No entry. It's your own fault.

What is it with my family and keys?

Years ago, when me and my sister were just kids, we all went on a day out and had ourselves a wonderful time - right up to the point our parents locked BOTH sets of car and house keys in the boot. Or trunk, for non-Brits. Cue an expensive journey home, including three trains, a bus and a taxi. Not necessarily in that order. And then we had to break into our own house. Oddly enough, it was soon after that that us kids got our own house keys. I wonder why...

Some years later, I was working night shift at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham, when my shift leader came to me with a message that my parents were at the security gatehouse and needed to see me. I started panicking - after all, when you get an unexpected visit from your folks, it's not often good news. Besides which, you will have got the gist already. Yes, they had gone out for the evening and locked themselves out. I had a little rant about communication.

Fast forward some more. Not long after I had moved south to live with Julie, the two of us went to the beach. I'm not great with the idea of leaving my belongings unattended on the beach while we go for a swim, and there was a small pocket on the inside of my shorts. Unfortunately, when I went for a dip, the keys fell out. Fortunately, I found them rolling in the surf on the water line. Fortunate indeed. Never before or since has Julie been so angry with me.

And now yesterday.
I was talking to my Mum by means of the old telephonic device, and she was telling me of her 'little bit of fun' the day before. Apparently, my mother had had a hospital appointment. Parking there is abysmal, so she booked a taxi, removed a lot of crap from her bag in order to make moving about on crutches a bit easier, and then shut the doo...oh shit.

No sooner had the door clicked shut than she realised she hadn't put the house keys back in her handbag. Crap. The taxi and appointment still need to happen, so off she went. When she got back, my mum found that while house keys were absent, she did have the car key. Deciding to use a cafe as an impromptu office, Mum tried to think of how to get a locksmith - not having one on speed dial, you see.

Having failed to come up with a solution, Mum then went to a garage to fill the car with fuel, and noticed a police car there. Collaring a copper, she asked him if he knew of any locksmiths in the area. Confused, he asked why, and got the whole story.

Well, there's handy.

Interestingly, I have come across a couple of good ideas for trying to make sure you have a house key with you at all times.

Found on Tuvie, this one looks funky, but I can see you would have to have a key specially made. Far better is this idea from Pocketbands.com - it's a silicon rubber bracelet with a pouch for you to put a key or an emergency tenner inside.

Naturally, the bands you would wear would not be transparent - it sort of defeats the idea of hiding something. I'm seriously liking this product, actually. Ideal for kids, clubbers, people on the beach (ahem), I am actually thinking about finding out if there is anywhere over here that flogs them.

Badgered

Ready for a quick blast of Cute?

Baby badgers; so young their eyes have yet to open.

Julie found this delightful image somewhere, and I insisted she shared it with me - by private message on Facebook, so it wouldn't get lost in every other post I see.
I had an ulterior motive, though. Lovely as these badgers were,* it was Julie's comment that cracked me up.

Nope.
Just to clarify; these are baby platypuses:

And these are baby badgers:

They're all cute, and they are all (roughly) mammalian. Other than that, nope. Not the same.

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* By the way; baby badgers might look cute, but adult badgers are vicious buggers and are roughly the size of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier - and with roughly the same temperament when pissed off. Don't mess with them.

A lengthy problem

This one is old. And I mean 'before I met Julie' old.

I used to work in a warehouse that stocked and supplied electronic components. It was a pretty big warehouse, and at the time this took place, I was a shift team leader in the goods in department.

As anyone who has ordered multiple items at a single time knows, what you ordered isn't necessarily what you receive. One supplier even threatened to take us to court because we were refusing to pay for items we hadn't received - but they were adamant they had shipped. And then they found said items in a dark corner of their own warehouse. And two suppliers seemed to think it would be a jolly good wheeze to throw a load of components into a box with polystyrene chips (a fantastic idea, courtesy of static electricity), and then leave us to guess what each item may be.

It didn't help that the term MICROelectronics was often a very salient term to describe the parts. While some items had the device code printed on them somewhere, others were too small to fit the entire code, no matter how small the print.

