Morning observations...

Monday 10th August 2009

So a couple of things came to mind this morning and I thought it best to write them down before they vanished into the depths of my woeful memory.

The first was just an observation; something I had noticed before but didnt really think about.

Alex and I were driving past the gas station on the way to the train station and a police car was stopped there. One of the officers was re-fueling their vehicle, a marked police vehicle. As I said I had seen this before but it suddenly occurred to me that there seemed to be something a little skewed about this. It just seems odd that their vehicles aren’t somehow or other always filled with fuel...

I quite often see police vehicles tearing up the road that this particular gas station is situated at the top of, lights flashing and sirens blaring. And for a moment I imagined the scene inside one of these vehicles:

** Unit 452 responding to the incident logged at 16:42 by Comms central. Incident number 23392. Complainant has witnessed offender’s breaking and entering neighboring property at 415 Gt North Road we will be on site in approximately 2 mins. Awww shit, sorry Comms we’re going to have to stop and get some gas.**

Wait... what?

*****************************

The other thing that came to mind this morning was how much we take for granted the ease of telecommunication these days.

If I could have imagined the ability to carry around a portable communication device that would connect me with the rest of the world and was powered by a battery that would last upwards of a week when I was a boy, I would have considered it only that – imaginary!

I became involved with electronics when I was a very young boy somewhere around 9 or 10 years old.

The Z80 processor was the height of computing technology in those days. Communication with my best buddy who lived next door was restricted to wet strings attached to tin cans and even then we had to go outside to use them in order to keep the string stretched taught and in a straight line so it couldn’t touch anything else. In fact by raising our voice a little more than what was required in order to use the tin can phones we could hear each other anyway!

A year later we had managed to string a four cored wire between his house and mine by utilizing the fence around my family’s swimming pool and the very large back lawn that separated his house from mine.

We then connected several old telephone handsets and some batteries to the cable to form the basis of a very crude telephone. This was entirely more satisfactory and a vast improvement over the tin cans and wet string. Unfortunately it did make us extremely unpopular with my buddy’s father when shortly after the initial installation of this ground breaking cable laying his father decided to mow the lawn... It took him several hours and a great many Dutch cuss words to disentangle the mower blade.

So for me this tiny mobile device I carry in my pocket is still a source of amazement despite understanding the complexity of its operation.

I like that feeling.

I recommend standing back from oneself and looking at that small device and being amazed.

It wasn’t always like this, remember...

Currently listening to:

Nightmares on Wax - Smokers Delight

...ahhhhummmm

Today, Thursday August 6^th is to be the official first day in my quest to remove “ummm” from my spoken vocabulary.

It need only be removed from my spoken vocabulary because funnily enough it has never been something that I would write. Sure I might use it deliberately if I wanted to but it never pops up in my prose of its own apparent free will, unlike the manner it does whenever I’m speaking.

I tend to use ‘ummm’ as a filler in normal conversation to ‘stop the gap’ in those micro moments of awkward silence between words.

I also use it, embarrassingly, to fool myself into believing that I am improving the continuity of my speech.

Being of a somewhat ‘know it all’ disposition I have also learnt that continuously fitting ‘ummm’ into a conversation at the right time will not allow the person I am speaking to any chance of getting a word in, thereby allowing me to continue on telling them where something is at without fear of distraction by sidetracking interruption or the facts!

By the same token I often get so carried away with myself that my mouth seems to take off at a hundred miles an hour leaving my brain in the dust because it can only muster a piddly forty miles an hour. ‘Ummm’ then gives me the time I need for my brain to catch up with my mouth.

In reality I have no need for ‘stop the gap’ tools as in all honesty I quite enjoy awkward silences, it gives me an opportunity to observe facial expression and read body language so that I can determine honesty, genuine behavior or lack thereof.

As far as improving speech continuity; that is bollicks! From my viewpoint men whose speech involves a lot of ‘ummming’ present themselves as uncertain and lacking in confidence with regard to the topic of conversation they are currently engaged in. And when it comes to using ‘ummm’ as a means to do all the talking in the hope of convincing someone of how right you are – well that is just wrong! Likewise, if your mouth out distance’s your brain whilst talking you could be setting yourself up for a well deserved punch in the face!

So today hopefully will be the beginning of a much improved me and all I have to do is stop saying ‘ummm’

We’ll see...

