The wonders of nature
A guest post by Grandad
I have never written a guest post before, there has to be a first time for everything.
There again, K8 didn’t ask me to write it, so it’s not exactly a guest post – more of a hi-jack post?
I was woken in the early hours of this morning by my phone beeping at me. It was a message, but it was one of those sound file things, not a text message. I played the sound and it was of a very new baby crying.
Only half an hour old and the baby is being subjected to the Interweb and mobile phones!
Our K8 is now the mammy of a bonny bouncing 8lb 3oz baby boy.
Mother and baby are fine, despite their refusing her any sort of pain killer. Heh! Serves her right.
I spoke to her a short while ago. She is rearin’ to go home already. I asked her what the baby looked like [a stupid question - we all know that all babies look exactly the same].
“He looks like his daddy, so his daddy won’t eat him” says she.
There’s logic there, and she does know TAT better than I do.
Ain’t nature wonderful?
East meets Breast – Boobquake Day
I can understand how women baring too much skin could cause earthquakes, after all, if we can cause cow’s milk to sour and a pestilence on the spuds, it naturally stands to reason. That’s why I wasn’t surprised at all when I read the following quote;
“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes …” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, senior Iranian cleric
I am therefore outraged that Blag Hag, an irresponsible and reckless blogger in Indiana has decided to put millions of people’s lives at risk by staging a national ‘low-cut top’ day on Monday 26th April that she calls ‘Boobquake Day’.
“On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it’ll be one involving plate tectonics.”
Disgraceful, endangering people like that.
She’s on the facebook and the twitter, and is brazenly flaunting her boobs in everyone’s face which is all well and good when you’re all sprightly and perky, but what if you look like this lady:
I am afraid. Allāh will not like it. Not even one little bit.
Robbin’ Robin
A trip to the National Garden Exhibition Centre today with the mammy inevitably led to an urgent case of the munchies and a craving for cappuchino. We sat outside by the waterfall and basked in the warmth of that rare ball of gas in the sky and picked at our sangidges contentedly until suddenly mum exclaimed loudly and made me jump the height of myself;
“Look! Brave robin – hello robin!”
Sure enough, a little red-breasted dude was perched on a nearby chair with his head cocked, watching us sharply. I picked some crust from my sandwich and placed it at the far edge of the table.
Turns out that robins in Wicklow have more gourmet tastes though. Crusts bedamned… he hopped over to the edge of our plates and began to persistently rob bits of egg salad and chopped tomato until his teensy belly was full enough to merit us worthy of a quick song which he sang loudly from table centre. He might have expected a tip, but I’m not sure what the tipping etiquette is for garden birds.
Pass the salt, luvvie?
Death of a Fad
I volunteer as a docket stamper in the school library on Friday mornings. It’s like having an inside feed into the popculture world, much like @BreakingNews is to Twatterrers.
Today I overheard one eight-year-old scoff at another…
“Oh my Gawd, you don’t still read High School Musical books do you? Isn’t that… like… so boring now?”
All my malenky little hairs stood endwise real horrorshow, O my brother, I was that happy to hear it.
Maybe that’s the start of of Gee and Whineapple’s decline on the Gogglebox so? Fingers crossed!
The Pyjama Gang
If there were such things as fashion police, who would they be and how would they enforce basic fashion sense? Like those depressing notices you see in hospitals and Post Offices telling people that indecent behaviour will not be tolerated – in modern society, in a reasonably intelligent world, there should be no need for notices like these.
I now live in what could be called the arsehole of what was a quiet rural communtity. It’s a lovely place to live in if you ask me, a small housing estate that keeps itself to itself with ivy decorating trellised walls and planters holding pretty exotic grasses adorning the doorsteps. There is just one phenomenon that irks people of our surrounding hinterland no end… the pyjama gang.
