End of February haiku

February’s been horrible in many ways and there have been lots of distractions, but I’ve still managed to get to 19 posts for the month! Get in!

Anyway - here’s the haiku:

Another month gone

The year is flying by like

A drunk kingfisher

Even ugly twins

Will seem very attractive

Coz there’s two of them

Can’t wait til morning….

Whatever happens tonight

It’s March tomorrow!

RC 28-2-14

Jumbled

Life is gathering pace at a frighteningly alarming rate. A month ago I was happily relaxing in a gorgeous little house, blindly ignoring the fact that it wasn’t actually ours. Now we are on the brink of moving again, and today Philippa came home with another potential life-changer. Tom (her relative, her boss, my ex-boss) has invited us over to his house this weekend for what he is calling ‘a discussion about a business opportunity.’
Philippa’s imagination has gone into overdrive. She says he’s been talking for ages about working less, so she thinks maybe he’s going to ask me to step into his shoes a few days a week. Or she thinks maybe he’s going to open a new shop somewhere else and he’ll want us to run it for him. Or she thinks maybe he’s going to offer to sell us the whole thing at a reduced rate as we’re family. I’m trying to get her to calm down and just wait and see. Whatever she thinks it is will probably be wrong, so we should go there with an open mind and then we won’t be disappointed or surprised either way. I also keep reminding her that Tom is about as close to sanity as I am to my mother, so the likelihood is it will be something tinged with absolute lunacy.
Personally I don’t care what it is. When Philippa came in talking about ‘a potential life-changer’ I thought for a second she was pregnant. Whatever Tom throws at us will be nothing after going through that.

RC 27-2-14

Lifted by the Light

It suddenly hit me this morning as I was driving in to work - “Bloody Hell - it’s before 7am and I haven’t got my headlights on!!”
Wonderful stuff.
Now I am stuck indoors in a windowless air-conditioned office in the middle of a massive lifeless supermarket surrounded by pasty-skinned teenagers. But there we are - you can’t have everything. At least I know it’s nice outside. 

RC 26-2-14

Bad new start

Philippa wants us to live to a budget. As we’re about to be paying rent for the first time in two years she says we have to consider things more closely and pay more attention to finances. I said “We’re only paying rent short-term, and isn’t this why we’ve been putting money away instead of spending it - for occasions like this?” But apparently I’m an idiot…
So now we have to buy slightly cheaper toilet roll and eat out slightly less often. If this is what life is like when you have to exist without housesitting, you can keep it….

RC 22-2-14

Big news, big relief

Funny old thing, life. Your mood, situation and future can change so quickly depending on the simplest little things. I guess that’s why they say a butterfly can flap it’s wings in your sock drawer and cause an explosion in your eardrum, or something.
Through Philippa’s efforts online, we have found somewhere to live! There are some lovely little holiday homes sitting unused by the river, and the company that own them are more than happy for them to be occupied during the Winter, even if they don’t make much money on them.  They are furnished, they are pretty, and we only have to pay £400 per month, whereas if we stayed there during Summer it would be £1200 PER WEEK! We explained our situation and said we might end up leaving at short notice if the Housesitting Agency found us somewhere, and they were fine with it! I guess a few weeks with someone paying rent is better than having an asset sitting empty, so everyone’s happy all round. Especially Philippa, which is the most important thing, because my happiness goes up or down in direct relation to hers.
It may only be a short-term fix, but it’s better than being homeless!!

RC 20-2-14

What/where next?

I’d forgotten how short a month February is, which means we have far less time that I realised to find somewhere new to live!
To my mind, the Housesitting Agency should be responsible for making sure we have somewhere to stay when one of our assignments finishes, so if there’s nothing else lined up for us they should put us up in a hotel…. but apparently it doesn’t work that way. 
Philippa is going to have a chat with Sally to see if we can slide back into their spare room, but I’m not sure they’d be as welcoming as last time if they knew it was open-ended.  Suddenly I am realising why Philippa has been trying to pester me for a ’Plan B’ since before Christmas. I am, however, refusing to panic. Panic is for people who have no Rioja….

RC 18-2-14

Blue sky thinking

There was a light sky tonight until quarter to six. QUARTER TO SIX!! That’s almost midnight!!
As you can tell, I’m fit-to-burst with optimism today. My mood is on the upslope and I’m determined to ride it and enjoy it before it crashes down the other side!
Philippa is still unhappy with me, but not in a way that makes me think I’ll be living on my own soon. She says it’s her own fault really - she expects too much of me and then gets disappointed when I don’t live up to the standards she is hoping I’ll reach. That sounds to me like she’s let me off the hook, but I’m sure when I sit down and process what she said in detail I’ll realise she’s actually still as narked off with me as she was this time yesterday. And I think I know exactly when it’ll hit me and swirl around in my head and make me feel awful and convince me she’s about to leave me - it’ll be at 3am one morning when I’m back on the downslope and already feeling awful about myself, and it’ll make my insomnia worse and I’ll cry.
Anyway - back to the optimism!!
We are meeting up with Sophie and Tamara on Friday night. We’re all free and it’ll be our first chance to get together since my birthday bash. And I don’t think any of us can remember that weekend, so it’ll be nice to try and do it all again (but with less hangover…)

RC 17-2-14

What a great fiance

Yeah alright, I admit it - I got caught up in what was going on with my car and forgot to arrange anything for Valentine’s Day.
Now I have to spend six weeks trying to make it up to Philippa. 

Today may have helped a bit. We watched some Winter Olympics in bed, then went out for lunch, then had an afternoon walk in the unexpected, gorgeous sunshine. It almost felt like Spring and it was much needed.
If only Philippa had been talking to me it might have been perfection.

