I just wanted to confirm something.
I wanted to let you know that The Daftness Gene that afflicts me is not restricted to just me. It moves around the family.
This is Sister 1. Painting the nails of a mannequin. In the shop that mum works at. At mum’s request.
I think you’ll agree that they have both been at least brushed by The Daftness Gene. :o)
I had a bit of an epiphany on Friday. It all came about because I was hanging my washing outside to dry and the sun lit up the seam at the back. Or more to the point, it illuminated the fact that it was on the verge of breaking away from itself and setting my bottom free in the very near future. I’d like to think this is due to the fact that I’ve had them for over a year and wear them a couple of times a week so they’d just worn away. I fear though that it may have more to do with the fact that my bottom has grown to the next size up.
I spent a short while feeling cross that I have expanded since giving up the cigarettes and giving in to the cookies and started planning some fat burning bike rides over the weekend. Then I got more cross because I really wanted to finish my top secret project at the weekend. And make a Pogimobile and some bracelets for Sister 1 and 2…
And that was when I had my epiphany. I realised that if I died on Monday I wouldn’t really want anyone to say ‘oh wasn’t she lovely and thin’ (to be fair, it would be unlikely that two bike rides would get me to that stage in one weekend, but just go along with me here). I would much rather a group of friends could comment on the daft things I have tried to make them.
So with what was left of my birthday money I went online and bought a very small Wardrobe of Fatness. A few items of clothes in the size above my unhappy trousers. I’ll still swim and have a weekly woggle war in aquafit and cycle when the weather is less…British. Oh yes, the un-fatness plan is still in place, but not at the expense of fun things. And those trousers…I don’t think I’ll risk wearing them again… :o)
It has been suggested that I blog a cat arse-imal of the week (that is, my biggest ‘oops’).
There is only one real contender this week and it is short and sweet:
My boss was off on holiday and I wanted to ask if she was getting a bit ‘demob happy’ (in case that phrase is only used in my office, I meant getting a bit giddy and slowing down on the work to get into holiday mode). Anyway, the phrase escaped me. All I could remember is that it was a military based phrase that I was hunting around in the depths of my brain for.
So what did I actually say? Yup. I asked my boss if she was going commando.
Note: Luckily I have a very lovely, very human boss who just laughed. Thank you lovely boss :o)
Normous Norman attempting to look innocent...
It’s a bit of a family joke that I blame Normous Norman for just about everything. All the biscuits in the house eaten? That’ll have been Norman. The plate I was supposed to return to you? I can’t find it anywhere – Norman must have run off with it. The house is a tip? Norman has not been doing his share of the housework…that sort of thing.
But today I believe I have proved the theory that there is no smoke without fire. Because today, when I was trying to frantically move furniture as my sideboard arrived (early! When have delivery men ever delivered before 8.15am before?!) I found it. I found his stash. Under the armchair there was a small pile of many of the things that have gone walkabout in the last few months….
I honestly did NOT set up this picture!
I’m going to move the sofa later. I bet he’s hidden the other halves to all the odd socks I have under there. As for my bed – I dread to think what he has managed to hoard under there. Actually, maybe I’ll leave that one for now. There’s probably the head quarters for a gang of cats that he’s been training to work from. Ok, maybe not, but nobody believed me that he’d been stashing my stuff either…. :o)
I’d quite like to not be an adult for a while if that’s ok with you? It’s all been a bit too grown up recently but the good news is that I now have a sorted out remortgage (grown up) with the help of a lovely financial advisor (very grown up!)
The e-mail I sent to lovely financial advisor to tell her that the valuation on my house had been done however, was not quite so grown up…:
Hey,
He’s been, I plied him with coffee, smiled a lot, said lovely things and admired his damp proof finding tool.
I then shone a bright light in his eyes and interrogated him, but he’d been trained well and wouldn’t give away the value. I did casually wave the quote from Your Move at him and asked him repeatedly if he’d found anything to suggest they were wrong. He said no :o) (I wasn’t quite that bad really. Almost though.)
Kind Regards,
Still, lovely financial advisor didn’t get the men in white coats to pay me a visit and is thinking of hiring me for my persuasion / interrogation techniques so it can’t all be bad.
I will have one more grown up moment tomorrow, when a sideboard will be delivered (scarily grown up). Happily, I now definitely have a house to put it in. And once it arrives I think I will get off the adult merry go round – just for the weekend of course… :o)
We’ve had the Tubby Toe Incident (a few times over if I am to be honest), but this morning, well, this morning we had my first serious Chubby Calf Incident.
