The Smell In The Hall

There's a really bad smell in the hall.

We don't know what it is, but it's bad. It kinda smells like rotten food, but we've searched high and low in there and can't find the source.

It's possible that Dexter has caught some poor rodent and brought it inside to play with, but we haven't found any little cadavers.

Anyway, my solution to this is to go away for a few days to Edinburgh and hope that Dr K solves the problem while I'm gone.

I fully anticipate returning on Friday to a lovely, fresh smelling hallway with no corpses or rotten food in it at all.

Hey, Dr K: check all the shoes for deceased mammals!

They Call Me 'Two Beds Morrissey'

That's right.

I've arrived at my hotel in Edinbugh to find two beds in my room. Not two single beds, two DOUBLE beds. Awesome, huh? I might just swap between them during the night.

Thinking about it, there's probably enough bed surface area for a proper orgy or something. Yay!

I'll work on that in a minute when I meet my travelling companions in the bar. I'm sure it will go very well and that everyone will think that it's a most excellent idea and no one will kick me in the nuts at all.

Now I'd just like to clarify a bit of hotel etiquette here: I have facial soap and I have bath soap in my room. I want to wash my hands.

I've elected to use the facial soap, rather than the bath soap, as I suspect something designed to clean a bath might be a bit harsh on my hands. Soap designed for my delicate, beautiful face however, should be fine.

I just want to be sure that I haven't made some sort of terrible hotel soap related faux-pas.

EDIT: it is now almost midnight. My nuts are intact, however I am, unsurprisingly, alone in my hotel room as the only person who was interested in my suggestion was a hairy man called Paul.

As an unrelated aside, I've now been in Bonnie Scotland for around six hours and, as far as I can tell, have yet to meet an actual Scottish person. The guys at the taxi rank were of Middle Eastern persuasion and the hotel staff appear to be comprised of Eastern Europeans. I'm informed that one of the girls who served is dinner may have had a Scottish accent, but as I did not hear her speak, I can't really accept that as empirical evidence of Scottishness.

Hell, based on the evidence so far, there are more Scottish people in Bristol than there are in Edinburgh.

There Are No Vaginas Here

I'm off to Edinburgh tomorrow for a couple of days on a 'team building' thing with my workmates.

On Monday, one of my colleagues asked me what I would be wearing on Wednesday evening for the supper and networking session. She went on to enquire whether or not I would be wearing jeans for the Friday morning session.

I'd like to be clear about something right now:

I don't have a vagina. Look, here's a diagram that clearly shows my lack of any sort of vaginal accoutrements.


I dont have a vagina because I'm not one of the womenfolk and as such I have no idea what I'll be wearing tomorrow, let alone three days from now. It very much depends on what doesn't smell.

Here is a photograph of my bag:



Oh look, it's empty... I haven't packed it yet because I don't got a vagina!

David's Post

This is a post for a chap called David.

I'm told that he reads my blog in bed every night and doesn't like it when it's late. Well, it's late tonight, David. How'd you like them apples?

Actually, I'm quite gratified that anyone reads this nonsense at all. I'm not very funny or even particularly eloquent and my posts are full of rookie typos. I basically type a bunch of banal, sometimes vaguely bigoted nonsense every day and sometimes add a picture.

So anyway - David, this one's especially for you. Today you are my number one fan! Here's a big kiss:



There, wasn't that nice, eh?

Suicide cats!

I think my cats want to die.

They keep being where my feet are going. Often on the stairs. And Rochester keeps doing these slow motion dives in front of the car when I'm trying to park.

Fortunately, I'm very nimble on my feet. Nimble like a mountain goat. I'm also a very talented driver* so none of their half hearted attempts to end it all have been singularly unsuccessful.

Then there's next door's cat. Even though I keep charging at it in a murderous frenzy, it keeps wandering into our house and eating things. Maybe my murderous frenzies aren't quite convincing enough. I'll work on them.

(*as evidenced by my amazing parking on Friday night, where I attempted to parallel park my car three times before giving up and parking somewhere else. Fortunately there were no cats around.)

Blue Traffic Cone

While out and about recently, I saw something that disturbed me to my very core.

A blue traffic cone.

I know you think that's trivial. But I think when you see one, you'll find that it makes you, too question the very fabric of reality. After all, if a traffic cone can be blue, what else could be going around secretly being blue as well?

Yeah.

A Nice Day... Apart From The Traffic

Well, I did get dressed today.

You've probably surmised from my posts this week that I've been skiving from work. And I really lucked* out with the weather. Look:


This photo was actually taken when we got home from Leicester on Sunday, but the weather has been similarly fantastic all week. It's brilliant. For the first time this year, we can sit out in the sun and... er... drink tea.