...of genetic stupidity and corned beef

I was standing in my best mate’s kitchen the other day while his wife was cooking corned beef and I was reminded about the tale of Brendon and the corned beef of slow and painful death...

I had recently separated from my partner of many years and had moved into an old friends place.

This was pretty much the epitome of 30 year old bachelor pads; grubby, untidy, unkempt, boozy, loud and furnished with mostly tired and decrepit second hand armchairs.

Oh yes and there was the dog, which for the most part had the run of the place and didn't hold much in the way of respect for cleanliness!

One of the blokes that spent a great deal of time with us during this time owned a small farmlet. From time to time he would manage a home kill which saw us all overloading the death out of our freezers in an effort to fit the better part of quarter a butchered cow in them.

So this being the first time Brendon had had to deal with this amount of meat he went about it all wrong and rather than apply any type of intelligence to the sorting and stacking of the different cuts he simply piled it all in a la one humongous lump.

It wasn't until nearly 24 hours later that I thought to ask him if he had remembered to turn it all so that it didn't just become one enormous frozen lump completely locked together and irremovable from the freezer.

Of course he had not.

So we set about trying to separate the bags of assorted cuts from each other. Fortunately the sheer amount of meat involved and the reasonably small size of the freezer meant that most of the meat had not completely frozen solid and with a bit of effort we managed to unlock the bags from each other and the freezer baskets and unload all of it out of the freezer into piles which we stacked on the nearest available armchairs. I then sorted the cuts out and we re-loaded the bags back into the freezer where they could safely continue the freezing process with out fear of becoming locked together.

What neither of us realized was that one of the several corned silversides we had stacked on one armchair had slipped down the back of the chair and being old and tatty had fallen straight down the back, come out the bottom and landed on the floor under the chair. This old chair was one of those rocker types that you would find old men smoking a pipe in at night and had a little type of skirt around the bottom of it that was supposed to hide all the ugly mechanisms that allowed it to rock and swivel. So although the packet of meat had fallen to the floor it was invisible under the skirt of the chair.

I don’t know how it is everywhere else in the world but in New Zealand raw corned meat often comes in vacuum packed bags that contain some of the brine the meat was originally corned in.

These bags are tough so as not to leak at any time and this was proven to be the case as the bag sat undiscovered beneath the chair until discovered by Brendons somewhat eccentric mother several months later when she happened to push the vacuum cleaner head under the chair (cleaning was never high on our list of priorities) and scooped it out.

Now the bag, being of the toughest type, hadn't ruptured (although I can only suppose it must have gone through a ballooning stage) so there had been no leaks on the floor or therefore smells and Brendons mother swears, despite her actually picking it up and carrying it to the kitchen sink, that it didn't smell at close proximity. It did however have a definite green tinge but the foolish old woman neglected to deem that as important and merely considered that this was something Brendon had taken out of the freezer for dinner, she also wrongly assumed that the ill mannered dog had swiped it off the bench and hidden it under the chair for treats later, when able to sneak it from the house.

So having made an ineffectual attempt at cleaning the un-cleanable mess that was Brendons house she buggered off leaving the festering lump of several months old meat to continue its steady decay in the sink.

When Brendon arrived home from work later that Friday afternoon he spied the dubious lump in the sink and dimwittedly assumed that his mom had taken it out of the freezer for him earlier that day. (Yes, yes I know, what was his mother doing in his house cleaning when he wasn't there etc, etc – that’s another story...) Anyways – I wasn't there at the time but I can only assume that during the aforementioned ‘ballooning’ of the bag the smell was contained and the lump had become so fetid that it had gone beyond smelling or that Brendon was just as big of a moron as his mother, because without further ado he put it in a pot with a couple of litres of water and began the process of cooking it.

Again, having not been there at the time I will have to assume that either the water or the boiling process re-energized the smell because when I did return later that evening with our mate John there was a distinct odor to the place. When I questioned the hapless Brendon as to the source he commented rather inconsequentially that it had been a lot worse during the first stage of boiling and had gotten a lot better with subsequent water changes! Hmmmmm.

The friend John who I had been out with also happened to be the supplier of the meat and we were both fairly puzzled as to its distinctly greenish tinge around the outer edge and the curious odor which I thought I might have come across once before whilst working in a morgue. But being young and hungry (and a bit pissed and stoned) and seeing how Brendon had already scoffed nearly half of the chunk, we decided there was nothing to be lost by trying a little bit...

