Puppychild wrote a book…
…and won an award!!
I’m so proud.
She was very nonchalant about it, it didn’t seem to occur to her to be proud of the achievement at all… so much so, she forgot to tell me about it. I was reading the school newsletter when I saw her little name pop up in the section about the ‘Write-A-Book” project her school takes part in every year. She was one of two kids in her class to achieve a special merit.
I pee-d myself a little bit with excitement and shrilled scornful surprise at her for not telling me. She flushed and smiled a little bit, then returned to her own planet, and I to mine.
I grew a writer! How great is that?
Dub Boy Angst
Laughingboy invented a new music genre today, I call it Dub Angst:
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Isn’t it lovely? If I play it back to him during a shouting spell he calms right down instantly, but only for the duration of the track. I may have to record an album and turn him into a gazillionnaire.
I created the file using the ‘LaDiDa’ app(lication) for the iPhone. Sorry. I’m aware that last sentence made me sound like a tosser, but technology does have its perks.
Buried Treasure
I was clearing out my bookmarks this evening and looked what spilled out!!
-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)
This is what real love looks like.
-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.
-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!
-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.
-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!
Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.
Syntax Error
-Your brother’s a retard!
The second those words left my lips, I felt the scarlet rise. It just slipped out. To a room full of parents of kids with special needs too, no less.
Cringe. The flush burned my cheeks and made the capillaries on the tip of my nose tingle. My heart skittered like a ball of grease on a hot frying pan while the clock ticked a silence of undefinable length.
-Yes it’s true.
Somebody else nodded.
-You need to show them what words to use in self defence!
*nodding*
-True, true…
I was at a meeting to discuss Sibling Workshops, an initiative ‘they’ have set up to help families with disabled children. See? ‘They’ aren’t all bad! Brothers and sisters of kids with special needs have all sorts of issues that I had never even considered. Like… when a special needs kid passes a milestone it’s an amazing feat worth certificates and rounds of endless applause, yet nobody says a bippy when his younger brother passes the same milestone. From small droplets big waterfalls grow.
My question was about teaching some sort of self-defence mechanism to kids prone to bullying in the street… but it kind of came out funny.
I think my filter needs replacing.
Bromidrosiphobia
I was paring her colouring-pencils with a retractable blade when I asked her if she had any homework tonight. She replied that yes, she did, but Sophie didn’t because it is her birthday. Birthday?! Buggerty fuck… wasn’t there something about a party??? What time is it now… somebody find the invitation, quick!
Already an hour late (*face-palm*), we changed our clothes and found our missing shoe and packed wipes and nappies and bottles and ‘where the hell are my Goddamn keys’ed and brushed our hair and sped away sharpishly.
Airfield house is in Dundrum, which is a busy suburb just to the south of Dublin City. It’s full of apartments, commercial complexes, fancy hospitals and shopping malls but right in the center of all of this confusion, is a farm of all things. I’d never heard of it before today, it was a pleasantly odd find.
To say it was pissing rain, however, would be an understatement. It was the sort of rain that bounced off dry earth and got you wet from underneath, the sort that doesn’t allow for much petting or feeding of any sort of animal, most of whom were dug in for the day, squeamish of getting their wattles wet.
I found the party squished into a tent at the bottom of this farm, a beautiful sculpture of woven cloth and bamboo sticks stood sentry outside its door and an enormous noise came from within.
Eighteen children, twelve adults, a handful of babies and their paraphernalia were stuffed into this tent, along with two long tables, a tonne of teeny chairs and a food presentation table. There was clearly no room for yours truly and her Sir Fartsalot of fidgety baby tendencies.
I set up camp outside under my umbrella until the foodal servage was over, at which point the rain cleared, and people burst from the bulging doors of the party tent. Some regarded me with oddness and declared that I looked like a leprechaun sitting on a treestump, others looked at me with jealousy as they expired the final gasp of farty carbon dioxide hum from their lungs and gulped fresh taste of freedom and wished that they had done what I was doing, all along.
Small children gathered around Sir Fartsalot and I, wiped their small hands on my umbrella and wetted and spiked the baby’s hair and named him Tedward and shook the raindrops from sapling trees, and then ran inside again to see the Hello Kitty cake all bedecked with sparklers.
Airfield house must be a beautiful place when there’s time and sunshine to explore. I’ll re-visit it someday, when there’s cause to, or maybe for no reason at all.
Days like this
The general gist of what’s happening in K8land today:
Found here
Current Affairs
By the time we’d hit the vegetable isle, I decided I’d had enough. Sir Fartsalot was perched in the in-built trolley seat and was also looking pretty pissed off, and not knowing the laws of physics, he seemed pretty confused, too.
Every time I touched him… ZAP. Every time I touched the trolley chassis… POP. Static electriciteh on mah trolleh. Pain in the arse.
I could either:
a) Ditch the trolley and just stuff the groceries into various crevices and pockets I had hanging around, but I’dve gotten into trouble doing that.
b) Take off my shoes and socks and declare myself strange.
c) Earth the trolley somehow, some other way.
