The speed of light. And magpies

Posted on May 8, 2015 by thepogblog

It turns out that for years I’ve been getting things wrong.  You see, I thought that the way to do stuff (not every day stuff – the slightly bigger things with a bit of impact.  In this case, the sort of work stuff with about 5000 people’s worth of impact) was to:

  • Be given a task
  • Have a little think about it
  • Come up with a couple of solutions
  • Possibly write down a few pros and cons
  • Discuss with someone to decide the best option
  • Carefully work on whatever it is
  • And deliver

It turns out that I’ve wasted a huge amount of time with this theory though.  Today I’ve discovered what I should have actually been doing was either:

  • Be given a task
  • Apply first solution that pops into brain that will have the best impact in the fastest time
  • Deliver

Or alternatively:

  • Be given a half completed task
  • Decide that even though this has been reviewed and approved by around 398 people, it’s never going to work
  • Change it all at the speed of light
  • Clear it with absolutely nobody
  • Deliver.

It turns out that not only does nobody die when you don’t plan things out in a considered and sensible way, but nobody notices (or at least, they haven’t yet.  I could be eating my words next week).  I’ve not done my best work, but it’s been the only way to get through the ridiculous to do list this week.  It’s a revelation***.  And slightly annoying to think of all the crochet hours I’ve missed….

*** There is a slight down side to this.  I think it must affect other parts of your brain to work at what feels like the speed of light.  This week I’ve walked straight into two walls (and have the bruises to prove it), convinced myself I was going through the menopause (then realised that I’d accidentally selected a ‘hot and spicy’ chicken salad which was what was giving me hot flushes) and had a conversation about the magpie rhyme with far more intensity than was required.  For the record, nobody seems to agree on one answer, but I’m going with:

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

I just wish all the magpies I see would be more sociable and stop appearing in ones as I spend most of my drive to the station touching my collar….but that’s a whole different story :o)

speedy

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Norman’s birthday and other animals

Posted on May 5, 2015 by thepogblog

Yesterday was Norman’s birthday.  He’s five.  (It was also Charlie Cat’s birthday too, of course.  I’m hoping wherever he is, he knew I was singing Happy Birthday to him too….)

This is a photo of Norman as a kitten:

r11

Nothing much changes.  This is him this weekend:

r1

And I’ve just discovered this cat calculator on the interweb that gives you a cat’s age in human years using more recent findings that 1 cat year = 7 human years.  It makes Norman 36.  (Even he is younger than me.  I guess it would be weirder if if were older that me.  Which he will be next year.  Oh, that’s just befuddled my brain….)  Anyway, his age doesn’t stop him sitting in bags:

r2

Norman wasn’t the only animal involved in my Bank Holiday.  We had a family trip (7 of us) to a rescue place called (rather unfortunately)  Beaver World.  They rescue all sorts of animals (reptiles, birds, small mammals) from all sorts of places and do their best for them.  Pets that outgrew expectations, cost too much, RSPCA animals, and in the case of these chaps:

r4

A centre that bought them as an attraction and didn’t understand their breeding capability….ending up with far more than they bargained for.

Rather than being ‘Beaver World’, it was more like ‘Just the one Beaver, but my, isn’t she big World’:

r3

I asked Sister 2 to do something so I could show you how big this snake is (we were about 6 feet away):

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But Sister 1 got in on the act:

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(I told you you’d regret that ;o) )

While Little Pea behaved better than his Mummy and quietly said hello to the ‘dinosaurs’:

r7

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We went to a holding session for little people:

r5And, um, slightly bigger people:

r6

Since 7am this morning I have been so busy that I kept wishing I’d worked yesterday, despite the bank holiday (as I know some of my UK colleagues did), but having written this, I’m pleased I didn’t.  Nothing beats time with your family with a few animals thrown in for good measure.  Especially Norman cat:  My most favourite fur ball. :o)

 

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Erm…

Posted on May 1, 2015 by thepogblog

Isn’t it weird how people perceive you? I’ve always thought I should probably add some text to the bit that appears at the bottom of each blog post where you’re supposed to tell people a bit about yourself, but it’s so blimin’ difficult.  I think we must see ourselves very differently to others.

