Things That Go Wrong...

So far we've had nothing go wrong with my new bathroom - shown is the trim B&Q tiles we chose to go with the white suite, grey tiles and slate floor. Mind you, there's not much TO go wrong with the bathroom - it's been perfectly empty for days! I have a brand new toilet waiting in the spare bedroom, and my bedroom is back where it should be, though we still have airing cupboard contents all over the place whilst we await the sparkie and the plumber shifting the shower unit in a couple of days.

Oh, and we had the builders in a blazing row this morning, as the kitchen units were being brought in. One of the geniuses that designed it managed to screw up the measurements and now the units won't fit in! Thankfully the company do a slim version of one of the units which happens to fit perfectly in the space we're left - and I have a lovely new hob and oven in place. The hob is shiney, pretty and superglossy (when it's not covered in plaster and breezeblock dust). They even managed to deliver the right sized bit of worktop for the breakfast bar - soon I'll have a seat of my own there, and it'll be all "cathedra mea, regulae meae". I'd say it for the kitchen, but I have to share it. I found a handy little quote too, to bear in mind when things go to-pot. Thanks Mr Schuly!

But my goodness. Things do go much more wrong for some people don't they?

I was reading about the case of two muggers back in '94, having stopped a man in the street and threatened him with two large pocketknives for his money. The victim blinked in surprise: "Are you insane?" They demanded the money again and threatened to cut him. So he promptly broke their arms in multiple places, sat them in the kerb with their knives and calmly waited for the police to come. The man they picked has a 1st degree in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, an 8th Degree Grandmaster in Tae Kwon Do, 9th in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and Lee’s best student, Dan Inosanto, a 10th degree in Shito Ryu Karate, 10th in Tang Soo Do, and an 11th degree in Chun Kuk Do - an art developed in his own dojo.

The police were unable to handcuff the men as their arms were so badly damaged with bones protruding from the flesh - and promptly fell about laughing. "Did you not know who he was?!"

When questioned, one mugger replied, “Yeah, we knew who he was but we figured all that crap on TV was fake! Lesson learned: Don't mug Chuck Norris.

Today's Quote: "I like the way that sparks when I plug it in. Really makes me feel safe..." Said with ironic tones -HL.

Not-So-Tiny Tezza

I thought I'd update you good folks with a new pic of Mr Tackety-Toes himself. He's a sturdy 21.2g now and eatin' like a trooper. He's discovered a love of butterworms and waxworms, and still likes to wipe Alan Repashy's mango mix all over me. :)

This photo was taken with a Motorola V3X mobile. Imagine what I could do with a REAL camera!

He's hand-tame and strokable now, with a proper little character and a squeaky little voice that tells me off with a stern "PRAWR!" or makes little chirpy-beepy noises when he falls off things and bounces around in his tank occasionally. He's only recently started "talking", but my partner had to laugh when Terry told me off last time -it's a really indignant little sound!

He's been a right buggerlugs lately - I've been attempting to teach him how to hand-feed the same as my dragons and axolotls. And it hasn't been going too well. We started off too timid to take it out of my hand, so I'd catch his attention and place it in front of him, where he'd happily savage it.

Now however, Terry's certainly throwing himself into it with vigour - though somewhat... literally. He makes great leaping diving bites at the waxworm in my fingers and has twice failed to accurately snatch the bug - biting ME instead! Much to my amusement I had a rather hungry reptile latched on to the end of my index finger trying to terrier-shake me to death. Thankfully he's only got the wee-est teeth (even the axolotls are more formidable). It's his claws that are the most prickly!

Lately though, he especially likes finding different ways to STARE at me until I pay attention. You know that feeling when you just know someone's looking at you? Terry's got it down to an art, the creepy ratbag!

I find him glaring under leaves, hanging upside down on the wall, peering round the corner of a plant, dangling from the vine, wriggled like this between two sturdy palm leaves - but always so his head is at the same point to see through the little sliver of glass next to my sofa. Right next to my head. Right in my face.

It creases me up every time.

Terry peed on my foot yesterday too and then ran right up and got stuck in my hair.

It doesn't help that he's a bouncy little sod too - with an impressive leap of easily 6x his own body length and a distinct "splat" sound on landing, he's got very good at jumping around on leaves, vines and hands - though he WILL try to bounce at people's faces. I am trying to train him out of being a facehugger though, but with little success so far. That's the trouble with being a sticky-toed wee git - he's discovered there's not much you can't grab if you put your mind to it.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say he's a lovable pain-in-the-neck little crap-packet. Don't you think, Bogle?

Quote of the day: "Your mumma, she is the inventor of crap packet." - My mumma. Try it, it's a great insult!

