Dalmation, please

I have to dress up for school on Friday. Not that I don't make the effort every day, you understand - smart casual and practical usually, but this is for Book Day. All the children and staff are expected to appear on Friday morning dressed as a character from a book. In the past, I have fallen back on my stock in trade St Trinian's schoolgirl - short(ish) skirt, black, holey tights, oversized shirt (I can borrow that from Keith, of course), backcombed hair or red wig, black nail varnish and an overload of orangey make-up. Something like the photo, in fact.

However, this time I might have a change. Cruella de Ville, I thought - a touch of elegance. All I need now is a dalmation. Any offers?

Holidaymakers!

A nice little gem to amuse you from Elder Daughter.

These were taken from a newspaper article about the travel industry and the complaints made by tourists:

"No one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."
"We had to queue outside with no air conditioning."

"It is your duty as tour operators to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."
"I was bitten by a mosquito - no one said they could bite."
"We booked an excursion to the water park but no one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels."
"The brochure stated : 'No hairdressers at the accommodation'. We're trainee hairdressers, will we be ok staying here?"
"We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white."
"I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends'three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller."
"It took us nine hours to fly to Jamaica from England - it only took the Americans three hours."
"There were too many Spanish people. The receptionist spoke Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners."
"My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the rooms that we booked."

Comment moderation

Our 'friend' Anonymous has been raising his head again this weekend and obviously has little to do so he has been filling in his spare moments by leaving yet more ascerbic comments, which I have deleted as soon as I have spotted them. In fact, I wouldn't even dignify them by calling them ascerbic - just plain spiteful is nearer the mark.
As a result I have decided to give 'comment moderation' a go so that I can get to these comments first and delete them before anyone else has to read them. I apologise for any inconvenience and I hope it won't deter anyone else from commenting - even you, Craig! ;)

Who's a smart boy, then?

The new look.

What not to not wear - or something

For some months now, I have been increasingly concerned at Keith's lack of sartorial elegance - no really. His everyday dress is becoming more like the surface of NASA. (Yes, it's that bad!) The main problem is that his work is changing as he is doing more key cutting and car unlocking and code resetting which, while it doesn't actually involve crawling under cars, leaves him looking at the end of the day as if that is exactly what he has been doing. To add insult to injury, he insists on doing all this in a white shirt, which means that, every time I put his shirts in the wash, I first have to spend half an hour going over them with gallons of that stain removing stuff in a pink bottle. Also, as he frequently forgets to take his jacket off before he plunges into the day's activities, that too is looking the worse for wear.
So today, I devoted myself to clothes shopping.
No, don't get all excited and jealous. It's nowhere near as interesting when you're shopping for men's clothes.
Anyway, the sum total of my purchases was a pair of dark trousers, a very nice dark shirt and a dark casual jacket. When I can persuade him to try them on, I might take a photo.
Then, I moved over to the ladies' section.
Well, there's only so much boredom even I can take!

Valentine Day

Valentine Day and a beautiful bouquet of roses and extra large card awaited me this morning. When I opened the card, I noticed a small drawing on one side looking, to my untutored eyes, not unlike a small swarm of bees. Casually, I asked what it was.
"They're Heinkels from the Luftwaffe," Keith replies, apparently slightly miffed that I hadn't identified them immediately.
"Oh," I say.
"Good, aren't they?" he continues enthusiastically.
"I'm lost for words," I reply diplomatically.
And I was.

NASA again

Nestling amongst all the other detritus (sorry - items) on Keith's computer station, aka NASA, is a substantial pile of correspondance, all the boring brown envelope stuff and a fair proportion of it unopened. The other morning I mentioned that, this week being my half term, it was 'all going to go'.
Keith misinterpreting my threat to mean everything on the desk, hurriedly brought home the wherewithall to rebuild one of the computers so that the other one could be dispensed with. I suppose it was too early for me to celebrate; I should have waited for the final outcome. So for the past few evenings I have watched him rebuild the computer, not like yer average computer, of course. No, this one has about 20 hard drives in it (only a slight exaggeration) which means that
a) it is very heavy
b) there are problems getting it to work reliably.

So it's back to the drawing board. The NASA corner of the living room is still a mess, there are only three cables less than the fifty million that were there before and there are still discs, boxes and gadgets everywhere.
Oh, and the paperwork? Well, it's no longer on top of the desk, it's now been stuffed out of sight into a drawer. Progress of a sort, I suppose but not quite what I had in mind!