Better than a kick in the knickers with a winklepicker

Hello. I have a tale of extreme snow woe to tell - basically there was a massive birthday weekend planned for me in a country mansion starting today, but said mansion is now completely inaccessable due to the bloody weather and my Birthday has had to be cancelled. I am very glum.

Instead of going on about how very miserable I am about this (and, believe me, I am) here is my answer to today's fannish_5 question:

Name five characters who should have their own spinoffs.
The Adventures of John Worf, P.I.
This is the one that me and Hubs have actually got worked out - we've written the theme tune and everything (basically just 'Shaft'.)

Niles
Because a Spin-off of a spin-off would be fun.

Everybody Loves Hypnotoad

At Home With Legolas & Gimli
Domestic larks with everybody's favourite gruff Dwarf/Lactose Intolerant Elf pairing!

Felix And Louis Got Married
Dharma & Greg In Space style sitcom in which Gaeta and Hoshi make it to Earth together & spend the rest of their days celebrating their mis-matched romance and weaving shirts from spider's webs.

Oh God, Oh God, what a flipping awful day. Little Ally-pops is not a well boy at all. A sniffle on Monday has turned into a horrible, hacking cough yesterday, and that coupled with a temperature and pretty much constant grizzling and crying today. Couldn't have been a worse day for Hubs to be up in London for work until late tonight, but thems the breaks, I suppose. Just Calpolled him up and trying to feed him now but he won't bloody drink. AAARRRGH!

Fuck, fick, feck! Lost our carkeys! only discovered this when hubs was about to do a big shop this afternoon - lucky then and not as he was supposed to leave for work I suppose, but we've turned the whole house over & they're nowhere to be found. I was the last to have them, to take Alex to the doctors yesterday, but I have absolutely no memory of what I did with them. Apart from making a sow's ear of parallel parking while Alex screamed & hurrying into the house with him to feed him I can't remember a thing. The car's locked up but it's possible I left them in there by accident or even dropped them in the street, although they're not in the street between the car and the door now. Seriously - when I've been concentrating on one or both of the kids, I'm capable of dropping bigger, heavier things than keys and it just not registering at all. Either way, it involves me being a complete and utter mong. Feel like a complete twat, we're now going to have to call out an emergency locksmith tomorrow (expensive) and hope that someone hasn't taken the keys today and wants to come back and nick the car tonight. I just hope they're locked in the car, because I want to know where the Hell they are!

Oh GOD, never, ever use Royal Mail for packages. EVAR! First of all, I'm annoyed because my already expensive CafePress mugs need customs charge paying, but the bloody post has made actually paying it and picking my delivery up from their sorting office a nightmarish labyrinth of Gilliamesque red tape. I walked. In the rain. Willing to pay and pick up my sweet, pregnant self. Do I have my mugs yet? No. Do I know when I'll be getting my mugs? No. Here is the customer complain that I had to email instead of tell them BECAUSE THE CUNTS HUNG UP ON ME AFTER I HAD BEEN HOLDING FOREVER that sort-of explains why.

( In which I'm all posh when I'm outraged )
In short, Royal Mail, you have officially the most bollocks Customer Service I've come across in years. No wonder you're going down the shitter. Frankly, I hope you go to the wall. No business that inept should be able to survive in today's climate. No business that inept deserves to survive. Closing at lunchtime? Cash only payments? You're not a fucking Bring & Buy stall! Fuck off and die. But first, bring my my godammed mugs!

OK, now why the Hell has Vi suddenly decided that she hates her bed? At what was supposed to be nap time today I came upstairs to check on her and found her lying, half asleep, on the floor next to her book box. All attempts to get her back into bed were met with horrified screams. I thought it might just be that she didn't want to nap today, but now that it's bedtime she keeps crying and leaping out as if it's a hot potato. All that's different is that I've changed the sheets, which I do every week.

*Sigh* It's been a long day.

So, my recent Tweets might have given youse kids an idea as to why I haven't been around much this week... FYI if anybody's contemplating catching severe Gastroenteritis while 27 weeks with child, I can heartily recommend that you don't. Here's a fun fact-ette that my Doctor let me in on - when you're preggers, not only can you take NOTHING for any ailment you have, but also your natural defences automatically make protecting the foetus top priority - good news for rerun, not so good news for me. I just had to spend three days in bed trying - largely in vain - to keep fluids down and wondering if my barely existant immune system was ever going to fight off whatever it was that had turned my insides into an angry cement mixer. Oh - also, having a uterus that already stretches up to the bottom of your ribcage and has stretched and squished your guts as if they were in a funhouse mirror doesn't exactly make matters any more comfortable when you're trying desperately to keep half a pint of apple juice down.

