Shed Animal

Pictured above is our Shed Animal, which lives in our shed (hence the name) and according to eye-witness accounts is a rat-chicken-kangaroo hybrid. I'm slightly sceptical myself, but apparently it lives on a shelf in the shed, so is able to leap a metre high (and down again when disturbed), moves like a chicken and is the size of a large rodent. Someone suggested it's a hedgehog, but that would be boring! Never has taking out the compost been so exciting. Will Shed Animal appear and attack? Has it mastered wielding the weapons in the shed and is planning a massacre? To be safe most family members now rattle the shed door before entering, thus announcing their presence to Shed Animal. Surely it's only a matter of time before we have to garden in packs in case of a Shed Animal attack. I just hope I don't get to see what it really is because then I wasted five minutes drawing that stupid picture.

Felix

One of my favourite hamsters ever, belonging to my sister, now deceased - the hamster, not my sister. Hobbies included sleeping, shoe fetishism, drinking, stealing chocolate out of the wrappers in the bin and looking cute. Pretty much the same as my own activities! I think he was 1/4 rat, 1/4 hamster and 1/2 woman. He also had a talent for extreme acrobatics and breakout attempts:

Rest in peace, my furry friend.

$$$

Having paid off all my debts on Wednesday (when I say all I mean all - including my student loan and money from my parents and those outrageous gambling & whoring debts) I thought I would celebrate by going on a little eBay shopping spree. Most of my everyday things took a battering on my round-the-world trip so need replacing, and apart from that I need a wardrobe update because I've been pretty restrained thanks to my lack of funds. After a while of being impoverished my Scottish meanness really kicked in and it now takes some effort to make myself spend money at all. Unless it's a plane ticket, that's not a problem... I can usually persuade myself that I really don't need the item and it's overpriced - especially after seeing Asian prices for similar things which were always undoubtedly fake and sometimes of lesser quailty but ohhh so "cheap cheap". So the only thing I bought on eBay was a new aerial for my phone (since the old one looks like it's been chewed by a wolf) for £2.45. After that I looked at ladies' boots but I felt I'd reached my spending limit for the week and my browse through the available items was really just for fun. I found some very interesting items. Basically, if I ever feel the urge to dress up as a dominatrix, a gladiator, a five-year old girl, a robot, a yeti, or just a massive slut I'll know where to look. Check these out:

After that, just to contradict what I said earlier about not being able to spend money, I almost bought a couple of rolls of Laura Ashely wallpaper, despite the fact that I don't own a house or even rent one, but live with my parents who don't need new wallpaper. Maybe it's a nest-building instinct that has kicked in thanks to the glorious spring weather we're having at the moment (think fog and 7°C), or I'm just extremely stupid. Take your pick.

I've got mail! Hell yeah!

I just ate a rabbit's head, and I discovered that having a rabbit's head in my mouth is not a good look for me. But enough about experiments with Easter chocolate...

I caused outrage and barely contained hysteria among my friends this week by deleting my facebook account. I say 'deleting' but my data's all still there, squirrelled away somewhere for the British government to use against me if I ever show signs of being liberal or wanting to blow things up. Oh and when I say 'outrage' and 'hysteria' I mean that one or two people noticed I'd left and were a little surprised, maybe even raised their eyebrows or something. 

My reasons for quitting Ye Olde Book of Faces are complex, but the straw that broke the camel's back was the new Twitter-style thing going on all of a sudden. There's a reason I'm not on Twitter (it's pants) so imagine my disgust when facebook seemed to be jumping on the bandwagon. Also, lack of privacy, data stealing and stalking are not cool. I'm starting to sound like one of my whiny customers, but despite all this I'll probably be back on it when I get over myself. 

I'm still on German facebook, which is pretty crap too. There's this thing which is a cheap imitation of poking, called 'gruscheln'. Noone has a clue what it's supposed to be. Some random gruscheled me the other week so on the off-chance that I knew him (everyone uses pseudonyms on there) I looked at his page and it was just some asshole on a racing bike. There was no other info about him, just this pic of him (or someone he wants to be) racing around in skin-tight lycra on this gay bike. Whatever.

So yeah, I'm happily receiving emails now instead (sometimes "Gay Man on Bike has just gruscheled you. Check it out!" No thanks.). If I feel really melodramatic one day maybe I'll wave goodbye to the internet altogether and just write people letters and send carrier pigeons. It'll be a few years before that could ever happen though. And only if more racing cyclists gruschel me until I'm thoroughly pissed off.

Speaking of pissed off, work was really amazing again last week. What amazed me most was how dumb people can be. And animals. First of all we had this complaint from an old lady. Nothing special about that - but when we tried to call her back she had no recollection of ever having made the complaint (just a few hours before in fact) and claimed she had been in hospital for the last three weeks. Yeah, that'll be right, getting her head checked I suppose. Then on the second attempt she said she was with her carer right now and then hung up. I can't bloody wait for the third attempt. No doubt she will suddenly be completely lucid and recall every detail about the conversation from last week. 

Then there was the lady who called because she was ordering a pump for her washing up liquid bottle. Nothing special about that - but she was ordering a new one because her dog ate the other one. Yeah. Technically I don't think we should have had to supply her with a new one as she kind of still had the other one. It just wasn't that accessible...

On that note I'm going to retire and prepare my nerves for another week of lunatics. Otherwise I'll end up like the demented lady.

The beans. Take cover...

I feel like I should write an update on my life, but actually there are no beans to spill. Which is kind of lame. I've given up on going to random house parties with mad international couchsurfers and the token Scotsman with bad teeth. Well ok, they stopped inviting me, probably because my teeth are too good to play the token Scotsman with bad teeth and I'm not a couchsurfer. I'm a homebody who lives with her parents. I'm stuck in a monotonous job until the depr..I mean recession is over, which will probably be when I'm 35. Until then the most exciting thing I have to look forward to is when the next person who has drunk washing up liquid calls me for advice. To vomit or not to vomit is usually the issue. Yup. I seem to have become the crisis helpline for friends as well as washing-up liquid consumers, which makes me feel wise but boring because I rarely have interesting problems myself.

Problems are a sign of something happening in your life... like when I had root canal treatment the other week. Not entirely pleasant - just imagine a fun-loving sadist using tiny metal files to grate into your tooth for half an hour. We're talking 20mm but it felt like they went all the way to my brain. But even after the injection wore off I was pain free and pretty happy. A bargain at £68! I've never had so much fun in recent memory. Oh wait, apart from when I cocked up a million times at work with the German procedures. They happen to be insanely bureaucratic (SURPRISE). Each email that's sent out about an installation/ deinstallation/ repair of the stupid laundry-product dispenser has to be sent to seven people or more and you have to somehow work out who they are supposed to be depending on whereabouts in Germany the installation site is, who sent you the request and what your uncle had for lunch. Add to that a complex Excel attachment which you have to put together from the garbled comments and incomplete details called in by the engineers who all speak jargon in strong regional German accents and call from their mobile phones with crappy signals and hey presto, you have a recipe for disaster.

Other than that life is simple and I think I can safely say I am on the way to becoming one of those crazy old ladies who has lots of cardigans and cats and obsessively reads romantic fiction and is addicted to cake.