Dr K informs me that there are other things one can do in the garden. Something called 'mowing' and something else called 'pruning'. And then there was something about putting wet clothes out there, but that's clearly a stupid idea. They'd get all grassy.


Although I've spent the vast majority of my week off (well, the bits when I wasn't adventuring in the East Midlands, anyway) putting together a music video for Stead (god, I never want to hear that song again), I have taken the occasional opportunity to pop out and enjoy the sun. It would be rude not to. Unfortunately, sometimes the popping out can backfire horribly.

This afternoon, for example, I popped out to the shops for a few minutes and, on the way home, got stuck in a godawful traffic jam on the motorway. It took me two hours to get home. What was particularly annoying was that the vast majority of the delay was within a mile of my house. In fact for the last half an hour or so, I could actually see my house from where I was parked on the motorway.

I shouldn't complain though. Someone was obviously having a far worse day than me.

Steve Jobs for example. I'll tell you why: while I was at the shops, I noticed the enormous queue for iPads outside the Apple store. What caught my attention in particular though, was that the staff were handing out sandwiches to the people in the queue.

Do I even need to tell you what happened next? Here, let Steve and Bill tell it:



Tonight I shall be going out for my slightly delayed birthday tea with all of my favourite people and Stead. Oh yeah, and the Fish Lady.

Dr K just came in wearing a lovely dress and asked me if I would be getting changed out of my scruffy jeans and Batman t-shirt. I hadn't really planned that far ahead yet, but I suppose I'd better go and put my birthday suit on!

(*you probably don't need to know what Sigmund Freud made me mistype here)

Getting Dressed Is Overrated

I haven't got dressed all day.

That is all.

I Quit

Sorry, but that's the way it has to be.

I've been given six - count them: one, two, three, four, five, SIX - video games for my birthday and in order to get them all played (as well as the one I got for Christmas that I haven't had a chance to start and the two that I'm already halfway through), I'm simply going to have to give up my job.


I reckon I can match my current salary in benefits by becoming a disabled single mum. Of course that means I'll have to hang around coffee shops all day moaning about how hard it is being a single mum, or spend my days phoning into daytime chat shows to moan about how hard it is being a single mum and I think it must be required by law to log into Facebook and moan there about being a single mum.

Sounds like hard work That said, I've been off all week and still haven't had a chance to play my video games anyway, so perhaps going on the blag isn't the answer.

Ho hum. Back to not playing video games.

Bye.

Mmm... Curry!

I'm not sure that I've expoused enough on this blog about how much I love curry.


It's brilliant. There's really no other food that quite matches up to the pure amazing awesomeness of curry! My mouth starts watering just thinking about it it.

Last night, my little brother, with whom I was visiting, promised me a Carribean takeaway, which I was looking forward to immensely. Particularly the amusingly named (if, like me you have a mental age of 9) Jerk Chicken.

When we arrived at the Carribean takeaway establishment, we discovered that it was closed. While Chris was very upset by this development, when he announced that the alternative was curry, I have to admit that my dinner glands went into hyper mode.

I think if a doctor took a scan of my ample belly, it would produce a diagram that looked something like this:



I'm writing this blog post from the bathroom. It burnsssss...

Squareabout

I think this photograph says it all.

But what the hell; I can ramble on about square roundabouts for a couple of paragraphs no problem. I wouldn't want you to feel that you weren't getting your money's worth out of this blog. You know... all that money that you paid for it?

I'm not really sure what was so special about this meeting of roads that they felt the need to present it as a squareabout rather than a traditional roundabout. It certainly felt pretty much like a roundabout on the way round it. I'm not sure, in fact whether it was a square at all.

It may have been part of a conspiracy to mess with my head by the town planners; represented below by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in a completely original illustration that was not swiped from a previous post at all!

Location:Leicester

And Tat

While stalking the mean streets of Ashby De La Zouch* at the weekend, I saw a shop called 'Bangles And Tat' which made me wonder why they did not go with the somewhat more accurate moniker of 'And Tat' instead. I've never seen a bangle that wasn't tat. They're just shit, pointless bits of decoration. And some people use them as earrings which is even worse.

In lieu of an actual photograph of the offending shop, I present a photo of these two different shops, taken by a friend, which I now shamelessly present here as my own:


I have a sneaking suspicion that the so called 'nice things' sold by the shop on the left are probably actually more tat. Which suggest that the shop next door is full of pure, unprocessed Awesome!

(*which Steve Jobs, apparently, would prefer to be called Ashby De La Douche. If you're reading this, Steve, calling other people a douche doesn't make you less of one!)

Location:Leicester

Darren's Adventures in Leicester

Dazday Is Here!

