Grumpy on a guitar

I have been teaching myself the acoustic guitar for a while now. Thinking to myself that it would be useful to get some expert help I went on to YouTube.

The search for guitar exercises threw up "A !5 minute Guitar Exercise" video...it lasted 8 mins 37 seconds!!!

Bad start to the week!

Some weeks begin well. The world seems a good place to be, the sun shines and the sky is blue. Today was not a good start to the week.

Physio at 8.30 a.m. meant an early start to get to Edinburgh. The traffic was bad thanks to a selfish lorry driver who ignored the twenty car tailback behind him for eight solid miles. When I got to Edinburgh I parked up and managed to burst a tyre on the kerb. Bad enough?

No! Modern cars don't come with spare tyres. Knowing I had to make my physio appointment I fed the meter and resolved to sort it out an hour later.

The physiotherapist is a sadist so the session did not go well.

Back in the car I tried the "repair kit". It involved removing the tyre valve, squirting milk into the tyre and trying to reflate the thing with an air compressor that looked like a 1960's transistor radio. All that happend is that I pumped the milk through the tyre and out of the hole in it onto the road.

I rang the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) to arrange for them to pick me up. After ten loyal years of being a customer and not bothering them I figured it was time to collect. I didn't. The RAC it seems are pretty picky about which car you are in when you burst a tyre and they explained that they wanted to fleece me for money. I refused.

A traffic warden turned up at this point and explained, to my relief, that she couldn't book me while I was trying to get my car recovered.

Finally I arranged for a local firm to pick me up and take me to see my chums at Kwikfit. With an hour before pick up I wandered off for a coffee. I should add that I took the precaution of putting a note in my windscreen explaining to any passing traffic warden what had happened.

I got my coffee and ... a parking ticket!!!

Surely it could get no worse???

Having been safely taken to Kwikfit two hours later, having moaned to everyone I met about my parking ticket, I was told it would be a good hour to repair the damage.

"is there a cafe nearby?" I asked.

"Round the corner, Cafe Nine." said Jim, the Kwikfit fitter.

I went to Cafe Nine. Bought another coffee and a bacon roll and sat down at the back. All was well for ten minutes and then the really big guy who had sold his arse to Satan went to the loo behind me. I didn't know there was a loo behind me until he came out again shame-faced. making no apology!!!!

Off to bed!

Scottish Weather

Today (actually yesterday now) I was driving back to Scotland up the M74. Today was St Patrick's Day which means we are four days from spring. One of the overhead gantry signs carried the following warning...

"Is your car ready for winter?"

I cannot fault the accuracy of the forecast!

Cowardice

For some reason, I have never been curious as to why cowards are often referred to as chickens.

A few days ago I discovered the answer quite by accident. Our two bantams were making a racket in the garden, clearly alarmed at something. Fearing a cat on the prowl, I ran to the window to see Custard and Mustard being terrorised by nothing more than a rabbit and a squirrel!

Time for a name change to Henny and Penny!

Jobs at Sky Scanner

For some reason I went searching in the jobs section of the internet.... I found this job at Sky Scanner...

"Backend Engineer"

Times Online going bust

For the last week my online Times newspaper has been playing up. It won't load the front page and seems to stop working for no reason leaving me stuck on the same page. As regulars know I rely on the Times in slow weeks for the occasional post and would be lost without it!

Yesterday morning I set out to right this wrong and in an idle five minutes logged on to the Times website. In truth I was looking for a refund of about half the £26 monthly cost. In no time I was "chatting" with the online chat help person.

"Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?"

"Nope, let me try that."

Pause.

"Yes that has done it, all working fine now."

"Anything else I can help you with?" asked the chat agent.

"Yes I would like a refund please, my app has not worked properly. I don't think I should be charged full price for an app that needs to be uninstalled and reinstalled in order to work."

"I can't give you a refund."

"Well, perhaps I will think about cancelling my subscription then." I hasten to point out this was not in the spirit of a rant but a spirit of tired resignation.

"I can give you 50% off for three months though."

Kerching £39 up and I was only looking for £13.

Valentines Day

Wonderful story in the news today about Mr and Mrs Outram. It appears they had a two day row which culminated in Mr Outram grabbing Mrs Outram by the neck and pushing her out of the door of their house in Balquhidder Glen. Mrs Outram had been drinking (two whiskies) and had thrown a plate Mr Outram hitting him in the neck. She then tried to crawl back into the house through the catflap. Mr Outram was not impressed and hit her on the head and pushed her back out again.

The couple are hopeful of a full reconciliation.

Who says romance is dead?

Food in strange places 3

Having cleared up the egg from the previous post as best as I could, I noticed that there was a bit of shell that had fallen into Mrs Blog's handbag. Her handbag had been sitting on a stool right under the egg-line-of-fire. Not wanting Mrs Blog to be distressed by the shell I picked it up and thought she would be none the wiser.

Later that morning I received a lengthy and irate text from Mrs Blog. It seems that while I spotted the shell in her handbag, I had completely missed the big dollop of egg yolk. Mrs Blog found it when she went to the Post Office. It turns out that the bank paying-in book for the shop where she works bore the brunt of the eggy goo.