I was pretty sure that I’m just seen as ‘single with a cat and crochet habit.  Slightly weird,’ and that that kind of covered it.  But in some strange coincidence over the last few weeks, people have been giving unprompted additions to this picture.

I’ve met two very different people, described myself in that awkward introduction stage in those words and was met with two totally different responses.  One was ‘How old are you? Ah, you still have a bit of time to have children then’ (a bit presumptuous, I thought, from someone I’d only just met).  The other….: ‘That’s not weird – you’re a kind of hippie’.  (I quite liked that).

And there have been comments I really wouldn’t expect. A neighbour recently appeared stunned when I swore in conversation.  ‘We didn’t think you were that sort of person!’ he said.  Firstly, what ‘sort of person’ did that make me?, and second, who the hell is ‘we’?  Have there been neighbourhood meetings where my character has been discussed?  If so, I think they’ve jumped to some other weird conclusions.  Like when the kids next door kicked a ball into my garden (again!) and came round to ask for it back.  Their grandmother knocked on my door and almost grovelled a thank you for popping it back over the fence…as though I would do anything different…

A friend told me that he imagined my blog writing to be a considered affair over a leisurely cup of tea.  I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but on a Tuesday it’s a frantic scramble between the final teleconference of the day and leaving for my yoga class, which means that at some point I’ll be typing while trying to pull on my yoga socks (and believe me, they’re a bugger to get on with one hand).  Fridays are more casual, I admit, but they are written with a slight desperation to get the laptop switched off for the weekend.

And then this week one of the people who recently moved into my area in the office overheard a series of calls to two different helpdesks.  It’s a long story, but several calls were of the frustrated variety and one where finally, finally I got the solution I needed.  By this point, I knew I was dealing with Brian, who is off to Malta for a week with his wife today, as a matter of fact.  Brian called me, told me things were sorted so I told him I loved him, wished him a lovely holiday and put the phone down.  My colleague looked over and said ‘you’re a WYSIWYG, aren’t you?’  After being informed that this meant ‘What You See Is What You Get’, I agreed that I probably was.  I’m still not sure if it’s 100% good, but I’m ok with that.

So now maybe my description of myself should be ‘single with a cat and crochet habit.  Slightly weird.  Not quite too old for children (should that be my goal in life), kind of hippie, frequent swear-er, returner of children’s toys, frantic blogger and WYSIWYG’. And that’s why the bit at the bottom of my posts has always just said ‘erm…’ :o)

Me and my yoga socks. They are magical. Ok, they keep my feet warm, but that's pretty magical when you are part toad.

Yoga socks – think of these next time you see a Tuesday post from me :o)

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The danger of dentists and dvds

Posted on April 28, 2015 by thepogblog

On Easter Sunday I was given four Easter eggs.  This was particularly exciting as we’d made a family pact that we wouldn’t do Easter Eggs this year, but it turns out, I was the only one that stuck to this (I did crochet chicken egg cosies though, just so you don’t think I’m too mean).

I got home in the evening, lined the eggs up to decide which one to open, and….my tooth broke.  Feeling a bit sorry for myself, I put them all away, and called the dentist on Tuesday.  They were shut.  I called on Wednesday.  The first time they could see me out of work hours was three weeks away.

To cut a very long story short, this, coupled with a growing sense of unease about the dentist I’ve been to for years, resulted in my making an appointment with a new dentist.  I got an emergency appointment to discover that I’d not broken my tooth – it had collapsed in on itself due to previous bad work done on it.  It turns out across all my teeth there is £775 worth of work that needs to be corrected, and a good chance that I will have to have at least one extracted.

Anyway, to fix this tooth, I had to go back last Saturday to spend an hour in the chair having, what ended up being my first root canal surgery.  I’m not good with dentists.  I punched the old one (by accident, although now I wish it had been harder, as it’s quite tricky to magic £775 out of nowhere, especially when you’ve already paid him to do the work).

When I walked in, I told my new dentist that I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw up or pass out first, but if it was the latter, could she just get on with it while I was unconscious?  If that didn’t give her a good idea of my nerves, the fact that I burst into tears as she moved the needle towards my gums did.  She was amazing.  She put on some relaxing music, asked the nurse to put a DVD on the screen mounted on the ceiling and then told the nurse to hold my hand.  Nurse then had to count my breathing in and out for me as apparently I was close to hyperventilating.

