Toddler Wisdom

Upon being presented with her home made knitted Easter chick, Phoebe was very thoughtful. She stared at it for a while before finally announcing "Chicken's got a jumper on."

The Optimism of Arachnids

I know that spiders like to try, try, try again. They're famous for it. I saw one yesterday though that really shouldn't have bothered and also clearly wasn't paying attention at spider persistence school because it eventually realised that too.

It was amazingly trying to build a web between the ceiling of a train carriage (where it had a nice little hideaway in a ventilation duct) and the top corner of a commuter's newspaper - that he was reading! I missed how the spider managed to make it onto the newspaper in the first place, but it had managed to attach some sort of webby anchor point. Of course, every time the commuter turned the page the poor spider was flung off into space, being saved only by its silken safety harness. It kept climbing back up only to be repeatedly launched across the carriage. The commuter was completely oblivious the drama occurring on the other side of his paper. After about 20 minutes the spider eventually gave up and beat an undignified retreat back up to its ventilatory hideaway.

You've got to admire its optimism though, imagine looking down on a carriage full of people and thinking "You know what, that flapping newspaper looks like an ideal place to anchor my web." No I can't imagine that either, not because I'm not a spider and so neither live in ventilation ducts nor spin webs (although I don't) but because spiders presumably don't think in any way you or I would recognise. But you get the point.

The Perseids

Remarkably there was only slight cloud cover last night as we gathered in the garden to gurn at the Perseid meteor shower. We even managed to see a couple!

The good Mrs Mungo and I have a rather dismal record when it comes to seeing astronomical events, having missed eclipses (both solar and lunar), meteor showers, aurora, black holes and flying saucers* due to the UK's rather unfortunately cloudy weather. For the first time in years we weren't denied. Might try again tonight and see if I can get a few snaps.

*OK, so not all of those are astronomical and not all of those are phenomena either.

Caveat Emptor

Just had my first epic Internet shopping fail. I bought a book through Amazon marketplace, which was swiftly dispatched. When I opened it, initially everything seemed fine, the cover was slightly damaged but it was a second hand book, so I wasn't too worried but then I noticed there was a chapter called David Lee Roth. "That's a little odd..." I thought. I was eating dinner so put the book down for a moment. I picked it up again and idly noticed that the inside front page of the book referenced Henry Rollins, then my eyes wandered up and I also idly noticed that the title of the book seemed to be "Do I come here often." These thoughts drifted round inside my head for a few moments before suddenly crashing together with a bang. "This isn't the bloody book I ordered!"

Now, you might think that would be the sort of thing that would leap out at you straight away but person or persons unknown had ripped the cover off the book I actually wanted and glued it over the cover of the Rollins book. They'd done a fairly decent job of it too, the Rollins book was almost exactly the same thickness and shape as the original book so to a casual glance there was nothing untoward.

I should add that I contacted the seller and they are dispatching another straight away. So that part at least is working properly.

Why Are Some People Annoying?

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes I just immediately dislike someone for no reason whatsoever. At my previous job I ended up working with a man I found amazingly annoying, even before he'd ever spoken to me. In the past I've just gone with it, but this time I thought I would try and understand why I felt this way about him, after all, I'd never met him and didn't know anything about him, so there shouldn't be any reason for me to feel that way.

Initially I made some discreet enquiries and found that other people felt the same way. So, at least I knew it wasn't just me. I decided to try and work out what it was about him that was so irritating, but nothing seemed to leap out. Now admittedly he did do some irritating things, the most annoying of which was sending me an email full of questions, despite sitting next to me, then immediately coming over and standing behind me and saying "I've sent you an email..." Then just staring at me while I waited for it to arrive, and read it, before thinking a bit and then answering him. So yes, that was annoying but crucially can't be counted here because I didn't know he did things like that when I first met him.

I never did work out what it was!

Like the Proverbial...

One of the great joys in life is coming across an actual proverbial situation. I experienced such a joy this morning at the swimming pool*.

I suppose one of the hazards of going to a toddler session at the pool is, ahem, little accidents. Swim nappies are supposed to keep everything tightly wrapped up, but obviously today either someone suffered a containment failure or forgot to bring one. There we were, minding our own business in the pool when (cue the tuba) a small, but perfectly formed turd came floating towards us. We leaped into action and scarpered over the other side of the pool. But ten minutes later the damn thing was with us again. We kept moving and it kept following us, like some sort of germ laden brown dog. We finally managed to get away from it after about twenty minutes.

Let's just say, it wasn't very welcome.

*The proverb of course being "too many turds spoil the broth."

Money for Nothing

I was the glad recipient of some free money, from the Inland Revenue no less. Well, when I say I, what I actually mean is my company. I was a bit perplexed at first and so was my accountant, especially as the accompanying letter, terse though it was, explained it was interest due to me. Why on earth were the Inland Revenue paying me interest I wondered?

After a bit of thinking the accountant finally worked out that it was because I'd paid my corporation tax before it was due. I was quite pleased about this because the only reason I'd paid it early was because the interest rate on my bank account was the princely rate of 0.0%. So in fact, I got a better rate from the revenue than I did from the bank.

Result!