oh. how nice.
Oh shit. My stuff’s here.
Uncle B and I were standing on the shingle watching an indigo snowsquall tear through a red sunset over the English Channel when the movers called.
(NO I didn’t have my goddamn camera. He popped off a couple of shots with a pocket camera; I’ll fish it out of the back of the car tomorrow and see what he got).
The movers want to know what part of it I’d like them to deliver to the house and what part to put into storage right away. Honest to crap, that’s like buying a 30-ton load of horse manure and deciding which shit you’d like now and which shit to save for later.
Oh, and Jill will obviously have to be burned.
January 5, 2009 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 24
Tolja
We got invited ’round to the neighbors for Boxing Day afternoon. We got the time wrong and landed in the middle of family celebrations. Awk-warrrrrd.
Still…on the way home, I got Uncle B to take a picture of me next to The Sign.
December 26, 2008 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 45
Every 16th Century farmhouse…
…needs a 40″ widescreen TV.
Okay, this isn’t quite the act of aesthetic vandalism it looks. Instead of having a big glommy tube television perched like a shrine in the focal point of the room, this will fold flat against the wall when we aren’t watching it. And…display a slideshow of classic Tudor portraits, or some shit.
And it isn’t quite the act of devil-may-care profligacy it looks, either. Uncle B’s been saving for quite some time. It’s amazing the sweet deals you can get in the teeth of a global financial meltdown!
Me, I played this one just right. “A widescreen TV?” I yawned, languidly flashing a full set of gleaming weaselfangs, “oh, I guess that would be okay. I guess.”
Hahaha! Stoopit badger! I’m a Namerican! The moment he hit the ON switch, I *pwned* that sucker. My eyeballs stuck to that big boy like duct tape sticks to duct tape. Eet ees so verra verra beeeg and shiiiiiiny!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch the latest installment of CSI:Pulaski. Or the Wheelbarrow Channel. Or…whatever. Does it fucking matter?
December 22, 2008 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 25
I’m dreamin’ of a…Weasel smoochy
Though I gather my former neighbors in Rhode Island are digging out from under a foot of the white stuff, it’s unseasonably warm and sunny here. It’s nice, but let us hope for something a little more Christmassy next week.
December 20, 2008 — 10:26 am
Comments: 43
Smoochies!
Britain has been inching toward a semi-official two weeks off at Christmas and New Year’s in recent years — and, okay, nothing gets done Christmas week and New Year’s week; it does make a sort of sense — but, actually, everybody buggered off TODAY. I think taking the Friday before is pushing it, don’t you?
Poor old Uncle B was trying to get a little last-minute work done, and nobody was answering phone. So we said a merry “screw it!” and began our holidays, too.
That’s Old Skullcrusher draped in misteltoe, in case it isn’t immediately obvious. He’s the main housebeam, and that’s the front hall now — but we’re pretty sure he was once outside the house and that was an animal run, ending in what was an open-air stable and is now the kitchen. It may have been enclosed as recently as the 1970s, which is when the front door was built in its present location. It’s a whole forensic dealie, trying to work out the many phases of Badger House.
Anyhow, here come the holidays — Merry Preemptive Christmas, minions!
December 19, 2008 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 21
Set Weasel on KILL!
Margaret Calvert is still alive, but only because I haven’t found her yet. When I heard her interviewed on Radio 4, it’s the first I learned her name, but I had been looking for her for years. By her works I knew her.
Margaret and her boss, Jock Kinneir, undertook a much-needed redesign of British road signage in the middle 1950s and introduced thereunto previously unknown levels of suck and stink.
Weasel exaggerates? You decide. Let’s start with this here. The previous ‘school crossing’ sign was a charming little boy in a cap with a satchel leading a littler girl. As Margaret describes it, “It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”
So she smashed it to bits. Class warfare, feminism AND it looks like ass! Trifecta! Margaret later confessed that the little girl was based on a photograph of herself as a child. Yup. She had a model for this glommy piece of shit. Boggles the mind, don’t it?
She’s a Kiwi South African. Did I mention that? She emigrated all the way from far-flung colonies to screw over the mother country’s signage. Speaking on behalf of resident aliens everywhere: naughty, NAUGHTY immigrant!
But I don’t hate her for the School Crossing sign. I hate her for a sign I’m not even positive she designed. IT IS THIS ONE. Can you spot why this sign makes Weasel shiver and foam at the mouth? WELL, CAN YOU?! (Hint: say yes, or I’ll fucking come over there and hurt you).
Yes. Yes, that’s right. In order for a skidding car to make these tracks, the left front tire would have to detach itself, cross over and land on the right rear while the right front tire correspondingly travels diagonally over and does the other thing.
COULD. NOT. HAPPEN. This is suck writ huge. A graphical “ain’t got no” — times the tens of thousands of them jammed by the side of the roadall over Britain. How many people signed off on this abomination? How many bovine visual illiterates drive past it every day without a second glance?
I have one of my ‘funny spells’ whenever we pass one. It hurtssss ussssss. And oh…OH!!! There’s one at the end of the driveway!! MY DRIVEWAY!!!! I took one look and I thought, “Right! That’s how it’s going to be?”