I can honestly say, for the first time ever, I didn’t feel a thing – the new dentist is clearly some sort of magician.  There was only one small problem:

The video the nurse put on was a David Attenborough nature one.  The sort I admire, but have refused to watch ever since I saw a whale popping a penguin out of its skin and devouring it.  I was so cross – that penguin would hardly have been a snack for that great big whale – he only did it for fun, possibly just for the camera – he looked like that sort of whale.  But I had no choice, I lay back for an hour, focussed intently on the screen and music so I didn’t think about what was happening in my mouth, and watched at least 12 animals get eaten by predators.  I was not a happy bunny at all.  (Although possibly happier than the animals on screen).

I have to go back to the dentist.  Quite a few times, funnily enough.  I’m not worried about the hurty factor any more, but I am thinking of taking my own DVD next time :o)

Totally unrelated, but much prettier than a tooth...

Totally unrelated, but much prettier than a tooth…

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A Friday giggle

Posted on April 24, 2015 by thepogblog

This week my blog made it over 29,000 hits!  That might not be much by ‘real’ blogging standards, especially when you consider that’s over 4.5 years, but I’m pretty stunned.  That means either a few good friends have hit ‘refresh’ repeatedly or a heap of people have stopped by quite a lot.  Or, possibly, it means that a lot of people have landed here by complete accident….

You can work out some of those people by looking at the search terms that people have used that have sent them here.  And a lot of the time I have no idea how Google or whatever looked at they search and decided ‘I know – I’ll send them to the pog blog’.  I had a look recently, and have a few new favourites I thought would give you a Friday giggle:

  • Ginger cake storage:
  • Really?  You needed to look this up?  What’s wrong with a plastic tin?  Or a bit of foil?
  • Black market crochet things:
  • There’s a block market in crochet things?  What sort of things?  Have I been missing a trick here?
  • By for now.  Pretty busy today.:
  • I can only assume someone got confused between an email and their search bar.
  • Things that you could put on savoury products:
  • Um….
  • Bottoms rule the world:
  • I’m not sure of the accuracy of this statement, but I would like to know how they ended up here.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never made such a claim.
  • Stick insect resuscitation:
  • Two people looked this up.  TWO.  There are no words (other than the fact that I did consider it, and wrote about it, but you know, other than that….)
  • Wrestling in shiny lycra:
  • WtF?!

Happy weekend :o)

tpb

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Training the neighbours…

Posted on April 21, 2015 by thepogblog

My neighbours can be a bit of a challenge.  No, that is work language (see how they have trained me?!).  My neighbours are a nightmare.  And the problem is, I’m slightly scared of them and their very large extended family who seem to stay for days on end.  I can just about cope with the fact that at least one night a week the kids are still up and running around past midnight and I have to go to work on four hours sleep.  The arguments outside my front door are sometimes better than the TV I can’t hear over them.  And I can only assume they don’t realise that the bass on their stereo creeps up all on its own until my walls feel like they are vibrating and I snap.  I do snap occasionally, you see, but I try to pick my battles as I’m pretty sure if I complain too much they will just up the ante.

But when, on the third day running, I realised that one of the kids had picked the tulips I spent ages planting back when it was bulb season, even after the talk we had last year when she did the same with all my daffodils, and again, three days earlier, and knowing that both of her parents had heard the most recent conversation, I lost all sense of perspective.

My teeny, tiny front garden

My teeny, tiny front garden

I posted on Facebook to ask friends if they had any ideas of how to address this other than a 6 foot fence that was becoming very tempting.  I had all sorts of suggestions from stories about flower fairies to a rabbit fencing / car battery combination (you know who you are!).  They were all brilliant, but most people suggested that I plant some flowers with the kids to teach them about growing.

So, on Saturday, I trundled off to Homebase and bought two pots, some sunflower seeds, compost, a small watering can and some flowering pansies.  I’d already asked if I could borrow the kids and they were waiting for me when I got back.  We sat in the front garden and I told them how plants need food (compost) and water, just like us.  We smashed up an old pot to make crocks, added the compost, did lots of stirring, lots of watering and then we planted the seeds and started our sunflower competition.  I told them how they would need to water them everyday and that the watering can was for them, so they could do that on their own.

