything athletic well would do.
2. Have an artistic talent. I'd like to be able to bring on goosebumps when I sing, but in a good way for a change. I'd like to draw something recognizable or sculpt something that doesn't look like a lump.
3. Be able to eat anything I want without having to worry about my weight.
4. Visit Siberia. I've wanted to ever since reading The Endless Steppe as a child. Seriously.
5. Meet Helen Keller.

Five things you are currently into:

1. Playing with Son. He is currently very into driving his trains into his trucks and cars. And so am I.
2. Packing my Dad's house.
3. Rummikub.
4. Blogging.
5. Fuzzy socks.

Five people you’d like to tag:

I think perhaps I have tagged some of these friends before but, hey, what can I say, my circle is not that big.

1. My friend Patty
2. Mrs. Micah
3. This Wasn’t In The Plan
4. Frugal Babe
5. Twist & Skewer

Ich habe seit 1,5 Monaten nicht mehr gebloggt. Es ist einiges passiert. Das Abi ist fast rum, einige sind ein Jahr älter geworden...und bei mir wechseln sich Dauergrinsen und Sorgenfalten ab. Aber meistens überwiegt das Dauergrinsen :)

Ich bin glücklich. So. Wollte ich mal los werden. Hihi.

Ich freu mich auf den Sommer!
(Ich hab heute mit dem Gedanken gespielt, mir einen Bikini zu kaufen. Allerdings trau ich den Dingern nicht. Die, die ich heute anprobiert hab, scheinen mir nicht sehr...äh... beständig (?) zu sein. Jedenfalls bin ich dann doch nicht so exhibitionistisch veranlagt.)

• Andrea Del Castagno painted ‘a number of illustrious men in a hall,’  You can tell because of the hat stand and collection of Wellingtons in the corner.

At lunchtime today Matilda asked me if people who explored cheese were known as cheeseneers.  I asked her why she would think that.  She replied that people who explored the woods were known as ‘pioneers’, and she was just wondering.  We then had to have an explanation of why pioneers weren’t people who explored the woods.  I then asked her if she had ever met a cheese explorer.  She hasn’t as it turns out.  I think she is hoping to though.

Shortly thereafter Tallulah asked me if I thought you might kill yourself if you ate glass.  This kind of questioning sums up the extreme personality difference between my two children, one of whom lives in an imaginary world populated by cheeseneers and one of whom contemplates even more hideous ways to kill oneself.  I was very vehement in my anti-eating glass stance.  This led to a strange and complicated conversation about why a person might want to eat glass in the first place and my stance on suicide, including my thoughts on why someone would want to commit suicide.  I didn’t say: ‘Because even the simple act of sitting down and eating a cheese sandwich might involve deep moral investigations into methods and ethics of committing suicide, which is a discussion most parents don’t have to enter into with their four year olds, and which makes a person’s head ache quite a lot.’

We then had a conversation about collections.  Matilda is a great believer in collections at the moment, and her interest has been aroused because we read a Nicholas story yesterday (from our new book, Nicholas and the Gang), where Nicholas and his friends decided to take up stamp collecting.  Naturally it ended with Eddie punching everyone on the nose and Alec covering his stamp in smears of croissant.  They were most amused, and now it is one of Tilly’s pet subjects.  She expounded fervently on the delights of her three collections.  These are:

1. A collection of sweetie wrappers that she keeps in an old Quality Street tin and which I catch her sniffing at times of crisis, in much the same way as someone addicted to glue.

1. A collection of stones from the garden which she keeps at school because when she keeps them at home she invariably gets into trouble for scattering them hither and yon and feeding them by accident to her baby brother.

1. A collection of toilet roll tubes.  This is her latest collection.  She only has two so far, but is very excited about the possibility of having a third quite soon.  I asked her what she was going to do with them and she just shrugged happily.  It seems that it is enough just to own them.

Tallulah is quite jealous of Tilly’s collections (Tallulah is quite jealous of Tilly. Fin).  She tried to start a sweetie wrapper collection of her own, but she keeps forgetting that she’s collecting them and throwing the wrappers in the bin.  She will invariably have a Homer Simpson ‘Doh!’ moment about five seconds after it has been covered in beans or dirty nappies.  It is, it is clear to see, not a terribly successful collection.  I don’t worry about it too much, due to the fact that her collection is based on elder sister envy rather than any deep and lasting desire to own a load of sweetie wrappers.

Careful readers will be aware of what happened to her fledgling stone collection, which I ended up picking off the kitchen floor last night.  This has gone the same way as the stone collection her sister started to keep in the house.  She is now talking about starting a toilet roll collection, but only to annoy Matilda.  You can tell she hasn’t really got the heart for it.  She just can’t resist a bit of sister baiting.

She does have a postcard collection.  My mother gave her a load of postcards that she hasn’t sold and isn’t ever likely to sell.  Tallulah loves them, but they’re even less likely to increase in value now due to the fact that she has little reverence for the collection and spends quite a lot of time writing on them, creating her own stamp designs, folding them into rhomboids and trying to shove them under people’s doors.

My mother is a great one for collections and always has been.  It’s a part of her hoarding instinct.  She also gave the bug to my dad, unfortunately.  Things that she has collected and continues to collect include:

• Huge, brown, industrial sized tea pots.  At one stage the pantry was full of them.  Sometimes she would fill them with pennies.  Other times she would just fill them with dust.  The only thing you could be sure of was the fact that she would never fill them with tea.  She only liked ugly brown ones. I tried her on pretty ones, she just couldn’t warm to them.