Well, Dazvent is over. All those little windows on your Dazvent Calendar should now be open and lots of little Dazzes should be staring out out you while you go about your day. When I put it that way, it's a bit creepy, ain't it?

Well I had a super day. Dr K has been planning a mystery weekend away for me and today it all came to fruition. Well, some of it did, anyway. There are bits that haven't happened yet that are still quite secret.

I will admit to some mild concern when we pulled into Tamworth Services. This wasn't quite the magical birthday weekend location that I had envisioned*.

Fortunately, Dr K pointed out that we had only stopped for a quick wee and then she fed me a chicken and bacon sandwich which hushed my mouth quite effectively.

Anyway, a bit more driving later and we were in Leicestershire. Specifically, here:


It's a little science and engineering museum in Snibston. And very awesome it was, too. While I was there, I did some very cool things:


I lifted a mini.


Played with a cyclone.


Made a ball float in the air.


Played on a see saw.


Pretended to be a mad scientist.


And narrowly missed being hit by a plane.

I'm fairly sure that I should not read anything about the target demographic of this fine establishment, or Dr K's opinion of my maturity into the presence of many schoolchildren.

Next up was a castle in Ashby De La Zouche whose main claim to fame seems to be that a fictional character did not joust there.


We went up the tower (you're gonna have to look carefully for me):


And we went down a secret passage that I almost didn't fit in:


Something amazing happened this afternoon in a tea shop in Ashby: I drank my 500th cup of tea of the year. Here's a picture of me doing it:


The waitress was very entertained by the event and I imagine she will be telling her grandchildren about the day a dashing and handsome man came into her teashop and drank his 500th cuppa. Well, the cuppa bit anyway. I expect she's forgotten about it by now.

And then it was time to go and check into the hotel and find somewhere to have dinner. We picked a pub called The Crown because it looked nice on the Internet, but accidentally went to the Queen's Head instead - mainly because we're rubbish.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise because rather than being a normal pub restaurant, which is what it looked like from the outside, it was... well, this picture says it all:


I'm not kidding when I tell you that this was the tastiest curry I've ever had. Ever.

So, we've covered off Science, Castles, Tea and Curry. I have no idea how Dr K is planning to top this tomorrow, but since it's going to start with a hotel fry-up, I have no doubt that she's gonna manage it!

(*I'm told that Tamworth Services is really a summer sort of place. Winter and spring really don't show off it's true beauty and actually, the magic doesn't kick in until about May or June.)

Cakes That I Have Enjoyed

How much cake is too much cake? A wise woman once said that all the cake is too much cake, but I suspect that she was wrong.

Today I had a lot of cake.

It wasn't my fault. I didn't set out to eat a lot of cake. In fact I didn't plan to eat any cake particularly today, although I had a vague suspicion that there may be a moderate amount of cake in my near future.

Nothing could have prepared me for the mighty deluge of cake that was poured upon me today!

It started at about half past seven when Nicky arrived in the office and handed me a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Mmm... delicious. The box even had my favourite jam and cream filled ones with icing and white chocolate shavings.

Then Hannah the Tooth Princess turned up with a rather awesome Spiderman cake. With a free Spiderman keyring and roll of Spiderman related stickers. Frickin' sweet!

And then one of the dinner ladies found out that it was my birthday tomorrow and sent me a muffin.

And finally, Rachael promised me a birthday cake when I returned from my birthday holiday. So a cake IOU.

Brilliant.

So, yeah, I ate a lot of cake today. It would have been downright rude not to. I've also been on a roller coaster ride of sugar highs and lows which will quite possibly induce type two diabetes in me!

There's still quite a lot left. Wish me luck.

Although in my cakey excitement, I neglected to obtain photographs of my baked confections, here are a few pictures of cakes I have enjoyed in the past:

Oh, How The Tables Have Turned

I went for a curry with members of the Nuclear industry today.

There is one particular chap in this group of people who, without fail, waxes lyrical about how Bankers (and presumably me in particular) have wrought untold economic Armageddon upon the world.

Tonight, right on cue, he launched into his usual ignorant diatribe: Bankers. Bonuses. The usual small minded, uninformed bullshit that spills out of the mouths of Daily Mail readers like untreated sewage.

He was an easy target: a representative of the nuclear industry just a few days after the earthquake and tsunami that caused damage to the reactors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the failure of the pumps that provide water to the cooling pools containing used fuel rods.

I was a gentleman. I rose above it, met his eye and simply pointed out that we were only believing things that the Daily Mail had printed this week!

I did not have any more trouble with him.

Orbiting Cats

Blimey, it's hard to get a lie-in around here.