I managed a slice but decided it wasn't anything like the corned silverside I had ever tried and the spicing of it was downright funky. John, who I suspect was acting on guilt managed several slices before giving it away as “a little strange” and declaring that Brendon had added something to it whilst it was cooking and for lack of better words, ‘made a right fuck of it’.

John and I trundled off to his farm a little later on and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk which had the net result of my not heading back to Brendons until much later the following day after making a partial recovery.

Both John and I had noticed a degree of gassiness the previous night but nothing that you wouldn't expect when ‘tipping in’ the amounts of beer we were accustomed to.

When we finally made it back to Brendons it was to find him asleep in the fetal position dressed only in his under shorts on the grimy floor of the toilet.

Strange.

...and a little disturbing.

So of course we left him where he was amongst the dirt scum and pubic hairs and set about having a few beers to settle our hangovers. At some point he must have roused himself and headed off to bed. He emerged many beers later to inform us of the terrible plight that had befallen him, punctuated by his being interrupted every few minutes by a need to rush to the toilet and dry retch in sphincter clenching bursts that made my eyes water.

Well of course John and I nearly laughed our cocks off and spent quite awhile slapping each other on the back and coming to grips with that strange gassiness we had experienced the night before. We then spent several more minutes laughing at poor Brendon until finally he took the easier option and went back to alternating between his bed and the toilet.

We were tempted to clean up some of the vomit around the place but I had a sneaking suspicion that the dog was up to the job anyway because she had promptly developed a nasty dose of the shits and there were definately wet patches around the place that looked like they might have been vomit piles at one stage but now had the distinct appearance they had been cleaned up with a wire brush...

John and I decided to head out again later that evening and just as we were about to leave we heard a weak and frankly, rather pathetic wailing coming from Brendons bedroom.

“John... John”

so we stop and John hollers out a hearty “yeah mate?”

...”could you get me... a glass of water?”

Yeah, yeah I know it’s not all that funny but were all reasonably hard blokes back then so it was pretty amusing to us at the time and it took us both a few seconds to compose ourselves so as to not appear too callous, before John shot through to the kitchen to get the poor bugger a glass of water.

In all fairness as we were getting to the top of the street we did stop and ask each other if we thought he was going to be o.k. – only for a second mind before the lure of beer had us on our way.

We got back to Brendons late Sunday night to find his condition was quite a lot worse!

Luckily his mom had got wind of his illness and decided to come and check on him. One glance at his woeful condition and she whisked him off to the A and E at Auckland hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe bacterial and viral digestion tract infection!

They had kept him over the Saturday night and had released him Sunday after having pumped him full of anti-bacterial drugs and loaded him up with so many pills if you would have shaken him, he would have rattled.

It took him nearly two weeks to come right but to be honest after this episode I could never look at either Brendon or his mother and think they could actually ever be right.

Currently listening to:

del Amitri – Waking Hours

Ben Harper – White Lies for Dark Times

...of Range Rovers and work vans

I thought it was time that I took a break from being the object of ridicule for awhile.

Yes I did receive a couple of emails saying ‘ohhh do tell the story of the heated handle bar grips’ but that was some fourteen years ago and it will take a little time for me to recall the details exactly.

In the meantime I thought to recount the unfortunate tale that befell a friend of mine who shall, in the interest of discretion remain nameless.

O.k – So let me set the scene, because that for me is the true essence of this particular fail/tale.

My friend; lets call him, “friend X” just to make things easy, had lived all of his life, along with myself and most of our other mutual friends in the area commonly referred to as West Auckland.

Auckland is divided along the four points of the compass and by being extremely and rudely stereotypical can be surmised thus: North Auckland is home to the more professional people of Auckland with large expensive homes, harbor views and rates to match. East Auckland has a wealthy Asian population also sporting expansive new homes and rates to suit. South Auckland houses the lower socioeconomic groups, mostly Maori and Polynesian and is sometimes, perhaps unfairly, described as the violent crime quarter of Auckland. West Auckland is seen, to a greater degree by the other quarters as the fast car, loud party, hard drinking, drug centre of Auckland. (I did say it was going to be stereotypical and rude!)

As with any area in which you spend most of your life it becomes, ‘home’ with most of the downsides minimized so that you become reasonably attached, in a territorial kind of way regardless.

Not so for friend X.

