Moving Story

Thank you, Janus for your timely reminder that some of us are not exactly pulling our weight.

Moving day went as well as can be expected, and I dare say I will recover from the trauma in the next few months. Meanwhile, I cannot find anything or rather essentials always seem to be at the bottom of the large packing case we open. We have most of our furniture in the garage and about fifty packing cases still unopened. Packing cases which we have explored line the hall, mostly full of stuff which we can happily live without! I thought I had successfully de-cluttered but it would appear not.
Continue reading “Moving Story”

It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere

I took the summer off, basically. Well, if you can call doing two jobs, managing the house and garden and going through a family bereavement ‘taking time off’.

It was however time off from blogging.

Anyhoo I’m back. Continue reading “It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere”

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!)

Continue reading “Fish Walkies and the Black Death.”

Election Blues

I know that those in the UK will be aware that Australia held an election on the 7th of September this year. I was in the UK at the time, having already done my civic (and compulsory) duty and voted before I left. I was quite surprised how much coverage the election got on UK news.

I’ve always thought that the system here is preferable to the ‘first-past-the-post’ system of the UK, with some reservations, Continue reading “Election Blues”

Many miles

I haven’t added them up, but I have covered a fair few miles in the pursuit of a suitable University for 2nd son. Durham, York and this weekend Glasgow. Applications for University for the coming academic year have to be in as soon as possible: I know some have already submitted and had offers. Not my boy.

This latest weekend trip has required a pricey fuel top up twice – and I’m only up and about now because my back has seized up from all the driving.

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Continue reading “Many miles”

Bush Fires

Probably been done in which case forgive me. Although I have not posted here for some time the news from Australia regarding the terrible fires has turned my mind to some of the folk who live there and post on here. All I can say is you are in my thoughts and stay safe.

Feed the monkey

Nasa decided they’d finally send a man up in a capsule after sending only monkeys in the earlier missions. They fire the man and the monkey into space. The intercom crackles, ‘Monkey, fire the retros.’ A little later, ‘Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.’

Later still, ‘Monkey, check the life support systems for the man’.

“The astronaut takes umbrage and radios Nasa, ‘When do I get to do something?’

“Nasa replies, ‘In 15 minutes – feed the monkey’.

This then was part of Roy Hodgson’s (the England football manager) half time team talk last Tuesday night,

It’s been labelled racist by some, inappropriate, innocent, harmless, generational (gap) by others. Continue reading “Feed the monkey”

Ah, la famille – as the French say

Arriving in France the day after the Front National candidate won the local council election at Brignoles in the Var – the departement next to us – I was prepared for the usual hand-wringing and “how could they do this” wailing.  Instead all was calm in the press, perhaps helped by the arrest of three suspected jihadis in the same neck of the woods that day.  The French are fed up with Hollande and fed up with the number of Roma in the country, setting up squalid , illegal camps and living off crime.  The FN expresses these concerns and is anti-EU, which the French believe is the reason all these illegals are infesting the place.  So the FN is gathering more support.

This week’s cause celebre is Leonardo, a fifteen year old Roma girl of uncertain origin who was scooped off a school bus and deported back to Kosovo with parents and five siblings.  Pupils at some schools have been protesting vigorously about this, and Hollande in his usual pathetic effort to please everyone has said that the girl can return but without her family.  Leonardo has said that she cannot leave her family, but by all accounts she had to say that or else her father would have beaten her again.  Father has been lying in his teeth for some years now.  He and mother, who may or may not be Italian, are not married; there are no papers such as birth certificates or passports available and father’s story is unravelling by the minute.  The local police in France are glad to see the back of a petty criminal;  mother never learned any French or attempted to integrate; the family is now settled in a flat in Mitrovica, but two- thirds of French people asked do not want the girl back in France.  Seems a pity, since without her family she might have a chance of a decent life.