The unfatness plan revisited

Posted on September 18, 2015 by thepogblog

Since I’ve been writing this blog, the unfatness plan has been through many iterations. I’ve been heavily involved in cycling (until that incident involving a lorry, which ended up with me being checked out at the vets), I had a brief foray into early morning swimming (but as we know from scuba diving, water isn’t really my friend). I managed a few sessions the gym with Sister 1 as support (but she spent more time laughing at me than actually helping….and those machines are definitely designed more for torture than pleasure), and I even did a few terms of pole dancing….but I’ll happily admit that I spent more time laughing than actually succeeding at very much at all.

Proof! (For teh record, this was for fitness - never with the intention of an alternative career. There was no chance of that anyway...

Proof! (For the record, this was for fitness – never with the intention of an alternative career. There was no chance of that anyway…)

Yoga and a very brisk 30 minute walk between the station and office three days a week are pretty much my only exercise at the moment. I don’t think that’s too bad, but it could definitely be improved on. Which is why a couple of weeks ago, I signed up to ‘fit ball’; it promises to strengthen your core. Based on my wobbliness at yoga (still), I clearly have no core, so I thought it was time to address this. And besides, it involved rolling around on big beach balls. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh. My. God. That was Monday. By Wednesday I wanted to curl up in a ball and stay there for the foreseeable future. Until yesterday I couldn’t cough or move too quickly without the tummy muscles I didn’t think I had screaming at me. Even my hands hurt, (How? Why?!)… Although, I’m actually quite amazed I can feel anything; I spent most of the class giggling so much I struggled to actually do the exercises. These balls are big (tee hee), and the teacher made it look so easy…

“Ladies, stand in front of your balls and glide over over them until your knees are balanced on the top and your hands and head are on the floor. then simply move the ball away and then back towards your hands.” Uh huh.

I came off sideways with a thud and the giggles took hold. Everyone else seemed to slide off their ball at the end of each exercise with the control the teacher requested. I had no option but to fall off in a heap with a bit of a squeak. There was even one point where we had to do a plank against the ball and then….do something. I assumed because I can (just) do this in yoga, it would be a breeze against a ball. I think I was turning purple when the teacher rushed over and told me in rather urgent tones to stop before I did any real damage and perhaps I would be better doing a more basic version of this particular exercise?

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A picture on the wall of someone who clearly doesn’t turn purple doing the plank

As it turned out, the more basic version was quite a struggle too…

Another someone with significantly more balance / core / experience than me.

Another someone with significantly more balance / core / experience than me.

For the record, fit ball is definitely a little more involved than ‘rolling round on big beach balls’. And, as I found out on Tuesday, probably not best followed by a yoga class 24 hours later. Although I feel less like an very elderly lady today on Wednesday the screams of my tummy were joined by moans from my ribs and legs…

Anyway, I’m signed up for 10 weeks. It’ll either kill me or give me some sort of toned tummy, just in time for…Christmas. :o)

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A snort for you, because…

Posted on September 14, 2015 by thepogblog

I have been known to do the occasional daft thing at work. That time I accidentally took a baby stick insect into the office, and the time I told a manager I’d just met “I’ll be back to bugger you later”, for example. But I usually manage to keep my moments of idiot-ness to colleagues I know…or at least, ones I end up knowing.

Not today though. Today I went external. It’s been one of those days where you spend a lot of your time with your legs crossed because there isn’t even time to run to the toilet between meetings or stuff that someone just decided needed doing yesterday. I just missed a call running back to my desk from a meeting but saw from the number it was an external provider I’m working with at the moment. I had three minutes before my next teleconference but called him back anyway – I knew he would be responding to an urgent email I’d sent. In my rush to get through that call and on with the next, I just asked if he could reply in writing (so an utterly pointless call on my part). He said he would, but just to let me know, he could sort out everything I’d asked him to do.

At that point, I’m not sure quite where my brain went, but I said thank you, and then, just before I put the phone down, I said (in what sounded like quite a meaningful way) “I love you”. Argh.

While I was on the next call he replied to the mail he said he would, and by that time I was a little concerned as to how my unintentional declaration might have come across. So I wrote back and apologised:

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He sent me back this:

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I told a colleague. She told me it was a lot worse than that :o/

I sent the mails to another colleague though (One who has mostly kept me sane today even though her Monday was as bad as mine)- I thought it might cheer her up. She said it made her snort. :o)

So I thought I’d pop it on here because it might make you snort too. And because, you know, I love you :o)

Posted in Pog Life, work | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Pog the inventor

Posted on September 12, 2015 by thepogblog

I’m feeling rather proud of myself.

