Frankenstein Post

I wrote things to go here three or four times last week, but events conspired against me, so this is to be a frankenstein document of all those things I didn't post.

Heard in the office today (last week):
Office worker 1: Blimey, that was short skirt, not that I was looking or anything.
Office worker 2 (dribbling slightly): No, I didn't see her either.

The new bedroom in the sky is finished. We had an opening ceremony and everything. See the video on the dragon's youtube channel here.

The boy is happily installed in said new bedroom, so we have a spare room. He didn't quite make it in on his birthday, but it was only a day or two late. The stupid delivery guy managed to drop part of the new bed when he delivered it, so we're waiting on a spare part for that. Also, the storage drawers beneath the bed were missing a part, so they aren't yet complete either. I bought the boy a CD player shaped like a giant lego brick for his birthday by the way, which is comepletely awesome. He also got a very rugged digital camera.

I had to rush home from work one day last week to go to a parents' meeting at the boy's school. It's not his school until September technically. I was under the naive impression that all we had to do was drop him off there on the first day of term and "Robert's your mother's brother" as they say. Apparently not. We have a one-to-one meeting with his teacher, a mountain of paperwork to complete, and he has to attend several days before the start of term to aclimatise. They don't seem to have just teachers at school anymore. They have things like educational development advisors, and childcare supervisors. Is it just fashionable to add "isor" at the end of titles? That would make me a Technical Authorisor". Amongst other things we were asked to make sure that children could dress and undress themselves before they start school. The boy can already do this, but I usually help him in the mornings. This morning I asked him to dress entirely unaided, and when I came back he was all dressed perfectly. I'm such a good daddy.

Did I mention that I received my bicycle prize? It came in pieces. Had to build it myself. It went together quite well though and the dragon gave it a test drive. The brakes make a noise, but it's very cool. I need to get a rack for the back and some mudguards. I had a look at some racks yesterday and the cheapest one I could find at Halfords was £26. Now I think that's a lot of money for a piece of bent metal. I'll look in Tesco for a rack and mudguads. You can buy anything at Tesco now.

I bought a chicken last weeekend to roast because it was the boy's birthday. I needed to weigh it, but I haven't trusted the kitchen scales since I bounced them off the kitchen floor a week or so ago. This series of events conspired to find me standing on the bathroom scales holding a raw chicken on Saturday afternoon. Stay with me, there's a point to this. The scales said I weighed just over 72kg. That can't be right I thought to myself, so I put my chicken down and stood upon said scales again; just over 70kg. That's right ladies and genmtlemen, for the first time in my life I'm apparently over 70kg. Isn't that disgusting? I'm officially a fat bastard, right before easter when the chocoalte eggs get laid too.

Perhaps 70kg may not sound like very much, but I'm not exactly Andre the Giant, more like Dopey the Dwarf in fact. And it was all the fault of that bloody chicken. Had I not been standing on the bathroom scales with the damn thing I'd be sitting here in blissful ignorance now and I would probably have eaten one of the doughnuts currently looking outrageously fattening in the office kitchen. I'm told they are jam filled. Anyway I think it may be time to let some air out of the spare tyre.

I've just had to pay £142.50, yes £142.50, for a tv licence. I object to the outrageous price just because it's outrageous, but I doubly object to it because the licensing authority are bloody liars and they owe me money. When I left the country they said I couldn't have a refund on the unused portion of my licence but I could use it when I returned. When I returned they said I should have asked for a refund. See, lying bastards.

Interesting news stuff that you may have missed:

James "The Amazing" Randi has come out as gay this week at the age of 81 years. I'm a huge James Randi fan. I think he's probably the most significant magician of the 20th Century. He once escaped from a straight jacket while suspended upside down over Niagra Falls. He also spent 104 minutes in a coffin submerged in water, beating Houdini's record. He swapped Uri Gellar's spoons over just before his appearance on the Jonny Carson show and left Gellar looking like an idiot because he couldn't bend them. And he exposed Peter Popoff the Fraudulant Evangelist resulting in his going to prison. Coolest man in the whole wide world, surely.

Samantha Cameron has a tattoo of a dolphin on her ankle. Sexy or slutty? Could go either way I think.

Pete Doherty has been arrested on suspicion of supplying the illegal drugs that killed heiresss Robin Whitehead. The guy just can't behave himself can he.

Facebook has been blamed for, oh everything, including the spread of syphilis. Huh?

And today it has emerged that Ricky Martin is gay. Come on, is anyone even slighty surprised? I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with the James Randi news. Coincidence? Maybe?

That's it, I'm done, you may go.

