plumbing - an update

dear readers, 4am finds me unable to sleep, having been woken up by a cafuffle.

my boy's bedroom is flooded. he had the sense to wake herself rather than himself (who is snoring on the sofa) and she has stemmed the flow and put a baking tray under the leak in an optimistic gesture that brings to mind horses and stable doors. (that is an oblique reference to a saying, for those readers of a literal leaning). my boy put the kettle on and made tea while herself twiddled with pliers behind his radiator, making things considerably worse for a while by removing the drain plug altogether, thus creating a rather pleasing fountain. young dave decided to sample the water pouring out and had to be forcibly removed due to the likelihood of it being contaminated with chemicals.

but all is now calm and tranquility. i have to say the existance of my blog makes such moments in life much less stressful than they might be. even my boy now says, in the middle of it all, "this will be good blog-fodder"...

all fingers and thumbs

here you can see young dave and i carefully arranged in a tasteful manner ready for herself to take a photo. i thought this was a particularly inspired pose, what with the light and the sofas and the general greyness of it all. i feel that it is a comment on modern life. quite what it says about modern life i don't know but since herself popped into the national gallery at the weekend she has been all arty farty with her pictures. young dave, in contrast, is simply farty.

all was calmness and relaxation. a man is in the process of fitting a boiler for the peeps so herself was laptopping in the living-room in order to keep young dave out of the man's tool box. the new boiler is being paid for by way of a grant because of himself's dodgy kidneys. just as well as the old boiler hasn't worked since we moved into this house and himself will need to be kept warm after his op. luckily the shower is electric or the peeps would be getting a bit high even for me.

anyway, the man was busy cutting pipes and chatting to herself about the joys of macs as against pcs, a subject upon which herself could bore for britain. suddenly he went quiet.

"could you turn off the water at the stopcock?" he asked in a rather strained voice, "only these pipes shouldn't have water in them after i drained the system but they have." the peeps bought the house from some blokes who fancied themselves as plumbers. but they had missed out on various crucial bits of the 'how to plumb up your house' course. the old boiler met its end because they had put the wrong pipes into the wrong end which caused it to overheat every time it fired up.

anyway, herself disappeared into the cupboard under the stairs to try to turn off the water. but the stopcock was jammed.

"you come and put your thumbs over these pipes and i'll turn it off!" said the man. the boiler is situated in a smallish cupboard which normally houses the camping gear. herself squeezed past the man, who was already inside the cupboard, and took up her position ready to slide her thumbs over the pipes. young dave decided to pick this moment to see what fun was going on in the cupboard. the man climbed over dave and rushed out to his van to get the thing for turning off the water under the pavement. what he hadn't bargained for was that herself has smaller thumbs than your average heating engineer. so while his thumbs were perfectly adequate to do the job, hers were not. water came squirting out with some force. due to the positioning of the thumbs it was diverted into herself's face. within seconds she was soaked to the skin. eventually the man came back and instructed herself to slowly remove her thumbs. a further bucketful of water came out, more slowly this time, and then the flow stopped. herself climbed out of the cupboard and squelched upstairs. the man started to show her the pipes in the airing cupboard and tried to explain where they should go as against where they actually go.

"er, can i just get changed first?" she whimpered.

as she climbed out of the shapeless t-shirt that says "my other t-shirt is clever" and into the shapeless t-shirt that says "geek" i thanked the plumbing gods for this wonderful piece of blog-fodder...

fun and games

dear readers, young dave and i have invented a new game. its called 'bet you can't get me off the bed!' regular readers will recall a variant of this played by myself and young rokit, called 'bet you can't get me on the floor'. the aim of 'bet you can't get me off the bed' is for me to show young dave who is in charge. he will sit grinning in my bed in a rather over-confident way that gives me no option but to take measures to wipe the smile off his face. my bed, as my readers will know, has a rather fine grey blanket on it. dave makes a point of sitting smack in the middle of the blanket, which is his downfall. i take hold of a corner of it and slowly but surely pull the blanket, and with it young dave, off the bed and onto the floor. any puppy with half a grain of sense would admit defeat at this point. but young dave likes a challenge and sits grinning on the blanket on the floor. i then have to pull the blanket out from under him. it did not dawn on me until i saw the photograph taken by herself that dave rather likes this bit. he stands on the blanket while i drag him all the way to the other end of the living-room. then we have a tug-of-war with the blanket. all very good for the teeth.

