The disappointment of snow

After three years waiting the monsters met their first snow this week.

It turns out snow is:

1. cold - yes, I did mention the frozen water thing
2. wet - the little monster filled her gumboot with snow in a zillisecond and had a tragic sock thereafter
3. hard and icy - well spring has sprung, the sun is sunny and the snow is not at its powdery best.  This means no snow angels and great difficulties with snowpeople.
4. located on inconveniently slopey ground - ah yes, we live in a vast continent of huge climate extremes including an unparalleled desert collection and a steamy tropical swathe. Snow falls on a incey wincey portion of our country and all these bits are at the top of mountains.  All pointy.
5. the location of a fun-looking sport - Mum will not be spending 300 smackeroos for you two to take a 2 hour skiing class. Sad but true.
6. tiring - changing frozen, wet, exhausted monsters in a boot by the side of the road is not my idea of a good time.

On the up side we have done it.  The experience has been had. Now there is only surfing, skateboarding, ice skating, boating, tiger patting, dinosaur meeting (a girl at school says she has met a T-rex), overseas traveling, dog-owning, watching TV all-daying, horse and motor bike riding, going to every playground in the known universe at least onceing, kissing, and prince marrying left to nag for.

Who am I kidding.  I have just forgotten the other 13,000 items currently on the wish list.

I tell you why the goat is grumpy

You may never find out.  Ask the monsters - I am just quoting.

The real topic of today is a new concept in literature review:  the lightening review.  How few words can I use to describe the pile of birthday books I have recently inhaled.

Pratchett, Snuff

• Unusually lacking subtlety -  feels like the goodbye Discworld book.

Wodehouse, The girl in the blue dress

• Sadly lacking in pigs, approximately 3% of the chuckle of, say, Empress of Blandings.

Lewis and Uhlmann, The Marmalade Files

• Fun to play spot the pollie - Canberra must be chockers with  narcissistic maniacs trying to resist the temptation to reach for their libel lawyers.

Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

• Romance and literary theory - in theory intoxicating, in practice somewhat tedious, possibly because it  gave me flashbacks to hanging around semiotics lectures that I considered to be a pile of pigs earwax.*

Fforde, The woman who died a lot

• Fake bod for a day, destiny aware teenagers, smite protection, terrific and joyous.

Ackroyd, Foundation, Volume 1

• History at its least stuffy - who knew the Iron Age was so interesting.  I am only up to the fall of the Romans so a lot of kingery to come, I assume. 

"There must be grumpy goats out of here...", another mote drifts by and that is it for the day.

* Did I ever tell you about the time, quite early in my career when I attended a work function with a senior manager held by some clients?  Well, there we were, drinking our "cocktails" (= indifferent wine in nasty glasses), and, during a lull in conversation, I decided to launch into a tirade on the utter pointlessness of studying literary theory in academia, the drain on the world's resources, etc - full rant, 5 minutes worth.  Then my esteemed senior manager turned to me and said, "Did you know what I did my PhD thesis in?"  

You don't need one to guess, do you people?

How to bugger your husband's hobby

My dear husband has a  hobby that could also be characterised as an addiction. He buys electronic crap over the internet.  He got four parcels this week alone.  It is not as though he spends a lot of money - this is cheap crap.  Cords, chips, plug-in dooferwhatsis, etc.

It all started to hit a terminal stage when he decided to upgrade our set top box/ PVR thingie*.  He bought one and when it arrived, we worked out how to use the ratshit front end and over the next couple of weeks we worked out all the bits that didn't work. Needless to say the vendor's reply to his emails were a testament to "you were foolish enough to buy our pile of penguin guano - we don't give a fig if it doesn't work so shoofie off, moron boy".  Wife not pleased about the postage cost to send it back from whence it came.

Then the dear thing decides he can make one himself with a computer and several bits and bobs.  It takes about a month to assemble these b&bs during which time he negates the advantage of buying serially by continuing to purchase the next bob when the current bits are clearly non-functional.  The EPG ignores some programs.  The tuner has a little rest when it warms up.  The computer is also is prone to rests, apparently, or possibly not.  Maybe we should shield this lump of electric junk with aluminium foil?

After another month I hit the wall when he is taking the back off my tiny computer to set it up as the prototype.  Not once during this period has he gotten one program to record and play properly using his computer and now he is planning on buggering mine indefinitely.

Words were said.  He agrees the solution may be an off-the-shelf product offered for sale in our country of residence.

