I was diagnosed via the internet at the beginning of this week.  Internet though! How crappy. I’m not even allowed to go to see my Doctor if I’m feeling crappy and have at least two of the symptoms. Which I did.

You’re basically sent to an NHS website to answer a load of questions, if you say yes to enough of them, you’re given a code number and told to send someone to go and collect your Tamiflu for you.

What a kerfuffle.

So, now I have my Tamiflu and am thankfully beginning to feel better. Poor B has been left to entertain himself over the past few days, so because of this the house is an utter disgrace, but I’m not being too cross with him, as he must have been bored rigid, due to me not being allowed to go anywhere or do anything.

I’m hoping to be better by Monday as we’ve made plans to take B and one of his cousins to Legoland.

Two years ago, this month we had the God awful floods here.
Apparently one of the main reasons that Gloucestershire was so badly affected by the sheer amount of rain was that our gully’s were blocked.

Look what’s going around my village at the moment.

Considering the amount of coverage that Michael Jackson’s death has received on both the TV and the radio, I’m surprised that it took so long for B to ask me questions.

This conversation took place the day after Micheal Jackson died and I was watching the news.

B ~ “Mummy, who is Michael Jackson?

Me ~ He was a singer and a very good dancer.

B ~ But he’s dead now?

Me ~ Yes, he is.

B ~ How did he die?

Me ~ I think he was poorly.

B ~ Did he take poison?

B is rather obsessed with poison at the moment.  Not sure why or where it’s come from , but we’re hoping that it’s a phase that won’t last long.

Me ~ No, I don’t think so. Although I think he may have taken some medicine.

B ~ But medicine makes you better!

Me ~ Yes, but if you’re really, really poorly it doesn’t always work.

B ~ Like when I was sick after I had that medicine for my cough?

Me ~ Yes. Just like that. But you got better soon afterwards, didn’t you!

B ~ I suppose.      Was he married?

Me ~ Ummm, he was, but I don’t think he was when he died.

B ~ Maybe it’s his Mum then.

Me ~ Maybe who is his mum?

B ~ The lady that they always show on the news, when they talk about him.

Me ~ I haven’t seen a lady.

B ~  Yes. They always show the picture.

Me ~ Ok. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

A few moment later.

B ~ There she is. That’s the lady.

Me ~ No sweetheart, that was how Michael Jackson looked just before he died.

B ~ Freak!

I just let that one go.

I’ve just sorted through our pantry.

Well, it’s not really a pantry. Pantry makes me think of Northern kitchens, a back yard (instead of a garden) and an outside toilet.

What I’ve actually done, it have a bit of a tidy up in the cupboard under the stairs. It’s actually in the kitchen, and it’s where our canned foods, dishwasher, shopping bags, booze and general crap live.

Basically, I was just moving all of the tins and jars around, making sure that the beans were all together and other such riveting things that life as a housewife is all about.

And then I decided to put all of the bottles together.

I found:

• 3 bottles of Bacardi
• 4 bottles of Tia Maria
• 2 bottles of Baileys
• 2 bottles of Moet & Chandon Champagne (wedding gifts)
• 1 bottle of Tequila
• 1 bottle of Vodka.
• 1 bottle of red wine
• 1 bottle of white wine.

Seriously, I’m going to have to get drinking.

Every Friday B has swimming lessons.  It’s at the local college for kids with physical and mental disabilities. The pool there is lovely and a bit warmer than the usual ones and until tonight B’s class only had 3 kids in it. Perfect. Almost one on one teaching, but cheaper. There are two classes that take place at the same time and the pool is kind of divided into two for the kids.

I always sit in the same place. Next to another mum whose daughter is in the same class as B, and sandwiched between the doors for the changing rooms.  For the past few weeks, probably about 2 and a half months, a Dad who has two kids having lessons at the pool has been smiling and saying hi each time he wanders past me.   He’s had to walk past me a few times because his daughter finishes her lesson and his son starts his, at the same time as B but in a different class.  He goes off to get his daughter dressed, which involves walking past where I sit.

Tonight though, this changed.  After taking his daughter to get dressed, they came back out of the changing rooms, his daughter was in front of him and carried on to where he had originally been sat.  He, however, came over and sat next to me and asked me out!

Me!

