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Daisies
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Guest post, over there
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Nine point five months
Returning home after 5 days visiting family, Bernard is reimplanted into his natural environment (ie our living room) and I can at last see how quickly he is developing. Five days ago, if I planted him on the sitting room floor, I was able to coax him into crawling a few paces by constructing a precarious tower of blocks and saying to him “now, don’t demolish that.”
But now, he is flying across the room, cuddling the door (he is strangely fond of doors). A springing noise causes me to raise my head, and I realise that he has figured out how to open my CD box (better find the keys for that). He paws at the glass panel on the (long since childproofed) TV unit, trying to reach the LCD displays behind it. He pulls himself up to a stable kneeling position on the edge of the coffee table, increasing his vertical range by a foot or two. A whole slew of areas just got added to the “to-clear” list. He attempts to manually fillet a small book of Oscar Wilde quotes (which were deliberately placed in his reach for this purpose).
This is all very, very brilliant.
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Good news, everyone!
I’ve been sitting on something incredibly exciting for a few weeks now, but it’s finally come to fruition and I am confident that it can be disclosed to the public, without fear of looking like a dickhead later.
I have at last joined the echelons of bloggers-with-book-deals! It initially came as a huge surprise – after all, it’s usually the bloggers with tales of tawdry sexual exploits, or those who have lost their jobs as a direct result of having a blog, who get the book deals. I never considered for a moment that people would want to pay actual real money to read what I write, but clearly such self-deprecation was unfounded.
I’m not going to be giving up the day job just yet, which will mean that finding time to fit everything in is going to be a bit of a challenge. Still, you have to give these things a go, eh?
The book is to be called *The Curse Of Heron Peninsula*, though obviously this is subject to change.
I was doing some changes to my site when I noticed a completely unexpected message in the status bar. Upon further investigation, I discovered that Site Meter have started incorporating services from specificclick.net into their javascript. It’s your common or garden site-tracking cookie-based bollocks, and I don’t feel that my users should have to endure that, so I’ve removed the Site Meter code from this site, and it will not be coming back.
I’m going to try surviving without a stats tracking package for a little while, and we’ll see how it goes.
Apologies for all the meta, but I felt that it was important to get the word out about this, so that other Site Meter users are aware of it.
I love pens.
I’m pretty big on the whole paper thing too, but it’s the pens that really make me spooge my pants.
The pen thing really kicked into gear when I was at University. I developed a system from quite early on that I maintained throughout the entirety of my Maths degree, and I still have my notes to prove it.
I would purchase, from the University stationery shop, a small number of blue Pilot G-1 0.7mm gel pens, a small number of red Pilot G-1 0.7mm gel pens, and a large quantity of black Pilot G-1 0.5mm gel pens. I used the red pens to write headings. I used the blue pens to write statements of theorems, corollaries, lemmas &c. I used the black pens (with the finer tip) to write the proofs of the aforementioned, and any further miscellaneous notes.
The end result was sheer brilliance. The notes were about as beautiful as you could get without going the whole hog and typesetting them.
I still have, in my pencil pot, one blue Pilot G-1 0.7mm gel pen, one red Pilot G-1 0.7mm gel pen, and one Pilot G-1 0.5mm gel pen. These are the last pens that I ever wrote with at University, and have not been used since then. Maybe they don’t work any more, but there’s not much ink left in them so I don’t feel that I’ve been unforgiveably wasteful.
Since then? Well, I’ve tried numerous other pens, but I’ve kept coming back to the black Pilot G-1 0.5mm. I bought a box of 12 back in 2002, which is nearly empty (yes, 5 years is a long time, but I’ve been using other pens in the meantime as well, you fool). But there is a tragic twist to our tale – obtaining Pilot G-1 0.5mm gel pens is not as easy as it once was, and I am having to deal with the sad fact that once this box is finished, it may no longer be practical to buy more. I’ve already invested a lot of hours into trying to find these pens at a reasonable price, but to no avail, and I think it’s time to cut my losses.
What kind of person gets so worked up over a pen? Sad loser types like me, that’s what.
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My Teenage Years: 17
My final year at secondary school got off to a good start. I managed to get a handle on my obsession with Nicola, and my social circle widened a little further.
There was a very important day in September which is not recorded in the diary, as it did not seem important at the time ((CRUCIAL NOTE: as this event isn’t in the diary, it’s feasible that the exact date was actually a few months earlier, during the previous academic year. For the sake of a coherent story, I’ve gone with my hunch and put it here)). On the school bus one afternoon, I leaned over the back of the seat in front which was currently occupied by Craig. He was holding his copy of Different Class. “You have the version with the interchangeable covers,” I said, “I would kill you for that.” He looked up at my stony face, unaware whether to laugh or wet himself in terror.
By October, Craig and I were close friends. One of the Wednesday afternoon PE options was Squash, so we played together every week. We lived in the same village, just a ten minute walk away from eachother, so we would hang out, write songs about masturbation and Santa Claus, and watch Frasier together. On the 4th October I bought my first bass guitar, and in November Craig bought his first guitar. By the end of the year our band had a name, I had passed my driving test, attended a number of University open days, and I had also learned to accept that Nicola and I would never be an item, so was now pursuing a remarkable young lady called Carly. I was still close friends with Nicola, Nathan and Adam, and barely spoke to Tam, Vijay, and the two Martins. I no longer suffered from self-esteem issues. I had started going into the city again, though now it was not to play arcade machines, but to watch gigs.
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My Teenage Years: 16
I was now a sixth-former. Initially, Adam was still my only real friend, though I was on good terms with his friends, including the gorgeous Nicola and the oft-mentioned Nathan. Early on in the year I attempted to woo the new girl, Cheryl, only to be turned down promptly. Upon reading my journal, it’s clear that I had been watching too much Red Dwarf, as I apparently emulated Arnold Rimmer’s romantic technique down to a tee. I also continued to lech after her for a few weeks, which must have made her incredibly uncomfortable, and if I had any sense it should have made me uncomfortable too. By now I’m past my phase of ranking girls according to fanciability though, which is healthy. I would tend to pursue one girl for a fortnight or so ((notable instances being Kay and Ruth)), eventually plump up the courage to ask her out, and then get turned down. I’d be miserable for a while and then the cycle would repeat. Meanwhile, I’d periodically go to a party, get drunk, and then get off with some girl that I had never met before, so it wasn’t a world devoid of contrast.