Hide and go stalk
There is a most excellent comptetion on the go out there, run by manically impressive Maxi Cane!
The craic is that he’s leaving not just his job as restaurant manager, but the whole restauranting lark to embark on an entirely different path altogether (best of luck to ya, matey!). His last shift will be on Tuesday the 5th of August and his challenge to us, is simply to find him!
The prizes are:
-Correct guess on the comment form here: €100 to spend in his restaurant.
-Seeking him out successfully in person : €200 to spend in his restaurant.
He has even started us off with a few clues:
-It’s on the Southside of the City Center
-It’s not a Pizza Hut
-It’s not on Dame Street
-Chips/fries don’t appear on my menu
Have at it, people!! Dust off the old sniper rifle, give Jack Bauer a call, but do it fast because I reckon I just might have it sussed :)
Bray Summerfest Airwhatever
Did you hear about the Bray Summerfest Airshow today?
Did you hear about the big planes swooping low over the rooftops and the pretty fighter jets doing loop-de-loops in the clear blue sky and the army with their big trucks and tanks and uniformed men? I bet if you did, you thought ‘Let’s get our asses down there, quick!’ or, ‘Awww, innit a shame we can’t go to see all that great stuff?’ because it all sounded so great, but in reality, it wasn’t.
In reality it sucked.
I started my shift in Bray at lunchtime and drove in first gear to the seafront to see what I could see. Everybody I passed was staring up into the sky like morons – but not me, I kept my eyes on the road and battled onwards and Lo! Just as I was approaching my target I got called upon to pick up Mrs. Boring from Stupidville, without seeing diddly-squat.
When I was finished with Mrs. Boring from Stupidville I got sent up to the Ritz (in best behaviour mode though I can’t see why…) for Mr. Bad-Timing and had to drive all the way out to the airport and back.
When I returned, Bray was one big massive car-park. Cars were everywhere… parked on top of each other, under sleeping dogs, one or two were even parked in little old ladies’ handbags. It was mental. The gardee were everywhere, waving traffic back and forth and making rude gestures at passers by (I gotta say though, they seriously did an excellent job of clearing away every last smear of traffic sludge) so taxi-fares suddenly became extremely awqward.
Throngs of people kept hurling themselves at my car and jumping in regardless of existing passengers and shouting ‘TAKE ME TO THE SEAFRONT PRONTO!!!’, at which point I would take out my BB gun and ask them to make my day and they would slowly get out again.
I was then sent to Tescos to collect two people who had been waiting for over an hour for a cab. A gentleman and his ladyfriend loaded up their groceries and jumped into the back seat.
“Didya see the airshow?!” the gentleman said excitedly – “It was deadly, wasn’t it?!”
“No I had to go to the airport.” I was grumpy. Very grumpy.
“They had this huuuge carrier jet and it swooped right down over our heads and it was deadly!!!!”
“So you said.”
“Do you not like ‘planes?” He was dissapointed at my lack of enthusiasm.
“I bloody love ‘planes, so can you shut up about it now?”
“Right, subject changed. Did ya see the big army tank?!”
“NO!!!!!”
45 minutes later thanks to aforementioned sludge, we arrived at his house and the meter read €27.40. This was a tad cruel seeing we had only travelled the length of a football field, so I waived it and charged him a tenner instead.
“Wow, that’s really kind of you, thanks!” the gentleman’s missus said. Then, as an afterthought as she was leaving the car she added;
“Sorry your job sucks. You should try to arrange to get time off next year!”
Yeah. Some tip. Thanks wench.
Serendipity
Taxi driving is turning out to be a tough job. It’s not the punters, it’s the lack of work. We have to put in serious hours now that the hotels are quieter and people are guarding their money because of this imaginary recession.
It balances out, though. Driving is such great fun around Wicklow, the roads are interesting and there are thousands of undiscovered quirky Wicklowisms hidden down windy roads and behind dense thickets.
TAT found a most excellent quirky Wicklowism on his travels last week!
The Accidental Terrorist and I are best mates. We already feel married, but have been putting off the dirty deed… the knot-tying itself, for 7 years just because nothing felt right. It doesn’t seem right that we should have to sign away an arm and a leg to some swanky hotel and make such a big deal out of everything when it’s just really only about us, and our ickle family. We thought about eloping, threatened weddings in France and even considered Gretna Green… anything to get out of surrendering to the cash-pit that is the buzz-word ‘Wedding’.
Is it really so hard to find somewhere unique and intimate? Apparently so.