It looks a bit dramatic, but had to blur their faces for obvious reasons. THis is them with their sunflower pots....the little girl is in front of hers

It looks a bit dramatic, but had to blur their faces for obvious reasons. This is them with their sunflower pots….the little girl is in front of hers

Next, we planted the pansies in another pot and I said if they wanted to pick flowers, they could pick these ones as these belonged to them (NOT the ones that belonged to me and were in my garden!).  We discussed how pretty they looked and how if they picked them all there wouldn’t be anything pretty left to look at.  We also had to learn about roots as they wanted to ‘take those bits off’ before we planted them, and about how they had to be very, very gentle with plants (which of course resulted in very over-exaggerated carefulness that made me want to giggle).

Pansies and watering can

Pansies and watering can

The little girl got filthy (I had warned their mum!) and both were slightly stressed about dirt on their hands, but they smiled and asked questions all the time,and wanted me to take their photos to show what we had done.  They both had a bit of a melt down when we finished, which I took as a really weird compliment….

And in return (after sneakily planting some left over seeds in my back garden so if theirs don’t shoot, I can do a bit of midnight transferring), I got the biggest treat.  It turned out they were going out (their Dad sat watching from the car most of the time we were planting, so I should have guessed), so I got to spend an hour in my back garden in absolute peace, crocheting next to the bush I don’t know the name of, but has flowers that smell delicious.

y4

I have no idea if this plan will work, but 3 days later, all my flowers are still intact, so I can hope.

And in other news, I made some of the most unsuccessful Viennese Fingers possibly ever made (although they did taste ok):

y6

And did a spot of more successful shortbread making for this month’s Secret Baker Effort:

y5

:o)

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Smelling flowers in the doctor’s waiting room

Posted on April 17, 2015 by thepogblog

I’ve just come back from the doctor’s surgery where I had to wait an hour to see the nurse for an injection that takes around 20 seconds.  Normally this would have annoyed me intensely – I’d almost finished my work for the day, I wanted to get back, write some emails, log off and start my weekend.

At 5.10pm I overheard the receptionist say that the 4.10pm appointment was still in with the nurse.  I went to check I’d heard right.  And at that point, much like commuters becoming sociable when the trains are severely delayed, all of us waiting to see the nurse became comrades.

There were no seats when I arrived so I was standing next to one of the chairs for less mobile people.  In this chair was a lady who I now know is 86.  She asked me to confirm how late things were running and I explained we would be waiting at least an hour and she texted her husband (it’s probably ageist or something, but I was hugely impressed).  I was going to do my emails from my Blackberry, but we started chatting.  She’d just come back from her holiday in Norfolk – she does enjoy a spot of bird watching and can walk as far as the little huts, even with her gammy knee.  I heard all about her family tree – literally: her granddaughter researched it with her on the internet last summer, and how she had a few noteworthy people in her husband’s side of the family (did that count?, she wondered.  She thought it did.)

Then she told me about her experience of World War Two (which always fascinates me).  She was 10 when war broke out.  She lived in Bristol and was going to be evacuated to Canada, but the boat before the one she and her siblings were due to leave on sunk and everyone drowned.  At that point her mum changed her mind, telling them that ‘If they were going to die, they would all die together’.  She spent most of the war in Bristol, which was heavily bombed.  She remembered the register being taken at school and two of her friends not being there – their house had been bombed the night before and the family was dead.

Her Uncle Willy was worried the family would be short of food, so when war was declared, despite a complete lack of experience, he bought a 200 acre farm.  For a month in summer this lady was sent to Uncle Willy’s farm.  Aunt Mavis had some illegal animals (only a certain number were allowed to be kept) and she remembered that when the Department for Agriculture came for an inspection, she was sent over a hill with a cow and pig, instructed to hide them…

There was so much more she told me, but essentially, it was the best one hour delay I’ve had in a fair while.  And it reminded me that sometimes ticking everything off your to do list isn’t actually the most important thing. Sometimes it’s…well…  I made this a couple of years ago and walk past it numerous times during the day, but I never really read it.  Sometimes the most important thing is* to:

flowers

*That said, this very interesting lady asked where in Bumpkinsville I lived during out conversation.  As I left the surgery I stopped in the waiting room to say how lovely it had been to chat to her.  She asked me my house number and I told her.  ‘I’ll come to visit sometime soon’ she said.  It was lovely to chat to her, but I get the feeling that in a chat without an end time those flowers may go through full bloom, wilt and die…  Oh well, I guess everyone has to sleep at some stage.  As long as she doesn’t ever arrive at breakfast time, well be ok.  :o)

