She's a Normal Person, Her Name Is Invisible And She's Not Feeling Very Well Today

Another Blog entry within two days? - The man must be indulging in online displacement behaviour. Correct! Give yourself a pat on the back, a cocoanut, or a Kewpie Doll depending on how you are feeling today.

The truth is that tomorrow, as part of a day long reading day at the local High School, I’m supposed to be teaching three classes of 11/12 year olds the joys of reading. Another job I owe to my pimp Ilona. Thanks Ilona.

My lesson plan at the moment (with less than 12 hours till I actually have to face the first load of the little darlings) is to run into the room throw some books at them and run out again shouting “Read more books, you little buggers!” .

I’m supposed to be introducing them to the joys of reading Movie scripts on the tenuous basis that I worked in Post Production on a couple of movies and know which way up to hold one. Oh God. Why do I do this sort of thing? (If you didn’t say “Money” hand back the cocoanut now!). Oh crap! I’m running out of things to footer with. Last night I actually managed to convince myself that watching Thunderbirds are GO was a sensible thing to do.

THEN! I had to write a review of it for the IMDb….

I was about six when it came out and I remember a friend of mine having a huge plastic “Zero X", The Spaceship from the movie. I was so jealous. It was the sexiest thing I had ever seen (this was long before I knew what sex was or what 'sexy' meant).

I loved the TV show (I was six I was a boy!) but I never saw the film and when Merriol bought me a DVD copy at a garage sale, I was awash with nostalgia. A feeling of warm happiness that lasted for at least 7 minutes into the film... my god, it's so incredibly boring! After a while the only entertainment value I could drag out of it was spotting new ways the filmmakers avoided having to have their characters walk anywhere. During the TV shows walking was suggested by having the character puppets jog up and down as they moved forward. Fine within the limited frame of a TV screen (especially the scritty little fuzzy Black and White things we peered at back then) but a similar motion on the big screen would, at best, look ludicrous and, at worst, induce motion sickness. In a film where supersonic aircraft stay rigidly in the centre of the frame having the "actors" bounce around like ping pong balls causing pre-teen moviegoers to vomit over their neighbours would be distressing.

Tonight I find myself edging towards a Polish film M from Palimpsest sent me as a swapsie for a William Gibson book she couldn’t get in Poland. I love knowing nothing about a film before I watch it. This one I can’t even read the title, let alone the blurb. All I know about it is which way up the DVD goes in the machine… and it’s in Polish - with English subtitles. That’s the only bit of the box I could read: “English Subtitles”.

OK, It’s now getting LATE and I HAVE to do this thing…

I can't get that fucking image out of my head! It's the shoes - the little girl is wearing wellies for chrissakes! and the suits wrinkle up below the knees - so either they aren't their suits - they've just borrowed them for the weekend from some other equally weird (but taller) family - or they weren't meant to be worn with any footwear. So where could you wear them barefoot? In the house? Then why go outside to have the photo taken?
On the beach? You'd roast! Maybe not in a cold climate. Maybe these are suits for southern nudists to wear while visiting their friends in the north.
"Come on Pedro let's take the kids for a brisk walk along the nudist beach."
"But Sven! it is freezing outside."
"No it isn't. It's hardly snowing at all. Tell you what - I'll lend you lot the fuzzy suits..."

That works for me.


I spent this afternoon in the Fort watching Markens grøde - Norwegian silent movie with live orchestrial accompaniment. Lovely way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon(and I get to pop the cherry of another movie on IMDb.com)

I was going to write a long, informed, and interesting blog entry tonight but I saw this photo and I have totally forgotten what I have spent the last 12 hours doing. Be warned: this is very disturbing on all sorts of levels...

http://fantasygoat.livejournal.com/424.html

Mummy, Did You Wear These Slippers When You Were a Dinosaur?