• Victorian jelly moulds.  These were huge and unwieldy.  They weighed about twenty pounds each.  They were gorgeous on the inside but unsightly on the outside and almost impossible to display.  She was forced to leave them in the pantry along with the hideous brown teapots of doom.  As with the previous collection, no jelly was harmed in the making of these moulds.

• Toby jugs, but only ones which featured Welsh women in traditional costume.  You would think that this was quite a niche market, and you would have one or two in your collection at most.  Sadly not.  Turns out that they were very popular, and at the peak of the collecting fervour she had about forty, the tiny beady Welsh eyes of which would invariably follow you round the room.

• Commemorative mugs.  She made us collect these too.  They were universally ugly and we didn’t like them at all.  We would get them on special occasions, high days, holidays and if they were on sale.  Her theory was that it would provide us with mugs so that we wouldn’t need to buy any when we set up house for ourselves.  A kind of dowry if you will.

• Nasty German wine jugs which were made from poured concrete, featured jolly German mottos about getting shit faced and had florid bunches of blue and grey grapes on them.  They ranged in size from midget to huge and there were about a hundred of the damn things around the house at one point.

I have to say that it’s much nicer now that they tend to sell things on, and now that she is mostly collecting bits of paper. They are much easier to store and don’t land on your head when you’re sneaking through the pantry at four in the morning to have a sneaky slice of cake.

All the nice things they have mum invariably breaks.  All the ugly things are totally indestructible.  It’s just the law.  She had some fantastic World War One Jam pot lids with cartoons on that were worth a fortune which she dropped, probably on the pantry floor.  She also blew the delicate Vaseline glass Victorian posy flute out the kitchen window where it smashed onto the path below.  Never get her to look after your most treasured possessions, although she is quite good with small children, except the time she catapulted Tilly off the top step of the kitchen on a rotating ladybird.  That was a difficult day.

I think she got the collecting bug from my gran.  She didn’t have a chance to collect much in her earlier life, being too poor and busy with three small children and a husband who was keen on the outdoors and fresh air for everyone. In later life she liked to collect things that nobody else would give a home to.  The more horrible the things were, the more she felt sorry for them, and the more she wanted them.  This is why she ended up with:

• Big bowls of china fruit and vegetables which didn’t ever look like fruit and vegetables and made people cry.  I once bought her an artificial potato in a basket for Christmas. She loved it.
• Snow globes of places nobody wanted to visit like Hunstanton sewage works.
• Deer heads and random antlers on the wall.
• Paintings by people with no heads, hands, eyes or taste, but who liked to work ‘big’ and ‘bold’
• Pictures of people’s bottoms.
• Sand from every place she had ever been to in jars, buckets cups and old Heinz tomato sauce bottles.
• Stones, the bigger the better, preferably with holes in.
• Random jars of pennies, which she would give you on your birthday if you were lucky.  Again these ranged from the tiny pots of jam you get in hotels up to giant mayonnaise jars. She got really cross if you threw away a jar she could fill with small currency.
• Large wooden sculptures of eagles made out of railway sleepers.  She had one in particular called Leera (because it would look at you funny).  I was terrified of it and hated having to go for a wee at her house in the middle of the night because Leera would be watching me on the landing and might kill me and peck my eyes out.

My mother encouraged my brother and I to have collections when we were small.  She thought it was healthy and would keep us out of trouble.  It would be interesting to see how many psychopaths were forced to have collections of Victorian penny farthings as a child.  I don’t know what she was basing her findings on.  It certainly didn’t stop me drinking to excess and engaging in hair curling activities as a teenager.  Still, who knows what I might have been doing if I hadn’t had my collection of scented rubbers in the shape of sausages, stamps from Romania and postcards of Hop Picking in Essex to keep me on the straight and narrow. I’d probably be on a filthy mattress in a crack joint surrounded by the rotting corpses of my dead babies by now.

I can’t remember what Robert collected.  He was never very keen and was always much more anarchic than me when it came to things like that.  I think at one time he might have had a collection of those weird little beer mugs that were about the same size as shot glasses and had nasty pictures of water wheels with the legend: ‘A souvenir from Chipping Sodbury’ on them.  I think this may have been due to the fact that my mother would bring them back for him from antique fairs, rather than from his overwhelming desire to drink midget sized pints of beer.

I gave up all my collecting activities in my late teens.  If I had been my mother I’d have been wildly relieved as by then my collections had gone from the standard stamps, postcards, rubbers to quite odd things.  At one time I had:

• A collection of wooden spoons and various other wooden culinary implements which I kept in jars around my bedroom, rather like other people keep vases of flowers.

• Pictures of eyes, hands, feet and other bodily parts which I cut out and made into a giant collage which covered two whole walls of my rather large bedroom.  It unnerved lots of people and I didn’t have many visitors at that time.  Eventually even I got a bit weirded out.

• Flotsam and jetsam washed up from the beach where my then boyfriend’s parents lived.  I had a rusted milk churn (I was made to keep this outside), half a tree, hundreds of bits of weirdly shaped driftwood, the lid of a barrel from a Russian cargo ship (nobody knew what was in it, because naturally it was written on in Russian.  It stank to high heaven and was something else I was obliged to keep outside), glass fishing floats, bowls and bowls of stones and shells which I used to fill with water so that they would go all shiny, and then fail to empty out when they went mouldy and stank and lots of smelly rope with cork floats (outside).