Beautiful Birds

Sorry, no, this isn't an article on totty. You'll have to try a different site for that. Terry is 18.3g, just as a speedy update.

Now, everyone who knows me knows I'm not that keen on birds in general - but that's mostly due to Jeanie, the budgie my mother acquired from a cousin of mine. Oh, I apologise, there's a typo there; I put budgie instead of CRAZYBITCHBIRDFROMHELL! Even Himself thinks she's a crazy damn bugger-igar.

However, these guys really make it up in my opinion, with their funky feathers and snazzy moves (especially the one with his Dalek-style chasing).


These guys from Papua New Guinea ramp it up a notch:


And this guy wins hands down for his sheer insanity-dance in his funky yellow trance dance pants.

Another Article!

"Congratulations! Your entry (Faerie Care!) has been selected to appear in the Neopian Times. A shiny trophy has been added to your user lookup. Thank you for contributing to the Neopian Times!"

That's the second one of mine published and I've had some fan mail from Faerie Care - I think I'll have to get cracking on Faerie Care II, as everyone wants to know why I've hinted there may be more than one space faerie. My answer? Just because we occasionally see a space faerie, it doesn't mean there's just one! See my works released so far on this page HERE.

House of Pain (in the ass.)

So - we've been ripping out the kitchen. We're destroying the bathroom. We're rapidly running out of rooms to put stuff in, as the electrician wants to take up half of the upstairs floorboards. Boy this is fun!

All the shifting around, tearing up and pulling down is also revealing further "errors" produced by the nice men (AKA Cowboys) that built the extension and worked on the house in general - to a rather spectacular extent...

The list of fails found (and mostly fixed) so far includes:

Leaking flatroof on extension

Spaghetti cables for telephone wires

Carpet in the bathroom - mmm, rotting!

Extractor fan feeding into cavity insulation

Wrong valve type on garden tap

Kitchen concrete floor: carpet stuck in it!

Constant boiler overflow due to failed valve

"Great" wallpaper all over: upside down, overlaps, gaps, creases, and rips...

A random extra windowsill!

Double layer of tiles in bathroom

Incredible black mould in most rooms

Damp problems from leaking boiler

Spaghetti style water pipes in kitchen

Backwards aerial cables throughout house

3 pullswitches: no pulls. Just yanked out.

Gatepost fell off in high winds last winter

We STILL can't work out what the deal is with the pipes for garden tap (Valves?)

Random lightswitches: "Very f*kn random"

Livingroom carpet: big bald SEAM in middle

Burnt 250V cable was sparking/smoking

So they cellotaped it and plastered over it

Concrete facings outside crumbling

Fascias rotted through and falling off

Rat in the attic, climbed through fascia

Ariel fixing rotted and aerial dropped off

Extension main power ring done backwards and needs to be completely redone

Odd air vents left from old heating system

It's TRIPLE tiling in the bathroom.

Himself not happy.

I could cry sometimes. But it would only contribute to the existing damp and mould problems.

Quote of the Day: "You'd only be bored if we had a normal house." - His Lordship. Too true, too true. The sheer amount of fail is very funny though!

Sorry for the minor delay...

I am still here. We're having technical difficulties temporarily - blog incoming with further details. In the meantime, enjoy The Gifford Children's Choir's version of "Still Alive".

Mmmmm, chocolatey.

I blinked, and another week screamed past... How DOES that happen? Thank goodness for warm chocolate walnut brownies and cream - soft and squidgy, near liquid in smoothness, chewy walnuts and all with a crisp, sugary shell like a Smartie. Absolute heaven with a touch of cream - YUMMY! Combined with the original Willy Wonka movie and you have the perfect combination.

As much as I enjoyed the bizarre Burton/Depp, Wilder is better. The reactions of the actors in some scenes really are spontaneous; for example, when the children first enter the main factory and see the gardens, their reactions are real, it was their first view of that glorious set. The set itself is amazing because a large number of the objects and plants in the main factory were genuinely edible, including the giant lollipops - but in the scene where Willy Wonka drinks from the flower-shaped cup and then eats it, the cup itself was made of wax. Poor Gene Wilder had to stay and chew the wax pieces until the end of the take, at which point he spat them out. Further cool info available on IMDB.

I'm all greasy - I've been feeding the dragons both a special mix to help their tummies, as they have been forgetting to drink enough water again and poor Tsammy is constipated. The blended fruit, vegetables, calcium, vitamin D, water and olive oil should do the trick, and a little mango powder for flavouring. Yum yum yum!