He had decided that he was tired of the loutishness and ‘hoonism’ that in my opinion adds a degree of charm and interest to the area. And so he decided to make the move upwards to the north of Auckland and so be free of cars doing burnouts in the middle of his street in the dead of the night or waking up to find somebody had lost control of their vehicle in the early hours and taken out the better part of the front fence and accompanying shrubberies.

Fair enough I suppose. But somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice kept saying “good one, I wonder how your new neighbors are going to feel about you moving in and completely lowering the tone”.

Anyway; a week after moving in and friend X is quick to extol upon us the virtues of living in his more up market place of residence. “No more loud cars, reckless drivers, roaming dogs etc, etc blah, blah, blah" - whatever!

Now friend X was the owner of several vehicles one of which was a rather grumpy looking Range Rover powered by a 400cu Chevy big block which had been ‘uglied’ up by having a Series 2 Land Rover body perched upon it and a roll cage thrown in for good measure. He was also a tradesman and had a long wheelbase van for use in the day to day running of his business.

One evening in that first week of moving in, he returned home from work in the dim light of early dusk and still being a little inexperienced with the steep driveway of the new house, misjudged the width of the driveway and ended up with two wheels off the edge.

Given the speed of the descending darkness he made the decision to leave the van where it was until the morning when he could, with some assistance from his housemates haul the vehicle back onto the driveway proper.

He awoke reasonably late in the morning to find that while he had slept his housemates who needed to be at work much earlier that same morning - had left. Not wishing to face his ferocious waking temper (or breath) they had chosen to let him sleep on. The grounds for this decision being fairly based upon the premise that he knew they had to leave early and if he required assistance he would ensure he was ready when they were.

By keeping to the very far left of the driveway they had squeezed past his trapped vehicle and merrily headed off to their respective workplaces.

Now, being a reasonably practical sort of chap, friend x took it upon himself to recover from this predicament unassisted.

He went about it thus: He backed the Rangie down the driveway from the house and parked it within towing rope distance from the front of the work van. He then attached a stout 4WD recovery strap to the back of the Rangie and the front of the van.

I know what your thinking – how does one person tow two vehicles? Put that to one side for a moment because that is really only half of the picture – we’ll come back to that.

Let me attempt to paint you a picture of this driveway.

Not only is it very steep but at the bottom of it and running perfectly perpendicular to it was a fairly busy road. This road merely divided the steep hill that friend x’s house was situated on the top half of. Directly across this road was another driveway which was equally steep but of course was headed down the hill. At the bottom of that driveway was what you would call “the neighbor across the roads” house. Hopefully you get the picture – steep hill, road running across it, some houses up from the road, some houses down from the road.

Now where was I... Ah yes – so how does one person tow two vehicles? Or more appropriately, why would one person want to tow two vehicles on their own given the circumstance!

Well lets face it we’re men and we may all be brave under pressure but you would be foolish to say we were the smartest of the sexes... Enough said.

So friend x piles himself into the four wheel drive from hell and figures that just a gentle yank ought to do it as he has no intention of attempting to pull the van anyfurther than simply back on to the concrete.

Well this proves to be a little tougher than at first expected due to the rut the vans spinning tires have created multiplied by the thickness of the driveway concrete.

Thus begins the real tale of woe.

Having unsuccessfully given the van several light tugs (if such a thing is really possible with 400cubes and a low range gearbox suited for climbing vertical glaciers) friend x not known for his tireless patience makes the foolhardy decision to bury the go pedal.

Yay! - The van pops magically out of its ruts, one more small yank and she will be on the driveway completely.

Funny isn’t it, how disaster always strikes when success is so close you can taste it.

With a sickening lurch the Rangie leapt forward just as friend x had suspected it would when the van finally rolled up on to the driveway – but no.

The van had in actuality made it up on to the driveway but at almost the precise same moment the towing rope came undone at the van end!

Unlike most stories where in situations like this, time seems to slow and everything else slows with it, this was not so for the van and its phantom driver.

Being that it was rolling backwards down a very steep driveway and the steering wheels were at the back it simply followed the contours of the driveway picking up speed at an altogether alarming rate.

By the time friend x had clambered from the Rangie and begun to run frantically after the fast retreating van it had accelerated to a frightening 50 – 60km/h. Not daunted by the fast approaching end of the driveway the van appeared to gather even greater speed before launching itself out of the driveway and tearing blindly across the road where as fate would have it, the neighbor’s driveway lay in wait with welcoming arms.

