The Beep
It started early this morning.
I could hear a faint beep when I went downstairs. I ignored it - with six cats to feed, two trays to scoop, sandwiches to make, expense form to submit and breakfast to eat, I didn't have time to track it down before I had to leave for work. I went to work and thought nothing of it.
But when I got home from work I could still hear it. It wasn't from the washing machine. It wasn't the heating or hot water. It wasn't the fridge. It wasn't the dishwasher. It wasn't the cats water fountain. It wasn't the tap - the water had been turned off due to mains work.
I was starting to get spooked. I stuck my head in the meter box. Not there. I tried the fuse box. No. I listened to every plug socket. Then I turned the electricity off to be sure that nothing was beeping.
I could still hear that damn beep.
The smoke detector was working. The carbon monoxide detector was working. I checked both my mobile phones, my laptop, my PDA, and my iPod. All were behaving.
The cats were following me around, but refused to go in the kitchen. Which was where the beep was the loudest.
I ran. Convinced my new house was now possessed, I did the only sensible thing. I went to my Mummy.
She laughed at me.
My father laughed at me.
My sister laughed at me.
The Boy laughed at me. Then offered to call Ghostbusters.
I suspect that the dog laughed at me.
After much pleading and bribery I persuaded my sister to come back with me to my newly haunted house. We set off, through the dark and foggy streets. Very eery. Very fitting, given my house was now possessed by an evil beep.
We got in, and straight away she could hear it.
We headed in to the kitchen. The cats hovered in the doorway, heads tilted to one side and staring into space.
We were at a loss. We searched through every electrical appliance I own. All were beep free.
We both saw it at the same time. The Baron's tool case. His pride and joy. We advanced on it slowly, one one each side. Like it would spring to life. We prised open the lid, held our breath.....
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
and turned off the Baron's fucking metal detector.
He is doing the washing tonight.
My cup overfloweth
We are finally done in the living room. The lighting isn't great, but the floor and walls are done, the new sofa's are in and I have got my books back on their shelves. It isn't finished yet - more books must be put away and all the ornaments (cats, of course) and pictures (cat related paintings) need to go back up.
You will not note a small one eyed cat in one picture relaxing on the sofa, because I attached the wrong picture. She is a naughty one eyed girl. No fewer than 10 seconds had elapsed from her seeing the new (and expensive) leather sofa's to her scratching the new (and expensive) leather sofa's.
Still my living room.
My living room
Bad girl
For I am sooooo bad.
Did I get you all excited?
Sadly it is an ovulator predictor stick, but at least I work half right! This is the tail end of my LH surge. I threw away the the surge stick as the Baron would have had a coronary if he had seen two clear lines on any stick, but it was a beauty of a surge!
Evil
Damn this cold. It is evil.
The Boy has it too. He claims it is his cold that made him break his ruler over his leg in school yesterday and then hide it. It was also the fault of his cold that he was very rude to his teacher.
The Boy is evil too. Clearly.
Harvey is evil. He stuck his nose on my freshly painted wall. So I have a nose print, and a cat with a blue nose.
Ellie is evil. She has chewed the entire corner of my bookcase.
Hollie is evil. She likes to sit and growl at the others. Even when they are fast asleep and have no idea she has left her evil empire.
The Baron is evil. He has stained my new sink with paint.
I am evil. For many reasons.
A letter from the Boy
Dir arnty
I hop all yor cats ar well but giv huve a good cice up the bum
from me
It's my turn now
Happy Blogversary to me!
One year old today.
(And a huge thank you to Jeevan at Haloscan, for restoring to me all my old comments. You are truly fab!)
The Size of a Teabag
When sperm and egg meet they must enter into some serious negotiations for the zygote contract. Everything must be just right, as the contract must be delivered to exact specifications.
Picture the scene, about 27 and a half years ago, if you will. Mr Sperm is sat at one end of the table, and Ms Egg at the other. The hour is late, and the other sperm have called it a day. Ms Egg is the sole representative for her company.
Egg: I must pass on the ability to eat an entire packet of biscuits in one sitting. This is a vital skill, and cannot be lost.
Sperm: You have got to be joking! No way. Not going to happen. Why on earth would anyone NEED that skill?
Egg: Tough luck. No biscuits, no contract. That is how it must be.
Sperm: Fine. If you get that, then I want to pass on the ability to drink beer until it hurts.
Egg: Bloody pointless skill, if you ask me. But ok, what the hell. What's left? Are we nearly done?
Sperm: Hum. Only the unimportant bits, I think. Grey eyes ok?
Egg: They'll do. How do you feel about musical skills?
Sperm: If you get to pass on musical skills, I want to pass on the love of reading.
Egg: Deal. I like that. Last two. You get one and I get one.
Sperm: All I have left to pass on is short sightedness and an inability to map read.