He’s rather good looking too.  Tall, dark, slim and has a nice smile. I forgot to check out his arse though.

If only I weren’t happily married to the most wonderful man in the world.

Never mind ~ it’s nice to feel attractive to someone else.

In other news. M finally went back to work on Tuesday. He’s not well enough at all but needs must (and the Bank Manager would start sending us hate mail) so there was no choice.

Funny how he’s well enough to go back to work just as school holidays are looming though.

Suspicious, I think.

There are a pair of twins that are in the Reception class at B’s school. (Reception is what we called Infants ~ when I were a lad) They are a boy and a girl ~ shall we call them Willy and Billie?  OK, yes, lets.

Poor Billie is dressed as a boy. By that, I mean, she wears boys trousers, boys shoes, boys coats and boys pants. Yes, PANTS. I don’t make a habit of checking kids pants, which I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear, but she takes forever in the toilet that I’m forever having to follow in after her and herd her out.  This includes, occasionally having to pull her trousers up for her in order for her to get a bloody wiggle on!!

For the first four weeks after meeting the twins, I deliberately wouldn’t call either of them by their names because I just didn’t know which was which.  Occasionally I would call B over to me in the playground and get him to pass on messages for me. :-)   Kids seem to have an uncanny knack for knowing these kinds of things.

I feel so sorry for Billie. All well and good if she’s a tomboy but it’s my opinion that a four year old is not capable (or likely) to be demanding that she be allowed to dress as a boy.

Also, both Willy and Billie were conceived by IVF.  I could be wrong ~ it’s been known to have happened at least once before ~ but if I were to go through the heartbreak, hassle and emotional roller-coaster of IVF, and then to be blessed with twins, I’d want to dress them as individuals.  Wouldn’t you?

The parents though are a different kettle of fish. The mum is friendly enough but the dad looks like a typical local yokel.  With crazy hair n’all.

Just to give you an idea. . . Rebecca, one of the other women that does the After School Club with me was on her own in the school house washing out the paint pots that the children had been using while I had the twins out in the playground.    Rebecca has long hair and was bent over the sink washing out the pots and when she looked up there was Willy and Billie’s dad, just standing at the door watching her.  This guy is as skinny as a rake, about 6′ 3″ although with his crazy hair I’d say he’s more like 6′5″.  He wears dodgy baggy trousers ~ but to be honest, I think they’re actually called slacks ~ and home knitted cardigans or jumpers that are always the same colour as diarrhoa and at least 20 years old.

Is it any wonder that Rebecca looked up and screamed the school down?

The best bit though, was a message that was left on the school answer machine.  The message was left during lunch time when the phone is very rarely answered and one by one, all of the staff from the school were called into the office to listen to the message to try and decipher who had left it.

The message, in a very creepy voice with lots of odd pauses, was:

“Hello.

I am just …………………

phoning …………………

to tell you ……………..

that I will be ………….

coming to get………..

the………………………

little……………………

kiddies……………..

this afternoon.”

Click

Oh My God. Who was it? Some weirdo local pheadophile being considerate enough to warn us before he comes to pick up some poor unsuspecting kid?

No.

It turns out that it was Willy and Billie’s uncle.

Taken from Wiki: McDojo is a pejorative term used by some Western martial artists to describe a martial arts school where image or profit is of a higher importance than technical standards, and in the related use of martial arts franchising.

I read this post of Black Belt Mama’s a while ago which got me to thinking of all of the different ways that people look at their Martial Arts progress.

For me, it’s a way of feeling more secure and safe in the knowledge that I have at least a little bit of self defence.  Of course, I love going up through the different belts and the satisfaction of passing a grading and knowing that I did good.  But I’m also in no real hurry to get that Black Belt.  I know that I have a loooong way to go and a million things still to learn before I get there  ~ and to be honest, I’m looking forward to learning them.

One of my sisters however, I feel, has a different attitude.  And she doesn’t even train. It’s her kids who are members of what I laughingly refer to as a McDojo.  Not to her of course.  We have got to the point now where we’ve argued about the place that her kids go to, so much, that we’ve agreed to disagree. Her children, range from 15 down to 2 (ish) and the ones that are training are shooting through their belts at an alarming rate.  The older one’s didn’t start training until at least 7 months after me, and yet two of them are preparing for their Black Belts already.

