02/09/10Creature Feature, Email Scam News, Rocket Science
The
Starry Towers estate is becoming increasingly popular with the creatures
of the wild. This week I spotted a Pebble Prominent (Notodonta
ziczac) larva. Looks really interesting, but don't get too
inquisitive, it's really quite horrendous up close, with mouth
bits like the remaining half face of a victim in a SAW movie. The
second photograph is the eating bits, warning...do not click on a full
stomach. It's hanging upside down in the picture. It's them
Willow trees again, very popular with all things creepy that cr
awl.
The PP eats Willow and Poplar.Bugsandweeds.co.uk suggests the colour scheme of the ziczac seems to mimic the upper and lower leaf surface colours of the Willow. I wonder also if the orange patches are a clever mimicking of the Willow Rust to make it more difficult to spot.
Another bit of Starry Towers news, the garden bird species count increased by one yesterday. The Boy called me to see
a
black, white and red bird in the Lilac tree. A male Great Spotted
Woodpecker. He didn't stay too long, flitted about a bit then
rested on a branch for a few minutes. A few minutes was all it
took for the wee bugger to rip the bark and leave some dents in the
exposed wood beneath. Initially I was all chuffed to bits at his
presence...after seeing the damage...I don't know if my Lilac tree would
survive regular visits. But then again, if the Lilac tree had to
go, I could replace it with a Summer house. Swings and roundabouts,
change can be a good thing. 
So, the Starry Towers garden birds species list has increased by an
exciting, though destructive, one, reaching the grand total of 18.
Which is pleasing to me as I do all I can to support nature at Starry
Towers, be it in a flowering, feathered, buzzy or even creepy-crawlie
form, as long as they're not Grey Squirrels...or cats.I'm so lucky, yet another stranger wants to give me an extraordinary large load of money. Lile Song insists that an Iraq Colonel Sadiq Uday died along with his wife and only child when a bomb hit their home. If I don't agree to help this Hong Kong wanker then the Hong Kong government will claim the Colonel's millions, if I do agree to help then I'll get 30% and Mr Song will get the other 70%. He says I should tell no-one and give him my name, address and phone number. I emailed immediately..."go fuck yourself". The email address this scam provides doesn't work, my F U message got returned undelivered. They are such amateurs.
The Boy and I watched Rocket Science this evening, gentle, intelligent, quirky, so uncool it's cool, showing boys in a good light and the one girl in a very bad light, what a bitch. The big brother of the movie's main character is played by Vincent Piazza, looking for all the world the double of Pete Doherty. You never got a hint at
why he looked so wasted, sure he's a kleptomaniac and keeps an untouched
bottle of booze in his stolen items box, but he looks like a heroin
addict.This is Vincent Piazza as big brother Earl Hefner on the school bus in coming of age movie Rocket Science, baring an uncanny resemblance to junky m
instrel
Pete Doherty. However, Vincent is an actor in character and
usually looks this good, Mr Doherty unfortunately usually looks even
worse. I swear, he did look like him the movie.31/08/10BVH - ghost hunters and a short history, Kevin Smith and Hitman
Sunny
Dechmont is having problems with ghost hunters...summit I never thought
I'd have the experience of saying. Googling 'Bangour Village
Hospital' brings up a massive amount of returns these days.
There's a shit load more people interested in getting into Bangour
Village Hospital now it's closed and bordering on derelict than wanted
to be there when it was a thriving hospital village community, like what
it was back in my day.A great many of them hits are websites devoted to the idea that old buildings can be haunted. The people frequenting BVH these days seem to be paranormal-thrill seekers and urban explorers. People, most of them young or crusty, or young and crusty, enjoying some sort of anti-establishment excitement from a very mild form of braking the law, defying the security guys, looking for ghosts, mild spills and thrills in the middle of the night. It seems to be a popular pastime. As you enter bangour village hospital into the Google search, the pre-emptive most popular search terms come up...seems people are looking for ghosts and maps of how to get to where they suspect the ghosts are. I have news for them, there are no ghosts, you're giving your mind a treat. Some Sunny Dechmont residents, mainly in Burnside and parts of the Main Street, are being plagued by late night parking and revellers, and aren't very happy bout it, and who can blame them. There's no evidence they're consuming illicit drugs or alcohol, but they do drop their empty fast food and high-energy drinks containers out their car windows, slam doors and wheel spin late at night. ASBOs have been issued. Grow up children, a lot of the locals have to go to work early next morning after your all being so silly.
I mourn the demise of BVH, I liked working there from 1983 till it's long drawn-out final closure in 2004. Living in the Nurses Home for 4 years was a great time. Full of life and exciting, absolutely no ghosts. BVH was a big part of my working life, and my community. Despite the stigma of mental illness, and the old asylum tag, the people of Sunny Dechmont
were always, in my experience, respectful,
accepting and caring towards the patients. Sunny Dechmont was, and
still is to a lesser degree, populated with people who worked in the
hospital, and their children, and their children's children, generations
of psychiatric hospital staff, so I s'pose that had to influence the
village's attitude to the local employer and it's residents. The
stigma didn't exist in Sunny Dechmont. I've seen an elderly
man with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia shit his pants at a bus stop on
Main Street. An off-duty nurse attempted to persuade him to go
back to get changed, but he was having none of it, so he got on the bus when it arrived.
I imagine the driver must've got a whiff of the man's recent personal
hygiene issue, but he let him on. A phone call got made and the Charge Nurse from the old
man's ward drove down and collected him and took him home when he got
off the bus. Modern UK psychiatric services couldn't hope to get
even close to that type of integration and local community acceptance.I'm sad for the loss of real 'community care', it all went tits up, a government decided asylums were bad, they didn't understand what they had in their hand and were dropping, in favour of their forced 'community care'. Sure there were things that needed to be improved, but they threw away the pockets of local understanding and acceptance. Something that had taken a century to build up...lost. They closed the Asylums and moved reduced in-patient service provision into general hospitals in towns while concentrating on maintaining people in their own homes and providing new-build units for a reduced number out there in the community. In areas that weren't that keen on the idea.
Of course it's a good idea to keep people at home if at all possible, but when it's not possible, where's the best place for people who need 24/7 treatment, care and a lot of R&R? Middle of town with the bizz of town-life and strangers or in palatial grounds with a village of supportive, sympathetic and wise people on the doorstep? Ideally they could've refashioned some of the listed buildings within the original BVH grounds and continued to benefit from the beautiful surrounds as well as the lovely people. But sadly, nahhh...finances coloured the decision rather than people. Wonder where they are with that now it all fell through. The NHS have been obliged to provide security since they closed it down, hundreds of urban exploring ghost hunters, a good few local Sunny Dechmont folks and YouTube can testament to that being a complete failure.
Bangour
is a Listed site for very good reason and will be protected
accordingly...allegedly. Apparently the site was purchased for development by Persimmon Homes
in conjunction with The Burrell Company, with demolition of all non listed buildings in mind,
conversion of the listed into
luxury flats and the building of new houses on the extensive grounds,
but that plan's been shelved & the site thought
to have been put back to tender. And look at the state of it now,
boarded up and empty with only ghost hunters and urban explorers for
company. This is the Nurses Home, I lived there for four years,
that's my room up there, top floor with a view out on the church and
everything else beyond. Some of the buildings have been empty a
lot longer than February 2004 when the final two closed. The
Burrell Company website still proclaims it's intention to develop the
site...they need to get a better web-master guy.Bin News : The bin got emptied yesterday as usual, seems the strike and work to rule action I reported on the 27th was a 24 hour thing. I was sitting on the pavement tending to the street side bit of the Starry Towers estate when the Bin Guys came by, a particularly pleasant Bin Man told me what a lovely garden I have.
Kevin
Smith can talk, I mean, he can REALLY talk, thankfully. The SModcast podcast
network is expanding at an extraordinary rate and valiantly keeping me in listening material
with no less than SIX podcasts a week! And most of their podcasts
are around or way longer than an hour in length. AND now, Mr Smith
has SModcastle, his own 50 seat theatre/comedy club at Hollywood's 6468
Santa Monica Blvd, where they do a load of live recordings with an
audience, if I lived in Los Angeles I'd be down there all the time.The podcasts are, the original SModcast, Tell 'Em Steve-Dave, Highlands : A Peephole History, Jay & Silent Bob Get Old, Hollywood Babble-On (HBO) and Blow Hard, which seems to have replaced The Mo & Glo Show. In The Lobby I've replaced the previous various separate links with one link which takes you to The SModcast Podcast Network front page with easy access to the current six, go there, get them all (the archives are made easily available there too). If you're a fan of his movies you will love all this stuff, so many insights into where Mr Smith got his creative inspiration, the guys are all so very funny and they reveal hilarious heart-warming and exceptionally human and touching tales every time they talk to each other. Amazing. The new Hollywood Babble-On starring Kevin and Ralph Garman is particularly interesting and topical with Messrs. Smith and Garman discussing Hollywood news and goss, and I wasn't expecting that.
All the stuff I bought online recently from Topshop, River Island and
Matalan...love it, love it, love it, especially my new
all-time-favourite black leather stud slouch bag from Topshop, it is
fantastic, just...so...right. And I was right to assume that their
stud army jacket in khaki with the grey jersey hood would become my
favourite parka jacket, it did, on sight. Though I had to return
the size 12 and re-order in a 10. No hardship, given their easy
and free returns at your local Post Office. I always thought the Topshop sizes
are made specifically for the few remaining skinny schoolgirls in
Britain, most of whom are routinely discovered in the flagship London branch on
Oxford Street by top model agencies. But, maybe I was wrong.
The other special purchase is River Island's faux fur jacket. I
couldn't tell from the website picture, and the description doesn't give
enough details. I just hoped it had a hood, would feel as good as
it looked and I blindly ordered a size 10, right on all 3 counts.
Absolutely fabulous.The Boy and I watched Hitman the other night, because of my new Timothy Olyphant crush. Honestly...I'd have to say...it's rubbish, but he's my new eye candy, so it's not rubbish. It's also not rubbish because The Boy liked it for it's action and computer game origins, and he should know, being so young and cool and a member of a popular demographic group, compared to the one I fit into.
27/08/10Bin News, Pope News, H&M and Adventureland
Bin News : regular readers will remember the Bin situation last Xmas, when the rarest thing in Sunny Dechmont, for several weeks, was a Bin Man. I can say 'Man' without risk of sexism accusations, because an even rarer, in fact non-existent thing in Sunny Dechmont, is a Bin Man of the female persuasion. West Lothian Bin Men are on strike again from today. The council have given the same advice as last time, as there will be a work to rule they are instructing us Council Tax paying service-users to present our bins for collection at the kerbside with the handles facing the road and the lid firmly shut, and left there till they get emptied. Which kinda indicates that if your bin handles are pointing the wrong direction and your bin lid not firmly shut, they will lift it at all other times, but during periods of strike action they'll get all nit-picky militant bout the details. Which almost makes them sound like reasonable people when they're not working to rule. I don't understand. I always stick rigidly to the proper handle pointing and lid rules all the time, because I've been led to be indoctrinated with the belief that it's the only way. I've been told the bin just won't be emptied if I don't, all the time, not just during their regular strikes. It may sound like I'm dissing the Bin Men, but I'm sure they're all very nice people and I do hold this slightly bigger than a smidgeon...and growing...admiration of their insistence of standing firm and not cow-towing to the general trend of certain other unions merging so well with management that it's almost impossible to determine which is which.
Pope News : that old German bloke who's spending my
money. Reportedly, one small fraction of the overall £12 million
bill...at the bargain price of just £22,000...loose change really...an
80 metre stretch of road outside St Bennet’s house, built by architect
John Henderson some time after
1856 with a charming Byzantine chapel in the grounds dating from 1907,
and the Edinburgh residence of Scotland's top Catholic, Cardinal Keith
O'Brien, Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St Andrews, will be getting new
tarmac and the lamp posts painted just in time for his Holy Free-loaderness's
September visit. He's becoming soooo Z List, so grabby.
St Bennet's is so obviously in a poorly maintained downtrodden Edinburger street, look at it, it's about time they spent money on tarmac and lamp post painting.
All that is sensible tells me, that by now, we should all know that religion is a man-made concept that in times gone by, helped the largely self-imposed rulers maintain, both law and order, and their personal prosperity, as well as providing hope and a reason for living for the plebs who's lifestyle was at the best...less enjoyable, and at the worst, extremely grim. Religion really is the opiate of the masses. Despite being the reason behind so much torture, maiming and death in the history of the Human race it did help in our survival way back when. However...I find it highly offensive. We should've moved on, we're better than this stubborn and stupid adherence to primitive belief patterns. We should be able to go beyond, especially now we have the knowledge of the existence of the God Spot in the human brain. The Human brain developed a spiritual area because it had proved so beneficial to survival in the past, but I hope we're just a few generations off reaching a more advanced Human evolution position that can over-rule nature's cruel joke...so abused by some people (mostly men) right from the very start of human history.
Meanwhile, Council officials are denying that the work carried out in The Pope bit of Greenhill Gardens in the Morningside area of Edinburgh is related to His Popiness’s visit. Though it is the house that Benedict will be dining after he tours Edinburger in the pope mobile. Factored into his schedule will be some relaxation time after lunch and before travelling along the M8 to endure Michelle McManus and Subo at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow.
A Council spokesman said: ““We are working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, Lothian and Borders Police and their Met colleagues to ensure the visit goes smoothly.” I nearly choked! The Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, Lothian and Borders Police and their Met colleagues...and that's s'posed to make us feel like our taxpayers money isn't being thrown around like Holy water at an Exorcism?
I'm happy to say H&M will become a shopping option for me in the very near future. I do recall having a few items of their clothing over the years. I first became aware of them when I saw their name in fashion mags years ago, but the nearest branch at that time was in Newcastle. And NOTHING could entice me to visit Newcastle, the people have this accent that is ugly, vulgar and scary. I have personal issues, I'll never get over with the Geordie accent. Ah feel sick when ah heor it, ah divvent wish tuh disrespect people from Newcassel, but ah canny help ha me body reacts, aaal reet, git owor it.
I first visited an H&M in Amsterdam, in the '80s, the 1980s, which at the time wasn't all that bad. Even about a decade ago, the Edinburger branch didn't seem so bad from my memory. Three years ago I was in the Emmen (Holland) branch, not too bad compared to my local Livingston branch. So very very very messy. Nothing is on the right rail, everything's mashed up, if you see an item you like...you pick it off the rail to look closer, wrong size, so you put it back and look further along the rail expecting the same item in other sizes...that's not what's on that rail.. After a few times of that, you leave the store disappointed and frustrated. That's why I don't shop at H&M. But that may change soon, they're opening their online store on16th September, hopefully their website will be more user-friendly than my local bricks and mortar real store.
The Boy and I watched Adventureland this evening. I bought Adventureland as a direct consequence of seeing Zombieland and falling for the young American actor Jesse Eisenberg, he of Buzzcocks' Simon Amstell look-a-likee appearance. We both loved it, and it being a teenage-issue movie, addressing young folks' life, love, sex, work, peer pressure, reputations, education, pot, alcohol, driving, music, family relationships, coming of age, growing up, becoming your own person and how to ignore other people's opinions that aren't your own, once you're wise enough to recognise what your own are...it's great. Highly recommended by both The Boy (aged 17) and me, his Mother, aged 40 summit.
26/08/10Gardening News, the sting, Menopause News, Hay Fever Update, Scam News, some old German guy spending my money and River Island top buys
So there I was innocently gardening, on my honkers, wearing leggings made of a soft and thin fabric (that's probably important), when I was surprised to be injected with poison. It wasn't an undercover agent silencing me for my anti-religious views, but some stingy buzzy insect. I got stung, on the arse! Right buttock. I hope it wasn't one of The Starry Towers bees, I do so much for them, the thought one of them might attack me, would be too shocking, in a 'sting the arse that feeds' type way. If it was a bee, it'll be dead, so I'm finding the idea of it being a wasp more acceptable all round. The Boy had recently left to go to his Dad's place, The Husband's in The Land of Jeppe Laursen and Stig Frode Henriksen, I was on my own. As the pain increased I gingerly limped round the side of Starry Towers. First a little vinegar cos it's easy to find in the fridge and it's in my head that it helps with such things. Was totally impossible, given the site of entry, to check if the stinger was still in there. As I was dabbing the vinegar, I was locating the Hydrocortisone cream. The pain faded. It was a bit tender to sit on by this morning, and still an impressive big red circle of about a 2 inch radius, but by this evening even the discolouration has faded. If it was still bright red tonight I was going to take photos and put my bum on the interweb, but it isn't, so I won't. Moral of the story...wear the harder, thicker denim fabric while gardening...it might deflect the stingy things, offering superior protection.
Menopause News : and another thing...I'm having the third period this year, it's August, this would normally be the 8th. I'm so peed off, starting over again every time the period happens. Being under 50, I have to go 24 months without a period before I can say The Menopause is behind me, so every time the rare period occurs, I have to start again with the counting.
Hay Fever Update : On a more positive health note, I've started cutting back on the anti-histamines. This is the first year of my life I've taken the very likely probability that I have Hay Fever seriously and medicated daily to escape the runny eyes/nose missery. I've cut it back to every second day now and no symptoms. I'm planning on stopping totally mid next week. Fingers crossed.
The latest scam email to arrive at the door of MarilynsWorld.com is from the Swiss Lotto, sent by Mr. David Barnet Bradley using his transdept2010@aol.com email addy. I've won 750,000 EURO, and that's a big fat lie. I don't even get round to doing the UK Lottery, and have certainly never ever entered the Swiss Lotto.
The Pope, this Benedict one, I can't remember his number, is visiting the UK next month. At a cost to British tax payers of 12 million pounds. 4 days, 12 of our millions...is he worth it? Really? Stop with the madness. It's time to save money, tell him we cancelled, say we forgot we made prior arrangements, we won't be home. As an atheist, can I opt out of the Pope's visit? I know it's my human right to not be at the Papal Mass at Bellahouston on the 16th, where His Popeness will be entertained by BOTH Michelle McManus (Pop Idol winner 2003) and Subo (Britain’s Got Talent runner-up 2009), lucky man. Simon Cowell...grrrr, has a lot to answer for. But anyway, no-one can force me to attend that 100,000-capacity event, but they can force me to hand over my tax-payers Scottish pounds to be spent on keeping the old Catholic codger's influence alive in a country that should know better. In today's tough financial climate, with cutbacks in public services, including the NHS and the police, them powers that be will be wasting my money on this travesty of human kindness and good. Worshipping the leader of a religion that is repeatedly revealed to have lied and protected paedophiles. If he wants to be here I don't mind him kissing the runway at Glasgow Airport, but he should be paying for his own visit, when I went to his palatial abode I had to pay for my trip, and I've never suppressed information that could stop evil men and women abusing children, I'm not that kind of person. Actually, I do mind him being here, it's a disgrace. Are we still living in the 16th century? Obviously not, I was being sarcastic. Come on people, get wise...evolve.
It's budget deficits all round. Here's a couple radical ideas...lets give a rain check to the 2012 O- and Para- Lympic games (we're staying in to wash our hair) and cancel the Common Wealth Games 2014, (we're anticipating a migraine).
On the subject of Subo, I know a woman who knows a man, who swears blind Subo was spotted at A&E at SJH recently, with two black eyes. Of course I don't believe a word of it, there's a load of the West Lothian middle-aged female population could be mistaken for Subo. If I'm wrong however...you heard it here first.
I could resist no longer, look at the luxury that is this River Island faux fur jacket, it had to be mine. They also had this straw trilby which will be versatile with a change of scarf, I'm hoping I've at long last found my perfect Summer hat.
24/08/10The perfect parka, gorgeous bag, a load of other shopping, Lola binned, Dead Snow and A Perfect Getaway
I've
been shopping, as is my right as a hard working woman a couple days
before payday, get used to it. I love all the parkas I already
own, they're all great, stylish etc, but I think I just found the
perfect parka. Over at Topshop it's known as a Stud Army Jacket in
Khaki. It has particular detailing that makes it an absolutely
gorgeous army style parka jacket, four pockets, studs, detachable (not
that I'll ever remove it) grey marl jersey hood, wear-and-tear to make
it look vintage army-surplus and drawcords at hem and waist. The
line of studs carries over across the back too. Fabulous.
The reason I was at Topshop in the first place was to finally commit to
my most recent lust item. The item I've been looking at for a
while, is a little pricey so I've looked and hankered, knowing full well
I'd get it in the end. The Topshop Black Leather Stud Slouch Bag,
committing is so sweet after the lengthy self-denying longing.The Matalan delivery arrived on Friday last week, the very next day after I placed the order. Their new Angora-blend Boyfriend Cardi which looked a lot like their previous F
luffy
Boyfriend Cardigan I love so much, is a total success. I got two
of the black last week, today I ordered another 2 in black, a grey, and
a wild mushroom. While I was at it, I also went for their
Camouflage Frill Lace Vest, Slouch Jersey Crops in grey and their rather
attractive Zephir king size duvet set in black.
Ding dong bale, pussy's...not in the well, though we all know now Lola would've been dropped down a well if there had been one to hand. Alleged animal-lover (according to her Mum), Mary Bale was caught on CCTV behaving rather badly. She was walking along an ordinary quiet street in Coventry, like a decent normal human being, she found Lola the pet cat sitting innocently enough on a garden wall, and paused to stroke cute lickle kitty kitty Lola. And for all I despise my local cats for how they try their very best to kill my garden birds and how they find any area of the Starry Towers freshly dug gardens so attractive for shitting in, it was more than a bit off how Mary, Mary very contrary, suddenly saw fit to snap and dump Lola in the wheelie bin. OMG!
I'm torn, watching Ms Bale ruthlessly attempt long drawn out feline murder by starvation, I don't know ...could I? It's being regarded as a disgusting act of animal cruelty, for sure. Her apparent snap decision and the speed of her actions, she doesn't even look round to check if she might be at risk of being seen. It all happens so fast. What if I was helpless to save one of The Starry Towers garden birds, say for instance, I watched a Gold Finch be murdered for play/sport by one of my neighbour cats. I'd be gutted, extremely upset, I regard my garden bird visitors as my own, my pets. It takes a lot
more
work and effort to gain garden birds then to keep on enticing them back
to regularly visit your garden than it does to go out and get a cat.
What if I later found myself alone with the killer, and what if I knew
for a fact that there were no CCTV cameras on Sunny Dechmont Main
Street, and per chance, all the Sunny Dechmont Main Street neighbours
were away on holiday in the same fortnight, and I knew that for sure.
Would I lull the Starry Towers garden bird killer into a false sense of
security then woosh, you can fly little cat, for a split second, now you
can't, now your in a bin...stay there a while, and die. I couldn't
go down the long painful starvation death road, though maybe I could do
a quicker more instantaneous, less protracted version...death by bullet
perhaps, or gas chamber, drowning maybe. I'm pretty sure I could.
I don't even think Ms Bale was thinking Lola would die, if you stick a
cat in a wheely bin right outside the house of it's owners, just feet from
their front door...they will hear it's cries, cats are capable of
being very loud. I'm guessing Mary was probably reckoning the
owners would do what I do every time before I bring my bin in from the
street after it's been emptied, I quickly lift the lid to make sure the
bin guys have been and the bin really is empty. I don't think Mary
is as evil as they're all saying on Facebook and the national news.
Any bird-killing cat dispatched from Starry Towers would only be following in the footsteps of all the nasty Grey Squirrel bastards who've fell foul of Starry Towers.
And that brings us neatly round to the Red/Grey Squirrel debate...it's all very racist sounding. More on this in tomorrow's blog post cos I'm tired and still to post bout the movies The Boy and I watched this evening.
First up was the subtitled Nazi Zombies in Norway horror comedy, Død Snø, or Dead Snow, as we understand it. Ein! Zwei! Die! Excellent stuff, all you need to be told is we both loved it, get it and watch it for yourself.
After a ten minute break for toilet functions and a replenishing of snacks and drinks we did A Perfect Getaway. 6 strangers, 2 killers and one paradise island. We knew there'd be twists and 'Red Snappers' aplenty...and it delivered in good style. I fell in lust with Timothy Olyphant...on sight. Then discovered it's him off of The Crazies, so I'm claiming I wanted him since back then, and I did, a bit, just not as much as when he got his shirt off and talked very crazy tonight. I'm away to buy Hitman, Die Hard 4.0 and Catch & Release from HMV.
Probably a little more shopping tomorrow, I've got my eye on a new faux fur, and I really really really need a Toy Watch watch, just haven't decided on the colour yet...so watch this space.
23/08/10American Splendor
The Boy and I chilled with American Splendor this evening. I entered into the experience with an open-mind, fully expecting summit down-beat and different. After all, I bought the DVD after some considerable consideration. The reviews are amazing, I knew to expect Indie with a capital I, N, D, I and E, and wasn't disappointed on that front. It's just...if I was talking to this movie as a lover, I'd be walking away insisting...it isn't you, it's me. As the viewer I'm left feeling it must be me in the wrong. I've let the movie down in my inability to appreciate it's true American splendour. I got the portrayal of ordinary life's complexities angle, but it's just not touching or interesting enough. And seriously, it's not funny enough to carry it off. I was rather hoping for another Napoleon Dynamite, a truely cool, human and touching Indie movie, but also with endearing characters. The superhero aspect, the comic books, I was looking for a small production values Kick Ass. I was hoping for another Superstar, Brick, Clerks or Special, especially Special. Special did what American Splendor was trying to do.
American Splendor wasn't clever or funny enough to get away with all the boring comic book captions and drawings. The time warps can be followed easily enough but the endearing characters were introduced just a moment after I lost interest. IMO the likeable characters are the third wife and Fred and his daughter. I kept thinking the third wife would run off with Fred and form a family with him and the daughter she really needed, maybe even go on to have her own born to Fred, a sister for Fred's far too easily abandoned daughter. In a blink of an eye Fred hands her over. Too many shallow sudden turns. If these people deserved our respect or emotional connection, they wouldn't be the kind of people who make entirely unreasonable decisions based on nothing we've seen before that would make their decisions believable. The comic book style captions are annoying, there's a load of to and fro, back and forth in time, betwixt and between the real characters, played by actors, the actors playing the real actors playing the real characters, the actors playing the actors playing the actors playing the actors playing the older version of the real characters who are really comic characters, but comic characters based on real people. That's probably not the best description of all that's going down in this movie, but really...if I'm exaggerating, my description could be true, either that or a suggestion of what they'll do in American Splendor part 2. Confused? You probably won't be, but you may be deflated. We aren't exactly clear on why we watched all the way to the unrealistically happy ending, but we did.
19/08/10cardies and a new tunic, Gardening News, Leo photie gallery and The Contender
e
black version, and they get much regular usage by me, there's always one
or other in the wash while I'm wearing the other. Today I found
another long length Angora-blend boyfriend cardi which looks a lot like
the fluffy version so I threw a couple black ones in my basket. I
also got a couple of the black super soft V neck cardies for work-wear
and a grey frill hem cotton tunic.Got a bunch of new plants recently. At the weekend The Mum and I took a walk around the Klondyke at Livingston, my personal favourite local garden centre. It's my favourite because they tend to stock the slightly different specimen of your hardy perennial, their plants are obviously well tended, they dead head and such like, and the staff are so friendly, informative and go that extra step. I can recall the two main female checkout staff clearly, I know their faces and remember them for their friendliness and how easy they are to chat to. The Mum and I both fell for the Platycodon grandiflorum "Astra Pink" Balloon Plant and the Stokesia laevis Klaus Jelitto, the flowers of both are beautiful on an ethereal level, and neither of us knew they even existed before seeing them at the Klondyke.
I also got a Delphinium grandiflora Summer Nights and my winter flowering pansies for next years hanging baskets. I only do purple and blue pansies, and they only had two varieties to suit me, so I'm still wanting the pale lilac/blue version I like so much. I've replaced last years winter flowering pansies with the new ones I got, three per hanging basket, leaving room for the paler blue versions when I find them. If I don't find them, I've planted a tray of the seeds from last years, and moved a couple of the old plants from the hanging baskets to the garden...it's known as keeping my options open and maximising the opportunities. Last time I was up The Klondyke with The Husband I got a couple of Penstemon Penshams, the red/white trumpets of Amelia Jayne and the purple/white of the Czar, and the amazing Lavatera Red Rum
I was also recently at B&Q's garden section and brought home the glorious purple spikes of the Liatris spicata kobold, and a General Sikorski Clematis with it's large blue-purple flower heads which it displays from June to September each year.
I've also bought a shit load of bulbs to add to the front garden's already impressive bulb show. More red Tulips. I'm awaiting my delivery of the black Queen of the Night version and new Alliums with bated breath, they should arrive any day from J Parkers. I got a few Snowdrops, including some giant ones, loads of blue
You may recall I told of the man who's dog shit in the front garden at Starry Towers and had me racing out to the pavement to shame the owner into lifting the shite out my garden and made him take it home with him in the ASDA bag I provided him with. Then I realised it was a retired Charge Nurse, then I felt bad and awkward, but had to stick to my principles. The retired Charge Nurse has stopped by a couple of times recently, while his dog trots around our feet still off the lead, to apologise for the shit. He's so sorry for the dog-shit faux pass that he's seriously apologised, twice, while admiring the gardens and telling me how much he appreciates my garden. I feel so bad..alright Sir...I forgive you already. In other Garden Compliment News : An old lady I'd never spoke to before stopped the other day to tell me she admires my garden every time she passes. I get to talk to a lot of lovely decent people because of the Starry Towers Gardens.
