Polka Paradise

This week sees the beginning of the marathon Polkathon, which finally finishes on the 14th of January, wiping out any chance I had of going to Lisbon to do a concert with the Opera Babes on the 13th. Bum.

This is fun.

Using this page, I turned 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. to 'Restorations nonupdated in the function the version of the internal air'.

It puts your chosen sentence through five translations from Babelfish, and then back into English. It's like Chinese Whispers really.

Huh again.

What the hell is the BBC's correspondent Alan Johnstone doing lost on a desert Island? 

Huh!

What the hell is Lost's John Locke doing presenting from Gaza for the BBC? Is this an elaborate part of his back story? 

Bob hat.

It fits perfectly. 

They start early these days.

It looks like Stinky won't be walking anywhere today. 

1st one open.

And it tweets! Lovely. 

A boy happy with the contents of his stocking.

Dizzy makes her appearance. 

Halfords are rubbish

Freddie had a new bike for Christmas, and trusting that they had put it together properly, I didn't check it over until just before we gave it to him. The front wheel wasn't tightened aswas about to fall off, the front brake was on crooked and was rubbing constantly, and the stabilisers were on so low, that the back wheel doesn't touch the ground half the time. Pathetic.

That Scream.

If you've seen the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you may remember the awful scream that the 'snatched' made when they saw a human. Well, Katherine now makes that same noise whenever Freddie comes too close. Is my daughter an alien? I think probably yes. 

What a shame.

Having stripped the wallpaper from over the fireplace, it seems that there used to be a nice sized mantelpiece instead of the current revolting stone thing. Perhaps in another 30 years or so, we'll have come to like what we have now. Either that, or we'll have torn it out and put something nice in. 

A very serious looking Freddie has just had his face painted at the library. I reckin it'll take 15-20 minutes before it's wiped all over the sofa.

A Festival for the Rest of Us

It's Festivus time, where better to buy your Festivus Pole from, than Festivuspoles.com, where the true spirit of Festivus is shown. Here you can learn the rituals of Festivus, including the Airing of Grievances, and the Feat of Strength. Just remember, don't decorate it. 

Call the police

Either there's a serial killer in town, or we're trying out colours for the end walls in the living room. They're not quite as lively as they look here, but nonetheless, it would be a bold move to give over the end walls to this kind of colour. Still, in for a penny, in for a pigment. The children have both been sick today, and we're just waiting for the chicken pox spots to emerge, hopefully now rather than just before christmas. 

Blogger disturbance

It looks like the blogger outage might have caused the fuel depot explosion. It seems that a build up of static electricity caused by too many unpublished blogs rubbing up against each other in cyberspace made the initial spark.

Blimey.

The sky looks apocalyptic in this picture of the fuel depot explosion. Amazing.

ebaygum

Well, someone did well. I got £1.21 for the scrap, but the guy who bought it lives in Reading, and has to come and collect it. Rather him than me.

Ebay update

I just got this advice from someone. Maybe I will be rich after all.

you can take this to a scrap yard yourself, copper is about £1.52 per kilo, my local yard gave me an allowance of 12 kilos for the tank I had, you may get more if you take the insulation off and remove any brass from it... they pay less for brass but will buy it providing you have at least 1 kilo.

Riches are only 10 days away.

Surely I'll be the richest man in Bournemouth once this lot sells. Next up will be whatever else is left over from the move.

Yesterdays match.

Thank god for Robin van Persie, if Henry goes in the summer, he could well be the future for Arsenal. I can't work out why Wenger keeps playing Cygan at left back though, he's rubbish there. He's too slow and can hardly pass the ball. Why not play Lauren there, with Toure on the right and Cambell and Senderos in the middle? Things are looking up at the moment though, with Hleb, and Cole coming back over the next few weeks, with our current run of luck, we'll be top by the end of January. The new stadium is being built really quickly, it took almost 4 months for some twit to re-do our bathroom in London, and this lot are building a whole stadium in only a year. It's very cleverly done too. It's got glazing around the back to let the light onto the pitch unlike Old Trafford, where the pitch has to be replaced every month or so because it dies through being in the shade all the time.