We are training in two different styles of Karate ~ they don’t have to learn Kata and from the sounds of things, don’t practice Kumite at all ~ but stil!

Oh and did I mention that they advertise that YOU WILL HAVE A BLACK BELT WITHIN TWO YEARS.

WTF? How can they say that?  What if you’re not good enough for that belt? In fact, there are hundreds of “What if’s” that I could add there, but why waste my time.  That’s just the way they do business I suppose.

The thing is though, that when we were looking into Karate Schools for B, that was the first place that we went.

B and I were walking through Gloucester about a week after M and I had started discussing finding a club for B, when a couple of the students pounced on us.  That’s what they do, you see.  They stand around in their tracky suits in the main towns locally pouncing on people.

Anyhoo, they pounced on B and I as we were strolling through the shopping centre and we stopped. I gave them my phone number and a day or so later they phoned to arrange B’s free trial.

The 3 of us trotted off there and it was lovely. So plush and shiny.  Sprung flooring on the Dojo, a lovely viewing area for the parents to sit and watch the kids training and lovely friendly staff ~ even if they did go a little over the top (in my opinion) on the respect front.

As it turns out, the Sensei who was supposed to be giving B his free lesson, was running late and we ended up with his wife. Who I felt uncomfortable with from the start.   Obviously we were told almost immediately that B was a natural at Karate (insert eye roll here) and he was loving it.

So then we sat down to find out how much it would cost!

I forget the exact figure as it was about 3 years ago, but it was about £500 to join, and then an extra £30 or £40 per month on top of all that. Bless their hearts though, they would give us a free Gi.

I think it was that evening that M got out the Yellow Pages and phoned the Karate School that I’m still a member of now.

I may not have a Black Belt within 2 years, but when I do get it, I’ll know that I’ll have earned it. Sadly, B quit Karate in February. He’d been lacking interest for about 6 months and since Christmas had all but given up trying. He’d lost all interest and both M and I were beginning to resent paying for him to go when he had little or no interest.

The other day on my forum, this was posted:

..If you had a camera with a light on that was shaped like a small penis and records everything it sees onto your computer screen in glorious technicolor (and up to x200 magnification) would you have a look up your vadge, just out of interest like

See what I have to put up with on a daily basis!

I do not have an easy life, people.

Seriously, these people should have their passports taken off them and burned.

Taken from research by Thomas Cook and ABTA.

A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel “inadequate”.

A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.

“The beach was too sandy.”

A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.

“Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”

“We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”

“No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”

“It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home.”

“My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”

“I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller.”

“The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers - will we be OK staying here?”

“There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners.”

“We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”

“We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”

“It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”

“I was bitten by a mosquito - no-one said they could bite.”

“I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”

“It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ’siesta’ time - this should be banned.”

“On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”

“We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”

Although this time, our TV in the living room is still working.  *Cue frantic running around to find some wood to touch*

But, since February 8th there has been another TV in the corner of my living room,  (I’m not anal, I just remember the date because it was the day after my birthday.) and despite being told that it will be disposed of ASAP, it’s still there.

Anybody remember these incidents?  Dead TV,  or  TV overload,  or The Bloody Wheel and finally my triumphant moment?

Basically, M and B both went off to get their hair cut while I was at a weapons seminar.  Their Barber is a little old man who retired about 7 years ago, but still cuts the hair of his favourite customers at his home.  While they were there, the Barber mentioned that he had a TV that he needed to get rid of.  M very kindly offered to take it to the dump for him and promptly popped it into the back of the car, but due to the ammount of crap in the boot, it had to go on the back seat.  Not a problem because B is now tall enough to sit in the front of the car ~ but wouldn’t be able to fit in the back seat along with the TV once I’ve been collected from my seminar.

So what did M decide to do?

What would you do?

Personally, I would have sent a text to me, saying that I was going to be a bit late because I have to do something.

BUT NO!!!

M and B had to come home after their haircuts to wash their hair anyway, so they bought the damn thing into the house because they (apparently) wouldn’t have had time to wash their hair, drop the TV off at the dump and then come and collect me from the Dojo.

And it’s still there.

It’s far too big and heavy for me to wrestle into the car. After all, I am just a girl.

It’s at times like this that I wish I hadn’t married a hoarder.