Attack of the boxes...

I've just moved house.  I don't really like the experience..Don't get me wrong, the first bit - looking at places on-line and going on viewings - is fun, but the actual moving bit is a total pain. 

It's been a fairly big move, into a different city that I have only known for 6 months.  (My main excuse for no posts of late has been an eternal commute across the country everyday for work which took me out of the house for at least 12 hours a day) I'm still learning my way around and getting used to the different rules that come with a new city.  For one, people here don't queue.  I'm so used to the (generally) ultra polite ways of both Norwich and Edinburgh that this fact has been a little hard to get used to.  On the positive side however, the majority of people here are very friendly, and the standard of customer service in general is far higher...it's nice not to just receive a grunt from checkout operators in supermarkets! I'm certainly enjoying living in Glasgow so far, the reputation that puts people off visiting doesn't appear to be well earned...I've yet to witness anything that I wouldn't have seen on the streets of every other city in the UK.

We have been lucky enough to land ourselves a much larger flat than before, the same number of rooms, but better proportions and less wasted space than our last place.  The only downside to that is that all of our furniture (or what we have at the moment) now looks very small and doesn't really fill many of the rooms...I'm a fan of minimalist living but this is a little extreme!  The boxes were making up for it but as we empty them the place is...emptying.  I can see some shopping in our future in the months ahead.  (The cats on the other hand are loving their new spacious playground and have been in box overload...whenever you open a box...there's a cat.)

You never seen to realise quite how much junk you accumulate until you have to pack it all up and then unpack it again into a different place, the books that came off a bookshelf should all fit back on right?  Not according to the laws of physics on my bookshelf! I've even removed several large books and there still doesn't seem to be enough room...


I've unpacked a vast amount of boxes and have now officially entered "home making mode"....my desire to hang pictures and place furniture is overwhelming but making my new place feel like my home is an important stage of the whole moving process for me...I can be very territorial and get rather antsy if I don't have recognisable objects around.   I have spent hours today wandering around the house armed with various pictures and other objects trying to figure out where I want them...B Man gracefully lets me have free reign of this part of the decoration, provided that I leave control of his man cave to him.  I can handle that.   I still have many hours of wandering ahead before I get all the pictures I have up (never mind the ones that I'm sure to find on my travels and add to the collection!)

Once I've finished with the boxes, and I stop getting lost on my way to work, I'm looking forward to life settling back into a nice easy routine...one with evenings and weekends when I actually have some spare time!   I'll let you know how that goes....

Barbie gets serious...not decisive...but still serious.

I read this article recently, it's being doing the rounds on some of my friends Facebook pages.  I'm impressed.  It takes a huge amount of courage and strength of character to be able to face people who are potential threats to you so I very much applaud Mr Davis for his achievement. 

Reading the article made me think of my own recent internal argument relating to this subject....I admit that I have been a little disturbed of late by a number of posts I've seen shared by friends which are either a little questionable, or in some cases, outright offensive. I'm not going to share any of them here as I don't wish to add to their distribution.  Just to clarify, they are mostly posts which scream of religious intolerance and general misunderstanding of the subject they speak of.

 I've been in two minds on many occasions to instantly remove those posters from my friends list.  The internal argument goes something like this:

Voice 1: "do it! you don't want to be associated with people who actually think like that! Anyone who would share that is a bigoted ass hole." 

Voice 2: "but they're your friend, you've know them for "X" years and you know that they don't actually have that opinion.  Maybe they're being sarcastic or missing the point."

Voice 1: "or maybe they've changed...you haven't seen them for a while, friends drift and people's opinions can be influenced.  Maybe they are that person now."

Voice 3: "but I don't actually know. Jumping to conclusions in either direction may make me the exact person that I'm condemning.  I need to think on this more."

I know I said two minds, but there's always a little voice of reason in there!
(P.S. I'm not actually crazy...I have been tested ;) )

I did challenge someone on a post lately...I pointed out the inconsistencies and errors, and the response I got was confusing.  The person responsible for the post replied saying that they agreed with me and that they wanted to understand more about why people wanted to do such bad things and "ruin our country".  I know that not everyone has a pre-determined level of common sense, but surely, if you want to understand something (in this case it was Islamic beliefs) then the way to do that is to ask questions, or read and learn for yourself...not post intolerant garbage on Facebook. 

Is it me who's missing the point? 

My internal argument therefore rages on...the myriad of voices bickering over whether or not to hit that de-friend button...I guess that in some ways actually writing this post may solve that problem for me....I'll let you now if my friend count inexplicably goes down once this is published!

Breaking News!...Man wears mask on Halloween

Yeah, really.  The Scotsman must have been digging deep for stories yesterday so they actually bothered to publish this story  Maybe they had forgotten the date of Halloween?

