red mum

I STARTED this post with the Young Wan writing random things about our doggie and then realised before I do that I should actually do it about the Young Wan and finish with the doggie. Although Honey the dog is part of the family, she is not top of the pecking order so it is over to the Young Wan;

• She is an absolute stunner, I know all parents think this, but it is true.
• She listens to music that make my ears want to bleed.
• She has lost countless numbers of my CDs as well as scratching and ruining them.
• Her approach and easy nature with all sorts of people is something to see indeed. She is amazing.
• She makes me lovely cups of tea at the weekend.
• She is very funny.
• There is perfectly round oil stain on our high ceiling from when she threw a dollop of butter up there. I didn’t find that funny at all.
• She also talks a lot of teen rambling nonsense.
• Sometimes her make up is too heavy and then other times I think WOW I can’t let her out of this flat.
• Her room is currently the biggest kip in the world, seriously it really is.
• When she was three she emptied our bean-bag and pushed the polystyrene balls around every corner and nook and cranny of the living room, I kept finding them for months.
• She could say I love you from she was under a year old.
• She has always been an affectionate and loving child.
• She is silently stubborn.
• She thinks I am a pain in the arse.
• She is a great reader except for the fact she often reads Harry Potter over and over and over again.
• At the age of 7 to 8 she had a reading capacity which matched 12 year olds according to school tests.
• She is very quick minded and smart.
• She is a wanna-be goth.
• She hates me saying that, which makes me say it all the more.
• She is a lot of fun.
• She is a great travelling companion.
• She has travelled much more than I have.
• She has two boyfriends on the go at the moment.
• She speaks Irish, I don’t.
• She loves YouTube.
• She is growing up too fast.

• When we are having dinner she does this mad roll around the floor bending about the place move while making all sorts of doggie noises, she stops and then looks at you as if to say ‘aren’t I really cute?
• When she wants to get up on a Saturday morning as you are trying to have a lie-in, she will sit right up at/on your head touching your nose with her nose.
• Sometimes she has a complete small dog syndrome and barks like crazy at big dogs walking past.
• She has regular wars with our cushions and pillows, I think she wins.
• She knows a couple of tricks including roll-over, walking on two legs, burling, give me five and we are working on more.
• When she thinks she is going to get a lovely treat and you say ‘sit’ she gets all excited and does all her tricks at once in record speed, it is so funny.
• She will sit and let kids pat her too hard, pull her tail, slobber over her because she loves being loved by wee people.
• She loses all rhyme and reason around footballs. When she sees people playing with one she will howl, pull away hard, go mental to play too.
• She has burst every ball belonging to my pal’s kids and I should say a couple of pal’s kids. Once again sorry!

• She can’t swim but she kinda likes the sea.
• When I am not home she apparently runs to the window with every bus that passes.
• She recognises suitcases being packed and does not like it.
• She isn’t too fond of her travel backpack but associates it with going to a beach sometimes.
• She loves the beach.
• She can get travel sick.
• We get the best welcome home in the world ever, every night.
• She loves apples and will play with it like a football, take a bite and play some more.
• She would play all night and all day if you let her.
• She loves chasing pigeons.
• When she is allowed to sleep with me she will force me somehow away from my side of the bed while I am sleeping.
• Sometimes I wake up in the morning and she is lying with her head on the pillow beside me.
• Her hair/fur is everywhere, everywhere.

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I have to update my music. This is the last 25 songs played on my ipod and they are mostly oldies but goldies.

1. The Cure – Friday I’m in love
2. The Kinks – Sunny Afternoon
3. The Jam – That’s Entertainment
4. Erik Satie – Gymnopedies
5. Beautiful South – Old Red Eyes is back
6. Talking Heads – This must be the place
7. Ash – There’s a star
8. Pulp – Something Changed
9. Neil Young – Only love can break your heart
10. Ash – Candy
11. Lloyd Cole – Forest Fire
12. U2 – Beautiful Day
13. Stone Roses – [Song for my] Sugar Spun Sister
14. Fun Loving Criminals – Scooby Snacks [Schmoove version]
15. The Church – Under the Milky Way
16. The Las – There she goes
17. Lloyd Cole – Rattlesnakes
18. One Dove – Breakdown
19. 10CC – Dreadlock Holiday
20. The Beatles – One after 909
21. The Beatles – A Day in the Life
22. Beautiful South – Gold as Gold
23. Violent Femmes – Blister in the sun
24. Dolly Parton – Here you come again
25. Daft Punk – Voyager

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BOTH Steve and Fiona memed me recently on things that make me go mhhhhh and arrrghhh. (I tell a lie Fiona memed me ages ago.) Up to now I haven’t had a chance, so now I am going to attempt another version of the list.