When we were up at The Parent's place recently I took a lot of photies of Leo, The Pomeranian. I've uploaded them to a new Leo Gallery page on MarilynsWorld.com on a temporary basis. It's cos I'm hoping The Artist Ms Rossouw will paint a Leo portrait. I've asked her to and she requested Leo photies while she considers if she can. Best way of getting as many images to her as possible was a Leo Gallery she can flick through for images that'll help her, if she decides she can. I hope she can, cos that'll mean The Mum's Christmas pressie will be sorted already.
The Boy and I watched The Contender this evening. The cover says...thriller...I failed to realise that might mean it was all politics and hardly any murder and/or mental illness type thriller. However, it was a captivating thriller despite the lack of serial killing. We both enjoyed it muchly. Great acting, especially from Gary Oldman. I didn't recognise him till the credits ran at the end. He's well known for his disguises in the movies he chooses, he always looks different. Christian Slater and Jeff Bridges were easier to spot. At the end The Boy and I agreed if only the USA could have President Evans and a Vice President Hanson the world would be a much different politically and morally wonderful place.
18/08/10The Mum's birthday painting, Vegetable News, Grasshopper, The Book of Eli and The Machinist
The
Husband and I visited The Parents the other day, to deliver The Mum's
birthday pressie and have a gander at their new conservatory in
progress. I can at last reveal the pressie, I couldn't before due
to maintaining the secret and having to wait till the birthday painting
was framed. The painting is 'Birds on Neighbours Chimney' by Judy
Rossouw and The Mum was chuffed to over-the-moon bits with it. She
first discovered Judy Rossouw when she found a small framed print of one
of Ms R's owls at the local church fair. I found Ms Rossouw on the
interweb and bought the crows painting. The painting arrived on
time for The Mum's birthday, but it was a wee while before I got the
painting to our favourite framing shop, The Frame Shop at East Calder,
then had to wait another week to collect the finished pressie.Vegetable News : a take home gift from The Parents to us was a bag of tatties. Really fresh home grown potatoes that The Parents had received from their next door neighbour's garden. It's been years since I enjoyed home-grown potatoes, and so recently dug...all the way home I was conjuring the memories and the taste, and memories of the taste in my head, full of anticipation for that evenings dinner.
I brushed them clean in water, ripping and shredding the tender thin skins, placed them carefully in a big pan of cold water, and brought them to the boil before simmering for approximately 20mins. Perfectly cooked, I drained and gently slid them over from pot to serving dish. Looking good so far, I carefully slicked melting-on-contact I Can't Believe It's Not
Butter
on top, dabbing here and there on the top most potatoes, before snipping
a generous sprinkling of freshly cut Starry Towers home-grown chives on
top. With fish and mushy peas, lip-smackingly fantastic.
It's enough to make me consider growing potatoes next year at Starry
Towers. Amongst the potatoes was this lovely heart shaped one, I
heart home-grown new potatoes.We were sitting about in the Starry Towers back garden, The Mum and I chatting at the table and chair set on Patio 2. Out of the corner of my right eye I spotted a Grasshopper. I astounded The Mum, and myself. How long it must be since I set eyes on a Grasshopper. From memory, I think I was but a child. But maybe it was later, maybe in my teens, or 20s. I recall a country roadside, I was on foot, the roadside was in full glorious uncut Summer growth, I suspect maybe in the Borders, but I don't know for sure. I remember clearly the sound, the pleasing hum of the Scottish country-side, the backing-track of my youth. Just as I'd hone in on where the sound was coming from, it would stop, walk away, after a little it would start up again, walk towards it and it stopped, on and on, honing in, till...there it would
be, a Grasshopper. If I stayed still I'd even see the
back-legs-rubbing when it started up again the next time.On Patio 2 the Grasshopper wasn't making a sound, but it jumped in a typical Grasshopper way, I went quickly over and confirmed it was a Grasshopper. We've never had a Grasshopper here at Starry Towers before. The Mum came over, I called for The Boy to come see, the Grasshopper was jumping and head butting the patio doors with a tinny tiny thud. It appeared hell-bent on getting into the Starry Towers dining room via the one open patio door. For it's own good I cupped a hand then waited till it crawled on a finger. I carefully protected it from leaping off my hand, and carried it over before allowing it to crawl onto the lawn. Photo opportunity later, the Starry Towers Grasshopper leapt in my direction, hitting the side of my head, then was gone.
The Husband and I watched The Book of Eli a few nights back. It was disappointing, poorly acted, too cartoonish, and the story just isn't as clever as it ought to be. This evening The Boy and I watched The Machinist with the anorexic skeleton of Christian Bale. A step too unpleasantly far for method acting. Massively acted, cartoonish to a degree and the story was far too clever...or just way over-complicated. It was quickly obvious that he was mentally ill, it all falls into place in the last few minutes, but you see the final conclusion on the horizon for the final 10, and you just think...that's it? That's really why? Too disappointingly little, very late. I was hoping for a serial killer...but maybe that's just me.
14/08/10
I know a slug when I see one and Podcast News
In March 1990
I was removing the Clingfilm from a plated salad and moving towards the lady awaiting her meal. There was a big
snail moving around amongst the leafy greens. It was really a
slug, it didn't have a shell, but by the time it made it to the
newspapers it was a snail. I know the article was in The Scotsman,
and tonight I found on the www that it also made the local Courier.
"HEALTH UNION OFFICIALS ARE DEMANDING TOUGHER CHECKS ON HOSPITAL CATERING AFTER A LIVE SNAIL WAS FOUND IN A PATIENTS SALAD AT BANGOUR VILLAGE HOSPITAL. SODEXHO THE FRENCH FIRM WHICH HAS THE CATERING CONTRACT ARE INVESTIGATING THE MATTER." Abstract from the Lothian Courier 30 March 1990, found online at the West Lothian Horizon Information Portal.
From what I can make out this Info Portal tells you what articles you can access IF you pop down your actual local library, the real building, involving leaving your actual house, not actually online. Bummer. Happily I have the newspaper clipping from The Scotsman, cos I got mentioned by name...you'd keep the clipping too if it was a novelty for you to appear in newspapers. In 1990 I was still operating under my maiden name due to not having started marrying men yet.
Reading the Scotsman article again this evening I'm reminded of the experience of trying to avoid being an official spokesperson, but I gave in. My union rep at the time (see article) told me I had to talk to the journo, this was gold to the unions, and that I was a spokesperson for COHSE for the duration of the conversation between said journo and I. I remember clearly how the interview went, the journo phoned and asked questions...what kind of salad was it? what did you find? how long was it? what was it doing? were you shocked? did it make you feel angry? what did you do? There was also a lot of suggestion and reaction from the journo, leading me to give what he was after, along the lines of....yeee uck...that would be terrible...that must've made you feel sick...and then what...horrible...and you then...I feel sick just hearing bout it...oh my god you must've felt disgusted...along them lines. All very slick and fake, like he could care less even if the old lady had actually eaten 20 worms, five beetles and a spider. He just had a job to do, and it made page 3, not front page news, but page 3 isn't so bad. I did tell him clearly that it was a slug, he called it a snail, mine didn't have a shell, his version did. I did say it was curling and uncurling when he asked me what it was doing. If it had been a snail, an inch long snail wouldn't have been curling and uncurling, it would've been withdrawing into and coming back out of it's shell. He obviously didn't do much gardening, or he'd know that. The biggest issue I had with his article was that he quoted me as saying I left the ward because I was so upset. I did not leave the ward, I was the only trained nurse on that shift, it's a bad thing to leave your ward without a trained nurse for any reason, I know I'd never have done that. I did tell him I put the plate down and walked from the dining room to the adjacent sitting room. I'm pretty sure I didn't put the plate on the floor either, I'd have taken it with me out of the area that my patients were eating.
He took several of my one or two word answers to his questions, formed them into a couple long sentences, then presented those sentences as direct quotes from me. He used speech marks, indicating clearly that these were direct quotes making it read like I was so angry or disgusted or whatever that I said that without prompts...that's not the way it went. I did say all the words he used, I just didn't say them in that order. I did do the bit he said, the phoning the kitchen to be told to put it in a bag and return it to the kitchens, I did write a letter of complaint to the local Sodexho boss who did later deny any knowledge, so they were a bunch of liars. Was all just small potatoes political and big business shite. But worthy of my cutting the article from The Scotsman and keeping it to this day. Click on the slug to see the Scotsman clipping from March 1990.
In another follow up to yesterday's blog, I told The Boy this evening about the UK Border Agency recent raids on the two Starry Towers favourite Chinese restaurants in West Lothian. I was half way through explaining the Royal regent story and was looking extremely unimpressed, he interrupted me to say...yeah, they've all been done, both Chinese in Pumpherston have been done, all the Broxburn ones, they're doing them all. I did find this report on the interweb rom February 2010..."The UK Border Agency has found a woman from China working illegally at the Hong Chinese Restaurant in Pumpherston. She is to be deported. The owner has previously been fined £5,000 for employing a Chinese man illegally." I don't know if his claim that they're all being done is correct, The Boy is in the position to hear the word on the street before me, even if the word on the street is merely rumour and speculation, but the Pumpherston story does however highlight that it would seem the current deport and fine system is no deterrent to the restaurant bosses.
Podcast News : Today I am excited...the 2010 autumn/winter football season started. That means Alan Davies and his Arsenal fan friends will be podcasting soon, real soon, I can feel it coming, they'll be on my iPod with new material two days from now, it's promised on the 16th. Loads of other good podcast news, Frank Skinner was no sooner back from Africa then he was off again, making it up to his girlfriend by taking her on a two week Norway holiday. And yeah Mr I can understand why he'd have to, make it up to her, and his Norway experience did give him some good funny material for his podcast at Absolute Radio on his return. And he is making it up to us big time now. Today when I checked on the Absolute Radio website for Mr Skinner podcasts, there were 3 new ones. He's in Edinburgh at The Festival now and his podcast output has increased. Also, The Edinburgh Festival has led to daily podcasts from Richard Herring and Andrew Collins. Meanwhile I've been catching up on the Peephole podcasts from them delightfully amusing SModcast folks. Movie maker Kevin Smith likes to talk, and I thank him for his tongue action...and he'd be happy to be thanked for his tongue action, he knows he's a good talker, that he's funny, and that he gives good tongue...I know because he tells us...everything. SModcast issues no less than 4 regular weekly podcasts now, SModcast, Steve Dave, Mo and Glo and the Peephole stuff I just recently found, there's 7 Peepholes now, which kept me entertained as I gardened today. Another great thing about all four of the SModcast and the Collings and Herrin podcasts is that they have their entire archives available to easily and conveniently download from the interweb. Maybe one day Mr Skinner will be permitted to put his entire podcast back catalogue archives on his own website, but for now they are all on the Absolute Radio website, it's just that once you download the mp3 files from Absolute Radio you have to then convert them to an mp3 file that iTunes will allow. I hate iTunes. I've got it down to a fine art though, the conversion process, it's easy with the right tools.
While
I was listening to the first 4 SModcast Peephole podcasts I was
gardening for hours in solitary, and there was a lot of smirking, a few
LOLs and a smile on my face all day. Especially at the
Jason Mewes stuff, Jay
of Jay and Silent Bob. He tells a good story, extremely
off-the-wall, seems everything in his life has always been a bit
view-askew. Of course, it's only understandable because the other
SModcast guys keep him reigned in sufficiently. I've listened to
the Jason Mewes podcasts, Mewescast, there's 3 of them, issued
March/April 2009, and they ain't very good. He's much funnier with
the protection and guidance of the SModcast 'brella, 'brella, 'brella,
His black chicks porn video story is so funny, told on Peephole episode
#5. All the above mentioned podcasts are linked in The Lobby,
apart from Mewescast, but you can still get all three episodes without
going near the iTunes Store, click on the Mewescast pic.13/08/10Star Blog disclaimer and Starry Towers favourite Chinese restaurants both feel the heat
The
Husband and I had dinner at The Royal Regent
Cantonese Restaurant, Armadale Road, Whitburn on Friday evening.
One week before, the place was hoachin' with police and immigration
officers. The Royal Regent is a Chinese buffet restaurant serving
food of mixed quality. It's all you can eat for somewhere around
the £12 to £14 a head mark. We had all we could eat plus 4 soft
drinks and the bill was £32, can't complain bout that. We skipped
the soup of the day and dived straight into the real food. An
extensive choice of all the usual Chinese foods on offer in the
UK, starters, main meals, side dishes, salads and particularly delicious
chips. The Chicken with Lychees was my personal favourite but I
had a spoon of several other chicken dishes and a prawn dish, with fried
rice, a couple tiny spring rolls and those chips. I've got no idea
what they'd done to them, they were obviously potato, thick and rough
cut, deep fried to a deep golden brown, but summit else very tasty was
involved. The main course was a triumph, but we found the desserts
less exciting. There was a wide choice of gateaux, a couple cheese
cakes, profiteroles, chocolate coated biscuit fingers, mini doughnuts,
mini snowballs, a choice of fresh fruits, and a big jug of cream.
I was uninspired and settled for a slither of two different gateaux, the
Black Forrest and the chocolate, and poured a bit cream on.
Perfectly acceptable, but the disappointment was there was nothing on
that long sweet-packed table you couldn't buy at your local supermarket,
take from the box and put on your own table at home. One week back, on the 6th August it was a very different story. The car park at The Royal Regent was busy with the bizzies, them and more tellingly, immigration officers. Seems that of the 15 staff who were on site at the time of the raid, seven were in the country without permission and a further two had no permission to work. Five men and two women were taken away to be deported back to China and The Regent's bosses could be fined up to £90,000 if they fail to prove they carried out all necessary checks. I'm guessing they'll be having to cough up. When 9 out of 15 of your staff aren't all legal and above board, if you're carrying out all necessary checks, you wouldn't innocently get it wrong that often...would you?
The Husband had been passing on his way to pick me up from work on the 6th, when he saw the raid going down. On the way home avec moi, all was quiet at The Regent. When we set off for dinner, to be honest we'd forgot about what he'd witnessed. Wasn't till I was having a look on the interweb for my restaurant review that I found the news story from last week. And I work with a load of nursing staff from the local area, Whitburn, Armadale and hadn't heard the news story, indeed, was me told them what The Husband had seen last week.
After
I read the details of events at The Regent I found another UK Border
Agency story that effects us here at Starry Towers. Our favourite
local Chinese delivery service is provided by Taste Of China.
Turns out, they recently got done too! On Monday 19th July a raid
on the Taste Of China Restaurant, Greendykes Road, Broxburn resulted in
3 Chinese male and one Chinese female illegal immigrants being carted off,
resulting in the shop having to close that day, cos there was no other
member of staff left to run it. They'll be deported too.
The Taste of China was served with a civil penalty notice for employing the illegal workers. If the employer is unable to provide evidence that legally required checks were carried out before giving the jobs they will face a fine of up to £10,000 per illegal employee.
Rightfully so. The UK Border Agency is responsible for securing the UK border and controlling migration in the UK. Our legally-employed tax-payers money funds this government department to manage border control for the UK, enforcing immigration and customs regulations. They also consider applications for permission to enter or stay in the UK, and for citizenship and asylum. It's our money, earned honestly and taken from us in the form of the taxes we are obliged to hand over for the privilege of living legally in the UK. I expect to receive a good service for my money. It's our money, the government takes care of it and hopefully puts it to best use. So I'm happy this evening to realise they've been hard at work recently. Living/working illegally in Scotland is wrong and human trafficking is illegal and wrong. We as a tax-paying nation can't afford to support people not entitled to it.
While I'm on the subject...them Procol and Candor solicitors, the lengthy TV ad they run, on late night teleshopping channel ITV2 with some bloke called Adrian Mills selling a dream future via their DVD "The Key To UK immigration" a guide for anyone out with the European Union who wishes to come to the UK or if your already here and worried about the late night knock on the door. At a cost of £49.99 + £4.99 p&p, you will also receive a £100 voucher for one to one advice, and if they take on your case, they'll refund the cost of your DVD. The advert features apparent real-life cases, all of them star quality, a basketball player from the USA, teachers, those kind of people. At the very end of what seems like at least a quarter of an hour, a few seconds tells you, this was a paid for transmission by a solicitor firm...basically...this was not a documentary, however, if you only watch ten minutes in the middle and at this time of the early morning, that could easily happen, desperate people might be convinced this could be the answer to their prayers, £54.98 later...Procol and Candor won't touch your case but they will take your money and give you a DVD that is of no use to you whatsoever. And the advert promises they won't pass your information to anyone else. I hate this advert, it smacks of unrealistic promises and rip-off, both taking advantage of vulnerable people and promoting them seeking to take advantage of the UK system. The mix of unscrupulous solicitors and advertising is too much for me. How do they get away with it? The UK Border Agency should be cracking down on Procol and Candor and the system that lets them advertise, sell, make these promises and take advantage of people most likely already in hellish circumstances abused by others, withhold information about ilegal immigrants (that'll be the cases they don't take that don't get their £54.98 back)...and on UK TV. My gut feeling says this is so WRONG.
Anyone in Scotland who suspects that illegal workers are being employed at a business can contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111
10/08/10slugs, sharp sand, Hydrangea cuttings, Large Hardon Collider and it's all the rage
Regal but the Praying Hands is
practically leafless, though it's still bravely flowering well.There's a bag of sharp sand in the shed at Starry Towers, so that was handy and I got the Hostas surrounded in their new safety sand circles today. There's mixed reviews of this method on the interweb, but the man says it works for him so it's worth a try. I don't want to use poisons and the beer trap thing gets too disgusting when they start to fill with the decomposing bloated dead bodies of slugs. Too yucky.
I took the Rose Campion seeds to Ms R along the street yesterday and today she dropped by to thank me again because she felt she hadn't expressed her gratitude well enough. She was very grateful today. We chatted bout some of my flowers she was admiring, the Lavenders were scenting the air and the Wild Orchids especially piqued her interest. So if they get abducted I'll know where to look first. She also said how lovely and rare it is to see a young person so engrossed and devoted to gardening...'young person'!
I'm real pleased with the Hydrangea cuttings I took in 2008. They've flowered this year though they're still pretty tiny. They're pink just now, but next year I'll start my Turning Hydrangeas Blue Experiment. There's info on the www telling how to with the aid of some aluminium, but the plants have to be at least 3 years old. I might leave a couple pink.
I stumbled across a particularly straightforward and blunt website. I admire it's no nonsense approach, it asks a question and answers the
eye
to brain connection went a tad awry, I think it was that thing where you
see the first and last letters and fill the rest in for yourself, so I
confess...hadron, I read it as summit rude. An anagram of hadron,
a rude one.Lot of rage around today. First up, Flight Attendant rage. Steven Slater is in jail tonight after snapping at an obnoxious female passenger who was blatantly flouting the safety rules we all have to adhere to. She was removing her case from the overhead locker while the plane was taxiing after landing, bitch. That's the sort of thing that would infuriate me so I fully sympathise and support Steve's actions. AND she was verbally offensive to him, if only we could all give as good as we're getting on the job. I envy him the liberation of blasting back at her. Of course, he's sacked, but arrested too, charged wit
h
felony counts of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. He
knew he would be collecting his USA version of a P45 after he went on
the intercom and swore back at the rude passenger, telling her to feck
right off, so he grabbed his bags and beer and exited via an emergency
inflatable slide he deployed. He's now a Facebook celeb. Way
to go Steve! Well done that public serving flight attendant.
He did what we all day-dream of doing in the face of certain
unreasonable members of the public. Serving the public with all
their little quirks, and for quirks, read mental crazy nasty idiotic
stupid mean rude bastards, can be extremely trying, hurtful, stressful,
tiring and just plain boring after many years of putting up with it
while having to defend oneself to bosses who don't support the employee,
but instead sook up the arse of the service user and point the finger of
blame at the employee when the one in the wrong complains. NHS
'zero tolerance' my arse. Steve lives in Queens, New York...which
is both funny and appropriate.
However
dramatic that was, ain't nought compared to the
Food Rage incident. In Toledo, Ohio, Melodi Dushane really, really
likes McDonald's chicken nuggets. She's a fool. At 6.30 in
the morning at the drive-through window she reacted badly to the hardly
surprising or shocking news that McDonald's serve their breakfast menu
at 6.30am. Chicken McNuggets aren't a breakfast food.
McMelodi was so incensed that she got out her car and attacked, throwing
punches at McDonald's employees, pounding on the glass with her elbow
and then grabbing a bottle out of her car and smashing through the glass
window before speeding off. The McMoron was charged with vandalism
and asked not to return to the same McDonald's restaurant ever again.
Ooooh, rage-on McMonster, there's 8 McDonald's restaurants in Toledo.
She was sentenced to 60 days in jail last month and ordered to pay
McDonald's for the broken window. This was at 6.30am on New Years
Day, the McDonald's workers were serving the public on a day that most
people take for granted as an international holiday, and for what?
Wouldn't have been a large financial reward and practically no respect
She deserves worse than vandalism and a ban. She's not lovin'
it anymore. Spot the bruise on her right upper arm...fighting for
her right to a Sausage and Egg McMuffin at 11pm?09/08/10Religion News = Bad News
If you ever doubted that atheism is the only intelligent way forward for the human race...what's wrong with you? There's a long long long history of why-for you should realise religion is a man-made society control mechanism, which historically and currently allows bad men to control the masses for the benefit of the bad men. But since there's a whole load of misguided fools still insisting it's a good idea...a recent reason you should be ashamed about upholding and defending any version of religious beliefs...
Religion News = Bad News...Bibi Sanubar was 35 years old, a widowed Afghan woman and, for her sins, allegedly pregnant. Her crime...Oh Your God! Seems she was accused of having an affair, after her dead husband became dead...so that's not exactly an 'affair', but lets not quibble, she became pregnant...as nature intended. That'll happen when a man loves a woman, or rapes a woman, when the woman is denied the basic human right of contraception. Most religions don't promote contraception. That would mean fewer brain-washed converts being born. Maybe the woman is even denied the right to not be raped. D'oh! Taliban...did you not learn anything at your boys only schools? This is primary school stuff.
Bibi Sanubar was held captive, beaten in front of a crowd then shot three times in the head yesterday by an insurgent commander in the Qadis district of Badghis province, according to Afghan police. I spose 200 lashes in public then shot in the head rather than stoning her to death is an innovation. Well done boys...keep evolving at this rate and maybe women will be allowed to wear what they wish and go to school in another 2000 years. Local Taliban commander, Mohammad Yousuf, carried out the execution before dumping her body with her murdered unborn baby inside, in an area under government control. Is this the Taliban prefered abortion technique?
Mohammad Nasir Nazaari, head of Badghis provincial council, has confirmed the execution and said the Qadis district is entirely under Taliban control. And I believe him. Insurgents were also accused of hanging a 7-year-old boy for spying earlier this year and shooting dead a young couple trying to elope last year.
I'll stop now, religion = bad.
08/08/10Happy Birthday to The Mum
The Mum's birthday pressie is taking a bit longer, cos it wasn't easy. It's unique, despite this I got it in good time, but it needs summit done to it. The summit will be done tomorrow when The Old Friend Tom and I take a drive out to...get the summit else done to the pressie. This time next week The Mum might have her pressie. And she better be impressed let me tell you. Watch this space.
06/08/10Grey Dagger
Is
this a dagger which I see before me? Yes it is. Although
caterpillars of the Grey Dagger Moth (Acronicta
psi) feed on a wide range of broadleaved trees including
Apple, Hawthorn and Rowan, wildlife experts have recorded a marked
decline in the critters within the UK and it was scarcer in Scotland to
start with. It's on The UK Biodiversity Action Plan list of 1150
endangered British species.There's a Grey Dagger at Starry Towers, currently relaxing on the Harry Lauder Walking Stick tree.
Information on the interweb says the damage they do to leaves is not very noticeable and on a deciduous tree the leaves will shortly be falling off anyway. Also the adult moths may be important pollinators as they feed. The female Grey Dagger Moth lays her eggs, then around late July to early October the caterpillar emerges. This larvae will be forming a cocoon by spinning a silk case around itself, then it'll hide under loose bark or rotten wood. It'll hibernate there over winter in the cocoon and then transform itself into a beautiful Grey Dagger Moth next year. To help a little I've spread bark chippings at the base of the Harry Lauder.
05/08/10the world's smallest causing massive Starry Towers problems, I love football, Gardening News, Shutter Island and The Crazies
I'm
having problems with my Freecom 1 TB Hard Drive XS - the world's
smallest 3.5" external hard drive - for no apparent reason Windows had
started telling me it had malfunctioned and Window's didn't recognise
it. The world's smallest external hard drive has a load of all my
important stuff and all my music, so if it's not working then I can't
sync my iPod with iTunes. Proud to say, I fixed it. I made
Windows check the G drive, and proved Windows is a liar, it did
recognise it when forced to, and it fixed it. I've made a back up
copy of my everything to the D drive cos I suspect my problems aren't
over with the Freecom.I can't wait for the football season to start...words I thought I'd never utter...cos I've listened to all of Alan Davies' It's Up For Grabs Now
podcasts and I'm desperate for more. Link in The Lobby, you don't have to download from that bothersome iTunes Store. Their "Alexandre Dimitri Song Billong", to the tune of Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong is classic and strangely moving. Mr Davies treats us with his great impersonations and accents, the banter between him and his mates, Ian Stone, DJ Tayo and Keith Dover make football interesting as well as laugh out loud funny. She was nice, unlucky Theo and never email me again, that's all I'm saying. When does the football season start?
Gardening News : I've spent a couple days off pottering in The Starry Towers grounds. Mowed the lawn, trimmed the edges with scissors, I can't help myself. If your not over it by now, your not a regular reader. I also gathered seeds from my 2010 WOW! Factor Lychnis coronaria (Rose Campion). Sowed some in a small specially prepared area of the front garden and some more in a seed tray. I also kept some in a
n
envelope in case my sown ones fail and yet more I put in another
envelope, to give to Ms R, the Sunny Dechmont village shop lady who
admired and enquired bout my Rose Campions a few weeks ago. I took
a stroll along Main Street and entered the Sunny Dechmont shop lady's
walled garden. And was totally surprised to be met by the guy who
painted Starry Towers, up a ladder, painting some wooden facia bit of
the Sunny Dechmont shop lady's house. The Sunny Dechmont village
shop ladies, there are two of them, and they are a couple, were out, or
at least, no one answered the door when I rang their doorbell. I've moved some of my Wild Orchids from the middle to the edge of the front garden, where they can be seen better. Gardening and legal advice says don't move Wild Orchids, but these babies have been moved several times already and they're well fit. The originals were saved from certain death by The Dad, many years ago. The Dad was working at the Headless Cross open-cast coal mine and took the Orchids home to Braehead just hours before they would've otherwise have perished under large digging vehicles. From Braehead some of them came to Sunny Dechmont, and this is the second time I've moved mine. They've been self-propagating, multiplying underground in a right good healthy fashion. The plump very attractive roots of each individual plant were gently entwined with it's neighbours, easily separated, the hidden below ground parts were lovely to look at and a pleasure to have in my hands.
The Starry Towers gardens are looking good, well gooood. Since the first Tulips showed face in Spring it's been one WOW after another, Tulips followed by Alliums, then the Summer flowering shrubs, the Roses, the mix of Virginian and Night Scented Stock, yesterday The Best Friend told me my garden smells of sweeties...she shoots, she scores...that's exactly what I was aiming for, good job done.
The Boy and I watched Shutter Island last night. Jeezuzzzz! Leo DiCaprio...I can see it as a good movie, when I try a bit, but really...it could've been better. Too many complicated re
d
herrings, though it was obvious early on that it would be a movie with a
huge reveal at the end...it was obvious early on that we were dealing
with either a 1950s USA government conspiracy or Leo is mental. I
won't spoil it for others, so I'll say no more bout the final
explanation which comes in the last few minutes. We spotted one
inexplicable moment, just a few seconds of movie, it was either a clever
plot-building visual clue, or summit went wrong and it only made the
finished movie cut because someone didn't do their job well. When
Leo's U.S. Marshall was interviewing a female patient she asks for
water, the tumbler of water is then seen on the table in front of her,
she moves her hand to lift the glass, she then raises that hand to her
mouth, but when we see her drinking it, her hand is empty. She's
mimicking drinking a glass of water. We re-wound and watched 3
times...her hand is empty.The Boy and I, on a movie roll, watched The Crazies this evening. Excellent version of what it is, a horror Zombie type thing in the George A. Romero genre. I was rooting for the deputy (Joe Anderson), he was good, but we knew early on he'd probably have to die, there could only ever be two survivors. I Googled Mr Anderson afterwards, he's English, he was in Creep...he's really good.
