Moos and monkey nuts

Trying to talk Mum and Dad into starting up a blog for their Grand World Tour of Austrailia. They're off to Oz on Monday for a month to travel through the cities, beaches, deserts, tropics and barbies meeting various distant relatives along the way. They've even been invited to a Wedding while they are over there.
Not sure if they're keen on the whole blog thing although Mum is talking about keeping a journal in a small notebook I apparently bought for her many moons ago. Mum came across the book the other day finding a small message on the inside cover, written by myself. Turns out the notebook is a nice little hardback number with illustrations littered throughout it's mostly blank pages depicting scenes from, none other than, The Wizard of Oz. Let's just hope they don't get hit with any tornados while they're over there. Or meet any Witches, flying monkeys or pumpkin headed men. (I've never met most of the austrailian relatives before so who knows).
Talking of pumpkin heads, it's halloween this weekend and Ka's nursery are having a party today, three days early. No doubt there'll be loads of monkey nuts and apples flying about.
Halloween was always bad for monkey nuts. Who came up with the idea of monkey nuts at Halloween? Who wanted monkey nuts for telling folk your best jokes? You knew you had to walk a little further afield on your trick or treating if all you were getting for your trouble was flamin' monkey nuts. Sometimes you'd get really lucky on you way round the houses and start getting actual money for your jokes, usually from folk that were either unprepared or just rich and generous. Nowadays, if you were to give money out to the kids you'd probably get reported for suspicious behaviour.
Anyway, today Ka is dressed as a cow with a pink skirt and a ginger fringe. This was the only costume that came to hand for her nursery party. Her brother, Colin McG, wore this cow costume, one of two, at his drama group's panto last year and on Saturday Ka and Jillian borrowed the costumes for a trip to Motherwell. As you may or may not be aware, a bunch of cows stoating around Motherwell on a Saturday is nothing too unusual but on this occasion the cows were panto versions of the actual animal, large and furry with the afore mentioned ginger fringes. It was an animal themed Singing Kettle show which Grace took them along to with Morgan. The lengths these girls go to to entertain Morgan is quite extraordinary. I dropped them off outside the theatre, driving off speedily as they pulled on the furry black and white cow costumes and posed for Grace's camera alongside Morgan, who was a Giraffe. As if this wasn't confusing, or embarassing, enough for Morgan, she was then pulled up on stage during the show to be a penguin.
Saturday is Halloween and will hopefully be the same as last year with no visitors and no rubbish jokes told by seven year olds from under rubbish costumes as they stand muddying up your hall carpet. We live in a flat so we can easily shut and lock the close door to stop any of the kids into our block. This is assuming, of course, that not all the kids are down the swing park boozing or mugging each other. We've only had trick or treaters at our door once and I don't think they've ever come back. They couldn't have liked their monkey nuts.

Getting better all the time

Uncle Tommy has almost finished the Wedding video. Well, DVD movie, they're not called videos anymore are they?
We watched the rough a good few weeks ago now and since then Tommy has been working hard on a finished version. Ka and myself nipped round to the Westwood to visit Tommy and Tricia on Monday night. Ka is off to a 'Disco Diva' hen night on Friday and needs an outfit of some description. For some reason, Tricia was sure she could help. She was sure she would be able to find something lying around in her wardrobes. Tricia complains that she used to wear this gear before meeting Tommy so, in effect, must blame Tommy for killing off her inner Disco Diva. As my Auntie takes Ka upstairs I imagine Tricia supplying her with a large dark pair of shades before going into a wardrobe full of glittering, sparkling, luminous blouses and flares beaming an incandescent light out into the bedroom as she opens it's large doors. As it happens, Ka came down with a rather normal looking pair of jeans so my Sergeant Pepper like visions of Tricia's magical wardrobe were perhaps a little over the top.
The wedding DVD is almost there as Tommy has been patiently working on it for weeks, modifying, tweaking and generally slaving over his laptop in various movie making applications in order to get all the footage he filmed on the day into as good a movie presentation as possible. I feel I should publically, or at least on this blog, say a big thank you to him for all his efforts. To tell the truth I suspect he's had a few hairy moments with it all and more than a few moments of near laptop through the window incidents but the disc he gave me on Monday proves it has all been worth the wait. Thanks again Tommy.

