Scotland!

Or, more specifically, St Andrews!

We have now been living here for nine days, in which time the following things have occurred:

• Frolicking through the snow;
• Jetlag recovery as aided by copious amounts of Top Gear;
• The purchase of twelve novels from various bookshops;
• Friendly drinks at several pubs;
• Eating pheasant;
• My catching a week-long cold;
• Toby wearing plastic bags over his socks because his shoes leaked;
• Befriending an astrophysicist;
• Several successful dinner experiments;
• Completely forgetting how the coin-operated washer/dryer system works, twice;
• Yelling at the stove because the dials turn the wrong way, so that I keep setting them on low instead of high;
• My old laptop catching a virus and dying in the arse;
• The purchase of a shiny new laptop, on which I am now writing this blog post;
• The inexplicable loss of my favourite smooshy purple knitted hat;
• The discovery of a cafe that serves hot chocolate with marshmallows, whipped cream AND  a chocolate flake;
• One aborted trip to the movies, being as how it was too cold and we were knackered;
• One sighting of a genuine Scottish gentleman wearing a genuine Scottish kilt;
• The discovery that there is, lurking about somewhere, a town cat called Hamish; and
• The acquisition of a very strange bird-puppet, which I have named Archie the Arche Mascot.

So, as you can see, it’s been a pretty packed program – even so, I apologise for the lengthy radio silence. Doubtless I’ll have more to say (and the strength/will to say it more coherently) at some later date, but in the mean time, here is a photo of Archie, who was given to me by a nice lady at one of the town’s ten charity shops.

Cheerful little fellow, isn’t he?

Odd Self-Realisations

1. My being hungry is directly proportional to how bored I am. Thus, the greater the ennui, the greater the likelihood of my eating an entire jar of cocktail olives at the kitchen bench.

2. I find my fingernails genuinely fascinating. It’s not just that I flick them for lack of anything else to do; I actually enjoy paying close scrutiny to their ruined contours. I have no idea why this is.

3. The way I roll my shoulders so that people can hear the crunching sound is psychologically identical to how I used to flip my double-jointed thumb and chase the others girls with it. Conclusion: part of me is now, and will be forever, five years old.

4. I have a secret desire to be 10 centimeters tall, so that I can ride people’s pets, climb into drawers, live in a dollhouse and wander randomly on strange desks.

5. I am neither religious nor a believer in magic. However, sometimes I still have to remind myself that science works, no matter how crazy particle analysis sounds. 

6. From time to time, I contemplate seeing a psychologist just for the thrill of being told I’m well-adjusted. Strangely, were I given the opposite verdict, I’d find it just a bit thrilling.

7. As a kid, I copied certain behaviours from watching animals: scraping my foot like a horse when waiting impatiently, tilting my head to scratch my neck like a seal, stretching like a cat. I don’t think I’ve learned any new tricks as an adult, but I’ve never stopped doing the old ones.

8. During highschool, I divided up my personality traits into three categories,  anthropomorphised each one, and gave them names. I still often think of myself in these terms.

9. Keeping a record of the books I’ve read makes me want to read more books, just for the sake of listing them.

10. Given the above, it seems increasingly unlikely that I’d come off as anything even vaguely resembling well-adjusted to a psychologst.

What The..?

Someone has stolen our tree.

As in, uprooted it. Gone. Utterly. Since this morning.

A whole entire tree.

I do not get this.

When I left for work this morning, there was a slender, dead, but decidedly extant tree in our front garden, which is essentially a metre-wide, less-than-half-a-metre-deep patch of dirt between the fence and the door. It was not a big tree. It was very much deceased, but in a scenic, unthreatening way. Except for our house or the fence, there is nothing it could possibly have fallen on, nor was it heavy enough (being both exanimate and hollow) to damage anything it did fall on. Even had this happened, the tree would – one assumes – still be there. Slanted, perhaps, and decidedly less well-earthed, but nonetheless present.

This is not the case.

Instead, our tree is gone. Given that we returned home circa 1:45 AM after an evening out, this resulted in rather less alarm than might reasonably have been raised at any other time. But, still. There is no sign of the tree near our house or in the street. There is – and I cannot stress this enough – an exceedingly obvious hole where the tree once nestled. And that’s it. Zip. Nada. Nothing. No tree.

I am so weirded out right now.

I mean, suburban tree thieves? Who steals a dead tree with grey, rough bark, two meters tall, that’s thin enough to put both your hands around and have the fingers touch? A dendrophiliac with an anorexia fetish? The landlord, for inscrutable reasons of his own? Did the tree fall down,  only to be removed by a kindly neighbour/Samaritan before we got home? If so, why not leave a note to explain the absence? Are aliens abducting trees? Why our tree? Are there other victims? These are the obvious responses, none of which is especially, well, obvious. Because, seriously: who steals a dead fucking tree?

I’m going to invesitage this.

Good News Friday

Ah, life. In today’s news, we have:

Free condoms for Catholic World Youth Day pilgrims.

Randomly decapitated rabbits in Germany.

Woman finds bat in her bra.

Wife kills husband with folding couch.

Cat adopts rejected red panda cub.

And, of course:

Burglar trapped in chimney for 10 hours.

TGIF!