OMG! It a whole week since I posted anything here, where does all the time go? The schools are giving themselves a few days off this weekend so I get to spend even more quality time with my darling daughters - and take that note of irony out the way you just read that.

Tonight I sat down and watched: Maciste e la regina di Samar (1964) which sounds very impressive and interlechual, I mean, foreign films and that! But when I tell you it's English title is Hercules Against the Moon Men and consisted mostly of bad fighting between a well-oiled and hugely muscled italian bloke with a bouffant and about 7 stuntmen who swapped mustaches between shots you will understand where my brain is at the moment.
As I wrote somewhere else, this sort of movie is great for when you are too tired to think and you don't want to - even by accident.

Though, having said that, any movie that contains the line:

"Hurry! To the Mountain of Death! Hercules is already on his way! Let's go!"

Has got to be worth watching once.

We're Having A Conversation About Literature And Music - And You're Eating Foam!

Mike came round this morning with his boys, Holly, Daisy and Finn went upstairs and had a picnic and Mike and I drank vast amounts of coffee and talked about Music, and Movies, and Literature while Jude ate chunks of a foam toy while we weren't looking. A really good morning.

Merriol came home for lunch took one look at Holly and said "What are you still doing here?" - I had forgotten to take her to nursery!

Daisy spent the afternoon filling her welly-boots with crayons, then taking them all out again.

A typical day; though I did discover during the course of it that if, when asked the question "What are you doing?", a three year old answers "I don't know", it's a bloody good idea to go and investigate.

Testosterone Day!

For some reason I woke up this morning with Man Juice® flowing through my veins. I spent the day using real Grrrr! POWER TOOLS! and sawing wood and wearing plaid shirts! Grrrr!

Strictly speaking the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and the dishwasher are power tools too but they didn't count today - girly power tools. Anything you have to put soap in was out. Whirring, pointy, dangerous, and messy were in. I spent most of the day in the kitchen turning half an old door and some bits of the original ceiling of the house into the bottom half of an antique church pew. Wouldn't fool anyone it's old for an instant but it does help stop the kids' toys from skiting about all over the place.

I feel great!

Tomorrow it's back to Mom Mode. Not Grrrrr!

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It is three years to the day since I had a drink.

Hurray for me!

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Spent last night in the Ballachulish Hotel in one of the posh rooms (just above the kitchens) using up one of Merriol's vouchers and having a night away from the kids. (Thanks Mum!) It was great. I slept like a log and Merriol stared at the ceiling. Or rather she stared at the light fitting which looked like a gilded dog turd and cursed me out for snoring.

Goodman VCR Problem shooting:

Problem:

The VCR no longer accepts tapes.

Solution:

1

Peer inside through the slot and get depressed about not being able to watch crappy old SF movies.

2

Unscrew VCR casing with the depressing thought that you are going to spend the next three hours trying to figure out exactly which of the three hundred and seventy-two moving parts involved in moving the cassette three inches that way and then down a bit needs bending back into shape.

3

Curse yourself for not keeping detailed notes the last time you had to do this.

4

Remove VCR cover.

5

Removed audio CD from inside VCR.

6

Replace VCR casing.

7

Watch crappy old SF film with sense of achievement.

I love having kids - at least it wasn't a cheese sandwhich.

Sometimes I have Bad Dreams. I Will Tell my Head: "Head, No More Bad Dreams!"

It's Merriol's birthday on Friday!

Only bought 5 CDs today from the Oban charity shops on my lightening dash to buy Merriol a birthday present today: 3 Placebo, a Morcheeba and a Foo Fighters and NO BOOKS! this is a record. I have will power!

We both liked the Placebo, the Morcheeba is going on the shelves to add to the huge pile of music I don't listen too (even, in the case of bands like Morcheeba, when it is playing) and The Foo Fighters is on its way to eBay 'cos neither of us liked it.