As team leader, it fell to me to contact the sales department in question and ask them to iron out any problems. Cue this conversation (and yes, Mary was Irish)...

All around me, people were either laughing or demanding to know what the laughter was about. All I could think of was that I had just well and truly scuppered my chances of asking Mary out...

Well, what a duck-up.

I don't know how widespread this is, but in Britain, we have a growing number of buffet-style restaurants - usually for varying degrees of tasty Chinese/pan-Asian food. There is one near to where my mother lives which is pretty good. A little further away though, is one one that I have already mentioned in this blog.

As I am sure I have mentioned before, Julie didn't have quite as much of a cosmopolitan upbringing, especially when it comes to food. As a result, I have introduced her to various Chinese and even Indian dishes. This is all well and good, but if you don't know about some dishes, false assumptions can be made...

Ooops.

Reading between the lines.

Yeah, right.
Like a large proportion of the country Julie and myself occasionally dabble in the lottery. Even more occasionally, to mangle grammar, we find ourselves with a small win.

When it comes to a rollover, all sense of statistics, chance and logic go out of the window, so when it was announced that there would be a massive jackpot of over £15million, greed came to the fore and we each bought ourselves a bunch of tickets.

However, our senses returned and we then became all rather cynical about the odds. Julie put it very well indeed.

The wrong side of the tracks

Julie has a friend, an ex-colleague she has kept in touch with. The thing is, Julie's friend, Sue has a reputation for being a bit absent-minded and prone to changing her mind six or seven times a minute. Put it this way - even Julie labels Sue as being 'a bit dappy'.

Yes, I know. Scary, isn't it?

Quite some time ago, we were giving Sue a lift to visit a friend in Bexhill, the next town along from us. I have already related one part of this journey (click here to read).

The thing is, just before that event, Julie and Sue were deeply engaged in a conversation about the location of the local railway line.
From the outset, I was astounded by the fact this conversation was taking place - and that it was going on for so long. Back and forth, the two women tried to work out where the trains would be going by. After a few minutes of this, I snapped.

Just in case anyone thinks I'm being too harsh on Sue and Julie, may I present this map, courtesy of Google.

See that blue stuff? That's the sea, that is.

The conundrum of the cupcake in the container

When we reached Canterbury, there were two things foremost in our minds, both of which involved liquids. Lucky for us, then, that we very soon stumbled across the most delightful tearoom.

Set in one of the oldest buildings in Canterbury, there is much that is good about this place. The tea is loose leaf and you have a varied selection. For something more substantial, there is a special menu based around the theme of eggs benedict, along with a few daily specials. However, if you are not in the mood for cooked food, then you could always sample the baked wares, of which there are plenty and of wide enough variety to give you much pause for thought.
The portions will also give you pause for thought, too. The kind of thought that goes, "I'm not sure I can finish this..."

One cake caught my eye immediately - it was a cupcake in a jar...

Please note these are not from Tiny Tim's. I didn't get a photo of
those cakes, so I pinched this from The Swelle Life. Link at the end.

What a brilliant idea; if you didn't want to eat it at that time, you could take it away and maybe even give it to someone as a little gift. I was very much taken with this idea, as was Julie when I mentioned them to her. Unfortunately, Julie is a little... traditional in her cooking methods, and had difficulty in working out the mechanism of the concept...

When I pointed out that the cakes had actually been baked inside the jars, Julie was a tad incredulous. I had trouble with the situation myself; I facepalmed hard enough the thump drew attention from the other customers.

In case you're interested in having a go, here's a recipe for carrot cake in a jar; a good idea for Easter, perhaps?
Why not visit The Swelle Life - they feature some amazing baked products.
Finally, here's the site for the Tiny Tim's Tearoom - which is also allegedly haunted!

