Recently in General Category
Finally I have a claim to fame. Searching for "Hairstyles of the 1970's" on Live Search brings up not only two pictures of Grandma Fawcett but one of yours truly. Click the image to see a larger screenshot. I'm finally famous for my lack of style. (I wasn't doing the searching - I found it in the logs. Honest).
I've been tagged by someone different for a change. Contessa over at 1001 Ways To Be Naked not only has an interesting title for her blog, but she's also a parent to twins, takes some superb photographs and has a fun sense of humour to boot.
The rules:
1. Get tagged
2. List five things that have not been revealed on your blog.
3. Tag five others.
I'm not sure what is harder: Coming up with five things or tagging five people who read this blog!
Anyway, here goes:
1) I almost drowned when I was about 13 in the school pool. I can't swim. We were playing water polo. I was on the team defending the deep end and I was (and still am) quite short. Oops.
2) I once had a court case for avoiding paying the fare on a train. I used to travel by train to work on a daily basis, travelling about 15 miles but having to swap trains half-way through. With downsizing most of the village train stations did away with the person manning the ticket office and introduced "Permit to Travel" machines. The idea of these is that you put some money in, got a temporary ticket and then exchanged it at the first available opportunity for a real ticket where you would also pay the difference between the permit and the ticket. I used to put the minimum in (about 5 pence) and if the ticket conducters didn't come around on the train I used to get to travel all the way to the destination for that price. Sweet.
One Friday after work I was only going back to the changeover point which was the main city station and caught a taxi to my brother's house. A plain-clothes British Rail guy caught up with me as I was exiting the station and asked to see my ticket. I'd already ditched the permit in a bin. Lots of feeble excuses followed. He wrote down most of them and read them back to me.
I received his report from the magistrates court and it was completely different to what I had said and made me look more of a fool than I already was. Me being me I didn't want to go to court so I just let it go and they sent me a fine of around 150 quid. I've had bigger phone bills!
3) I've sung on stage with a couple of bands. Well, had the microphone thrust in my face for a few lines of songs. One was a covers band where I've been known to help out with vocals on Black Sabbath, Guns n' Roses, AC/DC, the Beatles, the Stones and even Gary Glitter. The other band I sang with was a cover of a Slade Christmas song. I was pissed. Say no more. (I won't do Karaoke though)
4) When I was pretending to be a metalhead in the late 80's I had to hide from my friends that I secretly liked Belinda Carlisle and some other pop stuff of the era. That would have been like coming out of the closet to admit it at the time.
5) I once stole some money. From a church of all places! I can say that I was lead on by the guys I hung around with. We were on a primary school trip to the local church in my village and there was a small cup containing probably no more than two pounds in loose change. Between at least two of us we pilfered the money and went and bought something with high sugar content from the shops after school. I don't feel guilty now because in 1997, while we were showing some overseas visitors around the village I grew up in, we stopped by the church and while no-one was looking I put around five pound back in the collection box. Even with inflation I think they made a profit. There have been no near misses with lightning bolts, so I think I've been forgiven.
I tag: Amanda, Miss Smack, Jo and ... umm ... no-one else reads this blog so I'll have to stick to just those three.
Yesterday afternoon we took a trip down to Glenelg for the first time in ages to meet up with Amanda and her clan who were back in Adelaide for a brief visit from some far-flung place 10kms past Woop-Woop.
'Manda came over with her hubby G and their three kids, the twins G & K and the littl'un P. Ab is the same age as G & K and our twins are the same age (ish) as P. Ab seemed to get on ok with G & K which was great and our twins just seemed to be in a world of their own - they aren't always the most sociable but at least they weren't telling the other kids off.
Ab had been on an excursion to Cleland with school so she was a bit knackered and the twins were tired but motored on through the evening regardless.
Glenelg really has changed since our last visit. More food places, more apartments and Magic Mountain (which was still standing when we were last there) has now been replaced by the funky but heavily over-priced The Beach House. I can see what they are trying to do and it does seem like a very fun place for kids, but just think of poor old Mum and Dad who would have to re-mortgage the house just to spend a couple of hours there. A big thumbs down to the staff who looked and acted bored. The dickhead on the dodgems (or doldrums as Ab calls them) grunted once and pointed a couple of times but didn't say anything comprehensible.
So after an hour playing some arcade games at that place we headed out for something to eat and just to keep the kids amused we grabbed some Macca's. After that we wandered up the main street and then back down to the beach to watch the sun go down while some mad Polish athletes from the World Police & Fire Games tried to take a dip in the ocean. Joe loved watching the planes take off. I must admit I think I still love watching them too.
It was great to catch up with Amanda again, particularly getting to meet her family for the first time, even if it was only for a short amount of time.
The sea air yesterday has left me completely buggered today though.
