Cheese Is Still Not A Colour

Aha! All the women have all gone!  Now to walk around in my underpants and fart and do MAN stuff in MY space. 

I may watch Dr Who.

.

Cheese Is Not A Colour

The house is full of women and I'm trapped upstairs. Not the stuff of puerile fantasy but a grim reality. Merriol organised a get the girls around and have a couple of bottles of wine and sell each other overpriced cosmetics / tupperwear / lingerie / Sex in the City props. This time it was perfumeries. Anyway the woman running the party baled on them for some reason but Merriol decided the fun bit was having the friends around and the wine. So I'm hiding upstairs, desperate for a cup of coffee listening to fucking awful music from the glorious 365 days Project
There are loads of slightly drunk women doing slighty drunk woman stuff between me and the kitchen

Yesterday Mike...

<Waffle Mode>

This Mike isn't 'Morag and Mike' Mike, but another Mike. I do know other people not called Mike but I'm finding it easier, as my brain gets more and more enfeebled, due to prolonged exposure to children, if all my friends have the same name.

</Waffle Mode>

... and I (but mostly Mike) chopped down the bloody big sycamore tree that was threatening to bring down a great section of my garden wall. Tomorrow I will drill a bezillion holes in it and fill it with tree killer. Not very ecological I know but I don't have the patience to trim off the new shoots week after week till it finaly gives up the ghost.

AHA!!!

Solved the Coffee problem. I just phoned downstairs. Merriol is on her way up with a cup soon - I hope.

Can I Lick Your Hair?

Today's Utterly Alarming Question from Holly
(See also Worm Sorters are Very Important ):

Holly:
Daddy, can we make a buggery?

Me:
A WHAT!?

Holly:
Can we make a buggery? You get two bits of plastic you can
see through and put dirt and weeds in and put some bugs in
and they come out at night and you can see them.

One of these days she is going to say something like that in front of a Social Worker and I'll have to live the rest of my life in a dustbin somewhere - possibly in South America.

Cuddle Me Backwards Again

Most of the day was spent without electricity. We've known about this for weeks, that they would turn the leccy off between 9am and 5pm. 8 hours without internet access? Twitch twitch.

It's amazing, when you start to think about it, and I had a lot of time to think about it today how much of the stuff around you becomes totally redundant without electricity. The fridges, the freezers, the central heating, TVs, radios, CD players, the computers.. and so it goes on, all pretty obvious really but today I noticed all the other stuff. There were all the CDs, the video tapes the DVDs - the LPs! There was so much stuff in our house that was utterly useless without 240v 50 cycle AC on tap.

The books still worked.

When I woke up the pooter after the juice was restored it had somehow managed to loose all firewall settings. Took me an hour to work that one out and will take us a couple of days to teach it what is what again.

Cuddle Me Backwards

The thought of people poking about in my brain has been occupying my thoughts for a lot of the day. Actually that's a fib - the film Fantastic Voyage has been occupying my thoughts. If you don't know the film the basic plot is that a surgical team is miniaturized and inserted into a dying man to try and blast a blood clot in his brain with a laser. They have 12 hours or something before the submarine they are in reverts to full size again, so they have to be outside the body before then. As usual Things Go Wrong for the scientists (played by Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, and Donald Pleasence etc.) and they have to take a short cut out of the patienrts tear ducts. What has always puzzled me about that movie, even as a kid when I first saw it, is what happened to the bezillion gallons of miniturised water the submarine was sitting in when it got shrinky-dinked? Surely that would revert to full size at the same time.

I spent tonight round at the parents playing scrabble with them and Dan, and trying to design a low-tech homemade midge catching machine. We've just hit the hight of the midge season here and the little buggers are as horrible, and ubiquitous, as ever. Midges are attracted to sources of carbon dioxide (mainly tourists) but last night I noticed there was an almost solid swarm of them over the compost heap. I guess rotting vegetation gives off a lot of the right sort of smell. Commercial midge eating machines work by pumping out CO2 made by burning Propane gas and sucking the attracted creatures into a little cage. They retail for around £400 - which is about £395 more than I can afford to spend at the moment. It occured to me I already had a CO2 source in the compost heap. All I needed was something to suck up the gathered beasties. Current plans involve some plastic waste pipe, bits of cannibalised computers (chip cooling fans, and relevent transformers), and a pair of old tights. Alternatively I may just take the vacuum cleaner out there on an extension cable.

