Muffet had a singing engagement yesterday evening, for which she had to wear a skirt and this white t-shirt.
After the singing, which went very well, there was cake and home made biscuits et cetera. I’m afraid the Slavation Army led me into temptation, and I rather overdid it on the baked goods.
I have this game that I occasionally play with Muffet at bedtime, where I pretend to be either a little girl called Daisy or a little boy called Cyril. They are both about the same age as Muffet, and go to a school called Hongleton, the location of which is a bit vague, but it’s nearby to Muffet’s school. Daisy and Cyril are taught by teachers who have similar names to Muffet’s teachers: Mr. Prado, Ms. Ambulance and Mrs. Prib. Cyril is a little bit stupid, and has difficulty with his seven times table, and counting beyond twenty.
The odd thing about this game is that Muffet plays along completely with it. After Cyril or Daisy “have to go”, and Daddy is back again, she will say, “Cyril was here!” and report on what Cyril said, and what she said to Cyril, as if I wouldn’t know.
On a recent occasion, Cyril was telling Muffet how he “liked” Daisy, and wanted her to be his girlfriend. Cyril had told his friend Nigel to report his affections to Daisy. Nigel was to tell Daisy to come to a rendezvous with Cyril behind the school wall, where Cyril would be waiting for her and would kiss her. Cyril said he then waited, lips puckered, behind the wall. But when Daisy arrived, she had brought several of her friends with her, and they all laughed at Cyril, which upset him.
Muffet listened to Cyril’s story carefully. Afterwards, she said “No, no, Cyril. That’s not what you should have done. Girls like to have a ‘love moment’ with a kiss.” No doubt Cyril will take this advice on board when he next tries to kiss Daisy.
The Torres goal in the Euro 2008 final between Spain and Germany yesterday was quite the best I have seen for a long time.
Oddly it is hard to find a decent photo of it online. The speed and balance with which he nipped past the defender and juuuuust managed to get his foot to the ball and flick it over the diving keeper was quite excellent. Pure skill.
Before Euro 2008 started, Muffet and I were watching Wimbledon! Yay for Wimbledon. It reminds me of my childhood, the summer holidays, mown grass, cups of tea and fruitcake, watching Borg, Connors, Roscoe Tanner, Chrissy Evert, listening to the grunts of the players, the cheers of the crowd, and Dan Maskell saying “What a dream of a shot!”.
Yesterday I was thrown into a dilemma. Who is more tasty, Serena or Venus Williams?
sarahparah bought me Guitar Hero for my birthday, and all three of us have been playing it on and off all weekend. It is a major blast, and highly recommended. The illusion of actually making music is very strong, and thoroughly addictive.
For those that aren’t familiar with the game, you get a guitar with five button on the fret, and a toggle/paddle switch for plucking, and a whammy lever for special effects. On the screen you see this:
The coloured notes move towards you down the fret board on screen, and as they pass the baseline you hit the corresponding button on the guitar’s fret. It’s quite hard, and takes some getting used to. But you can practice the songs at slower speeds, if desired. The “game” aspect is based around the idea that you are pursuing a career in a rock band. The song selection gets progressively more diverse (and with more well known songs) as you finish various gigs. The commentary and videos are amusing and lighthearted.
It turns out that sarahparah is a real dude at it! She seems to have an inate ability neither Muffet or I have. There is a particular song “La Grange” by ZZ Top that she breezes through, but I simply cannot (yet) get past the first section of. My personal favourite is “When You Were Young” by The Killers.
Cogshifter Five Stars
Sometimes you have to be very tough as a parent. Muffet just emerged from her bedroom, shortly after having been put to bed. I asked her what the matter was. She said “I dreamed, no I was falling asleep, and I felt two hands on my shoulders, and I thought it was you. But then I heard a voice say ‘Your Daddy is already with us’”.
Jeepers creepers: I felt a chill go down my spine, and I had quite a job not showing it! Aaaarrrrggggh!
Yesterday we met elusis for lunch in Old Pasadena. She’s even more lovely in person than in her LJ … who knew? We had planned to go to the excellent French restaurant that specialises in filled crepes, and I had been especially looking forward to their creamy mushroom and steak morsels offering. I had visions of elusis being overcome with orgasmic reaction to the fare, and baring her boobs in unbridled delight. But, alas, it was not to be, as the place had a burned oven, and was shut. So we ended up in an odd place that was OK, cuisine wise, although my portobello mushroom burger was less than scintillating. We drank sangria that was supposed to be alcoholic, but had absolutely no punch to it.
