I’m not sure what to say now! Three comments about being funny and/or witty and I am starting to feel the pressure. Then again, as you are basically all laughing AT me and my misfortunes, so long as bad things keep happening, this blog will keep making you all laugh… Which, when I pause to think on it, is probably even less reassuring :S Worry not, normally service will resume shortly I am sure, and I will go back to being the dull and normal Claire you all know and love.

Either way, what new is there in the world of Cas that I would like to share? Hmmm.

I spent the last three days dealing with the aftermath of the Great Flood of 2005 and trying to teach my mother how to use a computer. For yes, she is finally on the verge of joining the information age. As a family we were lucky, we had one of the first pc’s, and it has been an unbroken love affair ever since. I still have vivid memories of paying my brother 50p a time for lessons in dos and then C. From the very beginning he enjoyed mucking around with the hard code to make something new, whilst I preferred to take existing software and apply that in new and interesting ways. I may have fought the inevitable in the middle with that abortive attempt to get into vet school, but the lure of computers is clearly too strong. And now it has snaggled my mother as well. She fought a good fight (her glazed look at the Sunday dinner table as the rest of us discussed computers was a joy to behold and a mainstay of my childhood) but the time has come for her to wave the white flag and come over to the dark side. We got her a MacMini for her birthday and this entailed a quick dash back home to get it set up this week.

(The train journey down was fine, though it made me miss the car all the more; the journey back was horrible and worthy of an entire post all to itself.)

The Mini is a wonderfully cute and shiny little toy! So tiny! But so easy to set up – I was quietly dreading it but I am not lying when I say it took longer to dismantle the old pc than it did to set up the Mac. I checked: 20 minutes of swearing and cursing untangling the pc from its assorted rat’s nest of wires; 5 minutes to plug the Mini into the assorted bits (5 wires only, 2 of them keyboard and mouse, 1 the modem cord), to boot it up, and to enter all the details, and all without a single swear word uttered! I admit there was a bit of minor cursing when it came to trying to connect to the internet the first time, but that was because I had transposed a couple of digits in the number, doh! And then spend the next seven hours writing a ‘how to’ guide for my Mum. You don’t realise how complicated, and how much like a foreign language computing is, until you are trying to teach a total beginner. By total, I mean TOTAL. Previous experience with PC’s or Macs: Zip, nada, rien. We managed to fit in a few lessons before I had to leave on Saturday afternoon, and I know she will get it, but I did chicken out and tell her to do a course at the local college: I am a totally PANTS teacher!

Other than that, the few days were uneventful. Got my hair cut at my favourite hairdressers back in Wells. Why, you may ask, do I have to go home for a haircut? Surely, you live in a city, there must be one nearer you could use?! You would think so, wouldn’t you, but you would be wrong. There is a dearth of affordable, good, hairdressers in Soton. I’ve known people who’ve lived here for five years and more, who still take the two hour journey back to their home town to get a trim. The relationship between a girl, her hair, and her hairdresser is an odd one. I finally found someone who I like, and more importantly TRUST, to cut my hair nicely (and not to break the bank in the process), and that is worth the trip back home. Just that the last few time’s I’ve booked an appointment to go home, something’s gone wrong. The car crash back at the start of February, the Flood this time… Third time is the charm? Which reminds me, I have finally heard back from the Insurance company, and they say they will give me more money for the car! Colour me rather surprised. Now I have to decide whether or not it is worth getting a new (new to me that is) car whilst living in a city. It is rather decadent to keep a car just to go to the supermarket once a week, and back to Somerset once every few months.

The Orange 241 film this week was Sahara. To quote, “fun, silly, and a semi-naked Matthew McConaughey. What more could you ask for?” The Sahara review. Apparently we’ve seen upwards of 20 films so far this year. And that isn’t counting the dvd’s and movies on TV. Ouch!

Lastly, look, no OED! Dad came through with a fantastic computer stand: Shiny new stand. Far superior to what I was expecting! Major *huggles* to Farv for providing me with total ergonomic goodness for my computing experience. (Stand, keyboard, typing chair, lack of RSI, all courtesy of the parental unit.)

That is all I have to say, because I really really should be writing proposals. Not as much fun as this I am sure, but this isn’t getting me a masters degree. Toodles.

I’ve googled myself (sounds painful, doesn’t it?), and the only blooming reference to me within the first three pages on Google (I frankly have better things to do with my time than to look through all 524,000 hits) is to my appalling performance at BUSA archery a few years back. Now I have reason to not want to have to relive the memory of this event – it was my first competition back after many years of injury, but half way through my back gave out totally, and I mean totally. The five hour journey back from Edinburgh is a thankful blur of pain-meds and being unfolded from the minibus at the end by sympathetic team mates. It took over a year and extensive physio to recover from that particular competition. On top of that, the day before the comp I had just split with the then SO. Looking back, not such a big deal, but at the time I was most definitely NOT a happy bunny.

Why, do you ask, was I googling myself in the first place? Well, it has just been borne home to me the fact that anyone can view this blog
*points to the comment on the mini me post* (I am 90% certain that Jackson B as an individual is unknown to me. If I am wrong… my bad.)
So, I thought, what information can the curious out there garner about me from google? Thankfully, the answer to this question is “not a frelling thing” other than that I am an abysmal archer, I am a rather successful poet/author, and that I died aged 36 in a small village in Essex. Other random things attributed to my namesakes that exist out there (for yes, they were named after me!) were just too random, or plain dull, to stick in my sieve like mind.

