Monopoly and waffles

The clouds filled the sky on Saturday morning whilst only a slight spit of rain fell through the air as Ka, Grace and myself readied ourselves to take part in another 5k Big Fun Run in Bellahouston Park. The three of us had once more donned the Sands T-shirts, complete with pinned running numbers and our pictures of Lucy. Dougie stood at the side of the track, voted bag and camera carrier as he still nursed a sore ankle from a previous misadventure in the gym. Angela was on her way into town with Morgan and Joshua but had already called to say she had once more successfully got herself lost and had had to stop at Ibrox to ask for directions. Not the best place to ask directions, I thought, considering how long it’s been since they obviously lost their way.
Ka’s sister hadn't done much better than me though. After successfully taking the turn off for Govan from the M8, instead of taking an immediate left after the first right turning at the lights, which should have taken me down Paisley Road West, I decided to carry on, past Ibrox and down Edmiston Drive. It wasn’t until we reached Southern General Hospital that I realised I was way off course and performed a swift U-turn.
After picking up our numbers and carrying out a brief warm up on the track, we were off once more, running the same route that we had done last September, except this time with a little less rain.

At around the 29 minute mark I crossed the finishing line, Dougie missing me with the camera as Angela, Morgan and Joshua had just arrived from their travels. 29 minutes was Dougie’s approximation anyway although the time it took to go around the tree lined 5k route seemed a little longer, and a little tougher, this time around which doesn’t really bode well for the 10k to be completed this September.
Ka crossed the finishing line at approximately 45 minutes followed eventually by Grace, who was walking the lap with two other girls raising money for Yorkhill Hospital. After a visit to the swing park where Joshua squatted on the spring mounted wooden animal and dropped lolly pops and a quick coffee in the Leisure Centre’s café, we headed home, Morgan hitching a ride with Ka and myself back to Kenilworth.
The pursuit of money. A game of power, greed, financial domination, property ownership, riches, taxes and possible bankruptcy. Again, nothing to do with Rangers F.C. but a minor game of Monopoly, one of Morgan’s favourites. However, if my niece was a football team I certainly know which one she’d be. She tries everything within her power in order to not have to pay her taxes, bills and other various fines imposed upon her by the board, the Chance and the Community Chest cards. I think she tried everything but the “Look Madonna!” tactic in order to avoid paying her dues. Once she realised she was playing with someone that checked the rulebook every five minutes though she got a little fed up and began to lose interest.
The two of us were crouched over the board on the open space of carpet in the living room, rolling the dice and diligently moving our pieces around the square of London locations.
As the afternoon wore on Morgan and I continued to lightheartedly argue and complain, swiping our credit cards through the banker’s calculator as Ka objected about the volume of our game busy, getting herself ready for our visit to Tommy and Tricia’s for a BBQ that night.
At first Ka shouted at us from the kitchen, her showered hair wrapped up in a towel, whilst she grilled us waffles for lunch. The waffles caused a rather confused look over Morgan’s face at first as Ka asked her if she’d like wAffles. Waffles with the double A.
With that little frown Morgan had entered into a debate that has been raging in the Reid household for some time.
“You mean waffles Auntie Ka?” she puzzled, pronounced with the ‘of’, a pronunciation I have been trying to implement into our day to day lives for years. Silently, and smugly, I nodded at Morgan and looked up at Ka’s slightly exasperated face as she struggled not to acknowledge my superior, silent, linguistic, victory.
That was before my victorious conclusion to the game as we counted up our final amounts, whilst Ka reminded me, once again, that Morgan was eight, a fact, I told Ka, that I was more than aware of.
Counting our final sums didn’t take too long as they don’t even have cash in Monopoly any more?!
In the edition we have you use credit cards and swipe them through either the plus or minus side of the calculator. I suspect I missed Morgan using the plus side of the calculator when she was paying her taxes a few times as I only narrowly won by a couple of hundred bucks when it came to the final count up just before Angela, Steven and Joshua arrived.
Our own, real life, adventures in buying property are moving a little slower than my decisions about the fate of Brick Lane.
Verbally, our offer for the house in Calderwood has been accepted. Legally, there is nothing confirmed as yet, only an official letter affirming our offer sent from our solicitor to theirs. So it looks like we’re playing the waiting game.
Claire is already looking out for tenants for us. She gave us a phone tonight to tell us that someone was on facebook that may be looking for a one bedroom flat to let. So I immediately got on the case, looking the complete stranger up and sending him a message.
We have been given a date for getting the keys to the house so we may well be in a new house by mid August. That’s one hell of a chance card.

