Head Rambles

Archive for the 'Around the house' Category

Keeping off the heroin using a paper shredder

Grandad May 13th, 2008

A while ago, I was talking to a friend of mine.

He happens to know a bit about accountancy and tax and all that crap, so I showed him some papers I had been keeping.

“How much do you reckon they’re worth?” I asked him.

“About five years, with remission,” he replied.

This worried me a little. I don’t want to go to prison, because I don’t want to become a heroin addict, and I believe that is mandatory these days.

I bought a paper shredder, that is guaranteed to make any sheet of paper illegible.

It’s a nice looking toy. It’s all black and brushed aluminium. I couldn’t wait to try it.

I shredded up some stuff that was lying around, and it worked very well.

Then it jammed.

I rang the shop.

I got talking to a very nice woman who was very helpful, but she wasn’t too familiar with that particular machine.

“Have you tried reading the manual?” she asked.

“Ah!” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“I think the manual is what may have jammed it,” I replied.

“How come you shredded it?”

“I wanted to test the machine, and it was lying there, so I shredded it.”

“That’s fair enough,” she replied. “Try sticking something stiff into the slot to unjam it.”

I refrained from making a joke about bishops and actresses, and thanked her.

I found a credit card that Herself had carelessly left on the table, and that did the trick. She spent too much anyway.

I spent the afternoon yesterday happily shredding stuff. I then burned the strips and dumped the ashes in the heart of the compost heap.

Now I can’t find my car insurance certificate.

But that’s a small price to pay for staying off the heroin.

When balls have dropped

Grandad May 11th, 2008

I rue the day I taught that bloody dog to play tennis.

Now that summer is here [albeit temporarily?] she is insisting on several games a day.

She starts off in the early afternoon. She finds a tennis ball, and there are a few around, and then drops it. The sound of a tennis ball bouncing on the floor is common these days.

If I ignore her, she picks it up and drops it again, because she likes the bouncing noise.

If I continue to ignore her, she gets pissed off and starts throwing the ball at me.

Yesterday was the worst. Herself was nagging me over something or other, and the nagging was accompanied by the sound of a tennis ball constantly bouncing. It did my head in.

So I give Sandy a game. She always beats me and leaves me knackered. She then takes a short rest and the whole thing starts all over again. We’re up to about five games a day now.

I am a shadow of my former self. Sandy is as fit as a fiddle.

Afterwards, as the sun is going down, she heads off to sleep with Bruno.

sandy2

Or maybe Teddy.

She’s a randy fickle bitch.

A sting in the tale

Grandad May 7th, 2008

I like nature.

I love the sound of the birds and the hum of the insects.

I never kill anything unless it is a tourist. Or a wasp.

Tourists are irritating feckers who clutter up the place and make the countyside look untidy. Shooting them is good sport.

But I cannot for the life of me understand wasps.

What are they for?

I have always hated them and they are the only non-human life form I go out of my way to kill.

I will go out of my way not to harm Just about any other species. I’m not saying that if I found an homeless Ebola virus, I would offer him accommodation, but you get my gist.

I am forever carefully carrying out spiders, moths and other life forms from the house and setting them free.

When I see a wasp, I see red. Or rather, I see black and yellow and automatically reach for the swatter.

This weather has brought them out in their droves. The queens all seem to be looking for nesting places, and I am massacring them at the rate of several a day. I get a kick out of the thought that killing one queen eliminates thousands of possible future generations.

I was stung by wasps as a child. But I was also stung by bees, horseflies, nettles and jellyfish, so that argument doesn’t work. I always treat bees with great tenderness, because I like them.

They say that God gave us friends by way of an apology for giving us relatives, but what are wasps here for?

And why is it that when I smash another wasp against the window pane, I often think of Mary Harney?

harneywasp

Big fat ugly useless creatures.

The sweet smell of Romanians

Grandad May 4th, 2008

Luckily I woke early yesterday, because there was a knock on the door at nine.

There were three blokes there, and one stepped forward and shook me by the hand. He said something but he was foreign, so I haven’t a clue what he said. He stood and looked at me as if I was supposed to be expecting them.

After a minute of this, he got impatient and the three of them marched into our living room. They were big blokes, and I couldn’t set Herself on them because she was still asleep.

They looked at the walls, and they looked at the ceiling. They pointed at things and asked me questions. I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about so I nodded.

One of them mimed at me that he wanted me to take him for a drive. That was fine by me as it was a nice day. So we headed off. He told me where to steer by pointing.

We ended up at a hardware store. He was out of the car like a flash and I had to run to keep up with him. He grabbed a trolley and filled it up with tins of paint. He then rushed over to the check-out where he stood looking at me like a lost puppy. Obviously he expected me to pay, which I did. Luckily I had my selection of credit cards with me, so Olusegun Olakojo of Nigeria paid for that lot.

We drove home to find that the other two lads had moved everything out of the living room, and had locked Herself in the bedroom where she was protesting loudly. Whatever they were at, they went up in my estimation for that.

I got an atlas and brought it into them. They looked at me blankly. I opened the atlas and pointed to it, and then the three of them. They flipped through the pages and pointed at Romania. At least I had that sorted out. It also explained why I couldn’t understand them as my Romanian is crap and my Romany is even worse. I left them to whatever it was they were doing.

Soon the smell of paint permeated the house, and it gave me a headache. So I spent the day with the windows open and chewing Syndol.

At six, they vanished.

They had put everything back where it belonged and the walls and ceiling had all been painted. The glare off the bright paint added to my headache, so I was forced to put on sunglasses. In fairness to them, they had done a brilliant job, whoever they were. I went off down to the pub for a few pints to get away from the smell.

I got home at around eleven and remembered that Herself was still locked in the bedroom, so I let her out. She made a rush for the bathroom.

It was all her fault. She has a habit of ringing strange phone numbers that she finds hanging on the local shop notice board. She had phoned one and had obviously given the impression we wanted work done.

She bitched for the rest of the evening about being hungry and the smell of paint and everything else. We had to sleep with all the doors and windows open.

That’ll teach her to leave those phone numbers alone.

What do women get up to?

Grandad April 30th, 2008

I was sitting here this morning minding my own business.

Herself came in.

"Would you ever nip down to the village, post these things and collect a woman?"

"A woman?" says I.

"Yes. Are you daft? You know what a woman is? Long hair and glasses."

I am not the type to argue and I gave up asking questions decades ago. It’s not worth the hassle.

I went and posted the yokes she gave me and then hung around the village until I saw a woman with long hair and glasses.

I bundled her into the car. She seemed a bit surprised, but I’m going to use the Nuremberg Defence if it comes to trial.

I drove home and gave the woman to Herself. Herself was delighted.

I’m hiding in my den now. I don’t know what they are up to, and I don’t want to know. Maybe herself has gone back to her medical experiments? Maybe she just felt like a woman to woman chat? There is a lot of crashing and banging going on out there, but I’m staying where I am. I have Sandy with me for security.

There are times when a man knows when to keep his head down.

Organ Donor Week

Grandad April 8th, 2008

Was last week Organ Donor Awareness Week? I wasn’t aware of that.

It’s a pity, because I always wanted an organ.

When I was a kid, I was sent for piano lessons. I hated them. I despised them.

But I was forced to go.

In the end it was too much and I dug my heels in. There was no way I was going to turn into a Liberace.

liberace

So I took up the guitar and taught myself.

I enjoyed that, and played in a few folk groups and traditional groups. It was great craic. But that’s another story.

The one instrument I always wanted to play was the organ. I’d be too shy to practice in a church, and anyway if I entered a church, God would probably smite me with a lightning bolt.

So I need one at home.

organ