Bucket

Saturday: Cuil Bay. A family outing. Merriol and I, our kids, Morag, and her kids have a lovely hot sunny seaside day. As we are packing up to go home Merriol spots something small and green floating out to sea.
"Isn't that Holly's bucket?"
"Looks like it."
We looked at the little bright green blob bobbing on the waves. The thing was way beyond wading distance and I don't swim.
"Ah well, there's not a lot we can do about it is there?."
"No, not really."
At which point Holly sees it and bursts into tears: "My Bucket! My Bucket! I want my bucket!" She's inconsolable. She was less upset when the cat died - mind you we did have time to prepare her for that one - we should have sat her down before we came to the beach. " We're going to the seaside Holly but maybe some of your toys aren't coming back..." But we hadn't and there we were with a distraught child and nothing to do to save the situation.

Just then the motor boat that had been buzzing about off shore for a while came right in to the beach. People jumped off. I had an idea and ran down and collared the boat driver (is that the correct nautical term?). I told him the story and pointed at the near invisible floting blob. "Yeah, I'll go get that for you," he said - and off he roared.

The people who had jumped off the boat started humming the Baywatch theme. The boat neared the general area of its target and driver peered around looking for it.

Jokingly I said to one of the people standing next to me:" I hope it IS my daughter's bucket after all this," and as I did so the the guy in the boat pulled the thing out of the water - and I saw that it wasn't.

The thing the bloke had retrieved was his own son's toy boat which none of them had noticed was missing.

Holly's bucket was in the boot of the car.

---

Last night my Morag said she wanted to send me for a CAT scan or an angiogram. She has been meaning to talk about this with me for a for a while, well ever since Dan had his Hemorrhagic stroke (a blood vessel burst in his brain) a couple of years ago, but the timing was never right. Statistically there is a greater risk if a close relative has had a stroke - though whether this is a genetic thing, or because of similarities in environment and upbringing - I don't know. She wants to see if I have a similar, pre-existing condition.

If I do turn out to have cerebral aneurysm/s they might stick wires in my brain via my leg - it's a long bit of wire - and cut off blood vessels. This is what they were going to do with Dan after his first bleed. A plan that went out of the window when he had the second and they had to do the emergency operation.

This all a bit scary, the though of having people poking things into my brain is very disconcerting - I demand a miniaturised submarine!

‹(•¿•)›

Woke up yesterday morning to find the water was off.

A quick phone call to the neighbours reassured us (and them) that it wasn't personal; the whole village was off. Electricity off on Tuesday, no water on Wednesday, Mike - the neighbour I had phoned - is convinced that the gravity will be disconnected on Friday. I then spent ages trying to find the phone number of whoever is in charge of making the water come out of our taps while thinking up ingenious ways of getting some water from the river to our toilet cistern. Three people, one toilet, hot weather? I wanted to be able to flush it - tying a rope to the handle of a bucket and bunging it off the bridge seemed the easiest solution.

Eventually I found the number, and got stuck in one of those:

"If you are a not an existing customer and want to report your frustration at being held in a queuing system, please press hash followed by your 27 digit customer number"

things.

Eventually I got a recorded message saying:

"We are aware of the problem with the supply in Ballachulish
- you have wasted 15 minutes of your life listening to a robot".

I phoned Mike to tell him that they were aware of the problem with the supply in Ballachulish and I had wasted fifteen minutes of my life listening to a robot.

He told me the water had come back on twenty minutes ago.

I am starting to tie things down before Friday...

Please Can I have a Boyfriend To Be Married To?

Typing fast. The power has been going on and off all night. This happends sometimes during the summer. Sudden unexplained power cuts. So, a quick post before the lights go out and the computer becomes just a heavy useless lump of metal and plastic.

Vegging on the sofa tonight watching bits of Futuramas between blackouts tonight Merriol and I opened and, with the lack of will power that only the opening snack foods or chocolate can generate, consumed a whole packet of Pioneer Original Turkey Jerky 'Natural Smoke Flavour Added'. Phoebe and Tyler bought it over for us when they visited.

