Getting around to stuff

I’ve decided that I’m going to try and turn over a new leaf (or should that be an old leaf since I haven’t got around to raking most of them up from the garden) and no longer put things off that I’m supposed to be doing now until sometime in the future.

The decision was made when I suddenly discovered this morning that I had about thirty things to try and get done in one day, all because I had put them off and off and off.

One of these things was writing another piece for this blog and part of the reason for putting it off was, well I couldn’t think of anything I should write about.

For a while I toyed with the idea of coming up with asking people on Facebook and the like to send me suggestions.

But then I thought no.

Omigod you never know what kinda stuff people might suggest and next thing you know I’d be trying to write a blog about everything from laundry to fog.

Then I figured that it was presumptuous of me to think there were any readers of this blog anyway and I’d still be left wondering what I should write about.

And that’s when I decided. Let’s leave it for a while and surely inspiration will hit me.

 

 

 (A while later….)

 

 

It didn’t. And so this blog joined a list of things I had to do today and I went happily on about my business of doing stuff that I should have been doing days or even weeks before.

And yet I was edgy because I knew there was something I needed to get done right away and I was leaving it too late and next thing you know this sentence was getting longer and I still hadn’t a clue what I was writing about.

“That’s the thing about procrastination,” my twelve-year-old daughter said smugly when she saw me struggling to try and come up with an idea at the last minute.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I made a mental note to look it up in the dictionary sometime.

And then I thought, hey, surely everybody’s like this.

I mean don’t most people have stuff they should be getting done, if not right away, then very soon.

And when they do get to that thing, is there not something else that has made the list to get done anyway?

I concluded that this certainly was the case and wondered if somebody had actually got every single thing checked off their to do list what the heck would they do then?

That still didn’t help with my immediate problem though and in desperation I turned to the internet for help.

Did you know that there is an actual society for procrastinators?

I didn’t know that but unless I really can manage to turn over this new leaf I’ve promised myself, then I guess I might actually join it. 

Not today though. 

Maybe tomorrow or the day after that… 

Not quite as instant as instant...

I used to think that instant meant, well, instant, but it would seem that’s not exactly the case, which is not just a great pity, but to be honest also a source of some frustration.

Let me explain. 

Some time ago (a few years at this stage) I began taking lessons on how to play the guitar and discovered I was being asked to twist and turn my fingers into shapes that normal people just could not do on an everyday basis.

The lessons began after I had been bought a guitar as a present. It was a terrific present except there was just one problem. I couldn’t play the guitar.

But hey my family had thought of that as well, and inside the booklet that came with the guitar there was a voucher for eight guitar lessons.

I only discovered that though after what I had initially thought was the most fantastic invention ever because the booklet was entitled - ‘Instant Guitar.’

“What an invention,” I thought to myself, before I wondered how the scientists/authors behind it had managed to keep it such a secret.

Wow, a guitar and a book that meant I could play it instantly. My mind was racing ahead to the next party (we weren’t planning on having one but that was rapidly changing) when I would stun everyone present by my new-found musical mastery.

First instant mashed potatoes, now instant guitar. I rushed to put the kettle on and flipped the book around to read the instructions.

Dammit. What a misleading title. I soon discovered that I was gonna have to read and try to understand this book (they included a cd which they insisted would help) and with practice and patience I’d maybe be able to play something in a few weeks.

A few weeks! Now that is not what I’d call instant. In my mind I’d seen myself pouring hot water over the booklet in a bowl, making some kind of papier-mâché soup, adding some salt, grabbing a spoon and tucking in.

Ten minutes later I thought I’d be grabbing the guitar and playing a-la-Clapton.

The reality check was a little different.

I suspect my wife and kids had already sussed the fact that even if it was called ‘Instant Guitar,’ they should not expect miracles. With that in mind, guitar lessons looked like a fairly decent option.

Climbing the stairs to the room where the lessons were being held I pictured a room full of hot-shot rock ‘n’ roll kids who all had a basic idea of how to play the guitar sitting waiting for the fun to begin.

But even though there was a couple of youngsters in the class, by and large everyone was in the same boat as myself – they hadn’t a clue.

Not that there were any instant answers available from the teacher either. If it was easy, he said, everybody would be doing it, but he pointed out that if it was that hard, half the people we know who can play guitars, wouldn’t be playing them.

Then he showed us some chords warning that he had already over the years heard every excuse there could be for us not to be able to play them.