We already have a spot, it’s a patch of grass under enormous trees by a river with a permanent burnt patch in the center. I’d love to get married there. This is my tree:
This used to say ‘Happy 21st Kate love…’ (but oh look, the name’s chipped off. TAT he remains so.) and was carved on the day he proposed to me with the ring-pull from his can of Miller. I prayed for that tree and hugged it and apologised to it for carving into its flesh and I think it’s forgiven me. It must have liked the warmth of our campfires for it’s still alive and thinking.
Thing is though, we can’t get married there because it would involve hiking with generators and boxes of lights and boxes of sausages and tea-bags, but we discovered the next best thing! There’s a nudist colony just up the valley hidden at the end of a very long windy road so we’re getting married there instead.
I would so dearly love to link to this place but I don’t think they’d appreciate the publicity, besides, I don’t want you all gate-crashing stark bollock naked.
Yep, we’ve finally set a date to get hitched! We’ve got nine months to get our act together and then BAM! we’re official. Sweet.
I might need help with this. I don’t do the whole ‘organizational skillz’ thing because I can’t think past tomorrow generally. It works for me for the most part, but the idea of sorting out a wedding scares the bejeebus out of me. This might be the wedding blog of Bridezilla for a while, I’m sorry about that but tough shit. Extremely helpful people will get a pass into the nudist colony for a week.
Peior est bello timor ipse belli.
Discerning daughter
Puppychild likes to watch DVDs as she falls alseep, it’s a wicked habit, I know that. I plan to put a stop to it as soon as I can figure out how…
…anyway normally she’d ask for Cinderella or the Care Bears or some Godawful crud like that but tonight she impressed me no end;
“Mommy?” (shouted from the top of the stairs)
“Yes-see?”
“Wanna watch?”
“What you wanna watch?”
“King Arthur. King of the Brittins!”
Now you’d expect a child of three years of age to produce many clear words relating to stuff she knows through endless practice, but these knocked me for six altogether – turns out she watches this film sometimes with her dad while I’m at work and is well impressed with the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. I went to the bookshelf and found it – Monty Python’s The Holy Grail.
She loves this film a little bit too much.
I’m waiting for that day though… that day when I find myself having to man-handle her in the supermarket for wanting to trolleyseat-surf, and for her to shout for all to hear…
“Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!”
Ahh. It’s good to see the apple hasn’t fallen far from the nnNi.
Ooo-er, Bryan!
I get these Phoebe moments from time to time… like discovering that the expression isn’t ‘for all intensive purposes’ but actually ‘for all intents and purposes’. It’s vital that if you want to show off your big lexicon you at least spell it right, so that was a swing and a miss for me for many years.
The latest boo-boo I discovered relates to Bryan Adams.
You know that song ‘Summer of ’69′? Of course you do. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this song but I have only just discovered that I was drastically wrong about the lyrics.
I always thought it was a very kinky song with pretty shocking lyrics… I wondered how he got away with it, but hey, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s worse. It was only when I picked up a kid and his dad in my taxi yesterday that I realised my mistake. Turns out this kid loves Bryan Adams, and sang me the first few lines of the song which was highly inappropriate I thought, given that he was singing it in front of his dad… that was, until his dad applauded the effort. I was disgusted.
Here’s how I thought the lyrics went:
“Got my first real sex-dream, boy I had a fine old time. Played until my fingers bled… etc.”
Apparently I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
T.M.I.
Life in a Semi-D isn’t always easy.
I knew my neighbour was the same breed of smartarse as myself from the minute I set eyes on her. We knew that there would be a lot of unwanted information shared between us… our super thrifty local authority houses are separated only by a layer or two of plaster-covered polystyrene from the sounds of it, so we knew to keep the t.v. volume low and be aware of the decibel levels of our arguments. There is something, however, that is very difficult to keep secret.
1.00am – Thump thump thump etc…
1.15am – Thumpthumpthumpthump *pause* thumpthumpthumpthump etc..
1.30am – Thump. Thump. Thump. *groan* Thump. *groan* etc…
… this would carry on for a surprisingly long time and we would try so hard not to listen but you know how it is… there’s always the part of us that didn’t mind listening at all, especially since it let us off the hook in the bedroom accoustics on our own side. We listened to each other’s love-lives for a full month before anyone had the balls to say anything.
Then it happened. We met each other on our front-door steps one morning and shared a shmoke, but said nothing. The atmosphere was pregnant, each of us dying to take the piss. It just needed one trigger… a badly timed pun would do… anything.
