pants

dear readers, this week is the half term holiday. this means that my boy and himself are both at home. himself works in a school so manages to have holidays at all sorts of odd times. so they are both around the house, getting underfoot and playing on their respective computers. herself is of course at home anyway at the moment. she was sitting in bed laptopping yesterday when himself came into the bedroom and said indignantly, "where are all my pants?" (for my american readers i should explain that in these parts pants are what you wear under trousers).

"how should i know?" asked herself.

"well, have you washed them? you must remember where you put them!"

this prompted an explosion from herself. "i am so going to blog this! you sound like some unreconstructed caveman with your 'wife, find me my pants' thing! at the moment i am trying to make a list of all the stuff we have to remember to do for moving house. i don't have room in my brain for a numbered diagram of where all your underwear is located as well!"

himself slunk out, muttering.

then in came my boy. he is in the middle of a campaign to persuade the peeps to buy him a particularly nasty computer game. up until this week the peeps were united in their opposition to this, but a visit to some friends with young folks earlier this week has weakened himself's resolve considerably. these young folks have been playing this game for ages and none of them have turned into axe-murderers. in fact they seem remarkably well-adjusted. he has weakened to the point where he is planning to buy the game and use it for what he describes as 'behaviour modification'. my guess is that he saw how much fun it was and wants to play it too.

my boy started up yet again about how it was good for him to express his anger rather than bottling it up and how it might help develop his social skills if he could practice interacting with chainsaw-weilding monsters. herself dispatched him equally quickly with an instruction to go and research what graphics card his computer had. she went back to the moving house list.

almost immediately my boy returned, screaming. it seemed that his computer was in meltdown. herself went to have a look. a virus has wormed its way into my boy's computer and was in the process of attempting to ping adverts for viagra around the world.

"oh my god!" screeched my boy, "people will think i am selling viagra!" herself explained that no-one would think the ads came from him as they were the work of a spambot. but it became clear that the poor computer was overloading and grinding to a halt. herself spent a fruitless few hours trying to clean it up but the poor thing did not have enough memory to remember where it had put its pants never mind load up the virus-hoovering stuff. it later transpired that my boy had switched off the firewall in order to play online games.

so yesterday evening was somewhat stressy. my boy did not help matters by helping himself to a pot of pot noodles during the afternoon when no-one was looking. pot noodles (pronounced po noodlay by my boy and himself in an effort to make them sound like a gourmet dish) are chemicals and plastic in a little pot. you add hot water and then squirt some goo from a sachet on top. then you eat them. herself cannot bear to be in the same room as she says they smell hideous. the chemicals in pot noodles send my boy into the stratosphere. it was really not a sound move on his part to eat them on the very day when his computer was caput. he spent the evening rampaging around the house, alternating between tears and rage. there is a rather odd furry sheep (not alive i hasten to add) that plays the victim in my boy's murderous games. the sheep came in for a fair bit of grief yesterday evening.

the peeps were sitting in the kitchen rolling their eyes to the ceiling and trying to stay calm when my boy came into the kitchen at a slightly slower pace, looking rather sheepish. i put this down to excessive contact with the furry sheep. he explained that the bedroom lights had collapsed. herself went to see what he had done. it transpired that, in his fury with the unfortunate sheep, he had banged around so hard in the peeps' bedroom that the halogen lights (which are fixed on a wire that goes across the room) had fallen down.

luckily this weekend the extreme programmer is coming to visit. this was arranged before the virus made an appearance but is now even better timing. my boy has been e-mailing him about the latest catastrophe. i hope he can bring the computer back from the brink before my boy decides to demolish the house, which would be particularly tricky, given we have sold it to someone else...