in an effort to accommodate young dave's desire to sleep in my bed alongside me, herself had a bright idea. she has recently tidied my boy's room, a job which requires mental preparation for many weeks beforehand. part of the thinning out process liberated an old futon which had been gathering dust in a corner. this has now been turned into a large and rather glorious dog-bed. the theory was that there would be room for myself and dave side by side. however, due to living alongside an artistic boy for so long i have caught some of his beefburger tendencies. i do not like change. so i am making a point of sleeping in my old bed. young dave insists on climbing in on top of me. after playing 'bet you can't get me off the bed' i have to lie on the blanket to make a point to young dave. he of course lies on top of me. so there are 3 dog-beds, one of which is large and wonderful, all empty, and two lurchers crowded onto an old and increasingly tattered blanket.

this morning herself took matters in hand and propped both the other dog-beds up against the wall. it will be interesting to see if young dave is able to sit on a vertical bed...

The Pasta of the Undead

The Pasta of the Undead, originally uploaded by Joker the Lurcher.

this is what necromancers eat, dear readers.

top gun

relax, dear readers, my boy is not on the rampage. this is a picture of him shooting (or more accurately trying to shoot) clay pigeons. don't ask me what a clay pigeon is. the whole concept is beyond me. how would anything made of clay be able to fly? i know the pigeon is not the most elegant of our feathered friends but they do manage a certain degree of altitude. perhaps the clay ones don't get out much. come to think of it i have seen china ducks on people's walls...

anyway, there i go again drifting off the point. as regular readers will know, my boy is mad on guns. he draws them, collects model ones and turns any object you like to mention into one (pogo sticks, scooters, lego, you name it, he has made a gun out of it). so when herself saw a kind offer by one of her cyberfriends to come for a mornings clay pigeon shooting she was there like a, well, shot.

young dave and i were not invited. while dave is clearly a fellow of tender years and might be startled by the gunshots, i rather hankered after my poaching days and tried to wheedle her into secreting me into her bag so i could tag along. however, when she explained that there would be no deer or even rabbits to fetch and that no animal would be harmed all morning, i turned over and went back to sleep.

when they returned my boy was brimming over with excitement. he had a pile of cartridges in a variety of colours as well as a small orange disc made of bitumen, which he told me was a clay pigeon. i have to say it bore no resemblance to any pigeon i had ever seen. no wonder they aren't breeding much.

my boy is over the moon at having discovered a way of learning to shoot which does not involve neighbour nuisance and an asbo nor killing furry animals. they plan to go again in a month. and my boy is desperate to earn money to pay for it. which suits herself down to the ground as she has a gravel moving job for him...

the dark arts

here is a picture of dave and i chilling out. we are exhausted. not only am i having to walk miles on the lead to show young dave how its done, but i am being kept up till all hours by my boy. he has taken up necromancy. necromancy involves sitting around with his dressing gown over his clothes writing endless screeds in funny writing, then covering them with tea to make them look old and rolling them up. it also involves pacing round the house wielding a broom handle and saying he is a mage. i think this may be short for magician but i am not sure as the whole point of necromancy seems to be to maintain an air of mystery.

my boy has re-arranged all the ornaments and candles and lines up various jars containing liquids which he says are potions. i have had to lean hard on herself to break the habit of a lifetime and use capital letters as all the things to do with necromancy have names in capitals. there is The Key of Anarchy, The Weight of Justice (actually a brass fob from a hotel doorkey given to us by a doctor friend), The Elixir of Truth, The Stone of Destiny and The Staff of Wisdom. my boy lights a great many candles and sits by the fire mumbling spells. it is really difficult to get to sleep with him pacing around with The Staff of Wisdom, hence the bags under my eyes.

herself has been slightly more enthusiastic about the new hobby than i am. it keeps my boy off the computer and gets him writing things, albeit in unintelligible runes. or perhaps Runes. and she says it will be a slightly more socially acceptable career than that of an assassin. she will be able to boast about "my son the brilliant necromancer" at coffee mornings...