There I was, checking my e-mails while pulling on my boots when the zip unzipped. Not from the top because that would be far too easy to rectify. No, it unzipped in the middle. I assume, because it could no longer contain the chubby calf within. So with 5 minutes before I had to nosedive out the front door (and still needing to shut down the laptop, pack my bag and feed the cats) I was trapped in my boot. Not the best start to the week…
So the un-fatness plan is back on with a vengeance (again). And luckily I was given just the sort of daft present for my birthday that appeals to a Pog and could help in the invigorated un-fatness plan. Yes, it’s a ‘Waist Torsion Disc’!
I had a go earlier. All I achieved is 2 confused cats who looked like they may actually start to laugh and a very bemused neighbour who spied me through the window before I spied him… It’s early days though. There are far more neighbours to bemuse and in the process I may even find my waist. And lose my chubby calves. (Please let me dream)
Now where did I put that left over jam roly-poly? I could probably mange to eat it while 
on the Waist Torsion Disc and burn the calories as I eat them. No? Oh sod it, I’ll just sit on the sofa and enjoy it properly. Maybe Norman can find his waist while I watch and laugh at him… :o)
It’s my last few hours of freedom! I’ve had a lovely whole week off work and it’s been great not to have to get up at silly o’clock even once.
Originally I looked into going away and doing a ‘doing’ holiday but discovered that:
a) there are no ‘doing’ holidays of the sort I fancied
b) if there were they would probably be filled with cat loving spinsters (yes, I know. Just shhhh…)
c) I didn’t really have sufficient spare pennies to do anything of the sort.
So instead, I decided to stay home (single and with the cats. Yes, I know…Shhh.) and just not waste any of my time off.
So…
I made Pogimals:
I made a Pogimobile and a bird mobile:
I learned to appliqué (and have been working on a top secret heffalump project):
I created some mothers day cards for the shop that sells them:
I learned to make bracelets:
And, the cat arse-imal of the week: I attempted to make a jam roly-poly (well one didn’t look enough. I’d not considered that it might rise and spread. I’d also decided that I could make them on a baking sheet rather than the suggested loaf tin). They didn’t taste too bad though:
(And yes, you may notice that one has a bit missing. Quality checking is obviously essential before feeding to the rest of the family…)
Maybe I should start my own ‘doing’ holidays at Pog Towers. I could make the shed into a spare room. Only maybe I wouldn’t include jam roly-poly in the activities… :o)
I went out for a huge pub lunch last Sunday with a very lovely friend (The Lovely Nut).
We laughed about men, compared our mum’s idiosyncrasies, worried about our expanding waist lines and then decided worrying was wasting time and ordered a pudding each after all. (Chocolate brownie with warm white chocolate sauce and honeycomb ice cream is hard to resist.) Mostly though, we laughed. At each other and with each other. Because that is what friends do isn’t it?
So why am I writing this? Because The Lovely Nut who I had such a fun day with who made the effort to drive all the way down from North London to Bumpkinsville to see me is, in her slightly nutty mind, a year younger than me. She ‘forgets’ the four decades that go the other way. She’s actually 39 years older than me. (She is also an ex boyfriends mum, but we’ll gloss over that for now…).
Another nut... :o)
I guess I just wanted to have a written reminder that you can find the loveliest of friends in the most unlikely people. And the nuttier they are, in my view, the better :o)
Is it a cat? No.
Is it an oversized bird? No.
Is that….a ferret…? Erm. Yes.
Last seen running through the front garden of Pog Towers, meet Mr Ferret: (and yes, I did chase after him with my camera, and no, he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he’s quite photogenic, don’t you think?)
:o)
no, it's not popcorn, but who has a picture of popcorn lying around?
I thought today that I’d found the way forward and that the future was ‘Skinny Popcorn’. (I’m not sure why ‘skinny’ but the packet was big, the calories were low and there was some chocolate type stuff in there too, so I was happy.)
It turns out I was wrong. Skinny Popcorn is not the way forward. At least, not if you are wearing a dress. Because as I left the office this evening, I had an itchy-scratchy sensation on my legs. It felt like there were lumps of gravel in my tights. As I passed the acceptable age of pulling up my dress and rooting around in my tights in public about 32 years ago, my only option was to continue to the tube and brave the toilets at the railway station to extract whatever was making me walk like a complete weirdo.
It was at this point I discovered that popcorn had (I assume) fallen down the front of my dress and managed to work its way into my tights. Where it had stopped before it reached my knees and collected to have a party…
But, in the interests of everyone who wants to find a tasty, relatively guilt free snack that doesn’t cause weirdo walking and because I rather liked it (the popcorn rather than the itchy-scratchy issue) I will be trying it out again tomorrow. But tomorrow I will wear trousers :o)
the pog blog 