A Timely Derrick

First thing I did was miss Ben's birthday party at ¡Goals! and miss out on a chance to captain a team. Now, it's never good standing up your best mate but the way I hear it, they had a bangin' serious footy match for an hour in the biting wind, a quick lunch and then another 40 mins grudge match. I couldn't have coped.
So we did the bottlebank walk and did some park action and threw snowballs (of increasingly low quality as the snow melted away) at trees and lamp-posts. I also got a surprise Grade 2 haircut at good old Sid's place by the park. I really need to take a hat everywhere with me now. We built some Lego rockets, but something was missing, the tall scaffolding derrick thing where the astronauts climb up and walk into the cockpit.
There was a session of frantic cleaning and laundering before our house-viewing visitors arrived at 315 and then we all went out. He went to the Tattoo parlour while I took Jof into town. We bought some bath fizzers and had some toastie sarnies in M+S because that's my favourite food. I did pester Jof for Lego, so many times that she said I couldn't have any more, ever.

Well, poodle me sideways if Bud didn't have a surprise for me upon our return. The fabled £10 bag of random Lego from a charity shop struck again! This time, he was happy. We have our artistic differences: I like Ninjago Spinner-type items: he says they're rubbish because you can't take the bits and recycle them to make a tower. This is true, but I like them. He likes big blocks and other building-type stuff. Today's bag was - a massive selection of blocks with some derricks! So we made a massive Lego Rocket launchpad! Look at the walls on that! Everything in this picture is from today's bag, apart from the rocket and the grey base. Just like Ben, I'm moving towards Daddy dearest, away from those apron strings.
For Youtube videos after Bath Fizzer Night, I had 'Mad Russian with .50 cal machine gun versus 250 watermelons' and 'Mad American and his mates fill the sky with lead from every kind of machine gun imaginable', and Beethoven's 5th to calm me down again.

Boba Feta Cheeza: Trudgement day

Well, it definitely snowed this morning. However, we are on the coastal strip and hence enjoy a milder climate than locations even 1 mile inland. So I bet Salisbury and Winchester are having fun today whereas we have to trudge to school (and on a Friday, too!). Just onto the mainland, Highbury and Paulsgrove Primaries closed. Then, gradually, Portsea Island schools started to register on the closed list - the JB's school, Ben's place, even the Junior school next door, and the bus company ceased operations. But I had already been dropped behind enemy lines and Agent Erin and I were in deep cover lockdown mode for the duration of the war.
Well, we had our Judo lesson (during which a consignment of little boxes suitable for our car-building project mysteriously turned up in my classroom) and played in the snow and slipped over but carried on anyway.

The snow continued past lunchtime but it was heavier off the island, and by the afternoon it had stopped. Pops didn't even go in today although her school was open as well!

The swimming pool website bore all the hallmarks of lack of effort. Closed due to adverse weather conditions. A swimming pool closed? They're just being wet. Aha.
This just gave Erin and I more time to enjoy the park.

The snow has clearly been tramped down for the whole day by all the kids from other schools that didn't open, but there was quite enough left for our purposes.

Our purposes were to attack our parents, of course, strange that they attacked us too. In a snowy free-for-all we huffed and puffed and got snow and woodchips down our collars and wellie boots. One sneaky move saw a handful of snow applied directly to my builder's bumcrease while I was bent over collecting my next shot.
Pops appeared later and brought her sledge thing with drag-rope attachment, which we filled up with ammunition. But all too soon, Erin had to go and Pops had a party to go to, so we emptied out the sledge and Bud pulled us home in the slush, we were quite cold and wet: you can never really have enough gloves. The whole event took all of half an hour but it was full-on and quite quite tiring. Very funny, though.

Ben is having his birthday party at the football place tomorrow. I could say that I'm not going because it'll be unreasonably icy and any one of us could easily slip over and crack an arm - and I didn't enjoy it when I broke my arm. I could say that it's because Jof is taking the car tomorrow, so I can't possibly get there. But really it's embarrassing because I don't like football any more. It was OK at Thursday football when we were all 5 or so, we were all as crap as each other and spent most of the time quacking and laughing and running up and down between the little orange bollard things, which required no skill. But now everyone else is a foot taller than me and they're really keen and I just get knocked over and if I ever get the ball, someone nicks it off me and I get kicked in the leg. I guess that makes me like the girls who don't want to do the football party. Sorry, Ben. But I'm busy getting in with the girls.

Ben Jammin' et les Plaisirs Inconnus

Everyone keeps going on about possible snow, but I don't believe it.