 

 

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It *was* an emergency…

Posted on April 14, 2015 by thepogblog

Sister 2’s boyfriend is really good at baking cakes.  He made one a few weeks ago with caramel loveliness in it, and then admitted it was tinned caramel stuff.  I love it and admitted that I had a tin in my cupboard for ‘emergencies’.  He said it would have to be a big emergency to warrant opening a tin, just for me.

I can confirm that the big emergency has happened – well, a serious of small emergencies combined to feel like a big emergency – and the tin is now open and now only about a third full….

Yesterday:

4.30am – get up

5.30am – leave house

6.03am – get on train

6.30am – six stations into the ten station journey, grind to a halt

6.40am – driver: ‘We’ve stopped.  We don’t know why’

7am – (should be at destination) ‘Due to signalling problems, we’re staying here for the forseable future.  You might want to get on a train going the other way – if any turn up – go back down the line, change routes and try again.’

7.45am – locate train heading in right direction

8am – arrive at station down the line to start again.  Staff: ‘We have no trains going anywhere’ World and his dog all trying to get somewhere:

z1

8.30am – locate train going to Bumpkinstown.  Get on train, arrive, find train that may or may not be stopping at station actually needed (Sign says one thing, announcement says another).  Get on anyway.

8.33am – Breathe sigh of relief that train stopped at the station where my car is parked

9am – Arrive home and start work, feeling somewhat irritated that I could have had an extra four hours in bed and saved myself a cross country journey.

<not a bad day>

8pm – receive email that intern’s contract is not being renewed in two weeks.  Intern only does 15 or so hours a week, but these are now mine, all mine.  Have panic.  Post panic on Facebook.  Receive lovely responses.  Continue to panic.

Midnight – remember critical piece of work that was supposed to be done first thing.  Do work.

1am – go to bed

Today

7am – realise that there’s a lot more to the midnight piece of work than thought and try to coordinate  that with showering, dressing and drying hair

8.30am – go to dr for vitamin B12 injection

8.45am – smug receptionist informs me that my appointment is not until 11.30am. ‘Discussion’ continues until she realises that she’s looking at the wrong part of her computer screen.

8.55am – happy moment that although the nurse is running late, I bought my crochet with me.  But not my glasses.  Serious amount of squinting to try to see what I am doing

9am – really hurty injection

9.10am – revisit of last night’s panic for no particular reason

9.20am – get home and remember that Sister 1 delivered her homemade banana loaf to me yesterday (Hooray!)  Decide today is the day to open the emergency caramel and combine the goodness of both:

z2

9.23am – realise I probably couldn’t get more sugar on a plate if I tried and decide to make it healthy.  Ta dah!:

z3

10am –  wonder how long my tummy will hurt for.  But, lordy, it was worth it!

And that would have been the end of that, except later in the day I thought I should probably have a healthy dinner (as all I’d eaten was the banana bread / banoffi creation which although included one of my five a day, that was probably all I could claim in the way of healthiness).  I got some chicken out the freezer to have with salad.  I put it with me in the conservatory to defrost (I know that’s not a sensible way to defrost chcken, but I’d left it a bit late and it’s warm in here) and got very involved in work.  So involved, I didn’t notice Norman tucking into it earlier…which in itself is a bit of an emergency.  It might just have to be banana bread / banoffi creation for dinner too :o)

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A Sausage Dog mum and a lack of animal snap

Posted on April 10, 2015 by thepogblog

I have a new friend!  It’s all very exciting.  Ok, that might be stretching the truth a bit, but over Easter there was a reshuffle in the office and new people have been scattered all around me.  People who interact with each other, who know each other’s names, and who aren’t scared to talk a little about life outside work.  It’s the best thing that has happened in five months at work.

