Thursday 23 February 2012

Please tell me this is not for real

Card through the door today from local estate agent bearing the phrase "Sale your home for £xxxx". Sale? SALE? Please tell me this is local idiot who can't proof-read. Please say it's not entered the English language.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Useful skills for the 21st century?

Daughter went on bushcraft day yesterday. Learnt how to light fire without matches, build a shelter using a tarp (yes, I know how to do these, I've duplicated enough Ray Mears programmes in my time) and how to skin a squirrel.

That's right, squirrel. Already dead, I hasten to add. They also cooked it, but weren't allowed to eat it due to Health & Safety. I think that's probably just as well

Monday 20 February 2012

Saturday 18 February 2012

This and that

On popping out to buy a phone top-up voucher for younger son this morning I noticed in the confectionary near the till that Cadbury "Olympic mascots" were 2 for £1. Except that the goods on offer were actually Aero lambs, Cadbury mini eggs and Maltesers. When I commented on this to the lad on the till he asked "What's an Olympic mascot? Is it a lion or something?" Seems I'm not the only one with a lack of interest in the Olympics, although I have heard of the mascots - I just can't remember their names as it's all so twee.

In other news, older son has had his car wrapped. At first we thought he'd had a respray and were horrified as that surely would have knocked at least 3 grand off its value. There was nothing wrong with it before, he just fancied a different colour. So now it's white instead of silver, white being the new black as it were. This is now being seen as "a good thing" in this household, as it's protecting the original paintwork and can be "unwrapped" at any time to return to the silver. Just think, if I'd written this paragraph twenty years ago you wouldn't even know what I was talking about.

Monday 6 February 2012

I be liking local

When I went out at lunchtime today the sun was shining, the birds were singing, it was quite warm - I thought this feels like Spring. Are we living in the same country as all these folks with snow?

We did have snow on Saturday. It lasted about half an hour, was all of about a millimetre thick and then it turned to sleety stuff for about ten minutes. It was quite cold but then it warmed up. I don't know what the rest of the country is getting so worked up about.

Daughter got quite worked up this evening. Older son brought home a bike that friends of his had bought for their son from Toys****Us. It cost £250 and they had to put it together themselves. Which of course they couldn't do. So it was brought round for Daughter (that's right, the wannabe professional mountain biker) to fix it so it worked. Which she did, in as far as you can make crap work, but she then pointed out that they could have bought a far superior bike, from a named brand, for £30 less from the bike shop where she works, and it would have been delivered fully assembled and with a free service in a month's time. When will people learn that mass retailing is bad, and that local traders are good?

We have a new initiative in Brizzle today - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-16852326 - should be interesting. There's probably enough outside the box thinkers around here to make it work. Let's see.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Where have I gone wrong?

Sorry about the lack of posting for the last month. It's been January, and as an exam invigilator, that has meant lots of work up at school doing - well very little actually, as when you're invigilating an exam there is bugger all to do. You're not allowed to read or do the crossword or sudoko or anything really because you're supposed to be ensuring that all is going well with the exam. This is usually not a problem, unless you have a three-hour sixth form languages exam, which is exceptionally hard going.

Anyhow I've been busily doing that, along with an occasional stint in the finance office ('cos I'm good at figures and Excel and things like that).

Oh and we've also had an interview for a job (that's not the royal 'we', that's me and the OH) which, despite not even being interviewed first time around (didn't score enough points on their scale), actually got the job after all. It's a one person for a year, or in our case two people over two years, position. It actually means we can offer support for a far longer period, and also the time we spend will be much more effective. (It's all very well training someone to do something, but then you have to wait for them to go out and do it, and then come back, before you can move onto the next stage.)

Plus MiL was carted off to hospital because she was trying to starve herself, and we've had to go down and take her to appointments for cataract operations (in which they supposedly saw no need for her to have anything other than a local anaesthetic, despite the fact that she was bound to have started questioning what was going on halfway through) and is rapidly losing much touch with reality.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post tonight having seen younger son's homelearning. (Not called homeWORK these days - probably because of the lack of work involved)

He had to compile a document for his "dream house". So having chosen a Ferrari, an Alien Ware Aurora (don't know what that is), a Jackson Leather Corner Sofa, a PS3, and Xbox 360, a house in Carmel (as in California).... I said to him are you choosing a "real house" next, in which case you'll be choosing a sofa from DFS .......... he said, that's where his "dream"sofa was coming from, 'cos that's the only place he knows where you can get a sofa. I could weep.