This morning I went to have a shower and was met by the distinctive smell of rotting mouse as soon as I walked in the bathroom.  The mouse Norman had alerted me to last week had not been enticed by chocolate spread or peanut butter in the humane trap I’d set for it.  Instead, it had chosen to end its days behind my toilet.

Rotting mouse is not a good smell, especially when you have friends coming over in the evening.  These friends (nearly neighbour and almost nearly neighbour) put up with a lot from me, but I thought ‘hold your nose when you go into the bathroom – it smells a bit of decaying flesh’ might stretch any friendship.  I had to get mousey out quite speedily.

The problem was that having taken off the shelf over the toilet, I realised that I can’t actually reach the ground behind it….

imageI put my thinking cap on and thought through some options and eventually I worked it out.  I have designed, possibly the very first ‘dead mouse catcher for when your arms aren’t long enough’:

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(Part of a milk carton, with a stick sellotaped to it and another stick for poking.)

You do need to put a torch in your mouth to see when using it behind a toilet, but I have successfully removed the mouse, and now have a scented candle burning in the bathroom in an attempt to get rid of the smell. By the time they arrive, as long as they’ve not read this, my friends will be none the wiser and the only thing they will have to cope with is my cooking.

I may patent the idea.  I could retire.  But I’ll let you borrow the concept should you ever need to retrieve a slightly out of the way, dead animal :o)

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Going postal

Posted on September 11, 2015 by thepogblog

“Don’t go postal!” That’s what someone told me on email today.  I had no idea what they meant.  I had to Google it, and I found this:

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To be fair, I had just sent a slightly very frustrated email to her, and probably deserved the comment.  It’s just as well she didn’t speak to me on Tuesday though….

I was working from home.  It was a day I planned to get my head down in total silence and plough through a heap of work.  By 9.30am I’d been called by recorded service offering me PPP compensation, and a window company:

“I don’t need new windows”

“That’s ok; I’m selling conservatories”

“I have a conservatory. How did you get my number?”

“You made an enquiry with us recently.”

“As I have had both windows replaced and conservatory built in the last few years, I don’t think so….”

Within an hour the phone rang again.  I don’t know why I didn’t just do my usual thing of putting it to one side and leaving the person to talk to themself. I must have been feeling a bit grumpy. Instead, the conversation went like this:

“You have recently had a car crash.”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, maybe not recently, but you have reported one.”

“No.”

“You have. I have the details here.”

“My last car crash was about 20 years ago”

“So you have had one!”

“How did you get my number?”

“The insurance company gave it to me.”

“What company are you calling from, what is your name and what is your phone number?”

“Why?”

“Because I  am going to report you.”

“Why?”

“Because what you are doing is morally wrong. If I were a vulnerable person you might have managed to confuse, or worse, scare me. It’s inexcusable.”

“Umm…. Thank you. Good bye”

I did go on for a bit longer.  Quite a lot longer in fact. And I may have got a bit shouty. A bit postal, as it turns out. Oh, I do like using a new phrase the day I learn it  :o)

On a serious note for a second, if you are in the UK, you can register with the telephone preference service (Google it) to reduce these sort of calls.  It doesn’t stop the ones from foreign call centres  as they are outside UK law, but it cuts them down a bit and reduces the chances of going postal. (Did you see what I did there? I used it again :o) )

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Disorganisation, leading to a suspected urine sample and a jumper that may well not have matching sleeves.

Posted on September 8, 2015 by thepogblog

I am disorganised.  Really disorganised.

At work, if I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it.  I’ll probably even deliver it early.  I can find that document you need from 5 years back, can write really detailed training instructions, and can set up an event for 5000 people (although the latter does tend to give me palpitations).

At home though, it kind of all falls apart.  I’m the sort of person who has been known to have long conversations on the doorstep with people who have turned up unannounced, rather than let them in the house to see the chaos.  I do try, but it’s not the right sort of trying….  I may occasionally put clean clothes back in the laundry basket because I can’t work out quite how to fit them in my chest of drawers (because I never throw anything out.  I have clothes covering 4 dress sizes in there).  If I know someone is turning up, I put pretty much everything in the kitchen cupboards, wardrobe or under my bed.  Wool is stashed in so many places that it’s like Christmas some days when I open a bag hidden somewhere in a cupboard.   Most of the time though, Pog Towers is mostly in a state of barely contained chaos.  And that’s ok, because Norman and I can manage that.