Once the cats decide it's time for me to get up, they begin to orbit around my head, purring loudly. There's only two of 'em, but once they start, it feels like there's about 20.


It's not just the orbiting, either. The purring is as loud as someone using an electric drill in my inner ear. I mean, I've never actually had anyone use an electric drill in my ear, but I'm sure that's what one would sound like.

Still... At least there's not much chance of oversleeping.

Changing the subject, I watched an episode of Burn Notice this evening. That's one down on the cylon bingo!

My Memory

My memory is pants. It's not even good pants, like cool jockey shorts or sexy thongs. It's a grubby pair of two week old stained y-fronts.

I can forget something in a second. I'm so effective at forgetting stuff it's almost a superpower.

For example: I often pick my man Scotty up on my way to work. In order to do this I have to turn off at a certain roundabout. About 50% of the time, despite leaving early, especially to collect him, I forget to turn at the crucial moment, meaning that I have to drive an extra mile or so before I can turn round.

Once I had lunch plans with a friend. She phoned me about 10 minutes before to make sure I had remembered. 12 o'clock came and I wandered down to the canteen, bought my lunch and wandered back up again 15 minutes later to find her waiting by my desk looking slightly pissed off. I had to give my lunch away.

It's a bloody miracle that I remember my meetings at work. And I don't always!

If I don't leave my laptop by the front door, I'll forget it on my way out to work. Packed lunches are a real problem as they have to sit in the fridge overnight. In order to remember to take it with me, I have to spot it in the fridge, make a connection in my brain so I know what it is and, crucially, put it by the front door.

Even if I get it to work, it's touch and go as to whether I'll remember I have it with me. As often as not, I'll just go and buy a baked potato from the canteen.

I'm rubbish.

Recently, I went to the doctor about my awful memory. He took a scan. This is what the scan looked like:


Finally, I wrote this while waiting for Dr K's tea to brew. Obviously I forgot about it. Hopefully she won't notice that it's a bit stewed.

Big Words

I've been far too busy building a galaxy for my brother to put together a decent post for you tonight. Instead here's a second rate post for you to chuckle at.

I have a desk calendar at work. It's called the 'Big Words' calendar. It's not very good - a lot of the words are not actually that big and many of the ones that are quite big are a bit rubbish. So in order to make the whole thing far more entertaining, I've decided to come up with a few alternative meanings for the words. Behold:

Callisthenics
Plural noun – Gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement.
Plural noun – Stupid, girly exercises to achieve DVD sales.

Hypnopaedia
Noun – Learning by hearing while asleep.
Noun – The act of luring children into your car through hypnotism

Rancour
Noun – The deepest malignity or spite; deep-seated enmity or malice; inveterate hatred
Noun – Large, ugly, alien creature susceptible to to falling doors. Beloved of fat half naked men.

Turgescent
Adjective – Becoming turgid; swelling
Noun – Boner

Abnegate
Transitive verb – To deny oneself (a pleasure); renounce or reject.
Verb – To eat cake.

Utilitarianism
Noun – The doctrine that actions are right if they are for the benefit of the majority.
Noun – A government run by a coalition of electricity and water providers.

Humanitarian
Noun – Holding the views of Humanitarians
Adjective – Of or relating to human welfare
Noun – One who eats only humans, e.g. Godzilla or Dracula.

Extravehicular
Adjective – Outside a vehicle, especially a spaceship.
Adjective – where the cars on a driveway outnumber the sum of valid diving licenses in the house.

Dazza vs the Car Sales Industry

I took a friend car shopping today. She was looking at the... er... bottom end of the market, so we went to some very interesting places. Not bottom shops. Car lots.

The thing that struck me most was the incredible variance in the price of very similar vehicles even on the same lot and I'm pretty sure that this is because salesmen are actually trying to con us using bigotry.

Rather than putting the correct price on a car, they will typically display twice as much or more.

If you are a decent haggler, you'll get a much, much lower price than if you're not. There's a certain type of person who's a good haggler. More often than not, they're also a bit of a dick, but that's incidental (although it's worth noting that I am rubbish at haggling, which either supports or emphatically opposes it, depending on how you feel about me).

So... basically, the car salesmen are discriminating against certain personality types. Wankers. The salesmen, not the rubbish hagglers.


And it's not just cars. Have you ever bought double glazing? Did they quote a ridiculously high price and then go through the performance of phoning their 'manager' to get you a better price only to end up offering you about a quarter of the original price. Dickheads.

You don't get it in the supermarket. Or the butchers. Or the button shop. The price they display is the price you get and it doesn't make any difference if you're a bit of a di... er... haggler.


We didn't buy a car in the end. Or double glazing.