dark matter

this morning young dave and i ventured further afield for our walk. herself cadged a lift with himself and my boy on their way to meet the taxi. the plan was we would walk back home along the river, thus introducing dave to more grass. dave has taken to the beach like a duck to shingle as our garden has a lot of stones underfoot. but the lawn, as regular readers will recall, was paved over in one of herself's landscaping projects. so dave tends to look a little perplexed when faced with grass, hence the river idea.

as we disembarked from the car my boy gave herself a hug and in a rather gloomy manner said,

"see you after school, so long as the world doesn't end."

there had been a certain amount of discussion about the world ending last night. it seems that in assembly at school one of the science teachers had been explaining how a very important experiment was due to take place today. this experiment involved a couple of very large magnets in a tunnel. it seemed that the experiment would involve a number of bisons and other creatures buzzing round in circles at high speed. the mind boggles at what bisons would look like running in circles. lurchers of course do this sort of thing with no trouble at all but your average bison is a much bulkier beast. the whole point of the bisons running in circles was to produce dark matter. i really would not recommend anyone getting downstream of a bison that has been running in circles for any length of time. a dizzy bison would almost certainly produce quite a stream of dark (and no doubt very smelly) matter.

anyway, the reason they wanted to make the bisons produce dark matter is because they can then see what the beginning of the world looked like. it is well known that all living things came out of a very big swamp. what i had not realised was that the swamp was the result of dizzy bisons. which means there must have been bisons before the swamp. so where did they come from? this sort of thing makes my head hurt. it is almost as bad as the chicken and the egg thing. i suppose that is why i am a lurcher and not a particle physicist.

the trouble with dark matter, it seems, is that it acts like a sort of hoover, sucking things into it. my boy seems to have interpreted this as meaning that the experiment would lead to the whole world getting sucked into the bison poo and not being able to get out. this is because bison poo is apparently full of things called glue-ons, which do exactly what it says on the tin.

my boy was most perturbed about the whole business and spent most of yesterday evening looking things up on the internet, interspersed with coming down and worrying the peeps about it all. in the end himself got a bit exasperated.

"what kind of idiot, in a school where a third of the kids are autistic, announces in assembly that the world might end?" he bellowed. this had me ducking for cover as i recollected the business of the cookery teacher's demands for impossible ingredients, and how my boy never fails to tell the relevant teacher just how complimentary himself has been.

i left writing this post until lunchtime in case my boy had been right. no point in writing something that no-one will be around to read...

puppy love

well, dear readers, i have to say young dave is growing on me. i have had to pull him up a couple of times for putting his head in my bowl, which causes a whole lot of fussing and screeching, but on the whole we are settling down into a nice routine.

his interest in gardening is causing some consternation but, as herself says on a regular basis, there is no point sweating the small stuff. or indeed the medium sized, evergreen stuff. as you will see, our carpet is pale. this was not the choice of the peeps who would always go for something the colour of mud that you clean with a mop. but the pale carpet is not really enhanced by lumps of soil and moss.

and there is a little matter of bladder weakness. i am the last one to point the paw at someone for this sort of thing. regular readers will recall the little problem i had with the prostate. so i will confine myself to supportive remarks when he does the right thing.

but on the whole he is a cool little bloke. he likes to give my old ears a lick and even tries to wrest the chocolate bone off me once in a while.

one other thing, for those loyal readers who have got this far, himself's kidney transplant is 15 october. so pray, or whatever you do, for him. and for the rest of us.

ok computer

my boy is quite keen on computers. well, to tell the truth he is obsessed. herself encourages this interest, largely in the hope that my boy will be the next bill gates, who is apparently also a beefburger person. herself is not so much keen on my boy developing software that makes everyone want to buy a mac, it is more the thought of untold riches. and bragging about 'my son the software magnate' would be infinitely preferable to bragging about 'my son the assassin'.

because of my boy's computer obsession, he gets through more computers than most people. he seems to wear out the hardware and clog up the innards with downloading code which allows him to adapt his computer games. it was just such a piece of code that allowed him to fly his lorries in the sky in hard truck 2, as well as making them burst into flames. his last computer was made by herself when she had a snapped achilles tendon. herself felt that she should keep busy with projects so she asked the extreme programmer how to build a computer. he sent her a link to a website with a couple of pages of instructions and a shopping list full of things with names that did not sound as though they would be nice to eat, like heat sink paste.

