Murgatroyd

Woke up at the crack of 1.30 in the afternoon. Dammit, wanted to go see some architecture near Southampton this week.

Yesterday's first London flashmob sounded somewhat unspontaneous - perhaps the British need a bit more time to practise such things. And a few less reporters, but they could mostly do with a quick cull anyway.

I'm the worstest cat owner ever. Sophie is not speaking to me, and Megan stares at me in quiet shock at my cruelty.
First off, I removed four - yes, FOUR - of Sophie's favouritest toys ever from the house (these would be: I removed the spare bed, which is for hiding under when people try to lock it back down under the other bed; I removed the six foot four inch cat tree, which was somewhat difficult to manoeuvre around in a one bedroom flat, and hadn't been touched by paw nor whisker for two years - oh but that's not the point, not the blasted point at all; I removed the daily bin-emptying ritual, which allows strictly indoor cats to escape out of the front door, run down the stairs, and to roll in the crap in the yard, before the main point of the escapade, being caught; and ultimately, I removed the DH, the sucker, the favoured owner, the one who lets cats sleep on her head, gives them fresh salmon treats at ten am everyday, and plays the 'high up' game, where you throw annoying cats into deliciously dusty cupboards somewhere near the ceiling on a regular basis, then walk away and leave them there. Who knows where I've put the DH, but they're pretty certain by now that I got rid of her.)
Then, in the blistering heatwave, I developed an irrational dislike of small extremely badly balanced animals climbing out of third floor windows and sitting on outside window sills in the blistering heat. I've been so utterly inhumane as to pick them up off the hardly dangerous at all 2.5 inch exterior window ledge, make loud, insensitively cross noises, and then sleep all night in a total oven, with all the windows closed firmly shut, mumbling about bloody untrustworthy animals.
Finally, today, Sophie managed to climb further out along the ledge than previously, to the point where she couldn't get back into the window. (but of course, hours of watching the pigeon in the tree and daydreaming have convinced her this is no issue to a cat that can no doubt fly, if only her stupid owner would let her.) Not only did I have the temerity to grab the dumb cat, drag her back inside against her will, but in trying to escape the huge raw scratches I now sport across my chest, I shut the window on her left paw.
Appalling. (There is of course, nothing wrong with the paw, but that doesn't stop the Guilt Trip, whereby cat runs away from me when I approach, carefully hiding left forepaw from view at all times.)
I have a feeling only carefully chopped helpings of premium tasty cat nibbles will repay this grievous slight to feline honour.

Young Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.....!!!

Spent most of yesterday evening watching ooooooold videos of the only bloke I ever wanted to marry. Phwoooargh!

Heat Repeat: it got waaaay cooler indoors today, was able to turn the fan off occasionally (cheers, global warming! Can you melt the polar icecaps next, and move me a bit nearer Denmark, or somewhere with decent, normal temperature ranges?)
If you go out, though, the air's so dry and hot it's like getting a waft from a fat man's armpit.
Stores, thankfully, tend to be air-conditioned, but this itself only leads to the inevitable "oof!" moment when you get outside again. I remember that feeling from Rio and everywhere in Egypt... but there you had the benefit of being on holiday. Ahh, p'raps my weather whinges are just deluded after all.

Food watch: staying indoors to avoid heat all day results in me making some great food. Spicy avocado, grape and walnut salad, then later on cod pan-fried in salsa yesterday; Greek salad with fresh herbs, s&v crisps, aioli on toast and popcorn afters the day before.
The week before that was mostly cola and popcorn, so it's a taste explosion!

Things that make hot days bad:
(1) Old blokes whose clothes don't fit right
(2) Hairy backs and sweaty necks

Okay, I ran out....

Taciturn feckers, aren't ye?

Yesterday my levels of boredom and heat-related annoyance reached new troughs, and I actually emailed half the people I know (yes, even people from work, although only sane ones) and begged them to read and comment upon my blog.
They had an alternative choice, they were free to invite me out to the pub on any day or location of their choosing, instead.

Casting aside such problems as having had nothing to write about for a good long week now, I watched my new, more efficient site stats rise. 10..... 20.... nearly 30 people visited between today and yesterday.

And how many comments?
You bastards.

While I'm here, I'd also like to thank those who emailed or used MSN to send their comments:
"lol!"
"I'm not at the pub, so there."
"ewwwww, they had sex, in your bed .... ewwww!"
"Well, okay, I'll read the thing but only cos it's got a link to Chris B's blog. His is more likely to be interesting."