03/08/10the Ridiculous stuff annoying me recently
That's...strange. I thought it had more to do with hormones, maybe the company the woman is with at the time, or a couple of measures of alcohol, maybe new shoes or the scales saying she's lost a few lbs and that new skin-tight frock reflecting the same in the mirror...or is that just me?
Anyway...77% of women...Nivea's blatant shameless abuse of meaningless statistics is near on worse than the now famous '8 out of 10 cats prefer' Whiskas nonsense. Maybe Nivea are hoping "77% of women feel sexier" will enter common language and get a quiz show named after it too.
Ridiculous
#2 : I got this email from some scammer, click on the tin of Spam to
read it. I know, I know, there's a lot of it about, but this one
appealed to my funny bone. There was no need to check it out.
Rule number 1 is no one wants to give me money unless I work for it.
Rule number 2 is all emails from people or businesses you don't know are
to be treated as scams. This one was just soooo obviously
ridiculous. Internet scams aren't exactly news, everyone should
know by now.
Who in their right mind
would fall for such ridiculous nonsense? Who even in their not so
right mind would? If you've got enough of a grasp of the real
world to get yourself on the interweb in the first place, that involves
getting a computer, getting a connection, plugging it all in, switching
it on...surely to feck...you'd have to see through this level of
ridiculousness.Ridiculous #3 : Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari should've got on the next plane back home as soon as news of the the seriousness of the devastating flooding back home reached him. Actually, he shouldn't have left in the first place. Maybe then I'd have felt he was a credible world leader and I shouldn't have criticised him (for his country's double-dealing with terrorists) and his people (for their ridiculously uncivilised and unreasonable inclination for making highly flammable manikins and then taking a match to their dolls at the first sight of a man with a camera) in my last blog post. But he did go on his jollies and he's still here, via Paris. His actions are so very wrong, even English MPs of Pakistani origin are snubbing him and boycotting meetings previously arranged. The English MPs are obviously reacting to the ground-swell of British Pakistani reaction to the flooding back home, there surely can't be a Pakistani-origin type person in the UK who doesn't have a large extended network of family and friends back in Pakistan. The UK MPs won't be wanting to alienate their voting public...an MP is an MP...doesn't matter what country they're in...looking out for #1.
Word
of advice to Muslim fire-starters, your effigy burning has got so
ridiculous and ineffectual, it's becoming the Muslim version of writing
a strongly worded letter to a local news paper. Ohhh, Mr Angry of
Islamabad. Scottish people don't write Mr Angry letters and they
don't burn effigies, unless it's Guy Faulks, everyone's happy
and there's a
load of fireworks involved, or perhaps the Wicker Man thing, but
really...that would only be way way up north and entirely in an attempt
to hold on to a rapidly declining tourist interest for such things.
Not since Ireland Unionists torched a rudimentary facsimile of Margaret
Thatcher in 1985 has any sort of cheer went up in the UK for the burning
of a straw doll. Another word of advice to Muslim fire-starters,
get a bigger crowd, so many of the images that reach us here in the
western world...the bit of the planet it seems most of you would rather
be in...get a bigger crowd before you light the fire. Too many of
the images seem to show the same dozen people in their Sunday
best, all washed and preened for their 15 minutes of fame moment.
I can't tell one burning of a prominent Muslim-annoying figure from the
next these days, though I did my best research to identify the ones in
my Homer Hell fire pic.As an atheist, I feel entitled to disagree with any and every ridiculous religion, with no fear of idiotic PC British people tagging me with the horrors that the word racist can bring. So I'm an intelligent woman...get used to it.
It's all too ridiculous.
31/07/10my recent worries, PM thumbs up, Huntley, and Land Of The Lost
All I need to do now is gently nudge the fledgling out the nest via a good job. Look at his ickle face and chubby limbs, sooo very cute. I've been helping him write a school leavers CV and covering letter...OK...I wrote his CV and covering letter and persuaded him to join me today for half an hour to put
the
finishing touches and his personal stamp on it. He needed to
participate and take ownership, to truly own it, or how can he go into
an interview situation with no basis of what future interviewers think
of him already? The Boy...he's young. He's also a good lad,
with an innocence and moral standing that would put the rest of us to
shame, he's never committed any sort of minor crime. But he's not
a geek, he's cool, well accepted and a founder member of all the cool
kids in the area, he's good lookin, he's smart of intellect and sharp of
wit. He thinks everyone deserves equality, even fat people, and
shames me sometimes, correcting me when I sometimes say stuff that isn't
totally PC (I blame the schools). He's never knowingly
harmed a single other living creature. AND, he isn't quite decided
on religion, he says he's a Christian, because he wants to believe in
God. OK, that bit is my fault, while I was raising him as an
atheist I always suspected he'd rebel against parental influence in
teenager-hood. But, surely I should also be taking the credit for
all the good bits about him, come on, he's the most innocent person I
know...I done that...that's my boy. He's 17, he lives in the
central belt of Scotland...I deserve a medal.What's wrong with a straight talking PM? I reckon it's about time we had one. I support David Cameron for telling it like it is. Hell mend Pakistan and their support of terrorists. Meanwhile, Pakistani demonstrators burnt an effigy of our prime minister on the streets of Karachi. And that hot headed reaction is exactly why we shouldn't even bother about their opinion, they're wrong, they need to shape up and stop doing the dirty. I am absolutely positive it'll work out for the greater good in the end.
I don't expect safe jails, in fact I quite like the idea of a bit of rough justice doled out to the worst of the dregs of our society by fellow inmates who aren't quite as bad as the dreggiest. It's basically wrong that a child murderer like Ian Huntley should be permitted to sue the prison service and win compensation of thousands if his claim of negligence is successful. My moral standing tells me he doesn't even deserve to be breathing. Keep him safe? HIM? Like he's the most important person here???!!! A duty to care? How deep were his feelings of a duty to care for others when he was snuffing the last breath out of two little terrified children? What a bastard.
Huntley, now 36, lured 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman into his house in 2002, under the guise of the kindly and safe-adult school care-taker who was the partner of another safe-adult, school teaching assistant girlfriend Maxine Carr. Murdered them and hid their remains in a drainage ditch, then came forward to the police and media as being oh so helpful, sad and sympathetic at two little girls going missing. What a oh so stupid and arrogant bastard...putting himself out there as an obvious suspect.
The bodies were so badly decomposed that we'll never know exactly what he did to them before or after they died. We'll never know all of what what they had to endure. And he gets to sue us!!!
Access to legal aid, paid by us, to sue the prison service which works for us, paid for by us, to obtain compensation, paid by us. He can f**k right off! If there's one word that both sickens me, and sums up all that is wrong with our culture these days, it's that word 'compensation'. The compensation culture infuriates me. I watch Judge Judy, I adore the woman, but that's OK for the USA, I don't want that here. It wasn't the prison staff that caused the harm, it was fellow criminals, and in their credit, they weren't ones who had killed two little girls. Jailbirds can be resourceful and extremely devious, it's in their nature. So is it any wonder that in September 2005 Huntley was scalded with boiling water at Wakefield Prison. Are prisoners to be only allowed cold drinks? They'd sue en masse for an infringement of their right to hot drinks. Then in 2008 at HMP Frankland he was attacked and slashed across the throat by a prisoner who was said to have been armed with a razor blade. Are prisoners all to be forced to grow a beard? They'd sue again, they wouldn't all suit a beard. It's believed that Huntley has tried to commit suicide three times since his conviction in December 2003...can we sue him back for trying to harm himself? Maybe we can sue for the costs of keeping him alive, the basic bed and board, and for the suffering of the prison staff who have to tolerate his presence while resisting the urge to kick him to death. We paid for every step he's taken since he killed two children. Not to mention the ex getting her new identity. Stupid lying bitch, I hope she knows what she did wrong, but I doubt she feels it, I don't suspect she lives with her bad every minute she lives, she's probably had a lot of therapy to help her move on. It's costing us a bloody fortune for his crimes, and now he wants compensation??? How much money do you pay for a 10 year old girl's life? Way I figure it, by my calculations, HE owes us!!! Big time! I'd compensate him all the way to the electric chair, years ago.
To be the parent of a murdered child...doesn't matter how long he rots in jail, boil him alive like a lobster, slit his throat and stitch him back up 100 times. Huntley will never know real pain and Maxine will never care.
I accidently watched a load of a TV program this evening...'Tsunami: Caught On Camera' on More 4. Terrifying, I had to stop watching, is was too horrific. I got sucked in hearing, seeing and feeling these eye-witness accounts, their camera and video footage. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami which left nearly 300,000 dead in eleven countries, told through the experiences of tourists who were actually there. So The Boy and I went and watched Land Of The Lost with one of our favourites, Will Ferrell. Maybe it was my Tsunami hangover, but I didn't enjoy Mr Ferrell as much as I usually do. I forgive him anything, usually. This may be his worst movie ever or maybe it's his worst movie ever AND watching footage of some of the 300,000 people dying and imagining the rest was just too much to forgive him this essentially poor effort.
30/07/10T&S, finding the lost hairdresser and hay fever
their
previous TV output? Even better than their Magic Knickers?
Hell yeah! By a long long long long way. Calling the Magic
Tummy Flattening Bikini Brief a bikini brief was really stretching the
trades description act thingy. In case you haven't seen it, I
hadn't till I had a scout about the interweb this evening, it's that
ugly thing here. It's not a bikini, it's not brief, and it's
definitely not magic, it's a surgical truss garment. Who would
risk leaving the house in summit like that? I'm astounded.
Though going by the promotional photo here, it obviously works, the
lumpy bumpy overweight model looks amazing. Why advertise it on a
slim lady? Do fatties fall for this stuff?I didn't rate them before, but this mockumentry, they're joining in, laughing at themselfs and their recent decent from stardom, they've turned their downfall around, made it funny and with their tongues in their cheeks they re-emerge triumphant, and with a new target audience. Good on them. It's like a fashion world take on Gervais' The Office, and he has a cameo appearance, along with a load of T&S's friends and contacts.
The big deal bout What They Did Next is that it's only available on the www, and of course, bloody iTunes. Watching it online is laborious as each of the 4 episodes is broken down to 4 parts, but on iTunes
you
can pay one and a half of your Scottish pounds for each episode.
Then you can watch your purchased .m4v files on your iPod only. I
started the first episode in iTunes and forwarded to the end to see how
long the file was, I think that's what I was doing, but whatever, when I
see the files being present on my iPod now, that episode doesn't show
up, at this time it looks to me that I can only watch them once for my
£1.49? Even though I didn't actually watch it, was just having a
skim through what I thought was my purchased items. Is it pay per
view? I thought purchased meant purchased, for ever, mine now, to
watch as many times as I want, as long as it's on my iPod. I don't
know bout these things, but I know I don't like it. AND another thing while I'm at it. However hard I try, I can't download Frankie Boyle's free podcast, it just won't, so I sent a message to iTunes asking what I was doing wrong, and the result...nothing. No reply and I still can't download the free podcast. There's another couple of free podcasts I'm subscribed to that just don't, I don't know why, and they won't tell me. I hate iTunes.
In my quest to sort my ownership problem, I want to change the T&S files to a file type that I can watch anywhere and as often as I bloody well please. My usual favourite freeware Quick Media Convertor wont do it, I keep getting the message "cannot get resampling context", whatever that means. I'm currently trying out another freeware prog...with no success. Answers on a postcard please, to Starry Towers, Sunny Dechmont, or you could just email me, marilyn@marilynsworld.com, link in The Lobby.
My hair's been needing a bit of work for a while, ie a bit of a trim, and the roots are doing that skunk stripe thing up the middle of my scalp. When The Menopause sweat things happen...I can't stand even an inch of hair on the back of my neck. And my fringe! I've already taken the scissors to that twice. Problem is the flyer with the contact details of Karen, my lovely Mobile Hairdresser went missing. It's always been on The Starry Towers kitchen notice board, and now it isn't. So I resolved to find her. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk along Main Street and down the lane I kno
w
she lives on. I got talking to a wee man and he could tell me
Karen's his next door neighbour. He took me to her house and both
he and her flatmate gave me her business cards. I got given a
bunch of them, so I'll be looking for opportunities to hand them out and
help her advertising. She's so wonderful, I phoned her yesterday
afternoon, and by 8pm my hair was cut. The skunk problem I'll sort
out over the weekend.I've found myself shedding tears over iTunes, the lost hairdresser and everything else recently...cos...I've had more than just A Menopause to bother me. I think I can definitely state, I suffer from The Hay Fever too. Bollocks, if it's not one thing it's another, and it never rains but it pours...just two common sayings that come to mind. Lucky white heather says it best though. For approximately a decade now, every summer brings me a few weeks of miserable eye-watering grief. This summer when it started I put myself on one-a-day Cetirizine hydrochloride, after three days of the pills my eyes were back to normal. Still not convinced of the cause I stopped taking the tablets. The problem returned, I started taking the tablets again, a few days later my eyes are OK again, lesson learned. I'm staying on the meds till November.
28/07/10Podcast News
Good
Podcast News : there's been a lot of Podcast News recently, and
here's another little gem. It's Up For Grabs Now, is the Arsenal
football fan Podcast with comedian and actor Alan Davies, he who some
people only recognise as Jonathan Creek, but he is to be spotted on QI
also. I'm not a football fan,
I've never even heard of a lot of the people they talk about, I don't
watch the games, but it is so very funny. Alan and his friends
talk about all things Arsenal and football in general, class comedy.
Link in The Lobby.Sad Podcast News : there's no more Jonathan Ross at the BBC, so no more Wossy radio show podcasts. His BBC podcast page is empty, saying there are currently no episodes of this podcast available. Currently? There never will be again. They should've shown some humour, writing maybe something like...Wossy has left the building. Missing him already. Link sadly removed from The Lobby.
27/07/10Podcast News, ticking the NHS boxes while not being paid for it, 712 and tidying with attitude
In other happy Podcast News : always happy to see another SModcast Podcast offering. I just found their Highlands New Jersey Peephole Podcast, of which there are 4 episodes so far, link in The Lobby.
And
in yet more Podcast News : though I'm stretching the meaning of "news"
here. I'm finding myself so influenced by one of my favourite
podcasts that I seem to be subconsciously absorbing Emily Dean, or the
spirit of Emily Dean, or maybe just the language and attitude of
extremely high maintenance Emily Dean. The Devine Ms Em is
Deputy Editor of InStyle magazine and radio sidekick
of Mr Skinner. It's probably happening when I fall asleep with the
earpiece in and slumber while Emily, Frank and Gareth chat on through
the night. I keep hearing myself finishing sentences with the
words "...get over it", or "...get used to it", and I've even lied and
said, "so what, Jonathan Ross is my friend, get over it".I'm always surprised when I check out our Las Vegas Wedding with Elvis video on YouTube, it's up to 712 viewings now, and at least 300 of them weren't me. I know I've looked at it a lot, but really, loads of other people must've too. Link in The Lobby, lets aim for a thousand. At the start I was only aiming for 100.
I spent too much time doing my homework today, my LearnPro NHS flexible learning modules were expired, several months ago, so I bit the bullet despite my natural disgust at having to do this stuff on my time off. That's me well and truly on top of it, for another year anyway. I started off reading the education information in each module, before sitting the assessment exam at the end, the way it's s'posed to work. But really, it's so time consuming and monotonous, I changed tack and headed straight for the exams, knew a load of the answers off the top of my head, and the bits I wasn't sure about, I opened the education bit in another window and skim-read till I got the answers. Saved myself a lot of grief and my unpaid freetime. I saved my correct answer pages down to Word docs for next year, if they don't change the questions frequently that should make my LearnPro 2011 experience quicker next time. I did all the modules I'm required to and a few more I felt were applicable, and some others I saved down to My Learning page thinking I might do in the future, just cos I get really addicted to achieving and collecting and might need to make my certificate stretch over at least 3 pages of A4 when I print it out. Click on the LearnPro Logo there and see how obsessive I got. The ones marked by a green circle are completed, a lot of the subjects contain more than one section, some as many as 5 or 6, each with an exam at the end. The red circles mean I haven't started them ones. The Learn Blood Transfusion stuff, I had a dabble, but it w
as
too complicated cos I went there after I did all the rest, and quite
frankly I was both bored and pissed off by that time. All that O,
A, B, AB, antigens, rhesus negative and positive, and me not required to
participate in blood transfusions anyway, seemed a bit mad, but a fellow
Mental Health staff nurse at work had received a letter informing her of
the modules she was required to do, and the blood stuff was on it.
Doesn't make any sort of sense, but ho hum, a load of stuff at the NHS
doesn't make any sort of sense, more Kafkaesque every day.In the little time I had to myself today, when I wasn't ticking the NHS boxes, I tidied some cupboard spaces and a drawer. Some of my tidying and throwing out happened in The Starry Towers Study. The Husband will have a fit when he reads that cos he's in The Land of The Coffee Shops and Canals, and The Study is predominantly his domain. But fret not The Husband, as you cruise the easily accessible and extremely well-maintained Dutch road system in the Z4, with the top down, without me, I only tidied my bits of bespoke solid oak cupboard space, book shelves and that one drawer in the bespoke solid oak set of drawers with my stuff in. All is well in your Starry Towers Study. I'm only joking The Husband...get over it. Tee hee hee.
26/07/10Happy Birthday The Boy, St Abbs and Harry Brown
The
Husband and I were out and about on Friday with a Z4 trip to St Abbs.
The weather was fine and the soft top was down, so when a young woman in
the passenger seat of a passing car on The Edinburgh By-pass rolled down
her window and shouted "I LOVE YOUR CAR!" while giving us a sincere and
heartfelt thumbs up, we heard her very clearly. What a nice girl, we
were quite surprised, to say the least. We looked at each other,
The Husband and I, and it put a great big smile on both our faces.
Feel-good factor up by 10 points. The Z4 is sooo worth it.Anyone who has ever taken their vehicle down from the main village to the St Abbs harbour will know it's a tricky little bit of road. It's steep, it's curvy and it's single lane with a blind bend at the top, no access for buses or long vehicles. Despite the Z4's long nose and low slung body we got down and back up OK. We had a little stroll around the harbour area, turning a blind eye to the not exactly youthful fat divers in their underpants, changing in, or maybe out of diving suits, I couldn't look closely or long enough to figure out the details. As we passed, one of them divers announced to us...it's a grand day! He was so right. But I still looked up and ahead, I'd seen enough already at a distance.
We've had lunch at the historic Springbank Cottage (1827) down by the St Abbs harbour before. Alas and alack, we weren't all that impressed with the menu. It was a bit pricey for a really plain basic roll on summit. We've witnessed their proclaimed car-delivery service, though we didn't know at the time that was what we were seeing. We watched a member of their staff bring a tray of w
hat
looked like tea and maybe scones to a car containing two OAPs, in the
rain. Admirable customer service, but we found their food
uninspiring, boring even, and pricey for what you get. So we'd
already decided we'd spend our lunch money and time at The Old Smiddy
Coffee Shop on the B6438 back out of St Abbs. The Old Smiddy is
doing itself a disservice calling itself a Coffee Shop, it's better than
yer usual run of the mill coffee shop, it's got outdoor tables and hot
food we can highly recommend. The Husband picked the baked potato
with beans and I went for the bacon, brie and cranberry Panini, both were
delivered to our table in the field with side salad and coleslaw and were delicious.
The row of old stone cottages is also home to The Number Four contemporary art and craft Gallery with many gorgeous arts and crafts type items, if that's your style you'll love it a lot. Though I have to say...Mike Hinton...should take a good long think about what he's on about. Two of his small Limited Edition jesmonite (a water-based resin invented in 1984) sculptures were on the counter. The half thalidomide-woman/half-rabbit of his 'Motherhood' was uncomfortable to look at, arm stumps? rabbit ears? And his 'Torso' was only easier because it didn't remind of half a rabbit, just a legless, armless, headless, big fat woman torso with massive tits. And that wasn't a good thing.
The other shop on the row is Woolfish, a luxury yarns, textiles and embroidery shop, charging a small fortune for what is essentially a shawl, 90-odd of your Scottish, or more likely, your English pounds, they're not proud. It's a tourist thing, get over it. Checking out Woolfish online tonight they also do 'retreats'...so you can lock yourself away from the real world and do a bit of knitting. For 'retreat' read...3 nighs B&B with organised knitting and a group trip to the cliffs is extra. Give them a bit more time cos they're still working on their crocheting and embroidery retreats.
The
Boy and I watched Harry Brown this evening. It has it's bad
points, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and tried my damnest to ignore the
bad bits. However you view this movie, you can't help but be sick
at thinking about what some good people, especially our elderly and our
youngest have to endure living in gang-infested town and city ghettos.On the same day as I watched CCTV footage of 67 year old Granddad Ekram Haque outside a London mosque being happy slapped to death by teenagers Leon Elcock and Hamza Lyzai, Harry Brown left me wondering why there's a distinct lack of coloured actors in the movie
There's a bit in the third third where you realise you've been listening to the same bit of dramatic music on a loop for the last 15 minutes at least, and that breaks the spell somewhat. It's a really serious UK version, with precious little feel good factor, of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. I kinda saw it as an English homage to Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Was well pleased to recognise Joseph Gilgun, he of Emmerdale's Eli Dingle fame. He was good, but his role was easily upstaged by Sean Harris's drug and gun and prostitute and home-made-porn dealer 'Stretch' character. That man was an evil and scary, twitchy, itchy, scratchy, sweating, stupid, murderous, off-his-face, self-harming with a Stanley blade to his own...Highlands road-map torso, of a psycho-killer scum-bag. And he did it really well. Happily good triumphed, though it was a bit touch and go thrilling in the end, the bad guys got their comeuppance, and that's the way it should be. In real life the depressing fact is that little bit of cleaned up city would probably be claimed by another drug lord very quickly and the normal status quo would return.
22/07/10visiting The Parents and Green Zone
What
a lovely day we had today. It was a mostly sunny experience, even
up at Braehead. We left Sunny Dechmont in full sun and drove into
cloud approaching Braehead. But not for long, the sun
followed us and we banished the clouds in our wake. The Husband
and I took the van up to Braehead without prior notice of our surprise
impending visit. And hell mend us, no-one was home. And I do
mean no-one, not even The Pomeranian.There was no barking, but that was a good sign, meant The Mum and The Pomeranian had to be close by out on a walk. I phoned The Mum first, then The Pomeranian, I'm jesting, I just phoned The Mum. The Mum and The Pom were about 1/4 ways round the Wee Circle, a local popular route with walkers which I've walked many many times in my younger life. We were glad to hear from The Mum that she and The Pom she were just doing the Wee Circle, the Big Circle is way bigger. Click on the map here, the blue route is the Wee Circle, the much longer red route is the Big Circle. I've walked that one a good few times too, just not as often as the Wee Circle, and who could blame me. The Big Circle isn't as tree-lined, pleasant and easy on the eye, not on the more northerly two thirds, the bits that are further away from Braehead where the road takes you round Braehead Moss, and it's too long.
So, The Mum carries on her walk and we set off down Carnwath Road towards the pub, on foot. I tell The Husband the tale of us kids doing The Invisible Rope Trick on Carnwath Road, we fooled a load of people. All these years later it amazes me how many people fell for it, some of them just drove on afterwards as we fell about laughing, some of them got angry and shouted a loud of abuse, and I'm pretty sure for them ones we made a quick getaway up the side of the village hall and into the fields. Maybe in the late 70s/early 80s it was so new to Scotland that few had heard of it. I can't remember how we got the idea to do it.
We reckoned there was no great hope of the pub being open. It's a week day and it's not exactly a major tourist route or area, so no surprise, The Last Shift Inn was closed. I talked The Husband into taking a stroll down Main Street to meet The Mum and The Pom. And when I say I talked him into it, I mean, I dragged him by the hand while pointing out sights of personal historical interest and ignoring his whinging. Past several relatives houses, the house I grew up in, the site of the old Tennant's garage (it's been built on with a house since then) we used to investigate as kids and never got into trouble for, the row of cottages that used to be derelict when I was a kid and we did a Ouija Board there once. One or two of the old houses look the worse for wear, indicating I think, the homes of the very long-term inhabitants. The more spruce houses being the homes of people of The Parent's generation and the newcomers, of which there are many.
I for one enjoyed the walk down Main Street immensely, there's been lots of changes, little details here and there, since the last time I made The Husband walk down Main Street shortly after we met in 2006. And massive changes since I was a kid. Big sigh opportunities, ahhh, the memories. Then, just after we reached the outskirts, past the old church which is now a very modern and covetable house conversion, where I was a child bridesmaid forced to wear a lemon flower-patterned lace empire-line frock and matching bonnet! in the 70s, and where I later, in jeans and other such relatively cool clothing used to take Tara The Doberman when I bought her Golden Wonder cheese and onion crisps at the village shop (long since closed) and she'd carry the bag in her mouth and only open and eat them when I gave her permission when I sat on the church wall, then past The Old Manse, and there they were. I ran to meet them and The Mum dropped The Pom's lead to let Leo run to meet me.
We all headed back to The Parent's place and The Husband fitted the new wheelbarrow tyre for The Dad. I'd ordered it on eBay for The Dad, and when he got home a bit later he was mighty pleased to find not only had the tyre arrived, but had been expertly fitted too. The Parents had a bunch of scrap metal they wanted to sell and a pile of old wood for the tip. So, The Husband and I assisted. The Husband wanted to take it all to the tip, but he was outnumbered 3 to 1. This is the first time ever that The Parents have sold scrap metal, so please, don't go thinking we're in any way a Pikey type outfit, they just had their old metal guttering and rain water pipes replaced with low-maintenance plastic versions, and are to be admired for their strongly held green views on recycling...and not throwing money away, same as me. We are Scottish.
We stuck it all in The Van and the four of us headed out in the general direction of Sunny Dechmont. The Mum and I went to Starry Towers with Poppy plants The Mum had dug up for my garden, and The Dad and Husband went to the scrap dealer in Linlithgow first, then the council tip at Livingston with the old wood. The Mum and I sat around on the swing seat at Starry Towers, with The Boy between us, showing how an iPhone and many of it's Apps work. We anticipated the men's return, wondering how much...the result was £36.40 for 260kg of scrap metal, The Boy got given the £6.40, much to The Husband's horror. The Husband was putting in all the effort, while absolutely not looking for payment, this was family stuff, helping each other and loving the time in each other's company...BUT...it still jarred...The Boy didn't get out of bed till at least 1400, then sat around in the sun playing with his iPhone and got paid...just for being cute. And polite and a generally good guy, his grandparents love him and like to give him some cash when they see him. The Husband thinks money should be earned and doesn't rate family ties and general sweetness as a sellable quality. We all enjoyed our day, much laughter and warm fuzzy feelings.
Oh, Matt Damon, it was a bit...old. I normally adore Matt Damon but Green Zone tells a story that just isn't exactly news. I found I wasn't caring about the 'secret' he discovered and put his life on the line for. The world and it's wife knows there were no weapons of mass destruction. If they'd just come up with a new idea, this story isn't news, it isn't exciting, it didn't engage me. I believe it's probably best in the long run to ignore the intricacies of war and just let the greater good happen on our behalf, we shouldn't think too deeply about the tactics, it's war, people have to do what they have to do in terrible circumstances. And I thank them for doing my dirty work.
21/07/10The Husband home, Menopause Update, Pomeranian Keychain and The Taking Of Pelham 123
Menopause Update : My work mates have been hearing all about my menopause, and seriously I am having a menopause. I know this to be factual because I'm nearly 47 and for the entire fertile phase of my womanly adulthood, apart from the bit when I was pregnant with The Boy, my monthly cycles have been as often and as regular as the moon and it's waxing and waning.
But this year, this 2010, up to this 7th month of 2010, there's been only two of them menstrual events, commonly known as periods. And I've been feeling sadder for longer than usual in between the periods, and...this is the real big biggy of a change, cos I've never been prone to this. It's the sweats, I've been sweating...a lot, often and immensely, day and night. I don't like it, not one little bit.
My work mates have had to witness me miserable and oozing, from the souls of my feet to the scalp under my hair. Flapping my hands and papers and anything I can that will cause a bit of a draft that might help cool me down in working conditions that are already too hot and stifling in a warm Scottish summer. Think thick heavy fabric uniform and poorly air-conditioned buildings...such is the plight of the NHS nursing staff. I unzip where I can, but get told I'm revealing too much, breast or bra. I don't care! I'm not feeling sexy, I just want relief from this heat, this damp sweaty hot hell. I kick off my Crocs and walk on cold floors in my bare feet, but get told that's a health and safety contravention, though I suspect it's more to do with being too different, it doesn't look normal to see your nurse colleagues with no shoes on. I don't care...I don't want to be different, I just want to stop the distracting uncomfortable distress and let me focus on my job.
So we ladies had to talk, share personal experiences and advice. If the ladies can help...I'm listening. When The Husband arrived impromptu and the situation became available...I took it...he got led to the lion's den, poor little lamb. I offered him up, and requested that the ladies tell him how it is, I left the room...and they did. If he doesn't know now how he should be a little more kind bout it all, and not make a big joke of it leaving me feeling alienated and even more miserable...then he's the fool I wouldn't have taken him for. He surely has to understand.
