The Bells Have Made Me Deaf

One major problem with living alone, after not previously living alone, is trying to get used to making home cooked things small enough for just one to consume in one sitting. Even after a second helping I’ve hardly made a dent in it. I now have two choices. Have it for breakfast dinner and tea for the entire weekend or fill the freezer with it and hope it tastes as nice nuked from frozen.

I’m having a digestive break aided by a large glass of wine, before I attempt dessert. It’ll give me time to ponder why lovely green limes seem to stay green in the supermarket but soon as you get them home then they turn yellow within hours. It’s one of lifes mysteries!

This was also the day the heating oil ran out. Why does it always happen at a weekend when you have to wait until Monday to stick an order in. I’m tempted not to bother at the price… it’s spring after all. Things should be warming up any day now.

January is always a slack month. People have no money to spend after indulging the god of outdo throughout December. On the other hand, January* brings unwanted gifts to eBay for cheapskates like me to indulge the god of almost necessary and come in handy.

In the past couple of weeks I have purchased 130 metres fabric, 1 monks bench (someones homemade effort), 2 staplers, 1 nail gun, 1 compressor, 1 pasta maker, 400 metres piping cord, 1 desk, 1 5pk of air tools and 1 jump start/compressor unit for the van.

I must try to steer clear of all bargains in the foreseeable future or at least until these ones have paid for themselves… heh!

*Yes I know it’s February already.

No doubt there’ll be a few people groaning tonight as they glow in the dark. I’d almost be content if the weather was this good for at least half of the year. So nice it was, I thought I’d take myself and the doag for a bit of a drive around the bottom end of the peninsula this evening in the vain hope of finding an empty beach from which to admire the North Channel looking like a mill pond. I even took the detour round to Kearney Village and Quentin Bay but every stretch of sand or shingle had someone already in residence with their portable barbeque belching out the foul stench of pork dripping. What is it about a bit of decent weather that makes people want to char their food outdoors and force everybody else to put up with the stink. The smoking ban should be extended to cover the stomach churning fumes from barbequed pork. It makes me ill. Not only were all the usually empty beaches swarming with lardy white bodies, but that smell was inescapable for the entire circuit. I had to console myself in Kircubbin with an almond Magnum and a nice bottle of wine for dinner.

With busted machinery there is little I can do other than visit potential customers and do a spot of book keeping. I did the potential customers who were at home yesterday so today is book keeping day. I general write everything into a rough ledger as it happens but last night I downloaded “Turbo Cash” a free accounting software package to give it a try. It’s been a few years since I used one of these things, my last one having had the millennium bug and became redundant in the dreaded year the world was going to end… 2000. I’m a little rusty or perhaps this is designed more for accountants who like to spend their entire day learning how to make the software work and clicking annoying buttons which are there ‘just to be sure’. I intended to have the years figures all done in the space of one evening, as should have been the case. It’s not like I deal with more than 6 or 8 customers per month. I took the whole evening to figure out how to do a receipt and that was only in theory. It’s going to be a long day of middle aged slow learning.

Maybe I should read the instructions.

There’s nothing quite like a scorching sunny day to make you get the bleach out and scrub the soot off the window ledges and then sit and fry in the garden admiring the fruits of your labour, supping the essential can of pilsner complete with snorting straw for that added je ne sais quoi.

I should be working today but one of my machines has had to be rushed to hospital for major surgery. A transplant no less and meantime it sits desolate in a box leaking oil while waiting for it’s new guts to arrive from some recycled parts vendor in Italia. Without it I am at a loss to further achieve anything at all. Get well soon lil Rimoldi…

Last night I had just turned the tv on when the phone rang. It was one of those ‘how do I install my modem?’ calls, so I knew I was going to be there for a while and stuck the kettle on. Tea all brewed and something sweet from the cupboard to make it less wet, I settled down to do the step by step guide for elderly parents. After several attempts I deduced that in fact the wrong disk was being employed and was listening to some very intense rummaging going on at the other end to find the proper CD, when I noticed Big Brother starting on tv. At this point I generally switch off and this time would have been no different but for the fact that the correct CD was found and so I decided to find the remote later and endure the first few viewing minutes of pretending to be a fly on a wall in the kingdom of inane drivel. Correct CD makes all the difference when it comes to getting things to work. From that point on it was plain sailing and I was soon to be released from the conversation to find the remote and zap Ch 4’s screeching giggling girlie party with what I can only assume to be twins in matching pink polka dots, bouncing off the furniture and a lot of affected screaming going on. Yes I’d rather watch paint drying. I never did get it, why people want to spend their time watching the most mundane crap with even more uninteresting commentary in what seems to be a wannabe Geordie accent. I fear for the nation’s sanity.

make them like this any more…