“Took a trip to Bargaintown yesterday and got meself a new three-piece…” my neighbour finally said. “Got bunk-beds for the kids on order too!”
“Savage… gotta love the bunk beds!” I said, teetering on the edge of a dirty grin.
“Yeah speaking of beds…” (here we go!) “… Ye wouldn’t push yours about a foot away from the wall, would ye?”
That was it. We exploded in a torrent of filthy laughter and revelled in each other’s embarrassment and it was good. The issue did eventually require that we both go out and buy sturdier beds (with obligatory celebratory pint!) and since then it’s been quite peaceful… until last night.
It started at about 3.30am and continued for two hours. I won’t go into details except to say that it was graphic, and awakened a newfound respect in me for my neighbour’s husband. He really is a trooper by the sounds of it.
She knew just from the look on my face this morning… that ‘HA!! I’m surprised you can walk!!’ face …that no apology was necessary.
I went into town for a few bits today and had a sudden goo for a burger and a portion of tasty-chips but when I dived into the shop to find my neighbour’s husband waiting to take my order I stopped in my tracks. I nervously examined the menu for a few seconds and decided to go hungry instead and walked away, for the temptation to enquire after his battered sausage was far too great.
Getting Your Goat… meme!
I was just thinking the other day, so I was, about how quiet it all is on the meme front these days. Then I regretted thinking it because that’s like saying… ‘at least it’s not raining!’, and sure enough, a nice big juicy meme arrived in my linkses.
It’s from my Daddyo who at least has the good taste to only forward the good ones.
It’s called the ‘Getting Your Goat’ meme.
The Rules
1. List two things that irritate you for a reason (and list the reason!), and two things that irritate you for no apparent reason whatsoever!!
2. Give credit to the person who tagged you.
3. Link your answers to the original blog.
4. Tag four new people to participate.
YAY! Everyone appreciates a good opportunity to whinge, well, Irish people do, anyway.
1. Two things that annoy the hell out of me for good reason:
Toy/Miniature dogs: I’m so delighted that I share this one with English Mum. A Bichon Frise is not a dog. It is a tampon with teeth. Maltezers, especially the ones with the ponytails, look stupid and love to Yap into the wee small hours. I know this because my next-door neighbour has one. When TAT asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said ‘a BB gun’ and so he bought me one. I’m nearly out of bullets but at least I’m getting a lot more sleep! The Shih-Tzu’s only redeeming feature is that occasionally one will walk over an up-draught ventilator a la Marylin Monroe which is a very entertaining sight indeed.
Stranger than fiction
Packaging: Foundations that claim to contain ‘nano light-reflecting diamond-chips’ and ‘Micro-Collagen-Spheres’. Shampoos with extracts of things like fig-leaf and Gogi-berries. It’s all just the same mix of Cetearyl Alcohol, Benzyl Salicylate and Methylchloroisothiazolinone but with a different smell. I wish they’d just scrap the bullshit and sell us re-cyclable plain containers instead. Buggered if I’m paying for your adverstising costs!
Two things that irritate me for no real reason:
Over-acted radio voices/personalities: Mainly two: Harvey Norman (at least the owner of the advertising voice), or should I scream ‘HAAAAAAVVVIE NOOOOOWWMAN!!!’ should be sacked and given the job of a cricket commentator instead. Michael McMullen is a sports commentator on Today FM and starts every single bulletin with… ‘Hoooy, Oi’m Moich’l Mok Mulllll’n.’ His accent is a cross between Lloyd Grossman and that of a Blackrock College student and it makes my face feel like it needs to turn inside-out.
Ugg Boots: These are okay on their own, they’re warm and cosy. I just hate it when they come with grey-hound-skirt wearing slappers. A girl cakes herself in sparkly makeup, inserts the hair-extensions and breaks out the tiny dress with optimum bling and suddenly realises she’s sending out the wrong impression. What does she do? She dons Ugg Boots. Now she thinks her legs look amazing and men will just think she’s a quirky cutie, but in reality she looks totally fucking ridiculous. I would love to just walk over to these girls and slap them, I have no idea why.
2. Credit to Squidward for the meme.
3. Linky hand-shakes to the dude who invented this meme: www.skillet.com
4. Meme dutifully passed to: Warrior, Jefferson Davis, Sam Problemchildbride and Kirk M who also gets my Dog’s Bollocks of the month award for being so constantly inconsistently entertaining lately.
Fossett's Circus levitates terrorists
I don’t like the circus.