Egg: Does that explain why you had trouble finding the venue today?
Sperm: Haha. You don't have a real sense of humour to pass on then?
Egg: I have a bladder the size of a teabag, and a clicky elbow left. Let's toss.
Sperm: I find that to be a deeply offensive remark. It is offensive to my millions upon millions of compatriots who met their end through tossing.
Egg: Shove it up your arse.
Sperm: I'll ignore that. I'm going to go with short-sightedness.
Egg: I choose the bladder the size of a teabag.
Sperm: But we agreed on the ability to drink beer until it hurts!
Egg: It will hurt now. Never let it be said I do not have a good sense of humour.
And that is how I got my teabag sized bladder.
The Crazy Chronicles
Everybody has quirks. Strange habits. Odd phobias. Peculiar sayings.
I, for example, have a long standing fear of car washes. I also must have the toilet roll going under, and not over.
The Boy does not believe in blisters. He does not get blisters. He gets splinters in his feet, and that is that. He also dips biscuits into cold Ribena.
The Baron is fairly strange in most respects, but even he has his oddities. He always leaves the last few mouthfuls of Coke in the bottle. He doesn't just stub out his fags, but obliterates them into little heaps to prevent the raging inferno that may occur in the ashtray. Oh, and he likes peanut butter and houmous sandwiches.
My mother is the queen of peculiar sayings. "Okey dokey, lemon soaky" is one that the Boy has caught onto, but there are countless more. "Better a pole in the eye with a dead stick" springs to mind.
My father is currently crusading against the Times, for removing his beloved broadsheet format. He will not read the paper in tabloid format.
The Baron's father believes that it is a personal affront if the Baron doesn't answer the phone immediately. Even if he is at work.
Even the cats are in on the weirdness.
Harvey will tap me repeatedly in the night until I roll over and cuddle him. Try as I might, I cannot ignore him as the taps turn into bops, and then if I am still so impertinent as to ignore his demands, he will claw me.
Yet, if I am awake when he comes up, he wants nothing to do with me.
Frankie cannot groom himself without first folding back both of his ears. He also likes to scatter litter over a 5 mile radius, to ensure that everything is covered.
Ellie cannot remain silent even when stalking prey. She crouches low and starts hunting. Then she forgets herself, lets out a little chatter and her prey runs away (her prey being invariably the hapless Frankie, who can hear her chatter as he has forgotton his ears are still folded back).
Charlie will roll over and show his belly. Then he takes your hand with his paws, as if it let you stroke him, and then he bites. Hard. And then glares malevolently at you.
Willow watches foood cooking in the oven. It doesn't matter how long it is in for, she will watch it. We are thinking of spit roasting a pig, just to see if she will watch that. I've taken to leaving UKFood on for her when I am out, just to keep her occupied.
Hollie just likes to be in small spaces. In fact, the smaller the better.
My parents dog chases his own leg. In his defense, he doesn't have a tail to chase, but even so, that is one of the weirdest things I have seen. When he catches it (!) he actually tries to gnaw it like a bone.
So.....share your quirks!
Whoops
There was a big accident on the motorway over the weekend - a petrol tanker overturned after a crash, killed the driver, and spilt petrol all over the motorway. Unsurprisingly, the road was closed for a long time, and it needs to be resurfaced.
By this morning, they had opened one lane of the motorway. The traffic was therefore horrendous, according to the traffic report that woke me up. And it was where I was due to be travelling to.
So I did what any sane person would do - I decided to work from home. I e-mailed the client to say I would not be starting the on-site work until tomorrow, and then settled back in bed with my laptop, a pile of paperwork and an even bigger pile of files to review.
Well, in all honesty, the Baron was still in bed, so we settled down to something a little more fun than work, but since I am not paid to do that, we'll gloss over that bit and get to the work part.
A little while later, I started to update my calendar to reflect the change in plans. It wasn't a big deal, since I had five days allocated to the review, and in all likelihood only needed three to complete. Then it hit me.
Fanfuckingtastic. I had cancelled the wrong review. Same client, but different departments. I had e-mailed the department relating to next week's work to tell them I wasn't coming in today. Since they weren't expecting me, that probably didn't come as a great surprise to them.
However, the department under review this week were still expecting me. And I need all five days allocated to this review as it is highly technical, time consuming, and mind numbingly boring. Since I have a tender presentation to give on Wednesday I am seriously running out ot time on this review already, and I haven't even started. But since I am at the same client the following week, I can probably do the two reviews concurrently and fit everything in.
I called them to tell them I would be starting tomorrow. Only to find out that no-one is free until Thursday, but it was good since no-one was around today to actually do the review with.
So, in a roundabout way, things have worked out well. I can stay at home until Thursday, and catch up on other bits and pieces (the pile of ironing the size of Wales springs to mind) and my clients are happy with the change in plans.