On the other side of the country however, the clock in Glasgow Central station was dressed up for Halloween for weeks and nobody even seemed to notice!  I, of course, took a photo like the stupid tourist that I am!

Whats in a name...

OK so there's been lots of talk lately about names...mostly because some stupid lady (she's "famous" because she was on a reality TV show) went on TV and offended three quarters of the UK population by admitting (and then trying to defend her thoughts) that she made instantaneous decisions about whether or not other people's children could be friends with her children based on their first name.  If you feel like venting some outrage the actual interview is below:

 To be honest I thought it was quite funny and the woman in question simply made herself look stupid when she declared that "India is not a geographical name"....I think someone should send her a map.

I like names.  I'm interested in how they can either shape the person you become, or how some people shape their names to fit who they are.  For example, I hate it when people shorten my name.  I don't complain about it but those who really know me would never dare (except for one especially close friend who has never called me Annalee because she's too lazy to pronounce that many letters so calls me Al instead...I let her away with it because hearing her say Annalee would be like her speaking a different language!) Don't be fooled however, I hated my name until about the age of 12 and wanted a normal name like everyone else.  As I grew up I realised that it made me different and that I didn't have to fit into a stereotype.  Instead could be whoever I wanted to be which I think allowed me to become an individual earlier in my development than others. 

Nowadays I meet/hear of many more people who share my name, (mostly with different spellings but the pronunciation is the same) but people still often react when they read or hear it because it's not common and I'm often asked about it.
Some people assume I have an exotic background because it's not a typically English name (apparently its Germanic) and when they hear I was named after a well known horse rider - Anneli Drummond-Hay - they assume that I'm from a posh background where people are interested in who wins the steeplechase....Nope. My parents heard the name and liked it...simple as that.  (As you might have noticed I don't think they saw it written down or I would probably have a different spelling!)

My name doesn't however mean that I'm a good influence on anyone else (usually in fact the complete opposite!) Whilst I probably would have been allowed to play with the snobby woman's children in my youth she would have likely learned quite quickly that I wasn't the best role model unless she wanted a child with piercings and tattoos who drank too much and definitely didn't do homework!

I found this article about the subject today which made me smile, mostly because the author (Periwinkle Jones) themselves has an unusual name and added the wonderful final line "Let the comments on my own ridiculous name start."   If it's any consolation, I quite like the name Peri but I know how evil children (and adults) can be about names so I guess that Periwinkle has possibly had a rough time of it. 

There has been a visible change in baby names in the last few decades, when I was small there were an awful lot of Claires, Emilys and Johns but looking at the top 40 baby names for 2013 there are very few "standard" names as more parents opt for the "unusual" (which therefore paradoxically makes them common) with Freya and Imogen gracing high spots on the list for girls whilst Noah and Oscar strike high for the boys.  The comments at the bottom of the page illustrate how the more common a name becomes the more off put people can be.  I admit that I would avoid any popular names for my children too but whether they would thank me for their unusual name during their formative years would be another story...

Aggressive Fruit?

Sometimes I'm unsure whether some people have much of a concept of reality....in today's case the award for overly-cautious-health-and-safety-hazard-spotting goes to the Royal Mail who have refused to deliver to a house due to it's aggressive raspberry plants.

I'll pause there to let you reflect...


Raspberry plants.
Not triffids.
Not giant Venus flytraps.

Raspberries.
Honestly.

The bushes' retired owner is quoted in the article:
"The Royal Mail say it is dangerous. They came round and told me they were aggressive raspberries. It was a visit out of the blue....I have got a fierce growth apparently and the postmen are intimidated and threatened by it....But they haven't got any thorns on them and they are not like nasty brambles so I don't see what the problem is.'"


Royal Mail certainly get my vote for overzealous claim of the year so far...intimidated by raspberries.

Barbie uncovers an evil plot

This week there was a house fire...I think I can spot the arsonist from the photos posted in the news story about it..

 

This little chap was found in the wardrobe (I know it says closet in the article but I'm not American so it's a damned wardrobe!)   Look at that face....I think he was definitely cursing that his master plan had been rumbled...

Like a Rollercoaster

No Its not a cryptic title, it's actually a post about roller coasters...

I love roller coasters...They scare the life out of me but that's exactly what I love about it.  The news today contained a rather chilling story of Rameses Revenge at Chessington World of Adventures getting stuck after the electronics failed and the ride  came to a controlled stop just a few seconds in.  Sitting up there for four hours not really knowing what was happening sounds pretty scary in itself but I'd have at least been glad they were the right way up when it happened!

Amazing that a very still ride can probably be far more scary that when it's moving!