Later, I was reading the back of the packet. (Life tip: always read the contents of foreign snack foods AFTER you have eaten them) when I came across this:

"The meat contained herein is for personal use only and not for sale". What does that mean? And why is it on the Export Statement? Are Americans allowed to use Turkey Jerky impersonally - and sell it? I really am feeling baffled - and slighty queasy.

-----

Tallulah Blankhead

I have no idea why I thought that was funny or why I thought it blogworthy but I did and I have. Please accept my apologies.


Merriol took the kids out for the day and I spent most of the time working on the second of three revolving standing stone for Ilona's show. Ilona, if you are reading this keep breathing. It will all be ready in plenty of time. Trust me.

Worm Sorters are Very Important!

Today's Unanswerable Question from Holly (she must lay awake at night thinking these up):

"Can eggs climb trees?"

Today's Random Alarming Statement from Holly (and I'm sure she spends hours on these):

Holly:
"Daddy, I like porn!"

Me:
"What!?"

Holly:
"I like porn."

Me:
"Erm, what's 'porn', Holly?"

Holly:
"It's little bits of meat. You can
have it in pies - yummy tummy!"

I have absoloutly no idea what she was on about but I may have to start playing her Fifi and the Flowertots DVD backwards looking for hidden messages.

A short (true) story I submitted to Unmadeup.com was put up today. I feel a bit chuffed. On the downside I watched "It Came From Outer Space 2" last night and need a new brain.

---

Thing Thing Thing Thing Thing Thing - I am getting far too fond of that word in this blog. That was today's quota used up.

And Lo!

At some point over the last couple of weeks, I forget quite when, I took the carpet brushy bit of the hoover to bits (you can see why the date isn't etched in my mind).

For quite a while the lever things on the back that push the brushy bits on the bottom up and down (just skip to the next paragraph if this is getting too technical) had been getting stiffer and stiffer and just not doing what it was supposed to do. It felt like there was something in there obstructing the motion of the levery thingies.

With reluctance I took the whole carpet head thing to bits. I say with reluctance because I know from past experience (and if you've been following my gripping adventures in housekeeping here you'll know too) that any task that involves any dismantling or repairing anything around here invariably ends up involving plumbing, a trip to the timber yard and the exessive use of power tools up scaffolding

I took the metal plate off the bottom of the thing, and carefully placed the screws in a safe place followed by some little springs that I discovered behind it. (Amazingly, they hadn't flown across the room and disappeared behind some heavy piece of furniture.) Inside was a heavy quite complex felt gasket. I lifted it out. There was nothing else in there. With the gasket removed the lever things moved freely.

I fitted the gasket back in and reassembled everything. I tried it. It was just as bad as it had been. I opened it up again and took a long look at the gasket.

It may say something about the state of my mind and my general tiredness but it was a good 10 minutes before it struck me that it was extremely unlikely that the Vacuum Cleaner Division of the mighty Panasonic Corporation would manufacture a felt gasket the exact shade as the average of my carpets. I had carefully reassembled the thing with a 10 year accumulation of compacted fluff. I threw the gasket away and the cleaner works a lot better now.

---

Holly decided she was God tonight.

She came in from her bath to the kitchen and said "Let's pretend this is a Church and someone is God!"

She then promoted herself to the post and processed around the kitchen with Daisy trailing along after her like an accolite* chanting: "Where are your wishes? Where are your wishes?"

Why do they have to grow up?

*New AccoLite!
50% less fat than your average disciple!

OK! OK! A Title! - Damn You! You Stupid Machine!

I sometimes wonder how people coped with having children before CBeebies, disposable nappies, and automatic dishwashers.  I would be buggered without any one of them.  As it is I'm buggered at the end of the day anyway.  I have been less tired after a day's work on a building site than I am looking after my daughters all day.  They just never stop - unless I plonk them in front of the television which is evil and fills me with such guilt that I finish whatever it is I have to do at breakneck speed and rescue them. 

