marramgrass

High ideals combined with a frugal attitude to spray paint.

(Spotted this yesterday on the fence outside the Ulster Museum — the museum is currently being refurbished.)

Technical modifications are strictly forbidden due to the inherent dangers!

It’s a coffee grinder. For now.

The weather today has been simply shocking — there’s lots of flooding going on round here.

Makes you glad to be inside in the warm. I think we’ll be lighting the fire tonight when some family come round.

My plans are well under way. We went to see Beowulf last weekend, and I caught The Golden Compass yesterday. They were, to different degrees, disappointing. I’ll come back to them when I’m not supposed to be writing something I actually get paid for…

The cool and interesting blog post I had envisaged for today may have to wait a day or two.

This is because today has been spent fighting with an assignment for this course I’m doing. The fight was a little one-sided, since my brain is slowed by the medication I’m taking for my once again messed-up back. The report beat me to the ground repeatedly. What can I say?

Over the weekend we emptied out the bottle that sits by my bed, where I dump the change out of my pockets each night:

That makes a whole seventy quid. And you know what that’ll be? Leopard.

A charity I’ll not name was out in force in Belfast today. Their strategy appeared to consist of employing attractive, flirtatious young ladies as fundraisers.

It may be a good approach.

One in particular made it difficult for me to get away from her. Persistent, yet nicely so, the second time she asked me my name, I told her. I knew straight away that I’d made a tactical error, and it took me a good couple of minutes to extricate myself.

Aside from my total unwillingness to hand over the necessary details for a direct debit on the street, there are two good reasons her efforts were doomed to failure:

1. I’m very happily married.
2. She was obviously only after my money.

I came out of work today, and the rain was such that I was soaked through – as in, my clothes were completely saturated – in 15 seconds.

I didn’t think that was possible without being actually submerged.

It took me an hour to build, partly because there were a couple of parts I managed to put on upside-down and had to disassemble back to later. I’m good at the whole building-screws-nuts-and-bolts thing.

But we can say that the food was good. Very good. As was the company.

Why did we wait this long to buy a barbecue?

Last week a nice lady stuck a big pair of pliers into my mouth and wrenched out one of my wisdom teeth.

This afternoon the same nice lady stuck a pipe up my nose, filled my lungs with N₂O, stuck a big pair of pliers in my mouth and wrenched out another of my wisdom teeth.

Which I guess means I am now 50% less wise.

Oh well…

Why is it that when getting to sleep is quite imperative, that’s when you can’t?

(Background: ever since I was about 9, I’ve had recurring bouts of insomnia. I’ll regularly have spells of a week or two to a month or so where I sleep very little verging on not at all — at these times a lot of reading gets done. It’s a trait I share with my father and my brother. You get used to it.)

This morning my alarm went off at 0430, as I had to drive my sister-in-law to Dublin airport (about a 180 mile round-trip — I was back in time for breakfast).

But of course, when I got into bed last night, I lay awake until sometime after 1 a.m. Typical, and I knew it would happen. Any time I have to get up earlier than normal, it happens, sure as anything. Probably because I tell myself it’ll happen, I know.

At that time of the morning, it was quite a pleasant drive.

…

While I’m here, I think I’ll be adding another link to the sidebar, on top of the recent flurry of activity there. Monochromatic Outlook is the very readable and rather eclectic blog of a guy in (I think) San Francisco.