Transitory Jubilations

Nationally, and internationally, there have been some big reasons for hogging the headlines in a positive manner. One of them was the very recent transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. It took a few days to do it, but it was easily visible to anyone who had the most rudimentary of equipment. Even a pair of cheap binoculars would have done it - although you had to take precautions, naturally. Even with a little disc taken off, there's plenty of light to cause permanent damage to your eyes. Take a look at this cunning device for eclipse-watching.

Clever, eh? Would it have been worth looking like a wally, though, just to see a little dot on the face of the sun? Well, yes. Don't take my word for it, here's a picture of Venus set against the sun, taken on June 4th.

In case you weren't sure, that little black circle is Venus, set against
a magnificent dawning sun.

Beautiful, isn't it?*
Sadly, by the time you read this, it will all be over, bar the dissection of data gathered by various scientists. The last time it happened was back in 2004, but don't get excited, because I can pretty much guarantee you'll never have a chance to see it first-hand again. You see, this particular phenomenon only occurs in widely space pairs over an even more widely-spaced period of time. Here's a good description of the science bit - with no difficult parts.

I was talking about this to a female colleague of mine last week, as we sat in the canteen at work. At another table, one of our other colleagues was sat playing a game on his phone. Most of the talk was between my female friend and myself and it was a little vague, because we were excitedly talking at cross-purposes about the transit and trying to explain it to yet another colleague.
The point we were especially trying to make was the need for him to pull his finger out and make plans to either observe the transit of Venus or book a berth in a cryogenics facility. After all, it was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as my female colleague explained - before the game-player suddenly jumped in and came up with a comment that blew us all out of the water, metaphorically speaking.

Nice one, mate. Science to a diamond jubilee in one giant and very uneasy step. In case you weren't aware from our last post, Queen Elizabeth has reigned over Britain and certain Commonwealth countries for sixty years now. This fact has elicited a massive jubilee, resulting in a four-day weekend for many and street parties all over.
Quite what this has to do with a planet crossing the face of the sun, I'm not sure, but I suppose I can't really deny he was actually quite correct. Her Majesty, even ignoring her currently advanced age, will never get another chance to see Venus taking a leisurely stroll across our nearest star.
Oh well.

*ZME Science (a superb general science blog by an enthusiastic amateur) has an excellent article with even better photographs, so why not trot along and enrich your mind.

Alphabetically abnormal sudoku

You know what a sudoku puzzle is, right? A grid of 81 squares. 9 squares long, 9 squares wide. The whole thing is subdivided into 9 squares, 3x3, each containing 9 squares. In some of those squares are numbers. The basic idea is to work out, using logic alone, no mathematical skills needed, what numbers should go into the blanks spaces. Bear in mind that all vertical and horizontal lines and each 3x3 square must contain the numbers 1-9 with no repeats or absences. Here's an example.

Obviously, the top line is missing the numbers 1, 4 and 8. Since there is a 1 in the 2nd and 3rd sub-square, the 1 should then go into the 1st slot, between the 6 and the 5.
And so on. It's pretty easy, but then again, there are quite a few starter numbers. Me, I like doing the variety known as 'killer sudoku' or 'sumdoku'. See if you can work out what the rules are.

Anyway, both Julie and myself like to do sudoku - although Julie prefers the basic type. Not that that's a bad thing; she's actually pretty good at solving them. However, I sat in the lounge one day, poring over my puzzles, when Julie piped up with an offer of assistance...

Er. No, love. I'm still using numbers. Same as ever, same as you.

Ships sounding out a physics fail

Every now and then, you'll come across something that causes a sea-change in the way we perceive the universe and its workings. Einstein proved that Newton didn't have it all covered. Darwin showed us there was no cosmic watchmaker. And Julie now tells us that hitherto indivisible physical concepts can actually be separated out.
See this piece of string?

What do you have if you cut it in half? Instead of one piece of string, you have two smaller pieces of string.
What don't you have if you cut it in half? You don't have two half  pieces of string.

Odd, isn't it? If someone rips a piece of paper in half you have two pieces of paper, not halves. On the other hand, if that swine rips up a twenty-pound note in front of you, then there will be two halves of a note. And a mad scramble for a roll of sticky tape. It seems it's only when things become more specific and defined that you are allowed to half, quarter, fifth (etc) them.