Finally starting to make progress on the set I am building for Ilona's National Theatre of Scotland thing. 3 weeks to go and I've finally got my act together.  Between the kids and everything else I'm only managing to get an hour or so at this each night - but it's starting to take shape.  One of the things I was trying to get to do before I started on this was to clear out my workshop.  I have a 25 square meter workshop that is so cluttered it is impossible to work in it.  I haven't been able to get to the wood lathe in over a year and I have to stand out in the front porch to run things through the circular saw.  It's pathetic that I let it get into such a guddle but I have, and it is, and life is exremely everso more complicated because of it.

I'm building the set in the porch which is also full of junk - including a 1950s electric cooker (functional) and a late 20th century photcopier (totally dead).

I need to get a grip.

I invented a new branch of science the other day:

Arhythmatics - the only known equation for which is:

A1, A2 + A123

I know: "Don't call us..."

My Blogging Tool Requires That I supply a Title; Who Am I to Disappoint a Machine?

It's Tuesday.

How do people have the time to update their blog every day? (Avoiding having children and not living in a building site would be good places to start).  Here it is Tuesday and I'm making my first entry this week.

Not that I have a lot to tell. So far this week my deepest thought has been:

"Subversive".  I know that 'sub means 'below' as in submarine and submerge, so what's a "versive" and how would you get under it?

I think having read two Perry Rhodan Novels, and watched both Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and the Eurovision Song Contest (and voted for the winner) this week has totally fucked whatever brain I had.  Please kids, don't attempt this at home.  I have had years of experience watching bad movies and reading drek SF.  I know what I am doing.  This could have been a near fatal overdose in the hands of less hardened dross addict.

Smell my Bum!

It's Friday. The kitchen worksuface is in and stinking the house out as I liberaly slopped it over with polyeurethane last thing. Tomorrow Sue and len are taking the kids all day and my Mum and Dad are taking them all night. 24 hours (- ish) without the children. Gasp! What are we going to do with ourselves - apart from sleep a lot and indulge in the annual crapfest that is Eurovision!

So sad, so sad.

Still hint waiting hint for hint Phoebe to hint tell the hint world via her blog.

I want to, but it's not my news!

Hint Hint!

Because You Are Not A Mysterious Fish - or - What Can You See Through A Tomato?

Rewiring of Kitchen Done! Hoo-Bloody-Ray! Yet again I have ended up lying flat on my back under my floor boards in the pitch black with the torch turned off (to save the battery) while people poke bits of wire at me through gaps in floorboards. Anyone would think I like this sort of thing.

Mind you, it was interesting down there.

It turns out, despite my strongly held belief that whatever I do to this pile involves me getting under the floor at some point, that I haven't been crawling around down there for about 3 years. I spent an awful lot of time under there before that - making the underfloor supports, that hold up the pillars, that hold up the new upstairs but I haven't been down there since the central heating was installed. I had no idea there were so many new pipes! God knows what they all do, and why I have so many stopcocks down there, and what I'm supposed to do with them, is an utter mystery.

Plumbing is weird.

...

From fellow palimpsest.org.uker Kumquat's Blog:


1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Ok, done that:

'The cable is wrapped up in its own little package as well.'

Not sure why I did that. I don't usualy go in for these chainy maily things. I have this idea that someone somewhere, the person who started this, is waiting for X amount of time to pass before Googleing all the results and assemble a novel out of the (semi-) random sentences.

If they don't, I will. The lawsuits for plagiarism alone will keep me busy for the rest of my life.

Ceiling of kitchen taped today. I hate taping. I'm totally crap at it. It's a cyclical feedback thing: I hate it because I'm crap at it and I'm crap at it because I hate it. Halfway through I ran out of tape which was a bit of a bugger but luckily Sue came to my rescue with a couple of till rolls she just happened to have in the caravan. It's weird but it worked.

Wednesday. Holly's school was closed for the day to let the teachers attend a seminar on paperwork. Lucky people. I took the kids and Sue to Oban for the day. It was a lovely sunny day the first time I had been out in the 'big town' when it hasn't been tipping it down or about to rain for ages. Quite a few people about all dressed as badly as only the British can be when the sun comes out. Pink flesh bulging out over the tops of too tight trousers, grubby grey bras as the bottom layer of that strange thing women do in warm weather of wearing 3 or 4 things with thin shoulder straps. Living in a small village I forget about things like this.