Someone else is going to view our house! I'm really looking forward to the endless cleaning and re-hoovering that inevitably accompanies such a viewing appointment. Personally I object to having to quarantine my Lego while the ingrates stalk around.

School today was terrible. Depending on how you ask me, either I was told off 12 times by my classmates, or I was told to sit on the wall for the whole playtime by one of the teachers. Mostly I wanted to play Green Ninja attack but someone else wanted to be Green Ninja and there weren't any more colours and they told me off for squinnying so I moaned and bleated instead.

This afternoon we visited Ben for his mini-party. I'm still hoping to get the band back together and keep coming up with suitable names, if only they'll listen this time. We always split acrimoniously over artistic differences and who gets the drumsticks. This time we turned up exactly on time which turned out to be well before everyone else so Ben and I played Lego until Erin arrived and then we played HexBug and hid upstairs. Then we were graced by a Pops and the JBs so most of us disappeared upstairs when Ben nicked his mum's Ipad.

We watched Gangnam style and some special films from his Dad's browser cache. JBsMum may be a Government bean counter but boy does she make a good chocolate cake. We did the birthday song with all the wrong words and got chocolatey moustaches. During the fallout, Ben appeared to have had his first full-on 'Encounter', but none of us noticed until the pictures ... came out, hoho. I think maybe his Mum will have to have the special talk with him.

Then we all fought on the sofa and danced to rock music like Gangnam Style and stayed longer than was scheduled because we always do. I trod on Bobert's head by accident and he told me off. This was the final straw in a day of tellings-off so I howled and ran away, even though he was the one that got trodden on. We took Pops home and we made dens under my bed (honest) before we had to relinquish her. I had a massive plate of luxury fish pie, with Pringles, as you do. Hey. I'm trying to gain weight here.

Burgers for supper? Neigh, thanks

Distinctly nippy this morning, walked to school past all the drivers scraping frost off their windscreens. Our car has an orange snowflake icon on the dashboard to alert you if the outside temperatures are between 1° - 4°, in case you hadn't noticed on the way to the car. Today we discover that it also has a red snowflake if the air temp is 0° or less, in case you hadn't noticed the frost on the windscreen.
In other news, I assure you it is by complete coincidence that tonight's supper (to eat on the hoof) is Shergar-burgers with Flex-E-Bend™ cheese slice. Personally I suspect that horse meat is just as nutritious as beef, just a little unexpected in something called a beefburger. I mean, all the other processed reformed mechanically recovered meat products are self-explanatory.
Turkey Dinosaurs. Created by creationists with the finest meats from only the most extinct dinosaurs.

Vermicelli (little worms). Slimy Italians were not the first to appreciate the gritty taste of the humble earthworm.
Toad in the Hole. Adorable amphibian skewered in its own burrow. Just don't eat the hallucinogenic ones.

Hot Dog. A sit-down meal of this obedient Chinese delicacy will have you begging for more. Down, boy.

Chicken Nuggets. Strike the motherlode with these, mined in the Wild West, with grizzly bearnaise sauce.

Fish Fingers. These crunchy willy shapes will leave you turbot-charged. It's not as if fish need their fingers anyway.

Pigs in Blankets. Few can eat a whole pig and the blanket can get stuck in your teeth, but they're worth it.

Jerk Chicken. This adult-only urge-awakener is served with Coq au Vin at those saucy suburban parties.
Meat Balls. An acquired taste that'll drive you nuts: these manly morsels will put hairs on your chest.
Roll Mops. A dieter's dream: the string is filling and has zero calories, but the wood tends to make a hard stool.
Monkey Brains. These can improve your climbing ability, appreciation of bananas, and possibly your IQ.

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After a post-school sandwich we hastened to the seafront to catch the promised sunset. However first we had to collect a bag of shoes from Jof to save her carrying her own shopping home on the bus, and also to mourn the loss of the Lego Spaceship which was in the charity shop yesterday and Jof was going to reserve it but then someone else bought it.

While we were in there we spotted a couple of Lego Bionicles so we got one. All this is why we missed the actual sunset, which to be fair, was a scheduled event at a known time. We threw a few rocks and jumped in the iced-over puddles.
Jof ran as far as the front gate before the icy onslaught drove her back inside.

