The Magnificent Frog

Some lovely people have suggested titles for future Thursday Thirteens.  I’m going to do them in the order I receive them and would be more than happy to receive suggestions for future entries

Suggested by the adorable Michelle:

• 13 things you love about your house;
• 13 things in the room that you are in right now;
• 13 things you would do if you suddenly won the lottery and;

13 childhood memories suggested by the fabulous Tracey.

And Mas suggested these:

• 13 things (that mean something) on your desk, (shelves or noticeboard/pinboard/wall/bag) ? (oh, that’s similar to the 13 things in the room you’re in which was suggested. Hmm)
• 13 decisions that changed your life?
• If money was no object, 13 places you would rather live.
• 13 things that keep you going when the world’s against you.
• 13 (bad) things that the world always seems to throw at you.
• 13 truths you’ve learned.
• 13 secrets you’ve not told.
• 13 of the best gifts ever given or received by you.
• 13 people you would bring back from the dead and meet if that was something that could be done.
• 13 food or drink items we might not expect you to like, but you do.
• 13 hours in one day.
• 13 mistakes you regret and
• 13 mistakes you do not (regret)

Better get started then…

13 things I love about my house:

1. The people who live there.  My house is just a place to live.  It’s my family that make it my home. 
2. My bedroom.  My favourite room in the house.  It’s usually piled up with ironing or stuff that needs fixing but it has a big bed which is ideal for snuggling.
3. The value of it.  I know it’s greedy but I’m making money just by living there.  Think of it as an investment for the future when the country can’t support me in my old age.
4. The spiffing laminate flooring that I laid throughout each bedroom and the downstairs.
5. My book cases.  I have stacks of books despite regular donations to the local library and I have to store them somewhere.  Fortunately we’ve got these really old oak bookcases that are very useful for holding books up.
6. Having two loos.  Don’t laugh.  There are six people who live in my house and queuing for the loo isn’t fun.  Neither is having my “reading” interrupted by the plaintive wails of an eight year old announcing that they’re “desperate”.
7. The elephants that live under my stairs.  I have these ancient wooden elephants from Africa that live on a chest in the hall, under the stairs.  The Hildy has added an elephant tapestry to the wall for added effect and, when we don’t pile junk up near it, it looks rathy good.
8. The back garden is small but it’s good just to sit out there and relax sometimes.
9. The bounceoline is an 8 foot diameter blue trampoline that gets regular use by the kids and their friends and one or two “adults” who fancy a quick bounce.  Little Al christened it the bounceoline.
10. My L shaped living room is really treated as three rooms.  One for the computer and music, one for sitting and watching TV, and one for eating food and doing homework.
11. My two seater sofa is soft and warm and fits two full sized people, usually me and The Hildy, with one kid able to squeeze in between us for a huggle.
12. The clutter.  I know that clutter really bugs some people but it makes my house feel “lived in”.  It’s dynamic and you can usually find something interesting near the bottom of a pile of clutter when you tidy up.
13. The communal green that the back garden leads on to was placed there for everyone to make use of.  Only my kids make use of it so I’ve essentially got a giant lawn that someone else mows once a month.  I’ve even got a tree to climb.

Next week (if I remember) is Michelle’s “13 things in the room that you are in right now”.

Thanks.

Since I got my iPod for Christmas I’ve been listening to music rather a lot.  Music always seems to be able to evoke emotions in me much stronger than other art forms yet listening remains a passive activity (oxymoron?).  I like to listen to music when I’m doing stuff.  All kinds of stuff.

The next thirteen random songs from my iPod:

1. The Real Thing – Gwen Stefani
2. Blockheads - Ian Dury & the Blockheads
3. Misty Morning, Albert Bridge – The Pogues
4. The Unknown Soldier – The Doors
5. I Was Hoping – Alanis Morisette
6. The Jean Genie – David Bowie
7. I Got You Babe – The Pretenders
8. Straighten Out – Stranglers
9. Going Underground – The Jam
10. Deadbea Club – The B52s
11. Victory (Mike Batt Mix) – Bond
12. E5150 – Black Sabbath
13. Gouge Away – Pixies

Phil Lynott died 21 years ago today, at the age of 36.

Firstly this is very silly ==> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfR2MUu1eG4

Secondly:

Thirteen Great Things About Winter

1. Cold.  I am too hot for most of the year but in the winter I can finally be comfortable.
2. Snow. The best kind of weather that there is.
3. Watching the sun rise as I walk to work.
4. Dragon’s breath.  There’s something about seeing your breath misting in the air that takes me back to those magical times I remember as a child.
5. Frost on the grass.  It just looks so clean.
6. Christmas.  In this country Christmas and all it’s resulting chaos occurs in the winter.
7. Mulled wine.  I know, any excuse.
8. Real log fires.  Not in my current house unfortunately but a real fire is a great way to stay warm.
9. Snuggling.  Winter is a fantastic excuse to snuggle.
10. Ice.  Not that I’m mean or anything but I get a great deal of amusement out of watching people fall over.  Ice is great for slapstick falls.  Plus you can skate on it.
11. Food.  Winter is the best time of the year to over eat.  You need the extra fat as insulation and it provides plenty of energy.
12. Stinky cheese.  This is probably just me but I only really buy stinky cheese when it gets freezing cold in the winter.
13. Nuts.  The shelled variety.  I love eating them almost as much as cracking the shells.