You bastards!

waste o' bleedin toime, innit

I'd like to post a blog entry today, but I'm just too buggering hot to do so. I can't even go get a cooling beer from the olde worlde corner shoppe, because it's too hot to dress yourself - wastes precious minutes between the hourly cold showers.
So I have to sip warm wine and watch Ocean's Eleven. Which, so far, is pants.
Nice documentary on how the Turks thrashed us in Crimea later, though.

Take a minute to check yidaho's new blog, on the blogroll over there < = . Apparently, she's a 'physcho evil beeyatch', so she's got to be worth it.

This page graced by sarsparilla at 10:34 PM BST
Updated: Wednesday, 13 August 2003 5:03 AM BST
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And tomorrow ...... SCORCHIO

Too hot to move. I flop about with the wobbly five foot fan trained on me, watching movies and dreaming that this country were advanced enough to have air-con anywhere. I see mirages of darkened rooms with a bearable temperature, and if the car weren't 50 degrees, then I could drive to the cinema and live there forever.

Movies I've been watching this week:
Solaris: Which had a pants plot, but was a work of genius in terms of everything else: acting, pacing, cinematography, score. Really reminded me of Kubrick and 2001. Not to mention it starred the incredible Clooney (hadn't previously been that impressed with his acting, but loved the imagination and skill he showed as a director, in his directorial debut.) Soderbergh produces my old alumnus Chris Nolan's movies, so I must admit to watching his stuff purely to gain a feeling of sneaking jealousy, really.
My friend Caroline has a theory that most writers feel their art is a basically confessional impulse, but also shows a misunderstanding of the impulse - she thinks they're doomed to eternally confess something of themselves, but never resolve it. This film seems to prove her right.
Frailty: I love Sam Raimi movies. They remind me so much of Tales of the Unexpected. Bill Paxton loves Sam Raimi movies, and this is the first film he's directed. Liked this when I saw it at the flicks, and this week I bought it.
Primary Colors : I loved the book of this film, because its elegant prose reminded me of Gore Vidal. It's an effective movie, starring the admirable Adrian Lester, who really should have been given an Oscar vehicle by now, but it's not the best in the world.
S1m0ne: Just frigging awful. So bad it gave me nightmares. From the director of the Truman Show, who has apparently not snorted his way through the profits of said Show yet, as he can't even be arsed to get himself in focus on the dvd extras interview. Oh Mr Pacino, how can you do this crap?
Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Vuet Du Bien: Another one I caught by accident at the cinema and loved. It's just incredible. Watch this, then watch Vertigo or Psycho, and see the parallels.
Alice Adams: Katharine Hepburn is patently 43, but in this movie she's the teenage daughter of a local crabby working man who refuses to allow himself to become upwardly mobile, to the horror of his grasping children. Hilarious, but unintentionally so.

Nobody feels the need to add a signature tune to a snowy day.

Just reminded of another summertime horror: the way people insist that the one thing that would complete the perfection of their brain boilingly moronic perfect day is to open the windows and blast a bit of R n B out (or in this area, some Bhangra Techno [copyright Chris B] as often as not).
Why must they bless us with their execrable flabby taste in mood music when it's hot and I can't suffer grumpily in silence so easily?

Finally, a link for Looby. Does blogging ever serve a useful function, or is it "hardly anything to do with telling the literal truth; and everything to do with fashioning an authentic persona from bits of alibis and consistent lies" ... ?

Scorchio

My God, I don't think I've ever had such a deleterious effect on a person's sanity as I did this weekend by not letting Chris smoke in my house. Check the London post on his blog (4th August) for the full awful tale of woe.
Speaking of insanity, my cleaning mania continues apace - earlier today, I tried to clean cat hairs from a white sofa with some sellotape (in the vain hope that it make make me feel better for not knowing how to remove the chocolate Flake cupcake streaks), then took incriminating photographs of the unhelpful bloody hairy cat-like creature that rolled all over the sellotape in a spiteful cat fashion.
My cleaning mania isn't helped by a broken washing-machine. When I say broken, I mean dirty: I boiled a red chenille rug that didn't want to die, and it's risen from the grave to turn everything I own into another red chenille rug... or at least a grimy pink, fluff covered cousin.
Today's solution was to pour half a pint of bleach into the drum, and wash nothing at ninety degrees heat. There's a disturbing burning smell emanating right now.

It's too bloody hot, and I can't cope with the heat. Thirty three degrees yesterday, when I had the hangover from hell. It's going to get hotter and more humid all week, apparently breaking all records. I'm only leaving the house to go to cinemas with air-con, in protest.