And I actually managed to buy her a present (not I hasten to add from a charity shop. I'm cheap but not THAT cheap) to replace the present I had bought last week but managed to loose a few days ago. At least I presume I lost it because the last time I remember having it it was in my coat pocket and when I went to hide it yesterday it wasn't there. I can only think it must have fallen out of my pocket when I ran to get help for an old lady who had collapsed on the road in the village. Someone was with her and a neighbour had called an ambulance but I had an inkling she was a resident of the care home round the corner so belted off there to get someone who knew her.

Hello much neglected Blog. Where does all the time go? If anyone has some spare time knocking about please send it to me - about another hour a day, that's what I need...

...

One of the great things about being a parent - well, one of the great things about being a human being, this isn’t just restricted to those of us with sprogs, though they do act as a hell of a catalyst - is that you find yourself saying, or rather hearing yourself saying things, that, if you had but a couple of years before been told you would at some point say such a thing, you would have instantly dismissed the notion as an absurdity.

(I apologise for that last sentence. I have been reading too much Victorian literature recently and it has started to affect me most profoundly.)

Thus it was today, when seated at the dining table with my beloved wife and my two darling children, I heard myself utter the words:

“Holly, don’t put cheese in your belly-button.”

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The rest of the weekend paled into insignifcance ...

The Girls went back

The Girls went back to “school” this week after the Christmassy Holidays and I was alone on Wednesday for the first time in what seems like ages. The house suddenly seemed incredibly huge. So I filled it with VERY LOUD music - which I am not allowed to do when the girls are around:

“Daddy Daddy! Turn your music down, it’s too loud!”

- I will remind her of this when she is 15 and playing whatever crappy boyband cloned pop drivel she is listening to too loudly for my aging ears.

What to do? What to do? The whole house to myself...

Several hours later half way through mopping the kitchen floor (it took me all morning to find the kitchen floor underneath the 34 tons of toys, Play-dough, dried-up felt pens, glued-on Cornflakes - and I suspect some of them were, literally, glued to the floor. Holly is none to tidy when she is “doing sticking”) so... there I was half way through mopping the kitchen floor, trying to work out what I was going to feed Merriol and the kids when they came home, when it struck me - I am so incredibly happy at the moment.

I love being a Mum.

Spent yesterday similarly alone for the day pounding crap into eBay to take advantage of one of their infrequent cheapo listing days. We have so much stuff I need to get rid of just to keep my sanity and to make room for all the other stuff that just appears. I don’t know where it all comes from. It seems to ooze out of the woodwork or something.

Kipple! It’s bloody Kipple!

From Wikipedia:

Kipple is a term coined by science fiction author from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It refers to unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself.
Some of Dick's descriptions of it suggest an analogy to entropy. According to two characters from the book, John Isidore stated that the first law of "kipple" is that "kipple" drives out "nonkipple."; Buster Friendly liked to declare, "Earth would die under a layer — not of radioactive dust — but of kipple."

Other forms of the word used in the novel: "kipple-ized", "kipple-factor", and "kippleization". People can turn into "living kipple". An apartment can become "kipple-infested".

Save ME! Buy my Kipple! - please!

After I post this I'm off to leave someone Bad feedback on eBay.

A Hint: If you are going to tell someone you "will post the parcel tomorrow" and don't get round to it until a week later, make sure you stick stamps on the parcel and not one of those sticky printed lables they make behind the the counter. Because with a sticky printed label one of the things that is printed nice and clearly is the posting date.

With real stamps they have to frank them by hand with a smudgey rubber, inkstained and illegible blob.

Idiots! It's taken 3 weeks to get something I was seriously expecting to get before Christmas.

Spent hours last night crashing the pooter, and tearing my hair out, and eating vast quantities of pointy food (more El Cheepo brand tortilla chips) in a struggle to OCR a handbook for Merriol just to save her the effort of typing all 33 pages of it.

It would have been easier to type all 33 pages of it

- but I know how to do it for next time!