The main thing I took from his experience of a bunch of menopause-experienced women telling him how it is, is the particular experience of one of my worky pals, lets call her H. When H got her menopause, she didn't get sad or miserable like I'm feeling, she got evil. I told her...show him H...show him what evil personified looks like in the face of a menopausal woman. She demonstrated to The Husband just how evil she got, she showed him her evil face, like she'd wake up of a morning, as her hand slowly d
rew
the duvet from off her chin and she raised her head from the pillow to
the new day...it was in the eyes. Her eyes, OMG...her eyes, like
Damian, the devil was in her very soul. She also told him an
example of what it was like day in, day out, saying...if the kettle
didn't boil quick enough I'd f**k that kettle right out the window.I'm going to set aside some research time, and read up on what I can do to help my symptoms.
I got The Mum a wee pressie she's loving. Just a little thing, a Pomeranian pewter keychain from Little Gifts. When I first saw these keychains I knew The Mum would love a Pomeranian one, cos she loves her little Leo so much. She thinks it's gorgeous, I knew she would. Highly recommended for dog lovers, they're available in all the popular dog breeds.
The Husband had to get to bed this evening to recover from his room full of menopausal-knowledgable women experience, and maybe a little bit cos of all the hours of travelling home, driving and ferry, from The Land of Tulips and Mice that sit around on the Stairs of Windmills. So The Boy and I watched The Taking Of Pelham 123, the one with Travolta and Washington. Massive amounts of praise to Travolta and Washington, and overall, they made the movie, we both enjoyed it tremendously.
19/07/10UGGs and burkas - I know what I'd rather have
Cos
I gave away my older pair of UGGs and am only left with my good newest
pair of UGGs I needed another pair to keep up my Two-Pairs-of-UGGs
lifestyle. I love my UGGs.www.Cloggs.co.uk have the genuine UGGs, the style I want - the Classic Tall Boots, in the colour I want - black, in my size - 5. They've got a 15% discount code right now. The £28.50 off takes the price down to only £161.49, a bargain, and free P&P. Enter VC15 at the checkout, but be quick, expires 23/07/10.
Is there anything appealing about a burka? Only if you're a controlling male sexist pig Muslim man, a chronically shy Muslim woman or Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary. The British government's taking the stand that banning the burka would be against Britain's values of a free society. Caroline Spelman's on record as going further, apparently the burka can be a statement of empowering feminism.
Ignorant woman, what part of PC overkill does she not understand? She might be going down that road, but for the most of the people in the UK, and the rest of the main European countries...this is one step too far down the road of protecting religious freedom over female freedom. Women are humans too. Granted it must be a tough call, to try to decide what -ism she would rather be charged with, racism, sexism...tough one. But she made the wrong decision. Does she really think that any human being, if they were to be given the chance of being unencumbered by centuries and generations of patriarchal religion would actually choose to be anonymous and faceless. Refused permission to fully engage in the society in which they live, even if that society has so much more to offer than the society generations of their mothers and grandmothers experienced?
The
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the wearing of the burka by Muslim
women in France undermines their dignity, and I'd have to agree with
Nic.It's a ridiculous piece of clothing that should have no place in a free society. Speaking as a non-religious woman, a woman who has not been forced or brainwashed into accepting a religion-based culture that demotes me to a second-class non-entity...I know what I'd rather have, and the freedom to make that choice for myself, to choose the UGGs over the burka...and no pressure...it's totally up to me, do I want UGGs or a burka? Ummm, let me see...stick your burka up your arse.
18/07/10The Husband has a bicycle, The Parents visit and Chatty Man chats to Jared and Kylie
The
Husband is in the Land of The Clogs and The Anne Frank Museum and news
reaches Starry Towers of his recent purchase, a very Dutch purchase, a
bicycle. I don't know for sure, but I'm imagining a proper Dutch
style bicycle like what's in this picture. I'm looking forward to
seeing this in action.The Parents dropped by this afternoon and found me out back with my gardening gloves on looking at the newly mown grass and thinking how I'd really rather have a larger monoblock area there instead of grass. The Parents brought news of a new car purchase and had time for a wander around The Starry Towers estate, as The Mum and I talked flowers and caught up on all the latest family news. The Mum and I are very close and we do like to talk.
After I kissed and waved The Parents off down the road I got back to my pottering in The Starry Towers gardens and clicked my iPod back on. I listened to the latest Collings & Herrin podcast, link in The Lobby. Richard has been sick and shitty, vomit and diarrhoea, with vomit on top of diarrhoea in the loo. I feel his pain...from memory. Andrew chose to avoid close contact
%20&%20Andrew%20Collins%20(wise%20boy).jpg)
with
the recovering Richard and his now ill girlfriend at the poorly pair's
sick house. Result was the boys recorded their separate halves of
the podcast...separately. It wasn't as good as when they're
together, but I don't blame Andrew. What fool would willingly
visit the home of a couple who are either still ill or just recovered
from what sounds to be the symptoms of a Norovirus. I've had a
Norovirus twice that I know of, I know they were Norovirus's because on
both occasions I'd cleaned up vomit and shit from patients with
diagnosed Norovirus just hours before I got ill. It's horrible
being in your bed for a couple of days with D & V and I'd encourage
anyone and everyone, if you can take steps to avoid the risk, do.
It's highly contagious, with as few as ten virus particles being able to
cause infection, and you'll not only be saving yourself, but saving
others you may pass it to. Richard behaved like he was offended at
Andrew's decision to avoid the risk, but Andrew did the wise and right
thing. Andrew mused about the risk that Richard's girlfriend might
pass it back to Richard and this pass-the-unwanted-parcel back and forth
could go on indefinitely if they were particularly unlucky and
unhygienic, but the one decent thing about the Norovirus is it's
believed that once you've had it you can't be reinfected for a period of
approximately 3 months, not with the same particular strain anyway, and
you'd have to be hellava unlucky to go from a bout of one strain right
into another strain.I happened upon the latest Alan Carr's Chatty Man show this evening, and what an entertaining and attractive experience it was too. No, I'm not saying Alan Carr is attractive, don't be ridiculous, and lets swerve past Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop, he's alright sure but nothing to get excited about, there were two aesthetically pleasing sexy bit. It started with Jared Leto. I'd never really been aware of him before but he was in Fight Club, Lord Of War with Nicolas Cage, Panic Room and American Psycho. He's also the lead singer of the band 30 Seconds To Mars which sound fine going by the little bits I've heard so far. I was quite surprised by the swearing though, Alan Carr and Jared Leto do a bit of f***in' and even enjoy the sound of their own voices saying the word c**t, for no other reason than they can and they must have been thinking they'd be shocking. Surprising yes, surprising that they felt the need, cos it seemed to me a bit schoolboy childish, shocking no. Anyway Jared's pretty damn hot to look at, he could be a contender to be the next generation of my favourite quirky actor guy, following in the footsteps of Christopher Walken and Nicolas Cage. Maybe, just maybe, watch this space.
The star of the show however was Kylie. There's summit so lovely bout her. As she walked over to chat to Alan after singing All The Lovers, I recognised a certain Dolly Parton element to her look. Funny thing was they went on to talk about how she was influenced by Dolly Parton when recording her new album Aphrodite, and even dressed in cowgirl outfits in the recording studio, then she gave a quick blast
of
All The Lovers in a Dolly country and western stylee.
The
video for All The Lovers is both beautiful sublime viewing and a
shocking horrific STD warning. It could easily be a 1980's AIDs
campaign ad. Starting with a representation of Kylie's immediate
ex-lovers, the pile grows below her, to my mind representing all her
lovers that have gone before and all her lovers lovers that have gone
before, multiplying on and on till it's a writhing mountain of what
looks like the entire population of New York's sexually active
attractive young people and bringing to my mind the 1987 Faber and Faber
book "Who's Had Who". A book I used to own, and annoyingly I can't
seem to find now. The premise of the book being that if you have
ever slept with anyone ever who has slept with anyone else ever, who
has...that thing 7 times...then your only ever 7 sexual connections at
the most away from having slept with everyone in history, ever, I
think that's what authors Simon Bell, Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis
were trying to say. With her beatific smile Kylie's looking
innocently oblivious of that theory in her All The Lovers video.17/07/10pottering around, Patio Heater News and The Happening
Was
rain and shine today at Starry Towers, rain, shine, rain, shine, rain,
shine. I was up at 0830 (thank you Mr Postman) to a glorious
blazing sun, by the time I'd got beautified and finished the ironing at
1030 the rain was pouring down and I thought I'd missed my window of
gardening opportunity. But never fear the sun returned again, and
again, and again. My parka hood was up and down faster than the
elevator in the Taipei 101, which is the fastest elevator in the world in, what was till
2006, the world's tallest building...Google's a wonderful thing.
Two buildings have since overtaken Taipei 101, but they don't have the
fastest elevator and they don't have such picturesque surroundings.
Anyway, back to Starry Towers. My pottering consisted of dead-heading, cutting the Lilies down cos they're just bout past it, weeding, planting some seeds, taking cuttings and moving a couple plants. One of my Gentian verna angulosa had to move cos the big birds, the crows and wood pigeons, kept standing on it where it was before. It was between two slate stepping stones in the middle of the bird feeding area, not the best idea to put a delicate little flower there. I've just moved it off to the side a bit. The big birds have ruined my Lily Of The Valley too, the leaves are all tramped on and ripped. I've moved the main bird seed feeder in the Lilac tree over to another branch so it's now hanging above a big well-established Christmas Rose that can take the strain better. I'd like to see the Crow that can trample that.
I've stuck some of the dropped Mahonia japonica berries in a pot of compost, I have no idea if they'll grow, but I'm thinking it's gotta be worth a try. The cuttings are one each from an Ivy and a Cotoneaster cos I've got a couple of empty spaces in a trough against the east wall.
Them east wall Ivies and the Cotoneaster are cuttings of the two different Ivies and the Cotoneaster I had for years and years before we did the Monoblocking and I had to tear them down, poor babies, but they live on in the cuttings I took. I suffered worse really, broke my heart to rip them down and bin them a couple days before the Monoblock guys started. And now here's me taking new cuttings from old cuttings, that's how well they're doing.
Patio Heater News : The Dad did have a look at the gas cylinder situation. Problem was I was trying to fit a 15kg, the heater takes a 5, 7 or 13, but not a 15kg. It was another of them boring situations where your s'posed to read the instruction booklet in detail, I'd only looked at the pictures. Anywho, it's up and running and it works, kicks out a lot of heat, is inconspicuous and I'm happy. There's been absolutely no interest from the ads I placed to get shot of the big Patio Heater which is currently stationed betwixt the solid oak bespoke 8 place dining table and the equally solid oak and bespoke big cupboard in the Starry Towers dining room. This seems to be becoming my fox paws, the most current and very obvious one.
The Boy and I watched The Happening this evening, he gave it an 8, I suggested a 6, because M. Night Shyamalan's 6th Sense was in my head. M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening probably more rightfully deserves a 4, for being so pretentiously and maddeningly silly. I say that because, despite some excellent apocalyptic visual scenes and a few moments of high tension, the good stuff was few and far between and tended to be eclipsed by the over-acting from the squeaky clean pretend people and the ridiculously easy to guess plot. When the group of survivors we follow find themselves in a show-home with false everything...it's so apt you'll laugh out loud.
If I was them, by the time I'd witnessed so many people committing zombie-like self-hating suicidal acts and the likelihood was I was going to off myself in the next wee while, I'd be getting serious with my still-existing survival instinct. The people were all so very unreal, two dimensional and shallow...and clean, morally, emotionally and physically. I'd have got a bit dishevelled by then, I know I would, but the perfect American family were still looking pretty and loving their fellow man. And that Zooey Deschanei only acts with her eyes, right from her first scene I was asking The Boy...why's her eyes rolling around...she can't have been stricken with the bad thing already?
In a good movie, a serious and really scary movie, by the time the three main characters we're all s'posed to be rooting for (pardon the totally unintentional pun), get to the house in the country that time forgot, the one with the crazy old lady that time forgot, surely they should've just disabled the crazy old lady by chaining her to a post in the garden within easy reach of a shard of broken glass or perhaps an ironic bottle of Paraquat, where they could watch from a window in a secured section of the house they could make air-tight if need-be, moved all the food to that secured section, and maybe even started trying to fashion home-made gas masks from out of whatever materials they could find around the house. That's what I would've done. I've never seen The Sixth Sense or Signs...I knew there had to be a good reason they never appealed. It's because M. Night Shyamalan has such a pretentious name in the first place and because all his movie titles are preceded with the words...M. Night Shyamalan's.
16/07/10Peter Sutcliffe and Jonathan Ross
Actually, the fact that he is still breathing is wrong.
A sadistic serial killer found sane at trial then later controversially diagnosed with the mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, he was found guilty of brutally murdering thirteen women and attempting to kill another seven. He was found to be sane at trial.
What part of "murdered thirteen women" and giving it your best shot at another seven gives the merest hint that freedom should be any part of this man's future? Not one bit of it. I don't care if some professionals have since been convinced that he's mentally ill rather than evil, that 'diminished responsibility' at the time of his crimes somehow should allow him to be released, no way, never. I wouldn't care if he were to be dying of cancer and have only two days to live. I wouldn't even feel one iota of sympathy for this man if he developed dementia and couldn't even recall his killings and the gratification he obtained from his actions at the time. This man went out to kill with a specially adapted jumper down his trousers which provided padding for his knees, for when he anticipated kneeling over his victims.
He has since admitted assaulting another woman and a 14 year old girl, I'm guessing the wee lassie must've been doing an extremely convincing impression of a prostitute. I am being sarcastic.
With the tag of an illness, physical or mental...comes the fore-word 'suffering'. Like if it's an illness, it's a condition, it's happening to you, and your behaviour thereafter is not your responsibility. But I don't see him 'suffering' from his 'mental illness', I see him alive, well fed, cared for. There will be a fleet of nursing and doctor staff caring for him, psychiatric and medical. I only see that he made others suffer, in the most terrifying way conceivable, and him looking for the best way out of it after he got caught.
His weapons and tools of choice, the ball-pein and claw hammer, hacksaw, knives, sharpened screwdrivers and rope. Typically his cowardly method of attack...from behind with a hammer to the head. While the victim was reeling from the initial and repeat blows, he slashed and/or stabbed with a knife/screwdriver. Youngest victim found guilty of attacking, 16. Youngest victim he later admitted to, 14. I hesitate to mention prostitution. The fact that some of his victims were prostitutes is no excuse in the slightest, and probably just circumstantial...my thinking being they were probably more readily available and willing to be alone with him than women in other professions.
At trial he was found sane, within a few weeks he had convinced the docs that he wasn't. I tend towards the bad rather than mad theory, based on the reports of his behaviour and that he was thought to be imitating mental illness with the idea of serving a limited time in the soft option of a psychiatric hospital rather than going to jail for life. In the early 1980s it was a widely held belief that a short spell in the 'loony bin' was a viable option in preference to serious time in jail. Of course that idea was a kinda urban myth at the time, a jail term usually has an end, being sent to a special hospital with a chronic treatable mental illness for serious crimes isn't so certain and limited. When you've got such a serious history of harming others...your public enemy #1, and will remain that way for ever, thankfully.
The roll call of women he brutally killed - Wilma McCann 30/10/75, Emily Jackson 20/01/76, Irene Richardson 05/02/77, Patricia Atkinson 23/04/77, Jayne MacDonald 26/06/77, Jean Jordan 01/10/77, Yvonne Pearson 21/01/78, Helen Rytka 31/01/78, Vera Millward 16/05/78, Josephine Whitaker 04/04/79, Barbara Leach 02/09/79, Marguerite Walls 18/08/80 and Jacqueline Hill 17/11/80. They all suffered and died for one man to get his rocks off.
If I've made any errors regarding Sutcliffe's victims, I sincerely apologise to the memory of the dead, to their families, and to the survivors and their families, the list is so dreadfully long. I support today's decision to keep this evil (and I don't use that word often or lightly) incarcerated for as long as he is breathing.
I have this idea that not enough people allow themselves to think in any great depth of the experience of dying at the hands of a sadistic sexual serial killer. The shock, dismay, horror...the fear, the pain and suffering of those murder victims. What thoughts would be your last? If you were to be struck on the head with a hammer, or as your being strangled, as a blade slashes or a screwdriver pierces your flesh? It's no easy process, to imagine the suffering as your life is snuffed out at the hands of a stranger attacking you with tools that should normally be found only in a workman's tool box...well it's probably no wonder that few people give it any deep thought, it's way too horrendous for 'normal' people to think about. But I find it hard NOT to think about it.
He did so much terrible harm to specific women and their families, and to society in general. What about the people who had to deal with the criminal case, including the jury members who were forced to deal with his atrocities in minute detail. The police and others who had to, literally, pick up the physical pieces of his victims, the doctors and nurses who had to treat the victims who survived. I've caught a bit about some of his surviving victims over my lifetime, some of whom are still so physically brain damaged, let alone the mental trauma, they are still effected and living with it three decades later. He drains the public purse of a small fortune to see him legally dealt with, then keep him alive, cared for and 'treated', AND then to allow him to indulge his human rights in fighting his legal case. If he were to be released, imagine the financial cost of keeping his identity secret from people who may wish to kick him to death.
And for all of that...I say bring back the death penalty.
I watched the last of the Jonathan Ross shows on BBC this evening, and I wasn't all that impressed with the ultimate guest list either. First up was Mickey Rourke, he was on recently, so why have him back, I didn't feel the need to see his really bad cosmetic surgery again so soon. Second guest was Jackie Chan, never seen the appeal. Top guest, David Beckham. Has he been having voice-coaching? I do believe he's learnt to drop it an octave or two, he didn't sound as pathetically weedy and squeaky as the last I heard his voice. Then we were 'treated' to a short medley of Roxy Music songs with Bryan Ferry on the mike, hardly the hottest act in town. So here's looking forward to a major improvement when JR hits ITV, good luck Jonathan on getting your mojo back soon.
13/07/10Patio Heater News, gardening and Law Abiding Citizen
Introducing the heater to Patio 3 meant moving stuff around, so I can park it to the side inconspicuously, but easily roll it into position when it's needed. So a few pots had to change place, and a couple plants had to swap pots cos only Terrazzo pots are welcome on Patio 3...and they have to be black. Tonight, I'm happy with my work.
My two birthday Rowan trees, Zeus and Erik, have had a couple problems recently. They've both been blown over by strong summer winds. If that's what summer winds could do, I had to think bout fixing the problem, cos winter 2010 would surely be worse on them. The first occasion was just after I'd moved Zeus from the relatively sheltered Patio 2 at the back of Starry Towers, to the more exposed Patio 3 at the bottom of the back garden, and it got blown over, despite it's big heavy pot. So I moved Zeus back to his Patio 2 position. Then a few days later Erik, who hasn't moved an inch from his position on the sheltered Patio 2 since he first arrived, he got blown over too. I started thinking it's to do with the fact they both got a bit taller this growing season. I was going to wait till winter to trim the Rowans down a bit, but I did it today in the hope that the winds will leave them alone. Up the ladder, snip, snip, snip.
I also recycled a winter Ivy. Moved it from it's essentially temporary, hanging basket position, and tucked it lovingly into the Terrazzo pot that has the black metal conical climbing frame thing. The pot that already has the Royal Highland Show bought Honeysuckle thriving. The Honeysuckle is fast growing, deciduous and probably going to need to be cut back next year, so I want a bit of permanent and evergreen in the pot to cover for the Honeysuckle's absences. Hopefully, the two will compensate for each other's deficiencies.
Last autumn I planted up the four hanging baskets with a load of Winter Pansies and Violets and two apparently hardy Ivies per basket. Only three of them 8 Ivies survived that extreme winter we had there, so I reckon at least one of the survivors deserve to be moved to more permanent positions and nurtured into old age.
The Boy has an iPhone. The Boy and I watched Law Abiding Citizen this evening, and he has an iPhone. We loved Law Abiding Citizen. Best movie we've seen for ages and ages, and he has an iPhone. HOW COME? How come my 16 year old son has a better mobile phone than I have??? Having said that, an iPhone probably comes with software that would drive me crazy, we all know how much I hate iTunes. And I do not want an iPad, I can't imagine anything worse that fingerprints all over a screen...oh wait a minute, I can...a computer without a keyboard. I like to type properly. I haven't adjusted to that finger-touch 'slide' technology yet.
Law Abiding Citizen is a tour-de-force of everything The Boy and I love about high intensity twisty-turny thrillers, with more than a tinge of the Hannibal Lector feel. They did it so well I wanted Gerard Butler's good-guy-gone-bad character to succeed and go on to do loads more, I want part 2, 3, but maybe not 4, cos probably by that time they'd have run out of energy and some other team would make the movie, and be rubbish at it. Ten out of ten from both The Boy and me, and I will watch it again, with The Husband. It's possible there might be a 2 and 3...cos maybe, just maybe, what we saw in the last minutes could've been not what it looked like, fingers crossed.
12/07/10football, Prince, and Funny People
I know I'm hardly, by a very lonnnnnng shot, the first person to mention it, but really? the vuvuzela? Why?
Straight up, I tell you, I don't like it. The collective sound is, both pointless and so very annoying. It hurts the head, via the sore ears. I don't like football enough to endure a game while having to put up with that racket. The South African Blowing Horn will be a most unwelcome addition to UK football if even just a few of them turn up on the terraces back here.
The general impression I have of the World Cup 2010 is one of a huge disappointment. The English got fecked, as always since 1966. And when I say 1966, 1066 and the Battle of Hastings tries to persuade my brain it was actually THAT long ago. It seems to be of major f*ckin importance to the Englanders, but the Scots don't really care, unless we were to get there in the first place, but when we don't, which is most years, we achieve pleasure at the English not finishing well. So it seems we Scots are in a win-win situation, achieved from a lose-lose situation. We lost, but hey, they lost a wee bit later and way more spectacularly, so lets all laugh at that. It's all becoming a sad and miserable four-yearly event for everyone in the UK.
But this year, seems to me it's been the most depressing World Cup ever, in my lifetime experience. Even the final seemed to be less exciting than usual, even maybe disappointing, with two teams of angry Europeans playing badly and dirty, then blaming the referee. Well, Spain and Holland have reasons to blame the English. Spain has to endure all the worst of the British summertime holiday makers. I'm not Spanish, but I wouldn't want to be in their seaside resorts either because of the foreigners. When it comes to Spain, you'll only find me in Barcelona or Madrid. And Holland, the Dutch must think of the Brits as arseholes who vomit on the streets of Amsterdam cos they don't know how to enjoy a drug experience in a calm and controlled manner, and I suspect, the Brits are the idiots standing at the windows in the Red Light District laughing and disrespecting the prostitutes in a sickening school-boy fashion.
Third place goes to Germany, I hardly have to remind you of why Germany could easily be roused to despise the English at the drop of a very round ball...called a Jabulani. Fourth, Uruguay, erm...well, they probably don't like Spain. I don't get it why we even think for a minute that football can unite the world, not even for a minute. Get over it boys, it's a pile of shit.
I got my copy of Prince's new album 20Ten, for 65 of my Scottish pennies. I got it from The Sunny Dechmont village shop on my way to work on Saturday. I had to leave the shop with a Daily Record too, but I coped, that went in the blue recycling bin. How amazing is that, Prince gave it to newspapers, as long as you had your finger on the media pulse you'd have been sure to get a copy of a participating newspaper. I only knew bout it cos I saw a TV ad the night before.
When I got a chance to listen to 20Ten my Windows Media Player indicated there's 77 tracks, there's not. There's the 9 songs, then way down the list of numbers, number 77 is a secret track, song called Lay It Down.
Tracklisting
:1 Compassion
2 Beginning Endlessly
3 Future Soul Song
4 Sticky Like Glue
5 Act Of God
6 Lavaux
7 Walk In Sand
8 Sea Of Everything
9 Everybody Loves Me
Secret Track 77 - Lay It Down
It all sounds as hot, sexy and sensual as...the stuff he was doing when he and I were 20-summit. Prince, the hot sexy pixie of pop...still. He's a strange one, but damn him, he makes me feel good.
The Boy and I watched Funny People this evening. We made a joint conscious decision to go for the 'Extended' version over the 'Theatrical'. Two hours and fifteen minutes later we wondered if that was the best choice. Yes we liked it, yes we
enjoyed the star-spotting aspect, especially the Eminem cameo
appearance. Yes we started off empathising with Sandler's George Simmon's character, even felt moved by his performance as the movie
built on his personal sadness, and we felt drawn to Rogen Josh's Ira
(our pet name for Seth Rogan) here and there, but it got confusing,
because in the end, none of them proved to be particularly endearing or
honest. Maybe if we'd went with the 'theatrical' we could've got a
shorter blast of them and liked one or two of them more than we did
after...135 minutes! But...we'll never know, we'll never watch the
'theatrical' version now we've seen them all in their shallow entirety.Back to the star-spotting, I spotted Sarah Silverman. I thought it was her, then I knew for sure because of her vagina joke when she shapes her mouth and turns her head to 90 degrees, and I only knew she does that cos I heard it mentioned on one of my favourite podcasts recently. The Boy spotted Ray Ramano...who he? I'd heard of James Taylor, The Boy's way too young to have any reason to. And all credit to The Boy, he first spotted Writer-Director Judd Apatow's wife and kids from Knocked Up. The Apatow daughters are cute as get out, and there's not one single child on this planet that can out cute the youngest Apatow, Iris.
08/07/10Patio Heater News and Descent part 2
managed it by dragging it out of her house and over to the fence. I half
lifted, half balanced, then heaved it onto the adjoining fence, which
was the hardest bit, before levering it down onto Patio 1.I broke a nail.
More dragging, I got it across Patio 1, more serious effort pulling it up the Starry Towers doorstep, then in our front door. At which point I dumped it and didn't even get round to opening the box till today.
An Enders Cosy Polo Patio Heater arrives in 60 parts, I know, I counted them. Building a Cosy Polo Patio Heater is a 'two person assembly' job, so I engaged The Boy's assistance. We done good, I did the brains and figuring out the diagrams in the instruction manual, and the removing of the protective foil from the stainless steel body panels, The Boy did the screw tightening stuff. I'm quite pleased with us. Thing is, the size of the parts and therefore, the size of the box it arrives in...much of a muchness, THEY could really have sent it out already built. I'm assuming it saves them money by making me and The Boy build the thing. I'm a little too scared to do the gas inlet connection bit, I'm a girly, and I don't know shit bout dangerous gas explosive type stuff. I'll ask The Dad to sort that out next time I see him, cos I'll see him before I see The Husband, him being on The Continent right now.
The Boy and I watched The Descent part 2 this evening. When I purchased this I'd got it mixed up. I was thinking of The Hole, the Keira Knightley movie when the English public school kids get locked in an underground chamber, but that's not important right now. The Boy remembered Descent right from the get go, it took me a couple minutes, then it all came flooding back. The Descent scared me and part 2 does the same. They're both very good scary movies. I find them particularly frightening because of a couple of personal phobias. Never mind the disgusting, ugly, vile, horrendous killer creatures. Way before them, it's the claustrophobia, the potholing underground cave scenario...you'd never get me down there. There's heights, people die from falling from great heights, there's water, people being submerged in water filled tunnels with no knowledge of when the next 02 will happen. It's terrible. Heights, depths, claustrophobia, stifling, suffocating tight spots under tonnes and tonnes of rocks...and there's horrendous frightening scary monsters of slimy naked gross human-like appearance. I don't do heights, depths, claustrophobic spaces cos it's like...I can't breath in those places.
Then, I started spotting the problems with logical belief, would a doctor allow a sedated and traumatised patient to be removed from her hospital bed by a Hicksville police man? Would the apparently more intelligent younger police woman have just agreed to go? She gets her own back on her boss BTW. No underground rescue team would agree to go down there...the team leader told the police man he couldn't take a gun due to the serious risks of a gunshot causing a cave-in, yet within seconds he let the police guy take the gun down there. Then there was the ancient lift from the old mine, no intelligent anyone would've got in that lift. Health and Safety would be having a fit. But I
put
them thoughts aside quickly as my worst nightmares came at me, one after
the other, in quick succession. OMG!Then...it all took a comedic turn and The Boy and I couldn't be scared anymore. It's all to do with The Jacksons. First Krysten Cummings who plays female police officer Rios, got so much product in her hair, and for 'product', read shit and blood, she was suddenly the double of Michael Jackson, and not just in the Thriller video, she looked like Michael Jackson on a good day when he was breathing. Then the Juno character from the first movie, The Descent, the one that was still down there and over the space of two days seemed to have become one hellava survivalist and ass-kicker, she started to look a lot like Latoya, or maybe Janet. Was all rather hilarious. I couldn't find any really clear pictures of Rios on the www, but watch the movie, you'll see the Jackson connection. But still, getting past The Jacksons, The Descent part 2 is very good.