• Hats. I loved hats.  I had loads of hats, and campaigned for many years for a hat stand, which I eventually drove my parents mad with, taking it to and from university each term.  They hated me.  Serves them right for encouraging me to collect things.

• A pair of crutches and a hockey stick.  This was to be the basis of a collection of tall things.  I also wanted a false leg (don’t ask! I have no idea.  It seemed like a good idea at the time), a lacrosse stick and some stilts.  It petered out after the crutches, due to lack of enthusiasm on my parents’ front for subbing me for a false leg.  Spoil sports.

• Uniforms and army stuff.  I don’t mean military hardware.  I just liked those second hand army supply shops where you could get all manner of strange things.  I had a fantastic Norwegian seamen’s jumper which came down to my knees and saw me through many a cold winter.  I also had dog tags, a navy pea jacket, a kit bag and several hats.  My ambition was to own a belt with all the spent gun cartridges in and a full Admiral’s uniform.  Sadly it was never to be.  Men in the navy were rather small, and once my bosom started growing I was on a losing streak there.

Anyway.  When I got to be eighteen I got rid of most of my collections except for the hats and the uniforms.  My mum was worried about me, so tried to encourage me back into the world of collecting by starting several collections which she thought might stop me from sliding into depravity, having tattoos and making her a grandmother.  The first thing she chose was shoe horns!  Why she chose shoe horns I’ll never know.  I was slightly amazed when she turned up with a couple announcing that it would do me good and I could use this to get going.  I just couldn’t get enthusiastic about the world of shoe horns, so she tried a couple of other things (cigarette cases might have been one of them.  Clearly she wasn’t worried about me smoking myself to death), but it was all to no avail.  My collecting days were over, but it looks like my children have got the bug and will carry on the fine tradition, thus ensuring they grow up healthy and in sound mind and body, just like their mother!

Anyway, I’m writing this so that I can keep an eye on the kids without actually interfering too much.  They’re next door having a disco to the strains of Abba’s Waterloo.  As indicated in previous blogs, for some reason they think that having a disco means that you have to wear pants on your head.  They are all replete with pants, which is good.  They are jigging about, pants aloft with their hobby horses in one hand and various weaponry in the other.  It’s a bandido’s disco as far as I can see.  Still, as long as they’re doing something creative and not just watching telly I don’t mind too much.

After lunch we did colouring.  They have all done pictures for Caron’s new baby.  Tallulah and Tilly were very keen on the theme of aliens and have done pictures of the baby being taken away in an alien space ship.  I don’t know whether this will reassure Caron, but after a week of no sleep she might find that thought strangely soothing.  I know I probably would.  Oscar has done some lovely squiggles.  He’s very into drawing circles at the moment.  He did one and I said in an encouraging voice: ‘Oh! Oscar! That’s lovely! You’ve drawn an ‘o’ for Oscar.’  He looked at me, looked at his work, pointed at it and said very firmly: ‘No.  Pooh.’ So there you have it.

Oh! I love my new site

It’s all spangly and shiny

I am so happy with it

I can’t stop having a little look

Oh! I love my new site

Even when I have a little look

And it looks just like it did

When I looked five minutes before

Oh! I love my new site

Just because it is all clean and sparkly

And has some moody trees

Covered in clean, sparkly snow

Oh! I love my new site

Even though it’s still full

Of the same old bollocks I always write

Because sadly it’s not a magic site

Oh! I love my new site

It is just so me, me, me

Well, me today anyway

But possibly not me tomorrow

Because that is the strange Heraclitan nature of time and  existence itself…

Fin

By Katy (aged 21 and a bit)

Anyway I'm not that fussed on what beer I drink but I have to see one and choose one before I order. The problem occurs when I enter a bar with a low fridge. I am five foot two and I don't wear heels. I can't actually see half of the bottles behind the staff. I'm met with odd looks as I crane my neck over the taps and eventually give up and order a spirit instead. Adding insult to injury last night, I couldn't find a name on a bottle that I fancied and settled on Jack. The girl smiled really wide and asked if I wanted to make it a double for a pound. Being slow on the uptake I said sure. She almost winked at me, I could see the muscles in her face moving to do it. Of course as she moved to get the bottle I realised she meant an extra pound. £4.10 gone in one glass I didn't really want.

I can't help but think I wasted a fiver basically because I am too short.

For all you know all of this blogging could be an elaborate tissue of lies.  I could be a twenty one year old chinchilla breeder called Mitzi with hair extensions and twelve inch nails.  I’m not, by the way.  The nails thing would make it almost impossible to type anything, certainly not in the same room as the keyboard anyway.  And as for the name Mitzi. I would have long been in prison by now for murdering my deluded parents for saddling me with what is in effect the name of a small dog that lives in some Louis Vuitton luggage.

I am a bit slow to experiment with technology and it has taken me this long to work out that there are hundreds of lovely templates available in the Wordpress archives.  I had a wonderful time last night when I should have been boning up on the world of Renaissance Art, trying them all out for size and taking them for a test run.  For some reasons I am drawn to all the ones with black backgrounds which look very technical and important.  Unfortunately, due to my deteriorating eyesight I couldn’t actually read any of the text on them, and then I decided that my mother would complain as well, so I binned that idea after staring longingly at it for some time.