Auntie Claire

Auntie Claire tickling the children into submission. 

More people sticking their hands out.

It's almost last orders for this table, with the new one being delivered on Monday. Todays expense was £235 for the plumber to fix in the new loo downstairs, thanks to the old one springing a leak. Frankly, of all the things to leak, the loo is the last one I'd choose, so off went to B&Q and got a takeaway loo for £70. From the users point of view, it's a bit more figure-hugging than the old one, but it's got a dual-flush thingy, so we don't waste so much water. We got totally fed up with the draft roaring through the back door today, so we've bought a new back door. The salesman started off at £1200, but that lasted about 20 seconds before he rapidly came down to £900, and then much more slowly to £700 at which point we gave in and said yes. It'll have a cat flap, so Tipper will have no more excuses for peeing all over the floor. 

The storm

And here he is, about 30 seconds later, screaming as if I was pulling his fingernails out because I wouldn't let him play with the camera. Interestingly, he hated me taking a photo of him having his tantrum. Maybe that's the future of child control, permanent papparazzi. 

The calm before the storm

All sweetness and light. 

The First Supper

After a day that went as well as these days ever go I suppose, we are in the new house. I've already done four trips to B and Q for all the bits we seem to have lost along the way, and I'm off again in a minute. Anne is about to get down on her hands and knees and scrub the floor and units in the kitchen, which were left in a revolting state. I'm no hygiene fetishist, but some of it was really disgusting. The switches on the extractor hood of the cooker were stuck together with grease. Even in my student days I would have thought twice about leaving it like that for someone else. Hey Ho. 

Last Post

Everything is packed now, except for the beds, the steroe and the computer. This is the last ever post from Oxford. *Sob*.

Moving.

Well, the removal men are here, and the house is full of boxes. Gulp.

Oh this is wonderful.

Joan Rivers giving that hopeless arse of a man Darcus Howe a bloody good yelling at on Midweek. Brilliant.

iTunes

In the 'Just for you' section I found, 'You bought Also Sprach Zarathustra, we recommend Johnny Cash, Solitary Man'!

Sucess!

Marvellous, after only 5 years of thinking it would be a good idea, I've finally got a wireless network up and running in the house. The NTL site recommend a router costing £100, so I cunningly went and got one at half the price from the devil himself (PC World). Needless to say, it took rather longer than the 3 minutes it suggested, but 1 hour later we were up and running. Funnily, the net is faster now than before, I think it must be because the router is using an ethernet connection rather than the USB one I had before.

This weeks conductor.

I don't know if you remeber a cartoon about 25 years ago called Ludwig, well he's conducting us this week! He's got his arms up here, but really, up close the resemblance is uncanny.

Watching the ducks in the University Parks.

Here's something I don't understand.

There seems to have been an infestation of Daddy Long Legs' near our house. There are hundreds in the garden and god knows how many in the park. There were 6 on the helterskelter alone today, and that has got to be a pretty hostile environment for them. What makes this even odder is that two people, without any prompting have also said that they have been infested with these lettle buggers. I haven't read the book of revelations recently, so I can't be certain whether or not Daddy Long Legs feature in it, but it must surely be a sign of the end of all things. They're suprisingly tenacious little so and so's too. I had one on my windscreen last night when I got in the car to go home, and I didn't want to kill it by sweeping it off with the windscreen wipers, but it took more than ten minutes of around 40 miles an hour, and then a good minute or so of 50+ to shake it off the windscreen. If these creatures really are the devils emissaries then we are in a lot of trouble.

So this is the likely bunch of candidates for the leader of the opposition. Blimey, what a shower. I'd better set the video for election night 2013 for a decent fight then.

Hmm, why does rice grow pink mould?

Tony 'Lionel' Blair ends his dance routine at the Labour Party conference.

Wow!