In other news I went to my former next door neighbours funeral at lunchtime today.  Despite having no living relatives the crematorium was packed out.  It seems that the friendly old bloke from next door who grew his own veggies had spent the last several decades being a great help to people.  People appreciate this for some reason.  Food for thought, at least for me.  I may just put myself out a bit more for others next year.

I’m going to raise a glass to Reg on the way home.  Cheers everyone.

….in which hoverFrog tries not to offend anyone.

Thirteen things about The Hildy:

1. I’ve known her since I was 15 and she was 19 when she started working in the video shop round the corner from where I lived.
2. She went on to be the manager of the same video shop but still earned less than today’s minimum wage.
3. When she is concentrating she tends to get this little frown line between her eyebrows.
4. Her hair started going grey when she was 16.  Long before she ever met me.  The kids tease her about having grey hair but she just tells them that it’s hereditary.
5. She started her OU degree five years after I started mine but she’ll finish hers before me.  This is because she has a plan whereas I keep changing my mind.
6. She is left handed and therefore a witch.
7. Further evidence of her witcheryness is the fact that she never learnt to swim.  We take the kids swimming quite often but she always stays in the shallow end.
8. Another thing that she had not learnt to do was to cook.  I had to teach her how.  Now she is a wonderful cook although she still buys per-packaged food from time to time.
9. Her favourite meal is mushroom egg foo yung, mushroom chow mein and egg fried rice.
10. When we win the lottery The Hildy would like to eat her favourite meal every day to see how long it takes her to get sick of it.
11. When we were poor we had £10 a week for the two of us to buy food.  We practically lived on pasta, rice and potatoes.  We always had enough money for Hildy’s cornflakes though.
12. The Hildy is half German on account of her father being from East Germany.  She does not, however, speak any German at all.  When the Berlin Wall came down and some of her long lost relatives came over to visit she couldn’t understand a word that they said.
13. She has a fear of butterflies.

Go on…tell me thirteen things about your partner….you know you want to.

Having been busy last week laying laminate flooring I missed out on the Thursday Thirteen.  I did mean to post this last week following on from a few comments I’ve had about moving around a lot and living in different places.

Anyway. Thirteen Places that I’ve lived, in order with duplicates omitted.

1. Limavady, Londonderry
   The place where I was born.
2. Akrotiri Bay, Cyprus
   The place where my brother was born.
3. Peterborough, Norfolk
   A brief stay after the Old Man left the Army
4. Liss, Hampshire
   Training for the Old Man int he pub trade
5. Southampton, Hampshire
   Their first pub
6. Aldershot, Hampshire
   An OK place to live especially if you don;t mind squaddies.
7. Littlemore, Oxford
   A very pleasant town
8. Farnham, Hampshire
   I was trapped on a council estate so my opinion of Farnham is not that high.
9. Reading, Berkshire
   A shit hole.  A violent, unpleasant, soul destroying place.  Sorry Diva.
10. Bordon, Hampshire
    Possible the armpit of the country.
11. Havant, Hampshire
    I’ve had five different addresses in Havant and possibly a sixth next year.
12. Cardiff, South Glamorgan
    I loved Cardiff.  I went to uni there and had the best time ever.  I was in halls in Penarth and then rented in Roath.
13. Portsmouth, Hampshire
    A strange place.  Very busy with wildly differing social groups depending on where you live in the city.  It’s damn crowded.  I lived in Copnor and Southsea and it’s like living in two different countries rather than the same city.

There you go.  I don’t think I’ve missed any.  Have you lived anywhere near me?

Thursday Thirteen is a meme with one purpose:  to get to know bloggers better. Thirteen secrets they’ve never shared before, Thirteen random things about themselves or their lives that give the reader a better idea of who they are.

Thirteen reasons I love coffee

1. It wakes me up like nothing else.
2. The smell of coffee brewing has got to be the closest thing to the perfect smell ever created.
3. Mornings aren’t complete without the jingle of a spoon in my coffee mug.
4. Drinking coffee is a relaxing way to spend your time.
5. You can always escape the annoyance of shopping by stopping for a coffee. 
6. Making coffee at work breaks the day up into manageable chunks.
7. Making someone else a coffee is a great way to say sorry.
8. There are thousands of varieties of coffee so you can always experiment with a different flavour.
9. Old coffee cups have character.
10. Coffee can increase alertness and improve short-term recall.
11. Coffee is good for you.
12. Instant coffee really is instant.  All you need is boiling water to add and it’s ready to drink.
13. You can add whisky to coffee and it only makes it taste better.