PS - how cool is that keyboard? --->

My friend Langmesser said something quite profound (for him) today: "You only get one life, no replay."

I couldn't help myself. I had to comment. "Unless you play Dungeons and Dragons, then you get no life, but as many rerolls as you like. (Although if you ask Silent Bob, he'll tell you that pressing Y, A and Left Trigger simultaneously on Xbox D&D is the cheat code for extra lives. But there's extreme nerdishness for you)."

Data Protection - Are YOU Protecting YOURSELF?

It amazes me the amount of information people give away without even realising it. I quickly and simply worked out which town this person lived in, their school, that they'd recently moved to America and their ethnic background from one image of a rescued rat without having even spoken to them. It was childplay simple too - there was a letter upside down with a zipcode, a school timetable folded up and they were stacked on a foreign notebook with a scribbled reminder to apply for something on social security and another letter allowing them an interpreter if required. I'm a regular Sherlock, me - but this was just too easy. The "Victim" learned a valuable lesson though.

I know I allow a LOT of info out about myself, even if it doesn't look like it to you, dearest reader - but I'm always careful to make sure it's stuff I'm OK with other people knowing. Things like the rumour of the "Facehunt" stalker app unsettles me - the ability to snap a picture of someone on the street which the app then runs through a database to find out as much as it can about that person if it matches the image on a social network, a website, anything they've put online. That's SCARY.

Terry is growing fast in the sweltering heat - he's now 15.5g and shed last night. Mmm, tasty skin. Geckos really know about making sure people can't find them. What better way than extreme camouflage and leaving no evidence that you were ever there in the first place?

"I think your friend is a computer. She knows to much about animals and hacking peoples informationz." - the "Victim".

Doctor Who + Loituma = Awesome

I have to say, I actually like our new Doctor Who. I miss Tennant of course, but the new boy is doing a grand job really. We've just watched the last episode of the season and I laughed my ass off. Very well done Mr Moffat - I've always appreciated your work, but that really was a slight in the face of the many... and so subtly done. You'll of course remember in previous seasons there have been subtle tie-ins through all the episodes, ones you don't remember at the time or connect until they all swarm back to you in the final, explanatory episode (remember the Bad Wolf graffiti for a good example). This one however, it had the tie in blatantly staring you in the face all the way - but we didn't know the story behind it. Just like the others, but delicately backwards. Bravo sir, bravo.

So here's the Doctor Who Numa, fully updated!


By Britguy at Newgrounds.com

YAY KITCHEN! (Part 1)

I'm tuckered out! After all the furniture shifting, I got home the other evening and moved the fridge freezer into the living room, both axolotl tanks into the front room and whipped up a wonderful sausage, mushroom and vegetable casserole in time for His Lordship returning from a meeting with one of his clients. I probably ought to explain that we're moving the bigger items into the front room due to the impending kitchen renovation - it looks like it's happening FAST! This is the sort of look we've chosen: http://www.howdens.com/i/range/704-image-large.jpg

Though we're getting a "jamocha" granite solid stone worksurface rather than the laminate shown in the picture, which will be nice! I always fancied a proper solid worktop. (Img: worktops.uk.com) It'll be so nice to have a fresh, clean kitchen that has things in the right order and easily accessible; I dream of having a sink the right way round! Our sink has a diddy worktop, then the sink, then the dry rack and then all the rest of the worktop - it's in backwards. (However it now turns out after all the fuss that we're definitely getting granite, we're NOT actually now. Oh well.)

Terry is 15.1g and freshly shed - a squeaky new 'ko.

Real Dragons!

Kyle has had a wonderful day today. She took a stroll around her tank (as she is occasionally inclined to do) and discovered her hatchday present from back in May. Delighted, she's decided she DOES like it after all and spent the ENTIRE day sat on her little Dragon's Hoard feeling like a proper fire-breathing, proud dragon!

Tsam's quite content too - his best fun was yesterday going for a walk in Sherborne park. He hopped out of his basket and happily trotted along the paving slabs besides the little stream and waterfall, stopping at the edge. "Oooh." he says. "I know what THAT is!" He leapt into the water and shuddered - it was a bit colder than his baths at home. He had a nice splash under the waterfall, a quick wee and hopped back out to bask in the sunshine. Heaven.

Did you know...

His Lordship was sat looking at his thumb, clearly having read this little articlette. Curious, I leaned over and read what it could be that caused him to look so carefully at his thumb:

I nearly KILLED myself laughing. He snapped out of it, finished reading and went bright red.

We haven't laughed so much in ages.

Long Live Learning!