There was something else I wanted to share with y’all, but I meant what I said just now, brain-injured goldfish have nothing on me.

*waves at people, both new and old, goes to watch Equilibrium because why not, and frankly the pressure to be funny/amusing is starting to get to me :P*

My Onion horroscope this week:
Virgo: (Aug. 23—Sept. 22)
You’ll question your wisdom in hiring such a fanatical personal trainer, but you must admit that those who manage to escape his diabolical Maze Of Fitness Or Death emerge looking pretty damn buff.
See yours at The Onion

Or iPods are no longer cool.

A drastic statement I will agree, but the iPod owning population also now includes President George Bush. Apparently he listens to music downloaded (I hope legally) by his aide whilst mountain biking. Bush, not the aide. Let us put aside for now the slightly mind-twisiting image of Dubya on a bike and concentrate on the image of him using that icon of modern cool, the iPod.

…

Doesn’t quite work, does it?
(link to the story)

Today Chris sent me a very cute pic of a penguin he had created (with a dollup of inspiration from elsewhere) in an attempt to make me think that they aren’t evil. Too bad he then mentioned how he was now animating claws… (The picture). And I am not sure if thanks or curses are in order for the following, but he is also to thank/blame for the following link:
Everyone loves, magical Trevor…

There might be one or two of you out there who remember a certain yam & anthropology-related joke from Liverpool (you had to be there, I can’t explain). Well, I saw this cartoon, and it reminded me is all…:
Yams cartoon

… Not four, not five, but three… (excuse the brief Python paraphrase, just watched Holy Grail)

Before I forget, gives Ceres a quick *huggle* I tried to email you but got bounced. Very painful.

Things, they say, happen in threes. Never has this been truer than for my Mother at the moment. She goes on (to use her words) a ‘holiday of a lifetime’ to Italy which was scheduled to reach Rome at 1900 on Saturday 3rd April. Just over half an hour later, the Pope has died. We aren’t Catholic, so Mum freely admits that lots of people were more affected by this event than she was, but it still meant that a lot of what she wanted to see (Sistine Chapel for one) and do (window shopping through Rome) just weren’t going to happen. She did get to see inside St Peter’s before they laid the Pope out, and apparently it was amazing how the Italians (who are the first to admit themselves) aren’t the most organised people in the world, coped. Her words: “I doubt the British would have managed as well”.

So she manages to get out of Rome (tricky in and of itself on Friday morning) and finally gets home last Saturday (9th April) to find a flood of, if not Biblical, then proportions still larger than any sane being would want in their home. Cause? Faulty ball-cock in the water tank in the loft. Effect? Water comes through rafters into airing cupboard beneath, makes the boiler go bang, turns all the linen etc in the cupboard soggier than if they’d just come out of the washing machine, and keeps on going all the way through the ceiling of the downstairs loo, bringing part of that down with it. Result? The house is stone cold (the boiler supplies all the hot water for central heating etc) and VERY damp; all the soaking clothes, towels, bed linen etc are in the process of either being washed in a neighbour’s machine (thanks Joan) or drying on hastily erected washing lines; we are facing the grandaddy of all cleanups; we need a new boiler; it’s time to redecorate the cloakroom; and my Mother has vowed never to go away again (last time she went on holiday she came back to a flood – slightly smaller, caused by a hole in the brickwork, but still water water everywhere).

Number three? In an effort to get her mind off the carnage inside, Mum decided on Sunday to tackle the lawn that, due to two weeks of neglect, resembled a junior jungle. A third of the way round, the lawnmower also goes bang. In the grand scheme of things not so bad, but still enough to make you wonder which deity is having a hissy fit and taking out on my poor Mum.

The only thing now is, Mum is on tenter hooks about what might happen next! She (and most of the rest of us) would like to think that those are the three things and everything is going to be ok, but there is a dissenter in the ranks who feels that counting the Pope’s demise isn’t allowed, so he is waiting for one more thing. And I thought I was the eternal pessimist!

Jo has a theory about the naming of Kitty. (For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, go here for an explanation of sorts and a pic). She pointed out that in one of my recent film-binges, I watched Monsters Inc, in which the child (Boo) eroneously calls Solly “Kitty”. For those of you who are not familiar with Monsters Inc, Solly is the large, fluffy, stripy monster. The theory? That this wiggled its way into my subconcious and made me think that a large fluffy worm was called Kitty. Alas, she has yet to make a stab at explaining why I was dreaming about a large fluffy worm in the first place. Suggestions on a postcard to the usual address please…

In other things that caught my eye today and made me go ‘you what now?’
When talking about the royal wedding yesterday, the NYTimes had this to say about Prince Charles
“Suddenly, Mr. Awkward began to seem like Mr. Darcy.”
*goggles* –> The Story

Well, royal wedding aside, today looked like a slow news day in my papers, till I saw this:

Man gets nine years for spamming
A man has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Virginia judge for sending millions of junk emails, or “spamming”…

(full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4426949.stm)