It's not often you get to buy the same thing from two different second hand sales on two different continents. I don't mean a identical objects; I mean the same object.

About thirteen years ago I was in America, getting over the break-up of long term relationship by running away to join the Hollywood circus twenty years too late. I was thirty-five and, as a friend so wonderfully put it at the time: "Having my mid-life crisis while I was still young enough to enjoy it."

So, there I was in California nearing the end of my six month's Tourist Visa and needing to buy presents for people back home. What do I get for the woman I had lived with for the last twelve years and who had precipitated my flight to America in the first place? Answer, a second-hand, hugely heavy grey metal 1940's Rolodex - and a signed copy of Joan Blondell's semi-autobiographical novel. I think we both had a big crush on Joan.

The Rolodex I bought at a huge 'swap meet' at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. That was a strange day. I have never seen so much second-hand military hardware for sale in one place before or since. Every stall seemed to have bits of obsolete weaponry. Sometimes it was hard to tell what the things were, various sized chunks of Army-green machinery with serial numbers and 'Property of the US Government' stamped all over it. None of it looked lethal in itself but I'm sure you could have built a couple of tanks out of the parts lying around.

(Johnny Cash's One Piece at a Time just popped into my head there.)

I can't remember what else I ended up buying that day but that's where I got the Rolodex. It still had a few of the previous owner's cards in it. Whoever he was was something in the writing game because they were all numbers of writers and literary agencies. One card had Ray Bradbury's number. I didn't phone him.

The book I bought in a bookstore on San Vicente Boulevard.

Fast forward to five or six years later. I'm now living with Merriol who, to be honest, is not as keen on Joan Blondell as I am, but is very fond of office equipment. I guess a fascination with the tools of your trade is an occupational hazard whatever your line of business. Personally I find the Viking Direct catalogue an odd choice of bedtime reading, but there you go. One day, in passing, I mention the rather substantial and stylish Rolodex I had lugged over from the US all those years before and was immediately subjected to one of those reverse-engineered fits of jealousy that women can knock up at the slightest provocation. 'How dare you buy something for someone else that I might have wanted at least a year before you knew I even existed?' One of those. Retro-fitted guilt tripping.

Fast forward to last Saturday. Holly's school is having a table top sale. Smaller than the swap meet in California, three or four tables instead of the several hundred at the Rose Bowl, and no sign of any tank parts. The first stall inside the door, was being run by Callan, my ex's ten year old daughter. In front of her, in the centre of the table, was The Rolodex. So I bought it - again; for Merriol. I bought it once once in the Twentieth Century, once in the Twenty-first.

I'm not doing it again.

People are weird.

The other day in Oban, I was escaping taking the kids to see The Singing Kettle by doing shopping, I saw this trolley outside Lidl. Nothing particularly unusual about it apart from it's not attached to all the other trolleys in the rack by one of those coin-operated dongles. I hate these things. I hate having to pay to borrow a shopping trolley. I know it probably cuts down the number that end up in canals or people garages but I personally feel insulted that I'm not trusted to take one back without having some of my money held hostage. So, after being shown this trick by shelf-stacker at Farmfoods*, I have a key from a corned beef tin on my keyring. The fat bit (of the right sort) of a corned beef** tin key is just about almost exactly (well near enough) to the diameter of a pound coin to enable to to push it into a shopping trolley dongle and, with a twist, when you've freed it from the other trolleys, you can take it out again. When I return a trolley I never chain it back up again so that the next person who comes along doesn't have the hassle of finding a coin etc. etc.

I guess I'm not the only person who knows this trick, because outside Lidl in Oban,there was this liberated trolley just sitting there waiting for someone to go shopping with it. As I stood there trying to decide whether or not to go to Homebase first, a bloke walked up to this particular trolley, stopped and looked at it. (I was standing far enough away for it to be obvious this was in no way MY trolley). He looked at it very closely. Bent over and peered at it. He worked out that it wasn't attached to the other trolleys. He hesitated - then he moved away, took a coin out of his pocket, and freed another trolley and trundled it into the shop.

Why?

No idea. I went to Homebase. When I came back to Lidl half an hour later the trolley was still there. I took the trolley. It was a fine trolley. Nothing wrong with it at all. Walking around the shop I estimated from the number of people in there just starting their shopping that at least half a dozen people must have bypassed it and dug money out of their pockets to get a chained up, unsuspicious trolley of their own.

People are weird.

* I shop in all the best places.
** Or 'Corn beefed' as I originally typed.

Well, I didn't get short listed as a best of the 'Daddy' blogs possibly because I'm not an American Christian, (which, from my casual reading of the other contenders, they all seemed to be to a man), possibly because I haven't written anything about ye kids for a while, which, when you think about it, is pretty much an essential qualification for a 'Daddy' blog (that, and a penis). As I said in another place earlier today:

'It's all my kids' fault. As soon as I put myself up for it they stopped doing anything weird, humorous, silly, or annoying - damn them! Now the short listing is over I fully expect them attempting to abseil from their bedroom window using dental floss, or do something science-shatteringly, physically impossible, like make a working room temperature cold fusion reactor with two potatoes and a paper clip.'