These are a small gang of teen-aged girls that just happen to be travellers. Nope, I’m not going to go on another rant about travellers because I’m too damn tired and I couldn’t be arsed. Whether it’s a coincidence that these kids won’t be told or not, that’s up to your own judgement. Fact of the matter is, a few locals have pointed the phenomenon out to me in dismay, and seem to have elected me the fashion gardai. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
This is Elaine Carmody, a lady who is the victim of a recent fashion shut-down in a Tesco outlet in Cardiff. She was booted out on her ear for wearing her PJs during a brief attempt to buy smokes from the store. Other news stories declare parental dismay at the fact that some people couldn’t be arsed to get dressed to bring their kids to school. There’s a flat-out blanket ban on pyjamas in Shanghai, China. But – what is the difference between pyjamas and tracksuit bottoms? Is this new invention of pyjama jeans included?
If pyjamas are banned on the basis that they look stupid, shouldn’t spandex cycling gear also qualify?
In the case of my local pyjama gang however, the problem runs deeper. They don’t wear pyjamas to the local shops because they’re too lazy to wear clothes, they wear them because they have bigger pockets. There’s me being all racial again! Just because they’re travellers, doesn’t mean they’re out to rob everyone!!!
Wrong.
I interviewed the dude in the local shop in the hopes that he too might introduce basic clothing laws, but he spent our conversation venting a huge lament over his loss of stock to dressing-gown pockets, and telling me how much his new CCTV system cost. The suggestion to ban such clothing was lost on him, I guess I’ll try again when he’s calmed down a bit.
So, I suppose my question is, if I were to tackle these girls again to ask them for the basic courtesy of getting dressed before they leave the house, how do I bridge the gap that is the bleedin’ obvious? Do I point and laugh?? Do I hire goons to knock on their doors late at night? Even if I could get the leopard to change its spots, who’s to say the new spots won’t have deeper pockets!
Why am I bothered anyway? Oh yeah… pride and sense of decency. Damn it.
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #6
The one thing that’s very obvious about pregnancy is the gruesome. Films focus on the gunge and the pain, TV documentaries love to stress how horribly things can go wrong… they show husbands fainting, vomit inducing stretchmarking, hormonal shriekage way beyond banshee capability. Gore sells. Even friends and well-wishers love to tell horror stories about labour and pregnancy without much consideration for the woman they’re talking to, the person who is by now a mass of nerves for no reason at all. It’s very hard to take all of this with a pinch of salt.
This is a post about some of the good things, the great things, the things you crave for again once baby’s been born and epidurals are but a fading memory.
1: The Dentist. There is no better excuse not to go. Amalgam fillings aren’t generally a good idea during pregnancy unless there is dire need for them, so it’s best to wait until you’ve got your body back before visiting the surgery. So, the guilt at not making that horrible appointment is completely and beautifully absent for a whole nine months. The fact that the baby is in the meantime robbing all of your calcium stores should probably not be dwelled upon. Losing teeth isn’t so bad, one less to clean, eh?
2: Weight Gain. Eating for two. While health experts say that this theory isn’t necessarily true, it’s lovely to be able to eat six Weetabix followed by two apples, then two super-noodle sandwiches smothered in chocolate sauce, all washed down with three cartons of orange juice and NOT feel disturbed and gluttinous afterwards. A little voice obviously told you to do it, and I don’t mean the one your psychiatrist’s concerned about. Getting fat is fun, don’t try and tell me otherwise.
3: Hair. I’ve lost count of how many people have commented that my hair’s gotten all bright and shiny. It’s lovely. The reason is purely because pregnant women stop moulting so their hair becomes thicker, and the glands are slightly oiler than usual. It does what it’s told… its fringe stays on its best behaviour… bad hair days become a rarity. Of course it’ll start falling out in clumps once the baby’s born, but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.
4: Hiccups. There is no bad mood, no amount of spilled milk, no gaping mire of disapointment that can’t be lightened instantly by a dose of foetal hiccups. The kicking is of course a thing of beauty, a welcome sign of life, but hiccups are something else entirely. After a bit of research I found that they’re not caused by a deficiency or abundance of anything in the mother’s diet, they’re just caused by a tiny diaphragm practicing wee breathing excercises, it’s owner probably wondering what the hell is going on. Think of the cuteness of puppy hiccups, but muffled deep down inside your body. Absolutely bloody amazing.
