Watch out...

After finishing work yesterday, I decided I couldn't be bothered to go home before the dress rehearsal, and since it was such a lovely sunny day I thought I'd walk to the theatre. It's only a few miles as the crow flies, but I'm not a crow, had rather optimistically struck out in the right general direction without a map, and spent a fair bit of time dawdling along collecting conkers so it took a couple of hours. Over the course of this two hours I managed to get asked out three times. The first time was a pleasant surprise, and he seemed very nice, so I gave him my number. Unfortunately he then sent me a text later in the evening, all in full on txt spk, and we know how I feel about that. I should probably stop being such a stuck up cow and give him a chance though. After all, it's not as if handsome, pleasant young men make a habit of (oh look, a conker!) asking me out. The second man who approached me yesterday was neither handsome or pleasant; being seemingly incapable of hauling his eyes away from my bustline, an enterprise not aided by the fact that it was pretty much at eye level for him. Still, I offered a polite refusal and wandered on (ooooo, conker!) up the hill. Sadly I noticed nothing about the third man. He could have been my soulmate and I will never know, because by this time I was furtively looking round for hidden cameras. One guy asking me out is flattering. Two will bolster my ego for a month. Three is downright suspicious, and leads me to suspect that somebody is playing a particularly dull practical joke on me. I was half expecting Jeremy Beadle to jump out from behind a tree (is that a conker tree?) with a camera. Wait...is Jeremy Beadle dead? Hang on.....yes, wikipedia says he's dead. Perhaps the ghost of Jeremy Beadle is haunting me. What a horrifying thought.

Things that make me smile No.68

Someone must have a fire going. It smells of coal smoke outside my place of work; a smell which, along with tomato plants, sawdust and honey, is guaranteed to take me back to childhood visits to my grandparents.

Don't read this if you're squeamish

I may have made a casual, off-the-cuff remark the other day about my lack of respect for my cat's hunting abilities, prompted by her obsession with bringing earthworms into the house. It's worth complaining about. They shrivel up and stick to the carpet, and scraping them off is a disturbing and undesirable tactile sensation. Still, I should really know better than to tempt the fates by objecting to such a trivial inconvenience. In what seems to me to be a gross fate-based overreaction, I came home tonight to a hall full of feathers, a sitting room full of feathers, and a dining room full of very large, very dead pigeon. Now, my cat is not large. In fact she's not much more than a kitten; her recent foray into motherhood being but a chavvy teenage mistake which could have been easily prevented with better sex education in schools. So I was, and don't tell her I said so, ever so slightly impressed by her acheivement....

Breaking news! While I was typing that she brought in what appeared, at first (and very alarming) glance, to be a large turd. Luckily it turned out to be a half-eaten sausage. What is wrong with this animal?

....Anyway, back to the pigeon. It was surrounded by kernels of corn. Or wheat. Possibly barley. I'm not an expert on arable farming. Some sort of grain. They probably spilled from the bird's stomach when she ate it (sorry squeamish people, sorry, I did warn you) but it gave the odd impression of her having laid a little trail of them to coax it into the house. Maybe she did. Maybe she's out there right now with a little bag of cheese pieces, luring unsuspecting mice to a violent death. Run away, little critters! Run for your lives!

From tiny acorns, mighty piles of crap do grow

The cat is going a bit weird and excitable over my nail polish. She keeps trying to lick it and chew it off. Is there catnip in nail varnish?

I was supposed to be going for a walk on Hampstead Heath today, but it's pouring down, so we've taken a raincheck (ha!). This leaves me, once again, without a plan for the day, which inevitably leads to me walking upstairs, looking at the huge pile of clothes in the corner of my room and then walking away again. I don't have room to fit all my clothes into my wardrobe and drawers, which really means I should do a big sort out, but I don't know where to start. Massive quantities of it doesn't actually fit me anymore, but I'm cagey about throwing it away. What if I put the weight back on? I'll have nothing to wear.
I think I may have been a squirrel in a former life. Quite aside from the clothes mountain, I have endless stacks of books, which I couldn't bear to get rid off, and numerous odd containers full of 'stuff'. Stuff with sentimental value, stuff that might come in handy some day, stuff that just doesn't have an assigned place to be, so ends up in a 'stuff' box. And of course, having so much junk, I have a squirrel-like tendency to forget where a specific thing is. Staple gun? Yes, I have one of those! Erm....
Just don't ask about the stash of acorns under the living room carpet.

Things that make me smile No.67

Somebody just pointed me towards the Savage Chickens page, and I immediately stumbled across this comic. I may have to start being good.

Season of mists...

It's beginning to feel ever so slightly autumnal down here. The last few days have had a new bite in the wind, and my toesies have been hinting to me that it may be time to put the duvet back on my bed. I even have a conker in my coat pocket. It's all prompting me to empty my online shopping bags of floaty maxi dresses and flippy cotton skirts, and refill them with faux fur, shearling and velvet. Of course I still can't afford to actually buy any of these clothes, so it's all a bit of a waste of time really. Window shopping for the digital age. But then what else am I supposed to do while I'm unemployed? I'm trying to fill the day with productive things like knitting or working on my sign language, but there's only so much time you can spend on such things before you start to go a bit doolally, and I'm quite doolally enough to begin with. On the plus side, I finally dug out Firefly from the back of the shelf and started watching it. I acquired it when I was working on my dissertation, and then I went straight into exam revision, so I developed a bit of a Pavlovian response to it, where every time I looked at it I got an intense feeling of guilt, as if I had far more important things to do. Now, fortuitously, I have nothing more important to do, and it really is brilliant. Why would they cancel it? It's a mystery.

Wakey wakey

I fell asleep on the tube on the way home last night, which is rarely a good idea. Happily I live at the end of the line, and was woken up when the train got there by a tiny, elderly Venezuelan man. I know he was Venezuelan because it emerged we were going in the same direction, and I ended up walking most of the way home with him. I wouldn't normally pick up strange men at train stations, but it's hard to feel threatened by a five foot nothing octogenarian who tells you that you remind him of a dog he had when he was a little boy . Apparently it had hair just like mine. I can only assume it was a red setter. Anyway, my new best friend chattered away to me until the time came to go our separate ways, at which point he uttered the words I hear so often from the old people who talk to me at bus stops and in supermarkets:
"You know....you seem like a nice girl....I have a son......"
I have to wonder whether these men know that their parents are pimping them out to every random girl who has the manners to smile and nod while they talk. And do all ageing relatives do this? Do I need to worry that my Grandma is trying to sell me off to every nice young lad who gets her the washing powder from the top shelf in the Co-op? And if so, what do I do about it? Tell her to stop? Or give her a list of my requirements and send her forth?

Vet-tastic

When I picked up my cat from the vet last week, I spoke to the receptionist and she called through to the office.

"Hi, I have a Miss Megan M******** here to pick up her cat Molly, and a Mrs Molly R****** to pick up her dog Megan."

Classic.

popularity

A woman in the library was trying to persuade her child, who was about seven years old, to take out a book entitled How to be Popular. A fairly heinous message to try and force on a child, I'm sure you'll agree, but the kid's response was wonderful.
"But I don't want to be popular, Mummy" she said. "I have two friends. That's lots."

A well-shod shell

Oh dear, a whole fortnight without posting. Bad blogger! Still, now that my library contract is over, I'll have a fair bit of time on my hands. The silver lining of unemployment?
Incidentally, I didn't get that job I wanted. I was horribly disappointed, but a little bit of a cry and a slightly larger bit of wine cheered me up, as did this:



I challenge you to watch this and not smile!