The kitchen is edging towards - something. Between the kids and this and that and the other (which this week including digging a drainage ditch for the parents) I have been averaging about 2 hours a day on this job. Tonight I got the plasterboarding finished. At last. Taping and sanding still to do, then make the work surfaces, do the rewire... I should be finished by Christmas.

No news from the Solicitors about the vergey thing but on Saturday one of the agrieved parties in the parking dispute started to work on the planters the Community Council have decided would be a good idea. They stopped when we pointed out that we might own it and we're all just twiddling our thumbs now.

I stocked up on long French movies yesterday; there were a pile of them in a Charity shop in the Fort at £1.50 each - anything to break this bad movie loop I seem to have got myself stuck in. While I was there I also bought a video compilation of classical ballet highlights for Holly who, when she isn't being a mermaid, is "going to be a Ballerina when she grows up". Last night we watched it. I'm not a ballet fan. I just don't get it, don't understand why they are doing it. I like some of the music - though according to Holly, only The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is "Real Ballet Music" - and I can admire the athletisism, skill and dedication of the performers but I just don't get storytelling through dance. Apart from the ocassional "Wow!" moment, which I equally ocassionaly get watching ice-skating, or gymnastics, or the opening stunt of a James Bond movie. I just just don't get it.

I'm waffling.

So there we are sitting watching skinny women and well muscled men gracefully prancing about the stage. The "Balcony Pas-de-deux" from Romeo and Juliet comes on. Juliet swoons on the balcony. Romeo sweeps onto the stage. Their eyes meet. Juliet sweeps down the stairs. They run to each other, they part, they tentatively embrace. They part again. Hesitantly Romeo kisses her hand. She acquiesces to his entreaties. He leaps across the stage in a series of impressive bounds. Holly says: "He wants to kiss her hand. Why doesn't he just stop dancing and kiss her?" I don't think Holly really gets it either - but then she is only 4.

Fish Tennis

For weeks now I have been avoiding getting involved in (or even hearing about) a long simmering row that has been going on up the street from where we live. A near neighbour has been parking his car on the verge of the road alongside our house much to the annoyance of other neighbours who have complained to the council about the possible congestion etc. etc.

Today the neighbour arrived on our doorstep asking my permission to park just where he has been for weeks.

"Why are you asking me?" I said, "It's nothing to do with me, it's the Council's land. Part of the public Highway."

"Not according to the Council," he said. "They say it belongs to you." He produced a letter from the council saying just that.

Bugger! I'm involved.

The whole of the grass verge up the roadside, between my garden wall and the road may be ours. We apparently own 120 square meters more of Scotland than we thought we did. 120 square meters with a streetlamp, a telegraph pole, 2 roadsigns, and a mains sewer running the length of it.

I sort of kind of wish this isn't true. If it isn't true, and the land does belong to the Council (or someone else) the long simmering row will go on simmering without us being involved. I've only lived in this village 15 years; I haven't been here long enough to take sides in any rows not of my own making.

On the other hand. If it is true and we do own it, are we then suddenly responsible for the upkeep of the roadside? Do I have to mow the grass? Pay the Council to mow the grass as they have been doing? What happens if someone hurts themselves there? Can they sue me?

I will have to talk to my lawyer about this.

How the hell does this happen? Every time I do anything on this house it ends up taking fifteen times longer than I planned and always becomes three hundred and thirty two times more complicated than I could have ever imagined. Tonight, as a direct consequence of putting a skylight into the kitchen two weeks ago, I have decided to move the cooker - which means completely rewiring the kitchen.

The blocking up of the wall continues. Pa and I are managing a course a day and we are now over half way up. We're getting to the point where those rocks technically known as "The Big Buggers" are too big to get up into place without stupid and complicated amounts of work so we are using "The Little Buggers". This takes a lot more fiddling about to get them to fit but it's less likely to knacker our backs.

What's the most stupid thing you did this week? I ran out of heating fuel just as oil prices are at their highest point for years. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! A delivery of dyed Deisel is coming tomorrow - at which point I will realise I have absolutly no idea how to relight the boiler and no idea where the manual is.

Still, you gotta laugh ain't cha?