About half an hour after writing that I went to pick up Holly from Debs's house. Debs who was fulfilling the role of Village Taxi* for the afternoon, was ferrying at least four families' worth of sugar soaked children from a classmate's party in the next glen. She arrived a short while after I got there with a car-full of face-painted kids: the usual fairies, pirates, and butterflies - and Holly. Holly's face was painted a pale blue with short, darker blue, vertical streaks all over it. She looked like she had just been involved some bizarre, prolonged toothpaste accident.

Me:
"You look nice, sweetheart, what are you?"


Holly:
"A waterfall."

Not cold fusion (or even room temperature superconductors) but it's nice to have my kids back on form.




*This is not a euphemism for anything.

If The Sun Shone All Night Would The Potatoes Grow Any Faster?

Well the plumbers seem to have vanished again (it's Late Spring, I think they migrate) leaving is with a working toilet and sink. But without finishing off a couple of things. It's a very well ventilated working toilet and sink they've left us with, because they haven't filled the holes they bashed through the walls to feed the pipes out. Lots of daylight to be seen from inside - even if you don't stick your head down behind the toilet for a closer look. This hasn't been a real hardship as we are enjoying a spell of the hottest weather I can remember having around here for years: uninterrupted sunshine, picnic teas with the kids, the sides of the roads dusty and gritty - not covered in the usual sticky rain-sodden sludge, I have had a sudden urge to play boulle, drink Pshitt, and ride a moped. The weather feels very Southern and French. It's not like the normal, grey, sodden West Coast we all know, love, and endlessly moan about.

Just to add the flavour, the other thing the plumbers haven't finished yet is the manhole where they joined the new drain onto the existing system.

All through this lovely, hot, sweltering, perfect summer weather - we have had an open sewer in the back garden.

Just poking around on my counter to see if the expected sudden rush of a visitor had pushed my readership up into double figures when I noticed this:
My counter can't count.

I also just noticed that the picture of the 'Free CD' that used to be over there ----> has gone and vanished. Which means...

Arse!

...yep. The webspace attached to a long defunct email address has been reclaimed by the owners. Damn them! How dare they reclaim their own property? A whole load of pictures from the blog and forums I have posted to have evaporated. Bum! Luckily I seem to have made a backup and will now have to go find where all the empty spaces are and redirect the links to their new home.

Any and all help appreciated, just go here: http://the-junk-monkey.com/Blog/blog/
find a picture you like and see where you think it should fit in the World Wide Web. Should be easy, it's just like a jigsaw - except all of the bits are rectangular.

Here's one to start you off.

Further to sorting out Dan's computer problems yesterday; they're not all over. While I was fixing him up installing this that and the other, and getting him up and running again I kept having real trouble steering the cursor. The mouse just kept sliding all over the place, and the cursor would wang off uncontrollably into another corner of the screen. I was about to take the mouse to bits, preparing to de-gunge the rollers, when Dan stopped me.

Apparently, religiously, once a week, his Home Help lady polishes his mouse mat with furniture polish.

A couple of weeks ago Dan's computer died. The Big Blue Screen of Death.

Pretty scary at the best of times - but on a Mac????

Dan needs his computer. He's all but housebound after the stroke and the computer is a necessary life line. I dropped the machine off at the local computer repair shop who booked it in for a good looking at in their first available slot; which was ten days later (busy people). A couple of days ago they phoned me with the news that the hard drive was indeed totally snuffed. There were no recoverable data and what did I want to do with the large paperweight that had been Dan's laptop?

To cut a long and boring story (down to a short and boring story) it cost £70 to get a new hard drive installed. It would have cost that much again to install the OS. It seemed crazy to to pay for a highly trained professional Microsoft certified computer repair person to sit in front of the machine and watch status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hit the enter key. So this afternoon I spent a merry couple of hours watching status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hitting the enter key in as confidant a manner I could muster, stopping only to turn the machine upside down and round this way and that (while it was still running) to find the COA number I needed to stop XP imploding after 30 days. (Why don't they ever put those things where you can bloody see them easily? I nearly broke my neck trying to read the one off the back of my machine the other week.)

So Dan is back on line. My good deed for the day.

Short blog tonight. The galloping trots that have knocked over the kids in turn over the last week has just claimed its third victim. And when did it strike? Last thing at night. Brilliant timing. I need to sleep. I'm trying to work out if I could duct tape myself onto one of the toilets.

Until normal service is resumed: here is some crappy music:

Phoebe, here's the code to do that: just substitute the usual HTML Dalekspeak pointy brackets for the squiggly ones

{embed controls="smallconsole" autostart="true" src="http://207.228.243.82/crud/defenders1.mp3" height="15" width="50"}{/embed}

EDIT: I turned off the autostart. It was driving me crazy. But it still works if you click the play button.

Oh, the joys of parenthood. No sooner have we got number one daughter back on her feet and well enough to go back to school when number two starts regularly vomiting on the hour, every hour.

There's nothing to be done (apart from cleaning her up and giving love and cuddles - oh, and getting the order right is good as well; clean THEN cuddle is much the best arrangement).

It's a bug that's galloping around the village at the moment; a couple of days of adding to the laundry pile from both ends and then they are pack to normal. Still, it gave us something to talk about at the school gates. I spent half an hour this morning swapping vomit stories with the rest of them. Sometimes I wonder what the mums talk about when I'm not there. They probably spend most of their time discussing topics like Wittgenstein's view of the transcendental nature of the ethical. I'm sure I lower the tone.