Fingers too fat, too thin, too long, too short.

Darn, I thought, I was gonna use some of those excuses.

Still, while I headed off from that first lesson with an idea on how to play some chords I also had a feeling that I might never master any of this.

At this point many (well okay, maybe not many but definitely me in the past) might have contemplated putting an end to the misery and placing an advert on ebay for ‘one guitar never really played,’ but armed with a certain innate stubbornness that this wasn’t going to beat me, I sat down to practice.

It didn’t even last ten minutes. I set about attempting to tune my guitar with all the dexterity of an elephant and I broke a string.  Disaster had struck. How could I go to the next class with a string hanging off the guitar?

Google had the answer and even though I wasn’t all that sure I was doing this correctly, I set about the task of replacing the broken string using an idiot’s step-by-step guide.

To my surprise I actually managed to follow the instructions (I think the guy who wrote them should work for flat-pack furniture companies – or maybe even write titles for guitar manuals) and with a bit of practice under my belt I headed back for lesson two.

Since then I had a few more lessons, and have a few more chords under my belt.

But it didn’t take long to figure that this guitar-playing thing would be a very long drawn out thing that involves lots of practice.

I’ve discovered if you don’t do that, dust does tend to gather on the said instrument but I’m slightly alarmed at the fact that I can no longer say any more that I don’t have the time.

Which means that, unless I can think of a few other excuses I’ll have to shake the layer of dust off that guitar and make another shape of trying to learn how to play it.

Let’s face it folks, chances are I’ll have forgotten everything I learned by the time I pick it up again, but if I stick at it, you never know I might just master this guitar playing thingy eventually.

And you know what? 

If I do, I’ll let you know that very, umm….instant! 

What the Fog?

I really don’t like fog. I guess I’ve known this for quite a while now, but I was reminded of it again today when I had to drive in, well in the fog.

Driving in the fog is quite possibly the trickiest piece of driving a person ever has to experience, in fact I’m beginning to think that a person shouldn’t even be given their licence until they have shown that they understand the rules of driving in fog.

Simple things. Like turning on your lights for instance.

Today on my relatively short drive I met at least five drivers who didn’t have their lights on whilst driving in fog.

I say ‘at least’ because there might well have been more – it’s just that, well perhaps I didn’t see them in the fog because they didn’t have their lights on.

This really is the number one rule for driving in fog, and yet amazingly there are eejits out there who choose to ignore it.

On the other hand I’m beginning to wonder if they had just switched on the lights but were using those energy saving bulbs?

Nope, I’m pretty sure that these people just don’t switch their lights on while driving in the fog and that is pretty damn annoying.

Once I even pulled in at a shop behind a person who had been driving with no lights on in the fog and, because I knew them, asked them why they hadn’t switched their lights on.

I was astounded when the person in question told me that they didn’t put their lights on because they could see perfectly well in the fog.

"Of course you bloody could," I said (although not aloud because this person was quite big and bad tempered) "that’s because everybody else has their lights on – but nobody can see you!"

Fog in itself though is quite pointless really when you think about.

I’m not sure how many people have actually thought about fog, but if you’ve bothered to read this, take a few seconds and think about fog.

You see what I mean? Pointless isn’t it!

I mean rain I can understand. Water from rivers and lakes evaporates and forms into clouds and when they get a certain temperature the water falls again back to earth in wee drops.

That’s a kinda simplified version but we all know rain. We might hate it, but we know it.

And then there’s ice and snow and we all kinda understand them. In fact, we get that if it rains a lot there might be flooding and there could even be signs on the roads to say so.

We get that in some places there are signs that say a road is liable to frost, or that if it freezes or snows the gritters and slowploughs come out to get the roads passable again. (This may or may not happen in the place where you live – but honestly there are places where it does!)

But fog. Dammit you can’t even put a sign up to say that the road is liable to fog cos you wouldn’t see it. This, by the way, is a good thing though.

I mean could you imagine how many dumbasses there would be out there trying to say it wasn’t their fault they didn’t have their lights on because there was no sign up saying there was fog ahead.

And you can’t even do cool stuff with fog. I mean in the rain you can splash in the puddles or whatever.

You can go siding on the ice on a plastic 10-10-20 fertiliser bag or an old biscuit tin lid (or if you are really fancy on a sleigh) and with snow you can make snowmen and have snowball fights and make snow angels.