Err. Umm. So we went and bought the TV anyway. And the sound system. And the digital receiver. So much for the cheap option ;-) We just need to find something to put the damn thing on as the entertainment unit we wanted at Ikea is no longer available. We must have visited about ten shops today trying to find something similar, but with us being fussy buggers we ended up with nothing.
On the bright side my toe is getting better and more pink. I managed to wear shoes all weekend after going half-shoe/half-sandal for the last week. Not this winters look, apparently.
Off to bed. I'm completely stuffed.
Found this on another blog and thought I'd make one as I have nothing better to do right now.
Oh dear. More pics from the archives. School photos this time. I don't think I need to say anything else because the hairstyles (or lack thereof) speak for themselves.
Search results that led people to my humble abode have dramatically increased this month. The thing I can't work out is that Hives accounts for 107 visitors. Some 30+ used Satan to find me. That's scary. It's not like I have mentioned them more than I talk about boobs, surely?
In the meantime I just went through some old belongings of mine (funny how your life can fit in one box) and found some documentation for my two brushes with the law. Maybe that's a different blog entry or two, but the combined total of 200 quid in fines was nothing compared to the phone bill for calling Jo from the UK which came to almost 350 pounds. (Damn I miss the pound symbol on my keyboard - thank F££k for Character Mapper). This was a time where I didn't earn very much.
The other thing that scares me today is that I found a ticket for the Cambridge Corn Exchange (the local music venue in my home town) which was to see American rockers Skid Row on their Subhuman Beings tour on 7th November 1995. For the life of me I don't remember ever seeing Skid Row live and I wouldn't have missed that gig for the world... I'm getting old. Very old.
Adelaide Cup weekend and I don't know who won the race. I also don't care. I got a day off work and that's all that counts, except it was the Grand Opening of our manufacturing facility so I ended up having to be in the office most of the day. Luckily I get a day credited but I'm not sure if it was worth it for all of the hassles we had today.
Picture this: senior managers from head office in Germany, local politicians and the mayor, company colleagues from Korea, China and the States all on-site for some speeches, unveiling of a plaque, nibbles, wine and a tour of the plant. What happens? The production line shits itself big time and we have no frickin' idea why. Thankfully it's not an area I am 100% responsible for and we now have folks overseas working on the issue. They built the damn thing, they can fix it.
On top of the shit day at the office and the stinking migraine I had between 3-6 in the afternoon, I also did this on Sunday:
I was attacked by a sofa that went mental and tried to chop my feet off at the ankles. Luckily I managed to jump out the way, aimed a kick at the offending piece of heavy furniture and fractured my little toe. It immediately felt different to other knocks I've had to my little toes on furniture, door ways, etc (I have a track record of kicking things absent mindedly, obviously). I remember feeling or hearing a crack and Jo got me some ice pretty quickly. Jo and her friend gave me grief about it, calling me a wuss. I would say I had the last laugh, but I didn't. Male + pain = immense physical distress. (Side note: in the picture you can see the bizarre growth I mentioned here in item 3. Technically it's a polyp. Betcha glad you came?)
Within 20 minutes I was back on my feet doing what I had been doing previously, but more carefully. I then cooked the roast dinner for the family as I had promised and just before I'd finished I noticed my toe was going purple.
After the kids were in bed I went down to A&E to check out the nurses get it checked out, some four hours or so later. Three hours earlier they had 60 people in the queue. When I got there I was only behind about ten people - I find the occupants of an A&E waiting room quite interesting. Last night we had the criminal in handcuffs, flanked by two cops. There were two guys who'd had some beers and received punches in seperate incidents. One looked like he would kark it there and then. There was a girl who had an allergic reaction to a wasp sting (at least my reaction was mildly more interesting). One woman had turned up after crushing her wrist and probably breaking it quite badly and another was quite intent on letting the waiting room hear her story about violently chucking up several times more than we needed.
Anyway, after two hours waiting I got called in and sheepishly left within five minutes. I had suspected that they wouldn't x-ray as I'd heard about broken little toe experiences from other people. All the doc did was wrap tape around the offending toe and the one next to it. He wrapped it so tight my walking was worse after the taping than it was before.
Saturday was a hot day (37 degrees) so we didn't do much. I investigated new TV's and then spent the rest of the day torn up about spending the best part of five grand on a complete new system. We have (for now) decided on a cheaper alternative to get us going and then we'll upgrade over the coming years. After all, it's not essential.
So that was the long weekend in reverse. Tomorrow will be fun at work as the problem is still not resolved, but at least it's an RDO so there is no production and that gives us time to test things out properly.
How quickly can you type the alphabet? I managed 6.047 seconds on my first try and haven't been able to beat it since. Most of my efforts are between 6.5 and 6.9. Have a go and leave a comment on how well you went.