07/07/10Patio Heater News and the first Thumbs Down award awarded
The first ever MarilynsWorld.com Thumbs Down award goes to...The Times. The newspaper. I only buy one newspaper, The Sunday Times. Every Sunday £2 of my Scottish pounds, or £2 of The Husband's Scottish pounds goes over the Sunny Dechmont village shop counter in exchange for a huge big newspaper and more importantly, the three magazines I love so much. My favourite journos do their stuff in the Sunday Times magazines. The bad news is The Times Online has stopped their free internet access. I don't know what their charging, but it'll cost you now if you want to read their online content. And that's why I can't get my Bugle podcasts online anymore, I have to get them via iTunes, and we all know how much I hate iTunes.
05/07/10Patio Heater News
Patio
Heater News : Enders the makers of my new CosyPolo patio heater, have
been in touch, they're delivering tomorrow. I'm a bit excited, at
long last I'll be using a patio heater. Of course I've still got
the first one to sell. Initially I placed ads at work and had
three people interested, but their interest always faded leading to no
sale. So today I wrote out a card, decorated it tastefully with a
few silver stars and placed it on the village shop notice board.
£1.75 for one month, money goes to a cancer charity, so a good deal all
round. Then I placed a free www ad on AdTrader.Since ordering the CosyPolo from Tesco I've been emailing Marco Pierre White to cancel the order with him, but was getting no response so I phoned him today. He sounds different on the phone to what he does on the telly, but he's told me my money will be refunded, he was very friendly and helpful. The item is still out of stock with him, he reckons Tesco must have greater buying power, and he's probably right.
04/07/10Garden News - damage and new plants and The Box
I've got a bunch
of plants with silvery woolly leaves, covered in stunning magenta
flowers and I always forget their name. I brought seeds back from
Oxford a few years ago and have been doing the seed thing every year
since. One of the Sunny Dechmont village shop owner ladies was
asking me this morning for the name of the plants, and of course I
couldn't tell her, because I never can remember the name. So I
went home and Googled it, Rose Campion, or Lychnis coronaria, now I've
written it here I won't forget the name again, and I'll make a point of
telling the shop lady. I should really give her some of this years
seeds later. Anyway, the Rose Campions have been getting battered
by very strong winds today and another lady at the shop told me her old
Mum uses an old pair of tights to tie her plants up so I gave it a try
with the Rose Campion that had collapsed over the path. Top Tip Of
The Day...for temporary tie up situations, use your old tights and/or
stockings, or stay-puts, or fishnets.I've purchased a few new plants recently. We visited Binny Plants at the Binny Estate, Ecclesmachan, which is just along the road, and owned by an old friend of Shetland Sheep leading light, The Old Farmer Friend, Tom. I got a Skimmia japonica subsp. reevsiana, which is an hermaphrodite clone with white male and female flowers on the same plant, with the white flowers turning to red berries. It's in a big Terrazzo pot on Patio 3 now, for it's interesting and long lasting berries, it's evergreen-ness and it's very hardiness, I'm thinking year round foliage and colour.
Also from Binny Plants, a couple of Scabiosa caucasica with lavender blue flowers, a couple of Campanula persicifolia 'Blue Bloomers' for their extremely showy blue blooms, a Ajuga rep. 'Caitlin's Giant' for it's huge spikes of blue flowers in early summer, two Allium cernuum with delicate purple pink flowers, and a couple each of two different Hostas. The Hostas have lavender flowers, 'Praying Hands' and 'Pearl Lake'.
Binny Plants is quite a magical place. It's a specialist nursery and all their plants are hardy to the area, which is reassuring. Run down, a bit dilapidated, but so calming, relaxing, quiet, devoid of sound other than bird song and the occasional posh Edinburger accent coming from a one of the few other browsing customers, 'oh look darling, a PAEONIA Cherry Ruffles', and 'ahhh, a beautiful CYTISUS battandieri', grand-father bred these, you must recall', and obviously the font of plant skill and knowledge. They have plants I haven't seen before, so even if their old trellis tables look like they might collapse under the weight of the po
ts on top, and most plants on sale have at least
three young weeds growing along side the plant, and when you're ready to
make you're purchases you have to ring a hand bell and wait a while till
the guy makes his way back from some far off corner
of their land. And it isn't very easy to find unless you know
exactly where you're going. It's at the end of a long private road
on lush, Rhododendron and Hosta rich grounds. Sure there is a sign
telling you you're probably going the right way, but the main sign at
the start of the single lane private road is for the Edinburgh branch of
a private hospital company, The Huntercombe Hospital. An
impressive early 19th century Georgian style two story manor, originally
belonging to the Stewarts of Binny. As we drove past Binny House
again on our way out I concluded it was most likely a private eating
disorder unit, the clues were obvious to the trained eye...1. a group of young people seen through a window seemed to be in a circular seating arrangement
2. a young, too thin girl wearing many layers of shapeless baggy clothing was out front on a bench sitting face to face with an obviously average sized young female with little make-up and hair tied back plainly, giving her the appearance of a pretty woman definitely playing down her best features, she looked like a caring staff member providing one-to-one therapy. The thin girl's head was down, staring at the ground, the average sized girl's face was intent on looking directly at the thin girl
and
3. further along the road we passed a rather special looking sports car entering the grounds, driven by a young, thin, blonde and obviously rich female. She looked like she was the beneficiary of a parent-provided income/allowance, more money than she could be earning for herself, unless she was a model or summit.
It's an excellent place to have a young persons private psychiatric hospital specialising in eating disorders.
I was mildly surprised when I Googled Binny Plants they have an amazingly top notch and professional website. In the flesh they appear so sleepy, oldee world and under-staffed, but in reality they're very astute business people.
Today we were up at The Klondyke for support sticks and ties, cos the windy old weather was threatening to break some of the more delicate stems, especially the new Scabiosas and Campanulas. So they're all tied to sticks now with green metal tie stuff. While I was perusing their plants I fell in lurve with a big Lavatera Red Rum costing £20. It's now in a huge pot on Patio 3, it promises evergreen, hardy and a massive amount of showy attractive deep pink blooms from May right through to October. I've also had to move Zeus, one of our big Rowan trees back up closer to the protection of Starry Towers to Patio2, because the winds were blowing it over on the more exposed Patio 3, despite the massive heavy pot Zeus lives in.
I've started a word doc which will contain all my plants with pictures, care instructions, eventual sizes etc. This will help me get it all right and when someone asks me a question about one of my plants, I'll be a font of knowledge, even if I have to refer to paperwork.
The Boy and I watched The Box this evening. We thought we were getting a taught psychological thriller with an insane but ingenious puppet master type scary guy manipulating people into their own demise. About 30 to 40 minutes in we were getting excited, it was turning out to be a good movie, though we'd started to put 2 and 2 together and just as we thought we'd worked the basics out, then it dawned on us, erm no, it's not that, it's a weird sci-fi thriller, and that's not really our bag. So, it's good for what it is, if you like that sort of thing. We should've known...from the director of Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko's way better though.
03/07/10appeal to Frank Skinner, The Boy News, wine and whine night out in the back garden and Mr Dale's a gentleman
The
Boy News...he's on the cusp, he's in that period of change, from boy to
man. I recently provided minimal assistance in applying for his
provisional driving licence, which is in this day and age, a credit card
sized laminated photo card. He was thrilled to bits today when it
arrived in the post, for real. It's like this little bit of
plastic confirms to him that he exists in the real grown up world.
He's such a pleasure to be around just now. He was a total joy
till he reached the early teens, with just a brief annoying toddler
tantrum type thing here and there, and a load of teenage tantrums in
more recent years. But on the whole, as his mother, in the near on
17 years he's been in my life, he's been a pleasure. He's lovely,
and obviously I love him, absolutely and totally. He's shaping up
well, a good guy. Look at him, I'm so proud. The Best Friend and I had another one of our much needed Wine and Whine nights this evening. When she arrived I took her out to the Starry Towers back garden and we settled down on my beloved hammock swing seat. Despite the lack of a patio heater, and a little rain fall, we sat out comfortably till well into the night and it was about midnight before we went indoors. We only went indoors because one of her sons had arrived to drive her home. When it got a bit dark outdoors this evening I got my new hurricane lamps out, first time out, they work very well, and are extremely aesthetically pleasing. We had a lovely evening. I gave The Best Friend a pair of my Ugg boots this evening, the ones that are too big for me, at size 6. Ugg size 5 is my size, so my 6's needed a new owner who will love, adore and care for them like I did. She's the one.
Yesterday I emailed Mr Alan Dale, proprietor of BugsandWeeds.co.uk, to thank him for the information I got from his website about the insect creature-feature things going on in my Willows, and was happy to receive a response from him in a very timely fashion, thanking me for the stuff I said in my email to him. What a nice guy.
02/07/10Andy Murray, Patio Heater News, helping start the quest for a baby and Frozen River
Next
year Andy, next year, you're time will come. And you're better
looking than that strange munchkin-faced Nadal anyway, there's summit
not quite right about his eyes.Patio Heater News...I'm getting close, oh so close, to my sitting outdoors of an evening even when the chill comes down dream. Regular readers will know I purchased, and some would say 'foolishly', but I got a great deal on one of them big tall mega patio heaters. At that stage I was figuring on buying two cast aluminium sunloungers to go with it. But then the sunloungers deal fell through and I found a 3-seater hammock swing seat I love instead. Then the tall patio heater doesn't go with a swing seat, due to the canopy being up there, and it'd be too close to the patio heater and a serious fire risk. So I've got a brand new mega patio heater I need to sell now. Interested parties please contact me at Marilyn@MarilynsWorld.com, we can do a deal. Meanwhile I found a hammock swing seat compatible patio heater that's only about a meter tall and sends out it's heat at that lower level, sideways instead of downwards, so there'll be no nasty accident waiting to happen, no combustibles overhead.
So, I blogged about buying the CosyPolo heater from Marco Pierre White at his HeavenChef website, and when they emailed me saying it was out of stock but would I like to wait for it, I said yes, cos it was out of stock like EVERYWHERE, and I've got used to how difficult it is to purchase garden furniture items during a British Summer. But I kept a beady eye on the Tesco Direct website, couple days ago it suddenly became available from Tesco Direct, and they have it at the lowest price on the www, so I emailed Marco cancelling my order and snapped it up at Tesco. Any day now I'll be the proud owner of my CosyPolo. I haven't heard back from Marco yet, despite requesting that he...
1. cancel my order
2. refund my money
3. email me confirmation that my instructions have been carried out.
I checked my credit card statement online tonight, no repayment, so I resent my requests via email. Purchasing anything bigger than a plant pot for your garden during the Summer is extremely difficult, convoluted and near on impossible in the UK, from personal experience...I recommend you do it in the other parts of the year.
I got to do summit kinda special, I know someone starting out on IVF treatment. She just wasn't up for self-injecting, so I did it for her. A sub-cutaneous injection into the tummy, I didn't have to check prescription or anything else I'd normally do on the job, all I had to do was fulfil her request and inject what she handed me. Something hormonal I suspect. I feel all warm and fuzzy bout it, helping on her monumental first step.
The Husband, The Boy and I watched Frozen River. It's not all that very often that there's a movie the three of us want to watch together, but I promised them an intelligent thriller, while emphasising the 'intelligent' for The Husband, and the 'thriller' for The Boy. It was, well it's more about what it wasn't. I was expecting someone to come to a sickeningly terrible end and there to be a bit mystery around the investigation of said grizzly death, but it doesn't quite go down that line. The Boy found it a bit of a non-event, The Husband and I enjoyed the tense drama and insight into life and social problems on and neighbouring a Mohawk reservation between New York State and Quebec. Good movie.
28/06/10Happy Birthday to The Dad, The Royal Highland Show 2010, Willow Worriers and Mesrine Parts 1 & 2
Today's
the day, Happy Birthday The Dad! He didn't get Moonpigged cos they
don't have a spoof farming magazine cover, strangely enough. Over
at Hallmark.com I was able to make a photocard using an uploaded photo
and add a caption. I used the image of The Dad proudly displaying
his Young Handler rosette at The Fife Agricultural Show a couple of
weeks ago.And talking about Agricultural Shows, they're becoming a bit of a habit for me, with my second in one month. The Husband and I spent an afternoon at the UK's largest agricultural show, The Royal Highland Show, taking advantage of our complimentary tickets. I've since learned a single adult ticket costs £22. Bloody hell! Expensive. Then it's £5 for parking your vehicle, and the food is expensive. I'm guessing most everything else must be pretty OTT price-wise too, but all I can vouch for is the cost of a big hot sausage in a much smaller finger roll, two of them and a can of Diet Coke cost £9. I also had a couple of ice-cream cones, but I didn't pay attention to what The Husband paid for them, it was too hot and I forgot I'm a roving reporter blog person. The only stuff I bought were a couple of climber type plants, they were about the same price I'd expect to pay at a garden centre, and very very healthy looking.
We
were there to support our old friend, and leading light of the Shetland
Sheep world, Tom. The Dad was there already providing the real
support. He'd been over a couple of times in the week running up
to The Highland, helping with the serious sheep preparation, and he was
there by Tom's side, each and every one of the four Highland Show days.
Tom's told me The Dad's help was invaluable to him. The results?
My sheep, Rench Marilyn got a second place in her class (Shearling
Ewe), being beaten only by the sheep that went on to become the
overall Champion Shetland. Tom got two seconds (Shearling Ewe and
Ewe - two shear or over), a fourth (Ewe Lamb, Rench Marilyn's baby), a
fifth (Shearling Ram) and the silverware for Best Wool. Phew, good
going. Winning anything at the prestigious Royal Highland Show is
a huge accolade, and Tom's no stranger to the Royal Highland prize lists
over the years. There's also a best group of 3 class and here's The Dad helping Tom show them, along with Tom's 16 year old granddaughter Louise from New Zealand. This is the closest The Dad will get to being a doctor, shame too, cos he suits the white coat. Tom was also called on to present a trophy that bears his name The T & R Findlay Perpetual Trophy for best group of three animals consisting of one male and two females.
The Husband got a bit out of hand at The Highland and needed caged till he calmed down. Once freed he tried to convince The Dad, hand on heart, that he truly does lurve me. The Dad looks dubious, click to see the larger picture, the girl on the right is blushing at his cheek and the woman on the left just can't believe it.
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owers
standard Willow lives in a big Terrazzo
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pot
on Patio 3 and the two miniatures are planted out in the back garden.
All three seem to have been playing host to creatures that I'd rather
they didn't. Leaf crunching, leaf munching, leaf rolling, and leaf
discolouring, leaf destroying creatures. To really confuse me,
they're in varying stages of their life-cycles. I'm not certain
but I suspect there's more than one creature living in my Willows.
There's powdery orange stuff, galls, tiny white capsule looking things,
two types of caterpillars which are really larvae. One lot of the
caterpillar looking creatures are eating like
an army of Caterpillar Mr Creosotes, and a few others doing funky
rolling up type stuff to the edge of leaves. I've never known
anything like it, it's all gone mad in the Willows. The Willows
are looking surprisingly gorgeous despite being under constant attack
from at least three foes.
It
would seem the "caterpillars" hanging around in groups are
probably the larvae of the Sawfly Nematus
capreae (N. miliaris) type. Apparently the garden birds should be
loving them, but when I first spotted them they were going about their
business, obviously unaware that feathery creatures even exist. I'm
a little disappointed at nature. If I'm to put all this effort
into providing a bird and bee friendly habitat, the least nature can do
is kill the things that seek to hurt my garden. Before I read that
the birds should be eating them I'd removed as many as I could find and
after spending time and effort capturing these detailed close-up photies
with the Canon G10 (great macro feature), I chucked them in the compost bin. I'm taking advice found at the BBC
gardening website and moving the standard Willow to an open position in
the hope the Blue Tits notice the creepy-crawlies and will be able to easily feed on
them. The itsy bitsy teeny wee whitish eggs are what I
believe to be the eggs of this Sawfly.
There's
also this leaf rolling thing going on with a single "caterpillar" inside
each roll, these "caterpillars" don't have the black markings to their
bodies. Then there's the Galls, and going by my Googling so far
this seems to be caused by another type of Sawfly, the Pontania gallarum.
I haven't worked out for sure if the single larvae found in rolled up
edges of some of the leaves are the same critter that is in each gall,
but I strongly suspect the gall and the leaf-roller are different stages
of the same creature's life-cycle. I've opened a gall and inside
is a single minute Mini Me version of the leaf rolling larvae. The
BugsAndWeeds.co.uk website was a great help.
And
don't even get me started on the rust, it's a fungal thing.The Husband and I did a Mesrine two-parter in one sitting tonight. Part 1 went too fast for the first half...whoosh...here's his early adult life in 45 minutes, every time we turned around there was another baby, another bank robbery, another jail sentence, too much too fast. But around about the second half of Part 1 it all gets totally engrossing, and they slow the pace a tad, just a little. Both movies are fast paced throughout, I just found the first bit of Part 1 way too fast to allow me to start to care for any of the main characters. But in the second half of Part 1 when he hits Canada it gets really interesting at a pace that I for one started to feel excited and involved. Part 2 is brilliant in it's entirety. All in all, a great movie experience. One thing I couldn't get past though, is it just me, or does Vincent Cassel look a lot like Robert Lindsay?
24/06/10iTunes is just so unbelievably bad, gardening and 44 Inch Chest
My latest issue, and it's an ISSUE rather than just an issue...out of the blue, for no good reason, and I can't fathom why at all, at all, but some of my mp3s, quite a lot of them actually. Usually I have approximately 2500 mp3s on my iPod, but 5 to 6 hundred of them just don't register with iTunes anymore. They used to, but now they just aren't on my iPod, they disappeared and no amount of persuasion and repeatedly putting them back on in the usual ways will make iTunes acknowledge them. And there's no obvious connection, some of them are mp3s that weren't entirely legal, but a whole load of them, the majority of them, were ripped from the real CDs I bought. The first I realised I had a problem was with Hung Up from Madonna. I bought the CD, I ripped it, Hung Up played on my iPod via iTunes, and now, it doesn't. ITunes gives no explanation, there's no error message, it just refuses to accept I'm trying and trying and trying to get Hung Up back. It's my mp3, I paid good money for Madonna's "Confessions On a Dance Floor" on CD. I paid good money for my 160GB iPod and I insist I should be allowed to listen to Hung Up when and where I choose.
But no, Apple prevents it...now, all of a sudden. Why? What happened?
Researching desperately on the www, there's a lot of talk, going back years, on forums. The same thing has happened to thousands of iPod owners for at least the last 5 years. The most frequent explanations and successful resolutions seemed to be to do with tags. After much Googling and reading I tried my own version of changing tags. I used my favourite, and long time trusted freeware programme, Quick Media Convertor to convert an mp3 into an...mp3. It doesn't make sense to me, but it's working. I change the mp3 into an mp3, and the properties of the new converted file are empty, I have to enter the properties details by hand, the replace the old unworthy mp3 with the new one in my Music folder, then drag and drop the new one into iTunes, and low and behold, the iTunes, it says yes. There was Hung Up, I synched iTunes with my iPod and Hung Up is back on my iPod. If only that were the end of the problem. But there's another approximately 599 tunes needing the same treatment. How very very very annoying. Apple...you really need to employ better staff.
Maybe my recent problem with the Absolute Radio podcast files isn't an Absolute Radio problem, maybe it's an iTunes problem. If I find out, I'll blog to explain it here.
I had a nice day off today, dabbling in The Starry Towers gardens in a leisurely fashion. Potted up another Terrazzo trough. The 3 troughs I already have are doing so well, with the Ivy and Cotoneaster cuttings, and I now have my Passion Flower seedlings doing so well, looking for a wall to climb, so I got another trough which is now sitting along the eastern boundary wall a little along from the other troughs.
Also picked up a black metal pyramidal support frame for a pot. I've planted out another two Passion Flower seedlings into a medium black Terrazzo pot with the support frame above, hoping to achieve a bit height, structure and colour for next to the Swing Seat on Patio 3.
The Husband and I watched the Ray Winstone vehicle, 44 Inch Chest. It's a strange one. Probably too much talking, and definitely too much use of the c**t word but maybe the talking and Mr Diamond's hallucinatory visions and mental breakdown is better than if they'd just blatantly shown all the violence. John Hurt was outrageous in his Old Man Peanut part, I'm astounded it was John Hurt, this has to be the worst performance by him in anything, ever. I knew his face, but the acting was terrible, never crossed my mind for a minute he was who he is. The best bit of acting came from Stephen Dillane who played Mel, one of the gangster pals. When the movie demanded talking the talk, which it mostly is, he talked the talk better than the rest.
23/06/10Blackbird News and Brig O'Turk Tea Room
Blackbird
News...We done it! All my hard work with the bonding and training,
building up trust with The Starry Towers Blackbird has achieved a higher
level. The Blackbird took a grape from the hand. The fact the hand
was The Boy's hand and not MY hand, isn't important...really.
Seriously...I'm happy The Boy is so interested and he's getting such
pleasure from connecting with The Blackbird, I can be a good Mummy and
take pleasure from my Boy's pleasure. Really. We think maybe
The Blackbird may be raising a second brood in 2010 cos he eats half a
grape then flies off into the huge trees in next door's garden, like
he's taking food back to a nest. I only hope grapes are good
baby food, cos they're getting a lot of them. I'm hoping it's
balancing itself out cos there's long hours and days that no-one's home
providing the grapes, The Blackbird has to be getting seed type stuff
and finding other grub and worm type food too.I've been working the last couple of days, but the day before I went back, The Husband, trying to cheer me up, took me for a Z4 drive. To The Brig O'Turk Tea Room, then on through The Duke's Pass before heading back home. We had a lovely leisurely drive on a beautiful Summer's day with the top down.
The
Husband's been to The Brig O'Turk Tea Room a couple times without me,
but this was my first time. It's a favourite hang-out of Brig
O'Turkians, especially of an evening (it's got a liquor licence) and
bikers. I can be easy going and willing to try new stuff,
sometimes on a wing and a prayer, and I guess you probably need such a
mind-set to eat there. Drinking there is most likely easier when
it's your only option for a night out on the village. But I'm
guessing the tea room doesn't appeal much to the uninitiated who're lacking in
what you'd call an open mind and a sense of adventure. While we
were chowing down, The Husband on vegetable soup, me with some garlic
bread slices with tomato and melted cheese, two boring looking gentlemen
and their ladies came in, took a look around then left again. I
think they were a bit put off at the rudimentary decor, but they
should've sussed the interior wasn't going to be 5 star, giving the
exterior appearance. It couldn't have been the dead flies stuck to
cobwebs on window frames, cos they never stayed long, or got close
enough, to spot them little details that I concentrated on ignoring
while I was enjoying the hot caramel fudge cake with vanilla ice-cream.Work got a lot easier today when a colleague talked a lot of sense, so that's me feeling massively less miserable, blog posts should be a lot more cheery again now.
We've got tickets to The Royal Highland Show which starts tomorrow, and Rench Marilyn will be there, I'll blog all about it.
20/06/10delusion quashed, wedding and Alice In Wonderland
The Husband and I attended a family wedding yesterday, which was...well, it was a family wedding. What is there to say, it's a part of life, you just wish everyone would spend the money on a Las Vegas wedding/honeymoon/holiday experience instead of the church/dinner/speeches/dance affair. But then, each to their own of course, and was jolly nice of them to invite us. The photographer did appear to be a modern type, we watched a load of photography in action.
The Husband and I watched Alice In Wonderland tonight. It's certainly the best Alice In Wonderland I've ever seen, but I've only seen two I think, this one and an old one.
I sound like a bit of a misseryguts don't I, probably cos I'm feeling a bit down, there's been a bit trouble at mill and I know I shouldn't let it bother me, but that's easier said than done. And my week off is about to end. I'll give myself a kick up the arse and bounce back any minute now, or in a few days, sometime soon. Count my blessings and all that, it's been one beautiful week of weather here at Starry Towers, if you're only going to get one of your annual leave weeks during the Scottish summer, and you're fortunate enough to have been allowed this one, you did well, so I should be well chuffed at this happenstance. And I can't rule out hormones, this could be a menopausal thing. Who'd be a 40-summit woman I ask you?
17/06/10my new pet, Gmail and This Is England
I woke up again in the garden, that swing seat is unbelievably lovely on a properly warm Summer's day, and today was a properly warm Summer day here at Starry Towers, 23 degrees. Must've been the best day of 2010. Got loads of washings done including the faux fur throw from the sofa, and stripped our bed. Got the big things dried by hanging them over the table and chairs in the garden. I couldn't find the whirly gig, I'm guessing it must be in the extra locked section of the shed, and it's way too much trouble to get in there.
What fun I've had with the male Blackbird today, we're really bonding. He's behaving like my soul purpose in life is to feed him. He greeted me at the back door this morning and he's getting this close to taking a grape from my hand. We're at the stage where he'll come take a grape from off the ground just a few inches away from me, he comes incredibly close. I can't take photies cos messing about with a camera would interfere with the bonding, maybe The Husband'll get some pics when he gets home tomorrow.
My
main googlemail.com email address inconveniently stopped working today.
This is the address I use for all my shopping, so there's loads of info
on there that I need. Google claimed they'd spotted some dodgy
activity on it and made me give them my mobile phone number before I
could get access to it again. They got mobile phone number and
texted a verification code which allowed me to enable the address.
What was that all about? Apart from them getting my mobile number?
Allowed back into my email account I couldn't see anything that looked
out of the ordinary.
I watched This Is England this evening, an extremely poignant take on the English skinhead scene from 1983. The year I started my nurse training, I was aware of the skinheads, didn't know any of them, not even the Scottish version. Is it just me, or was the pairing up of the little 11 year old Shaun with his 16 year old and tall girlfriend was just too ridiculous? Was nice to see actor Joseph Gilgun (Woody), Eli Dingle from Emmerdale. Was both shocking and expected when the aggression happens, brutal and horrible, but it had to happen, tension was mounting.
16/06/10MarilynsWorld new look, Absolute Radio podcast problems and Terrazzo Stools News
I'm having problems over at the Absolute Radio website. I go there regularly to download mp3 versions of the Frank Skinner weekend and Wednesday podcasts, and now, for the Baddiel and Skinner's World Cup 2010 footie podcasts. This last week there's been changes on their website and it ain't good. Regular readers will know that I dislike iTunes. It's probably my own fault, maybe I just don't know how it's finer details work, but I much prefer to download mp3 versions of my favourite podcasts then load them to my iTunes library then synch to my iPod. The changes at Absolute Radio seem to be forcing downloaders to switch to subscribing on iTunes. Probably to up their iTunes traffic and promote their podcasts to the top of the iTunes chart.
I can still save the recent podcast files to my laptop, but when I go to transfer them to my iPod via iTunes...they don't go. They just don't appear in iTunes. So I gave in and got the files via iTunes by subscribing to Mr Skinner's podcasts, but somehow they get lost when I try to move them to the playlist I use on my iPod. I put the latest podcasts onto a playlist called New Stuff, so I can seamlessly and conveniently catch up on all the latest episodes of my favourites. The ones I've downloaded on iTunes just won't go on the playlist. They look like they're there in iTunes, but they're not there on my iPod. Such a pisser.
I've got round the problem by burning the iTunes versions to a DVD, opting to make it an mp3 DVD, then from the DVD I put them into QuickMediaConvertor and convert to mp3 again. After I enter all the details into the properties of each individual podcast file, I then move them versions to iTunes and my New Stuff playlist. Then and only then do they show up the way I like them on my iPod. What a bloody palaver. Absolute Radio needs a good slap.
I'm allowing myself to get a tad hopeful about the Poly Dish and Terrazzo Stools I ordered from FeatureDECO.co.uk. I got an email saying the Poly Dish will be delivered on Friday and the stools...and I quote..."the stools will arrive as a separate parcel". With any luck they don't mean sometime in 2012. "the stools will arrive", they "will arrive"!!! That's way better than all the other companies who pretended to be selling Terrazzo Cube Stools in black.
15/06/10Terrazzo dreams, gardening, Starry Towers creatures, Wish Her Safe At Home and top shopping
I'm
scared to say it, could I be third, or is it fourth time lucky?
Apparently I've found the terrazzo stools in black. The delivery
charge is horrendous, but the stools are cheaper so the overall cost is
the cheapest so far. I've ordered two of their Rhodes Fibre
Terrazzo Stool, and get this...in the SALE! Down from £84.95 each
to £49.95. AND they have a
black
terrazzo dish just like I've been looking for. With a diameter of
34cm and a height of 9cm this dish is the final thing I've been after
for my Summer evenings on Patio 3 experience. Only £11.80.
Could my search be over? Please, please, please don't let me down
FeatureDECO.co.uk. If FeatureDECO.co.uk come through I'll still be
hanging on waiting to see if Marco Pierre White supplies the Cosy Polo
Stainless steel patio heater via his Heaven Chef website. The
suspense is killing me.Today at Starry Towers I ploutered about in the gardens, tending to the Stock seedlings which were sown out in situ, then potting up the Passion Flower seedlings from a tray to individual pots. I moved one of them into one of my Terrazzo troughs by the wall, joining the Ivies and the Cotoneaster. My Ivies and the Cotoneaster are cuttings from the big old plants I had to kill off when we had the monoblock laid down. I'm real pleased with how well they're doing. All bar one of them survived that extremely bad 2009/2010 winter. This Passion Flower seedling is taking the dead one's place.