He then goes on to say that at least the cables he buys are ok (with the subtext that he will continue at about 2 purchases per week).  I remind him of the intermittent pins, loose plugs, poor shielding and limited life of these things. He then has that look on his face that means "I was carefully ignoring that thought.  Life would be easier with a dopier wife". 

I have a theory that the longevity of our marriage is dependent on my not generating that look more than a couple of times per year.  Exciting, isn't it!

*To be fair he had justification for this.  The shutdown of the analogue terrestrial transmission meant we could no longer watch one thing and record a second.

Future husband checklist

I was reading about some woman who had an extensive checklist of attributes her future husband must have.  I am not sure if he needed them all or of some were optional extras.

Anyhow, I decided to consider what checklist I must have been using when I met the husbandal unit. 

1. Clear sense of morality - check - though I suspect he would download illegal stuff if he did not have this particular wife.
2. GSOH - check - there is no way we would have gotten this far into parenting together without the capacity to see funny bits on the far side of hysteria.
3. Major nerd - check - he looks forward to the monthly edition of Silicon Chip mag.  Sometimes he leaves them at work for his workmates to browse but it disappears in under an hour - yep, he works in a nerdery.
4. Can budget - check - he was talking to folks at work about his yearly budget, rather than a "I can buy lunch because it is payday" budget and his workmates were shocked and said they would never get their wives to stick to lines item allocations for clothes, holidays, etc.  I said to husb, "how many of these chaps (all nerds, see above) would be willing to stick to an IT budget of say, $150 per year, including fancy phones, computers, tablets, entertainment systems, PCBs, etc?"  We laughed.

Which led me to consider what attributes may have been on his wifey checklist.

1. Must be willing to reproduce species - check - possibly some disappointment that production stopped after 2 but then he was just as pooped so fair cop.
2. Must like rumpy pumpy - check.
3. Must have relatively high tolerance for conversations about newly released PCBs and control systems generally - check - though occasionally, when I am actually listening, I have to ask for definitions.
4. Must be willing to give up loopy, demanding, well paid and interesting career to support husband in his quite dull job, demould windows, cook cake, wrangle library day and swimming day, and do school runs - check - sigh.

 And finally, here are some low-end optional extras we didn't get - you can guess who belongs to which.

1. Must be able to dance, even a slow shuffly cuddle. 
2. Must speak another language (BASIC and predicate calculus do not count)
3. Must be a keen, knowledgeable and interested investor.
4. Must love sport.

Haha haha  hhahhahaahahhaa HHA AHA AHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAH.

An oldie but a goodie - more spot than girl.

Yet who would have thought the old man [woman] to
have had so much blood [snot] in him [her]?

Macbeth has great flow - it is hard to resist.

I used to work as a kitchen-hand in a low end restaurant.  It overlooked the fairways of a golf course - the very same golfcourse where my brother went wading the lakes at 2am when he was 9. He was looking for lost balls to sell to golfers.  My other brother and I sat on the bank watching the fog swirl and listening to the sound of the asthma attack from the daft, financially-focussed one. 

The restaurant specialised in reasonably priced group bookings - club dinners, weddings, etc. Not that the weddings were particularly cheap, but it was in the low (and I mean low) end of the wedding market.  Schnitzel night (size of A4 paper, texture of crunchy leather) was pretty popular.

The kitchen was tiny.  The only advantage was that it was split in two with a back galley kitchen. After graduating from the dishes and pots I used to prep veg and serve the desserts in the back.

Times were tough in the economy and the conditions were ratshit and illegal.  If you worked from 5pm til 1am you got hungry.  The boss was a maniac.  He would sack staff if he caught them eating food.  Frankly, I thought you would have to be mad to eat the food from this place so I had a plan.  Every shift I opened a new punnet of strawberries and ate the lot.  Luckily the bench in the back kitchen faced a wall and I would swallow the current strawberry as the cheap, sneaky dickhead crept up to catch me.

Ah, snowy bits

 It was always an interesting place to work:

• what could be killing the mice found with their little feet in the air under the benches
• how many days does it take for your hands to return from orange if you peel 40kg of carrots in one go
• was it possible to buy cheaper, heavier plates because the staff hernia count was not quite at 100%?

Eventually the end was nigh.  The butcher went to cash on delivery, the veg got bendier and the wine even nastier.  I made sure I collected my wages el prompto.  During this period the whole place burnt down one night.  I know, I was as unshocked as you are now.

If I was being charitable I would say that with all that fat on the kitchen walls the place was a tinderbox.  And to think that for a period, the world had built a better mouse trap.