The arrrgggghhh list

1. Half-filled take-away coffees. If I can feel they are half-full even though the foam makes them look full and I buy one a day-ish, surely someone who makes them all day can feel that the regular latte you have bought is actually a small-small.

2. The eejits who insist on getting on a bus and standing by the driver even though they are travelling across the city. Sit down you obstructive and in-the-way selfish frigger.

3. Rude service. Now while I am aware that most people at the shop front of the service industry are not paid well, that is no excuse for rudeness.

4. Banks offering services to non-customers which is better than the service they are giving their customers. I have had experience of this lately and complained, I’ll let you know in the next couple of days whether my complaints have ensured a better quality of service for me.

5. Groups of slow-walking and obstructive people on pavements, blocking the way so no one can get past them and their slow pace.

6. Groups of Spanish students blocking doorways, pavements, buses. This has been something I’ve noticed since I moved to Dublin. It must be a cultural thing, but stop it.

7. Cold-callers on my landline trying to sell me something. Stop calling.

8. Landlords, well my landlord texting me asking me can he call over for rent when I have handed over a grand a week before. Do I look like fecking Elton John and made of money?

9. Being told to do something when it is apparent I am already on it. This has been something that has bugged me since I was a child.

10. Being pigeon-holed. Something we are probably all guilty off, we need to stop it now.

11. Sending the Young Wan to the shop with a list. She returns an hour later with less than half of what I have asked for and half of what I haven’t. Read the list darling.

12. Umbrellas in the city centre, well that should read inconsiderate b*stards who walk along without a care in the world scalping people.

13. The fact that most people walking in town expect me to move out of their way despite heavy shopping bags making it hard to move anyway other than in a straight line.

14. People walking in front of me so they can get the first taxi that goes by. Why do Dubliners think this behaviour is okay.

15. Sitting on the bus, taking out my ipod and realising my daughter has completely powered it out, without saying.

16. Missing a photograph because someone has walked in front of me, the amounts of ears I have instead of the pulizer prize pics I saw are too numerous to count.

17. Leaving home and forgetting my mobile phone. Funny how we feel naked without them and how important they have become, what on earth did we do before them?

18. Getting home from work expecting loads of missed calls on the forgotten mobile and there are none. Just call me paddy-no-mates.

The mmmhhhh list

1. A wonderful fire on a cold evening.

2. Fresh cut grass, gets me everytime.

3. Spending time with old pals (can’t wait Boliath already talked to M about getting away and Tawdrey can’t wait for Donegal:))

4. Getting up on a Saturday morning and the Young Wan sticks on the kettle in a kitchen which has been tidied voluntarily. Absolute bliss.

5. The smell of fresh laundrey.

6. The Friday night pint after work.

7. The first cup of tea of the day. There is nothing like it.

8. Sunny days and cool breezes.

9. Snowy days while you are wrapped up warm.

10. Coming home in winter evenings to find a lit fire, wine in the fridge and lovely dinner being made, thanks Mum.

11. Lie-ins, everyone should have them.

12. A tidy flat on a Saturday morning, the whole weekend is ours. It rarely happens.

This is all I can think of at the moment, I am dreadful with lists, I hate the ‘give me your top five’ conversations. Because as soon as I commit to my top five someone says something that I should have said.

I am also aware that there are more arrgghhh things than mmhhhh things. What can I say? I must be just a grumpy b*llox or maybe someone with simple pleasures. We’ll put it down to getting old.

Consider yourself memed if you feel inclined.

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I HAVE never been one for New Year resolutions. Why make rules you just won’t keep? There are times like now when I feel for whatever reason that I am hitting a brickwall so it is time to change and adapt. Time to move on. Now I find myself making resolutions or maybe making promises to myself would be a more apt description.

So far I have come up with…

1. Get the hell out of this flat as soon as I can. We need out of here. I find it hard to believe that we have been living here for more than 10 years. When we moved in here I was a student, on the dole with a young child and it was the only place we could find. Or should I say one of the few places which would even entertain someone who ticked the boxes I did.

And as time went on the prospect of renting somewhere else never mind buying was out of my financial reach so we stayed here. And while it lacks so much I have made it our home. But now we need out. We needed out years ago. I want our own home. I want heating, running hot water, privacy, a garden (probably in my dreams), a washing machine. The Young Wan and I deserve our own home.

I applied recently for Affordable Housing and it was a disaster but that story is probably for another post. I will have to do the whole thing again because there is no other hope for buying our own home any other way unless of course I win the lotto. So the first stop is to sort out all the red tape and forms I need to do it all again.