5: Drive. Thank God for gay men, I say. If it weren’t for gay men, there’d be no porn for women at all. No, we don’t want to see scantily clad men holding a mop or an iron suggestively, we want to see men perform gravity defying acts with their bits, thanks very much. Happily there are open minded blogs out there who have provided many hours of entertainment for hormone-laden horny pregnant women (think Phoebe and her Evander Holyfield phase) like myself… some links of fascination might be – Sex Is Not the Enemy, Youporn (obviously), Altporn.net, Boob.ie (Yay for those wimmin who embrace their inner lesbian!) and CarnalNation, for when you just need good old fashioned educating. Yes, I will indeed miss this part of pregnancy.
6: Lazy. Yeah, I’m lazy. Now I have an excuse. Get over it and make me some tea.
Did I leave anything out? I’m absolutely positively sure I did… another thing about pregnancy is that melted brain. It’s lovely having a temporarily shrunken mind, blokes have it so handy (;-p). Help a girl out will you and remind me?
Household chemicals- not just for making bombs out of.
Being a 30 something fun-lovin’ chick with a hectic social-life, I chose last New Year’s Eve to clean out Laughingboy’s fishy bubble-generator. That was when I discovered that distilled water is more expensive by the gallon than petrol for some reason. I decided to innovate, and got to boiling kettle after kettle of normal water and sat patiently all night waiting for it to cool down. The excitement was pants-wetting.
Four months later, and I discovered that I’d grown a very magical but totally useless algae-garden which had swamped the air-pump and rendered the bubbles obsolete. Bugger. There goes the idea of putting REAL fish in there.
Last week I re-hashed the whole process and got clever with kettles again, this time adding two capfuls of pure bleach to the water as I poured it into the tube. I was so smug at my smart-arsednedness, I was sure I’d cracked it, but no.
I turned around from administering Laughingboy’s meds on the fishy bubblemaker’s maiden voyage and was met with this disturbing entity:
It would remind you of going to a pub in the UK and watching the barman pour a pint of Guinness. Complete bubble fail.
Back to the drawing-board, then.
Smell ya later
My pet hate of the day is the farting air-freshener.
TAT brought one home last week and as much as I bitched and moaned about his having been duped by Godawful fake smellies and the fact that the refills are thrice as expensive as the gizmo that farts them, he set it up anyway.
It’s like a big stupid white dildo on the shelf there, reminding visitors that we stink.
I hate it.
Whenever I walk into the room it farts at me. This is okay during daylight, but at night it’s a whole different story. I reserve the right to wander into the kitchen at 3am for my nightly fix of chocolate biscuits and milk without having the bollix scared out of me by a farting air-freshener. It sounds just like a cat, hissing violently at me as I walk past. It gets me every time. Sometimes it sees me coming and farts directly into my eyes, scaring me and blinding me in one fell swoop. Other times it waits until I’ve just passed it, then hisses at me behind my back, causing me to scream in blind panic in my sleepy state and whirl round jiu-jitsu style to face my combattant feline attacker. Then I just feel stupid.
I moved it to the shelf above the TV yesterday. That didn’t work, it just farted on my TV dinners. This morning it got moved to the computer table and messed up my mouse’s mojo with its sticky effluent.
Tomorrow the farting air-freshener faces death by pressure cooker. Pine fresh my arse.
Eastery Artistry
Easter Holidays. A time to reflect about how much fun school actually is. A time to figure out ways to entertain one’s children without involving the television or the outside world because it’s feckin’ snowing out there for some reason.
I thought about making something chocolaty but given that I’m pregnant, it turns out there isn’t an ounce of the stuff left in the whole house. I thought about glueing eggshells back together but eggshells are flaky things and refuse to stay in tact under the pressure of a five-year-old’s grasp. I’d hard-boil them, but hey, we’re in a recession.
It was Puppychild who suggested an Art Attack. It’s one of her most favourite TV shows, bar Supernanny and Spongebob Squarepants. I showed her the website and guided her through its archives, asking her to pick an art project to do. I expected her to choose something involving fairies or fashion or something pink at least, but no.
She chose the severed hand.
I’m so delighted she’s inherited my sense of the macabre. TAT objected that this art project isn’t exactly Easter related but I disagreed… it does have loose connections to the theme of resurrection, if you think about it.