350 friends

I spent three hours on facebook the other night updating my profile page to it’s new ‘timeline’ design before it’s forced upon me on the 12th of March. Suddenly that date is suddenly almost upon us I thought I’d better get it done before the wonderful programmers at facebook take it upon themselves to mutate my profile page and pick layout to their own liking, probably slapping some tagged picture of my mug up, massive on my profile, for all to see.
I haven’t spent such a long time on facebook for ages. In fact, I’m very rarely on. I usually pop in to wish Happy Birthdays and pop back out again. It’s great for keeping in touch with people you rarely see in day to day life, such as a brother in Australia. Drinking, partying, sky diving, bungee jumping, nighty wearing.
With the exception of the occasional brief visit, I’m rarely on facebook. Especially recently. Everybody on my home page, who I haven’t hidden from view in my preferences, seems to be having babies at the moment. Either that or just talking about what their babies are doing, in minute detail.
Before you think it, it’s not jealousy, I just have no interest in what a fb friend’s wee Baby had for dinner and why he or she (or it in some cases) looked so cute eating it. Some folk on facebook struggle to talk of anything else other than the latest movement or noises their baby is making. Do they have nothing better to talk about? Politics, sport, the war in Afghanistan, art, independence, cinema, the state of the block’s wheelie bins even? None of these subjects seem worthy enough.
If Lucy were around I wouldn’t be boring everyone that’s befriended me with endless stories of how Lucy belched at the dinner table.
Why do facebook have to keep modifying things anyway? They’ve been messing with the design for a while now. Adding bars, pop up screens, new newsfeeds, new buttons, preferences, scrolling effects.
And how many times do they need told that no, I don’t know that person that somebody else does and no, I’m not interested in gaining their friendship just because someone else is.
I suspect there are people that do aim for that though. You come across folk on facebook that have 350 friends.
That’s just not possible is it? How can you have 350 friends? I’ve got about 3.
Excluding family members of course. They’re friends whether they like it or not.
But then facebook friends and Friends, real friends, are very different things. The word ‘friend’ is a very loose term of phrase online.
There must be loads of folk out there that just add and befriend folk for the sake of it, just to make their friends list look attractive and popular. The place to be, like they’re involved in some kind of game to see how many hundred facebook friends they can get?
When I get a friend request from someone I don’t know from Adam (whoever Adam is?) I send them a polite question asking them who they are exactly and how they know me, just in case I have known them in a previous life and have just managed to forget all about them (if that was the case, would you even be interested in befriending them?). This usually gets ignored and I lose out on another +1 to my friends list, a fact which I do struggle with at first, but usually manage to come to terms with over time and persevere onwards with my life.
Twitter’s a good one for that. If it’s not complete strangers, it’s scantily clad girls in provocative poses (thankfully not involving sheep), looking at me hungrily on a profile picture telling me they’re now following my tweets. Then there’s the completely crazy followers you somehow obtain. Twitter emailed me one day, informing me that Coronation Street had decided to start following my tweets for some reason. Why Coronation Street was interested in following me I’ll never know (perhaps they mistook me for Norris or something?).
After changing my facebook profile page to it’s new timeline set up, I looked over it to make sure there was nothing too embarrassing on it.
How did facebook know when I got engaged? I couldn’t even remember when I got engaged! (because it was such a blur of joy and happiness!!)
A low profile on facebook is getting all the more unlikely.
The timeline documents the birth of my brother in 1983, yet there’s no mention of Lynsey, my sister, who was born in 1980 or all the other family members that have confirmed by a simple click that, yes, to their misfortune, they are indeed related to me.
Admittedly I do quite like the new timeline profile. It allows for a little more creativity for your profile page. If you’ve got a particularly stunning picture that you’d like to show off you can now make that you’re main, cover picture. My cover picture is not particularly stunning but it is a rather nice shadow photo of Ka and myself walking over Saint Peter’s Square in Rome on our Honeymoon (I wonder what my facebook timeline remembers about that?). Of course it just looks like a couple of shadows over a stoney ground on it’s own, but at least I know what it is.
Looking back, the old profiles were pretty boring giving you only the one smaller profile pic to toy with alongside the small photos that you’d either uploaded yourself or had been tagged in by other happy snappers (Jillian!).
But even the old profiles were a struggle for some.
My Mum phoned me the other day while I was at work. She needed my help. I had been attempting to tell her over Yahoo Chat how to upload images from her phone by connecting it to the computer via USB and then navigating to her device’s memory drive on the computer and lifting the photos from there. Mum had wanted to upload a picture of herself from her phone to use as her new Facebook profile pic.
Unfortunately she must have got a little muddled on the way.
I answered the call to Mum howling over the phone. I mistook the howling for crying which immediately made me panic and think the worst. After a few moments of a rather strange, undecipherable conversation, I realised it was uncontrollable laughter and with the few words I eventually managed to piece together what had happened.
In attempting to upload a new profile picture from her mobile she had successfully uploaded something quite different from the computer.
My Dad’s letter of discharge from the hospital, following his heart scare last year, was now her profile picture.
Jillian, who had been on Facebook at the time, seen this new update and clicked the ‘Like’ button assuming it to be a happy statement of rejoice from Betty for her husband’s good health, be it six months later.
Needless to say I had to log in under Betty’s name and sort it all out for her.
This was the same day my Uncle Jim left a Happy Birthday message on my profile page. Moments after I started getting a little excited about my birthday I realised that Jim had his Michael’s mixed up. It was my cousin’s birthday, not mine, which I quickly pointed out to him, just so he had enough time to give the right Michael his many happy returns.
My ambiguous, evasive brother, currently adventuring in Oz, even found the time to comment on that. When not exploring, working, partying and dressing up in nightys, Kenny has now decided to start jumping out of planes.
Now that does make a good profile picture.