CNPS: 18!!!
[Although Mushu has told me she got to 700 plus as a child - this would place her at the top of the world leaderboard, so I have my suspicions.... :D ]

Busy Busy Busy Bizzzzeeeeeeeeee

The strange thing about cleaning .... you go through distinct stages:

pretending you can't see the dirt
don't wanna
oh god it looks murky
counting the dead insects
measuring how many weeks dead insects can hold on to a ceiling tile after death
pathetic attempts with a bit of tissue
realisation that it's making it look worse
pretending it's a political issue; one must make more of one's leisure time than to be some twentieth century slave to a 50's perception of 'clean'
neat bleach (the gay male /Dutch readers will know what I mean)
realisation that it's making it look worse
getting out the scary products to do it properly
railing against the crappy builders who never bothered to clean the stray grouting from the tiles three years back
realising this particular rantation means you haven't wiped down the bathroom wall / kitchen floor for three years now
aiming to do too much (ie, begins to retile the bathroom)
trying harder, for ten minutes, to get the filth off
burning the skin off your hands because you forgot that scary products need gloves
pride and industriousness
realisation that it's making it look worse
deciding that those ten minutes are more than you've done for three years, so of course it's enough to stop there
clearing up the steaming chemical mess from the floor
blackmailing family to provide you with several hours of cup-of-tea-related servitude in honour of your unerring will and derring do in the face of a bit of grime
realisation that the contrast of the bit you did with the bit you gave up on, makes it look worse
pretending you can't see the dirt

I have to clean the flat because a load of women* who all have cleaner fingernails than me are coming round for a kinda reunion on Saturday, and if anyone realises the true extent of my filth, they'll point and laugh.
*- and one bloke (Chris, whose blog is over there < = on the blogroll), but his fingernails look pretty manky to me, so he's not such a threat.
Besides which, whenever DH goes away, I have to tidy endlessly, to prove that I'm not the utterly filthy one.

It's two weeks into my holidays now, and it's time I started getting out of bed before 4 in the afternoon, attempting to achieve something from the day, and avoiding drinking every single evening, simply to change the pace.

:?(

Just dropped DH off at the airport.

:?(

Check me stats...

Hats of Meat

Have been drinking and eating for days, now, and forgot to blog.
Caroline came over, laughed at my camera, and cooked me a barbecue consisting of twelvety different styles of meat products on Sunday. I also had a Meat Festival with the DH for her birthday, consisting of salami, duck, bresaola, prosciutto, salmon.
After that, I decided to make a hugely Indian style curried kedgeree, using tamarind sauce and every type of seafood. Unfortunately, I made enough to serve 30, and stuck prawns/scallops/seafood in it, so it would neither keep nor re-heat. I coulda eaten just some then thrown it away.... but nooooo, I decided to eat all 30 portions, and stayed up till it had all gone down.
I feel like Geri Halliwell after a particularly torrid night on the bog. Votes requested for my new name: The Bloater, or Fibre-Provider?

DH news: She's going to Australia for 7 weeks, from tomorrow.

Computer news*: it died totally, wiggling things inside helped it resurface, and it now drags itself slowly along while I spend hours trying to back files up onto god-damn zip disks (the CD drives don't seem to exist any more). This week, the washing machine also decided to break down, and the freeholder decided to undertake #9K worth of repairs on the house, so I'm not feeling too wealthy... :D .... another 5 weeks of counting my toenails beckons.
Am going to try to install a cracked copy of XP over it all, then if that doesn't work, try insurance. After all, the cat puked on the mobo, that's gotta count for something.
The whole dreadfully tedious story documented here.

* = circumscribed cos my mum complained about the amount of geekery on here...

I'd like to play 'Total Thermonuclear War' . . .

PC still dead, but legs are wriggling.
I can read emails, haven't tried sending them yet. I can use Agent, although most posts disappear.
I updated the drivers on the monitor and graphics card ..... now the screen still shows only 16 bits colour, but *thinks* it's showing 256 bits.
A few years back, I only used the pc for word processing, usenet and emails, so would have been fine, but now it's best use for me is movies and fiddling with pictures, so it's a total bummer.
Dunno what to do, the Matrox graphics driver's website's best advice is to make sure the card's plugged in effectively (gee thanks, guys!)
If I leave it like this, I guess the adsl line for downloading movies is a waste of money, as is the digital camera.
Aaaaaaaaargh!

Joe suggested installing XP over the top of the Win 98 system that's there at the mo, insisting it would retain all my stuff / proggies / files .... but I dunno. He's pc-literate enough to retrieve things, and I'm not.
Quandary!

FBB4: I lost! (grrrr) Well done to Ayrmale (/grrrr)

Mobo Meltdown

My pc is dead.
I can read emails on my laptop, but I can't reply, and I'm stuck on freeserve dial-up, instead my spanking adsl line. Plus all the proggies I put on the main computer are no longer at my disposal. :?((

No idea how to fix this. Gonna be a long, dull summer, now!