I finally worked out how to do it at about midnight (the thing had to be ready for the morning). I must remember to write it down some where where I can find it again before I forget.

(Expect a really boring Blog entry in the next few days...)

Rapunzel! Rapunzel! - I've got you some yoghurt!

Living with my kids is like living with a couple of weird, bonzaid Surrealists. Just before delivering the impassioned cry of "Rapunzel! Rapunzel! - I've got you some yoghurt!" Holly sang us a song at the dinner table. She often sings weird little songs but this one just creased us up:

I wish for a fish in the shape of a house

I wish for a fish in the shape of a house

I wish for a fish in the shape of a house

No No! it was a fish that had been made as a biscuit

It probably looks total pants cold on the screen but trust me, the moment was one of sublime hillarity. Especially when she started telling us it wasn't funny:

"It's not funny. It's not funny. Stop laughing and don't put your head on the table like that!"


And people wonder why I don't watch the television...

Finally got the last bit of my Ma and Da's Zmas pressy to the girls assembled this afternoon, after a lot of swearing and dropping of teeny-weeny washers they now have a swing in the garden - something else for me to worry myself sick about. Why do we pick the coldest days of the year to do this sort of thing? my fingers were numb after 3 minutes.

Went for a walk today up at the Hospital Lochan in Glencoe where the kids had a picnic and Holly rode her bike and Merriol and I had great fun judging the Miserable Bastard Competition that seemed to be happening around us.

Of the people who went past (99% tourists) most of them didn't even acknowledge Holly's cheery "Hello"s let alone raise a smile. I suppose they were all too fucking uncomfortable in their crinkly, hot, expensive Helly Henson and Patagonia hill-walking gear to deign to notice a knited-poncho, Tweenie welly-booted, 3 year old trundling around on her bike - or maybe it was the 18 month old pushing the Shrek2 rucksack on the toy pram behind her that was putting them off their stride - whatever, there they were, all kitted out for the Great Outdoors, and there we were having a Sunday stroll (a day late) around the park.

It's not as if it was really raining that much either.

"Come To Scotland And Be A Miserable Bastard" - I think the Scottish Tourist Board is missing a trick somewhere.

No doubt they will all be back in their hotels tonight, congratulating themselves at having survived the rigours of nature while sipping 30 year old MacCallan's (because it's the only label in the bar they can pronounce) and tut-tutting over those reckless feckless parents who took their children out on the hill without the 'right equipment'.

Screw them all - apart from the tall baldy bloke and his missus who gave us a cheery hello and the couple who passed us and had a wee blether. Their gear looked like it had seen a few hills and hadn't come out the packet last week. Cheers guys!

Happy New Year World.

New year got off to a flying stop for me as, full of snot and pain, I retired to bed at about 10pm having foolishly taken some patent snot dryer-upper recommended by a friend. A bizarre and intermittently sleepless night followed with me at one point being woken up by this God-almighty Whoooooooshhhhhhh! from the garden. I opened my eyes and looked up through the skylight above out bed to see a bright red light hanging above me swaying gently then slowly drifting off. It was very pretty. It Looked like a UFO. No, it didn't look like a UFO.... UFOs don't have parachutes... It took my sleep beffuddled brain a few moments to work out that Merriol had sneaked downstairs and had set off one of the 30,000 candlepower signal flares some anonymous person (thanks Billy!) had left in our hallway that afternoon.

(Look forward to more photos of Morag and I hitting explosives with hammers soon - though this batch are less out of date than the previous bunch and, at least one of them has worked! which is more than could be said for the last lot.)

For the rest of the night I tossed turned and read Day of the Locust a couple of pages at a time waking up with my thumb still in the book reading another couple of pages then waking up again. I love reading books like this. I do some of my best reading when I'm ill. I seem to get much more involved somehow.

How to set up a Treo 600 on o2 Pay As You Go...

