So SAD

It's cold and miserable and I feel cheated.

Outside it's raining, there's a north-easterly wind (never a good thing) and it's all very grey.  When the clocks go back on Sunday I shall probably put the heating on.

I feel cheated because we haven't had a proper summer this year, so there's no sense of crops harvested, gathered in ready for the winter.  There's no sigh of satisfaction.

There's a deficiency of SUNSHINE.

Hibernation, anyone?

To continue the chicken theme ...

Living in Bristol, we get a fair amount of traffic news relating to motorways, but today it reached a new high/low/level of bizarreness(is that a word?  Should it be bizarrity, or something?)

To the north of us we have the M4 with important people travelling east (towards London) and people travelling west, getting away from it all (into Wales, albeit at a cost - the Severn bridges cost going west). 

And then to the left of us (well, if you look at a map it is on the left) we have the M5.  There are those (misguidedly) going north, ready to encounter the motorway system around Birmingham, Spaghetti Junction and all - this is a really shitty bit of road system.  And then there are those going south.  Apart from usual motorway traffic, these are all holidaymakers. 

It's usually pretty obvious when something has blocked the M5 as the alternative route (the A38) is at the bottom of our road.

But today, the excuse was a little out of the ordinary ...

"M5 at standstill due to 1,000 chickens on road"

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/M5-standstill-1-000-chickens-road/story-17089930-detail/story.html


(I'm sorry, the link should have been under the headline, as it were, but Blogger's playing up and won't display anything other than the actual link - technology, d'oh!)

Sorry, who did you say you are?

On Saturday I went to the library and on the way there I met a friend of one of my children, accompanied by her boyfriend. 

"Hello, what are you doing here?", I asked as I thought she should have been at uni and it seemed a bit early in the term for coming home for the weekend.

She launched into a detailed description of their plans for the day and I began to think I was not talking to who I thought I was. 

But it was only when she said "it's dad's birthday today" I realised that I was talking to C, a contemporary of my elder son, who's just lost her adoptive mother recently to cancer and not A, my daughter's friend who has never known her father (coming from a family of six children, all with different fathers - well apart from the twins, that is).

It occurred to me that it was interesting that both girls look so alike, both are pretty and lively and very intelligent, and they come from such vastly different backgrounds.

Still, luckily I don't think she realised that I thought she was someone else.

Shh! Don't tell Blue Witch about this post!

Heard a great story today.

Went into school to do a "training session" on drama filming with the young IT apprentice (who's actually about to start a proper job - yay, youngster who's got a job, good for him). No, that's me training him, not him training me.  Anyway, clearly a farce, so we ended up chatting about all sorts before we went off to look at the new sound racks which the school has, in its ignorance, bought.

He was telling me that his girlfriend's father, who is probably about the same age as me, used to work at Rolls Royce at Filton, and was on the team testing each new engine.  And one of the tests, to simulate a bird strike at 20,000 feet, was to fire frozen chickens into the blades of the engine.  And they would spend an entire week just firing frozen chickens.  And the whole point was that if any single one of those chickens should cause damage to that engine, then clearly the engine was faulty.  No pressure then.

So towards the end of the week when they were feeling pretty confident that the engine was okay, they went to lunch and when they returned the worst case happened.  They fired the cannon, and the blades of the engine just all snapped off.

They were devastated.  After all, how much was that engine worth?  And once you have that tiny shred of doubt then everything becomes much more tenuous.

They studied the CCTV in minute footage.  Which is when they discovered that whilst they'd been at lunch a cat had strolled in, climbed into the cannon and fallen asleep.  The next shot, once slowed down considerably, showed that the frozen chicken which had been fired was closely followed by a cat.  Which had totally demolished the engine.

So it just goes to show that if you're travelling at 20,000 feet and a flock of birds comes towards you then you'll probably be okay, but just a single cat at that altitude and you should be seriously worried.

Oh, the power of the internet!

Yesterday younger son finally mastered one of life's great skills.

No, it wasn't swimming - which he couldn't do until he was 10.

Not riding a bike - which he couldn't do until he was 11 and the prospect of having to do his cycling proficiency came up (and even then I had to ask them to put him in the last course of the year, just in case).

No, yesterday, faced with the prospect of having to have some really ghastly velcro shoes for school (because by the time you wear size 7 there's not much to choose from with velcro fastenings for boys), he finally learned HOW TO TIE SHOELACES.  And it's taken him till he was 14, well nearly 15. 

And the last ten years or so that I've been trying to persuade him to learn were all a waste of time because in the end a 1-minute YouTube demonstration was how he chose to learn.

So don't give me all that "learning at your mother's knee" bollocks.

On procrastination

I think I've just spent all week procrastinating.  I will find anything to do other than what really should be done.

I'm probably making excuses but I think it all goes back to a fortnight ago when OH called in at his mother's house (she having been consigned to a care home by now) and discovered that her dining table and chairs and her fridge/freezer had gone.

So last Saturday we went down (a mere 40 miles each way) to discover vastly more stuff had gone - to wit, dining table and chairs, fridge/freezer, microwave, kettle, a sewing box, two chairs, freeview box, shredder, kitchen clock, nest of 3 tables, 2 table lamps, a quantity of cutlery, and bizarrely the BT master socket (which is actually the property of BT).

We went out to the care home to confirm that actually none of this lot was out there.  We also discovered that of all the photos of grandchildren the overwhelming majority were of SIL's offspring.

By now OH is panicking that her car is going to suddenly disappear, even though she has technically signed it over to our daughter a year or so ago, but we've left it in her garage so that she can pretend that she could drive it if she wanted to, but she just doesn't want to.  To be honest, her mental ability (lack of) and eyesight (also lack of) mean that she would be an absolute menace by now so a while ago we removed the battery so she couldn't start it anyway.  But she liked the idea of the car being there - just in case.

So on Monday we go down and move the car to a secret location (which obviously I can't tell you where it is) so that it's safe.  After all, once it's gone, it's gone.  No car has ever come back from a breaker's yard, has it?

And now all the Court of Protection stuff is going to have to be changed because OH thinks he can't trust his sister to be joint Deputies.  And it just goes on and on, and takes more and more time.  And I'm still not knuckling down to work.  Which is all very depressing.

Check drain

Red flashing light.  "Check drain".

I have never seen so much grey sludge.  It's never been at all like that before. I'm surprised any water got pumped out at all.  Yuck.