christinaosborne

Fish Walkies and the Black Death.

Apologies for not having been around, I have been busy dying from the local version of the Black Death. A couple of weekends ago I ventured south to inspect a festival of Llamas, no, Not the religious variety more the four hooved kind! And to purchase an alpaca/silk mix for spinning on behalf of my sister. This was held at some rat hole too near Seattle, namely Monroe. I say rathole without fear of contradiction when the best restaurant in town for lunch was, wait for it, Dennys!!! (For those of you not conversant with our erstwhile colonies, think Little Chef!

Obviously there was an insufficient distance to quarantine the place from the miasmic effluvia of Seattle, too many wogs and queers have the place radiating germs, stray bullets and knives! Three days later, wipe out! A week in bed and thereafter spectral totterings from room to room, coughing, choking, hacking, wheezing and cursing. I still haven’t been out of the door and am unlikely to in the near future.

Good thing I have pneumonia shots these days or the local Sisters of the Perpetual Prophet, sorry profit, aka The Sisters of Mercy aka Bellingham Hospital would have had their claws in my bank balance! (No mercy shown there I assure you!)

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Back from Neanderthal Territory

Have been out of touch in deepest darkest Pembrokeshire.

The place appears to have been invaded by a strange new set of creatures.

They are all obese, of indeterminate age, suspiciously female and bedecked with bright red hair and navy blue claws. They purport to be human but I’m not too sure. The blue claws are a bit disconcerting when handing over one’s obligatory infusions of red wine, perilously close to ones own unbedecked hands.

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Splendid bit of aggro going on in Brazil.I

Splendid bit of aggro going on in Brazil.

I really don’t blame the Brazilians,who have notoriously poor public services, protesting vigorously against the use of their funds for the ludicrous aggrandisement of a few sports fans. Plus all the associated graft, corruption and backhanders to officials.

I have never been able to understand why public money in any country should be wasted on providing stadia for exceptionally rich football clubs to make further profits. Any outfit that can afford to pay their moronic employees millions per year can afford the grounds should they want to. Why the public should subsidise any voluntary activity is beyond me. I include the Arts, Opera, Olympics etc. Those that want them should pay for them, not the rest of us! I’ll add other people’s brats to that list too!

With any luck all these events will be cancelled in Brazil. It is a great pity the UK didn’t respond likewise to the Olympics last year and save the country a great deal of wasted money. It is high time, if these events are wanted, that the moving and shaking officers located permanent arenas world wide and shared out sufficient contributions to the relevant participants to maintain such, rather than sucking at the public teat.

And send the bloody Olympics back to Greece with sufficient funding to keep it there forever. Think of the backhanders that will no longer have to be paid.

Well done the Brazilians.

PS I derive a degree of sardonic amusement re the current disintegration of the NHS and that appalling mawkish nonsense in the Olympic self stimulating mish-mash last year showing ‘tender angels of mercy ministrating to the sick’. More likely bumping them off any which way they can!!! i remember many here actively defending the NHS, I wonder if they are still quite so insouciant and trusting in their attitudes to the NHS? Had the money wasted on the Olympics been spent in the hospitals instead I doubt things would have come to quite such a pretty pass.

Oh, if only for a good revolution, any revolution, the UK sorely needs it. Never seen such a mess made in all my life.

Holidays from Hell

Ruminating on LW’s soggy sojourn in the NE docks I was reminiscing on holidays from Hell one has known.

As you all know, my opinion of holidays is zero rated and I am now quite old enough to refuse to go anywhere. In the past I have been more persuadable. Once upon a time, a million years ago the boy, when little, 8/9ish, moaned and bitched about he had never been on a beach holiday abroad. Well of course he hadn’t, my idea of hell would have been a package holiday on some foreign beach!! Well, he moaned and bitched sufficiently for me to relent. We booked a summer holiday at a resort on Fuertaventura in the Canaries. It was a beach resort sort of place, not too cheap and not too dear, looked quite attractive, a bit out of the way with no vulgar bars etc. Little cottages rather than a hotel. So off we went, some dreadful airline that expected you to get out and push, half the clients pissed before it took off. One knew right then it was a BIG mistake! Only to be confirmed when the peasants broke out in a rousing chorus of Ole Espan(y)a on landing right side up!

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Woe, thrice woe!

Its happened again!

Everything, but nearly everything happens to me in threes. It has become quite ghastly waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Okay, so triffids would wear three shoes wouldn’t they?)

Three people dropped dead on the week of October 10th over the recent past years, so that date is finished now! Three relatives in the 80s died within a few weeks although none were apparently ill. Three husbands and three dead children, I won’t go on!

This time it is only appliances thank God! The other day my worthy, elderly, very comfy desk top computer blew up! Smoke billowed forth, thank heavens I was using it at the time or otherwise it would have burnt the house down. Needless to say, I ran screaming, (Union rules!) Spousal unit had it disabled before it could render the office into a funeral pyre. Seriously pissing off as it held my whole photo archive or so I thought and all my club admin stuff, but a great troll round his mates has found all the material to retrieve data so no real harm done. So here I am on my laptop which already has my photo archive thanks to forethought of spousal unit, (I knew there was a reason why I married him!!)

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Beware of goats.

We are well used to canine kniptions and explosions of manic barking, people, eagles, coyotes all set them off. To be fair, they are not discouraged, it is their job to alert us to approaching ‘threats’.

The goats normally live behind us, five acres away and are ritually visited for a bark up a couple of times a day. No great threat just a canine ritual.

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Insufficient Buggery, Dammit, Bloggery!

Just blame Janus! As you all know, I have nothing but gardens on which to blog. Holding most other activities in anathema, having declared ‘fatwas’ in all directions and holding most appurtenances of modern life to be ‘instruments of the devil’, there is sod all left! Then there is the other side to that coin- When you live in ‘God’s little acre’ why the bother with anywhere else? We actually did emerge this week to go to the tulip festival in Skagit County (one down) with friends. Wonderful tulips but the multicultural aspect proved too much for us, it was mobbed by more of them than us. Vancouver had emptied across the border to view tulips en masse. We retreated to lunch. I didn’t bother to take any pictures. So, just for a change you get more of what is in bloom right now in the garden.

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An antidote

To the bloody ludicrous carry on in Boston and the attendant collective denial of the American people-see my acidulous comment on the Boston bombing.

So as an antidote we fled to Canada yesterday to see a spring garden. Nothing like a garden to calm the nerves and reduce the apoplectic blood pressure!

This is Dart’s Hill, about 15 miles North of us, but always seems a bit warmer than home.

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Des Res, iron age style.

It’s raining again! I’ve had it with spinning and knitting and the greenhouse is up to date so I am reduced to looking at old photos. I came across these from spring of ’08 that looked apt for the residences blog. NOT that I hasten to add are they part of the competition, that would never do!!! Just thought you might like to see them.

No! Not monster mushrooms, just your genuine brand new iron age des res. This is a tourist trap built in N Pembrokeshire on the site of an iron age fort. The buildings are supposedly actually built on the original sites using the original post holes etc to get the size and clustering of the community.

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Ludicrous Weather.

Yesterday reached 70! Blazing sun and bright blue cloudless sky. Absolutely ridiculous, things busting out into leaf overnight a good three weeks early. Flowers appearing by magic!