A horrified friend x had sprinted to the bottom of his driveway and across the street in time to see the accursed van gather ever more speed on the neighbors driveway only an instant before burying itself with a horrendous smashing of glass, crashing and tearing noise, half of it’s own length deep into the neighbors house.

As he stood there wringing his hands in woe and wondering which emergency service to call first two things happened.

One was the recalling of a vague memory to do with the parking brake in the Rangie, the second was a strange rattling noise coming from his driveway.

And so, just when friend x thought things could hardly get worse, they did.

Hello! – here comes the fucking Rangie.

In his haste to abandon the 4WD upon seeing the van making an escape from the towing rope friend x had failed to adequately engage the parking brake and now the 4WD too was hurtling down the driveway apparently intent on rejoining its escaped companion.

In a frustratingly inconvenient display of arrogance time now choose this exact moment to slow down. And with agonizing clarity and a painful feeling of impending doom friend x watch the behemoth of a 4WD sail across the road, down the neighbors driveway to plant itself with a sickening crunch two feet deep into the only remaining undamaged panels and windows in the front of the luckless van. This also had the undesirable effect of pushing the van the rest of the way into the bedroom on suite that had taken the brunt of its impact, ripping the bathroom vanity from the wall, rupturing the associated hot and cold water pipes from the taps to send showers of water over the whole rotten mess.

I suppose if there can be an upside it would have to be that through the whole debacle nobody was injured in the least, so long as injured pride is not taken into the equation.

But what will forever remain ingrained in my memory are my friend’s initial reasons to move out of west Auckland...

Currently listening to:

Pitbull – The Boatlift

SuperGroove - Postage

Of Electric Socks...

Entry for June 23, 2009

We are currently experiencing a bit of a cold snap in Auckland and across the country in general to be accurate.

The workshop that I spend the better part of my days in is rather large and the air conditioning still hasn’t been installed so it closely resembles the cool store in the local bottle shop until about one o’clock in the afternoon. By three in the afternoon the temperature begins a rapid decline back towards perfect beer temp again.

Being that our primary business is the manufacture of battery charging system for industry there is no shortage of energy available in the form of batteries and surprise, surprise, chargers in my immediate vicinity.
That, coupled with the cold got me to thinking that some electric socks would be just the ticket for keeping my feet warm while sitting at my desk.

I figured they didn’t have to be too flashy as they would spend most of the day under my desk inside shoes with my jeans or overalls over the top.
So Monday night just gone I sat myself down on the floor in my lab at home and proceeded to weave some thin nichrome wire through a pair of long woolen footy socks I had selected for the job.

It was quite a lot more work than I had envisaged but eventually, after multiple foot stabbings I managed to get the wire fairly evenly distributed around the feet and half way up the leg section of both socks. I super glued a couple of ceramic connectors just below the top of the socks to connect my power wires to and was reasonably happy that by folding the top of the socks down over the connectors the whole shebang would stay in position so long as I didn’t decide to move around too much.

I had spent a few hours that day designing and building a simple adjustment device that by my best reckoning would give more than enough control over the elements now woven into the socks. I then wasted little time connecting this to a battery of a type I knew we had plenty of at work.

Eureka!

Success is mine
Or so it did at first appear...

Because I had to weave the element through the socks the nichrome wire came into direct contact with my skin in places and although I could have simply put the electric socks over the top of another pair of ordinary socks to overcome this problem I felt that in some ways that was inefficient and to some degree defeated the point of electric socks on the whole. I figured that I should be able to adjust the power into the elements to a point where the wire was not uncomfortable against my bare skin, yet still produced enough heat to be of benefit.

It was during that adjustment that things went horribly awry!

For no apparently good reason my controller decided that it would choose that very moment to lose all semblance of control and go from near minimum to flat out!

I gauge myself as a reasonably adept electronics engineer but for some reason when it comes to experiments I conduct upon myself I show a frightening lack of foresight or consideration for potential failure and the associated consequences.

If you feel so inclined see how long it takes you to completely remove a pair of reasonably snug fitting, long footy socks...

The flurry of activity that took place on the floor of my lab was dynamic to say the least!

The socks went from comfortably warm to suitable for the cremation of rhinoceros in the blink of a now watering eye. To further add to the ensuing chaos, my cat Walt had come into the lab while I was weaving the wire into the socks and settled himself on top of a pile of magazines in one corner and at my first bellow had levitated a good two feet from the ground, doubled in size and lit out for the door, legs peddling at the speed of light.