So that’s what I did. I wedged my keyring into the metal arch of the trolley wheel and arranged everything so that the keys dragged on the ground, then tested my idea by hyper-accelerating to the butcher’s department. Dubiously I touched the baby’s nose and…
…nothing. Score!
I got strange looks. Very strange looks.
“Your keys are on the ground, love” – I got. Or…
“Don’t leave them behind ya! Haha!”
I nodded, and thanked, and I felt like the biggest weirdo on the planet, but at least the electroshock therapy wasn’t getting in the way of the retail therapy any more.
Why don’t supermarket trolleys have earthing-strips?
(I realise this is an increadibly boring conversational topic, but I don’t care. I’m bored.)
Image stolen from Slavenka and Obi
A nation of pigs
Something is happening to the children of Ireland. Since I’ve twigged its cause, I’m seeing it more and more every day… or rather hearing it.
Just as the older kids are all awesoming in their slightly yankee twangs, the smaller ones are picking up weird but very sweet English accents which fall out in questions and inflections and introductions like these:
-Hellaw, mai name is Peppa Pig, and this is my little brutha Geoooooooje.
-I thought your name was Sarah?
-Neeeeuo. It’s Peppa Pig, and he is my little brutha Geooooooooooje!
It’s the fathers of Ireland that I feel sorry for. Peppa’s father Daddy Pig (obviously), is portrayed as an awful gobshite. His entire family constantly poke fun at his obesity and make him run and climb things because they know he’ll make a tit of himself and they can all point and laugh. He’s hopeless at flat-pack assembly and general DIY and while this may be true for a lot of Irish men, they don’t need reminding of it so harshly.
AND I worry about the erosion potential of Irish soil… our government will have to pay out millions to fix the pot-hole damage caused by the increase in incidents of children (and adults) jumping in muddy puddles. It’s all very irresponsible.
Ban Peppa Pig!
… ah no I’m on’y messing. I do love her so.
Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
Xbox gaming is a bit like smoking. Those who don’t do it just cannot understand why those who do it, do it. So I’ll tell you, in my own gamey way.
My reasons are threefold;
1. It’s good for your hand-eye coordination and so therefore must be good for your brain and its fight to stay sensible in this crazy world. My children will thank me for this someday, when I’d rather be leveling up on a shoot-me-up than flirting with the toaster.
2. There are emotions in day-to-day life that need releasing. Painting is something that I would love to do, but blowing things up works too, as does firing a trench-gun into somebody else’s face.
3. I like to abuse nine-year-olds.
Oh wait… that came out wrong.
I mean I like to return the abuse that nine-year-olds give me.
At the beginning of each game, a wee speaker symbol pops up beside other online player’s names, and you could either be met with pregnant silence or a barrage of verbal abuse from some kid… usually an English kid for some reason. It would demand that I answer it, and so I would strap on my head-set for some fun.
(I should divulge right now that the game in question is usually ‘Call of Duty-Black Ops Nazi Zombies’ which is strictly over 18s given its extremely bloody nature and strong language.)
Four people meet in a room on the first level, there are four windows through which zombies wearing Nazi uniforms are trying to enter. Each player must defend its own window and help its team-mates, or abuse them as they wish. This is where it gets interesting… in a consequence-free world, you can say what ever you damn well want into your wee headset thingy.
If some pre-teen gets on there, and tells me I’m a Paddy Pikey scumbag and I can’t shoot for shit, what can I do but explain to him why his mummy doesn’t love him and throw hand grenades at him and nag him into taking up football thus mucking up his gameplay? There are very weird conversations to be had on Xbox Live.
I thoroughly advise you try it.
Stoner’s brainwave
I’ve never met a mother who hasn’t feared summer-time to at least some extent. The mumblings start at this time of year, roughly a month before primary school children are released from captivity to stare blinky-eyed into the sun (or at the television), to revel in their freedom for a whole entire two months. That’s a life-time to a small child, and to it’s parents, and to it’s neighbour’s flower patch for that matter.
How to entertain one’s offspring, but? How to keep them feckin neighbour’s kids from hanging out on your shed roof and torturing your dog all the live-long day? Throwing stones at them gets you in trouble, I found that out the hard way.
I’ve had the most amazing idea in the whole world though.
When them idjits from Dragon’s Den read this they’re going to be throwing millions at me for even TWO percent of the intellectual rights to it.
Prepare to be amazed…
-o0o-
…I got to thinking, why not attach a giant hamster-wheel to the side of your house, but hook it up as a generator at the same time. It would entertain the kids, cure obesity and solve your energy crisis simultaneously!
Think of it this way… a half hour of television would cost ten minutes on the wheel. To re-charge a DS would cost forty-five minutes. Send the dog running on it at high speed for half an hour, and that’s your dishwasher cycle right there!
-o0o-
It’s an un-tapped sustainable energy source that’s just waiting to be abused and I invented it! A Nobel Prize would look lovely beside me Wii, so it would, if anyone’s asking.