2. Buy a quick pick for the lotto heading for €5m this weekend so that should buy me at least a small house in Dublin:) It could be me.

3. Take time off from work and just recharge, a lot. Part of these plans hopefully include a weekend away with old pals in Donegal, and following the Young Wan to Turkey for a week (who fingers crossed could be flying off at some stage over the weekend but its all very up in the air at the moment, or not:)). And of course whatever else comes my way is under consideration, weekends in Galway and Belfast are some of the contenders.

4. I am going to kick and shove myself out of the comfort zone I am happy to be in because I am not happy being there.

5. Rethink and reset my priorities and goals. It is always a good thing once in a while to have a mental clear out.

6. Start to try to save. I have actually saved some recently but it is probably more false saving as it is all earmarked for debts.

7. Walk to and from work often. I can so I should do it more. I only walk home once in a while and mostly because my auld camera finger is itching.

8. Give myself photography projects. I want to keep learning. Digital photography is still so new to me and it is so different from film. There is so much you can do with photoshop and I know some but not much. At the end of day nothing beats a well taken and exposed photograph.

9. I will actually watch and try out the techniques provided by the excellent Photoshop Killer Tips compiled by Matt Kloskowski of the American National Association of Photoshop Professionals which I download on itunes and put on the long finger to go through. I thought maybe I could check them out on my ipod nano. Of course I now know I cannot so the plan of learning all sorts of things about photoshop while on the bus went out the window. I can still watch them on itunes or with real player. There are all sorts of handy tips from what little I have looked at and I will watch them and learn.

10. I will start to read/plough my way through the pile of books I have bought more than recently. There are some books which I bought and put on that auld long reader finger and others I want to have and others which caught my eye or were recommended. However I got them, they sit there while I read and reread books that I really enjoy. I read every day so there is no excuse at all for this pile of books. So again with that comfort zone; note to self move on.

11. Leave room to add point 12 and 13, etc as I go along with this. Make it up as you go along certainly applies here.

If I don’t report back you know its all going well!

Like me this list is a work in progress. And I suppose I am not only making the late New Year’s resolutions that I said I never make but I am also spring cleaning my life and clearing out dead wood. I’m making things happen because I have to, no one else will for me. So bring it on.

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· Men sprawling out with wide-open legs next to and on me on a bus, utterly vile.

· Half-filled cups of take-away coffee, did I ask for small, fill it up.

· People shouting on their mobile phones on the bus, wise up! Do I look interested in your conversation – ehm no!

· People letting their kids run riot on the bus (I spent too much time on public transport).

· Sandwiches which are packed with fillings that require dismantling before eating.

· Txt/sms messages from advertisers, how dare phone companies use my mobile number for marketing, I signed ‘no’ to using my address for marketing purposes so the same follows for my phone.

· People jumping ahead of me in Qs, can you see me waiting????

· The video machine turning itself off 10 minutes before the end of recording a programme. I’d prefer to miss the first 10 rather than last 10 minutes.

· Marketing/advertising/someone selling something phoning me at home, tell you what I won’t phone you at home during Coronation Street so you don’t phone me.

· People who will not move up the bus and instead stand near the front door like some kind of selfish muppet. As a result, people are left standing at bus stops.

· Motorists who do not indicate when making a turn because, well I haven’t a clue why! It defies logic.

· People looking for me to sign up to charitable donations when my arms and hand are full of shopping – not a good idea, choose your victim well.

· The Americanisation of the English language, fine if you are American but if you are an Irish teenager, it is so, like, WHATEVER!

· People eating noisily, particularly on buses beside me, I LOATHE noisy eating and by the way close yer mouth too – I don’t really want to see, at all.

· Men scratching themselves intimately on the bus, PLEASE NOOOOOO.

· The clipping of fingernails on the bus (really I have seen this at least three times – which is three times too many).

The feckin crazy frog, who is crazy enough to spend money on this shit!

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Chocolate calculator…

1.First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to have chocolate. (more than once but less than 10.

2. Multiply this number by 2 (Just to be bold).

3. Add 5. (for Sunday)

4. Multiply it by 50 (I’ll wait while you get the calculator).

5. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1755…. If you haven’t, add 1754.

6. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.

You should have a three digit number.

The first digit of this was your original number (i.e., how many times you want to have chocolate each week).

The next two numbers are… your age!

THIS IS THE ONLY YEAR (2005) IT WILL EVER WORK, SO SPREAD IT AROUND WHILE IT LASTS.

(from http://sixfaces.blogspot.com/2005/05/ur-age-by-chocolate-math.html)