Alas, his escape was not to be so easily executed for as soon as his frantically scrabbling legs hit the ground they came into claw contact with the pile of magazines he had been sitting upon and they proceeded to shoot out from under him like so many cards dealt from the hand of an experienced croupier and in his effort to correct his lack of forward motion he misjudged the gap in the door and collided heavily with the door frame. The impact of the collision was enough to knock him backwards and off his feet – for a Pico second!
In almost the same movement he was back on his feet and headed in my direction.
The look in his eyes was unnerving to say the least and for a moment I felt a touch of panic, only for a moment mind because within the next, he was in my lap all 11 kilo’s of him.
Despite the pain in my feet I felt every claw.
Caught between my overwhelming desire to throw him from my lap and through the half open door and the need to get the twin induction furnace’s off of my feet, I failed abysmally at both.
Sure, Walt sailed through the door but not before managing to just barely hook a single claw under the tip of one of my nostrils and drag the other outstretched paw down my arm.

I hit the floor, writhing in agony, screaming a foul torrent of cuss words and tore at the socks that now had the similar feeling I would imagine you could expect if you were wearing wasp nests as shoes.
All of this occurred in a matter of seconds and the several seconds longer it took to remove the socks seemed to be drawn out by some strange bend in the time space continuum giving me ample time to not only receive multiple small burns on my feet but a fairly decent number to my fingers in to the bargain.

I ran through the bi-fold doors that separate my lab from the bathroom and turned the shower on my feet and hands and despite my panic was relieved to find that the damage was pretty minimal with only a couple of tiny burns around my heels and several more on the top of my feet and toes.
It was while I was still standing in the shower looking wistfully at my scorched thumbs that the socks caught fire.

Shit!
Shit, shit, shit!

Get the wet flannel - back into the lab.

Shit! Sore feet!

Damnit not woolen socks after all - wool and nylon mix

SHIT!

Smoke alarms gone off!

Fuck!

YES WALT - I want to be outside too!

Oh for fucks sake the nylons melted and stuck to the floor!

FML!

...so the socks have joined the homemade electrolysis machine in the junk pile and will not be revisited.
As I said to a friend; I really should have learned my lesson from the motorcycle heated handgrip exercise because that too was an exceptional catastrophe.

– It is also, another story...



Currently listening to:

Cold War Kids - We Used To Vacation.
Sheryl Crow - Detours

Of mice and men...

Entry for June 09, 2009

Its been awhile but to be honest the busyness has been nothing more than mundane.


O.k, so this is one of those logs I am kind of hoping my daughter doesn’t come across until enough time has past that she might be able to see the funny side of it.

Alex has been looking after (if that’s really the right word for it, because it seems more to me like, held captive) two pet mice for the past two years.

She got them when they were very small and for quite some time they seemed more than happy to stay within the safe confines of their cozy wee cage. However as time came to pass and they became more adventurous they began to make nighttime forays out into the house to peruse the contents of the various rubbish bins situated throughout.

It was not uncommon for me to wake to the sound of Alex returning one or both of the wayward explorers back to their cage in the middle of the night having found that she was in fact sharing a bed with one or other or both!. Often we would notice them near one of the bedrooms and several hours later they would have returned themselves back into their cage, they seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased and in the end we gave up worrying too much as so long as they could get back in the cage we reasoned that they would at least be able to find plentiful food and water.

At first I was concerned about the possibility of interbreeding with locals who would often turn up from the fields out back whenever the weather started to turn cold. I was also concerned that mouse pee, no matter the miniscule size had a tendency to cause a powerful and long lasting odor that was extremely difficult to hunt down to source and certainly did nothing to make a house more welcoming.

This went on for quite sometime and I was pleased to find that neither of my fears were realized and although both Alex and I lived in constant fear that our cat would be found one morning proudly displaying the sad remains of Honey or Bella this too proved not to be the case. In all honesty I found it quite cute to discover one of these brave little ladies trotting around my feet in the kitchen, quite unperturbed by my presence. In some ways they were like really, really small cats.

Eventually one of the large field rats from outside decided to take up residence in the floor space below our dishwasher and before I had a chance to feed him the deadly green barley of horrible and intense thirst I believe he met with Honey and Bella because from that day to this, the two mice have never again left their cage under their own steam.