Offal

Russell's working in the UK, again so I got to go eat with him, at a funny Italian place in Store Street - hurrah!

Last time but one I saw JATB i ended up eating offal (pig's trotters and snouts) at a Brazilian restaurant in Hornsey, and last time I saw Russell, I ended up eating pork belly (a mere 4 inches of jelly on that belly) in Smithfield Meat Market.
Both rather worryingly offal-related trends. Despite the gorgeous spam sandwich I had yesterday, tonight I stuck to salad, but it didn't remove the compulsion to eat animals' lips sauteed in tripe.
Ewwwwwwwwww!

out of touch

Apparently, being out of touch is no longer an insult, as it's now so difficult to maintain out of touchness that it becomes a distinct lifestyle choice. You'd have to deliberately go hunt grizzlies in the Eskimo wastes to achieve it. Should make all the 40-somethings in the world a bit happier, then.

The DH is writing an editorial, so I can't get onto my normal pc/ISP, so can't read any e-mail. Humph. Will have to sit at the by-now boiling hot laptop, fartling about on freeserve dial-up instead, for even longer.
5pm! Time to get dressed.

My Head Doesn't Hurt

What Happened on my Birthday:
DH gave me an envelope containing vouchers for a nail-job, a foot-job and a head-job. Briefly wondered if this were a rather personal insult, then recalled insisting yesterday that these would prove good presents, and thanked graciously, etc. Nice idea, and I know she's short of cash, since I spent #900 on her prezzie (flight to Oz, next Thursday! oo-er). She then retired to bed, to puke into a bucket.
One look at my stubby talons and worse feet, and I rang the nail peeps and rescheduled the 'pointment for next week (wa-hey! another fun-filled week, heh). But decided to turn up for the haircut, at the most expensive salon in the area, as it was sheduled for a more reasonable hour - the crack of 4pm.
Decided not to wash hair before going, in order not to over-process it, or whatever some wanky hairstylist once told me ... possibly a mistake, judging from the uber-cool stylists' opening words: "blimey! is it raining out?!"
Anyway, one perfectly respectable haircut later (snips the story of the marine orchestrating his filipino girlfriend's haircut next to me, as I'd find it hard to do the accents in text), they demand fifty knicker off of me. I protested loudly that this is free ... we check the till, I demand they check the week's receipts, we drag the manager from a nearby caff ... glorious hoo-ha ensues ... it's on the tip of my tongue to yell "it's a bloody birthday present, of course it was paid for! What kind of a fool would give me an APPOINTMENT for my birthday?!"
Thank christ I didn't. Got home several hairs and fifty knicker lighter, to find that not only was it not part of my present, but never will be. Eeeek!
I suppose the one up-side is that if I were in my 20s, I'd never have gotten away with making such a Hyacinth Bucket in public. They all tolerated my hissy fit very normally, as if to say OF COURSE this is what 33 year olds do in public places. Next week: I practise "I'm afraid you'll find I'm too old to change now"....
Postscript: have dug out DH's permission to tell you this!
Quote of the Day: "a man for pleasure, a woman for children, and a melon for ecstasy"
FBB4: Forgot to post two entries, and it's pretty clear that I'm not winning... argh! Ends this Friday.

{Robin Askwith}

Farkin Staffed Meself, Didn' I?

{/Robin Askwith}
Spent the evening of the 22nd drinking copious quantities of champagne (the original plan had been to get pissed at 10am, but DH puking with a migraine and the need to be vaguely sober for a 4pm scissor-attack had delayed this - that and the fact that I get up at one in the afternoon these days).

I can appreciate the egregious wrongs that have been perpetrated over time in the name of "a really good time", but the 23rd was the day for lunch with the glorious JATB. I decided to be late, so I could spend 30 minutes sitting in Limehouse Lidl's car park, staring at the pikeys first. It's an unpleasant hobby, but it's better I take the strain, so you don't have to.
DH came with me to meet JATB at Somerset House, and we worked out her boss was away for the afternoon, so we were free to do a four hour drunken lunch -- WA-HEYY!
This meant we could jump in a cab to Cornhill, where a few dodgy turns down dodgy alleys lead you to my favourite lunch spot in the universe, the George and Vulture. It's such a cool place to lunch that JATB and I spent the first ten minutes just giggling at the naughtiness of it all. It's where Dickens wrote the Pickwick Papers, is very old and panelled, and full of City boys who do four hour boozy lunches. The real appeal is the food, though - there's little choice, as it's all entirely public school dinners, in huuuuuuuuuuuuuge portions. It takes hours and much stomach to get through it all, you emerge extremely drunk, and then most of the clientele go back out to work. Sigh. Ideal lifestyle.
Afterwards, we walked drunkenly down through the City to the wobbly bridge, and JATB tottered back off to her workplace, and I got a riverbus with the DH. I don't remember a lot after that, [I do recall someone whom I don't have permission to name shrieking "ere! I wet meself" in a

You Mus' Respec' Mah Buthdah!

