I Name These Flip Flops Chicken Shit!

I tend to deal with quite a lot of shit on a day to day basis.

Dog shit, cat shit, hamster shit, bullshit all kinds of shit really ….... But now it coming round to that time of year again.

IT'S CHICKEN SHIT TIME!



total cuteness



I quite like chickens and Alpacas, (purely because they both make this really cute chuckling sound).

But chicken SHIT, well, it really is just 'fowl'! (sorry, didn't resist, should have!)

I love the idea of chickens and I love my neighbour Janet for keeping chickens in her garden which is roughly 3 times the size of mine and should BE mine!



Janets Garden



Should be mine!



I also love that Janet has a VW camper van and spends most of the weekends in the Summer visiting the VW shows leaving me chicken sitting (or chicken shitting as it's become known as in my house).



A wopper from Esmerelda



Janet chickens are ex battery hens and are kept as pets with the eggs being an added bonus.

They live in the relative freedom of a very large Aviary at the bottom of her garden where they can wander around, peck at the ground and feel the sun on their mostly bare backsides.

They aren't pretty chickens but they are HAPPY chickens. They also produce enough guano to fertilize a small farm!

Janet, like me, likes to give things names, thus the chicken are called Esmerelda, Clarissa, Hortence and Prudence.

We don't just draw the line at naming animals in my family though.

My daughter once had a blister called Phil and a plaster named Jeff.

Meet Jeff

A friend of mine has great names for all her neighbours, something Im working on at the moment with mine. Chloe, I totally ADORE Van Slag!!!

I wonder, do other people name 'things' ? Do you?

Inspiration

I have had the inspired idea of setting up a file, I have called it 'inspiration'.  The plan is, that instead of compulsively writing anything and everything down as soon as I can after it happens (which is why many of my postings are in the early hours!) I shall keep snippets, snapshots and reminders that I can dip in and out of.

There is no cohesion to my blog, what you get is whatevers in my head at any given moment.

Given that many things dont stay in my head for long and Im often left grasping at things that shimmer and disappear this seems to be the answer.

Before I discovered the 'Wonderful World of Blogging' most of my rambles appeared in the form of FB status updates and then later, (the expanded version) was inflicted on the innocent victims of the dating website.

NOW, I have YOU!!!

I decided the best place to start was with the aforementioned Face Book so, bearing in mind that I do tend to post quantites of rubbish I thought I just trawl back as far as the begining of this year, see if I'd said/done anything vaguely amusing, interesting or illegal.

My first status update for 2011 posted at 2:08am on Jan 1st read:

"woke up with a bang (sadly fireworks related)"

Such is my life ...................

Mistaken Identity

I think I might suffer from a form of people dyslexia.

of course you know me!

If you take people I know out of the environment I'm used to seeing them in then, although I may know them really quite well I sometimes haven't got a clue who they are. I know I KNOW them but I don't know why and I don't know how. Long (and on my part) often disturbing conversations can enchew only for me to bump into them in the tea room at work the next day.

I know the world doesn't revolve around me and people don't live in the little bubbles I put them in but life would be so much simpler if the did!

This does also works in reverse. I've often stopped to chat to some very confused people only to find that they work on the checkout in Sainsburys (although I do obviously count some of them as my dearest friends these days) or that they just happen to have a passing resemblance to a character on TV.

I sometimes wish other people suffered in a similar way. It seems that whenever I get myself into a situation that has embarrassment potential (quite often!)l there's a hoard of people who know me just popping out of the woodwork!

I discovered a couple of years ago that I had a much underused social conscience so joined a local action group that fund raises and actively promotes our local park.

The average age of the action group is about 65 so I frequently get roped in to help with things like painting the park benches ect. Now I quite like painting things (as I may have mentioned) and we spent a happy couple of days painting the 18 benches a multitude of colours A job well done .

A couple of days later I discovered a rumour was going around that Id was doing Community Service!!

One of the things the action group does to fund raise is host a bingo evening once a month.

I'm not really a 'dabber' but I usually go along, help make the teas ect and, as treasurer, sort the money. I don't tend to advertise the fact as I'm not sure how good it would be for my 'street cred' :-)

So I really do have to thank Mandy for posting a comment on a totally unrelated post on my Face Book (rather than sending me a private message, texting or even calling me) asking if the school could borrow MY Bingo machine. Hmmmm, now EVERYONE knows!

What's In A Name?

The mention of Matt the Gnat in an earlier post got me to thinking about names.