So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like, “ZOMG! Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father!!!!!” and hid under the sofa.
Two more sessions to go!
December 18, 2008 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 32
AIIIIII!!! geddidOFFAme!
I can’t believe I did that…I CAN’T believe I DID that. Uncle B and I just got back from seeing the vicar about the…THING. That legal thing. That…ugh…let’s back up a second.
You can’t get married just anywhere in the UK. They’re stuffy about civil ceremonies — outside the church, only licensed venues in your area are allowed to do the deed. The Town Hall would’ve done me fine. For an extra £50, a wheezy old git in a tricornered hat and kneesocks will walk ahead of the happy couple through town ringing a handbell and going, “hear ye, hear ye!” Nay, a-shitting of thee I am not.
Uncle B wasn’t happy with the idea. The Hall is pretty shabby and downmarket and all the worst people get married there. I’m like, “but it’s so old!” and he’s like, “pff! No it’s not — it’s 18th Century!”
Oh, how we laughed.
We had never even considered the church option, because — duh. But then he met the local vicar and was taken with her (her! Lady vicar! Oi! Clue!). Our little community outside the town has its own ancient church, which — like so many ancient churches in little communities — is struggling to survive. And so in time it grew to seem a neighborly good deed, this propping up our local House of Saint Mustelid.
The vicar said she would certainly consider (!) marrying us…provided we come in for several counselling sessions (!!!) beforehand.
And that’s where we have been this night. First thing, we were each handed a mimeographed page of British road signs and asked to circle the three which most typified our idea of marriage. And so naturally I gave the vicar a lecture on Margaret Calvert — the New Zealand woman who redesigned most British road signage in the 1950s and a parTICularly violent hate object of mine — including several diagrams drawn on the spot to explain why Calvert’s graphic design skills are totally Teh Sux0r.
Yeah. I think that went well.
December 17, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 53
Dis-graceful
Okay. I confess. The general lateness and lameness of posts lately? I’ve been…
…umm…
…asleep. And that’s not a metaphor for hot, hot mustelid sex or anything. Uncle B and I have passed out comatose a minimum of ten hours a day since I got here, snoring and farting like livestock.
Seriously, it’s whack. It’s Britain-induced narcolepsy. Turbojetlag. Even the cat can barely lift her head off the pillow to cadge Friskies. I knew I had some catching up to do after a year of low drama and high anxiety, but this is stupid. We haven’t spent eight hours awake in a row since November 26.
Tonight, I struggled awake to the sound of, “oh my god…it’s ten o’clock!”
And I go, “I dreamed I was having lunch with Mrs Rockefeller and Bette Davis.” And I really was.
And he goes, “I dreamed I was watching the Prime Minister put on a conjuring act.” And he really was.
Well. We’re a well-matched pair, I guess.
Surprisingly, that’s not as happy a thought as you might imagine.
December 16, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 25
Any excuse to eat fruitcake
Him, not me. I can’t stand the stuff — though I had a bite of this one and it wasn’t bad (it didn’t have that horrible boozy taste; Uncle B was terribly disappointed). The powdered sugar snowflake is a nice touch.
Sorry to be so damned boring. I’m chasing Father Christmas this week with my skirts flung over my head.
That mental image? You’re welcome!
December 15, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 26
It is bitter, and yet…
Where do you go for the latest in cutting edge medical information? Yes, me too: the trans-Atlantic in-flight magazine. There, snuggled between the barf bag and the instructions for using your seat cushion as a flotation device (I wonder, has anyone ever survived using a seat cushion as a flotation device? I think not), I found an article on Angostura bitters.
They were invented in the 1820s by a German doctor serving in Simón Bolivar’s army. He intended them as a general health tonic, but they quickly passed into folklore in Venezuela and the Carribean as a sort of cure-all. I mean, raising people from the dead is pretty good going for a cocktail. No-one outside the firm knows what’s in them, apart from sugar, alcohol and gentian.
The author of the article I read swears that a few drops in a small amount of soda water will settle an upset stomach and crank up appetite (and I’m sure we’re all searching for an easy way to increase appetite!)
The British Royal Navy latched onto them as a seasickness cure, which is why pink gin is the official drink of the Navy. A shiny new sixpence to the lad or lass who manages to think up the “pink gin/homosexuality in the Royal Navy” crack that eludes me here. Feel free to work Hornblower in somehow. Anyhow, you make a pink gin by swirling Angostura bitters around the glass and then filling it with gin. Mmmmm! Pink!
I really like bitter, ouchie beverages, so I made a mental note to order some of this stuff. Then I saw it in the booze section of the grocery store here. I’ve been a-drinkin’ pink vodkas ever since: vodka, tonic and a splash of bitters.
It’s…nice. It’s not reallly bitter, though. It tastes like this professional dentifrice my dentoid used when I was a teenager. Why I should find that appealing, I…point you to the observation above about my love of things bitter and ouchie.
I give it …
three and a half drunken weasels.
December 11, 2008 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 38