It’s amazing how much you can do when you’re putting off other things.  I also decided that as you can customise the picture at the top of the site that I would.  I had no idea how to go about it.  It is, it turns out relatively simple.  It took me an hour to find this out, along with much cursing and wailing.  This is because the instructions fail to take into account that I too am relatively simple.  Anyway.  I did want to upload one of my own pictures, but I only really have pictures of the family on my p.c. and as much as I like to destroy their dignity and privacy by writing about them, I do draw the line at people actually being able to recognise them in the street.  Just in case one of my regular bloggers turns out to be a psychotic axe maniac with a penchant for butchering small children in their beds.  I did have an excellent picture of Jason pointing at a huge poster that says ‘Safety First!’ and looking very wise and strokey beardy, and I think he can defend himself from axe murderers so I gave it a go.  Unfortunately it was the wrong dimensions to fit the available space and although I could size it, for some reason I could only get it to give me a picture of his ankles.  His ankles weren’t very inspiring, love them though I do, so I abandoned that idea.

Then I thought about my cousin Tom, who is a graphic designer and who comes up with brilliant ideas.  Unfortunately by the time I thought about him it was about 11.00 p.m. and I didn’t really think he would appreciate a call from a frantic me, asking him to whip something up which expressed my deep nature and delicate soul in the next five minutes.  He is an undoubted genius, but probably not at eleven o’clock at night.  I am going to mail him and ask him later though, because I think he will do a brilliant job and it will be the icing on the undoubtedly delicious cake of my new virtual makeover (grovel, lick, spittle, grovel).

Then I remembered that you can sometimes get free images from Googling and that they might have something that would do.  I found a lovely site and some quite nice pictures, and they said that I didn’t have to sign up, or tell them my thoughts on the situation in Eastern Europe, or who I think will win the next Eurovision song contest, I could just have them.  I was very impressed and picked one.  It then gave me lovely instructions but said that the one catch was that I had to insert a hyperlink saying how fabulous they were.  I managed to load the picture with relative ease, but it then took me another twenty minutes to do the link, which you will now find in my blogroll as I still can’t do text hyperlinks at all.  It is the next thing on my list of things to learn so that I can carry on avoiding learning things about Italian art.

So, I hope you like the site.  It’s a bit spangly, it’s a bit new, but remember, it’s the same old bollocks content, so rest assured that’s not going to change.  In fact, due to my insane interest in blogging at the minute, it’s likely to go from bad to worse.  Hey ho.

Despite my best efforts to avoid any real intellectual work, I am making headway with the Vasari book, mainly because the number of books I need to review has started stacking up again, and I still have to read that book that Caron lent me six months ago.  Also, I’m so bored of Vasari that I am actually reading it so that I can just get the damn thing over with and move on to something else.  Remember I said yesterday that it promised to be racy and full of thrill packed gossip?  Well, it has picked up a little.  That’s probably because I’ve actually managed to read 210 pages instead of forty pages, sheer volume alone must account for some gossip being inserted between the interminable lists of paintings.

Remember: ‘I go there so you don’t have to.’ So here is what I have found out so far:

• Paolo Uccello got very cross when he was working at a monastery where all they fed him was cheese.  One day he got so cross that he ran away and refused to come back until they stopped feeding him so much cheese.

• Filippo Brunelleschi might have been talented enough to vault the Dome in Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence but he was an insufferable prig who was always being mean to his so called ‘friends’.  Apparently he pulled a hilarious stunt with ‘the Fat Man and Matteo’, but we are never privy to the details (presumably much like the Monty Python joke, it was so hilarious it would have killed you on contact).  He also did a cunning ruse with an egg which was so exciting I can’t possibly relate it here.

• Donatello was too lazy to look after his farms properly.  They never tell you that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

• Piero Della Francesca was excellent at painting peasants leaning on spades.

• Antonella Da Messina was exceptionally good at varnish.  In fact he revolutionised the world of varnish.  He did this by stealing some revolutionary varnish recipes from a bloke in Brugges.  How noble.

• Fra Filippo Lippi actually was quite exciting.  He ran away from an order of monks so he could pursue painting and shagging. He got kidnapped by a bunch of Barbary pirates and was kept in chains for eighteen months until he did a portrait of the pirate king and they let him go.  One of the Medicis locked him in a room to try and make him finish a painting he had commissioned.  He got so overcome with lust for loose women that he tore the bed sheets into strips, knotted them together and escaped through the window so he could assuage his heat filled loins.  He brought an entire convent of nuns into disrepute when he ran away with and impregnated one of their order.  Generally he was not the Messiah, he was a very, very naughty boy.  Good on him I say.  Apparently he wasn’t very good at painting hands though, so he quite often covered them up with bits of cloth.  Fair play.  Apparently L.S. Lowry was crap at horses, particularly their legs, which is why, if he ever felt the need to put a horse in his pictures, they are always behind walls.  It’s why my paintings are all painted black.  I’m crap at everything so I just paint them behind a large, black tablecloth.

• Lots of painters, according to Vasari, were total nobodies who were all employed as sheep and goat herders and then were miraculously discovered by troupes of roving art Svengalis who were out on a picnic and happened to spot their artistic talent.  They did this, not because they were herding their sheep in an artistic manner, but because they were so possessed by the power of art that they drew in sheep pooh with their crooks and stuff.  The hills around Florence must have been awash with artistically stifled goat herds and picnickers with a keen eye for perspective during the Renaissance.