You can’t make a fog man though. And even though it’s cold and wet you can’t slide or splash in the fog.

All in all it’s a pretty useless piece of weather, except perhaps to cause major inconvenience and hassle to motorists.

Even the explanations I found on google didn’t seem to lend any good reason whatsoever to fog as an actual weather event so I decided to e.mail met eireann to see if they could help.

They sent me a long and scientific reason why we get fog and told me to read it very carefully.

Apparently if I did so, it would all eventually become clear…

Keeping us in the dark

I know this might have escaped some people’s attention, but the government recently introduced a ban on ordinary light bulbs, forcing people to use energy saving bulbs instead.

And I know that many people will say that this is a great idea, since it will not only help save money, but will also help the environment.

But me, I’m not so sure.

Hey I’m all for saving money and saving the environment, but it’s just that I kinda like the light from my bulbs to be, well, instant.

And have you ever seen how those energy saving things work? It’s obvious that when they started talking about things travelling at the speed of light they weren’t talking about the kind of light that you get from those bulbs.

Let’s face it folks, most of us want the light to actually come on when we flick the switch now don’t we, but with these energy saving bulbs it can take anything up to a few seconds before we see the light.

Okay, so maybe we’re spoiled, but then hey we’ve been used to this for a long time.

Even a candle will give you instant light, even if it is not that bright in the overall scheme of things.

So I’m wondering why these bulbs - since they can actually bring us decent enough light eventually - can’t bring it in an instant.

Is it a case that when we flick the switch and the electrons are ready to hurtle down the wires at the speed of light but then they see some kinda electrical speed cop ahead and they all slow down?

Or maybe there’s a primary school teacher electron roaring at them – “No running in the line.”

Perhaps they are hippy electrons and looking to chill, because like rushing over to the bulb is like, “a total waste of energy man.”

Whatever the reason, you don’t get instant light from these energy saving bulbs and to be honest that just annoys me.

I’ve also been thinking that, even if it is kind to the environment, this light may not be all that natural.

Maybe it’s just a notion to me, but I always imagined that when God said “let there be light,” it came on more or less right away.

In fact I’m sure considering the scale of the amount of light involved, if it came on as slowly as these energy saving bulbs, well let’s just say we’d probably have to have a few more days in the week.

I’ve also been wondering how these bulbs are going to be marketed to pessimists.

It is one thing to suggest that they will save you money in the long term, but what if you are so pessimistic that you don’t believe you’ll be around long enough to reap the benefits?

And then of course the switch to energy saving light bulbs could mean the end of a firm favourite, the old how many does it take to change a light bulb joke.

I mean if it gets to a stage when people are hardly ever changing a light bulb then all of a sudden these jokes might not seem funny any more.

You know the ones like – how many politicians does it take to change a lightbulb? It depends on how many it took under the previous government.

There are those however who will suggest that there is a different answer to that question and it takes two politicians to change a light bulb – one to change it and one to change it back.

One thing’s for sure - politicians got their way and pressed ahead with the introduction of these energy saving bulbs insisting that it’s for the good of the environment.

Me?

Well I just think it might be another plan by the politicians to keep us in the dark…

Sole searching…

I've got an confession to make - I like shoes. In fact while there are plenty of men I know who can survive well on two pairs – a brown pair and a black pair – I am not one of them.

I’m not really sure how or when this fascination for shoes happened, but in recent weeks I came to notice that I have quite a lot of shoes despite the fact that I still have only two feet.

That still did not stop me gravitating towards the shoe department on a recent visit to a store with my family, but at least on this occasion I did find myself able to resist the temptation of buying a new pair.

It was during this trip to the shoe department however that I began to firmly place the responsibility for my fascination with shoes on the shoulders of my family.

Coming in at number 11 in a family of 13 as I did, meant that as a child I didn’t always have new shoes, and sometimes relied instead on shoes passed down from older siblings.

But I have eight sisters and there were only so many pairs of pink sandals any self-respecting boy can stick!

Well, okay that’s a slight exaggeration (the eight sisters bit isn’t), but I did grow up in a time when shoes were passed down if they could be.

Despite the fact that my brother who is two years older did his best to virtually destroy every pair that he was given, curses of curses we had a cobbler in our town who could just about fix anything.