Knee pads, that's all I'm saying

I laid an entire laminate floor in the new bedroom this weekend. I haven't replaced skirting boards, plugged the expansion gap with cork, or refitted the door, and I think I want to recut the piece round the door frame. I do however feel an incredible sense of achievment. And if there is one piece of advice I could give you about laying laminate floors by the way, it would be this, knee pads my friends. I thought about buying kneepads on Saturday when I started work, but they were £8.99, and I thought that was ridiculous for a piece of polystyrene. By Saturday evening I was nearly crippled and I wished I hadn't been so tight. I bought them on Sunday morning anyway.

Yesterday was mothers' day and I bought a card for the little chap to give his mother. He liked it because, when opened a bear inside (might be a dog, not sure) opened his arms like a pop-up book. Anyway, I helped him write his name in it and a little message to mummy. Then we put it on his bookshelf and I told him he could give it to mummy in the morning. That was when I put him to bed. I went to check on him when I went to bed myself and and found the card on his pillow. He must have got out of bed and got it. I put it back on the bookshelf. At about 7am he was up and trying to give the card to mummy. Mummy wasn't really awake enough to understand what was going on. I asked him what the card was doing in his bed and he told me he wanted to make sure it was safe. We went and made some pancakes for mummy for breakfast together.

Today my new bicycle has been delivered. I won it in a raffle at Raffle-It. It's a ladies' bike, so the dragon can have it. It's a Lamborghini apparently. I wonder if it's in pieces.

This month Elton John said something particularly stupid (even for him) in an interview with Parade Magazine. Sir Elton is alleged to have said that Jesus was a “compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.” I've read several reports about this and I can't find exactly how he's reached this conclusion. I quite want to read the actual article in Parade (whatever that is) but I don't think I could bring myself to pay for it.

Stay with me, there is a point to me telling you this. We're all used to Elton John talking bollocks of course, and most of us don't even notice it anymore. Neal Horsley (Christian lunatic) on the other hand did notice and took offense. Not only that, he took it upon himself to make a video of himself standing outside Elton's Atlanta apartment building with a large placard upon which was printed in large letters, "Elton John Must Die". This resulted in Horsley being arrested, and Elton increasing security. Read the Rolling Stone report here.

Interesting choice of words from Horsley isn't it. What did he mean by, "Elton John Must Die". Does he mean he must be killed, or simply that one day his life must come to an end like everyone else's? If he's suggesting that Elton John should be killed, one wonders how he manges to justify it alongside the ten comandments. Horsley is a known nutter and has flirted with terrorism in the past apparently. His Wiki page makes interesting reading.

Bicycle Update - it was here when I got home from work and it was in pieces, but I've assembled it and it's petty fabby actually.

What the papers say

I forgot to pay my stupid credit card bill this month. It was due yesterday. I know this because the stupid credit card company just called me and bearated me. I get fed up with the bastards. I pay the bill every month, I'm a good customer. Well technically I didn't pay this month, but it was only a day late, and it is paid now. And if their bloody on-line payment system worked occasionally, I'm sure I would pay more promptly. I hate my credit card. I may change it for another one.

We have to try and get the floor laid in the new bedroom this week. If we can do it we have half a chance of getting the boy in there before his birthday. It's nearly painted. I have to board up the floors inside the eves cupboards before the floor goes down. I'm really looking forward to doing the floor. I don't know if we can finish it over the weekend though.

All the british newspapers are today alive with the news that President Sarkozy and his glamourous wife are both having affairs. It would seem that she has become close to a very pretty boy singer, six years her junior. He appears to be hosing his ecology minister, a tall. slim and very elegant 40-year-old. There is some speculation that her affair is real, but that his was engineered so that he would look more like a bit of a player, and less like a jilted, middle-aged man who married a a wayward trollpe. This interesting theory is put forward by the excellent Toby Young in the Telegraph this morning.

Apparently Carla Bruni is Monsieur Sarkozy's third wife. He married her, in some haste it would seem, after his second wife ran off with some swanky advertising executive, with whom she now lives in New York. Some say that his marriage to Carla was another PR exercise, designed to improve his image after the separation.

Carla is not regarded by everyone as an asset. In fact, I conducted a quick poll by email today and discovered that all my female friends appear to dislike her really quite intensely. I think she's a good looking girl myself, but she does come across as a bit of a cow. One friend described her dress at a state dinner this weekend as "hideous". I'd have gone for "innappropraite" myself. She looked all "nipples and eyelashes". Quite wrong for a state dinner. See for yourself. The thing about Carla Bruni however, is that she is glamourous, and Monsieur Sarkozy is most definitely not. This makes them an odd couple. It also means that she always gets far more attention than him when they travel anywhere together. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

There have been a few comments about nipples. Thanks to all of you. The most sensible came from January Girl who reminded me that we are all female in the womb, and that therefore nipples on men may be a result of that. I'd also like to assure Mr Punk that all is well in my trousers after the fuel flap incident.