Apart from the fact that they let clowns run around willy-nilly all un-restrained like that and the whipped animals that look like they could use a year’s timeout in St. John o’ Gods, it’s the lack of eye contact, the feeling that you’ve been robbed of something – part of your soul perhaps – as you walk out of the tent at the end.
So, thusfar in my kid’ses life, the circus is the Accidental Terrorist’s department. I got a text earlier on today while I was skulking on the streets of Bray;
“We’re at d fossett circus rathnew. Ringside for free! Lovin it”
I called him up to find out what the craic was with the word ‘free’, and learned that TAT had tried to pay entrance for himself and the kids, only to be ushered through straight to the ring-side seats without any payment at all! They spoiled my family rotten. They dragged TAT into the ring with some other unsuspecting audience folk and performed a levitation trick that left Puppychild in awe of her daddy, and had excellent escapades with motorbikes in cages, apparently.
Best of all? Not an animal in sight, apart from one or two Shetland Ponies (which are only mythical creatures anyway…) so no animals harmed here then.
I was so impressed with the sound of it all.
Fossett’s circus is run by an Irish family, who are now the proud recipients of a grant from the National Lottery and Arts or something like that, being that they’ve recently been bumped to the bonafide ‘artists’ category, so they’re the real deal and stuff.
They’re in Rathnew for a bit. Might even pop in meself which would be a berry big deal for me.
Here’s a happy picture of some crazy people. Please ignore the weird colouring, photoshop hates me. Also please ignore the VPL.
Blog-dressing
It occurred to me tonight how very similar blogging is to brushing my toddler’s hair.
I keep meaning to approach it but end up having to put it off until such a time as I know I’ve left it too long, by which stage it’s time to either launch into the knarliness until it’s done, or just cut the whole lot off altogether.
So, I get all my bits together and begin the job. Roughly fifteen minutes in I then realise that it’s a bigger job than I thought and that it’ll be a long session, usually with much objection from the hardware in question which complicates matters even further.
Then I realise that my problems are probably due to length, at which point the scissors come out and the subject matter is shortened but not quite in the fashion I’d imagined… to avoid further damage I quit while the going’s good, knowing that I’m probably going to get some very strange comments indeed, but hey, maybe it’ll work out better the next time.
Most of the time I just sit and stare at it, wondering how other people manage to incorporate plaits and twists and pretty pink bows not just occassionally, but every single bloody day!
Easy pickings
Raining cats and dogs as usual, business tends to be quiet on days like this.
I pulled up at a taxi rank just after lunchtime and noticed that all the other cars were deserted, bar one – a people-carrier into which was crammed at least eight taxi drivers. I knocked on the window and was let into the secret smoky underworld that is cabby conversation. I sparked up a schmergel and listened.
They had the newspaper out and were reading about this rape incidence in Dublin, yet another excuse to be paranoid about foreigners. I learned many interesting things (and heard much racial hatred which I won’t be repeating here) which blew my mind, to give examples…
Apparently forgeign nationals only need to get 30% of the Public Service Vehicle test correct, as opposed to the 70% us nationals need. Also, foreign-nationals aren’t asked for a back-ground check before they enter the taxi-driving business, yet we Irish need full Gardee clearance.
They say that this is to give foreign nationals a hand-up, an easier way to score employment. That’s all very nice and stuff, but these people aren’t thick… with a bit of practice and a year or two living in this country they’d have it down no problem. It’s only the rules of the road and a rough knowledge of city layout… hardly astrophysics!
Besides, isn’t this sort of stuff important? I would have thought a knowledge of roadsigns would be rather helpful for driving? And as for the back-ground check… are they kidding? They’re asking the people of Ireland to just ‘trust’ their taxi driver?
Is it really true that complete foreigners can land in the country and just dive straight into the taxi-driving business, winging it the whole way?!? I can’t imagine having the guts to go to say… Nigeria and start charging poor unsuspecting punters for trips to places I can’t even pronounce, let alone find.
Pure madness.
I feel so sorry for foreign national taxi drivers today. Nobody’s going to want to use them now as they’ve all been tarred with the same pidgeon. They’ve busted their chops trying to learn the ins and outs of the cabbying business so that they can feed their families in this God-forsaken economy of ours, and now they are to us what the Al Quaeda are to the Americans, just because of a stupid head-line and the usual short-comings of our Irish Big Brother.
I’m laughing though. Who’d suspect an innocent looking female taxi driver of evil intent? Nobody, that’s who.
I could have fun with that…