Then I took time out to relax on the Starry Towers hammock swing seat with it's lovely aqua and brown cushions and fell asleep. Waking up with Sparrows, our Blackbird and a pair of Wood Pigeons feeding close by was just such a pleasure. I've taken to carrying green grapes in my cardi pocket so I can throw the Blackbird a grape throughout th
e
day. He watches my every move, and comes real close to pick up the
grapes. He follows me around when I'm digging in the soil and can
often be seen with his beak full of soil type grubby creatures I've
disturbed and made available for him. Lying on the swing seat I
watched a lot of Bee action coming and going under the shed. They
look to me to be wild Bees, or Solitary Bees, as The Mum told me they're
called. This one was certainly on his own at the time I took his
picture, he's on my recently purchased insect-attracting Brook Thistle.I had an entirely lovely gardening day. I couldn't wait any longer to get on with the job of obtaining more Tulip and Allium bulbs for the new bit of the front garden. At jparkers.co.uk I ordered 45 black Queen Of The Night Tulips, and 25 each of the Allium Purple Sensation and the blue Allium Azureum. As a treat to me I ordered x3 of their huge big massive purple Allium Globemaster, they're way more expensive than the other Alliums, so I'm expecting them to be even more eye-catching and striking than the rest, which are way impressive in their own right. They better be Allium heaven, so amazing that passers-by stop to go WOW! Every order at jparkers.co.uk gets a free Rhododendron Scarlet Wonder worth £6.95 and if you spend over £40 you get 10 free Devon Dianthus. Devon grown Dianthus which will produce a constant flow of scented flowers every year from May to October. The collection is two each of Doris, Devon Dove, Devon Cream, Carmine Letita Wyatt and Grans favourite worth £12.95. I still need to get more red Tulip bulbs and more of the later flowering lovely lilacs.
A
wee while back I read an article in The Sunday Times Culture magazine
about 73 year old author Stephen Benatar, who received his first
rejection slip at age 12. Several decades later he'd received many
glowing reviews but still no publishing company would have him. So
he self-published his Wish Her Safe at Home then set about selling his
book, one copy at a time, by approaching strangers on the street.
I've ordered my copy from Waterstones.co.uk for £5.79 with free p&p.
By all accounts it's a wonderful story and he really does deserve his
new fame. Do take the time to read
The Sunday Times article. I converted a word
doc to the pdf file version for free online at pdfconvert.com, great
service.
I'm practically living in two outfits so far this Summer 2010.
Both involve black leggings, and a cardi. One is the Peacocks
beige tiered broderie anglaise mini skirt with Peacocks beige boyfriend
cardi and an ASDA long black V neck vest, th
e
other involves the pale pink frill hem tunic from George at ASDA and a
black Matalan fluffy boyfriend cardi. On my feet...either black
classic tall UGGs, my Crocs Crocband Flats or them cork-heeled strappy
studded wedge sandals I got at New Look in the Summer of 2009. I
was so certain that was a trend that would run and run that I bought two
pairs...good call.
When I love an item of clothing I try to get another one or several more, so I'll always have it, however much I might wear it out. My new fav Peacock items aren't available anymore and the Matalan cardi is no more, so I went back to George at ASDA and got another pale pink frill hem tunic. While there I found summit else I fancy, a fit and flare with stud detail longline vest top with dip raw edge hem, just £10. The dip to the back hem is a finger-on-the-fashion-pulse detail I've always been very partial to, top tip, get your dip, fishtail and frill hems now.
14/06/10another Terrazzo stool dissy, prossie boot on the other foot and Britain's most annoying fake-lawyer
While I'm in there I'll be sure to avoid Scorpio Leisure, a massage parlour on Albion Road down Leith. Would seem that saunas and massages can be a serious health risk. The Scorpio has now had two customers collapse and die from heart attacks, strangely enough, they were both men. Last week a 79 year old gentleman spent his last 30 (£20), 45 (£25) or 60 (£35) minutes, depending on which entry fee he'd paid, but I'm guessing he'd probably went for the £20 half hour option, having a nice relaxing sauna and/or massage. In 2001 a 42-year-old married father-of-one taxi driver collapsed and died in similar circumstances. I wonder if Da Management and owners, brothers Ian and Charles Haig, trading under the name of Joppa Enterprises Ltd, have considered CPR training for their "hostesses".
If I was a masseuse I'd insist on being known as a masseuse. I'd find the term "hostess" extremely derogatory, what with it's sexual connotations and all, especially if I was working in Leith, an area with strong prostitution connections. Thing is, if this place was a brothel, which I'm not saying it is, but if it was, it would be a pleasant change and bucking a major trend, the male punters dying at the hands of female prostitutes.
Could someone please tell Billy Murray that he's an ac-tor, not a law-yer. I know he's an ac-tor because I used to watch him in The Bill, before the Sunhill police soap-opera stopped being shown on STV. And I have vague memories of him in Eastenders. As an ac-tor, he was neither a personal favourite or a pet hate, but I'll tell you summit, he is SOOOO annoying now in the extremely crap TV ad for injurylawyers4u I keep seeing on TV. Has he trained as a lawyer? Is he a real lawyer? Is he an injury lawyer for me? Why does he keep saying...we are injury lawyers for you, we're real lawyers, we deal with personal injury claims...and we work for you, we are injury lawyers for you, 100% lawyers, 100% compensation. NO YOU BLOODY WELL ARE NOT! You are an actor, your not even an ac-tor, your just a TV actor reduced to selling ambulance chasing injury lawyers. Stop being so annoying, at the very least, stop saying we are injury lawyers, they might be, but your not.
13/06/10give it up Engerland, I lurve Crocs, gardening news and if I get let down just one more time with my garden furniture shopping, watch me...I will batter someone at 111 George St
They
have a document which is reputed to be William Wallace's passport and
they're in no big rush to hand it over, given that they've had it for
over 700 years. They've also disappointed on the football pitch,
but was only the Englanders that were disappointed last night, so that's
not important."What is off major f****ng importance is that..." (a Mr Walken line from True Romance), when William Wallace was captured by the English he had a document on his person, a letter written by the French King granting him safe passage on a visit to Italy. This letter is currently held at the UK National Archives in Kew, Surry, and for "UK" read "Engerland". They can have the English stuff, Scotland should have the Scottish stuff. Campaigners are, rightly, calling for the 1305 document to be returned to Scotland and if it proves to be what they think it is, put on public display. A team of medieval experts are currently looking into the significance of the letter, at the request of the SNP government. Nationalist politicians had previously called for this process to be initiated, but non-nationalist politicians previously refused to back the proposal. Scots who refused to support the return of what may be an important William Wallace relic to Scotland? They should just pack their bags and leave, quietly, via the A1 and make their apologies to the people of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the way down.
On the English "UK National Archives" website
they refer to this document as
Letter Concerning William Wallace. If it’s
not real...they could've given it up 700 years ago.
I've been rocking my Crocs Crocband Flats to work since I got them, absolutely fantastic, they've been much admired and I love them. I swear my legs aren't as sore at the end of a long shift as they were BC (Before Crocs). The springy bouncy soles of the Crocs cushion the legs from the impact of the hard concrete floors on the musculoskeletal system, highly recommended. You've still got 2 days to take advantage of a bargain, and get yours from Crocs.co.uk. The UK official Crocs website has all the styles and there's a discount code EVERYDAYSALE15 (valid till 15th June) giving a 15% discount on your purchases. Spend more than £70 for free P&P. Do it now, you won't regret it, just don't go for the ugly ones, them clog styles, yeeeeuck.
A bit of Crocs advice, if you miss the discount code mentioned above and can't find another code at the time, try this at Cloggs.co.uk...go to the site, register for their newsletter so they know of you. Then when your logged in at their website put what you fancy in your virtual basket, then just leave the shoes in the basket. I did that and soon got an email from them offering a "5% Off for Abandoned baskets". One thing I know for sure from my www shopping experiences, always, always, never fail to, look for discount codes before you click to pay.
Gardening News...during the week The Parents arrived at the door of Starry Towers bringing the Las Vegas Wedding with Elvis framed photies with them. They'd been over to The Frame Shop at "Lea-rig", 22 Raw Holdings, Langton Road, East Calder and picked up our framed wedding pics for us. The average cost for the pics we got done was £15 per A4 framed photie, excellent. But, as I was walking them out to their car, The Dad said, "there's a weed, in Oor Marilyn's garden". He was being mischievous, having a wee joke, BUT the result was I spent all the next day making the front garden OCD perfect. There's no weeds left, I snipped off Blue Bell leafs at ground level (they are too messy to endure for a minute too long), removed the tulip leafs that had happily turned yellow by that time (had to leave the ones that are still green so they can get all the nutrients they need for next year's flowering), trimmed anything that looked like dead wood, manicured and shaped some shrubs I deemed in need of it due to appearing too leggy for my liking, turned over all the soil by trowel (cos it looks better...to me anyway) and dug in Growmore fertiliser round everything. Reaching near on gardening-fever-pitch by this time, I shut up shop out front and went round the back. Got the mower out, lawn mown, edges trimmed, then...I was hungry for more gardening perfecting action. I always give my Lilac tree a haircut in the Summer, and it's never done it any harm. But I thought, maybe I'm wrong, so I researched online bout the correct time of year to trim a Lilac, just to be sure I've instinctively been doing the right thing, and the right time is now, so I got the ladder and secateurs. Done and done. It's OK to trim a Lilac after it's flowered, if you leave it too long thereafter you'll risk snipping off next year's flowering action.
The Dad arrived and found me on top the fence trimming from behind, he got my other secateurs and the ladder, and went at the Lilac from the other side. The tree is looking lovely and tidy again, every year I have to reign this wildly untidy monster in.
Remember I blogged that Patio 3 was in need of a pair of Cadix Grandelight Terrazzo Stools in black (not the grey). I intend to use them as side-tables, to sit by the Starry Towers swing seat to enhance and complete my dream outdoor Summer evening experience. They've so far proved totally elusive. Twice I've been disappointed. I ordered them at UKWaterFeatures.com, cos they had the best price plus free delivery. But I got an email, they're offering an item they don't have to sell, so they emailed me to ask if I want the grey version instead. I told them no, give me back my money (via Paypal). I phoned another online shop...and a man told me there was a major problem with this item in the UK, and despite the fact they're still offering it for sale on their site, they can't actually provide them either.
The Cadix Terrazzo cube stool search was looking very much like it would go down the same road as the Leisuregrow sunlounger search that had us jumping in the Starry Towers van and driving through to meet Mr Ali at Glasgow-based moralegardenfurniture.co.uk on a promise, only to be immensely disappointed to be told, we're sorry we told you to come pick up the sunloungers you paid for a week ago, but we don't actually have them for you to pick up, and we don't expect to have them anytime in the near future either...something to do with a lack of ships on the high seas coming from the direction of China. I really do despair at how bad some people are at their jobs, and what customers and/or potential customers have to put up with in such situations.
But anyway, back to the Cadix Terrazzo cube stool (in black), after much searching and nearly at the point of giving up till Autumn, I found them, and they're just along the road. Gardners-world.net at 111 George Street, Edinburgh has taken my money and sent me two emails so far. First email told me I've successfully purchased my
Terrazzo
stools, payment has been accepted and received, second email confirmed
the details of my order. I'd get excited, but I've been there and
done that before. I swear, if this lot let me down I will
personally go to 111 George Street and explain to them that when an item
they offer for sale on their website becomes unavailable for the
foreseeable future, they should, as responsible business people, inform
the website-viewing potential-buying public of the true situation.
And NOT build up hopes and dreams, AND especially NOT take people's
money, and keep people's money for a period of time when people's money
is benefiting them and not the people who's money it actually is.
It's got to be illegal to offer for sale anything that you know you
don't actually have to sell? Then to process the payment with that
knowledge, take the money, my money is in some business's account
instead of mine, and remains there while they send emails to ask the
buyer what they want to do bout the situation, then the ever-so-slow
banking processes take their sweet time to transfer it back. Oh
dear, these companies are so so soooo sorry, meanwhile, they'll keep on
doing this, won't change a thing, cos the more money in their account of
a month the better for them. It all adds up. That's got to
be illegal, and if it isn't, it bloody well should be.I have a good feeling about the Edinburger based firm Gardners-world.net, if THEY let me down too...I will go to # 111 and give a right good kicking to the relatively-innocent girl on the front desk. I'll regret it later, but will be strangely unable to stop myself. Or I'll just patiently explain it to them, like I did to Mr Ali with his non-available sunloungers, and like I did with the Linlithgow PO girl. Arrggghhh...why do some jobs come with a get out of jail free card, and others...disciplinary procedures and threats of court cases and job loss? Just asking, answers on a postcard please...to Starry Towers, Sunny Dechmont, Scotland.
10/06/10digital photoframe, Lord Turnbull makes decision and Paranormal Activity
I
blogged bout the Agfaphoto AF5080M 8 inch Multimedia Digital Photoframe
The Husband recently bought at Tesco for The Parents to view our wedding
photies, really nice piece of kit at a bargain price. It's 8 Inch
800x600 Hi Resolution Screen, Multi Media for Pictures, Movies and MP3
Files. Has 128megabytes Internal Memory for up to 500 Pictures. An Alarm
Clock and Calendar Function, 5 in 1 Memory Card Reader and 3
Interchangeable Frames.We went looking to buy another but they were sold out in Tesco branches and online. Not really holding much hope I completed the "email me when item back in stock" box. Was with much surprise I saw the email alert this morning, the "email me when item back in stock" feature works. It's back in stock, I bought two, one for us and one for some lucky giftee, when I decide who that should be. If your looking for a really stylish digital photoframe with a great quality picture display at a fantastically low price...get over to TescoDirect...NOW! They won't be in stock for long.
Scottish High Court judge Lord Alan Turnbull has ruled that 39 year old Graeme McArthur from Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire, is innocent of intentionally harming a 3 month old baby boy by inserting a baby wipe into the baby's rectum. According to McArthur, back in February 2009, he inserted a baby wipe so entirely that the next day when he tried to retrieve the wipe with his fingers he was unable to find it and that's when the massive internal damages, including a perforated bowel, which left the baby fighting for his life, occurred. He says, and Judge Turnbull believed him, that he inserted the baby wipe to
save
the baby from having a dirty nappy later on. Next day when the
mother noticed the baby was ill, she took him to her GP who immediately
called an ambulance to take the baby boy to Hairmyres Hospital in East
Kilbride. On arrival the wee boy was close to death and had to be
resuscitated. He was then transferred to Yorkhill Hospital in
Glasgow and underwent a four-and-a-half hour operation to repair his
bowel and during the operation the wipe was removed from
inside his abdomen. A consultant
paediatrician was of the opinion that the pain for the baby would have
been excruciating, YEAH! my opinion and most likely yours too, strangely
enough! The pain of having a grown up man's fingers houking about
his bum must've been terrible. I'm guessing the poor wee mite was
probably protesting quite audibly and showing his distress aright from
the start, wouldn't an innocent man have got the message at the time?Has the price of nappies risen inexplicably while I've had my finger off the nappy pulse? Or is McArthur of low IQ and lazy with it? Or was he deliberately abusing the wee boy? Apparently he was just being a silly billy, according to Lord Alan Turnbull. By the time McArthur got to court he'd come round to the idea of admitting he'd endangered the baby's life, however it's a matter of public record that when McArthur was questioned by police about the injuries they found him to be somewhat vague and evasive. Hmmm...if your an innocent low IQ silly billy you wouldn't even realise you had anything to hide and be vague and evasive about, would you? Or maybe he's an extremely Christian fool, doesn't know ramming wipes and fingers up a baby's arse and wriggling them all about is wrong, but does know sloth is a cardinal sin and didn't want to be found guilty of that, Heaven forefend. There's possibly a load of Catholic priests could defend him if that was his thinking.
Lord
Turnbull obviously had more information than the news reporters and us
reading the details of the case in the papers and news websites are
privy to, or surely he couldn't possibly be convinced that a grown man
would "innocently" fold a baby wipe round his fully grown-up man's big
finger and insert it into a baby's tiny little baby sized anus to
either...1...save money, or 2...save time and effort later.
Bloody hell, poor little baby boy, even now, a year on from the acute life-threatening physical damage he suffered, it's unclear if he'll make a full recovery.
I nurse elderly women with certain mental health issues which make them prone to double incontinence, at no time has it ever occurred to me, or anyone else, that some sort of wipe-type anal plugging might be appropriate, even in the event of a Norovirus outbreak.
09/06/10Absolute Radio VIP membership and Triangle
This is what I posted...Just downloaded today's podcast but haven't had time to listen to it yet. All this new Absolute VIP stuff took me by such a big surprise I'm trying to be first to leave a comment. I adore ALL the Frank Skinner podcasts. Saw Mr Skinner on stage at the Edinburger Festival 2009, I was down the front row hoping he wouldn't pick on me, he didn't (thank you Frank), a local chef guy and an American girl went up on stage, the Edinburgh chef guy proved to be an excellent choice, he was funny in his own right, was a fantastically funny night out. I've loved everything you've done Mr Skinner, since way back, and your books. I think though, on reflection, I've gained and continue to gain the most humour, joy, satisfaction and an all round cosy warm snuggy feeling from your Absolute podcasts with Emily and Gareth. The 3 of you are just so very GOOD together. For me, Frank's at his loveliest in Emily and Gareth's company. Please keep doing what your all doing, I don't know quite how I'd get through my solitary times without you all on my iPod. I'm an NHS nurse, I listen on my work breaks away from the ward and you all help take my mind off the stress. Two words...thank you.
The Boy and I watched Triangle this evening. Triangle gets 81% at Rottentomatoes.com, which should be good enough for me, I've always given Rotten Tomatoes credit for their overall percentage scores. OK, it's a slasher, but there are good slashers, really. And yes it took a good while for us to work it out, but we weren't entertained, we were jointly infuriated, thinking how bad it would've been to have watched this in a cinema. This movie needs to be watched in the comfort of a place where you can speak out loud, cos you will have to say out loud...whaaaaaat? whyyyyyyy? ahhhhhhhhhhh? doesn't that mean that this will have to....and that means...ah yeah, right so then....and that means, so in the end it has to be, then...ahh, there you go...all that stuff. It does come to you once you realise where's it going. I'm being deliberately non-spoiler here for them that haven't seen it. But all in all we found it less good than we expected. Also in it's favour was that it's a Director Christopher Smith movie, he of Creep fame. Creep was gritty, horrorific and shockingly different. We had real high hopes for Triangle, but this is more annoying than scary. Initially your wondering is it a ghost story or a psycho-killer thriller, at that stage it's interesting. One of the first downers is when you stop caring for any of the main characters, which is shortly after you realise the basic premise, as soon as you get that, the rest is just a matter of doing your sums. Real early on if you know anything about movies you will realise that 6 people on a boat, then 5 down in the first 30 minutes...that's not leaving much scope for the next 60 odd minutes, which ever way it's going to go. So when we fought our way through the deliberate confusion riddle stuff and came to the answer...it wasn't that surprising really. They done a very good job with the 3D DVD cover though.
07/06/10wedding photo gallery
Britain's Got Another Pile of Crap. Anyone impressed by the 2010 winners Spellbound, hasn't seen Le Cirque de Sol doing their "O" show.
I've sorted the photies from our Las Vegas Wedding with Elvis for t'internet and built a Las Vegas Wedding with Elvis Gallery.
05/06/10bird photies, the West Fife Show 2010, 59th wedding anniversary, Linlithgow Post Office
The Dad also got a prize for being a novice "young" handler. He'd stepped in for Tom in the show ring for the ewe lamb class, in which we got third place. Tom was having a sore back after showing the male lamb. The Dad and I were laughing and bemused with the "young" bit but Tom let it be known it was a serious and high accolade. Was thoughtful and decent of The Scottish Shetland Sheep Society to think of awarding a prize to The Dad as a new face in the show ring. The Dad was faking this jokey thing, making like get-away-with-you, naaah, don't take a photie of me and my rosette, but he was secretly luvin it. I can tell, I know him so well.
I enjoyed the company of Margaret for the duration of Tom showing his sheep in the ring. She was jotting down the results in her programme and kept me right when I didn't always get all the results, she let me copy from her programme to Tom's. Margaret, who's family were in the show ring too, is in her 80s, and an old friend of Tom and Robina. She was telling me how for years she'd sit ring-side with Tom's wife, I felt privileged to have the pleasure to take her place by Margaret's side.
Today in Fife has to have recorded Scotland's hottest temperature so far this year. Was so hot I was melting, and my head started telling me I needed a hat. After the sheep stuff was done The Dad, Tom and I went walkabout for Tom to get his customary ice cream cone. I sent The Dad and Tom over to sit on a hay bail by the main ring and joined the ice-cream van queue. Having delivered their vanilla cones I went for a wander round the stalls. There were cool looking faux suede cowboy hats at only a fiver each. The man put my hat of choice on my head and I came back wearing a black cowboy hat. Dad told me it would be best if I took the price ticket off, and Tom insisted on giving me £5 so he could gift me the hat.
After the Shetland stuff, a highlight for me was the performance by Charlie and the dogs from Mordor Gun Dogs, the international gun dog training and breeding specialists based at Craighead Farm, Path of Condie, Perthshire. Fantastic demonstration by wonderfully happy, well trained and obedient Labradors, Springer and Cocker Spaniels. It's a real pleasure to watch a man and his dogs working as one. If you get a chance to see them, do take it, Charlie gives out loads of information and advice, sharing his skills while being pleasantly humorous. After watching his half hour show he had truly convinced me of the simplicity of dog psychology and his techniques, it all made so much sense. With enough effort, I believed I could raise a gun dog, or any other breed, as long as I followed his advice to the letter. Check out the gallery on their website, loads of pictures of Charlie and his dogs. He doesn't even use titbits to reward appropriate behaviour, he convinces the dogs that they want to do what they do as and when he tells them to...because they like him so much. Amazing.
Bit of scary stuff...the cattle. Can them bulls get any bigger and any more uncomfortable? Poor beasts. The bulging bum muscles make some of them look like they're wearing bull-shit filled nappies, with rib-cages near on hitting the floor and necks that indicate heavy snorers. It all looks unnatural and unpleasant for them. It's all about the steak. Then there's the milk-producers...the Holstein cows for instance, too too skinny, the size 0 super-models of the cattle world. They look painfully thin and skeletal, concave gaps between most of their bones with huge udders. Reduced to mere milking machines.
Got home and cooked dinner for The Boy and The Dad while picking the best photies to print, printed them then gave a batch to The Dad to take home to The Mum, and another batch to Tom, to take to the hospital for his wife this evening.
Because today was also Mr & Mrs Tom's 59th wedding anniversary. I'd prepared ahead, writing it in the ward dairy so all the staff knew, got a card and filled a gift bag full of foody goodies as a pressie. I put in a box of Thornton's chocs, a chocolate a
nd orange slab cake, a
boxed bottle of 15 year old Glenfiddich malt whiskey and a jar of
Traffic Jam. Traffic Jam has a top layer of red Strawberries, then
amber Apricots and the green of Gooseberries at bottom. Nice.The Mum and I went shopping for the gifts for Tom's anniversary yesterday afternoon and we picked Linlithgow to do the shopping. Linlithgow's went downhill has it not? Yes it has. Used to be you could trust the long and rich history of Linlithgow, dating back to at least the 1100s and probably much earlier. It being a popular tourist destination, and administrative centre of West Lothian, therefore they had a high standard of gift shops. I have to report...Linlithgow no more. It just doesn't seem to have the same commercial quality as before. We went there hoping to find an excellent tourist gift shop, cos I had an idea of getting Mr & Mrs Tom a Shetland sheep ornament of aesthetically pleasing substantial quality, and relatively expensive to match it's beauty and perfection. If your looking for such an item...don't bother with Linlithgow. So we got the food and drink stuff instead.
While we were in Linlithgow I remembered there was a certain young lady at the Post Office who was in need of a good talking to. Do you recall The Husband applied for a replacement passport recently? He'd filled out the application then went out and got new photies at Broxburn PO. We dropped into Linlithgow PO, and SHE told him the photies weren't good enough. Despite hearing another branch of the PO had provided the pics that very same day, she insisted they were tinged with pink and unacceptable. She also claimed The Husband has changed so much since his last passport pic that he would have to have new ones signed on the back. She was wrong. We disputed her opinion, but she wouldn't budge. So we had to drive to Livingston, where a man at the PO counter accepted the photies without question. I waited to see if he was right. Would the Passport Office agree? Yes it did. The Husband got his new replacement passport.
Therefore I've been holding a grudge. This young lady was wrong, we both told her she was wrong, but she thought she was right, and wasn't open to listening to two older and more intelligent people, even when we told her the Post Office had supplied the photies. Silly girl. I'd thought I'd go back, get her name then make a formal written complaint to her bosses, but on the day, I was nice, I decided to go in and tell her how to be better at her job instead. Initially she was all smiles, and when I asked about the branch employees she said she is the only young female working at Linlithgow PO, ahhh, so I'd found my target. Good. I explained the events of the day we met, she remembered, she was still smiling. I patiently explained to her, then had to explain 5 or 6 more times, how she was wrong. I told her how the Livingston PO branch AND the Passport office accepted the pics. She told me of the strict guidelines she has to adhere to, I told her yes, the very same strict guidelines the Broxburn PO photo staff, the Livingston PO man AND the Passport Office staff adhere to. Then I reworded it again and again, and again. Was bout 2 minutes after I informed her...listen darling, your not getting it, I was going to write to complain about you to your bosses, but I changed my mind, I'm hoping by talking to you personally that I can help you to improve the service you provide, yes the strict guidelines you adhere to are patently subjective, they can not be objective, they are guidelines, guidelines on visual material rely on a single individual's interpretation and judgement, but I'm telling you, your single individual's personal interpretation and judgement are wrong, I know this because the Broxburn PO staff disagree, the man at the Livingston PO counter disagrees and the PASSPORT OFFICE disagrees! What part of YOU ARE WRONG do you not understand? Something finally clicked, I'm not entirely sure what did it for her, but eventually she stopped protesting, though I got no apology. At that stage in the game...I reckoned, that was the best I could hope to achieve. At least she'd stopped insisting she was right. My only hope lies with the much older male member of staff who was working at the counter next to her, he didn't step in to defend her, he carried on with what he was doing as he listened to our conversation. I hope he took her aside later and backed up my advice to her.
Day before The Husband went back to work we got our act together to look through our Las Vegas wedding with Elvis photographs, print out our favs then take copies up to the highly recommended by The Parents, The Frame Shop at "Lea-rig", 22 Raw Holdings, Langton Road, East Calder. We eventually went with 3 different photies, got 5 framed, 2 for The Parents, 2 for us and one for Tom. The Husband chose the Tom one, a heavily ornate gold frame for a portrait photograph of us in The Graceland Wedding Chapel showing the dress at it's best. This was a thank you gift to Tom for the wedding present he gave us, we used the garden centre gift tokens to buy our real stone bird bath. Before this day was over that picture was hanging on a wall at The Rench.
01/06/10new stuff for Patio 3, car dancing, Bees, Marilyn and women don't really like men who wear bras
I've
been doing a bit business with renowned chef of Hell's Kitchen fame,
Marco Pierre White. He sold me a Cosy Polo Stainless steel patio
heater via his Heaven Chef website. This one, at 1.1 metres tall,
won't set fire to my canopy.The Husband and I took a trip to Dundee today, just for the fun of it, 'it' being the Z4. In Tesco's I picked up some scatter cushions for the hammock swing seat, to match the 'Milos' Harbo cushion set I ordered online yesterd
ay.
I also got another faux fur throw in 'mink' for use on the swing seat.
I think I got the colours just right. This is a picture of someone
else's swing seat with the Milos cushions and the Tesco soft furnishings
I picked up today, looks a pretty close match. Well done me.All the way down the road from Dundee I did sitting down Car-Dancing to the songs The Husband has set up on his iPod as BMW playlists, so they work on the new iPod playing gadget he got installed in the Z4. It's a diet thing, never sit still when you can be burning calories, it was a lot of fun and The Husband was well entertained. I had to do some heavy thrash metal and some serious rock 'n' roll head banging, but I think I got away with it. I need to set up my own BMW iPod playlists ASAP so I can do some Indie rock dancing next time.
The second last thing I need to acquire with my Patio 3 Summer evening dream experience in mind was side tables, to sit, well at both sides of the swing seat, for the placing of glasses and such like. I've ordered two G
randelight
Lightweight Black Terrazzo Stools from UKWaterFeatures.com, they had the
best price plus free delivery. Patio 3 is adorned with plants and
trees in Terrazzo pots, so the tables will fit in well I reckon.
And if required, they can be seating too.
Just one more thing to find.