Then the four of us, sarahparah, elusis, Muffet and I, wandered around an art fair, which was fun. Muffet had a lovely broach bought for her by elusis, which she was mightily pleased with.
Oh the hilarity!
Of the many little prizes being given out at the public library for children who are members of the book club, Muffet homed in on the whoopie cushion.
Ever since we got home the walls of the house have been reverberating to the rumbles of flatulence, immediately followed by shrieks of raucous laughter. She has sat on it so many times it has split in two places, and I have had to repair it with duct tape. I’ve sat on it a dozen or so times myself, pretending I didn’t notice it, and each occasion has been met with intense and earthy guffaws.
She took it into the bath with her, and so we were treated to watery farts of varying volumes and intensities. It’s impossible not to laugh along, even if it is half an hour after bedtime.
So much fun from a small piece of rubber (said the Bishop to the Actress).
I remember J & G having a whoopie cushion and getting a huge amount of fun out of it too. I think my daughters have inherited my earthy sense of humour.
The mother of a friend of Muffet’s came around this evening, bringing with her Muffet’s friend, for the purpose of delivering some complicated girl guides task form which I didn’t quite follow the gist of. Somehow, instead of this being a front-door interaction, it ended up being a come-inside-and-sit-on-the-sofa-chatting interaction, while the two girls played. I’m always game for a bit of banter about schools and teachers and what are little girls made of, but after about an hour I was beginning to get a little fidgety. In fact I became sort of detached, and floated above myself, hovering in the sitting room just below the ceiling, watching myself sitting on the sofa, and hearing myself increasingly sound like Sybil Fawlty when she’s on the ‘phone to Audrey. “Ooooh, I know.” “Isn’t is awful?” “Well that is what I said” interspersed with the occasional raucous guffaw.
I could never be a mother.
Since I knew I would be alone tonight, while sarahparah is off doing the ocho with swarthy Latin chaps, I took to perusing the frozen meal section in Vons, with the intent of buying something easy and delicious for my supper.
I must say, the choice was enormous. When I was a bachelor (“Son, you are a bachelor boy, and that’s the way to stay-eee–ooo”) there were no such things available in England. At least I don’t remember there being any. But now there is this vast selection to choose from. It’s really quite a Good Thing.
My eye was caught by a series of “Hungry Man” boxes – a title which fitted the bill. In particular I was attracted to a meal containing meatloaf, corn and mashed potato, complete with chocolate brownie, which boasted “A full 1lb of food!”, in big red letters.
It cost me $2.50.
Back home, I followed the instructions, first giving Poopsie the brownie, which I did in the microwave (I dislike brownies), and setting it in the oven for 35 minutes. When it came out, it didn’t look like a pound of food, but, not discouraged, I dished it up onto a plate, and took a photo, for your delectation.
It looks pretty gross, doesn’t it?
This is one of those posts I am in two minds about submitting. It is the next in the series following the recent discussion about cat’s arseholes I had with the Poopsie. Please understand that there *are*, in fact, other topics of conversation in the Cogshifter household.
Scene: Poopsie splashing around in the bathtub, Cogshifter reading a magazine in the living room. Splashing stops for a while, everything goes quiet.
Poopsie (loudly): Daddy?
Cog: Yes?
Poopsie: I just found my arsehole!
Cog: Wow! Where was it?
Poopsie: On the side of my butt cheek!
Cog: How inconvenient.
You had to be there …
P: Daddy?
Cog: Yes?
P: You know your butthole?
Cog (sensing danger): Intimately. What about it?
P: What does “intimately” mean?
Cog: Very closely. Now what’s your question?
P: You know how it’s a very small hole?
Cog (increasingly worried): Yeeeees?
P: Well, how does the poop come out of it? ‘Cos it’s so fat …
Cog: Well, your butthole is a muscle, and it expands (makes butthole shape out of clenched fist and thumb, widens and narrows the hole to demonstrate) like this, to let the poop out. And when the poop is out, it contracts again.
P (looks thoughtful): Oh. Otherwise it would be like a pencil.
Cog (getting the imagery immediately): Yes! Exactly. And if your butthole was always this big (makes big hole with thumb and fist) then your knickers would be full of poop.
P: YEWWWWWWWW!
(Several seconds pass)
P: Daddy?
Cog: Yes?
P: Are cats buttholes smaller than ours?
Cog: That’s enough about buttholes. Eat your lunch.
