Monday 3 September 2007

Flip the grindstone

246 emails awaited my return to work this morning. Ordinarily I'd have been chipping away at them on holiday as I'm not a man to deliminate the boundaries between work and leisure. However, our new uber firewalls have balked at my VPN requests so I've been under strict radio silence for a fortnight.

246 emails, and only four of them spam. Our uber firewalls are also good at killing them mercilessly. It's took me until 14:00 today to sift them and sort out the mini-dramas and quandaries that I now need to solve. However, the world is still turning, nowhere has burned down and only one person has died. Things have been quiet since I've been gone.

My good wife phoned me in a kerfuffle on the way home in the car.

"I've lost the bloody tablets the vet's given McLeod. Thirty quid's worth!"

"Ok Miche, what do you want me to do about it? I'm driving right now." I say this with due regard for the law of course - I've got one of those tosspot earpieces.

"You're going to have a look in the bins outside the newsagents. I think I've thrown them away by accident."

"What! Oh for Christ's sake, you want me to root around in bins?"

"You're gonna have to pet, unless you want to shell out another thirty quid."

Typically the shop was busy, half the village seemed to be going to it. A cunt of teenagers were also loitering around. Which is now my collective noun for them as they mocked me mercilessly as I rooted in the three mangy bins around the shop. Despite getting my hands thoroughly greased with chip fat and snot, I found no tablets.

My phone rang again as I had my head in the final bin.

"YES?" I barked, not in the best of fettles.

"Erm, Scott," a sheepish Miche says, "the vet's just rang and I'd left the tablets there. Sorry hon."

"Sorry hon! Do you realise what I'm doing? Why didn't you think of that possibility before subjecting your husband to this depravity?" I asked this rhetorically, as I hung up and drove to the vets.

Grr.

So, as I was already minging with bin juice, I decided to do a bit of rock flipping with the kids in the back garden. According to Weeta, we've missed the International Rock Flipping Day by 24 hours, but hey ho.

In the absence of any really big rocks we decided to flip the frog ornament off an old tree stump. We found a whole colony of woodlouse. They looked pretty shifty and scuttled off before I could catch all of them on camera. I think the little buggers were planning something. I shall be keeping an eye on them...

1 comment:

Susannah Anderson said...

Hey ho, yourself!

I was late-ish myself, since I am on the west coast; for half the world, it was already tomorrow.

So what's a few more hours? Especially when you've been dumpster diving (which is what we call it here); that could be considered analogous to rock flipping, anyhow.

"Minging"; what a good word, with just the right queasy tone to it. Better than our "grungy".