• I have worked out that when Vasari goes; ‘It was so beautiful that I have no words to describe it’, that he probably didn’t actually see it at all and can’t be bothered to make something up in case someone blows his cover.  Lazy, lazy, lazy.

So, there you have it.  The highlights of the Italian art scene during the Renaissance so far. I’ve got another three hundred pages left to read, so if anything else exciting crops up, I will be sure to let you know.  You can write and thank me later when you’ve dazzled some bright young thing at a dinner party with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the cheese hating ways of Paolo Uccello and consequently made beautiful love to them all night long.  It’s all down to me, me, me.

Other things that have been happening in my tiny world are as follows:

I found out more about the delights of Tallulah’s farm trip, mainly through earwigging furiously.  Here is the conversation between Tilly and Tallulah over dinner on the night of the fateful farm trip:

Tallulah: ‘I saw loads of animals at the farm Tilly.’

Tilly: Supremely disinterested.  She knows all about farms already. It’s no big deal to a nearly nine year old: ‘Did you?’

Tallulah: Looking for a rise: ‘Yes! I saw some piglets this big.’ Gestures with thumb and forefinger to twenty pence size.

Tilly: Clearly couldn’t care less and is not at all impressed by the idea of midget pigs: ‘Yeah?’

Tallulah: Thinks: ‘And, and we saw some birds in a cage and it was really sad because they couldn’t fly.  They were all brown and they had spots on, but I don’t know what they were called.’

Tilly: Interested now.  This could be her chance to shine and show off her superior knowledge of all things bird/animal – In a patronising voice: ‘Are you sure they were birds Tallulah? They could have been moths or something.’

Tallulah: Looks incredulous: ‘Tilly! Don’t be stupid.  Of course they weren’t moths.  They weren’t moths because they had beaks.  Moths don’t have beaks.  And they had little clucky feet and circles.  I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WERE. O.K.?’

Tilly carries on eating her tea, saying nothing in the hope that the subject will be forgotten as quickly as possible, and trying to look as if she were only trying to trip Tallulah up, and not that she really did think they were moths.

I am wondering if what Tallulah saw were some battery hens.  They don’t tend to keep battery hens in farm parks though, due to it upsetting people and Jamie Oliver coming round and shouting a lot.  I’m not going to ask because I don’t want to spend the next three weeks explaining in minute detail the nature of battery farming.  I’ve already had to do this once with Tilly during a particularly miserable period of her insisting on eating chicken nuggets.  It made both of us miserable and didn’t stop her craving chicken nuggets.  Tallulah, with her obsession about death, which has been dormant for some time now, would undoubtedly milk it for all it’s worth, and I’m in too fragile a state of mind to cope at the moment.

Oscar has learned to say ‘shhh!’ and put his finger on his lips.  He doesn’t really know why, but it is very cute and he is doing it mostly for comic effect.  He did hit the nail on the head beautifully last night at dinner though, more by luck than judgement.

Jason and I were just finishing our dinner and Oscar demanded another banana for his fourth pudding (yogurt, chocolate egg and the first banana).  I wondered if he was just mucking about, but he was quite insistent on receiving another ‘nana’ forthwith, so I gave in.  He then broke it in two, waved it round his head with a flourish and dropped half of it on the floor.  He looked at me and said: ‘Uh oh!’ I said; ‘Never mind. Just eat the other bit.’  He took one bite, and chewing noisily threw the rest at the washing machine.  He looked at me and said: ‘Naughty!’ and then made a very solemn face just as I was about to tell him off, pursed his lips, put his finger to it and said: ‘Ssshhhhh!’

I tried not to laugh, dear reader, I really did.  For laughing at such matters undermines the whole fabric of the disciplinary procedure and means that you’re making a rod for your own back later on.  Unfortunately I caught Jason’s eye whilst I was trying to be very stern.  He wasn’t trying to be very stern, and we both dissolved into fits.  Consequently Oscar now thinks all he has to do is say: ‘Ssshhh!’ to be absolved of any heinous crime he may care to commit.  As the lovely song says: ‘There may be trouble ahead…’

sabi ko nuon, i will get married to the right person..who wouldn't want to marry the love of your life di ba? kala ko nga nuon nakita ko na ang mapapangasawa ko, kaso sa iba kinasal e.hehehe!

sabi ko nuon, marrying age ko is at 28-30 years old...not too young, not too gurangis naman, at siguradong super stable na ako financially at contented na ako sa career ko at umaandar pa ang bahay bata ko.

sabi ko nuon, i will not get married for the sole reason that i am preggers. yaw ko nga magwalk down the aisle na manas na ang ilong ko noh!

sabi ko nuon, people will get envious of my wedding...wedding of the millenium ang balak ko...hindi dahil bongga at magastos..kasi super saya lahat ng tao, super memorable lahat at super happy ako sa wedding marriage ko.

sabi ko nuon, sisisguraduhin kong iiyak ang groom pag nakita na nya akong naglalakad papunta sa kanya, at ang parents ko na maghahatid sa akin sa altar e hindi iiyak, dahil alam naman nilang i will be in good hands.

nuon yun..lahat yan ngayon sa remote memory ko na lang.;(

why? i can't get married..that's why!!!

i am 29 years old (there i've said it), not preggers (damn wish i was), not stable career wise (therefore di pa stable financially) people will not be happy if ever i will get married (especially my parents who i think is not ready to give me away to another girl!hehehe!) at ang pinakamalaking obstacle...it is not legit for gays and lesbians to marry sa pinas.

sucks for us!! thats why, our plan is to move out of dubai, settle in canada or australia..where it is legal for gays and lesbians to marry! or punta sa states di ba?

bummer!!!

anywho, good news to all gays and lesbians in california!!!