Current mood: Big-Smiley

As so many 27ers are posting their favourite poems or even writing their own I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and combine it with my Thursday Thirteen.  It’s a jolly good way to celebrate National Poetry Day.

My Thursday Thirteen Poems

1. Sonnet 130. My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.  By William Shakespeare.  Early 17th Century.
2. Ozymandias. By Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
3. mehitabel was once cleopatra.  By Don Marquis, in “archy and mehitabel,” 1927
4. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797
5. The Walrus and the Carpenter.  By Lewis Carroll 1872
6. Solomon Grundy.  By James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, 1842.
7. Paradise Lost.  John Milton. 1667.
8. The Owl and the Pussycat. By Edward Lear. 1871
9. The Tyger.  By William Blake. 1794
10. Dulce et decorum est.  By Wilfred Owen. 1818
11. Song. By Christina Rosetti. 1891
12. The Divine Comedy.  by Dante Alighieri.  Early 14th Century Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1882)
13. On the Pulse of Morning.  Maya Angelou. 1993

I won’t curse you with my own weak verse.

Thursday Thirteen is a meme with one purpose:  to get to know bloggers better. Thirteen secrets they’ve never shared before, Thirteen random things about themselves or their lives that give the reader a better idea of who they are.

This week I’m only letting a little bit of information about me slip out.  This is because I am secretly weeping tears of sorrow because Sioned didn’t stop by to look at the blog entry that I dedicated entirely to her yesterday.  Tears of sorrow.  It’s nearly enough to crush a man’s spirit.  Then I thought WWCYFD?  So here I am blogging again.

Thirteen Acronyms

1. WWCYFD – In any difficult situation you should always ask yourself What Would Chow-Yun Fat Do?  He’d look cool and probably kick someone’s butt but he’d do it in a wise way.
2. TLA – If in doubt chuck a Three Letter Acronym into conversation. 
3. PEBKAC – An IT problem that is the fault of incompetent users.  Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.  A typical fix for this is percussive maintenance.
4. RTFM – Another IT favourite.  Read The Fucking Manual.  I’ve told everyone that it means Read The Fix Manual but secretly I smile inside whenever I say this to someone.
5. DNA - deoxyribonucleic acid is amazing stuff.  So simple yet it contains a total map of what it is to be a human being.
6. FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions that are actually answers to questions that few people actually need to ask.
7. GNU – GNU’s Not Unix.  A joke in the naming of the free operating system.  I think it’s really clever that the name is built into the acronym like that.  It just shows how meaningless it really is.
8. Laser – Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.  I bet you thought it was a real word too.
9. WWTD – What Would Thor Do? In The Order of the Stick Durkon asks what his deity would do in a difficult situation.  The comic can be found here.
10. ROTFLMAO – Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.  Not literally obviously.  I rarely use this acronym but I do tend to get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever I see it in response to one of my comments.
11. WSB – The name of the little company that my chums and I formed.  The WSB nominally stood for Warblington School Boys but I secretly named it We Sell Brains.  Officially it stands for Wireless (and Wired) Systems for Business.
12. OK.  Another non-word.  The origins either come from US military term for Zero Dead (0 killed) meaning a successful mission or from the greek phrase “olla kalla” meaning all’s good.
13. NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT (Нииомтплабопармбетзелбетрабсбомонимонконотдтехстромонт). The 56-letter initialism (54 in Cyrillic) is from the Concise Dictionary of Soviet Terminology and means “The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.”  I like it because it’s long.

Thursday ThirteenIf any former 20sixers remember Enigma then you may have followed him Blogger and seen his Thursday Thirteen Blogroll entries.  Well I liked them but he’s deleted them now.

Thursday Thirteen is a meme with one purpose:  to get to know bloggers better. Thirteen secrets they’ve never shared before, Thirteen random things about themselves or their lives that give the reader a better idea of who they are.

So I’m in a sharing mood today so here is my Thursday Thirteen:

Thirteen Things that I believe in

1. “Why?” should be the first question that you teach your children.
2. Karma.  I should clarify this.  I don’t believe in the westernised idea of Karma where a person gets a good or a bad deed coming back to them.  I believe that when you do something good then people appreciate it and will do good things as a result.  This has an overall effect of making people perform good acts which makes everyone’s life better.  It works in reverse as well.
3. The power of debate.  If there is no debate then how will I ever understand my enemy.  I don’t need to agree with my enemy to understand him, I just need to see his point of view.  I believe that there is no argument that cannot be overcome through debate.
4. Logic is the beginning of wisdom.
5. A government should serve the interests of the people.
6. A smile is a great gift to give someone.  It’s free and contagious.
7. The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
8. We change the world in small steps and not in leaps and bounds.  Or as Ghandi put it “In a gentle way, you can shake the world. “
9. If you think that an order is wrong then you should question it and if the explanation is flawed then you should defy it.
10. Some sins are not wrong.
11. History teaches us that people make mistakes.  If we learn anything from history it is that many of these mistakes should never be repeated.
12. A little suffering is good for the soul.
13. Sarcasm.

There you go.  This was a little more serious than I originally intended but there you go.