When sarahparah is away (like now), I eat oddly. That’s not to say I adopt a funny position, and use a skewer, but rather that the *stuff* I eat is odd. Last night, for example, I ate fifteen chicken nuggets covered in Parsley Sauce. And I have already documented my meatloaf which, while a tad boring in name, actually contained some weird ingredients (e.g. half a jar of tomato pesto sauce and some grated raclette cheese). I’m not complaining: I find it all delicious, but it’s “instant gratification” type stuff, slightly distant from a boil-in-the-bag thing, but not far.
Anyway, now I am ready for a proper home cooked meal.
My youngest daughter is funny about her clothes. I select some for her in the morning, put them out, and she promptly takes them back to the drawer, and selects something completely different. However, if I ask her to choose her clothes right from the outset, she declares that she likes me to do it.
The whole getting dressed in the morning palaver is monstrously long-winded. I walk through the living room and she has one leg of her jarmie jinks off, and is staring intently at Archie’s Mysteries on the TV. I remind her to keep going. A few minutes later, I walk through the living room again. The other leg of her jarmie jinks is halfway down. Another reminder. I take a shower. When I emerge I notice she has now removed her jarmie jink trousers, and is sitting bare-bummed, still intent on Archie. Another reminder to keep going. I get dressed, and emerge from the bedroom. Now one arm of her jarmie jink top is off. More reminders. It’s like chivvying a snail along a racecourse. The putting on of the socks would drive you crazy … each sock is inched up the foot an inch at a time. So it goes on, an incremental process of glacial, geological timescales. Finally, of course, sharp words are had, and there is a flurry of activity with the desired result.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to get dressed. If it took me 30 to 45 minutes like that I would go crazy.
“There’s nothing so nice,
On a hot summer’s day,
As messing about on the river.”
Poopsie had a little friend over to play yesterday. Here they are just before we set off for McDonalds. This friend looks so similar to Poopsie that they could be sisters, don’t you think? In fact an old lady stopped me in McDonalds and said “I was looking at your two daughters and thinking how cute they are”. Smirk.
So I am having trouble with my email. They have decided to “migrate” me to the new server, an ostensibly simple task. Except that their new server is some public domain thing called DoveCot written by the open-toed Birkenstock Brigade who have not made sure it supports Outlook properly. This results in my getting double copies of every message. Now, instead of agreeing that they need to properly support Outlook running in POP mode with “leave message on server”, they say that Outlook is “broken” because it doesn’t understand the standard UID syntax. Moreover, they say I should use IMAP, or a different client, et cetera.
BOLLOCKS!
As far as I am concerned, if you write an email server, it needs to support Outlook, regardless of whether Outlook strictly conforms to the protocol. Otherwise, people wont use your server. Worse, if you adopt the attitude that it’s all Microsoft’s fault, it doesn’t help at all, but simply inflames the situation. If these jimmies really expect me to change all my tried and trusted ways of dealing with email just for DoveCot’s sake, they are mistaken. I will simply use a different server.
It reminds me of a recent investigation I did to identify Fast Fourier Transforms for Windows. There is a good one called FFTW, but the developers simply lost me because they said on their Web page, effectively, “FFTW will not work with Microsoft Visual C++ because Microsoft are incapable of writing proper compilers, and it doesn’t compile. Use a proper OS.”. The arrogance here is breathtaking! How not to win friends and influence people. Sheesh.
Do you ever get a weird moment when you read a comment in LJ, and it strikes you as oddly out of character for the person who’s commenting? Which makes you look closer and you find it’s *not* the person you thought it was commenting after all, but someone else with the same user icon? Latest case in point:
Used by kristenlou and phunbee.
And so to the Blackness …
Poopsie’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Judy, was recounting to me a conversation she had overheard between Poopsie, Megan and couple of other five year olds, who were sitting around a table crayoning. Poopsie announced that everything started with a Big Bang, and before the Big Bang there was the Blackness. No, no, no, said her friend, emphatically: everything was created by God. Megan said “There is no God!”, and Poopsie backed it up with “We all started as fishes, because fishes were the only things left after the dinosaurs died from the meteor”.
Miss Judy told me that she left them arguing Theology and Evolution while she went to clear up the glue bottles.
However, all is not so cut and dried in Poopsie’s mind. Yesterday evening she drew a picture of “God”. It featured a chap with a beard, a blue robe and a blue pointy hat with stars on it. She told me that God has a father, but not a mother. Weird, huh?