The same principle applies to noises. If someone whistles, then it's a whistle, even if they are suddenly cut short. On the other hand, if you talk about it musically, then our friend with the pursed lips can be said to have tweeted a minim, crotchet, or whatever.

See?

That said, some things are still indivisible. A hole is a hole is a hole. You can't prise apart a clap.* And a bell peal is a bell peal, regardless of length.
Until now. Fancy another Trivial Pursuit question? Of course you do.

Tell me; what's the weath... physics like on your planet?

*Death of Terry Pratchett's Discworld would beg to differ with this statement.

A foodie fail by the befuddled

Continuing the hospital theme for the week, it would be remiss of me to completely ignore the patients. I realise it may be a cheap shot, but you sometimes can't help but smile at some of the things people come out with when under the influence of medication, sedation or, sadly, age or dementia.
My maternal grandfather was a big man, and a healthy one to boot. That's actually a rather apt phrase, since he was actually a professional footballer ('soccer player, to those of you that think footballs aren't spherical), and had played for Leeds United and Norwich City, amongst other teams, during his long and successful career. Sadly, during the later years of his life, he developed Alzheimer's disease. After a long, slow decline, he died at a ripe old age, and the world is a less good place for that. However, his dementia did provide a few bittersweet moments, notably the occasion when he turned to his wife (also in her seventies at that point), and said,

How about we try for another kid, Flossie?

For ages after that, Gran loved to recount that story, laughing each time she brought it up. It still brings a sad smile to my face, too.

My Grandad, the soccer star.

Back to the present day, and to an occasion when Julie is serving up evening meals to various patients. As I have said elsewhere, Julie tends to keep a written list of what food is available for a given day. This is especially useful, should she temporarily blank over what is on her trolley. I think we've all done something like that, right? Having said that, no matter how blank she goes, she'll always have a pretty good idea of what the trolley doesn't hold - and of what the meals she lists are made of.

Someone is obviously used to better fare than that offered up by the National Health Service...

Dazed about days; Too many hours in the day.

People who know me are aware of a certain individual, a colleague of mine, one I shall refer to only as BD. My friends will know precisely who I'm talking about. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, it's true. In fact, to be perfectly honest, if we're using cutlery as a scale, he's somewhere around 'wooden spoon'. The only reason, sometimes, that I haven't clobbered him is that I'm too busy facepalming or beating my head against a brick wall.
Not long after he had started in the warehouse, the two of us were in the packing area together. I gave him a tape gun and got him to pad out and seal some boxes while I set our some address labels. Ten minutes later, the labels were done, but the boxes weren't. Why? Because the tape gun had run out of tape. And he didn't have the wit to say something about it, so he just stood there like the pillock that he is, waiting for the next thought to arrive.
Gah.
Oh, and another thing; he's a moaner. About how many orders he has to pick, the size of a box, where something is, how scratchy his throat is (despite the fact it hasn't got better on its own, instead of, say, buying some lozenges)... You get the idea. Every day begins the same way; sat in the canteen before we start, listening to BD moan about how we may be busy or quiet and how he can't wait for the weekend. In fact, he decided to take it a little further and wish it was the weekend all the time. I know, I know - what's so odd about that? Most of us feel the same way too, right? Sure, but BD likes to be a little more... avant garde* in his approach. (caution - naughty word ahead, although it has been 'blanked')

Yes, I know what BD meant, but look again, and you'll see that the prat has included Friday in the weekend. Last I knew, he was working Fridays, just like the rest of us. Also, when I commented on his desire, he just sat there and grinned nervously; I'd confused him and he was waiting for either an explanation or some sort of permission to forget about it and move on. Like it was with the tape gun.

(* okay... maybe 'avant garde' isn't the right term. Try 'bloody stupid')

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Talking of people who are somewhat slow at times, here's a clip of a couple in a car. The man is driving and trying to explain the concept of 'mph' and what it means. If you don't facepalm at least once when you watch this, that'll be because you're too busy doing the *head-desk*.