One hand in your pocket

Last night, Jof went to bed at 730, and never came back. He says why can't I do that. Plus, he only had to come in 4 times before 930 to tell me to stop singing.
We have discovered that our house-viewer of last Saturday (Code-name Gholigosh) is a serial time-waster. They view lots of places, feign interest, and put in an insultingly low offer in the hope that someone will mis-read it and erroneously accept. We shall not.
The very first thing Erin said as we came out of school was to dob me in for losing 5 minutes of Golden Time. It was because the teacher had to tell me to be quiet lots of times. What's a cane?
Anyway, we have had the end-of-year questionnaire from the Head Teacher, where she asks all sorts of questions about my perceived learning experience in order to improve the education service for future pupils. In answer to "What was the best thing you learnt all year" - Learning that a frog is not a reptile. In answer to "What would you improve about the school?" - put more things in the playground to hide behind.
Gymnastics was good as usual and my straddle rolls shone. Afterwards it was a bit nippy outside: Jof waited 35 minutes for a bus so by the time one arrived, her mind was so benumbed by the arctic temperatures she forgot to get off and had to walk back from the train station. She was unable to feel her icicle-feet and they stood up by themselves. The laundry was not dry. In fact, it had frozen solid on the washing line and the sparkly bathmat stood up by itself in most comic fashion. It should be noted that Bud went for a run up Portsdown Hill during my Gym session and a bit of him also stands up by itself.

FOR P = 1 TO 12. NEXT P

There was the briefest of snow flurries this morning. Snow's fun, particularly now I have so many gloves. But what I fear is the lake that is the park icing over. I suppose I could ski to the first Beavers session of the year.....
Anyway, school was good and Erin broke her toe yesterday but she's better now. I battled with spellings (what's wrong with the fauses of graverty?) and hid inside from the cold behind the new sitting room curtains.

I scootered through the park avoiding the vast puddles, they only needed one day of rain to return. Beavers was relatively quiet, they always wait a week or 2 to see how many people have failed to turn up and how many are now old enough to progress to Cubs before allowing a new intake. Anyway, I got 2 badges straight away! One is the Creative activity badge, the other is the Faith Activity badge, they must have caught someone worshipping me at some point.

At the end, after the Dear God prayer (which may be up for a re-write, from what I hear) we do this thing where we all join hands and make a ring and do the G-O-O-D-B-Y-E song and crash into each other in the middle and collapse in a big blue heap of squeakiness. Every week Bluebird (Leader) says we don't have to if we don't want to lose teeth etc and every week we let her finish her health'n'safety speech and crash anyway.

Fighting ice with fire

I was up nice and early, 1045. After a vitamin-poor breakfast of scotch egg and pork pie, we went shopping so Jof could run. I am currently learning to drive, by changing gear for him. So far I have mastered first and second, I have had a brief foray into 4th but while selecting 3rd, have a tough time not going back to first.  Later, Jof took me to the seafront so he could run. It's cold. I played on the arcades and won £4 for my Lego fund.
At home the final stage of the cupboard upgrade was ours for the taking. The old tool cupboards were bought by Grandma and Grandad in the 1950s and are now very rickety. The big one has a pull-out table thing in case you can't afford a dining table, this made an excellent den so I arranged all the cardboard and wood around it. It became my shop, selling wood, and I dispensed it slowly from my front window and kept rearranging the stock out the front. But gradually, Poppy's Xmas tree was finished and my shop began to sell everything it had (a firesale) until there was nothing left. I put on the last work surface myself and retired to sofa, my work done. After my shower I was allowed to watch Fort Boyard before bed. It was only then that we remembered the 6 giant cardboard triangles and the 2 boxfuls of Bay tree branches that we'd put in the loft out of the way of our house-viewer (codename Bhupinder Gholigosh). I'm sure there'll be another bonfire along in a minute, there usually is.

Sure beats doing 25 to life

First thing, I showed Jof my upside-down bicycling that was Judo warm-up. She tried it as well but fell over and I laughed at her. Rain. I refused to go on the normal Saturday bottlebank walk and missed out on a soaking. Jof was being strange and was cleaning everything, he bought a new toilet seat, what was wrong with the old melamine one that was original to the house and had all those authentic splatters of paint, I'll never know.

For a while it hailed, as if in readiness for our house-viewing visitor. This flyer was in the laundrette yesterday: looks fun. So if you want to be sleek, sexy and powerful like this ecstatic non-blonde why don't you join all the other Pillox down at the community centre.
So anyway, we waited dutifully for 315 to come around and sure enough, our Viewer (Codename Bhupinder Gholigosh) and family turned up 20 minutes early and loitered with intent outside in the rain, lucky they were in their car. At 2 minutes to appointment we cleared off as arranged, and drove to North End to donate the old TV to the charity shop where we hoped to get a tool cabinet or similar, any old thing would do as long as it wasn't the red-topped cupboardy things we'd inherited from Grandma. They look good but are terminally tired. The agent rang us and said that they couldn't get in the house. We said well we gave you the key, Sherlock. He said Oh dear, I've left it at the office, better go and get it then. Such is life when you don't organise everything down to the last final detail. Meanwhile, the football was rained off due to excessive rain, a good reason if ever I heard one.

