Random burblings since 1999
For the stuff about my life
A thin moaning whisper, hissing through gaps, sputtering through trees and racing over roof tiles, strumming cables.
Booming and bursting on buildings, howling and roaring onwards. Thuds and thumps peal from fallen bins, clanging gates fire salvos into the night.
The rhythm continues to erratically bang and clunk, knock and pound. A huge throb of air and rain smashing and whirling around, attacking every window with venom.
Tossing and turning, earful of drips, of gaps, of damage.
Seeing as someone asked…
He’s doing fine.
Ohh you want details? Well he got his booster injection yesterday and didn’t put up too much of a struggle, so he’s now all clear, vaccinated, wormed, flea treatment applied, all ready for his week long holiday in a local cattery. The vet gave him a quick check over and pronounced him fit as a fiddle.
Behaviour-wise he’s been much better this past week and we’re almost at 100% success with a simple, firm “No” stopping him from whatever he’s doing. He generally seems much calmer all round, although we still giggle at his mad half hour antics, particularly the cartoon effect squeaking of a cat trying to turn very fast on a laminate floor (in our hall, which is a hard wearing one so he’s not doing any damage).
Thank you to everyone for their suggestions, as first-time cat owners we are reading lots of books, websites and leaflets, but there is nothing like direct advice from the more experienced.
In saying that, he’s quite the laidback kitten most of the time, making our job a lot easier. Even the trip to the vet didn’t throw him, with no yelping or scratching even when he was doing his secret agent impression, clinging to the sides of his carrier as we tipped it upside-down to try and get him out!
To be honest, I’m more worried about calming down Louise whilst we are away than I am at leaving him in a cattery. He’ll take it all in his stride, whilst Louise will be quaffing gin to calm her fears (I’m only kidding… well, sort of… ).
More photos soon, although it’s hard to photograph a black cat during these dark evenings.
I’m a grown man. Well, as grown as a man can ever be, and I’m figuring that I’ll never really stop being a small child. Not really. I mean look at the evidence; the toys of our childhood remain but are now called gadgets, as children we were never happier than when we were being looked after and now we use man-flu as an excuse to revert to that behaviour, and of course as babies we fixated on one pair of breasts and as adults, well pretty much anyones will do.
And yes, the latter still applies regardless of sexuality. Show me a gay man who doesn’t wonder over a buxom lady and I’ll show you… actually no, let’s leave that one alone for now.
As I was saying, I’m (considered by some) a grown man yet occasionally I find myself forgetting that fact and reverting to embarassingly childlike outbursts.
Let me pause here and ask you to cast your minds back to the original movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Got it? Now, picture Veruca Salt in the nut room, singing her little lungs out:
I want a party with roomfuls of laughter
Ten thousand tons of ice cream
And if I don’t get the things I am after
I’m going to screamI want the works
I want the whole works
Presents and prizes
And sweets and surprises
Of all shapes and sizesAnd now
Don’t care how, I want it now
Don’t care how, I want it now
Apologies, that’ll probably now be stuck in your ear for the rest of the day.
Well, to my horror I reenacted a similar scene today.
Except I wasn’t in Willy Wonka’s factory, nor was I in the egg sorting room. I also wasn’t wearing a red dress with a white lace colour (I keep that for weekends).
Instead I was at home, marvelling at the inadequacy of the customer support offered by Pixmania. Having ordered a new camera through them, they were second cheapest but I get some back through Quidco, I’ve been tracking the purchase.
It had cleared every stage in their process up to the delivery point by yesterday afternoon so when I check again just after lunch, and saw that no further progress had been made, I contacted their customer support via email asking what the delay was, and if I could get an update.
The response I got back was “Your order has been validated and is scheduled for delivery shortly.”
Yeah. I already knew that you muppets!!
And after shouting at the computer screen for a while I realised what folly it was and I slowly backed away in horror. What the hell was I doing? Pixmania clearly stated 3-4 working days from order to delivery and I am still well within that time frame, what was I getting so het up about??
With everything on-demand, instant-on, available now, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and make unrealistic expectations. Sure, the customer support email I got back from Pixmania would’ve been better received if it wasn’t so blatantly auto-generated, but what was I really complaining about?
Ahh yes, information. Or the lack thereof. Funny how that seems to be the root cause for so much tension and anger.
Anyway, I’m calm now. Almost.
When we bought our house we knew it would take some time to modernise. It’s not been kept in the greatest of care, and we are slowly working our way through the required work. The next big job is a new kitchen, which is getting installed in March, and as we had a little money left over (getting a very good deal on the kitchen) we thought we’d see if we could afford updating the bathroom (the mushroom coloured suite has always been a bugbear).
I’ve phoned 4 or 5 different bathroom places, asking each to come out, have a look and a discussion about what is possible. Two of them never showed up, and didn’t phone to say they wouldn’t make it, so they are struck off the list. Two more have yet to call me back to confirm when they are visiting, which left one company who arranged to send a salesman out yesterday.
Lo and behold he turned up!
I just wish he hadn’t.
Maybe we were spoilt by the guy that sold us our new kitchen (as much as ANY salesman can ever spoil you), but this guy was just… I dunno, BAD.