Californias's supreme court overturned the ban on gay and lesbian marriage.

buti pa sa kanila legal na ang gay marriage. hay i wish dito din sa dubai o sa pinas! charot!!!

kaya nga nainggit ako sobra sa announcement ni ellen that she's getting married na!!! i cried too!!! good for her and portia...:) who knows maybe someday, ill be announcing my wedding na din dito.nyahahaha!! suntok sa buwan!!!

So. Since Wednesday, several people have asked me when I am going to give an update on my trip to see my favorite band, Drive-By Truckers. Here it is:

In a word, the night was perfect. Not good. Not great. Perfect.

(Trust me, this is the censored version of the night's festivities. Suffice it to say that it was the classic Rock 'n Roll experience for yours truly.)

It started at around 6 p.m., when my best friend since 10th grade, Matt Moore, picked me up from my townhouse drinking an AMP Energy drink. I knew it was going to be a great night right then, because Matt was already getting fired up. And if there is anything cooler than Matt fired up, I haven't seen it yet.

Anyway. We made our way up to Raleigh to meet up with Chad and Jeremy, whom I went 14 years (K-12, plus one year at State) of school with, along with Clark, whom I haven't seen in at least a year, two other Matts I went to high school with, Nikki and Daniel. I think that is everybody.

After a few hours of Wii play (Chad and Jeremy have two of the systems. In a world where those things are more precious than gold, only Chad and Jeremy could procure two of them), several beverages and several youtube videos, we headed towards Carrboro.

It was so great to be back in God's country. It was night, but I'm sure if it were daytime the sky would have been Carolina Blue.

The opening act was actually great - a band called The Dexateens. They were a little more mainstream than the Truckers, but their closing number, the theme from "Diff'rent Strokes" brought the house down and was apropos for the mood I was in at the time.

Then the Truckers hit the stage, and though they're are not the same without Jason Isbell, their old guitarist who quit the band for a solo career last year, they still rocked, especially Mike Cooley's songs. And they played a strong mix of the old songs I love and the good ones from the new album, which I felt was not their best effort. 

After several hours and a long encore, along with a slight detour through Chapel Hill to drop off a new friend, we made our way home. That is all I am going to say.

Now if you read this thing, you probably wouldn't think it was the best night of my life. It was. But if I told you the rest of the story on here, I'd probably get fired. If you run into me on the streets, I'll fill you in.

That'll do, pig.

Next time the Truckers are in town you'd better go. Don't think about it. Just go. I have been to three of their concerts and two of them rank one-two on my list of great nights.

The above video is the only one I can find on youtube from the night. I am not a great fan of this song and it does not show the true greatness of the band. But it'll have to do.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

The dream is in first person mode. It starts off in a bedroom very much like mine and I am sleeping. I am pretending to be sleeping because I know she is in the room. She is wearing a modest white frock with black designs on it. From my lying down on the bed I can see the skirt as it reaches down just below her knees and she is waiting and walking back and forth. She is clearly stressed out by something. I can see that she has documented every communication she has had with everyone of the other boys who had a crush on her. There are so many of them, so she has some kind of library style numbering for each memory.

I can see file G 9 of her diary/scrapbook and it is an email from one of my professors requesting her to please stop playing silent on me because I am so depressed because she doesnt respond to me. She hasn't replied to that email from my professor, but this is scary because my professor doesn't know about her and I am wondering how this happened. And I see her on notes in G 9 that say the she knows my parents asked my professor to email her... and I realize she has made this note to herself with some amount of contempt.

She is still waiting for something and at times she sits on something while not walking back and forth. She is sad and stressed about some memory and she wants me to feel the pain and that is why she delibrately doesn't respond to anything I write and she doesn't talk to me (unlike the way she was talkative in prior dreams).

She now knows I am waking up, she is waiting, but I am slow. So she pokes me on my left arm and walks away while I wake up into reality.

After I woke up I quickly wrote an email apologizing for every stress I have caused for her (which I did by sending her countless emails, smses and unanswered calls) and I asked her to seek help if something else is troubling her. I told her that she is still the nicest person in the world, but if anything is troubling her she should seek help because all of are only human and that nobody expects to be anything more than that.

I'm really tired after visiting her pensieve. I think I will sleep now.

Female_{Aptitude in Math and Science}+ Prudie_{Smart Ass} +

Biological Clock_{RINGING BITCH!!!!!} + House_{Big Ass} +

College Education_{Civil Engineering} + Career² +

2(2 Hour Commute_{One Way}) - (Men_{Single, In Suburbs})! = X

Where:

College Education_{Civil Engineering} = Study Groups⁴ +

Prudie_{Ruined Curve for Remainder of Class, Often} +

Teenage Boys_{Masquerading as Men}

and

X = 2 = Number of Dates Prudie Went on While Working as an Engineer for Six Years

I can only conclude that dating and math and I do not mix.