The shop didn't have anything good, so we tried Albert Road. Then we tried Fawcett Road. The junk shops there cater for the Landlord who doesn't want to pay too much for crap furniture for student and rented accommodation: we saw many great things including some rather decent bar tables, old church pews (may have to go back later to secure these) and Welsh dressers piled high without any chance of actually extracting an item of furniture without demolishing the 'showroom' but not what we wanted. B+Q beckoned. I wandered around the cavernous warehouse getting lost while they argued about lockable metal cabinets and bathroom units and troubled the staff and it just went on and on, like this sentence. In fact, the 2 delightful hours I spent trailing around after them seemed like a life sentence. In the end they agreed to buy 2 small units @ a mere £7 each and move a cupboard we already have into the conservatory. So after all that, we spent £14 and simply rearranged things. The phrase "couldn't organise a drinking session in a brewery" springs to mind. To rub iodine-rich salt into an already festering wound, the rain never actually stopped so we failed to have a bonfire. This is bad. We never fail to have a bonfire.

No man is Ellis Island

Friday is here again, congratulations for surviving the week. In school today we all made some kind of cardboard device, Erin's had many compartments and mine was an artistic triumph in brown with logo and swing handle. How they failed to see it was a suitcase, not a particle accelerator is beyond me, so I started the weekend in a huff as they laughed at my Herculean efforts. See the Tevatron-cyclotron electro-magnet and the fact that it's 2 minutes past Beer. Remember the unrequired bag of boxes he brought from work for the class city-building project that never was? The big flat box is one of them.

Speaking of which, today we started a course of Judo. The teacher calls it fighting-in-white-pyjamas. I was used as demo model for the forward rolls and then we did some upside-down cycling and back-to-back hug wrestling where you have to grasp each other sensuously and make your opponent fall down. Erin got a Golden Book sticker for her awesome moves and I'm looking forward to doing it again. ps, I was not paired with Erin for this task. Some things are beyond even me.

Back to regular swimming. But first was more clearing up for tomorrow's inspection. We have espied Poppy's Xmas tree which remains unclaimed by the recycling lorry, and is just asking to be burnt. It will slip away in the night and become as a beacon of truth, a towering inferno of crackliness, ho ho.

We picked Jof up from work. The Notts county football team coach got stuck coming out of the away end and nearly took out the bus stop, we all had a good laugh at that one. Then we dropped off the laundry and hoovered and cleaned and changed the beds and painted and mopped and wiped and I ate chocolate and who knows, maybe somebody'll buy our house. So much work, just not for me.

Change is good

 In other (quite old now) news, a little after my 30th birthday, the near-earth asteroid Apophis will make a fly-by. The only Apophis I know at the moment is the evil guy with the silly voice and the glowing eyes in sci-fi hit Stargate, which Jof still watches sometimes. But if this speeding space rock gets it slightly wrong (13th April 2036) there'll be quite a lot of changes, probably not good.

The discoverers of the asteroid named it (as per convention) after their favourite TV baddie, so just you wait until I'm a qualified astrophysicist and discover the imminent Extinction Level Event caused by asteroid 'Doofenschmirtz'.
At school I got a 'Your child has had a cheek bump' docket, this time it wasn't Zombie Tag but Ninjago Spinners, I got up and Sam crashed into me. I've moved up to Gold reading level, can I have 50p please?

Anyway, today is the first official Thursday Park of the year, a change I'm looking forward to. We were first there and then Ben and the JBs joined me. We were all set to play my game when they all decided to break away from the main group (me) and play football. I exiled myself. Then Bob and Ben broke up, meanwhile Johnny had already exiled himself too. Soon enough us disparate nation states came together, e pluribus unum.

We chased and light sabred and had a feast (on stilts this time as the ground was soggy) and played Master and Captains and got a good go on the swinging basket. Bob is a dangerous ball-thrower while we're swinging, we shall name him Bob Viscous, after Sid Viscous the punk, for his hair also sticks up.

Some 9 year-old girl had lost her HTC, I mean, she only left it sitting on her rucksack for half an hour in the dimming twilight while she wandered around, how come it wasn't there when she got back? I have many items far more valuable than a smartphone. But they're all in the bank, and robbers are out of fashion.
The estate agent rang to tell us someone's coming to see the house. This is a shame as it only gave Jof 2 days to hoover the entire house 9 times.