Just call me the Penfold of the auditing world. I have the T-shirt.
The Well Fed Cats
I sometimes roast a chicken just for the sake of it. We buy organic chickens, so this isn't a weekly occurrence - much as I would like to have roast chicken every week, at around £10 a chicken, it simply isn't going to happen.
I rubbed it with garlic infused oil and sprinkled it with sea salt and rosemary. I stuck a lime up its bottom (and pricked the lime for extra flavour), along with more garlic, and roasted it until crispy, golden and cooked just right. Willow sat and watched it cook for an hour and a half, as is her wont.
It was left to cool on the side. The chicken guardians were relegated to the other side of the door for safety. Best not to leave tempation in the form of a freshly cooked chicken in their path.
I told the Baron to keep the kitchen door shut whilst it was cooling down. But he couldn't resist the crying Willow, and so went and got some for her. Sucker. She knows who to beg to.
I yelled down to him to make sure that the door was closed when he came out. He replied it was, and disappeared back to the conservatory, where he is engaged in making a clay model of some sort.
I came dowstairs a little later, frustrated with my mp3 player, which has decided that it must give my computer the cold shoulder and claim not to recognise it. So my plans of an early night listening to music have been replaced by a late night dreaming of destroying stroppy electrical items.
No cats were in sight, and the house was quiet. This, as all feline fans will know, is a BAD SIGN. No cats, and no noise usually means that mischief is afoot. I went to the kitchen with a deep sense of foreboding, and a sneaking suspicion that the Baron was going to be in big trouble.
The sense of foreboding was justified. The chicken was gone. All gone. Not a morsel remained.
Harvey and Willow were sat licking their lips and looking very smug, and Frankie and Ellie were arm wrestling for the last crumb on the kitchen floor. Charlie is above such stealing and was slumbering in my chair, unaware of the Great Chicken Theft. Hollie would have been in on it, if she wasn't hiding under the bed again.
The Baron swears blind that he shut the door behind him. But smart though my cats are, they have not yet worked out how to open doors. Cupboard doors yes, but not internal doors. They are working on it, but success is not imminent.
I think the Baron did not shut the door behind him. I think he left it wide open. I think I may have to beat him around the head with what remains of the chicken carcass.
So, to recap:
Cats - One large, slow grown organic chicken for tea.
DMouse - Cup of tea for tea.
The Baron - no tea at all.
Where art thou?
Please come back to me, my sweet comments.
The rant from Katie.
The musings of the Evil One.
The newly Evil Pez's wise words.
Snapper's snippets.
And the comments from everyone else. I would link more, but dinner is burning!
Shit bugger fuck bollocks
This is why posts and comments should be saved. Whilst playing with my template, I have somehow lost all my comments.
All of them.
Bits and bobs
The bedframe arrived over the weekend, and has been built. It is so comfortable! We built the bedside tables as well.
The olive tree has been planted. The chilli's have yielded a great harvest, and the lemon trees are doing pretty well.
I am all better now. A day of simple relaxing (the first in a long time, what with work, the Boy, moving house, the cats, clearing the garden and the like) and a good night's sleep (in a bed, and not a mattress on the floor) worked their dependable magic.
The Baron is enjoying playing with all his new gardening tools. He is determined that everything we grow will be edible in some manner, and so is spending hours clearing the beds and working out crop rotation plans.
The Boy was awarded with "Achiever of the Week - Year 2" for actually completing his week's work in the time allotted (rather than talking to his harem of girlfriends). Nice one, Boy!
Harvey has been accepted into the Feline Gymanstic Team (UK), after a stunning performance with Da Bird, kindly sent by Pat from Minnesota. We can't get them in the UK, so I will have to keep troubling fellow cat fanatics to buy and ship them on the cat's behalf. At the moment, he is sleeping after his latest training session.
Frankie has learnt that he cannot walk down the stair bannister. He has also been caught snuggling with Willow on the new bed.
Ellie has had some digestive problems. Probably caused by sampling the chilli harvest. Silly girl! She still eats my plants, but has taken to sitting on the Baron's lap late in the evening.
Charlie is just wonderful. He is a whole new cat. When we brought him here, he realised we had moved but had not left him behind. The newfound level of trust is astonishing, and he has started training with Harvey for the Feline Gymnastics Team (UK) . He may lose some weight now. I caught him cuddling Harvey last night as well.
Willow likes to walk along the fences in the garden. She looks so beautiful sat in the trellis work. She is a lovely girl, so friendly and trusting, despite having been knocked over and left.
Hollie has lost a lot of weight, but has started to eat again. She still likes to hide, but is currently on the windowsill above the radiator and is watching the world go by. However, since I live in the bottom of a cul de sac, there isn't too much for her to watch.