We've got bees, and it's resulted in me developing a habit of bursting out singing "B's are good, B's are good, they're Beebeneezer Goode". We've all seen a lot of bee activity here at Starry Towers in the last few days, and not just bees buzzing around the flowers like usual, but bees coming and going from a certain spot under the shed. I like having bees living in the garden, it's a good sign, I must be providing the ideal habitat for our treasured little creatures. I'll try and get some photies.
If legendry beauty, sex symbol, icon, actress, singer and model Marilyn Monroe hadn't been disposed of back in 1962, and had instead enjoyed a long, healthy and happy life, today would've been her 84th birthday. I can hardly imagine her at 84, same age as my old friend Tom, of the Shetland Sheep fame. Happy Birthday Norma Jean, you always will be, THE original and best, American Beauty.
According to today's Closer magazine Jordan is now pissed off with Mr Jordan's cross dressing habit. That was inevitable. She brass-necked it when the tabloids first broke the story, well you would wouldn't you. Given her post-Peter situation at the time she'd have to act like she didn't care whatever her new man got up to. But practically every woman in the land must've been thinking 'oh dear' at that time. Unless you are a woman who absolutely adores and gets her kicks from men who dress like chicks, and I'm open-minded, there has to be some that do, otherwise we all knew it was just a matter of time before that got boring and should actually put her off the guy in the bra and frock. He's not even good at it, not even pretty, doesn't come close to beautiful. Doesn't know how to be a woman, how to look or act like a real woman. Dressed as Roxanne, he's a parody of woman-hood, he's taking the piss, awkward, chunky and ugly. He can't walk the walk or talk the talk. I suggest he doesn't even like women, he can't love and respect women when he gets his rocks off dressing up like a pantomime dame. It's all so cheap and nasty. The only question is, why would it take Jordan this long to to be sickened by his antics? She's obviously even more fame-hungry and money grabbing than I previously gave her credit for.
And perhaps, he finds her so attractive because she has made herself the female version of him, a parody of womanhood, a fake cartoon woman, and really becoming more and more ugly the more work she has done. If she makes it to 84, OMG!
31/05/10AGFA photo frame, Glen Cafe, new tops, a Mickey Mouse thing, patio furniture update, bad bad bad cat and Think Bike!
The Husband did a neat thing, he got an AGFA multimedia digital photo frame thingy and loaded it up with our Vegas wedding with Elvis photies for The Parents. It's cool, and allows The Parents to decide how, if and when they want to see us in Vegas with Elvis. We delivered it last Friday and it was smiles all round. After that we took a drive down to the Borders. On the way we dropped in at a shop in Carstairs Village and in The Co-op I was surprised to met with The Cousin Diane. I thought she worked at the Forth branch, but she tells me she's been getting around recently. I know The Cousin is a faithful reader of The Star Blog, hiya Diane, was a total surprise and very nice to see you.
Down in the Borders we stopped off at the Glen Cafe
& Bistro at St Mary's Loch for lunch. A surprising place. It
looks like it should either astound you with a wide range of the usual
dinners, fish and chips, chicken in a basket etc or provide an extensive
variety of very good quality basics like soup and sandwiches, home made
chips and a better quality home baking. But the main theme is a
sanitised version of the typical greasy spoon cafe. Sausage egg
and chips (of the shop-bought frozen type), bacon egg and chips, double
egg and chips, egg egg chips and egg with a burger on the side.
There's also a choice of paninis and toasties, they'd probably do you an
egg panini if you really wanted one. Then there's scones and jam.
Just probably not home-made scones and jam. It's a strange mix.
The crazy world of fashion has recently seen the Mickey Mouse ears as head-gear, then the Mickey Mouse ears attached to sunglasses, so now I present you with the Mickey Mouse watch necklace. I've got mine already...from eBay. It's cheap, it's tacky, it's blingy, it's quirky and it's eye-catching, it's also surprisingly good at time-keeping. You can get them for a couple quid at eBay, with free p&p, all the way from Hong Kong! They come in all sorts of colour options, I opted for the black, which seems the most trash-chic pseudo-classy to me. I predict a trend. Get yours now before the trend comes and goes over the space of a weekend. The trick is, of course, to be seen to do the trend before it becomes a trend. And remember you heard it here first!
I was blogging recently about my new patio
furniture and how the cast aluminium sunlounger option fell through so I
got a hammock swing seat instead. I'm very happy with my hammock
swing seat, there's just one little problem. Anticipating evenings
on the sunloungers I bought the patio heater already. But now I
have a hammock swing seat, the patio heater is redundant, before I've
even used it. I can't be setting fire to the hammock swing seat
canopy. So I now know I need a smaller patio heater that won't
loom over the top of the hammock swing seat putting me in fear of
radiated-heat-combustion. We think we've found the patio heater we
really need instead, more on that as I hopefully progress with that
option soon. Meanwhile, the current Starry Towers patio heater is
fast becoming an embarrassing elephant on the patio. We're
pretending it isn't there, but it so very much there. So I took
the initiative and sent round a memo at work hoping to find a
bargain-hunting buyer without having to advertise any further.
Negotiations are in prog
ress,
hopefully by Thursday I'll have it sold, if not I'll put it on the West
Lothian NHS intranet For Sale pages.
The next thing was finding cushions for the hammock swing seat. It's far more complicated and expensive than I could ever have imagined, all this patio furniture business. After much Googling I found the Harbo replacement 3-seater hammock swing seat cushion in the Milos option, a brown and aqua stripe fabric. Jumped on it from a great height for £99.99 with free delivery from the only place I could find in the UK that this particular fabric design version was not out of stock, the Riverside Garden Centre. Phew! This world situation with not enough ships on the seas bringing in-demand items to the UK is getting mighty serious.
Something horrible happened to bring a downer to my garden bird bliss here at Starry Towers. This year we've been rewarded for all our financial input, personal effort, care and attention by a load of Sparrow babies showing up and my personal pride and joy, our male Blackbird has entrusted two of his precious babies to our garden. We've all been enjoying watching him and his little sweetheart children frequenting our Starry Towers bird-feeding station and generally swooping around our heads and crash-landing around us as we go about our daily activities in the garden. Every day we put out grapes, then more grapes, and sometimes, even more grapes, if they show up looking hungry the answer is...more grapes. It's no trouble, they deserve grapes on tap. But last week an evil presence threatened to shatter the happiness of the Starry Towers Blackbirds. The Husband, and it was so fortunate that he did, but he happened to look out the kitchen window quite early one morning. On Patio 3 he spotted a fuckin cat with a baby Blackbird in mouth and under paw. Bastard, bastard, bastard. If cats, pet cats, generally well-fed and cared for pet cats, truly should have a right to roam. To roam around anyone and everyone's gardens, shitting, pissing, digging and killing wherever and whenever they please, then the natural population of our garden birds at the very least deserve equal rights. Equal rights that should include the right to life, to raise their children without fear and death by cat. Who exactly thought it a good idea to bring the huffy self-opinionated little murderers to the UK in the first place, the Romans apparently. Having invaded Egypt in 30BC they took cats back to Italy, then saw fit to throw some of the overly sharp-clawed critters with teeth like sharpened pins in their boats when they later made their way to the UK in 55BC. Oh yeah, the Romans, what have the Romans ever done for us? All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Cats.
We here at Starry Towers stand for the belief that all British garden birds have the right to a peaceful and prosperous life, harming no-one and nothing. Only enriching the lives of all UK citizens wise and fortunate enough to recognise the wonder there-in. Furthermore the particular individual garden birds which regularly visit our Starry Towers bird-feeding station, and especially the territorial species who have set up home and raised families at Starry Towers, we regard them as our pets. We have spent a huge amount of time, money and effort in their well-being. For some spoilt, over-fed nasty sleekit little shit of a cat to leave it's own garden then act on it's selfish sociopath killer instincts for the fun of it, in OUR garden, attacking OUR birds, well, quite frankly, I'm apoplectic. And if only it were lawful, I would personally send them cats the same way as the grey squirrels.
The something horrible that happened, and I'm choking on the words as I tell the tale, The Husband happened to see the Psycho cat on Patio 3 with a firm grip on one of our baby Blackbirds. With lightening speed and hair-trigger reaction, he was out the back door, lifting the only obvious weapon to hand, he shot the little bastard between the eyes. I wish. He actually threw a wooden clog from the Land of the Clogs. By the time the clog had hit the cat I'd just reached the kitchen window and was rewarded by a very good view of said incident. Then I was out the back door by The Husband's side. The baby Blackbird remained lifeless on Patio 3. The Husband pronounced the bird dead, or at least, more dead than alive. And it was more dead than alive at that stage, but I saw an eye blink while it's motionless body lay there looking broken and dead, it was stunned. I was pretty stunned myself. I lifted the baby up gently and held it for a while, preventing it from flailing around with wings and legs. It's natural tendency would be to get away ASAP, before it was strong enough, perhaps putting itself in more danger. Not knowing what damage had been done, I could only hope the fat cat had been playing. Pet cats have no need to kill to survive. From what I know, they tend to play with their intended kills, teasing and honing their no longer needed skills, for a while first. And thankfully this was the case that day. The baby Blackbird recovered a bit and was able to fly away, just not as strongly and confidently as I had hoped for. It flew over the garden wall and into a garden shed next door. I tell you now, if I could possibly shoot the local pet cats, I would. I'm very angry. Why does the law favour pet cats more than garden birds?
27/05/10new garden furniture, Crocs, Baddiel & Skinner reunited cos it feels so good, dishwasher fully integrated, iPod thingy installed in Z4 and St Trinian's 2 The Legend Of Fritton's Gold
After
all that sunlounger bother I
decided not to get cast aluminium sunloungers, due to the only ones I
like being bloody difficult to obtain and a bit on the pricey side
compared to the bargain price I nearly got them for before the world
recession, lack of ships on the seas and China inconveniently not being
able to send their Leisuregrow garden furniture to the UK anytime in the
near future.
Soooo, I suggested a drive up to the Silverbirch Garden Centre in the Clyde Valley
today, just to get a feel for garden furniture, create a mood board in
my head, toss a few ideas around. Founded by the late Ronald Wood
(not that one) some 30 years ago, the Silverbirch is a family run
business with a very friendly atmosphere.
Then my head was turned, I fell in garden
furniture love, with a Royalcraft Monaco Textoline 3 Seater Swing in
'coffee'. It has aluminium and steel frames to give a sleek and
modern look. It requires no maintenance as the frames are powdercoated
and the seating is made of textoline, ensuring my swing seat will
last for years left outdoors all year round. That's my type of
garden furniture. I intend to find big fluffy swing seat cushions
to make it really comfy, though it's very comfortable the way it is, and
I've got a spare faux fur throw I'll be using on chilly evenings to give
the illusion of sleeping under the stars pelt-wearing tribal activity.
A pelt-wearing member of a tribe that has gas powered patio heating.
I blogged bout my new Crocs so you'll know that I got the black 'Olivia' recently and love them right down to their, and especially because of their, extremely comfortable and lightweight bouncy spongy soles. I love them so much I need more. Crocs.co.uk have all the styles and there's a discount code EVERYDAYSALE15 (valid till 15th June) giving a 15% discount on your purchases. Spend more than £70 for free P&P. I got two Olivia and two of the new Crocband Flat. One pair of Olivia is for The Mum and the Crocband Flats are for me at work. They're much cuter and prettier than then the original Crocs clog style, I predict Crocs will become popular amongst fashionistas and will no longer be just be for badly dressed people who don't care if their footwear is ugly.
Baddiel and Skinner are to provide the comedy and fun from the FIFA World Cup in South Africa with a series of daily podcasts on Absolute Radio. The free podcasts are available from iTunes, but if like me you don't like downloading your stuff from iTunes and would prefer the mp3 version you can get them at the Absolute Radio website here. It's a must listen for anyone who loved the Baddiel and Skinner Football Fantasy TV programme.
The Husband took me home from work yesterday and in the Starry Towers kitchen he asked me to spot the new thing, I spotted a new thing, but that wasn't it, I spotted a few things that could've been new versions of an old thing, but they weren't it. I failed to spot that he'd got the new IKEA birch integrated dishwasher door and plinth we ordered a while back, and fitted them perfectly. I was tired, two long shifts and a lot of 'is it a pregnancy or my menopause' fears had affected my eyesight. I much prefer the birch effect door front to the stainless steel version, the Starry Towers kitchen, with the dishwasher (though I love it tremendously) hidden looks well better than a stand out silver front.
The Husband has been back to the BMW dealer and got the iPod thing installed, he was told it was a 3 hour job. When The Husband was asked to come back in 3 hours he said nahhh, I'll just sit over here and watch a movie on my iPod. Where he was sitting he had a good view of the Z4 and the men-at-work, and miraculously it only took 20 minutes to install the iPod thingy. So a 3 hour job became a 20 minute job, and hence cost a lot less money. Amazing.
The Husband and I watched St Trinian's 2 The Legend Of Fritton's Gold this evening, it's alright, but obviously not as good as the first one. Sarah Harding looks hot in an 80's type way but doesn't act very much, she's just sort of...there, I've got no time for David Tennant, but Rupert Everett carried off his usual headmistress role with ease.
26/05/10getting old and how to have a menopause, a £million...dream on and Sunlounger Update
I'm 46, will be 47 in September, there, I've said it online. Perhaps with a subconscious foreboding I've recently taken to saying "I'm nearly 50 you know", which doesn't seem to impress most people I say it to, probably cos most of them are in their 40s, 50s or 60s, or in my old friend Tom's case, his 80s. This is my personal...you know your getting old when...moment. You most definitely know your getting old when, firstly it's dawned on me I've been nursing for 27 years, secondly all I dream of is retiring, thirdly I'm having a menopause.
All my bleeding life my menstrual cycle has been as predictable as the seasons, as regular as the lunar phases. January 2010 I have a normal period, as per usual, February nothing happens, March 18th my last period starts, now basically 10 weeks later, nothing. A Health Centre nurse doing my smear test recently told me, if your under 50 you go two full years without a period and you can claim to have had your menopause, over 50 it's just one full year. Other symptoms...I'm sticky in bed. Generally sticky all the time, and twice I've been so flooded in sweat it resembled a bed wetting. I recall the first time it happened, I awoke in the night with a hand on my bare midriff (I refuse to use the word "belly" cos...my midriff is expanding). My hand slid off my midriff with a splash, water ran off my fingertips as my hand, in the darkness and confusion of dreamy-wakening naturally sought out other areas of my body looking for open wounds I could be bleeding to death from. I always knew I'd be stabbed to death in my own bed by a masked intruder, either that or that scenario will really turn out to be my worst nightmare.
As a responsible adult, despite the strongest of strong probability of this being a menopause, I insisted on a home pregnancy test, I had to rule it out before I could progress with accepting a menopause. I didn't want to carry on without ruling out pregnancy for sure, I could've been about to become one of those women who don't realise they're pregnant till the baby hits the kitchen floor. Pregnancy test this evening...Not Pregnant. The one thing I can say in favour of that news...good. All day today I've been considering a You Are Pregnant as an outcome, the increased risk of baby abnormalities at my "old" age, a baby with abnormalities and me not being around to care for it into it's adulthood, or if I was still around and it hadn't died tragically young after a few years with or without pain and suffering, me going into retirement and old age being a disabled youngster's main carer. Oh, I've had a very bad day. Every possibility was discussed at length with my workmate ladies. They were very good, after a groundswell of ridicule this morning, they came round to having serious debates on the matter. By the time I was leaving the ward this evening they'd practically booked me in for an abortion, sympathetic to the idea of such a disastrous situation.
The good news turns out to be...I'm having a menopause, and I used to think that was the bad news.
I've been watching the new live Ch4 Million Pound Drop, broken hearts all round then. It's called Million Pound DROP, because the money will drop, it's there "in the flesh" with men-in-black security guys who, by the looks of them, would drop you with a Taser if you got a bit carried away and silly with the £25,000 bundles of readies. But it will drop and be gone along with your dreams and self-esteem. The contestants are positively encouraged to feel it, smell it, whoop, dream and get emotional. How very disappointing, being encouraged by a flaky Davina acting her best at looking nervous/excited/gutted, to voice your plans for the money your yet to, and highly unlikely to win, most of the questions are impossible...get engaged, take Mum to China to walk the wall...then walk away with nothing. The first episode was so painfully slow, every little stage of the game was played out as a cliff-hanger, I was glad to note they'd sped it up slightly by show 2. However, three 4-minute advert breaks during a one hour show that already draws it out as far as they can get away with, is a bit hard to stomach. But not as hard to stomach as the cruelty and abuse of the very silly contestants involved.
Did I say I'd obtain them Leisuregrow "North Dakota" cast aluminium sunloungers come Hell or high water? Perhaps I was a tad hasty. I didn't get the sunloungers, just my money back. On Monday I phoned Glasgow based moralegardenfurniture.co.uk and told the girl I wanted to be informed if the sunloungers arrived that day. She didn't call me back, so a couple hours later I called her again to be told they were in. I told her we'd be through to pick them up ourselves. We got to Hillington Industrial Estate and found the shop. A couple of little Glasgow girls on the desks, if you go looking for a loo, you pass a door marked 'mosque'. It's very impressive looking, their showroom is full of tastefully arranged great quality and aesthetically pleasing garden furniture, however when I was told the sunloungers x2 had arrived and were awaiting pickup, that wasn't totally accurate, one sunlounger was available. But we were encouraged to believe the other one might be in the next day and to leave the one till the other arrived, he did mention that if the second one didn't materialise then it would be better to leave that one, in a sort of all or nothing type way. Anyway, the other one didn't arrive, something to do with the world recession and not enough boats on the high seas, so they refunded my money before asking me what I wanted to be done. I'd thought the least they could do was offer me two more expensive ones for the price I had paid, but c'est la vie, it's back to the drawing board on the sunlounger situation. The guy we met who gave the impression of being the owner, and the younger guy who was tasked with sorting us out, we got the impression he was probably a son of owner Mr Ali, were both very polite and courteous, but they weren't taking on our complaints seriously. And I can't get over the thought that maybe because we felt we had to be more courteous, maybe because of the basic cultural differences, reverence and not wishing to appear OTT or god/allah-forbid, even...racist. If the owners had turned out to be run of the mill white Weegies I'd have vented my frustration at their ineptitude, I'd have vented them up and doon the street, I know I would've.
Thing is I already know what's available, I spent a long time researching the options and prices. I could get the same ones elsewhere but at a cost of £50 more per item, or I could go for a different sunlounger, but certainly won't be able to get something as good as I want for a similar price, will always be at least £100 more expensive. Damn and blast.
23/05/10not lazing on a sunny afternoon
We were visited by The Brother and The Sister-in-law this afternoon, they dropped in for a sit in the sun and a wee blether. Then a late evening visit to B&Q and I came home with a Japanese Acer, the palmatum Skeeter's Broom, it prefers light shade and shelter from cold winds, hence it's ideal for the corner at the back door on Patio 2. All the other stuff I have in pots are too fond of the sun to be in a shady corner, so I'm pleased to find that Acers want to be out of the sun. I also got some colourful pretty acid-loving lovlies, two blue Gentian verna angulosa and a pink Rhodohypoxis Douglas which I've sited around the stepping stones at the bird feeding station area.
Tomorrow I will obtain the sunloungers come Hell or high water, but preferably Hell, I don't want it to be raining.
22/05/10still waiting, Bird News, gardening, dog poo and The Road
Bird News...in the garden today, the male Blackbird was feeding two babies with grapes and sluggy looking creatures he got as a direct result of my gardening disrupting the sluggy creatures. Later in the afternoon the Blackbird action at Starry Towers was so intense some of them were nearly in the back door and I had to duck several times for fear of low-flying birds striking me about the head. Very acrobatic Sparrows were seen copulating in the Lilac tree and on a high wire and later in the day other different Sparrows (I'm assuming) were feeding babies and showing them how to take a bath. There was too much coming and going, flitting and flying, Sparrow activity at this time to figure out how many were actually involved, but it all looked very good. My heart was full of birdy joy and my Quality Of Life levels soared, knowing all the Starry Towers bird-assistance programs and effort has been so fruitfully worthwhile, it's a good feeling.
Been
a beautiful day here at Starry Towers and as we're rather lacking in the
sunlounger department there was no lounging for me, I had to be doing a
little gardening. We headed out to my favourite garden centre, as
recommended by The Parents,
The Mill Garden Centre at Armadale for more roses. The new bit
of the front garden needs a rose injection. My choices were
self-limited as I wanted only red and purple. They had a deal
going offering 5 Hybrid Teas for £25, they're usually nearer £7 each.
I picked my five...two "Alec's Red" and one of the most fragrant of the
Hybrid Teas, a "Fragrant Cloud", that's the reds. For the purples
I picked two "Rhapsody in Blue", wasn't till we were at the counter I
discovered Rhapsody in Blue isn't a Hybrid Tea, it's a Floribunda, was
just they were sitting too close to the Hybrid Teas, easy mistake to
make. The lovely people at The Mill gave me the Rhapsody's in the
£25 deal, that's how lovely the lovely people at The Mill are.
I
deserved it mind you, the total bill came to £76. Having spent
over £50 meant I also got a complimentary Eco Jute bag. After
picking my roses I went crazy for some more really interesting and
attractive hardy perennials, a couple of herbs and a packet of Virginian
Stock seeds. I got a lovely Cytisus Boskoop Ruby Broom which has
raspberry coloured flowers, a Pittosporum tenuiform "Tom Thumb" with
it's attractive contrasting shades of green foliage, and a Caryopteris incana
"Sunshine Blue", as you'd expect, lovely blue flowers and I'm a sucker
for blue flowers. A Mahonia japonica which is a gorgeous jaggy
plant with very exotic looking fruits/berries, a Campanula glomerata
var. acaulis, tiny little plant with blue bell shaped flowers and a
Omphallodes nitida, which looks like a more impressive Forget-Me-Not.
The most interesting and pretty of the perennials I brought back to
Starry Towers has to be the Dodecatheon meadia Shooting Star. Oh
my, the flowers are like little pink winged stinging insects with
needle-sharp pointy black stinging apparatus on their noses, so delicate
and wonderful. Then I picked up a Parsley and a Rosemary, the two
herbs my extensive potted herb collection was lacking due to nature
taking it's cruel and ruthless course recently.Back at Starry Towers with my new and exciting plants I got the herbs in pots and the smaller three of the hardies planted in the back garden around the bird feeding station area. I'll do the rest tomorrow. No sooner had I finished in the garden this evening and The Husband comes round the corner telling me a dog just went number 2s in among the Tulips in the front garden. I went marching round onto the pavement, looking left and right I spotted the ratty looking mongrel culprit, and his dog. Driven by my anger I called out "Excuse me!". The man in a hat turned to see me as I was quickly closing the gap between us. I saw then that the elderly gentleman was none other than the retired Bangour Village Charge Nurse I usually pass the time of day with when I'm out front gardening and he passes on his dog walks. But, be true to yourself, and when it comes to my garden I take no prisoners, so I made the retired Charge Nurse clean up the shit. I asked him if he was carrying a poop scoop type device or bag to pick it up, but he wasn't and said he'd go home and get one. I wasn't falling for that old trick and informed him he needn't bother, I'd give him a bag. I doubled up two ASDA carrier bags and indicated where it would be safe for him to stand amongst my flowers. He was all apologies and he's away home having learnt a valuable lesson in dog-owner manners. I have had to lift dog and cat shit out my garden many times, and quite frankly, it's a most unpleasant task when it didn't come from your own pet and you know the owner of the offending shitty pet doesn't give a damn who has to lift it for them.
I've done this once before, while waiting for a train at the Livingston South station I watched a man let his dog out the car, he then got out the car and wandered around, studiously ignoring the dog, pretending it wasn't his. When the dog squatted and delivered a load of runny crap onto the grass and the nasty man was making his way back to his car I was incensed. That time too, I called out "Excuse me!" "Your dog just shit on the grass, are you going to clean it up?" He obviously didn't intend to, but from somewhere he developed a conscious and he cleaned it up. He was maybe thinking, oh shit, maybe she'll take my car number plate and report me. He didn't have a poop scoop or bag either and had to go to a nearby rubbish bin where he got an empty crisp packet, was pretty damn funny watching him lift dog diarrhoea with nothing more substantial or larger than a patheticly non-suited for the job in hand, crisp bag from a public bin.
I did feel a little bad after I made the retired Charge Nurse guy clean up his dog shit today, he's quite old and getting kinda frail looking, and he did keep saying it was his fault and how sorry he was. But hell, I'd do it exactly the same if I had a chance to relive it, and I probably will have that chance, there's a lot of such bloody ignorant dog owners around. Not ALL dog owners, I've been a dog owner myself, a dog owner who always had a plastic bag in her pocket.
After righting that wrong The Husband and I went on to enjoy our dinner at the recently moved patio table and chair set on Patio 2. This cast aluminium furniture was on Patio 3 till yesterday, but in preparation for the sunloungers I moved it all up nearer the house, and it's perfect where it is now, photies to follow.
After dinner we watched The Road on DVD. Jeeez Luoise!!! The scariest movie I've ever seen! More horrific than anything any of the six SAW movies came up with. Too real, and the little boy pulled at my mothering and survivalist instincts, and there seemed to be no hope. I know they've survived this long, must have been at least 10 years, so that in itself should lead the viewer to have some sort of good vibe, but really, it's not good. I was so so so very relieved at the final scene, I'll say no more obviously for the sake of them that haven't seen it yet. I tell you dear Star Blog reader, you have to watch this movie, if your not a big shitey scaredy cat. And of course, if your anything like The Husband, it probably won't effect you very much at all, he put my deeply emotional reaction down to me being a girly, I'd put it down to me being the mother of The Boy.
21/05/10garden progress, the dentist and Bloody Squirrel News
Nearly
all the new things for the surprise thing for The Husband have arrived, and
the other little things to go with the big surprise thing have been brought
home from local shops. The other day we popped into, first Maplins, for a GOTCHA! Solar-powered
Insect Killer, then into Homebase for some candles and Citronella
stuff. I got a couple of blue frosted glass candle lanterns, citronella
candles and citronella oil, and a large filigree outdoor thermometer.
I'm a bit obsessed about midgies and the fear of them spoiling my
planned Summer/Autumn evenings o
n
Patio 3.And so...the stuff I've been up to behind The Husband's back. First, and of great importance, I got his belated birthday pressie, a Karcher K7.91MDB+ T300 Pressure Washer. Top of the range Karcher from Amazon, for £140 less than they charge along the road at B&Q. We need it for the paving, but more importantly, for the Z4 soft top.
The rest of my secret activity involved the procurement of larger items which will enable The Husband and I to spend long lazy Summer and Autumn days, and more importantly, the evenings, on Patio 3 in total comfort. First up, cast aluminium loungers for the lazing around factor, then a patio heater so we don't start shivering as darkness falls, followed by hurricane lamps so we can see each other when the sun goes down. The only thing I can't fix will be the rain, if it's raining, well, I'll have to think some more bout some sort of roofed type building for the back garden. I've started considering the option of ripping up the Lilac tree and replacing it with a sort of summer house triangular garden gazebo type affair, one that is made of wood, with two walls and an open porch front, where you could sit under shelter, listening to the rain...bliss. The reason I have the Lilac tree is that the main bird feeding happens in the branches of the Lilac tree, but I could feasibly attach the feeding devices to the outside walls of a garden summer house. But anyway, that idea needs way more consideration.
For the cast aluminium lounger, times two, I finally decided on the "North Dakota" from Leisuregrow. RRP per sunlounger on the Leisuregrow website is £249, I found ours at moralegardenfurniture.co.uk, a Glasgow based company, for £194.99 each, with free delivery. Keep reading for my opinion of them so far.
I
already knew I was after a cast aluminium item, definitely, I don't want
to be dealing with something that requires maintenance or storing over
winter. The patio furniture we already have, dining table + four
chairs and a two-seater bench, is made of cast aluminium, and highly
recommended. After much www research I realised I was after
a reasonably compact cast aluminium sunlounger, some of them are too
bulky. I intend to site the sunloungers at right angles to each
other, to form a corner sofa type arrangement, for cosy chatty Patio
evenings, so I knew I needed deep chunky cushions like these ones, with
a long, more sofa-type base and a shorter head rest, rather than the
kind with three fluffy sections that would look more at home on a
relaxer chair kinda thing. I really want the ambience of a corner
sofa arrangement. They can of course be turned to lay alongside
each other, facing westward during a sunbathing afternoon, but my main
priority is the cosy chatty wine-glass-in-hand evenings.
After much deliberation, I bought the Garden Sun Classic 16Kw Stainless Steel Patio Heater from a company called QAVdirect.co.uk. RRP of £599.95, QAVdirect price - £149.95, plus free cover and wheels AND next day delivery if ordered before 3pm. And, true to their word, it arrived from Oldham the very next day. It's fantastic and QAVdirect are a great company, living up to their Quality And Value direct name.
Strangely
enough I found our two hurricane lamps at hurricanelamps.co.uk.