Since I seem to have succeeded in keeping a moderate breakfast inside today and no longer have horrible stomach ache I am being cautiously optimistic about today... although I was cautiously optimistic about yesterday too, before I frustratingly nosedived back into shaky-sicky-cant-get-out-of-bed in the early evening.

Still feel very dizzy, very weak and not enthusiastic about eating. Don't expect any epic odes or charity funruns out of my any time soon.

It has been, all in all, a pretty shit week.

Ugh. Was tired and stressed by the time I went to bed anyway last night. The Parade Of Twats at God-Knows-What -Time in the night really didn't help - it was like an unending river of honking, braying, bawling, drunken fucks. Went on for about half an hour, and I slept very oddly after that. Then Violet was sick, at about 6.30 in the morning, so I spent a lot of the early morning cleaning that up. Decided to take her to playgroup for a bit to stop her just moping in front of the telly, but that was, of course, when whatever's upset her tummy went from being vacated from the front end to coming out of the back. Spent the majority of playgroup changing her nappy. She then passed out in the pushchair. She's in bed now, hopefully she'll have a nice, long doze and wake up feeling better. Nothing else we need to do today, thankfully, and I've bought a new desk fan in the hope of the white noise drowning out any more 2am crocodiles of fuckwits.

Oh, and we got rained on, too.

Not a great day, so far.

Due to lots of little jobs that needed to be done last night, plus various interruptions, we only managed to watch Monday's Stewart Lee last night and didn't get round to Charlie Brooker's new show. However, this clip gives me the feeling that it's going to be well worth catching up on.



I'm starting to wonder whether young Charlton might actually be the Second Coming. He's always right. ALWAYS!

Massive pool of doggy diahorrea on the doorstep when returning from Playgroup this morning. Massive. Seriously, if your dog's got the shits that's a pity for you, but don't let them lay down a puddle of poop soup in a stranger's FREAKING DOORWAY! Good Lord, every day in every way I lose a little more faith in the ability of my fellow humans to have any semblence of thought or respect for others. As I mentioned on Twitter, I can at least take consolation that if the owners' doggy's got the runs, the poor mutt's probably sprayed their own house with shit already. Because at this moment in time I just want to seize control of government and bring in new laws that anybody caught not picking up after their pet will be tracked, followed home and have a tonne of slurry flung at their windows at three in the morning.

Right. Laundry, then bathroom cleaning, then washing up, then a few minutes of writing if I get time. A housewife's life is a glamourous one.

Once upon a time there was a terrestrial TV channel called Channel 4, which bought the syndication rights to an interesting, aesthetically-pleasing weirdy-poo sort-of Sci-Fi show called Lost. It was one of those dramas with an ongoing story arc which relied heavily on unanswered mysteries and cliffhangers - the sort of thing that young Scribbles enjoys. The sort of thing that young Scribbles could easily get hooked on, and hooked she got. But then one day an evil Right Wing tyrant called Rupert Murdoch came and outbid Four for Lost, two series into its six series run. 'Oh well,' said Four, 'we'll just carry on making bollocks reality shows and programmes about moving house, and nobody will notice.'

But Scribbles liked the art of storytelling, and Scribbles preferred to know the resolution of a story she had invested two seasons in, but Scribbles could not, would not get Sky. So Scribbles turned to her old friend the internet. First there was Naughty Pirating, but then the Naughty Pirates turned into Spineless Snitches and started giving out the IPs of their downloaders to big bastard companies, and Scribbles' husband said that they should trust the pirates no more. Then Scribbles discovered that she could purchase Lost from iTunes, which, gleefully, she did.