Mind bloggling

It is always surprising to read messages from folk that say they enjoy reading your blog or in my case, diary, or even, to give it it's official, perhaps slightly ostentatious title, 'journal'. This is my 100th post and I never once thought I would get this far. The whole experience of writing life's thoughts, happenings, meetings and conversations has actually turned out to be more fun than I thought, even though I'm certainly not documenting anything particularly spectacular. Then again, that depends how you define 'spectacular' I suppose... Everyone's ideas of 'spectacular' are very different. The fact I've kept this up is spectacular in itself perhaps. Looking back, I reckon it was hitting the grand old age of thirty that did it. On the event of the birthday I think I panicked as I could not remember where the last thirty years had gone and what the hell I had done with them. There was school, school, uni then work. But what happened inbetween, and during, come to mention it? Where does it all go? Where did it all whizz off to? They say life is fleeting but this is ridiculous. In the beginning I reckon this was all an effort to try and document something... anything?! Together with the odd rant, review and other extraneous thoughts thrown in for good measure, of course, I discovered what this blogging thing is all about.
When I first activated my own website (www.reidnet.org.uk) I had the intention of using it as an online portfolio, which I still use it for, but also as a place for family folk and mates to hang out. I engineered a messageboard for it, with much difficulty at the time, which only a few folk ended up using, usually arguing. This made it considerably pointless. That's where I went wrong. It was not a messageboard I wanted but a proper writing blog. A much better, easier way of saying something online. Okay, Bebo, Myspace and all these other online communities are great at that but more often than not you get a whole bunch of emails from complete weirdos, who you don't know from adam, asking you to be their friends. People sitting at home, on their computers, jumping with glee when they hit the fifty friend mark (or whatever friend amount would make you jump with glee). I'm not particularly interested in what celebrity I may or may not look like, adopting a computer generated duck or what kind of alcoholic drink I would be. Well, okay, the alcoholic drink I'm curious about, but usually I'm quite happy to just sit and type. This blog has been great in talking to folk on other blogs, some on other countries, reading other peoples' writing, getting inspiration, ideas, motivation and generally gaining a better way of exploring the web. In short, I'm having fun writing on this journal, whether people read it or not.

If...

Fellow blogger, Music Monkey, over at MIND body MUSIC soul, stole a mini survey from another fellow blogger on her blog and challenged us all to answer. The 'IF' survey I think it was called. One of these little surveys that tells everyone a little bit more about yourself like the ones you used to receive circulating on email, but this way you don't have it clogging up your inbox.
My answer to question 3 is actually quite apt today as it is the fourth anniversary of Ka and myself meeting for the first time. It was a Saturday night and I was meeting up with a long lost friend from Secondary school, named Paul, formerly known as Bungle. We had a few drinks and realised that if we were to stay out we'd better find a club to go to. Unfortunately for us we chose the truly awful Jumpin Jaks. I'd never been in before, but was aware of it's dodgy reputation. It was exactly as legend had foretold. A club filled with, seemingly, every middle aged Glaswegian drunk under one roof complete with a karaoke band on stage. Some parts of the crowd were a bit like watching a giant Nesbitt family reunion. Feeling completely out of place, Paul and myself decided to make the most of it and continued to have our catch up. We'd actually paid to get in so we weren't going to waste that money. It was then, just off the packed dancefloor, I spotted her. She was dancing with a guy that could only be described as a tall shrek. Seeing the one diamond in the rough was taken, I gave up any hope until her friend sauntered up to me a little later and told me, in the best Secondary School like way, that her pal fancied me! Before the lassie had even finished I lept out on to the dancefloor only to find the girl in question had scarpered. She'd run off to the toilets in embarrassment. When she eventually came out of hiding I talked her into a dance. As we were being chucked out at the end of the night I asked for her phone number to which she replied she did not have a phone. Seeing this as a brush off I almost shrugged and walked off. Even though I did not believe a word of it, I left her my number on her friend's phone, just in case, and left it up to her to call. Afterwards I learnt that her pal had actually tried to get rid of my number, her finger poised over the delete button on her phone, as I 'wasn't good enough'. (Not sure if mobile phones have a delete number these days...) Ka persisted, however, and managed to get the number off her. The next evening I was standing drawing a rather large naked woman when I received a surprise text. Taking my attention away from my easel in life drawing class for a brief moment I seen that it was from KA. The rest, as they say, is history.
If I hadn't bothered to contact Paul, the long lost secondary school buddy, Ka and myself would have never met. If I hadn't plucked up the courage to venture into Jumpin Jaks for that one night, we would never have met. If her horrid, so called, friend had pressed delete on her phone before Ka realised we would never have met. One of the most powerful words in the human language isn't it? If.
Happy Anniversary Ka. Love and best wishes. If your reading...

Quantum of Solace

Busy day at work running from desk to desk doing outputting, ads and planning! Yes, I know I'm a mug but supposedly the more jobs you learn to adapt to the more useful (and safer) you are. Not sure I believe that though...they could just be taking advantage of my 'muggish' nature. Nevermind, the rest of the ad team were twiddling their fingers today so it kept me busily occupied. Some of them were even looking for Halloween costumes?! Halloween costumes I ask ye?! Yes, the year is toddling along at a pretty fast pace but come on - Halloween's at the end of October!
When it comes to surfing in the work there are only so many pages 'that cannot be displayed' you can look at. We still have IE 5 in the office which nowadays is a bit old hat for the old surfing but our office macs are too old for anything else. That's one thing I love about my mac at home - none of those old display problems. Some of the browsers in the work don't even display this blogging page properly?! Imagine that...
Did manage to have a look at the new Bond trailer on my lunch break though...