Apologies to Mrs Blog, the two ladies in the post office who had to wipe up the sticky mess on the counter, the owner of Time and Tide (Peebles branch) and anyone else who knows me.

Food in strange places 2

I went to grab a couple of eggs yesterday morning to make an omelette. One of them caused no real problems and came quietly, the other put up a struggle. It was a struggle which the egg both won and lost. It won in so far as I did not get to put it in my omelette; it lost because it smashed itself to pieces on the highest shelf in the door of the fridge.

Food in strange places 1

This has been an odd week in the Blog household, with food appearing where it should not be. Mrs Blog was emptying out the washing machine this morning and along with the washing was a well washed radish.

Chicken Run

As regulars will know, the Blogs have been keeping chickens for a few months. If you have seen the film "Chicken Run" and wondered if it was in fact a documentary, I am happy to confirm that it is.

In the last six months the chickens have escaped dozens of times. They have burrowed, squeezed through the netting, nipped out of the gate when we weren't looking and even eaten holes in the mesh that is meant to keep them in.

Today Mustard failed, she flapped, flew up and wedged herself halfway up the fence - I nearly left her there!

Attachments

Today started with a portent of things to come when I sliced my face apart with my Sainsbury's own brand razor.

It got worse when I ventured to make cauliflower soup. Quite what possessed me to want to make it in the first place, I have no idea. I chopped and fried an onion and garlic, boiled the cauliflower and simmered it all with potato and bay leaves.

Then I had to put it in the blender/processor to puree it all. I was faced with the choice of three attachments, the dough hook was a no-no, so I was left with the slicey-thing or the mixer-thing. Under the false assumption that the ingredients would be soft by now I went for the mixer-thing. Big mistake, the lid flew off, the soup flew out and I had a cauliflower shower.

Cheese for tea

On the phone to daughter-blog yesterday she told me that she was having cheese for tea. That was it. No explanation. No recipe. No other ingredients. I assume it looked like this...

Ageing rapidly

Some days you just know that time is catching up on you, today was such a day.

I decided to take pity on Mrs Blog's two bantams as they shivered in the snow. I gave them some corn and they gave me the run around for ten minutes, escaping and disappearing under the beech hedge. After some clever hen-psychology I had them back in the coop and was not feeling the cold myself.

At this point young man turned up with a leaflet in his hand and offered it to me. I thanked him and went back indoors. At first glance the leaflet looked to be about sheds (great timing on the part of the young man - getting me in the garden within yards of my knackered old shed!). When I got my glasses on I saw it wasn't a  leaflet about sheds, it was a leaflet about "care cottages". According to the leaflet you can now buy a shed to put your granny (or in my case grandpa) in - just hope the kids don't get one!!

Unusual Soup

My thanks to Mrs Blog for her selfless contribution to this latest post...

She was advised by dentist-blog to buy an electric toothbrush. As a seasoned shopper, Mrs Blog was on the look-out for a bargain and priced up the benchmark offerings on Amazon and Ebay. armed with the useful ammunition that the going price was about £25 she was overjoyed to find a £9.99 offering in Sainsburys. That is, until she looked closer and realised it was a hand-blender.

You hear something and misunderstand

Mrs Blog was on the phone to the Sussex-blogs this morning, after the call she said,

"Yvonne said that she was awake all night with the wind!"

I know now that I should have checked with the met office!

Bit of a prat

Two days ago I wandered into the dining room to ask Son-Blog and Daughter-Blog  if they had seen my reading glasses.

I was met with derisive laughter that led me to my missing spectacles...

Otter beard

Recent posts have featured Son-blog in a number of pictures sporting his facial fur. Until now I had thought that he had followed the movement towards "lumbersexual" and was eschewing the teenage look of One Direction. This look involves growing an excessively long beard in an attempt to look like a cross between a lumberjack and a metrosexual man.

I then discovered this link and when I followed I realised that Son-blog has in fact been working unpaid for an american animal rescue charity. More to the point his beard has a life of its own, swims and drinks milk!

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/this-is-what-it-takes-to-teach-a-baby-otter-to-be-an-otter--lkEn1X7Hve

Happy New Year to both my readers!!

Work outs

Following the festive blow-out I decided to lead by example and head to the gym.

Son and daughter blog came along and daughter-blog took the lead with son-blog offering to teach him what she has learned since starting at "Cross Fit". (Not sure which sense the word Cross is used in).

So I expected to see son-blog doing this...

Or perhaps this...

So it was a surprise to turn around and see this...

The true meaning of Christmas

Just back from Church where our Polish priest gave a sermon on the message of the gospel. "Trust and Pensions". I was suddenly alert when I would normally be nodding off. Being in financial services I am aware of the seismic changes to our pension rules coming in to force next year and I wondered if there was some divine angle that I needed to be aware of. Added to that I have been promoting the advantages of trusts for over twenty five years. This could be the most personally relevant sermon of my entire life!

I listened intently, but there was not one single reference to annuities, retirement age or beneficiaries. Then I realised it was about "Trust and Patience".