Go to Home > Prefs > Network

Make Service: O2 Mobile Web GPRS Copy
Make Connection GPRS
Make Password: password
Make APN address: payandgo.o2.co.uk

Click [Details]

Make Fallback: None

Click [Advanced...]

Make IP address: Automatic
Uncheck Query DNS [_]
Make Primary DNS: 193.113.200.200
Make Primary DNS: 193.113.200.201

[OK] [OK]

Click the Home Button

Go to Web then select Options

Make Home Page: http://payandgo.o2.co.uk

Click [Advanced] Click [Set Proxy] Check Use Proxy[_]

Make Proxy Server: 193.113.200.195

Make Port: 8080

[OK] [OK] [OK]

Make sure you write this all down and keep it somewhere safe - like on your Blog.

Switch off the expensive Christmas present - then switch it back on. Hurray!!!!!!!! The web in my pocket - or at least a cut down streamlined version of it...

Guess what I have just spent the best part of 2 days doing... A lot of head banging frustration and phone calls to nice chaps in India and poking and prying on the web and I finally got it sorted.

Oh, final thing. Remember to have more than 60p in credit on the phone... That last bit took me about 3 hours to work out. It's been a long day.

Merry Christmas

Just taking a moments break from the Christmassy doings to wish the world a Merry Christmas!

We a currently trimming the artificial Christmas tree Merriol bought the other day - apparently my 2 foot tall brown artificial Christmas tree is just “horrible” and was once likened to a collection of badly wired together used toilet brushes - so after 9 years living with it Merriol has finally put her foot down and bought a new one. The new one is six foot, cerise and the gayest damn thing you ever saw. It was instantly christened Pricilla Queen of the Forest.

Merry Christmas, World.

One of the unconcidered joys of having Holly at two nursery schools is that we get to go to two Christmas concerts.

On Tuesday we got to see our little darling singing in Gaelic and today she was the "Fairy" Gabriel in the nativity play. She made a good Fairy Gabriel. Needs a few lessons in stage craft - I mean facing the audience at some point would have been a good idea - but she was right in onto the stage, on cue (with a helpful shove from one of the teachers), and said her lines good and loud. I sttod there the whole time feeling dead proud and videoed the whole thing. I love being a dad.

Rotted what's left of my brain last night by watching a TERRIBLE 1951 movie called Unknown World. And I still can't work out why I do this. Why do I watch this drek?

Answers on a postcard please. I really would like to know.

OK... Nearly Resumed

I didn't get the job. It was a fun day though; I don't suppose all professional auditions are like that, but it was a good intro. Basicaly we played some games, did some improv, did a bit of singing... (now I wonder WHY I didn't get the job...?) and they were good enough to tell us on the spot who got it. I could see why they chose the people they did, the three who were chosen (there were 8 of us at the audition) worked well together - and they could all sing.

It would have been nice to have got the job but at least I won't be running around the country when Phoebe and Tyler are over in the spring.

The last few days have been trying to beat the mess moster that is our house into submission and doing Christmas shopping. The highlight of which happened yesterday in Oban. We were in Ottakar's bookshop when Holly spotted a book about the Nativity. She is playing "The Fairy Gabriel" in her nursery nativity play this week so all we have heard for the past week or two is "Baby Jesus this and Baby Jesus that...". So she sat down with this book and became engrossed in the pictures then suddenly she started singing Away in a Manger. When she finished a couple of people applauded! It was a... I don't know quite how to put it.. it was one of those moments that if I had seen it in a movie I would have reached for the sick bag, but because it was real and because it was my child it made me so proud.

I'm so glad I have kids.

Other stuff:

I'm thinking of becoming a school govenor. The Primary school here has an elected board of Parent Govenors - exept it doesn't because no one stood to be elected this year. So they've had to call another election and I 've stuck my head up and said that if no one else wants to do it then I will. I'm not sure what I'm letting myself in for, but if someone else stands then I will run away and let them do it.

I hate joining things.