HAHA.

Amazing.

No spotlight, no audience, no nothing. It's a rainy day and it's filled with anticipation. I was banned from register at my job yesterday, later flashing my lady bits in front of the store during closing. I still have no reason behind that. I wonder if any one realized. I keep peering over at this mini-bagel with sos that my dad put on my stack books on my dresser next to me. The contemplations, the desires, and the not-so-apparent hunger pains. My dad has off work until the day after Memorial day. In return, I think I'll be a not-so-apparent alcoholic. Watered down coffee and a half cleaned room. What am I suppose to do now? I half-did every thing, so I guess my day is done. 1:58 pm, score 0. The bagel is still there, untouched. I can't read books any more, can't finish any thing. I don't even know the point of this. I mean, in time, I'm sure great topics will come about. But why this day? This day is so dreary, so un-exciting until about 7pm, lacking human hygiene, sloppy, and I'm not even stoned yet. Can I say that here?

I discovered a great podcast the other night, subscribe to it on itunes:

radical waterbong feminist revolt!

"there's something enervating to the rat race of daily life in the well spent night of debauchery" -http://sirndipiti.livejournal.com/

Maybe I'll write more later...

HAHAHAHA, juro que quase caí da cadeira de tanto rir. adoro nonsense!

I did not feel funny this week. So this post might be extraordinarily boring and extremely thought provoking for some cases.

I was confused for whole week and wanted to split myself into two, have a duel between two halves and decide all the matters.

I felt like a centipede. The one which everybody sees for a second while walking and debates for a second as to whether they should step on it. Most think otherwise in most cases and walk away. 

I feel like a straw (not the milkshake one! Just the normal water one!) Hollow! And somebody sucking life through me.

I have decided to take permission from people before I tell them a PJ. This way they get excited in anticipation.

I felt like a Jelly bottle. (I don't know why)

Other day, I though that I am the cap hanger and everybody hangs their caps on me. I don't know it it is good or bad.

I spent the whole Tuesday wondering what is the best terrain to test the feeling that an ant gets while walking on a 7 day old coffee.

I had this feeling that all 4 tires of my car are trying to go in different directions. But I did not stop to check. I calculated the vector sum of all the directions and decided that I am going to go in only one direction.

What the hell?!! What am I writing?! (I kept this to give you the joy of reading uncut version of this blog entry)

Cheers!

Well, the children are back from school and the farm and nursery and I’ve already raised my voice several times.  I dream of a day when I don’t have to shout like that Sargeant Major from 'It 'Aint 'Alf 'Ot Mum'.  It’s unlikely to happen before my voice box wears out.  it's almost inevitable that one day I will sound like Stephen Hawking.

I picked up Tallulah, who, as predicted had stepped in a puddle in her brand new, blue leather t-bar shoes at exorbitant amount from Clarke’s.  Her socks were drenched, but it was alright she told me because not only had daddy let her wear whatever she liked this morning when he got her up, his largesse also extended to the fact that she was wearing yesterday’s socks once again: ‘So you see Mama, you don’t have to be cross because I still have a clean pair in my bag.’ Oh! That’s all right then.

She had a lovely time, as exhibited by the huge amounts of straw she had in her hair.  Her hair is straw coloured anyway, and extremely curly, so it was very hard to make out what was straw and what was hair.  Add that to the fact that she was the only child on a rainy, farm kind of day in full uniform with her name badge crumpled and upside down, welded indelibly to her new summer frock and it just made me proud, proud, proud.

I ignored all this in a jolly; ‘never mind.  We’ve made our bed and now we must lie in it sort of way.’ And asked her if she’d had a good day.  Please bear in mind the constant barrage of information, questions and excitable squeaks I’ve had to put up with on the subject of farms, school trips, farm school trips and trips to the farm with the school this week and you will understand my amazement when she looked at me with shining eyes and said: ‘I saw the biggest worm in the world on my way to school today!’  My gast was truly flabbered.

I asked her how the farm went, thinking a direct question might be easier.  She was too busy fishing hundreds of tiny white stones, like the ones you get in those weird gravestones out of her book bag to show me instead.  By the time we were half way round the school to pick up Tilly I finally got her to concentrate on the farm trip.

Me: ‘Tallulah! Concentrate for a minute (this as she is gaily squelching along throwing fistfuls of small stones like confetti) and stop that! How was the farm trip?’

Tallulah: Looking around vaguely as if she can’t quite put her finger on it; ‘Oh! Yeah! It was alright.  I collected a load of sheep dust.’

Me: ‘Sheep dust?’

Tallulah: Well bored with the whole thing now.  Trying to sidle off to pick up a broken hair slide from the playing field in the hope I won’t notice.  I do.  She is very disappointed.  We have a small aside where I remind her that she is only allowed to pick up jewels and money.  She is not impressed.  ‘Yeah! Sheep dust.  You know.  Anyway. I lost it all.’

Me: ‘Oh!  Tallulah?’

Tallulah: Now trying to pick bits of dead flower petal off a bush; ‘Ummmm?’

Me: ‘Put that down immediately.  What is sheep dust?’

Tallulah: Looks up at the sky in utter amazement that I don’t know what sheep dust is; ‘Well.  You know. It’s the fluff from a sheep isn’t it? Sheep dust.’

Me: ‘You mean sheep’s wool?’