The only time it becomes a problem is if someone unexpectedly opens some of those cupboards…

Yesterday was Big House Day (Sister 1 and Little Pea come and do my cleaning every other week).  I hide everything in cupboards on the Sunday evening and when I get home Sister 1 has cleaned and somehow made it all look bigger.  She doesn’t open the cupboards so I can put what I like in there.  Except yesterday, when she very kindly, and very bravely decided to clean my food cupboard out.

I got home to find this:

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It was a fair point: I tend to keep food through the seasons, and, as it turns out through the years.

The bit that made me giggle most though was this:

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Over the weekend I’d made some blackberry vinegar for me and Sister 1.  One of the ingredients is white wine vinegar and there was a bit left over….but I needed the bottle to put the finished product in.  I stuck the extra in a jam jar and had left it on the workbench, but when I did my Sunday night de-clutter, I’d thought to myself ‘She’s going to think I have had a wee in a jam jar.  I’ll pop it in the cupboard’.  It seems nothing is safe though :o)

And in another demonstration of total lack of organisation, I made myself a jumper.  I couldn’t find a pattern I liked so I made it up.  I’ve done that before, but never written down the pattern, which is annoying as when the experiments have worked, I’ve not had a clue how to recreate them.  This time, my parents suggested I write down all the details.  That didn’t seem like much fun though, so I decided to go half way and write down the pattern for the sleeves.  This was what I managed:

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By the time I got to the second sleeve it was pretty much guess work as to what any of it meant.  And I still have no clue what ‘7 loops’ refers to….  Still, it’s safe to say, it’s a one off; I’m still not entirely sure the sleeves match :o)

b2

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A few observations

Posted on September 4, 2015 by thepogblog

Just a few of this weeks observations:

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The sign at the coffee place I walk past on the way to work.  I really should actually buy some coffee from there – it’s getting a bit awkward hiding to one side of the window to take these so the staff don’t see.  It made me giggle.

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And the polar opposite to what the coffee sign implies, I saw this:  A homeless gentleman going through the rubbish from the food market on leather lane.  He kept some for himself, and the rest, he fed the pigeons with.  He picked up a few to talk to them.  We had a chat when he finished and he told me he was looking for one in particular who had hurt her leg.  No sooner had he told me than she arrived at his feet and he was so happy he became totally absorbed in her, hardly acknowledging a lovely lady who gave him some sausage rolls she’d just been to buy for him :o)

Then we have me, being my usual stupid self.  Basically I managed to send an invite out at work that was linked in some way to my email account.  I had 90 replies in the first few minutes and the potential for a few thousand more.  Luckily there was a lovely girl sitting next to me who taught me to create a rule to move them all straight to a folder as they arrived.  There was only one thing to call it:

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And finally, I think I have an evening of running round with a pyrex mixing bowl and wooden spoon ahead.  Norman has spent the day in my bathroom like this:

a1

I can only assume that there is a mouse down there, under the skirting board (he often brings them in alive and drops them – I’m pretty sure it’s just to watch the entertainment value of me running round the house with kitchen implements to catch it before he does…)

Anyway, at least it’s Friday…Happy weekend!  :o)

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A Little Pea and me sleepover

Posted on September 1, 2015 by thepogblog

I’ve wanted Little Pea to stay at Pog Towers for a night since…well pretty much since he was born.  With a teeny, tiny house, no spare room and no cot though, it wasn’t really do-able. 2¼ years on it still wasn’t really do-able, but last Saturday, we did it anyway :o)

Sister 2 and I took Little Pea on a walk to attempt to wear him out.  It turned into a dinosaur hunt, but sadly we only found dinosaur poo (otherwise known as moss).  I was very impressed with Sister 2’s creativity.  Little Pea was less though.  He looked at her when she told him in tones of great excitement that there must be dinosaurs nearby as there was a lot of dinosaur poo and informed her that ‘No.  Not dinosaur poo.  Stegosaurus poo.’  (Very impressive, but he does still insist that everything is blue, so we’re not entirely sure where that moment of cleverness came from..).

So we investigated dinosaur sounds and deposits:

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Had a bit of a lie down:

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‘Are you coming with us?’ ‘No, not ready yet’.  ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Looking at trees and sky.’  ‘Are you going to be a hippy when you grow up?’ ‘Yes’.  ‘What colour are the leaves?’ ‘Blue’.