It started out fine, he turned up, was pleasant enough and asked some good questions when I was showing him the bathroom and talking about what we would like. Now, I made it quite clear that I wasn’t sure what we could afford what we really wanted and that we were looking for some help with the pricing and were more than willing to alter our ideas a little. Basically I was trying to get say that we wanted X, when in reality we expected to be getting Y, and letting him ‘manage’ to get us a good deal for Y.
So he seemed to be playing along and suggested we price up the most expensive layout option (new shower unit, moving the sink, boxing in under the window and the WC) first and work from there.
He spent some time measuring up, talked through the usual brochures and choices and then he jotted down some notes on a pad, totalled up and gave us his quote.
It was about £1k over our budget (we were keeping a few hundred back for negotiation). I told him this and he started humming and hawwing, rapping his pen on his notepad, tapping more figures into his calculator, scratching his head, writing more figures down, and eventually said that (ohh it’s a miracle!) he could come quite close to our budget. It was right at the top of the budget we had told him, and I made some general “not sure” noises to see if he would sweeten the deal.
Now, at one point he had asked us to pick floor tiles to which I said that we weren’t going with tiles so to leave that out of the budget, I’d handle that later.
So when his deal sweetener was to throw in a set of floor tiles for only £100… well I said no.
He then spent a further couple of minutes tapping away whilst Louise and I sat quietly, letting him break the silence first. No, he couldn’t get us a better deal, he was cutting this and this, ohh and this. I asked him to remove the shower option, and his reply was “well yeah, but you want to get it done properly”. My response of “but there is a perfectly good shower there already” was, seemingly, ignored.
He again pointed out that this was a great deal, and that his craftsmen were the best.
And to be fair, it was a pretty good deal so I told him that yes, I thought it was a good deal. To which he replied:
“Ohh ok, so when do you want to get things moving?”
Ummmm. Hello? I asked for a quote.
He looked a little befuddled at this point, and I wonder how many other people he has bullied into taking things they don’t want. I was quite firm, saying we had other people still to come in, but if he left the figures with us we’d call him this week. At that, he all but ran out of the door, leaving no figures behind. He will not be getting a call from us.
Why are good tradesmen so hard to find?
Dentist this morning, a hygienist visit only thankfully (no I don’t floss enough, I know, I know) then the car goes into the garage this afternoon to get a bump stop replaced. I think. It may be two bump stops. I’m not sure. It’s under warranty and has something to do with the suspension. After that I know nothing, which is exactly how car manufacturers want it these days and I guess I’m quite happy with the state of things too as I’ve not been bothered enough to go and find out what it is (mainly because, hey, it’s free).
As such I’m working at home today, which means I get to hear Ollie getting stuck in a large brown paper bag, and then ripping his way out. Alas no photos as I was upstairs and he was down. All I heard was the noise and by the time I got there a small slightly sheepish looking cat was glaring at the remnants of the paper bag.
The weekend was good, got loads done on Saturday including by some new shirts for work. I bought several from one store (all of the same brand and size, just different designs) and for some reason only half of them fit. Grrrrrr. Still that should really be my incentive to start losing weight.
Speaking of which I have started doing some basic exercises aimed at improving my flexibility, which shouldn’t be hard as I’m as rigid as a board most of the time, and toning up those muscles I’ve not used since October. My arms and legs are a little sore today but that’s fine.
My stomach is also sore, as are my sides and my face, again remnants of the weekend as Saturday night was spent celebrating the 21st birthday of my nephew and I honestly don’t think I’ve laughed so much and so hard… well since I saw Lee Evans a couple of years ago. Suffice to say that one of Louise’s cousins, Sharon, is hysterical. She tells stories, peppering them with enough references and imagery so you can picture things, in a manner similar to Billy Connolly. It’s observational and personal stuff for the main but, I mean this seriously, she really could go on stage.
Most of Sunday was spent chilling out and doing bugger all. Which given how hectic the past couple of weeks have been was a nice change. I even managed a nice little doze before dinner, before embarking on a fairly ass-kicking session of Lego Star Wars on the Wii.
Right, I need to go and dig out an email address. Does anyone else still have those promo Skype phones from 3? Do they want them back?? It was a month trial late last year and I’ve heard nothing… I’m sure I could shift them on eBay…
I don’t consider myself a morning person but, truth be told, once I’m up and about I’m fine, it’s just that I don’t do it that often at the weekend. I am a champion at eeking out the last precious moments of cosy-bedness.
So it was with no small degree of wonder that I found myself sitting in the car at 8.55am this morning, waiting to get into the local dump waste disposal and recycling centre. By 9.05am I was heading for Glasgow, and as I sit here at 11.42am I have successfully bought several new shirts, two pairs of trousers, washed the car and had my haircut.
A more typical Saturday morning would normally find me being cajoled into getting my arse off the sofa to get dressed.
Of course all this has changed since the arrival of the small fuzzy black thing that is currently shredding our wallpaper and running around like a mad thing. I’m hoping it’s just a ‘phase’ as he’s been very good up to now, but the last couple of days he’s been particularly destructive. Hmmmm.
Anyway, more things to get done before we head through to Dumbarton to celebrate the 21st birthday of our nephew.
No, wait, that can’t be right. If he’s 21 then I’m…
Ohh nuts.