Tallulah: ‘Yes’ This rendered in the manner of someone with vastly superior knowledge who knows that sheep’s wool is just the square’s way of saying it and that she is way, way cooler than me.

Me: ‘Oh! So did you actually see any animals at the farm?’

Tallulah: Examining her nails and coughing: ‘Yes.  We saw piglets and they were this tiny (holds thumb and forefinger in a circle about the size of a twenty pence piece).

Me: ‘Really? Piglets that tiny?’

Tallulah: ‘Ummm…No actually they were about this big.’ (holds hands to show something the size of a large Cornish pasty; ‘And then we saw some about this big (holds hands to indicate regular piglet size), and some pig mama’s and some pig dadas, and some horses and some chickens and some sheep and we went on a tractor ride and we did lots of running, and that was it really.  It was alright.’

So. There you have it.  Miniature pigs, sheep dust and enough disdain to make a diva weep with envy.  Glad that cost seven quid.

When we finally got home she shook her strawy hair all over my clean hall floor, stamped her muddy feet all over my clean hall mat and demanded to know why she couldn’t do her story sack now, and where her apple juice was.  This was at the same time as Tilly was looking petulant because I’d just found out that Brownies have decided in their largesse that the bowling trip that they made sound so free and simple last week is now to be complicated by the fact that they don’t want to hire transport, so all the girls must get there and back under their own steam. 

This is a problem for me as a) drop off is right at the time I should be feeding children, b) pick up is right at the time that Oscar should be asleep in bed, c) I don’t drive and can’t afford four taxis so that Matilda can go to bowling for ‘free’, d) Jason is camping all weekend and will be away with the car even if I did drive, e) mum and dad are away all that weekend and will be using their car to transport antiques on Friday.  I really, really hate Brownies.  I hated going to Brownies myself, and now I hate taking Tilly to Brownies.  That might make me a bad parent, but frankly I don’t care.

While the girls were exhibiting large amounts of hair flicking petulance, I was still wrestling the buggy indoors while Oscar was trying to exit it shouting: ‘Out! Out! Telly! ‘ilk (milk)! Telly!’ and getting hysterical because he was still strapped in and was slowly garrotting himself whilst also managing to twist his ankle up onto the bar that stops him falling out and killing himself.  Needless to say I wasn’t feeling particularly ‘joy to the world’ at this moment and made my feelings felt quite plainly by shrieking like a banshee.

I now feel hugely ashamed of myself, but then when I look back at what I’ve written I do feel that there were slightly extenuating circumstances.  I then had to deposit all the children in a clean and tidy manner in front of the television while I cleaned all the mud and straw from the hall, put away all the pictures, notes, story sacks, book bags, wet farm related clothing and other paraphernalia.  I had just cleaned the debris up when I picked Tallulah’s book bag up to put it in the cupboard.  It was at this point that all the little white stones that she hadn’t scattered about at school fell out all over the kitchen floor and table.  I got down on my hands and knees to pick them up, which is where she found me when she came in to demand to know the reason why I hadn’t sorted out her apple juice yet.  I’m afraid to say I had another mini shout, and she went back to the television, not before smiling sweetly at me and telling me that she had only just noticed how lovely my hair was.  This was presumably because up till that point she hadn’t had the good fortune to witness my scalp at face level due to the fact that I don’t like to spend much of my life kneeling on the kitchen floor.

They are now watching Horrid Henry.  Tallulah is taking notes.  Tilly is less sulky about the bowling trip because I have said I will come up with plan Z.  Juice has been supplied, Oscar has ‘ilk and is in bed for a nap, because I have to take and pick Tilly up from Brownies tonight because Jason is going out, and it is right around Oscar’s bed time yet again.  He needs a little fortification for staying up late.  I have to think of something lovely and simple to cook for tea because it has to be early tonight thanks yet again to Brownies, and all I want to do is curl up in a corner and wail.  I thought Brownies were supposed to be helpful.  I’m going to write a letter to Brown Owl.

I also found out what a meme actually is yesterday, which was good.  I thought it was your virtual character because I’m a bit thick.  It’s not, it’s like a virtual viral thing.  Any idea or thing that gets passed around on t’interweb from person to person.  So there you have it.  I am Bill Gates and I claim my twenty billion pounds.

You may see that today’s theme meme is similar to yesterday’s.  I replaced the words like/hate with need.  I’m now bored of this game and waiting for something else to play so hopefully for you, this will be my last one for a while until I get unbored again.

Katy needs volunteers to teach junior achievement

I wonder what junior achievement is? If you’re going to achieve something surely you’d want to try for senior achievement, or is that me just being pushy and ambitious ? I do share a birthday with Jeffrey Archer.  It was bound to come out sooner or later.  Anyway, I don’t like volunteering.  My mother’s motto was always: ‘Never volunteer.’ So I doubt that I’d be searching for volunteers of my own, particularly to do something that sounds as demeaning as junior achieving.  Rubbish, utter rubbish.

Katy needs adjustments

It’s true, I do.  I would like my eyes adjusting so that I can have twenty twenty vision.  I would like my feet adjusting so I don’t have to chisel hard skin off them with an industrial sandblaster.  I would like my stomach adjusting to the flatness it had when I was eighteen and I would like to be adjusted so that I can be perky on five hours sleep a night.  All this without surgery or any kind of weird mind control.  A magical wand type adjustment please.  Off you go now…