That was nearly a year ago and since that time Alex has grown and changed quite a great deal and the mice are not as attractive to her as they once were. As such they receive, in my belief the most frugal of attentions. Yes, she still feeds and waters them regularly but that is about the limit of interaction they have with their master these days.

So... last weekend I looked at these two (who I believed were looking at me pleadingly) and decided that their lives had more worth than old and forgotten toys and they simply deserved better than to be locked in a small cage never to be played with caressed or stroked and.... I took it upon myself to release them back to the wild.

Well it was the proper thing to do right?

I took them out into the back garden and found them a nice warm, dry and sheltered little spot up beside the house where the rain never gets to. There was plenty of dried grass for them to use as nesting material and lots of grass and flower seeds down by the soil for them to eat. There was also a large pile of old firewood that had been stacked right there but never used and it looked nothing short of perfect as a new lodging.

Sweet!

Problem solved.

Fast forward to today, Wednesday.

I hear Alex going into the spare room where the mice cage is... There’s the rattling noise of the mouse food container as food is poured into the bowl and then she emerges holding the water bottle. She fills it and returns to the spare room. I’m sitting in the kitchen, the hairs on the back of my neck all stood up and my sphincter drawn up to somewhere just below my neck, waiting, waiting... Next minute she appears at the door, flashes me her usual smile and heads off to her room to finish getting ready for school.

See – I thought to myself. You did the right thing; she didn’t even take the time to look for/at them and realize they aren’t there. So it was with a certain degree of relief that I went to shut the door to the room and pass a cursory glance at the now redundant cage...

Fuck me!
The little bastards had found their way back! And got back into the cage again!



Daryl. W

Currently listening to:
Blips via Blip.FM

Of policemen and speeding...

Entry for March 17, 2009

I was stopped by the Police while driving down country yesterday. Yeah o.k so admittedly I was getting along a little quickly but only a touch over 120. As soon as I saw him, way off in the distance I got off the go button pretty smartly but damn those automatic’s for just cruising along and not offering any engine braking!

There's something that really annoys me about getting speeding tickets on virtually empty roads that are quite safe in my humblest of opinions, for twice the speed they are rated for!

So... screeching u turn and flashing blue lights.

I pulled over to the shoulder as soon as I saw his indicator go on and already had my license out by the time he finally sauntered up to my window.

“Morning sir” he greets me in the most annoyingly supreme manner, knowing full well it is certainly not going to be a good morning for me at all.

“Are you aware how fast you were traveling back there sir” he offers (still looking far too superior for my liking).

“Well given that this is a highway and taking into account the way the lamp posts were flashing past the side windows I was indeed aware it was most unlikely that I was out for a stroll, so yes” I replied, hoping for all the world that I sounded half as sublime as he and all the while proffering my most placating benign smile. (...was that a twitch I saw in the corner of his mouth, couldn’t be, this is a Policeman, everybody knows the Police have no sense of humor).

“Sir, do you understand why I have asked you to stop”

“Well” I replied feeling my ‘please just fuck off and let me go smile beginning to slip’ “I suppose it would be too much to expect that you have pulled me over to compliment me on my exemplary driving skills – yes?”

I have never, ever in my life got away with anything when the Police are standing next to my window like this guy was. But he laughed! And I mean he really laughed.

“Look” he said, trying ineffectually to stifle his grin. “The reason I’ve asked you to stop is that the speed limit through this area is 100Km/h and you were a little in excess of that”.

“Ah yes, I did surmise as much” I offered, “Perhaps I was just being somewhat over zealous on the whole”.

“The truth is” he continued, “I clocked you doing 119 and you are quite welcome to come over to my vehicle and see the display for yourself”.

“No, no not at all” I gushed knowing I was completely defeated.

“So... all I wanted to say sir was, please, just slow it down a bit o.k, I know it’s only 19km over the limit but that seems to be where a lot of crashes are happening these days, 100 is the limit sir, not the target”. "So please watch your speed and have a nice day sir".

And with that he was gone.

No ticket!

There is a god!

Maybe he used to wear a blue uniform?

Gobsmacked does not come anywhere near it.

So yay! to the Police, or should I say yay! to that Policeman – I don’t even know your name but you have restored my faith in Policekind.

Currently listening to:

Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
The Black Crowes - Shake your Money Maker