Getting Plastered!

It looks like I managed to go an entire calendar month without making a blog post. The weird thing is that it isn't for lack of interesting things to say. I'm going to start doing a post a day for a while to get myself into some kind of habit.

So why am I posting now? Because I have a valuable life lesson to share with anyone who will listen. It is this:- *NEVER* attempt to plaster a wall. That is all.

I set about renovating a bedroom a couple of weeks ago. Ordered new bedroom furniture - no problem. Bought a nice new floor and paid someone to fit it - no problem. The only job left was the walls. They're horribly damaged and extremely porous, looking something like pumice stone. So I figured i'd pay someone to skim the walls with plaster, except that it was going to cost about £200, and i'd seen an advert on TV for a product called SmoothOver which (if their advertisement is to be believed) allows you to create perfectly flat walls that are ready to paint in a matter of minutes (the guy in the advert even looked happy to be doing it). So in my infinite wisdom I bought some and figured i'd save myself a bunch of money and do it myself.

What followed was possibly the worst three days of my life spent slopping goo over the walls and discovering that plasterers charge a lot of money for a reason. When I was done the walls still looked awful and needed completely sanding down, so I took a day off work and bought a sander. It was only a couple of hours work, but was split into cycles of sanding for five minutes until there was so much dust I could barely see my hands in front of my face, then coughing, hacking and recovering for half an hour before starting again.

The moral of this story is to realise that if a plasterer wouldn't be very good at doing your job, you're probably not very good at his job either.

Property Damage

I'm not saying that one of the cats did eat my earphones, and I'm not saying that one of the cats didn't eat my earphones, I'm just saying that my brand new Sennheiser earphones no longer work in my left ear, and that there are exposed wires covered in cat saliva.

After spending a few minutes being angry and another couple idly wondering whether there is a world distance record for cat hurling, it occurred to me (in the style of the flashback at the end of the Sixth Sense) that we've spent literally hours over the last six days teaching both cats to chase colourful pieces of string on a stick. I've been perfectly training them to do this to me.

Kami also seems to have developed an obsession with attacking anything that moves quickly. This is great fun when it's a fluffy mouse or a ball of yarn. It's less fun when it's my thumb moving around on my Xbox controller while i'm playing Halo 3. If you happen to be playing me on Live and I sporadically jerk up and to the left and drop all my weapons, there's probably a kitten scratching at my face.

Sentient Cables

You will obviously be familiar with the fundamental law of the universe which dictates that any two cables left in one place for any period of time will become knotted and intertwined. I intend to document a related phenomenon known as the "tangled telephone cable paradox". The phone on Sam's desk next to me will, over the course of time, become twisted into a small ball which makes it necessary to lower one's head to desk level to answer it.

In the spirit of scientific discovery, I have untangled his cable (see exhibit A) and will be recording it's re-entanglement over time, and speculating as to the cause of entanglement. The repercussions on our understanding of the universe could be immense and profound.

UPDATE: In a staggeringly fast turn of events, the cable has already developed its first tangle (see exhibit B). This appears to have been a spontaneous entanglement. I am, as yet, drawing no firm conclusions.

It's A Cat's Life

The kittens have had their first visit to the vet. I cunningly arranged this at a time when Kara was free and I was not so that they will continue to associate me with stroking, feeding and cat treats whilst they associate her with being crammed into a box and receiving painful injections. Muahahaha!

Kami received a clean bill of health and can resume chasing butterflies, draping herself over the arms of the sofa and all the other cute things that that kittens do. Waffles however has fleas, worms and rabies (ok I made up the rabies, but you get the idea. She's a poorly cat).

This does neatly explain her almost constant sleeping and general indifference to... well anything really, and I look forward to nursing her back to health, but why do I get the cat that's broken? It's the same with all new technology I buy. I guess cats are even worse because they have so many moving parts.

Kittens!

We have kittens! It was coming up to Kara's birthday and I couldn't think of anything to buy her (I think she was intentionally holding back on suggestions so there would only be one option left). A friend hooked us up with a woman who had a litter of kittens to sell and we went to look at one on Wednesday night.

I was expecting to have to catch one, but they were all really docile and one immediately attached itself to me. Of course when we came to the point where we were actually going to take the tiny defenceless kitten away from it's mother, we felt cruel and horrible and decided to take the other kitten as well.

They're both female and 12 weeks old. Kara's is called Kami and mine is Waffles. They're settling in really well and doing all sorts of amusing things. The pictures here are terrible because they're from my phone. More (probably many, many more) will be uploaded soon. Kami is the majestic looking one at the top, and Waffles is the lazy one peeking out from behind the sofa. Note the size of the cat relative to my shoe in the background.

And the rest is still unwritten

OK. Clean slate. This time i'm really going to keep this thing up to date. I now have a new house, an impending wedding and some cats to talk about.

Time will tell...