And for some reason, I became his dog:

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By the time we left Sister 2’s house and got back to Pog Towers it was time for tea.  I made mine as Little Pea ate all his, then we sat down together so I could eat and…’I eat that too’.  So it was one mouthful for me, one for him.

A quick cuddle while we watched ‘In the Night Garden’ (Seriously?  What weird brain came up with that?)

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And then it was bath time.  Only Pog Towers doesn’t have a bath…  But we did quite well with the shower.  It was four for the price of one really – Little Pea got washed, so did I, all his clothes and most of the bathroom. He even insisted on wiping down the windows.

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And bed – now that was exciting.  I’d blacked out the room with blankets (I took my curtains down about two years ago and still haven’t got round to replacing then), rolled up another blanket so he couldn’t fall down the side of the bed and Sister 1 had sent books, toys and nightlight with him.  I honestly thought there was a good chance we’d read a few books and he’d nod off.

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To cut a very long story short, at 8.30pm I ended up getting ready for bed myself and being instructed exactly where my arms and legs should go.  And they were not allowed to move.  At any point.  Because then Little Pea woke up.  He also insisted that Teddy had to sleep in the bed with us.  Teddy that has a cow bell round his neck, that clangs every time anyone moves.  But by 9pm (oops), SUCCESS!:

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I woke up about every five minutes.  It was like sleeping with a wriggly, sleep talking worm.  He talked so much I almost ignored him when at 1am he got a bit frantic about his blanket.  Being the queen of blankets, I offered him pretty much every one I had in the house until I realised that the blanket in question was actually his muslin. Which he had been holding all the time.

At 6am I was woken for the final time with ‘Poggy, let’s go on an adventure.  With pasta’.  I didn’t know 6am existed on a Sunday morning.  I also didn’t know why pasta was required on the adventure.  We spent some time using the bed as a swimming pool and being a shark, watching an unhappy Norman staring at us from the top of the wardrobe, and finding a fully functioning kitchen under the duvet, where Little Pea made and fed me breakfast from.  But then we got up to have real breakfast, which seemed to involve a few magic tricks as Coco Pops appeared just about everywhere…the table, the floor, between fingers and inside pyjamas…

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But we made it!  We even went on a little adventure to the postbox before Sister 1 arrived to take him home.  Only we didn’t take any pasta :o)

I know this will be a pretty standard set of events for Mummies and Daddies everywhere, but for this Auntie, it was brilliant, and I’d do it again as long as I didn’t actually have to be awake the next day.  It was very quiet – too quiet – when he left.  But Norman and I kind of appreciated that too :o)

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Have a lovely….

Posted on August 28, 2015 by thepogblog

You know how while you’re in the middle of talking, you can have a conversation with yourself in your head at the speed of light?  (It’s not just me, is it?)  Well, that happened to me this week, but it turns out that I’m not a great person to have those conversations with.

I was saying goodbye to a colleague and friend who was going on maternity leave.  ‘Bye’ didn’t seem quite enough so I started to say ‘Have a lovely…’ And then realised I didn’t know how to finish the sentence.   I do have a habit of saying entirely the wrong thing when my brain isn’t engaged and half the HR department were in earshot at this particular moment.  So this is what happened:

‘Bye!  Have a lovely…’

Lovely what? If I say ‘time off’ I’m pretty sure someone will think I’m implying it’s an easy 6-12 months.  If I say ‘3 weeks’ (that’s how long before the bump is due), it suggests the next 18 years or so don’t have the chance to be lovely. ‘Lovely rest of the day’ is a little too short term. ‘Lovely birth’ is entirely inappropriate.  What do I say?  What do I say? She’s going to have a baby…

So the genius that came out of my mouth after that really helpful conversation in my head was:

‘Bye!  Have a lovely….baby’

For the record, this was not a good choice of words either, although it did make some people giggle….

And in other little people news, a lady on a Facebook group I belong to is putting together Christmas parcels for the local Special Care baby unit.  She asked for knitted or crocheted hats and I couldn’t resist.  I couldn’t find any teeny tiny patterns that I liked, so I got the measurements that prem baby units request hats in and came up with my own designs.  They are really teeny tiny :o)

hats

Posted in crochet, Pog Life | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

A Saturday upholstery class in Bumpkinsville

Posted on August 25, 2015 by thepogblog

I love Saturdays.  They are the only day of the week where work plays absolutely no part and it’s a wide open space to do exactly what I want with (being a slightly odd, single cat lady does have its perks).  I love occasionally using them to do a course, learn a new  thing or two and meet new people, and last Saturday my evening class upholstery teacher ran a full day class in her workshop.  I think I was the first one to sign up :o)

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As at most of the 2 hour evening classes I seem to end up bandaged or covered in plasters, I fully expected to leave this 8 hour day in a full body cast, but weirdly, things went well.  I only stuck a needle in me once and only hammered my thumb a few times.  As there was only a small amount of blood, we didn’t even need to open the first aid box.