Me, I love the expressions on the guy's face. Seriously, I have had ALL of them when talking to Julie sometimes. Although I have to say (quite protectively) that Julie is in no way as dopey as the woman in that clip.

Seedy CD I.Q.

OK, I wasn't going to post this. It was going to stay on my personal Facebook profile, but no, it's having an 'official' release.

A friend of mine has been feeling a bit down lately, partly due to this and that, but mostly to do with a nasty bug that's been hanging around for some time. To cheer her up, I sent her a Bread compilation. Please note that this is Bread, the musical act responsible for the excellent 'Guitar Man'. I didn't send her three slices of wholemeal.

Once I'd sorted that out, I popped the discs into an envelope and posted them. Astonishingly, Jules received them the next (posting) day, which impressed me.
Not so impressive, however, was her tech-savviness. It appeared to be rather low, until I realised it was just a memory lapse. I can understand that...

As you can see, it's not much of a Gem on its own. It was, on the other hand, well worth posting on FB, so I did. In the comments, Jules called me an arse (in pictorial form, and quite cleverly, I thought), and then julie came along and capped it nicely.

...er... yes, dear.
(Bread) Roll out the closing music!

Julie and the great platypus debate

Cyfarchion o Gymru! I'm in Cardiff today, on another part of the second Spikeyboy tour. And yet - I'm still managing to update, despite not having a laptop or smartphone. Ain't I good to you? Then too, there was the fact I really needed to get this Gem/set of Gems up and ready fairly quickly, or else they would lose relevance.

On Friday, Julie's Gems introduced you to a lateral-thinking young chap by the name of Scott. Apparently innocently, Scott likened the object of his friend's affections to a platypus, in that she too was unique. The thing is, what with all the different approaches by various people to this subject, all making their own Gems, I felt there wasn't room to add a photo of the poor animal, and instead gave a short description and a link to its Wiki-page.
As it turns out, this may have been a serious oversight on my part, as Julie only took away the sketchiest of ideas of what a platypus looks like. Then again, considering just how much material I came away with, it may have been the ultimate blessing in disguise. You see, Julie had read the post and was wondering about the platypus's appearance...

I mean, seriously. I'm sure I said 'mammal' when I described it last time... didn't I?

Er.. what? Time for a little comparison, methinks.

A giant tortoise - with a human for some scale.

Two platypuses - being held by a human. For scale.

So - what do you say to that, Julie?

Seriously?? Surely you can't get any worse..?

<facepalm>
We were talking about all the above while I let my pen cool down, and as I was reading them out so Julie could also have a giggle (believe me, she does laugh at herself, too), Julie asked me what the difference in appearance was, and what I objected to, concerning her defining common point. When I said that while platypuses may be fairly low to the ground, a high-domed shell is one of the major features of a giant tortoise. Sadly, one of Julie's defining features is a general unwillingness to let go of an idea.

Uh... what? Um.. I suppose you have a point, love, but I think the animal protection societies might come down on you like a ton of bricks...
Back home, Julie was determined to make her point and was busy googling images of platypuses and tortoises. After a slight confusion thanks to a rogue picture of an echidna (also a monotreme), Julie felt satisfied she had been vindicated.

On the other side of the table, I gave her The Look and reached for my pen once more. When I went around to have a look, it turned out, Julie was mixing up tortoises for turtles. To avoid yet more animal-related shenanigans, I avoided the matter completely, by giving her a helpless look and walking away.

Partial intelligence, partial calming.

Once upon a time, we used to have a car - only a 1 litre Vauxhall Corsa, but it did the trick. I had it from new and eventually had to give it up for scrap after over 100,000 miles, when the cost of repairing it finally became too much.
>sigh<
I still miss ol' Voxy.

Anyway, enough of the nostalgia.
Well, not quite. Julie has a friend, Sue, who she used to work with. The thing is, Sue had/has a reputation for being a bit dappy. She's forgotten her keys so many times, we've lost count and I can assure you that she has a most ... inventive place to store her false teeth (not a complete set - just a plate with a few which replace some lost in an accident). I can also assure you that not many women can lay claim to have accidentally bitten their own boobs.