But then the day came when the first episodes of the new series were up on iTunes, and Scribbles tried to purchase.
'But no,' said iTunes, 'for no reason you cannot buy this unless you have the brand new, shiny version of iTunes.'
'All right then,' said Scribbles, 'please may I have the brand new, shiny version of iTunes?'
'No,' said iTunes, 'for your Mac is now obsolete! Mwah ha ha!!!'
'How can you be obsolete?' asked Scribbles to her Mac. 'You're, what, six years old - seven, max? If you were a person you'd only be at Primary school. How is that obsolete?'
'Ah,' said the Mac, 'but you are forgetting, I was made by Apple, and everything made by Apple, no matter how expensive, is apparently as disposable as a Bic Biro. Did you learn nothing from the saga of the knackered iPod Mini? Too bad, baby. No South Pacific-set wibbley-wobbley-timey-wimey hijinks for you!'
'But Mac,' cried Scribbles, 'I thought you were cool! You were personified by weird-eyed David Mitchell in them adverts, and I like him.'
'No,' replied the Mac with an air of Maclike smugness, 'David Mitchell played the PC. I was personified by Robert Webb - the one you have an irrational dislike of.'
'But how does that work?' Scribbles enquired. 'Surely Apple, the comissioners of the ads, should have been aware that David Mitchell is the one that's actually cooler, and Robert Webb comes across as too self-aware and trying too hard, like a bit of a nob?'
'Look,' replied the Mac, 'it's just an advert, all right? I don't know why we're having this discussion anyway, I'm only a machine. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to spend the next ten minutes not being able to get any internet connection for no reason until you switch everything off and on again, like I do every evening.'
'Fair enough', Scribbles replied.

In short, I can't get S5 of Lost until Hubs finally gets round to hooking New Mac upstairs up to the intertubes, which will be next week at the earliest, so I'm afraid I'll have to ask for further Radio Silence on the old spoileroonies, oh FList of mine.

This has actually been the least of my woes today, what with a very broken night's sleep coupled with a cold leaving me utterly exhausted, and having to deal with a toddler who not only is still not keen on her new bed but also shares my cold and cut the first of her back molars today ("Grumpy" is not the word for it) and whatnot.

Still, I have done some writing. Unfortunately though, even though I should be working on either the Thrilling Conclusion to the New Adventures or the next installment of Rollercoaster, I have instead been writing the first chapter of the conclusion/sequel to Rollercoaster, which I'm miles and miles away from, plotwise. It's mainly because I've recently decided how I'm going to end it, and how I'm going to fit it around a certain incident at the end of the canon, and the bunnies were gnawing away. Hopefully the first chapter will sate them for now, and it does mean that I now have not one but two future points to work towards, since I started the story off with a future flash to the end of First Contact and have since then been working to wards that - now I have an end point to head for once I'm past old Borgybitch.


What a long entry! Clearly, I needed to vent. Carry on!

Yesterday was a very, very Thursdayish sort of a Thursday. Allow me to share my pain with you in list format:

1, Began the day imitating a mid-90s pop song by being rudely awakened by the dustmen, at about 7am. There should really be a law against noisily collecting rubbish before the hours of daylight.

2, Awoke with a vague, annoying headache that stayed with me all day.

3, Remained exhausted all day, for no real reason.

4, Got a phone call at 5.30 (when hubs is usually home) saying he was caught in traffic and would probably be another 45 minutes.

5, 45 minutes later, at 6.15, hubs was very much not home.

6, Was starting to worry by quarter to 7. When hubs finally got in at ten to, I was utterly knackered and randomly furious without actually having anything to vent it on.

7, attempted to make cakes for the party tomorrow once Vi had gone to bed. My hand mixer decided to break half way through doing the cake mix. Planned on buying a new mixer today and doing the icing tonight but hubs declared the mixer fixed, so I attempted the icing. Mixer gave up after approximately half a second of mixing, but since I already had all the ingredients in the bowl I had to carry on. Ended up making the icing by hand - a lot of stirring. The icing may be slightly lumpy tomorrow :(

8, That done, Hubs and I spent 5 minutes turning over the living room to find the TV remote only to find it in the place it always was, only covered with a book. Perfect.

Today is being much more Fridayish, however. Violet has come out with several new sayings today ('Hello', as well as 'very very hot' and 'very very cold') and my Ma and Sis are down tonight.

Plus - don't faint - I've been working on Zombie Dad and it's very nearly finished!

Oh, plus a big weight has been lifted from all of our minds yesterday. I haven't felt comfortable blogging about it (and still don't) since it involved legal shenanigans, but one of my extended family has been going through a really horrible time of it recently but yesterday found out that (legally, it least) it wasn't going any further. I had been very worried about her, and she'd obviously been finding it very upsetting. But it's done with now.