This man was more than a saviour of soles, he fixed heels and tongues as well. I soon began to pray that my feet would grow to size 11 so all my shoes would have to be new. Staying down at a size 2 wasn’t an option since some of my sisters had wee feet, what I needed was a pair of feet so big that I’d need to apply for planning permission before I could set them down anywhere.

It didn’t happen. Instead I managed a compromise of sorts, getting to and staying at a size seven which was bigger than any of my sisters’ shoe sizes, but still smaller than any of my brothers’.

At last I was assured of shoes I could call my own.

As I recall I thought myself pretty snazzy when I purchased the wine coloured kangaroo skin moccasins and the white slip-ons with the tassels, but in hindsight I was probably just making certain that I bought colours and styles that none of my brothers would even think of trying to squeeze in to!

Anyway over the years my fascination with shoes has continued, even if for a long while I wasn’t even aware of it until I had to throw them all in a box recently.

It was then I noticed that I had several pairs of shoes that I had never even worn more than once, and horror or horrors I almost had as many pairs as my better half.

That was a detail that was brought to my attention as well I might add, and there was even a claim that since I also have around a half dozen pairs of runners and football boots etc, that I have way more footwear than I really need.

To be honest there wasn’t much I could offer in the way of an answer to that when they were all stacked up in a pile in front of me and holding my hands up to admit that it was probably true I thought I’d try to be funny and said…”well if the shoe fits.”

What I wasn’t expecting though was the swift reply – “you go and buy it in every colour…”

Words sometimes don’t come easy…

Bouncebackability. You know that wasn’t even a real word until 2004.

I was thinking on that this week when I realised that, what I need now, is some umm, well some… bouncebackability.

I like the word, partly because it really annoys those stuffy people who hate it and who hate the thought that new words can still be created and then get widespread usage just through a campaign on a silly football programme.

The professor types I heard giving out about bouncebackability are exactly the people who should know that the language is always in a state of change and new words come and go.

If it didn’t we’d still all be doing the ‘methinks and forsooth’ and all that Willie Shakespeare stuff.

Methinks that might verily be troublesome indeed.

Yet in the midst of all that I also wondered what it would be like to be the person who created a word.

You know, somebody who came up with a word that could go into a dictionary.

By that I mean in real print, verified and all by the stuffy professors who hate the thought of giving approval to this type of thing.

I say this because when I was young and at school I did get to put some words into a dictionary.

However, because the dictionary in question was borrowed from one of my sisters, I wasn’t supposed to write ‘Spurs are great’ in it and I’m almost certain I got a smack around the ear for my trouble.

Coming up with a good word though is difficult.

I mean it’s easy enough to come up with a word. But coming up with one and then trying to think on what that word might mean. Well that’s a different story altogether.

For instance, take the word Humungify.

Well, actually you can’t take it because it’s not a word. But what if it were, what could it mean? I guess if you were the person who came up with it (and I was) you could give it any meaning you wanted.

To be honest I think it’s a nasty word. I mean it’s like something you might do to somebody who really annoyed you. I can think of a few right now I’d like to humungify for instance.

All the same it’s no bouncebackability.

I mean there’s a word and, as soon as you say it, you know exactly what it means.

But then I wondered - is it not cheating when you just stick three different words together to make a new word.

Or is it just clever?

I mean I spent ages coming up with a word like humungify when I could just as easily have looked around for three words to stick together that might have done the same job. Something perhaps like umm…Punchbashbatter.

In the end I’ve decided that I like the idea of a complete new word, not made up of other words even if it is all a wee bit Willie Wonka.

I mean had you ever heard of a vernicious knid or a wangdoozle before you watched the original, and by far and away the best, Willie Wonka movie?

It was probably around the time I’d gone off on the Willie Wonka tangent too that I decided I had a great new word to get me on the road to bouncebackability.

Yep, all I need to do now is to get lotterified at the weekend.

Although I would need to be careful about how much I’d spend on the tickets.

After all, last thing I’d want is to get humungified if my numbers didn’t come up…

The science of laundry day

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated how complex a washing machine could be until recently.

By complex I mean how many actual settings there are on the damn things.

Perhaps this is because I have never really done as much laundry as I have over the past few weeks.

It’s not just laundry either it’s been all kinds of housework. And what’s worse is that I’m beginning to think that I might even be getting to like it.

Well, okay, that might not actually be true. But I’m beginning to not dislike it as much as I used to and that’s kinda the same isn’t it?