In my evening class I’d finally finished my prayer chair, getting it from this:

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To this:

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To this:

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I’d bought my next project a while ago – a chair I’d fallen in love with as it’s just the right dimensions for propping up my elbows while I crochet.  As soon as Dad and I started stripping it back though, I realised that it was going to be seriously complicated to put back together…

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But I actually made good headway.  Apart from getting all gung ho and putting the webbing in the wrong place:

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It was a really lovely day.  There were only three of us, which was perfect in terms of getting time with the (very patient) teacher.  What could be better than spending a day in the middle of Bumpkinsville, chatting away while the radio plays in the background and much hammering and knotting is required?

Actually, I’m not great at the hammering and the knotting made me swear quite a lot.  Well, look at how many clove hitches or half clove hitches or whatever they are you have to do to tie the blimin’ springs in:

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And you have to keep the springs ‘unspringed while you do it (which probably makes no sense to anyone but me).   Then you have to sew them in, despite the fact you can’t see them:

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But it’s fun to try, even if some of it does make me a bit grumpy.

One of the other students is a lovely lady from my usual class who I always work next to (if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) and the other was a local lady who has 40 sheep.  All I could think of when she told us is ‘there has to be some way you could crochet wool direct from a sheep’ followed by ‘how well would Norman get on with a sheep?’  I then decided that as my back garden contains no grass and is about the size of three sheep, it probably wasn’t worth pursuing the thought to much further…

It’ll be a while before I finish my tub chair, but if it means I get more Saturdays like this one, then I am a very happy Pog :o)

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To Google or not to Google?

Posted on August 21, 2015 by thepogblog

A friend recently posted this on Facebook, and I nodded with enthusiasm:

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It’s so true.  Today I have Googled everything from the email address for my old dentist (so I could request some of the £780 it’s cost me in the last 4 months to correct the appalling work he has done) to the time in San Francisco (to find out when was a reasonable time to contact a colleague) to ‘why won’t Outlook let me open any Word attachments?’ (I’m still at a loss on that one – Google got all technical on me).

I’m thinking now that perhaps I should have done a spot of Googling when I tried to fix the broken cord that turns the light on my bathroom mirror on and off.  I did fix it, and I was so proud of myself that I called Dad to tell him.

‘What exactly did you do?’ He asked

‘Well, I couldn’t get the casing unscrewed, so I sort of ‘popped’ it out.  Then I tied a new cord to the switch and tried to poke it through the hole.  It didn’t work, so I tried a few needles to thread it through, but that didn’t work either so I used some wire.  On the third thickness I tried I got it through and now it’s all working.’

‘And you turned the power off first?’

‘Ummmm…’

And it turns out that had I Googled this, I would have found out the first thing I should have done was turn the power off.  Not, as I did, leave it on so I could see by the light I was actually trying to fix.  To be fair, my bathroom has no windows and the only way I could have seen without the light is to have held the torch in my mouth – I didn’t think that was a good option while standing on a chair, and waving screwdrivers and wire around (Now I think about it, I was probably more likely to make it through alive in that scenario than the one I chose) .

Anyway, 24 hours after my handyman stint / near death experience, the actual switch broke (a complete coincidence – nothing to do with the previous days activities, honest).  I called Dad to ask how safe it would be to unscrew the wires it was attached to so I could take it to a shop get a new one.  I didn’t think Google would be able to factor in my recent total incompetence and that Dad might be a slightly better bet, but I did think I could Google the switch to work out what I would need to do, if Dad thought I would be able to manage.

His response?

‘Do NOT touch anything.  I’ll come down and sort it out!’

He did, and I now have a fully functioning bathroom mirror light, which is lovely – although I’d got quite used to not seeing all the lines on my face every morning and night – the dimness was my friend.  I’d like to point out though, that we did turn off the power this time, but needed two torches to be able to see, so one in my mouth would never have worked.

Weirdly, this was outside the coffee shop I pass on my commute yesterday, just as I was thinking about writing this post:

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It’s like someone is telling me something…. :)

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