I had a marvellous flashback to my schooldays today - and just how NAFF my school really was. Our Geography ceiling fell in and knocked Mr Edwards out, followed by the science ceiling a couple of days later... One end of our school was sealed off and sold to a school for problem kids that broke in and stole stuff. Our main hall impressively set on fire and flooded itself on the same evening. My first years of IT were on BBC PCs - green and black screen with dot matrix printers and eight inch floppy disks... (Pic: Wikicommons) After that, it was dodgy old Windows computers with no mouse balls. I fail to understand what value the ball from a mouse has, but everyone stole them! And the rest of my years in IT (and History... and German, come to think of it) was a shockingly fast rotation of staff members rapidly leaving. I recall one of our smaller history teachers got hospitalised when she sat on a desk and it collapsed...

Whilst school didn't exactly instill a love of learning into me, my family did - I enjoy finding out interesting new things: I learned today that fire as we know it, the flame itself, is a glowing hot gas released by the combustion of the fuel itself... And to those who say you can't drink tea with chopsticks, I say "PAH!" You can if you're in SPACE.

But here's a thought for you folks - if the clip below creeps you out, you might just be suffering from "consecotaleophobia", otherwise known as the phobia of chopsticks! Here's something to go with your chopstick tea - some Japanese kitkats in an entire kitkat kaleidoscope of weird flavours! Enjoy, and always remember to work hard.

"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." - Mark Twain

Building Beds and Lovely LOLs?

*phew* I am BAKED. His Lordship Senior has decided he wants to randomly gift us with a new kitchen and bathroom. Unfortunately, due to the mental way this house is wired (see late last year's bathroom fan fiasco) we need to rip up our bedroom floorboards to be able to access the wiring and make it go in the right direction.

So, I fished out my trusty allen key and took the bed to pieces, dragged it through and put it together in the spare (junk) room. His Lordship came to see where I'd got to; I grinned proudly and told him "I made the bed!" Literally. He couldn't believe I'd taken it all through and rebuilt it. (I think he forgot about my prowess with flatpack and the fact that we'd built the bed in the first place. Or rather, he'd kindly held bits still whilst I built it.) I do like making things...

So I'm making LoLizards - the reptile's answer to LolCats!

Ravenous and Roving Reptiles

The cutest thing happened today! I was watching Terry sticking to his window, and wiggled my finger across the front. For the first time, he tried to bite the strange white blob as it squeaked on the glass - so hard he fell off! I fell about laughing and dashed downstairs to grab the butterworms box. As he snuck around the little lilly, I dropped one of the smaller, luminescent yellow grubs onto the ground; Terry's eyes widened jet black. His head slowly tipped for a better look and POW! He had the worm and was shaking it like a mental terrier, battering it into submission and then chewing it side to side like the reel on a typewriter. Shluck shluck shluck - and the worm was gone. Nummnumnumlickity!

After the gecko had his lunch, we took a walk in the sunshine with the dragons to get ours from little Tescos. We picked up some fresh bread, peppers and salami for sandwiches and picked some of my home grown rocket and lettuce to finish it off when we got back. Kyle had decided she'd had enough of all this cheerfulness and made a mighty leap through the kitchen door, stalking off home in an inexplicable sulk. Which reminds me - my sister has made these awesome shoes!

Tsam, on the other hand, thought this was the best thing ever (as he's often prone to doing). We had a nice bask on the step before hopping down into the daisies for an exciting outdoors poop. (Him, not me.) This was followed by a slink through the grass and stopped to admire the rhubarb leaflets under the big red stalks. I advised him it was probably not a good idea to eat one, so he had a tentative lick and agreed with me; it didn't taste that nice. From there we had a good look at the radishes, an appraisal of the peas and a disgusted face at the number of onion stalks growing, so we left there and went to run amongst the raspberries. There weren't any ready yet, the gooseberries looked too small and prickly for words and the strawberries were all green. He gave me a look that quite clearly said "What kind of a gardener ARE you if you can't even have fruit ready for me when I want it?" We walked round the shed with Tsam checking it for leaks by sticking his nose in every slat...

Suddenly - a BIRD! The female blackbird looked at Tsam and Tsam looked at her. They both looked at me. She pooped and flew off, so Tsam and I came inside to relax with something a little less scary - my blogging and Tsam to dig in his cave. He does like to make it nice and comfy when he's been away such a long time! I wonder if she was checking her tweets?

Here's another cute eating scenario: This is Zac and Wheezie - the world's oldest and healthiest twin siamese dragons!

Word of the day: "Bobsnug" - from Garrett, describing Tsam attempting to assert his authority whilst huddling down in a comfy hug. Needless to say, it wasn't especially successful, but it was sweet!