The rottweiler puppy is due to be born the first week in December. We just need to find out whether she has enough dogs for those on the list. She is expecting 8 puppies, but the sex isn't known yet. Puppy ultrasounds just aren't that helpful!
The fish are swimming in the pond.
Ill
I am at home. A shocking head cold, coupled with the first period I have had in ten years without the comforting barrier of artificial hormones has wiped me out.
Well, technically it is the strong painkillers I have taken that have knocked me out, but who is splitting hairs? Not me.
So I am snuggled on the sofa in my woolly blanket and whichever cats feel like a cuddle - that is one of the great things about having six cats is that there is always a furry hotwater bottle to be had. There aren't that many great things about having six cats that you wouldn't get with a more normal number of beasticles, but that is one.
I have to look after the Boy this evening as my parents need to take their dog to the emergency vets. I'm not looking forward to it, but I suspect Sam is looking forward to his appointment even less. Still, it is only for a couple of hours and then I can return to bed.
So from my sofa, I raise my cup of tea to all of you who don't have the luxury of taking time off sick and have to get on with it. Because the kidlets are getting on with it.
Related to fucktards
The Baron's brother is a waste of good oxygen. He is selfish and lazy, cheap beyond belief, and moans like an old woman constantly about everything. The last trait seems to run through all the males in that particular line..............but I digress. He is a fucktard.
This is the same brother who, not content with dragging us all out to Ireland for the wedding and refusing to help pay for his parents (leaving us to pay), is still demanding a wedding present. Not asking, but demanding. An iPod, to be exact. I don't fucking think so, you tight fuck. Manners mean nothing to this arsewipe.
He has been moaning that the Baron never goes down to visit him and his wife. The Baron has offered on numerous occasions, but as his wife has her family over constantly, it is not deemed appropriate for the Baron to visit, who has unsurprisingly stopped offering to visit.
We moved house three weeks ago. The Baron's brother has not been here. In four and a half years he visited our previous house once. His wife was in the area over the weekend, and he came to pick her up. Did he come over to see his brother? Did he bollocks!
He did have the nerve to phone us and ask us to pick her up and take her home (an hour's drive each way) because he wanted a nap and to watch the X Factor. But once over in the area, he couldn't be bothered to come here. Too much fucking effort.
But naturally we should be willing to make the drive down to see them whenever it suits his wife's family diary.
So tomorrow is the Baron's day off. Guess which fucktard relative he is going to visit? His parents were initially coming over for a visit (so according to the Baron, I should be frantically tidying up. I don't clean for my parents, so why he thinks I am cleaning for his, I don't know), but since they found out that the Baron is going down, they are going to. No doubt to avoid paying for their own petrol.
I will be working. I planned to work at home tomorrow and was being forced into the visit, but luckily for me, a major fraud has been detected at one of my clients and so I have to go back to London tomorrow to start the investigation off.
I've just had a phonecall. Turns out that fucktard's little wifey (She of the low self esteem who married a turd she knew had cheated on her) left her glasses at her aunt's house this weekend. Like you do. Guess who has to go out of his way this evening after work (when he finishes at midnight) to collect them?
The same person who always gets taken advantage of by his family.
The one, the only, the Baron.
Bereavement
It is with great regret I announce the passing of the Baron's car.
Our Escort, circa 1991, has served us faithfully (barring the electrical systems, which have been a pain in the arse).
It has taken us to France. To the supermarket. To the North of the country. To the pub.
It has provided endless entertainment. The "when is the horn going to stop blaring?" competition was always a delight. The spontaneous horn sounding also had its moments - outside Holloway prison, stuck in traffic in a notorious gang zone, and behind a police car are just some of the precious memories we shall cherish.
It shall be missed. Not least because I must now share my car with a confirmed crap driver.
Farewell, Escort. May you rust in peace.
New boots
The emotional pain has now been superceded by physical pain.
I am the proud owner of a new pair of Grinders. Sounds kinky, no?
My Grinders are 14 eye, black leather steel top capped monster Doctor Marten boots. Supposed to be the first boots to be designed that will not give you blisters.
Bollocks.
My feet are bleeding, red and sore.
But they look damn good!
Bugger
I feel ill. And saddened.
Goodbye clean air.
Goodbye to a meaningful right to choose.
Goodbye to any real homosexual rights.
Goodbye to civil liberties.
Goodbye to more lives lost in a meaningless war.
Still, people get what they vote for. And if people vote for a smirking little fucktard who can't string together a meaningful sentence, and wouldn't know the truth if it was smacked round his smirking little face, well that is what people get. And deserve. Well done, USA.
It is s shame that the rest of the world must suffer the consequences. War on terror my arse. The world's biggest terrorist has just been given free reign for another four years.
Thanks.