A little girl whose first words when she sees me dressed in the morning are “Daddy! You look nice today!”, and who is just a wonderful little person to have around, deserves:
This also has the significant beneficial side effect that she disappears for an hour or so into her room, jigging around and dancing to her CDs, with only the occasional appearance to ask for something more to eat.
Some mornings I just don’t want to deal with traffic lights. Do you know how many traffic lights I have to drive through in the morning? Twenty five. Yes TWENTY FIVE! And some mornings 90% of those buggers are red when I arrive at them.
This is a plea for more roundabouts in Pasadena. I’m sure (based on gut feeling and no scientific evidence whatsoever) that it would result in less pollution in LA if there were more roundabouts. They keep the traffic moving. We all know that vehicles produce the most pollution when they are idling or pulling away from a stop. So keeping the traffic moving reduces pollution.
It would also reduce the irritation level for thousands of commuters.
Poopsie is being a little fragile about school now. Her last day at the daycare is approaching, and most of her little friends (some of which she’s been there with since a baby) are already departed to new schools, or soon to depart. Like me, I think she is uncomfortable with change. The thing is, she is going to love her new schools. But for now she is becoming a little wistful. Probably she also senses that S and I are a little bit anxious for her, and that doesn’t help.
Oh well, in another couple of weeks she will be fully and happily ensconsed in the new places.
Scene: Cog kitchen, early morning. Poopsie is hungry and wanting her breakfast, which she refers to as “supper”.
Me: So what would you like for breakfast? Toast with peanut butter, or Cheerios?
Poopsie: Grapes.
Me: No, Toast or Cheerios.
Poopsie: Grapes, please.
Me: You can’t have grapes. You want Toast or Cheerios?
Poopsie: Ummmm …. Toast …. and grapes.
Me: Right, you choose Toast or Cheerios. No grapes. Toast or Cheerios.
Poopsie: Peanut Butter on it.
Me: OK, Toast with Peanut Butter on it.
Poopsie: … and grapes
Ten minutes later …. Poopsie is eating grapes.
Dubbing some old LPs (that belong to sarahparah‘s Mum) to CD. I’m using AudioGrabber, a super, free tool that digitises to wave/RIFF from the sound card Line-In. Once the wave files are created, I use dBPowerAmp to convert them to MP3. The current LP is a Noel Coward double album.
Not sure about Noel Coward … his voice is a bit syrupy. But he was good in “The Italian Job”.
Poopsie is poorly with what appears to be the ‘flu. She is very naughty about taking medicine, which is irritating. Especially since, these days, children’s medicine is bubble gum, cherry, or ambrosia flavoured and should be little different, as an experience, to eating sweeties. Not in my day: I used to have to drink medicine that tasted like hospital antiseptic floor cleaner, and left a taste like a two day old dog turd in one’s mouth. So we had reason to moan about taking it.
A cup of Lapsang Souchong always puts a different complexion on a day, as I have written in these pages before.
Off to Best Buy with the Poopsie to ogle at the DVD/TV combos and generally noodle around gadget-gawping. It was bedlam in there. Wild-eyed shoppers eager to flash the plastic, and the home theater section demonstrating the effects of 20Hz at 140 deciBels SPL.
Poopsie gravitated towards the latest interactive multimedia books, where you press a pen on each page of the book and a metallic voice says what the pressed object is. This entertained her for a good 10 minutes. Question to self: is $50 for 10 minutes of pleasure good value?
Then back home, and out with the hosepipe to wash the car down, with Poopsie helping squeeze the trigger. After 1/2 hour I got bored, but she was still going strong. Note to self: 30 minutes worth of water, high pleasure quotient, negligible cost. Similar economics with taking a bath.
No, this isn’t one of those kinky card games where if I get an Ace you have to show me your chest. But we can have a game of that later, if you like.
It’s a game of chess, with Poopsie, who calls it “chest”. She’s quite good, for a four year old. She knows all the pieces, and she knows how the pawns move. She’s almost got the hang of the knights, and she can tell the difference between a king and a queen (“can’t we all, luv?”).
Perhaps she will be a chest prodigy: Grand Master ranking by the time she is ten. On TV, with a play-off game for the World Title with Kasparov sweating over her Pawn to Bishop 5 (P-B5?! … the ? mark signifying that the move is curious, the ! mark signifying brilliance, only realised after puzzling for a while).
Or perhaps she will simply be a decent club-level player. Or maybe she’ll just forget about how to play by the time she’s ten. Who cares? She’s awful cute when she’s delicately taking my pawn en-passant.