The importance we place on them, the assumptions we make about them and the influence they have on our lives.

I was born Roberts, a name I wasn't to use for long as my parents divorced when I was very young.

My sister (I have 3) was called Julia, she reverted to the name Roberts only a couple of years before the advent of Pretty Woman. That's a hell of a name to try and live up to and frankly, she didn't waste too much time trying.

My Mother remarried fairly swiftly and my surname became Shears.

It was the BANE of my life!!! Not only did it seem impossible for many to spell (I've been called Smears, Steers and even on one memorable occasion ARREARS!!!) but, it was also ammunition!

I was brought up in a small village near the sea, not much going on and we took our fun where we could find it. One particular woman (we called HER Smelly Nelly) used to think it oh, soooo amusing, when she saw my sister and I together to refer to us as a 'pair of shears'.

Another sister was in a serious relationship for a while, all seemed to be jogging along quite nicely when suddenly, after a proposal of marriage, she broke it off.

The reason? 'Well 'she said, 'I gave it some serious thought and decided, there was no way I was spending the rest of my life being called Claire Dwyer'!!

You have to wonder at some parents though, do they not think before deciding on a name? Or do they have an evil chuckle to themselves as they sign away their offspring's future happiness in a stroke of a pen?

My ex worked with a man called Christopher, shortened as it often is to Chris. In itself, that wasn't a problem but when it was linked to the surname Peacock, well, that's just plain mean!

hey Chris

I worked for a while with a girl called Carrie. A lovely girl, very unassuming and pleasant.

One day Carrie came into the office and announced that she had decided to double barrel her first name with her middle name and so she became Carrie-Ann.

Nobody really gave it a great deal of thought at first but, all became clear when she got married a few months later.

Her husband to be had the surname HISCOCK!!! (now that's not included in the marriage vows!)

I haven't saddled my offspring with strange, weird or embarrassing names but at the same time, I didn't really give much thought to their initials.

Thus Master Macs initials are JAM and Miss Mac is LGM! They don't seem to hate me for it at the moment but we are reaching the teen years so no doubt I have provided them with some fodder for the future.

Possibly my favourite Name of all belongs to ex lax's (my ex husband) ex who, when she married decided to double barrel her name as many do and so she went from being Miss D White to Mrs D White-Cummings -

For REALZ!!

As Chaka Khan would say – I Feel For You

This weeks rewind is a post from January 2011.

Well, I didn't start my blog until April BUT, it did start life as a diary on a dating website and extracts of this are from messages I had in January so I hope I'm not bending the rules too much by rewinding this one.

...........................................................................................

I would like to take credit for the title of this post but, it was in fact the heading on a message sent to me by my GBF (gay best friend).

Not everyone is as lucky as me to have an S in their lives but personally, I don't know what Id do without him.

He's funny, clever, thoughtful (and gives wicked parties). I was incredibly sad when he and his partner B of 32 years decided a few years ago to retire to the coast. Thank god for modern technology, we talk ALL the time. S is a fellow insomniac and we often chat into the wee hours (mostly about food for which we both have a passion).

Anyway, the point of mentioning S wasn't to boast about the fact that I have GBF or even that I seem to manage on very little sleep at times. The point is to say how lucky I am in my friends. Some women have shoes that fit every occasion, I have friends. I think I've got the best deal.

Friends may become a little worn and scuffed around the edges over time but they never go out of fashion and they're always a perfect fit.

I read about so many bad experiences on the dating websites in peoples diaries and thanks to S I managed to mostly avoid them myself. His advice was invaluable ranging from:

'bit hippy/dippy /Mills and Boon for me' to 'check the occupation, too fab by half' and also 'quite a sweetheart'.

I did have to question the latter as that was in response to my telling him that Id let somebody down gently and had the following message in return:

“thanks i quite appreciate your frankness and wish you well too,but in case you have a friend that might be interested in me let me know i don't mind coming to see the fellow”

I didn't run everything past S though, some people I could be quite sure of without a second opinion. The following are a couple of examples:

“'could you be my soil mate”

“'do you scuba dive and keep bees? If so, you are an enigma and possibly my ideal woman”.

'sudece my boby if you like whot you see...

heve you dan 3 same be 4 id couple?

While I may have laughed to myself at the content sometimes, Id never laugh at the person, life's hard enough without random strangers making fun of you, hell, I should know that! See 'Things'

Slightly Singed (part two)

You get all sorts of people at the beach and I DO love to people watch. From time to time yesterday I laid my book aside and drank in the rich and varied life forms sharing the sands with me.