RC 16-2-14

All better now

If one more person says ‘your car went wrong because it was the 13th’ I will punch them in the goolies.
Actually, the car is fine now. Simon the Lovely Mechanic Guy at work (who is actually an IT guy but loves to tinker with cars) had a fiddle with it during our lunch break today and it seems perfectly alright now. I have rewarded him with a bottle of his favourite alcohol and a handshake. He did tell me what the problem was but my understanding of cars is on a par with my understanding of women’s attitudes to shopping, so I got a bit lost and confused. I said “The important thing I need to know, Simon, is - if it happens again, will you be able to fix it for me again?” He said “Yes, but you can avoid it happening again if you just….” but by then I had tuned out and ignored the rest of his sentence. The day I start getting interested in car maintenance is the day David Cameron starts getting interested in poor people.
I’m SO politicial!!!!

RC 14-2-14

Never should have sold the VW...

My lovely little car is behaving like a shithead. It’s days like today I really miss TheLoveMachine. Yeah, she was a bag of shite but she was quirky and sexy and I could fit loads of stuff in her. This little pain-in-the-arse I have now has no redeeming features beyond reliability, and even that seems to be failing now. 
I hate cars.
Some people say a car is like a good friend. Well if that’s true, my car is the kind of friend that steals all your money, sleeps with your girlfriend, kicks you in the balls when you’re feeling rough and then laughs in your face when you confront him about it.
The sooner we develop teleportation, the happier I will be.

RC 13-2-14

Optimism, impatience, uncertainty

Today’s official sunset time was 1701! That’s one minute after five!! That’s the first time this year that’s happened!! We are slowly, slowly, slowly but surely aiming for The Light…..

I’m training someone new at work this week and it’s painfully, tortuously slow. There are only so many times you can show someone how to log into a computer before you want to give up and strangle them with the mouse cord.

We have to check with the Housesitting Agency because we don’t yet have anywhere else to go once we leave The Willows. Looks like Philippa’s fears about homelessness could come to fruition. I shall deal with this is my usual mature way - I’m going to distract myself with the world of gaming and ignore the fact that it’s imminent….

RC 12-2-14

Be Spring before you know it!

Today was a good day!
I woke up to daylight at 7.10am and was overwhelmed with the lovely realisation that Winter is slowly passing and the dark days are receding into nothingness. We may still have bad weather, but Winter loses its power over me when I know it’ll still be light after 5pm each day. And we’re in that glorious zone where we can look forward and EVERYTHING is going to get better: More sunlight, rising temperatures, lower heating bills… Next thing you know we’ll be sitting in the garden with flowers blooming around us, the sweet trill of birdsong in the air, and only one or two layers of clothing on, rather than the four or five I have to contend with in January. 
Amazing what a good nights sleep can do for your mood!

RC 11-2-14

Blue funk

I’m having one of my low days. Very low, in fact. I think it’s probably Philippa’s fault. She woke me up at 5.45am and went straight into a full-on panic about moving house again. I think she’d had a dream about being homeless and had convinced herself it was going to come true. So then she had to wake me up to make me feel bad about it as well.
Bloody women. 
The rest of the day has continued in a similar vein.  Other people’s incompetence at work left me with an afternoon of non-stop problem-solving and phone calls. I developed a horrible dull ache in my shoulder that I couldn’t seem to get rid of, and then the canteen had run out of lasagne by the time I went in for my tea break. That was just about the final straw. 
So I’m going to sit down with a hot chocolate, watch some highlights of the Winter Olympics, and hope for better things tomorrow….

RC 10-2-14

The Bronze Age Begins!

Man, did I ever pick the right time to get into the Winter Olympics. The day after I decide to start watching it all, Team GB win their first ever individual medal on snow! Snowboarder Jenny Jones - who nearly retired two years ago - did a near-perfect run and then waited patiently as all but two of the competitors behind her made mistakes or just plain fell over. She wept, her parents wept, the commentators wept, Philippa wept. I got so caught up in it all I shed a few tears myself. This time yesterday I didn’t even know ‘slopestyle’ was a sport, now I can tell you what a backside five-forty is, and how a good grab is different to a stroke. And at this point I shall direct you once again to the closing line of my blog from yesterday…

RC 9-2-14

So far, Sochi, so good

I’m lost in the world of the Winter Olympics and loving every minute. My highlight this afternoon was the stuff on the BBC Red Button that they showed in between events - a compilation from previous Games showing high-speed crashes by skiers, speed skaters and luge-folk (or is it ’lugers’?)
My favourite part of this evening was the point when Clare Balding said “Time to go and look at the ladies moguls”
Innuendo and sport - are there two happier bedfellows?

RC 8-2-14

Friday haiku? Go on then..

The night is still young
So the fact that I’m not drunk
May change very soon

Still in The Willows
But time is passing so quick
Soon we will move out

Where will we go next?
I quite fancy a small house
In a seaside town

RC 7-2-14

Crap-poem

A bumblebee
Is not a humble bee
And it shouldn’t be
Because you see
For you and me 
Life without the bee
Would be a bit wee

RC 3-2-14

Rory's Annual SuperBowl Prediction Blog

Denver Broncos 31 - Seattle Seahawks 24

RC 2-2-14

Feb fibs

I’ve decided to start this month by blogging a list of lies:

My real name is Cuthbert Chesterton
I am 83-years-old
When I was 14 I lost both my kidneys in a cycling accident
When I was 45 they miraculously grew back
I exist on a diet of nothing but corned beef and mustard
I am 17th in line to the throne of Denmark
Delia Smith stole all my recipes and made a fortune from them
My vomit is sold as a perfume in Poland
I am not drunk

RC 1-2-14