Flash! A- Haaaaaaaa!

Spent most of this morning filling out my tax return online. Every year I haver, and dither, and put it off, and put it off, and put it off, only to find, when I finally do get round to it, that the process of filling the form out is nothing like as horrendeous as I remember. Then I remember it not being as horrendeous as I remembered last year and wonder why I hadn't remembered that earlier.

Now I've filled that in, we can go on and fill in the Insanely Complicated Tax Credits Renewal Pack and hope we still qualify. If we don't we shall have to sell one of the children - in which case we might qualify and have enough money to buy her back. (Maybe we could just pawn them...)

Tonight I flopped on the sofa and fell asleep watching Flash Gordon, a film I remember seeing at the movies when it first came out. What an enjoyable piece of junk! I'm sorry I fell asleep. It had everything I admire and look for in a movie: wooden acting, corny dialogue, cliched set pieces, dodgy SFX, scantily clad people being tied to things and whipped in an unenthusiastic manner... oh I'm easily pleased.

how can you not like a movie with lines like:

"No! Not the bore worms!"

or dialogue like this:

Hedonia:
(Offering the captive Dale a drink)
It has no name. Many brave men died to bring it
here from the Galaxy of Pleasure... It will make
your nights with Ming more... agreeable.

Dale Arden:
Will it make me forget?

Hedonia:
No, but it will make you not mind remembering.

Got up, went shopping, came home, watched a bad movie, went to bed.

That about sums the day up.

It rained.

I went back to the doctors today to discuss the saga of the miniturised submarines poking about in my brain; the discussion boiled down to the simple facts:

If I have the scan and they find something worth operating on they will want to operate (why else do the scan?). There will then be a 20% risk of something happening. 'Something happening' being anything from me having a mild, recoverable stroke, to being 100% irrecoverably dead.

If I have the scan and they find something and I don't have anything done about it there is a 10% risk of the same 'something happening' in my lifetime. ie anytime between now and when I die, from whatever cause, which could be anything up to 40+ years from now. (Optomist)

If I have nothing done there is nothing I can change about my lifestyle that will make a blind bit of difference. If it is going to happen it will happen. All that will change if I know about it is I will be concious of the fact that I have an aneurism and all the attendant worries that will bring.

I think I am going pass on having the scan. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. The maths has convinced me that this is one of those sometimes.

I Had a Sausage Sandwhich for Lunch; I'm Not a Vegetarian After All

I'm being paid to play with kids again. Great fun. As part of some Highland Council money spending scheme I get to spend 4 days this week playing silly buggers with a whole load of 5 - 11 year olds. Nominaly they are called 'Drama Workshops' - but it's playing. I'm only assisting this year, which is a great relief, avoidence of responsibility being a really big part of my entire adult life, but it does mean I'm not getting £20 an hour which I did last year - less that a third of that in fact. One of the best bits about it though, is getting a break from Holly and Daisy for a few days. It seems perverse, playing with other people's children being a welcome break from playing with my own, but it is, and I am grateful for it.

This blog will be a year old next week, the longest time I have kept any form of diary in my life. I'll bake it a cake

I've Been Glued to The railway Track by a Dragon! - Quick, Get Your Dragon Glue Disolver!

I spent most of today laying concrete paving slabs around Mike and Morag's oil tank - something to with it being a condition of sale of their house, I'm not sure exactly why I was doing it but I promised I would, so I did - and I enjoyed myself. Today was the first time I have been away from the kids for a whole day, for ages, I can't remember how long it is since we had a rest from each other. I love my daughters, I really do, but lately things have been getting a bit tetchy between Holly and I. No one can spend 12 hours a day 7 days a week, for weeks on end in somebody else's company and not get a bit fed up with them from time to time - even if they are four and easily distracted.

Holly and are getting like that. It's hard. 'Living with a four year old', as someone smarter, funnier, and almost certainly better looking than I am once said, 'is like living with a psychotic dwarf.'

I'm working all next week and then again a couple of weeks later. I hope the break will do us both good. I love Holly very much but sometimes lately I have found it hard to like her very much. It hurts.

I Don't Like the Tomato - Go Away Tomato!

It is hot and sticky here at the moment as oposed to just plain hot like the rest of the UK. Down in England roads are melting and whole areas of the country are using water faster than the water companies can pump it to them. Here it is humid and I think that makes it worse. We're all wandering around like Tenesse Williams characters, fanning ourselves with whatever comes to hand and watching each other sweat.


It's too darn Hot.

Back from holiday!

Only took 10 hours to drive back and, as Merriol is going down with the snottynesses and not feeling to good, I drove the whole way myself. Furthest I have ever driven in my life. It is now several hours since we arrived and I still can't stop moving. I'm totally jittery. Everytime I shut my eyes everything comes rushing at me. It's a bit freaky. So, the kids are in bed, Merriol is in bed and I'm wandering around reclaiming my territory. Metaphoricaly peeing in the corners and pacing the bounderies growling at the other beta males. That sort of thing.

Grrrr.

Eleven hours to get to Sheffield - eleven sodding hours. Three quarters of one of them was spent stuck in a 'move five meters then switch off the engine for a bit, then move another five meters, nose to tail, type traffic jam on the M74. We could see the line of traffic appearing and disappearing over the hills away into the distance. We're in the center lane. It's hot and sticky real thunderstorm weather. Right on cue Holly says "I want a wee wee".

The thunderstorm broke as we arrived at the rented cottage high in the hills on the edge of the Peaks.

Huge flashes of lightning light up the sky. Thunder cracks. Wherever the lightning is hitting it is pretty close. Rain suddenly pours out of the sky in unbelievable quantities as Merriol and Len scurry backwards and forwards getting stuff out of the car and into the house as fast as they can. I have copped out of the getting wet game and stay in the house try and organise the incoming luggage out of their way, as soon as they lob a bag through the door, I whisk it away into the kitchen, living room or the bottom of the stairs.

At last everything is in. Merriol changes her trousers which are sodden and clinging to her in a very attractive, but uncomfortable manner and we flop on the sofas. We open a couple of beers. We are on holiday! After all the travelling, and driving, and keeping two hot bored kids amused in the back of a car we are finally on holiday.

We raise our beers in a toast, and as we do so there is a final Godallmighty crack of lightning outside and the electricity dies.

0 - 0

The power of thought. Engerland are out of the Whirled Cup and with British 'hopefuls' getting themselves thrashed out of Wimbledon as fast as they can it is now safe to go down south.  Unless of course the Tabloids come up with some 7 year old sporting wonder kid in the International Tiddlywinks friendly with the Faroe Islands.

No Laughing and No Bending Down! But Smiling is Allowed

Oh it's a good day for spotting things: This from here

In 1801, Thomas Young elegantly demonstrated his double slit experiment. The experiment showed that light also behaves like waves, because it interferes with itself.

Ohh-err Missus!

and this mindbogglingly obvious piece of advice from the intructions on a box of Early Learning Center face paints:

Using Face Paints
You can paint your own face or that of a friend. If you are painting yourself you will need a mirror.

No shit Sherlock! Who writes these instructions? I thought it was patently obvious that anyone who had managed to master the concepts of face painting and reading would be aware of the difficulties of painting your own face without being able to see it. Idiots!


Merriol and the kids and I are off for a few days down to the Fleshpots of Ingerland. (I hope they get knocked out of the Wurld Kup or whatever it is called soon because Ingerland in full patriotic We're backing the boys, Gawd bless yer Ma'am, earwig oh, earwig oh, earwig oh! Kraut, Argie, Wop bashing frenzy is as one of the Inner Circles of Hell to me.

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.