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’ve never picked up a floor brush or washed a dish or even did the laundry before, it’s just that until the past few weeks they were not quite as important.

By that I mean if there was laundry to do, I’d just throw it in the machine, hit the button and wait until I could hear the utility room wall vibrate from the machine’s spin cycle to know it was time to go take it out.

But last week I found myself looking at all the buttons on the machine and wondering what they were all for.

Well, okay, there were only four buttons and one of those was to switch the machine on, but there was also a wee wheely thing that, I’m pretty sure now decides what temperature clothes will be washed at.

And yes, I had noticed that this wee wheely thing was on the machine long before last week, but no, I never ever touched it.

As far as I can remember as well, the clothes I had washed before had always turned out okay, so I assume that whatever setting the wheely yoke was on, was perhaps some kinda average.

But here’s the thing, there is no real average when it comes to clothes, because there is some real scientific stuff going on.

You see as I investigated further, I began to remember that the labels on clothing weren’t just for telling what size a garment was, they also had wee symbols on them relating to the washing and care of the said garments.

And, a bit like a child matching up those wee wooden shapes into one of those block jigsaw puzzles, I began to sort through the laundry checking labels against the settings on the machine.

It worked too. I found a whole range of temperatures on a whole range of clothes that matched a whole range of settings on the machine.

And it was then I realised that, once again, I had a problem.

You see, before all of this laundry was simple. Sort the whites from the colours and then throw them in the machine without touching any buttons except the on button.

But after this scientific sorting, I found I had twenty-three different bundles, the biggest of which had just three items in it.

I think it was at that stage that I realised that there was no point in making laundry more complicated than it needed to be, so I threw together a couple of piles of clothes, put the wheely thing back to where it was at the start and threw in a load.

Sitting afterwards with a mug of coffee, I reckoned that if I spent too much time working out the science of washing clothes, I’d probably go ‘clean mad’ altogether.

I mean I didn’t even go into any of the powder versus tablets versus liqui tabs versus liquids scenarios, not to mention the whole fabric conditioner debates.

And then of course there is always what comes after - the dryer.

That just brings up terrible memories altogether. 

In fact last time I used it, I ended up seeing a shrink…

 

Hold on ‘til I get a pen

Have you ever wondered where all the pens go? Well, ok maybe you are a super organised person and you have rows and rows of pens, blue, black, red and maybe even a surprise green ink one all lined up perfectly on a desk, but if you’re not, have you ever wondered where they all go?

At a guess I reckon there could be anywhere between 200-300 pens in my house at any one time, but that doesn’t mean I can lay my hands on one when I actually need it.

Usually of course it happens when I am on the phone.

“Okay, so the number you need to call is....” the person on the other side of the line says and immediately panic sets in.

“Ah, hold on there ‘til I get a pen,” I say, trying not to let my voice sound at all flustered.

You see experience has let me know that even though I confidently have said hold on until I get a pen, the reality is I’m more likely to find the winning numbers for the weekend lottery.

So I have to stall them.

“Ah, isn’t that typical, you find one and there is no ink,” I say.

That may or may not actually be a lie, but if you do happen to find one that has no ink you just waste time by making an old envelope into confetti by scratching so hard with the inkless pen that it cuts through the paper.

And so the frantic search goes on and the person on the other side just sits there chuckling to a rambling rant that you think you are thinking inside your head but are actually muttering just loud enough to hear.

“This is bloody typical I don’t know how many pens I have bought and where are they all now, I had one there yesterday I left it beside the phone, if I find out who took it away....blah, blah, blah and more ramblings along these lines.”

I’m convinced that there is a parallel universe out there somewhere full of odd socks and missing pens.

Not that such a theory is any use when it comes to actually needing one, so when that call does come and you need to write down that important name or number you often end up using anything you can get your hands on.

I’ve written numbers down using eyeliner pencil (not mine!), lipstick (not mine either!), colouring pencils (how come when you find one of them at a time like that it’s always just the yellow and light blue that are really hard to see?) and even once with my finger on the dirt on the back of my car.

To resolve the problem I’ve tried loads of solutions. I’ve put wee pots full of pens beside the phone and yet when that call comes they are always empty.

I’ve bought those wee phone scribbling pads with pens attached and somehow they’ve become unattached by the time that important call comes in.

So, completely frustrated by all of my efforts I finally came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution.

I just sellotaped a pen to the actual phone.

Now I can’t find the phone either...