There were the two little Brummie boys intent on something that required close inspection.

Gradually their conversation filtered through to me and it was intriguing. Clever Trevor's going to win I heard one say. No, Drop Dead Gary's going to get there first said the other. All the time watching and waiting for something I couldn't see!

After a couple of minutes, YAY, told you, Clever Trevor got there first! The little sods had buried two ladybirds in the sand and were waiting to see which one dug itself out first!

There was the Dad, totally immersed in building a sandcastle with his small son, both gaining so much pleasure in adding turrets and a moat ect. The little boy was wearing a hat that proclaimed he was a 'dude' and I have to say, his dad was a bit of a dude too.

Sometimes I just gazed out to sea, well, in the general direction of the sea anyway. You don't so much get a low tide at Weston as a tsunami in reverse.

The water is just sucked away leaving behind a vast expanse of sticky brown mud. One things for sure, people of all shapes, sizes and colours might arrive in Weston but they all leave the same colour and it's a uniform brown.

Apparently there's a nudist beach somewhere nearby, one day I must seek it out, possibly on a day I DONT have the children with me.

I did come across an article on a tourist information site about Weston and a nudist visit to Flat Holm (one of the two small islands just off Weston, the other being Steepholm) with the comment the, 'The visitors, while enjoying the freedom of wandering the island unclothed did however wear hard hats to protect them from dive-bombing seagulls”!!

Slightly Singed (part one)

Rewinding with Multiple Mum

We're back, we're fed, we are tired!! ( and I am slightly singed down one side).

The day started pretty well, I managed to get three girls and one boy (who had spent half the night on his xbox) up and out of the door by 10:30. I even fed a couple of them.

I briefly consider using the 'quick buy' ticket machine at the train station then, laughing softly to myself, took my place in the queue.

Once on the train we settled ourselves. 'Why don't you put your arm rest down Mum?' said Master Mac.

Well I TRIED!! Expecting it just to slide down into place with the gentlest of touches, it DIDNT. So I gave it a tug, not moving …..... I used BOTH hands, noting doing!

I''ll do it Mum' said Master Mac. 'You cant, its stuck or broken' I replied.

'Don't worry he said, I can do it, ILL USE MY GENITALS'!!!!

Now Id say I was pretty open minded, fairly unshockable really but I have to admit even I was a LITTLE taken aback at the thought of my son having a) the equipment that would enable him to do that and b) being unselfconscious enough to happily whip it out on a train and use it as a pulley.

My look of horror, and it has to be said slightly smug amazement (not EVERY Mother has a son with those capabilities you know!) were swiftly quashes when it transpired what he had ACTUALLY said was, 'Ill use my Jedi forces'!

We arrived at Weston Super Mare to blazing sunshine and the realisation that I didn't actually know the way from the train station to the beach.

'No problem, follow that 4 year old with the bucket and spade' I said, he looks like he knows where he's going, so …...................... we went to Tesco!

Actually I was quite pleased, Id forgotten to pack a book and I'm not really a sitting on the beach kind of person.

I thought Id better pad out the picnic a little too while we were there so we had a wander around.

'Can we have some doughnuts Mum' said Miss Mac. 'I don't see why not I replied'. Sooo Tesco are doing packs of 5 doughnuts £1.60 for 5 or 2 packs for £2, 'might as well get 2 pack's I said. What Id failed to realise was there were several different sorts of doughnuts! Master Mac wanted Chocolate, Miss Mac wanted custard, friend A wanted jam.

5 people 20 doughnuts later …....

Once the children had parked me at the beach with the bags (right next to the toilets and behind a giant ice cream cone) they vanished to explore the pier ect.

Almost immediately my 2 square inches of beach was invaded by the dour and dismal family. Don't get me wrong, the kids were ok but the mother!!!! One of those 'Im not happy until I've sucked ever last bit of pleasure out of an outing for my children'.

Sun cream slapped on every exposed body part along with accompanying grumbles when the child got sand in it (hello, we ARE at the beach).

Instructions on where to play (within 2 feet), what to play (nothing that involved nasty, dirty sand) and constant changing of children's clothes, like a conjurer pulling ribbon out his mouth she had a seemingly endless supply of clean clothes in a tardis like bag.

No wonder the poor kids had to be ordered to SMILE when it was time for the 'happy day with the grumps at the beach' photo.