They're the famous over 90-year old West German-made "Firehand" shiny
silver stainless steel hurricane lamps. We filled them with the
midgey-repelling Citronella oil and they look as good as they work.Couple days back I had to go to see Lorna, my dentist lady, and broke the news that on our Las Vegas wedding trip, with Elvis, a filling (upper right molar) had fell out in the Kingman (the heart of historic Route 66) branch of Wendy's, when I chomped down on one of their fish burgers. Which led immediately to my freaking at the idea that I may just have bit down on summit alien and sinister that came with the fish burger, a split second later I knew it was my very own non-scary filling, then, flash of fear...will there be pain??? but relax, and breeee-aath, no pain. Having heard my description of the filling incident Lorna enthused big time about Elvis Vegas weddings. I can't pretend, that was the reaction I anticipated.
Lorna's Dental Assistant came in, and Lorna told her all about our Vegas Elvis wedding. Then all three of us went Vegas Elvis wedding crazy for a couple more minutes, then them two got down to looking in my oral cavity. Problem was easily fixed with some sort of non-serious filling stuff I don't think I knew about before. Lorna pumped this non-serious stuff into the gap, then filed it down till it was comfortable for me and told me if it falls out I should make a 20 minute appointment for a real filling. Fingers crossed I won't be in need of a 20-minute appointment.
On the way home from the dentist we dropped by Williamson's Garden Centre for seeds. I've been thinking of doing the Stock seed thing with vague memories of having sown Night-Scented Stock seeds years ago. This year I've sown Night-Scented Stock with Virginian Stock (Spring Sparkle), to achieve fast pretty colours combined with heady day-time and night-time scents. I'm a sucker for compliments. Spring-time 2010 brought much public attention, mainly for the Tulip colours. Also some told me of the perfumes. I'm not entirely sure which shrubs were supplying my Spring-time smells, I'm just glad they were. So with a mind to keep on supplying and impressing I came up with the idea of the Stocks.
I got a packet of each of the Stock seeds, then on looking at hardiness status and pictures, a pack of Passion Flower seeds, claims they are hardy and pretty climbers. I've sown a tray of them and placed it under plastic in The Media Cupboard. If they work out good I'll transfer a couple of them into the troughs against the eastern wall, on the monoblocked side of Starry Towers, to join the ivy cuttings that are starting to flourish there. The other seeds are Echium "Blue Bedder". They appear to be Starry Towers type seeds, they should be sown in "flowering position", claim to be hardy, very bee and butterfly friendly, easy to grow with masses of flowers...that's got to be a winner. I've since sown about 10 all around the front garden, marking the spots with a little bit of cane, and in case that doesn't prove successful, I did a tray of them too.
This afternoon I moved the patio furniture and pots around, getting ready for them cast aluminium Leisuregrow North Dakota sunloungers to appear from just along the road, from the Glasgow-based moralegardenfurniture.co.uk. This evening I sent an email telling them how surprised I am that having paid via Paypal one week ago, ie they've had my money for 7 days, and yet, I don't have my sunloungers. Their FAST delivery promise hasn't come to fruition and I'm peed off. Everything else was ordered after the loungers, and everything else is here already, despite coming from out-with Scotland, jeez...the Hurricane Lamps came to me addressed to Fräulein H!
I should mention, so we can keep accurate score...
Starry Towers 7 : Bloody Squirrels 0
That last one I blogged bout on the 9th and the 17th, that led to the trap going out again, but all I caught was a male Blackbird then the Starry Towers Hedgehog, that one's a goner now so we're up to 7 - 0. But since that one got sent off to Squirrel Heaven, there's yet another been spotted out back. The good fight goes on.
17/05/10Hedgehog News, Mr Brown and Mr Bronnikov and ash-cash
As
I mentioned on the 9th The Bloody Squirrel is back, it's not been back
much since I mentioned it, but it's been back enough to make it's mark,
so I've had The Bloody Squirrel trap out. At time of blogging,
I've trapped (humanely) and set free again, a male Blackbird and a
Hedgehog. The Hedgehog was a particular surprise, I didn't know
Starry Towers had a Hedgehog. When we freed The Starry Towers
Hedgehog it scuttled off under the shed. On closer inspection
someone's been digging around under there. There's a load of soil
been piled up at the back, effectively building a solid wall and closing
off a section of the under-shed space. It's too dark to see what
else is under there and I don't want to go shining a torch and upsetting
anyone, so for now, I'm assuming a Hedgehog has set up camp under there.And now I've been researching bout them on the www, I know what the strange little bits of black stuff I saw on Patio 3 were. Next to the shed just under the bench were some little cylindrical bits of, what I now know was Hedgehog poo, at the time I was stumped, didn't look like anything I'd ever seen out there before. I put it down to being something that something did and I was using the hose to wash down the patio, so after noting it's difference to anything known to me, I just washed it away. Hedgehog shite, excellent.
The Husband is home from the Land of 12.648 people per sq km (as of May 14, 2010) and Europe's northernmost country (I'm short on what Norway's famous for and having to turn to facts that just are and can't lay claim to any kind of fame), and none of the pleasant surprises I've organised have arrived yet, any day now. Watch this space for exciting breaking news on what I've been up to behind The Husband's back, well, at least, the stuff I can go public with.
I spent my weekend and Monday at work while The Husband spent his time zooming around in a silver Z4, with the soft top down. I was envious, but happy for him enjoying his new toy. Perhaps I was a bit hasty in giving the name 'Jolene' to The Jag. This one's more likely to deserve the lyric...'Jolene, please don't take my man, just because you can'. Each day my old friend Tom was in visiting Mrs Tom and giving me updates about how the Z4 was not in the drive at Starry Towers when he passed by.
This evening saw Derren Brown revealing another bunch of charlatans profiteering from the disadvantaged. Tonight his documentary show put the spotlight on The Bronnikov Method, teaching the blind to see...coming to a country near you soon! As
in, discussions are currently taking place with the intention of
bringing The Bronnikov Method to the UK. The
chief thief is Vyacheslav Mihailovich Bronnikov of The Moscow Center of
Human Development, "Academician of International Academy of Information,
Ph.D., professor, President of International Academy of Human
Development, Author of Method “Informational Human Development”.
Would you buy a second hand car from this man? The method
claims that with practicing the exercises a person can overcome their
blindness, even if they have no actual eyes (the organ of sight) due to
the exercises developing a "sharp increase in human energy potential and
synchronization of both cerebral hemispheres". One "switches on
the contact with one’s super-consciousness. Their website claims amongst
many other lies, that "the method has undergone large number of
examinations and scientific validation and is considered as an
established scientific practice." Nonsense, absolute drivel.OMG...I only hope the NHS doesn't add the Bronnikov Method to it's 'toolbox' of so called alternative/complimentary therapies. That would be as appropriate as, say...Crystal Therapy or Reiki...both on the list of NHS alternative therapies. Seems to me it's all to do with persuading the desperately easily-persuaded that this is their 'thang', if they believe in it then at least they'll go away and concentrate on their particular panacea, and therefore stop hassling the GPs for a valid treatment or cure. It'll tide them over and shut them up. Our tax payers/NHS funding well spent.
On the subject of NHS shame...yes that was the subject...once we got onto the bit bout Crystal therapy and Reiki...it has at last been highlighted in the news that NHS doctors are receiving hidden back-handers for signing cremation certificates, or 'ash-cash'. A Doctor disgrace. For a few minutes of their time they pocket around £71 a time for completing a form that permits a grieving family to cremate their dearly departed. And guess what...a cremation needs two doctor's signatures, so that average £71 is times 2, costing the bereaved approximately £142. I've long been of the opinion that this practice is well out of order. The fee is usually charged by the doctors to the funeral director, who hides it in their total bill as they pass the cost on to the grieving family. Most family members don’t even know the charge exists. Disgusting.
14/05/10up to no good
13/05/10Jarvis News and the coalition government
Yet
more Jarvis News, after winning his Sony Radio Academy Award in the
"Rising Star" category earlier this week for his Sunday Service 6 Music
radio show, here he is again. The good news...he's released a new
album!!! Even better news, unbelievably, you won't believe me,
but...it's totally free!!! Making it extremely easy for you...you
can download it from the www at
this place!!! The bad news...you should quell your excitement,
even if you are a Jarv fanatic like moi, he's been collaborating with
the National Trust in producing a 33 minute long album of ambient
found-sounds recorded at National Trust properties, which aims to aid
relaxation and contemplation and inspire people to visit the national
treasures.
The album, National Trust : The Album - Time To Think, is 13 tracks of sounds from England's special places, sounds such as waves lapping, birds singing, clocks ticking, footsteps stepping and staircases creaking, in places such as Brownsea Island, Blickling Hall and Ham House. I've saved it to my hard drive this evening and will be putting it on my iPod, I'm a dedicated fanatic and I probably need to take time to think, it'll be good for me. Track 10 is gardening at Powis Castle, I might listen to that while I garden, see if I make the same noise as the Powis Castle gardeners.
I was thinking I sp'ose I'd better gen-up on who's who in the new UK cabinet, in case I have to do a Pub Quiz or Dementia test in the next four years.
This is them.
At this point I have to incorporate some breaking news...they've agreed a 5% pay cut for themselves, Downing Street estimates that the cuts will save £300,000 this year and around £3m over the lifetime of the Parliament. Don't shed no tears for their personal loss, hardship, sacrifice and selflessness, to put it into perspective, they're giving up, over the coming YEAR, approximately 3 times what I take home for one MONTH. On the money they make, they'll hardly notice the difference.
So in at the top of the tree with the highest salary, at £7,500 less than Gordy was getting, £142,500 coming his way is...
PRIME MINISTER: DAVID CAMERON (43)
this next lot all get...I'll just do the sums...5% is £6,864.70, old figure was £137,294 take away the £6,864.70 equals...they'll be getting £130,429.30...
DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: NICK CLEGG (43) if I was him I'd complain bout getting the same as the rest, maybe summit round bout £140,000 would've been more fitting
CHANCELLOR: GEORGE OSBORNE (38)
HOME: THERESA MAY (53)
FOREIGN: WILLIAM HAGUE (49)
DEFENCE: LIAM FOX (48)
JUSTICE: KENNETH CLARKE (69)
HEALTH: ANDREW LANSLEY (53) The Tories want to create an independent NHS board to run the health service and change the Department of Health into the Department of Public Health, at odds with the Lib Dem vision of putting the power into the hands of local people through directly-elected health boards. AAARRRRGGGGG! Stop wasting money on yet more changes for the sake of changes, we've had enough changes already, our nerves are shattered with the changes. Though if you could all agree to increase the staffing levels on hospital wards and/or reduce paperwork and audits...please feel free to go ahead
EDUCATION: MICHAEL GOVE (42)
BUSINESS: VINCE CABLE (67)
TREASURY: DAVID LAWS (44)
WORK & PENSIONS: IAIN DUNCAN SMITH (56) to review the long term affordability of public sector pensions and examine when the state pension age will rise to 66...oh feckin joy of joys...please let me keep the public service pension I've contributed towards for 24 years and let me retire ASAP...please, I beg you, I'm physically and mentally tired and weary
ENERGY & CLIMATE CHANGE: CHRIS HUHNE (55)
LOCAL GOVERNMENT: ERIC PICKLES (58)
TRANSPORT: PHILIP HAMMOND (54)
ENVIRONMENT: CAROLINE SPELMAN (52)
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ANDREW MITCHELL (54)
NORTHERN IRELAND: OWEN PATERSON (53)
NORTHERN IRELAND: OWEN PATERSON (53)
WALES: CHERYL GILLAN (58)
CULTURE & MEDIA: JEREMY HUNT (43)
LEADER OF THE LORDS: LORD STRATHCLYDE (50)
WITHOUT PORTFOLIO: BARONESS WARSI (39)...I could do that, I'd just leave my portfolio at home
also "attending cabinet", damn it, I can't find information on what we pay this lot to attend:
FRANCIS MAUDE: Minister for the Cabinet Office, Paymaster General
OLIVER LETWIN: Minister of State, Cabinet Office
DAVID WILLETS: Minister of State (Universities and Science)
SIR GEORGE YOUNG: Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal
PATRICK MCLOUGHLIN: Parliamentary Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Chief Whip
and finally, "invited when required":
DOMINIC GRIEVE: Attorney-General
Do we need that many, really?
Breaking News...Cameron bans mobile phones from cabinet!
I'm just stunned that wasn't the case already...government banned nurses from having their mobile phones on the wards years ago.
12/05/10top eBayer, Sony radio winners, Nick lurvs Dave & Dave 4 Nick and Derren Brown
Oooooh! Frank Skinner on Absolute Radio won silver in the "Best Entertainment Programme" section at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2010, one of my very favourite podcasts, probably my absolute favourite actually. And Answer Me This starring Helen Zaltzman (sister of Andy Zaltzman of Bugle podcast fame), Olly Mann & Martin The Soundman Austwick, another of my favourite podcasts, The Bugle's another of my favourites, won silver in the "Best Internet Programme" section. Richard Herring was up against Answer Me This in the "Best Internet Programme" category, for his As It Occurs To Me podcast of his live stage show, The Sony Academy jurors said this bout it..."As It Occurs To Me uses the strength of podcasting as a medium to do something truly innovative. We loved the way the podcast showcased the night at the Leicester Square Theatre and the live and untested element of the format. British comedy and podcasting need more people like Richard Herring."
Jarvis Cocker won the "Rising Star" award for his Sunday Service 6 Music radio show, so that's my taste in singer/musician and funny guys well vindicated.
After all that radio and podcast awards excitement, this pales into insignificance, but the UK now has a Con/Lib coalition government. There you go then, I didn't vote for either of them, or Labour, but I don't vote with winning in mind, you don't get any special prize for picking the winner, the winners are the politicians who get their arses on the seats in parliament, their second homes, their annual BASIC wage of £64,766 and their expenses, even forgetting the fraudulently and/or morally questionable expenses, their legitimate expenses, the doors the position opens for them to be making even more money from book deals, business interests, wheeling and dealing and whatever else they get up to that I either have no idea about or can't think of just now. The big winners are them, not us.
As an NHS nurse, a public service employee, I can look forward to the next inevitable big shake-up this new government will bring to the NHS. Having started in the NHS in 1983 I am now so extremely bored and angry with the stupidity of what seems so obvious to me, and so unobvious to politicians. It'll be another double whammy for me, more of my own personal tax payers money being wasted on the latest initiatives they'll promise will improve the NHS, but in reality will just make my nursing job more difficult as I have to strive to meet another different set of agendas, more changes, more paperwork, a new government always results in less nursing. So very sad, and feckin maddening and difficult for us nurses.
Describing their vision of a LibDem/Con future, a few words indicated what's ahead for nurses"...where....patients can shape our hospitals..." said Dave at their garden love-in today, jeeez, really? Is that for the best? Are broken legs, cancer and schizophrenia accompanied by a special knowledge/skill base of the best way to run a major health care system? We all know what we'd like as patients, but as a Joe Public patient do we have even a basic understanding of how we can financially achieve infinite 5 star health care (what we want, what we really really want) on a finite budget (what's available to pay for it)? Should diners take over restaurant kitchens? Should star-gazers be in charge of NASA? Should car drivers en-masse be brought in to take charge of the oil industry and tell the directional drillers how to drill? Should we invite pupils to run the schools? Ooops, we're already half way down that road.
As a patient I want 5 star cuisine and someone to give me back massages as and when I request them...as a nurse I know what the patients need is less paperwork/computerwork and more nursing staff. T'is all very well promising the patients and their relatives a dream hospital experience, if you don't finance an adequate quantity of quality nursing staff, the ever-increasing cycle of disappointed consumers will lead us to implode.
Ahhhhh
Perhaps what any government would wish for, it's an expensive business providing an NHS, and private health care could be so much more lucrative for big business and it's promoters and them that may oil the wheels.
I watched Derren Brown's new TV programme on Monday night. Had to stay awake later than my usual pre-work-night bedtime cos it started at 10pm. I've taken to being in bed for 9/9.30 on nights before work, trying to make up for my extremely late nights when I'm not working. Derren back doing what he can do so well, prove no one can talk to dead people, well, they can, but if the dead people talk back, that's not right. Dead people are dead, they don't talk. Psychics lie and cheat and stupid desperate people believe it. It was just amazing that this Joe Power 'psychic' guy agreed to let Derren film his antics. I cringed and was astounded at Mr Power's stupidity and arrogance. Mr P has seemingly been so stupid and arrogant he thought he could fool the master at his own game? Not a good move.
10/05/10eBay for watch straps and the Starry Towers Tulips
I
was on eBay, obtaining a replacement 16mm red leather strap for my
vintage (circa 1995) Disney Mickey Mouse watch, and BTW I got a bargain,
£2.99 with free p&p. While I was there I checked how much a recent
promotional set of BMW "Joy Is Future Proof" Top Trumps cards sold for,
£7.55 and two quid for p&p. I've given away two sets so far, to
the young boy children of a couple of work mates, but I might think bout
selling my other 6 sets on eBay.
The front garden's full of tulips, not quite full enough, but by next Spring it will be. In the new area I planted new bulbs around the hardy annuals as I placed the hardies, so I knew where the bulbs were and wouldn't risk slicing them up with a spade at a later date. There's still room for a few more hardies and therefore space for more bulbs.
The Tulips in the new bit are mostly red and darkest purple, I'm awfy pleased with them.
I've also noticed that the new bit needs Alliums, the old bit's got loads so it's going to look a bit odd when they're in flower and the new bit is lacking, oh well, next year it'll be better.
09/05/10Bloody Squirrel News, wedding on my iPod and 10:10
I've downloaded our Vegas wedding, with Elvis from YouTube, converted it to an mp4 file and put it on my iPod, so there'll be absolutely no excuse for anyone to not see it, if they claim no internet connection and I don't trust them with a DVD copy, I can make them watch it on my iPod. If your wondering how to download YouTube files, go to KissYouTube, get your video file then convert it to whatever format you wish using the totally free and wonderful programme, QuickMediaConverter from Cocoonsoftware.com.
Here's
me doing my bit for charity. I saw these 10:10 tags featured in
the Sunday Times Style Magazine. 10:10 is the campaign to reduce
UK carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 and help save the planet, but that's
not important, these cute 10:10 tags are made of aluminium that's been
recycled from a Boeing 747, how cool is that. A very special
Boeing 747, Flight 9, the BA plane which experienced total engine
failure at due to volcanic ash from Mount Galunggung 37,000 feet over
Indonesia in June 1982.
All four engines were dead and captain Eric Moody announces over the intercom: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress." The reason for the failure was not immediately apparent to the crew or ground control.
Gliding towards the ocean, with failed oxygen masks and terrified passengers scrawling goodbye notes to loved ones, the 747 was saved only when the crew put it into a nosedive in a frantic search for breathable air. The aircraft was able to glide far enough to exit the ash cloud, and all engines were restarted (although one failed again soon after), allowing the aircraft to land safely. The 10:10 tags are an undeniable piece of aviation history, stylish and I really like the volcanic ash connection. I don't mind giving to charity when they give me summit in return.
08/05/10the Best Friend visit and Elvis News
The Best Friend came on through Starry Towers and I sat her out on the Patio 3 double seat, filled our wine glasses and we admired the back garden and the recent changes there. During the following hours we were driven indoors by the chill, chatted loads more and also shared the experience of the Las Vegas Wedding, with Elvis, obviously we've both seen it before, but The Best Friend had only seen it at YouTube, so we watched the DVD 3 times on the Starry Towers massive Toshiba Regza wide-screen. I feel obliged to say...my dress is just gorgeous.
On the subject of our Vegas wedding at The Graceland Wedding Chapel, with Elvis, latest figures...over 500 views. I swear to the sweary thing you swear to as an Atheist, our Elvis is the best. I've watched a load of other Graceland Wedding Chapel weddings on YouTube, and ours is best, end of.
Just prior to the video footage of our Vegas wedding at The Graceland Chapel, with Elvis, as seen on YouTube, Elvis turned to me and said, "that's a beautiful dress, did you bring it from Scotland?". I told him no we rented here, then we were off up the aisle. I love our Vegas wedding at The Graceland Wedding Chapel more every time I watch it.
And
more breaking Elvis News. Bad...and by bad, I mean really bad,
exceptionally bad, Elvis impersonator Simon Goldsmith, of Little
Bealings, Suffolk, just tried to break the Guinness World Record for
singing Elvis songs continuously. He tried and he failed, the record
still belongs to German, Thomas Gothje. Delivery driver Simon, 36,
planned to sing Elvis songs in an Elvis stylee for 43 hours, 11 minutes
and 12 seconds, which, I take it, is probably one second longer than Mr
Gothje did back in 2004. Alack alas, when it comes to all things Elvis,
he looks crap, he sounds crap, and by gum, he was crap, he failed, and
his
Elvis wig was the worst I've ever seen. Apparently he was on the
receiving end of "medical advice", which he took, so he ceased and
desisted after 35 hours. I'm guessing he was advised that if he
continued to pretend to be Elvis he'd be charged under the False
Advertising Law, and if he managed to evade them charges, he'd more than
likely be got contravening product placement law...his video does tend
to promote
The White Lion pub in
Ufford, Suffolk.07/05/10Derren back to reality, the UK Election 2010 and I've got a healthy cervix
And
talking bout fleecing innocent but idiotic suckers...I was working as
the UK General Election 2010 results were coming in today. I was
working yesterday too, but I didn't have to make it to a polling station
in my 90 minute window of opportunity after work, thanks to my postal
vote, I voted some time approximately one week ago. I hope my vote got
there, but who can ever be totally sure when they pop that Envelope B
into their local Post Box. My vote was OBVIOUSLY a protest vote,
because I live in the central belt of Scotland and didn't vote Labour.
I was figuring that most people must be as sick of politians as I am, I
seem to be wrong. The equation I was basing my decision on goes summit
like this...take your ballot paper, add the recent revelations of Labour
MP theft/fraud/cheating/lying bastard antics, add the recent revelations
of Tory MP theft/fraud/cheating/lying bastard antics, multiply by Gordon
Brown's 'bigotted woman' comment aimed at an innocent Rochdale Granny,
subtract Nick Cleg's boyish good looks, divide by the astonishingly
shameful greed of the top wankers, I mean bankers, add the cost to tax
payers of DEFENDING our local Labour ex-MP Jim Devine as he fights the
charges against him, ridiculous, but true. Crazy how things go, I can't
believe it all.At work on Election Day during a conversation about Election Day I mentioned I was sick of British politics due to some of the above, and...got shot down in flames by my work mates. On reflection, I shoulda known better, from previous conversations, they all believe in psychics too. See I was thinking many more people in my area had to be thinking same as me politically cos The Parents think the same as me, and The Husband thinks the same as me. But there I was surrounded by NHS nursing staff, all Labour voters born and bred, staunch and indoctrinated, some same age, some older and even them younger than me. All can't see past their historic roots. I'm appalled at the strength of this mind set. The first person I chanced upon on my wave length was the doctor. We had to keep our voices down and with continuous quick sideways glances for eavesdroppers with lip-reading skills, we hissed our absolute agreement through our ventriloquist static lips. I spoke to one Tory voting visitor...I made that person (I'm even protecting the gender of the person, for fear of reprisals) promise not to say that out loud...on pain of death by stoning.
As a nation, we've been abused. Slick abusers' tongues whispered tender lies in our ears as they rammed their slick abuser's protruding bits right up our numb nether regions. We've been held captive for years, then suddenly the shackles were released and the door opened. Our eyes, after such a long time in the dark are blinded by the sudden dazzling light of freedom and opportunity. But as brain-washed victims we run out into the yard, to find we are lost and without the pseudo-safety and love of the abusers we have no clue what to do. And even if we'd been strong enough, even if the brain-washing had failed, the sad fact is, our abuser lives on a street of abusers. Even if we reach a neighbouring house, clambering, falling and injuring ourselves on brambles and paving stones, as we reach the welcoming lights of a house up the road, our next abuser is laying in wait. We're a confused nation, in despair we're running around like headless chickens, with no clear direction. Joseph Marie de Maistre said..."every country has the government it deserves", hence we have a hung parliament, when a load of hung MPs should've been the result.
Good news though, and heavens knows I need some of that, on the Cervical Smear front, news in today, my recent smear test on 20/04/10 showed no abnormalities. Hip, hip horaay!
04/05/10not a natural blonde and a wee trim, The YouTube Big 5 - 0 - 0, Dogging News, Warehouse bags, the return of the Volcanic Cloud and Eagle Eye
OK,
shock horror, I admit it, I'm not a natural blonde, I know, difficult to
believe, it's so natural looking. But recently folks have started to
wonder if I've changed my decades long habit of having more fun, my
roots are a tad on the lengthy side. So I got a hair cut yesterday and
this evening I'm sorting out the ever so slightly darker bits of new
growth. Was about time I got a trim, given that The Husband told me a
few days ago that I was looking like a scarecrow in the hair
department! Oh yes, this marriage business does change things, I'm
letting myself go a little too long, and The Husband gets way out of
order.The product I've used for years is L'Oreal Recital Preference Les Blondissimes 03 Lightest Ash Blonde, because I'm worth it. I bulk buy my hair dyes to take advantage of the best buys available. As this is my last one I got on t'internet and tracked down the best Blondissimes bargain ever. Over at Superdrug they're charging 3 of your Scottish pounds and 30 of your Scottish pennies a piece with free p&p on orders over £25, they're usually £6.60 at Superdrug. I tried to buy 10 but I got the last 4 and it's currently out of stock, I'll try again later for some more.
My hairdresser is mobile, Karen The Sunny Dechmont Mobile Hairdresser, she who cut my hair for our Las Vegas Wedding, with Elvis. S
o
I was showing her the
Marilyn & John Las Vegas Wedding, with Elvis, video on YouTube when
she was over. She was chuffed that her work is on YouTube and went off
home to show everyone she knows. Maybe why we're up to 499 YouTube hits
this evening. Hence the shameless promotion on the Star Blog this
evening, have to break the Big 5 - 0 - 0. Does my bum look big in
this? Look at that wedding frock, just gorgeous.I was at the Sunny Dechmont Post Office today. Seems Chris, The Silver Haired Fox PO counter man still hasn't been able to access the www to watch the wedding, with Elvis. He had been relying on his daughter's dongle, but couldn't get it to work, so I sent The Boy back along with a DVD copy. The Boy came back telling of Chris's jubilation and joy.
Dogging
News...never thought I'd ever have any of that to blog about, but OMG!
For a moment I thought this was for real. A
brown sign has been erected by some fun loving prankster, then torn down
by outraged locals. The sign pointed the way to Barrow Wake Viewpoint,
a notorious site for Stranger Sex type activity in the English
Cotswolds. The non-dogging locals were already outraged enough at their
local view point being abused by local sexual deviants. Somebody called
David Parkinson is quoted on the subject.."It does tend to make the
lives of local residents impossible. The viewpoint itself is one of the
best in the area, giving fantastic views across Gloucestershire. You
park there and you get accosted by people after 'stranger sex', I
believe the terminology is. It's become a no-go area for residents."
He said the sign looked very much like an official one, but he was planning to burn it on a bonfire. There'll be a burning tonight, that's the way to go. Birdlip...hmm...I'm saying nothing.
Can a woman have too many handbags? I don't think so. I've been looking for my ideal satchel bag and I think I found it at last.
I went with the black version because there was a bit of doubt in my
mind bout the brown, it's not clear if it's dark brown or tan. A photo
I saw in The Sunday Times Style magazine made it look tan, but on the
Warehouse website it looks very dark brown. While I was there I saw the
sharpest most perfect cross body duffle bag. Duffle bags are so hot and
on trend, I needed one of them. Warehouse had this studded black
version with a gorgeous chain handle section detail. Uh-hu hu...a finger
on the fashion pulse lovely.Breaking News...guess who's back, Cloudy's back. Airspace over Scotland and Northern Ireland will be closed from 0700 tomorrow. And it'll probably travel south again resulting in closures to England's airports agin too. Not really surprising. If this keeps on happening I think I might need to book a last minute foreign holiday, get out there and hope the ash keeps me out there a while longer. Wonder what the NHS is calling it when it's employees are stuck abroad due to this Act Of Nature. Probably making it Annual Leave days, so if you have to phone in Stuck Abroad Due To Volcano, they're probably removing Annual Leave due days. Maybe I won't bother booking an opportunist last minute holiday. But I will be looking out for them promised spectacular sunsets again.
I use them In Ear type earphones with my iPod, with the medium size eartips, they're the only type of earphone that stays in my ears. The downside is you do tend to lose one of the little latex eartips occasionally cos they come off in your pocket or under your favourite faux fur trapper hat. The other day at work I was outside, sitting on a bench which is on a little pebble covered bit of ground. As I stood up the longer earphone wire which had been hanging down casually cos I usually only put one in at a time, so I have some idea of the sounds surrounding me in the real world, got caught on a bench slat. Next thing I know an eartip is gone, lost forever amongst the the decorative path stones. Damn and blast, no chance of finding it, but I sat back down for a minute to have a look.
I didn't find it, hardly any wonder, but later in the day I