Yes, you read that right. don't ask.

Moving swiftly on, there were a few times we were in the position of being able to give Sue a lift to one place or another. On this particular occasion, she wanted to visit a friend in Bexhill [On-Sea], so we offered to drive her there. As you can imagine, having Julie and someone like Sue in the same car should be a sure-fire way of hearing a humdinger of a conversation. I was not disappointed.

As we drove along a straight stretch of road, Sue noted the fact that the road seemed to be a little on the rough side. "Here we go," I thought.
However, Sue caught me out, "perhaps it's a traffic calming measure?" she wondered. "It's a long, straight road and maybe they wanted people to go slower."
"OK," I thought, "that wasn't too bad, after all."
If only Sue had left it at that.

You know you're in trouble when Julie starts howling with laughter at your silliness....

Down at Le Café Crazy

It was some years ago that I first came across the concept of a cream tea. In my teens, I would be on family trips and see them on menus, but choose not to have them. As it happened, nobody else had them either, so any curiosity I may have had at the time remained unassuaged.
Some years later, I had dropped ignominiously out of college and everything was, for quite some time operating on a shoestring. Eventually though, things got better and I could then afford to go places. One of the first things I did do was take a trip to a large family event that was taking place quite some distance away. Since the invite was for guest 'plus one' and my sister was taking her current beau - one of my friends - I asked if it was OK to bring along another friend as my '+1'. This friend was the fourth and final member of our little coterie and would have been the only uninvited member. This was OK'd (even though it led to long-running speculation upon my sexual preferences), so we all booked rooms in the same B&B near the party.
The four of us arrived a day early for the party, so we decided to venture out into town (Southend), just to get our bearings. After a while, we decided to take a breather and stopped at a cafe. My friend looked at the menu and opted for the cream tea. I was curious by now about what a cream tea entailed, but I had never ordered one, just in case it meant a cup of tea with cream instead of milk. As it turned out, a cream tea is a pot of tea, one or two scones, some jam and a portion of cream (clotted cream for preference).

NB - many cafes mistakenly include butter with the cream tea. Wrong - this is why you should use clotted cream, because it is effectively replacing the butter. Cut open the scone, spread some cream and then spoon some jam on top. Oh yes - and the scones should be freshly baked to, so they crumble slightly when you bite into them.
Yum.
Anyway... where was I? Oh yes.
Fast forward to the present. I have since met, fallen in love with, and married Julie.
This weekend just gone, the two of us were out and about and popped by a cafe called Neates Cakery. As you can guess, they have a certain specialisation. And believe me, they do very well in that area - here's the menu:

And here's their basic(!) selection of cakes - usually also available as cupcakes.

Pity the website isn't complete - they're on Facebook though.

Lovely cakes, eh?
In the end, though, I went for a tuna/cheese melt panini, and Julie opted for the cream tea. Well, there was a little moment of hesitation before the final decision was made.

Seriously?
If it wasn't bad enough, I've actually lost count of the amount of times, Julie has had, or at the very least shared, a cream tea. Oh, deary me.

Youseddit

Not too sure what it is about mothers at the moment. So far, one friend has supplied me with a couple of Gems from her mum - and assures me there'll be plenty where they came from. Now, Sharron has come to the fore and come up with something from her own mother. I have to admit, though, it's more of a'Fail' than a Gem.
Apparently, the family were sat around, watching Agatha Christie's Poirot on TV. You know - that famous detective from Belgium. The one best played by David Suchet.

Some way into the programme, Sharron's mother evidently has a flash of insight.

Well, yes. Yes, i... Actually, no. No, it's not. It's not 'just like' a whodunnit, it IS a bloody whodunnit.
Fortunately, what with everyone else giving her carefully blank looks (laced with a modicum of humour), Sharron's mother quickly realised what she had just said and led the laughter. Which, I am told, lasted a fair few minutes.