Six words that changed my future

I don't very often do the theme of the week thing because most of them are pretty stupid, but this week I am taken by the idea.

What seemingly inconsequential decision did you make, or what seemingly inconsequential event occurred in your life, that ended up profoundly changing your life?

Well children, let me tell you how six words in a text message changed the entire course of my life...

After university, my friend Dickie installed ICQ on my computer. In fact I think he emailed me with it, and it installed itself or something. I bet you don't even know what ICQ is do ya? Well I don't think it even exists anymore. It was like MSN messenger, but without webcam facility. It was pretty slick in its day and I think it was bought by AOL. The point is, it was on my computer and it was there so that Dickie and other uni friends would know when I was online and we could keep in touch. We all evacualted to the far reaches of the UK after we left university you see.

I only used ICQ to keep in touch with the Dickie and the Reading University Cybernetics crowd. Most of the time it just used to sit there in the background (shiny new Windows 98) doing nothing, until one day I got a random message from a complete stranger:

Hello, I'm Emily from Taiwan.

Now of course, I could have ignored that message, but for some reason, I chose not to and I began a conversation with this stranger 6,000 miles away. It turned out that she was studying English and wanted someone who spoke British style English to chat with. We became online friends. For 18 months we chatted regularly. There was the occasional phone call, then more frequent phone calls, letters and photographs sent to each other, then one day she asked if I would like to come and visit her, so on a whim, I said yes.

I met her for the first time at Chiang Kai Shek International Airport. She was with her father. It was a scary moment. She'd arranged a cheap hotel for me, on the edge of Hsin Tien. It was just a few minutes from her Grandfather's house, and her mother's. We spent a week together. She showed me Taipei and I met her enormous family. It was a wonderful, terrifying experience.

When I left I still wasn't expecting anything to come from this relationship, but we carried on chatting, mailing, phoning each other. Six months later she came to England, and stayed with me for about ten days. We had a good time together again, but it still didn't feel as though it could work, not because we weren't compatible, there was just so much space between us. As luck would have it however, I was having a really crappy time at work. The details are not important, but one particualrly awful day my boss took me to one side and told me, "it's just a job Alex". It was then that I realised that I had no future there and that I had to resign. I just wasn't sure when.

I formulated a vague plan to quit, take some time off, and maybe visit Emily again, but it didn't go any further than that. It was only when I happened to mention to another boss that I was thinking of leaving and going to Taiwan, that she told me I didn't have the nerve. That is what tipped the balance. Almost as a direct result of that conversation, I put the wheels in motion. I went on sick leave almost immediately with the idea that I would simply never return. I had work to do.

I managed to stay off work sick for two months I think. In that time I prepared to leave my home, visited a letting agency asking them to rent it out, put all my posessions in storage, and got myself a two month visitors' visa for Taiwan. The idea was to stay for two months and see if I could get some work as an English teacher. If I could, I would stay, if I couldn't, I'd come back.

So off Iwent to Taiwan with a rucksack full of clothes. In my heart I thought I would return the the UK in two months. I believed Emily and I had a chance of making a relationship work if we were on the same side of the world, but to be honest, I thought being togther would prove to be so difficult that it was unlikely to happen. I was wrong of course. That was 10 years ago.

I found a job within a few days, writing advertising copy and website content for a marketing department. It was a crappy job, but the people were nice, and it got me a work visa, so I stayed. I booked into a hotel, and almost immediately Emily moved in too. After about a month we were renting an apartment together.

After a year I quit the job and found a new one in a translation house, working with the niest people. I loved working there and I stayed for four more years. I'm still in touch with almost everyone I worked with there. I never looked back. We were married in Taiwan and in England in 2004. and the rest is history.

So that's how one text message on ICQ changed the direction of my entire life.

Bad Start

The day didn't start well. Things started going wrong in the early hours of the morning in fact. The dragon has been coughing like a walrus and producing huge amounts of snot for some days now, which in turn seems to cause her to snore (and there's no polite way to say this) like a warthog. By about 2 am I decided I couldn't stand it any longer and evacuated to the boy's room which has a spare bed in it.

At around 7.30 am I managed to fall over a swivel chair in the dining room and throw a fried egg on the floor.

Upon leaving for work I discovered that I had no petrol, so at the petrol station at the end of my road, I pulled up to the pump, inserted my card in the machine, and then realised the pump was out of order. I then had to go through a horrifying process of voiding the transaction on my card before it would give it back to me. I then managed to impale my testicles on the open fuel flap thing as I replaced the nozzle in the pump. This resulted not only in eye-watering pain, some bad language, and a worsening of my mood, but I also bent the fuel flap which meant it wouldn't close and I had to drive to work looking like one of those idiots who's forgotten to close his fuel flap.