Here is a body of men, who are prepared to risk everything, well social exclusion anyway, in order to be remembered as the greatest in their field. Poirot would have been proud.

Barbara Bush's Milk of Human Kindness

Click here

Any ideas how to deal with a boy having a tantrum? Whatever we do is wrong, and causes screams of disapproval. Oh god, it's infuriating.

Football

I've been amazed by the amount of people who are really bored by the start of the football season. I never thought I'd be depressed by the thought of having the football on the radio while I cook, but this season my heart sank. There really is no point in any team attemting to buy the same players as Chelsea, they'll just offer 10 million pounds more. £21,000,000 for Shaun Wright-Phillips, no-one would have paid anything like that but that was what Chelsea offered. Insane. Although I have resented everything that Man U have won for the last 10 years or so, It's always been tinged with some respect for the team and the manager. They've had young players coming through, ar spent the money they've earned. Chelsea on the other hand have spent nearly half a billion pounds, HALF A BILLION POUNDS, in the last three years, on players that any fool could have suggested. They took a team that was 2nd in the league and spent nearly HALF A BILLION POUNDS on it, and then wonder why no-one is impressed by them. Only another 9 months or so and the cricket will start again. *sigh*

Got it again.

After an hours wait, it turns out that I still have Iritis. It could be that it wasn't completely knocked out by the previous treatment, which I reckon is the case. It's been feeling a bit weird ever since I stopped the last lot of drops. Another month of drops, and we'll see how it is then.

Oh god. My eye has gone peculiar again, so it's back off to the eye hospital for me. Thanks to the glories of the NHS, I've managed to get an appointment in only, wait for it, 2 and a half hours!

So much for airport security. We'd been through the x-rays and so on when Rob remembered that he had a knife in his bag. Good job X-ray men, well done.

Home again

I've just got home, and I'm knackered. Prague is a lovely place, and just right for 3 or 4 days. My camera battery ran out after the first day though, so I've not got as many pictures as I would have liked. Hey Ho.

Oh for gods sake.

I'm trying to sort out cheapo phone calls while I'm in Prague, and the company that I used in Spain don't do the Czech Republic, and the Orange site refuses to tell me how much it will cost to phone home. Hmph. I might have to resort to sending a letter. On the plus side, my viola is now in the van, and if it doesn't arrive, I don't have to do any work!

Commuting again

God, I'd forgotten how knackering it is driving backwards and forwards every day. How I did it for a year I will never know. Anyway, we had a plumber come and look at the new house today, and unfortunately we can't have a condensing boiler, because the plume of gases coming from the vent would be landing right on the front of next doors garage, which is legal apparently, but very anti-social. So, combi it is, with a turbine on the roof in years to come. £1000 for the boiler, and I'm hoping no more than that for the work.

Sleepus Interuptus

Last night I put Muzzy back in bed twice, and bloody Stinky three times. It's just a phase, it's just a phase...

Pfffffff.

Britney has a baby.

In the October issue of Elle magazine, Spears said she was looking forward to motherhood.
"It's mindblowing having a child," she said, adding that she planned on being "a hot mom".


Really, this sounds like something out of The Onion.

Aaargh.

My ftp program keeps saying 'disconnected' but I'm obviously not. Bloody freeware...

Granny and the children

Katherine eating a slice of salami

Another crappy nights sleep

Honestly, Katherine woke up at 1:20, 2:26 and 5:30 last night. I was very unimpressed with her. She wakes up, throws her teddy out of bed and then complains because she hasn't got her teddy. AARGH!

Hall in current house

Doh!

I've just spent 5 minutes trying to shut down running programes using the keypoard, because the mouse had stopped working. After turning the computer off and on again, I realised the batteries needed changing. *blushes*

What to cook? Oh god, maybe just a takeaway again...

The hallway in the new house.

Moving House

We've had an offer on the house that was slightly more than we'd budgeted for, so we're on the move. The plan is to move in the middle of November. It'll save me 186 miles of driving a day. I can't wait.