Facebook and flip flops

Just back from seeing The Social Network, David Fincher's latest flick about the founding of facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, among others. You always come out of these biographical movies wondering how much of what you've just watched is actually true and what is fiction. That aside, The Social Network is a pretty good movie with great performances from the main players, especially Jesse Eisenberg who steals the show with his weird, obtuse, ignorantly arrogant portrayal of Zuckerberg. A fairly unlikable character but one you find yourself strangely sympathetic towards. Probably because he couldn't afford a decent pair of shoes. He spends the whole movie in flip flops. Whether wandering into parties, walking about the office or running through the snow, he is always in flip flop sandles. Let's hope he's grown out of all that now that he is worth billions of dollars.
Footwear aside, the movie is also a perfect lesson in how you should trust no one. Not even your supposed best friend.
Alongside Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin helped build the original facebook, coming up with the funding for what was needed to kick start the whole project. However he was swiftly elbowed out, his name taken off the facebook founder credits, as soon as Zuckerberg became ensnared in the whole identity, corporation building. Saverin takes Zuckerberg to court over this, which, along with the second court case involving the hard done by the Winklevoss twins keeps Zuckerberg busy, defending his rights over the facebook franchise.
The script and acting successfully keep the movie interesting, humorous and engrossing masterfully overcoming any potential problems the movie could have had with plodding political scenes interwined with scenes involving computer geeks staring at screens, jumping about excitedly whenever they solve another programming problem.
The scene with the chicken is also pretty funny.