my boy's new computer was cool. well, actually it was hot. so hot the fan sounded like a jumbo jet. but it had lovely lights on the front.

and it was small. but not, alas, perfectly formed. it had many problems, not least of which was entirely outside of herself's control, being a duff graphics card that had been recalled by the manufacturers. this problem was not identified for some considerable time and in the interim my boy was going off the scale in the way that only an artistic person can. my boy has valiantly battled along with the unstable computer for 3 if not 4 years but the time has come to start afresh. not least because when my boy has problems with his computer it filters throughout the whole house, leading to sparks coming from everyone's ears.

the problem this time was lack of cash. it is not possible to acquire a marvellous computer without spending some of the readies. but yet again the extreme programmer came to the rescue. having become sick of being harangued by text message and e-mail by my boy, who learnt his haranguing skills at his mother's knee, the extreme programmer decided the time had come to upgrade his own machine, thus freeing up some parts to build a machine for my boy.

so this week parcels have been arriving, closely followed by the extreme programmer with his screwdriver. as i type this (well strictly speaking as herself types this with me leaning on one elbow on the desk dictating) a computer is being constructed. we are having to sit in the garden to keep an eye on young dave. a puppy and loads of bits of circuit board do not mix...

knit your own dog lead

dear readers, apologies again for my absence. life has been all a bit of a blur lately. much of my time has been spent educating young dave into the ways of lurcherhood. he is a quick learner and if, i say so myself, i am not a bad teacher. i cut my teeth (a saying, for those readers of a literal type of mind) on young rokit, who had a school report every day detailing his performance in skills such as 'eating nasty things' and 'rolling in nasty things'. young dave has learnt how to sit looking cute before he gets his food, how to get off the sofa when he hears someone coming, how to steal tea from the cup (this will get easier for him as his nose gets pointier) and some basic gardening techniques. in this picture you can see him tending to some rushes.

the rush is an interesting plant. from what i gather you can make things from it. i have been keeping very quiet about this in case herself hears. we have just entered phase 2 of the 'knit your own muesli' project. herself has decided to take up dressmaking again. she sent off for a book from the internet about how to make your own dress patterns. this book is second hand and dates back to the 1980s. the photos of garments being modelled by ladies with very big hair made herself laugh. the drawings of the pattern made himself laugh. the principle of this pattern is that you make a large T shape and adapt it to make garments.

himself reminded herself about her efforts at knitting when my boy was a baby. somewhere she had got the idea that to be a good mother you had to knit things for your baby. as she did not have much skill in the knitting department she decided to make simple jumpers. they were a T shape. the first jumper, while rather odd, at least fitted my boy. it had black and yellow stripes and made him look like a bee. the second jumper was not quite such a success. it had red and green stripes. but the colour was not the problem. the problem was that it was a little tight under the arms, making it impossible for my boy to put his arms down by his sides. he looked like a little aeroplane. the peeps decided in the interests of blood circulation to his hands that he had better not wear the red and green jumper.

anyway, in order to make the pattern for the T shaped clothes, herself had to cut out a large piece of brown paper. first she had to go out and buy brown paper. then she had to fix the table so that the middle leaf stayed in (the removal men had done something to it redering it rather floppy). my boy came down in the middle of this and asked casually why the table was lying upside down like a stranded beetle when herself was supposed to be sewing. he was soon roped into holding it together while herself hammered and screwed brackets in to the underside. i bet he wished he had kept his mouth shut.

the brown paper T shape was eventually completed. i could not for the life of me see how this could be worn out of the house. one drop of rain and it would be mush. but it appears that this is only stage 1. there are many more stages before the garment is ready, not least the one where herself will cut out fabric in the T shape. the paper is just to cut around.

earlier in the week himself and uncle martin went up to london to meet the surgeon who is going to do the kidney swopping. it all sounds fine, although some of uncle martin's tests had not arrived the day before the appointment and had to be biked around the country by the 3 hospitals involved to avoid the appointment being cancelled. they have now been given a date for the operation. in fact they have been given two dates, although i understand only one kidney is moving. the first date is 15 october, but in case this doesn't come off they have a second date of 12 november. her maamship is coming to mind my boy while himself is in hospital so herself can go up and down to london without having to bring him each time. i am going to mind young dave. i hope by then his puddle-making tendencies will have diminished. i am not sure how to work the mop with my paws...