I pulled up to another pump only to find that it was "offline", which apparently means usable, but one has to pay the moron in the kiosk rather than use a card at the pump. I elected to do this rather than try a third one. I then got shouted at over the PA system by the kiosk moron because I was attempting to fill my tank with my car door open. What difference does it make? I was trying to listen to the news on the radio.

So, in summary; this morning, I've had no sleep, thrown egg on the carpet, been publicly mocked by a petrol pump and the moron in the petrol station kiosk. I've damaged my testicles, and bent the fuel flap on the car.

On a more positive note, I did successfully re-adjust (bend) the fuel flap back into place when I got to work. Though I even managed to set the car alarm off while doing that and frightened the bejesus out of myself in the process.

I'm working on the principle that things can only get better from here.

Anyway, enough of today, I've got stuff to tell you about the weekend. As you all know, the weekend technically begins on Friday at 5pm (plus journey time to nearest pub). Using that formula, I won a brand new Lamborghini Leggenda bicycle at exactly the moment the weekend began. How cool is that? I won it on the Raffle.it website. Proceeds go to charity, so even if you lose, you still feel quite good.

***

On Saturday morning the boy asked me why men have nipples. Now I think that's an intelligent question for a 3-year-old, though I had no idea how to answer it. He seems to understand that women's nipples have a purpose, and has worked out for himself that men's nipples can't do the same thing. I toyed with the idea of trying to give him a sensible answer, but couldn't think of a way to explain it. I'm not exactly sure what the answer is myself actually. George at work says you can only explain in in Darwinian terms if you consider male and female to be different species. Anyway, in the end I was evasive and I said it's just because they look nice. I'm pleased to say he was happy with that answer for now.

Closing

So, the polls are closing. One poll put the Tories only 2 points ahead of Labour with less than 4 months to go before an election. The Sun however puts them 7 points ahead again today. The Sun likes to think it influences public opinion. In fact it's simply a very good barometer of proletariat opinion. I'm still predicting a landslide for the Tories, but it will be a vote against Brown, not a vote for Cameron.

There seems to be a lot of fuss about Tory peer Lord Ashcroft currently. It seems he's finally admitted that he is non-domicile for tax purposes. In other words, he has business interests outside the country that don't incurr tax in this country, even though he lives here. If one was to be cynical, one could argue that his foreign business interests are only foreign because it's cheaper to keep them foreign. On the other hand, I've lived abroad wil earning an income in this country and I didn't pay tax on it in the country where I was living. Who in their right mind would? I can't deny that this hasn't been handled very well. It would have been far better to come clean months agao when it first started causing an issue. However, I don't care that the guy is paying tax abroad instead of here and I can't believe the average voter will either.

OK, there is a story all over the news about Devon today. My mother lives in Devon and nothing much happens there, so any news about it in the national press is an event. Seriously, they still point at aeroplanes. However, not only does Devon feature in the national news today, it features because they found a sex dungeon there. I'll spare you the details, just click the link. Apparently two people have been arrested I want to know what the charges are. Surely it's not illegal to have Nazi uniforms, handcuffs, whips etc. Maybe it is in Devon. Anyway, my boss says these things go on in Germany, he's German, and he doesn't understand why I'm surprised it happens in Devon. He's obviously never been there.

Our new bedroom in the sky is now just about finished. The dragon has been painting it and I'm about to lay a laminate floor. I'm really quite looking forward to it. I've never laid a floor before. I can't really start until the painting is done however. The aim is to get the boy installed in his new room before his birthday. That would be 21st March, so we have over two weeks to get it done. Isn't it exciting.

In other news, Michael Foot has sied aged 96. If you don't know who I'm talking about, you're either too young or not British. He was a politician, most famous in the mid eighties. Mad as a shit house rat, dressed like a tramp, card carrying pinko commie subversive, but for all that, in an odd way, sort of cool.

And Jon Venables has been taken back into custody. Venables made history in 1993 whgen he was found guilty of murder aged just 10. No one knew quite what to do with him, or his partner Robert Thompson who was also convicted of murder and was also 10. They put them both in a young offenders' institution, but when they reached 18 European law forced the British authorities to release them. They were given new identities, banned from returning to the city of their crime, and banned from contacting each other. Venables has however manged to breach teh terms of his release and hasbeen returned to an adult prison. No one knows what he's done, where he is, or even what his name is now. There are no recent pictures of him, and the authorities claim they are unable to provide further information. The public want to know however. How long do you reckon it will be before the leak comes?