I now sit next to a very friendly girl and we established in a very short time that we both live on our own with an animal (me with Norman, her with her miniature sausage dog), both are feeling jaded by work, and both have slight OCDs (me with checking, the number three and yellow sweets, her with cleaning.  She’s the first person I’ve met to carry dettol wipes in a handbag and whip them out on a daily basis…).  So maybe not quite a friend, but a very lovely work colleague who is interesting and interested.  And I’ve missed that.

And in other work news, I had my second coaching session this week and I can tell you that the cards Coach H said she’d bring were definitely not animal snap.  They were strength cards – you had to look through them and find five you felt were your biggest strengths at work and talk them though – how they helped you and how they might not.  Being very English the exercise mad me uncomfortable….English people rarely admit to being good at something – or at least this one does.  And they were all values, rather than ‘things’ so ‘crochet’ and ‘looking after Norman’ didn’t feature at all.

Anyway, the five I grudgingly chose were:

e1

(Social Intelligence, Curiosity, Integrity, Gratitude and Humour)

If you know me you might want to have a bit of a giggle at me right now.

Then I had to choose four cards that I’m not very good at and work out how I could improve on them.  It was difficult to go for just four, but I chose these:

e2

(Perspective, Courage, Persistence and Hope)

I did point out that all were quite difficult to achieve when you’re the only one in what was a team of six and don’t have time to think, but you never know – people in the office might soon see a more courageous, persistent, hopeful Pog with more perspective.  Or I might just stick to putting the world to rights with the sausage dog mum.  That’s good with me too :o)

And just one small tip: It’s probably best not to tell your business coach that you were hoping that the new boss of your (non existent) boss who just started would be straight and single.  That’s the point that you get a slightly disapproving look and a ‘You wouldn’t seriously go out with someone from the office would you?’  Because then you find out why that strength of ‘integrity’ doesn’t work so well at work… I’m not sure the answer of ‘Pretty much everyone I’ve ever been involved with has been someone I’ve worked with…’ was a very good one, even though it was completely honest.  Ooops :o)

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Lessons learned, mostly from Little Pea

Posted on April 8, 2015 by thepogblog

I’ve just had the best 10 days.  No work, no laptop, and don’t fall off your chair, but I even found the off button to my blackberry (I admit, it took a good 10 minutes to identify) and managed to keep it turned off for most of each day, just sneaking a quick peek in the evenings.

I didn’t completely switch off my brain though.  Courtesy of Little Pea, I learned quite a lot:

Somewhere can advertise itself as a rare breeds farm and only contain two animals.  However, when one is a peacock which Little Pea promptly falls in love with:

s14

And the other is a Zedonk:

s13

(I’d never have believed it), you can kind of forgive them.

When you are nearly two, puddles are the best thing in the world:

s12

And when you’re 39, the best thing in the world is having a Little Pea slip his hand into yours for no particular reason:

s11

Other people may award you bad auntie awards (seriously, one lady did have a go at me), for letting a very little person play on a very big play ground….

s16

(But he loved it and I’d been up and checked it was all safe)

s17

….but you can award yourself a bad auntie award and know you deserve it when Little Pea is in this position rasping ‘Stuck!  Stuck Pog!’ and you laugh lots and take a photo before coming to his rescue.

s15

Cooking is a weird thing:

s3

It tastes so good at the mixing stage:

s4

But when the goods are ready to eat, Little Peas’ decide that because they are brown, they are dirty (Still, Sister 1 and I did quite well out of that :o)  )

Jelly oranges, on the other hand were a real (and very slurpy) hit:

s5

And Nanny B made birthday cakes….now they are brown, but they are goooood

s6

And cards made especially because Little Pea likes making monster noises may seem good in principle…until you ask what it is:

s8

‘Peacock’ apparently.  Still, at least he remembered the peacock.

I also learned that I did  have room in Pog Towers (kind of) for another chair which will be the next upholstery project, that seven straight hours of gardening makes you feel about 80, that you can get 16 rows from the end of crocheting a cardigan that’s taken weeks and decide you don’t like it after all and spend two hours undoing it all, that the day before a bank holiday is the absolute worst day to be sent for a blood test (it take 45 minutes for two nurses to get through 28 people) and it is possible to make scones that don’t resemble pebbles….by adding rather a lot of baking powder.

And my very favourite picture from my Easter holiday:

s7

Talk about a gorgeous smile from a big boy who is now two :)

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