Was up late last night (ooh, what a surprise) watching movies ..... current movie watchage this week scored below:

The Life of David Gale ... Was recommended on futb by Granulated, but turned out to be a shoddy copy of Se7en, mistitled. (bloody Kazaa nobs!) Scariest thing, I recognised the movie purely from the opening shot of Morgan Freeman folding a jacket on a bed. Oo-er, too many viewings for mental health, methinks.
Rabbit-Proof Fence ... Very worthy aboriginal drama, but a touch too BBC2 for moi. The normally appalling Branagh was effective in it, however. (Unusual to see some real acting in a movie these days. I watched ten minutes of Eastenders yesterday, and some bit part actor was gobsmacking his fellow cast members by actually appearing to act.)
Firefly ... okay, it's a series, but I finally watched a dodgy downloaded copy of 'Trash', one of the episodes unaired in the US showing, scrapped when the series was canned. The picture quality was so skanky that I had to watch it at half the screen size, but it was a great episode, featuring the previous 'Our Mrs Reynolds' villainness (Saffron; not a patch on Servilan, but improving).
Only marginally spoiled by Sid later pointing out it had been aired on the UK Sci-Fi channel earlier that evening. Gah! No 'special' points for me, then.

Currently downloading: Solaris (because Mr Clooney is my hero), The Sum of All Fears (in mentallist apology to Mr Freeman), Sweet Home alabama (christ knows why, I hate that woman.)

It's my birthday! More on this later....

Sunday Night / Monday Morning

Yaaaaaawn.

Stayed up all night trying to fix the galleries on my website, after DH pointed out that photos weren't very private if they were plastered all over an /images/ directory.
Might also prevent Certain Anonymous Individuals from auto-linking to particularly hideous pics of my feet on his blog. (hehe/tsk)
Still, the cats kept me company....
Obsessive tendencies? Moi?

Sunday Sunday

Hot day and nothing to do, as I lent new digi-camera to DH to take piccies of Oscar while visiting there. [Oscar's namesake is a poet. bizarre!]

So I spent all day setting up Popfile, email filters, after L'animal recommended it several years ago (for some reason, L'animal always recommends things that are so interesting or useful that I always file them to do properly at a later date, then forget about, having precious few open-ended later dates to spread about in the year; then I s'pose I always look like an ingrate who ignores good advice. Ah, bleh). Anyway, it took all day to create a gazillion squillion in box rules, then Looby pointed out it would have been easier to send all my mail to either the spam box or the inbox. DUH!

Also spent the day ignoring pointedly another ten insults on fuktvbb. Hmmm, seems like my popularity there knows no bounds. :D
Was a relief that the initial one was only from someone I had indeed pointedly been rude to lately (owing to the fact that she's weird - perfectly acceptable all week, then turns into a raging drunken lunatic of a weekend - typical poster to the depression groups, if you ask me), and all the rest are from crap sock puppets who've expressed their animosity years before, under different names. Interesting technique, though to add to the trolling 101 style sheet... never give out personal information, and always reflect others' personal details back to them in a negative fashion. Seems to indicate a lack of confidence in the posters' selves to be so secretive online(as do most of the posts in futb, tbh... See above comment about depression newsgroups). Oh well, at least I give them some entertainment.

On the more positive fuktvbb front, yidaho sounded like she had a great party yesterday, if the voicemail dominated by shouting and Las Ketchup was anything to go by... If I hadn't been shattered from wine and driving around playing with my new camera (and disturbed that the Poison Dwarf might turn up), I'd have gone along.

It's my birthday on Tuesday!

Still haven't worked out how I can persuade people to help me pay off the present that I accidentally went and bought for myself (digi-cam - see pics)

Lunch with JATB on Wednesday - hurrah!
My week pans out as Monday: Work, Tuesday: birthday, Wednesday: food and gossip, Thursday: more work, Friday: DH's birthday, Saturday: some pride march or other. Still need hordes of sleep after a difficult term, but this means I can variegate it with other activities.

CNPS: 16

FBB4: losing badly! :?)

Sleep: got loads, yum!

Food: musssshhhhhh rooooommmmm sooouuuupppp today!

Check me stats...