The birds and the fat ball.

A little while ago I filled the bird feeders and got some fat balls out of the shed. In fact I got 5 fat balls out and then discovered that the holder only takes 3 but since I had already re-locked the shed and I couldn’t be a*sed to open it again just to put them away I put them on the bird table^*1. The next day I looked out the window and they were gone – can you believe how greedy those birds are? No? Well, neither could I!

Anyway, hubby (who is unsurprisingly taller than me) can actually see the patio out the window (the window ledge is a tad high for my petite^*2 almost 5 ft frame) and said he could see one of the fat balls halfway across the patio. The other one was still missing and you know how sometimes your mind goes off on a weird tangent (well mine does anyway, just in case you hadn’t realised over all these years of blogging) and that was it, I had a theory!

I reckon that those fat balls were just too darn heavy for any bird to pick up and fly off with, so they pushed them off the bird table and tried to just roll them on home^*3. You can imagine the scene, can’t you – Mr Sparrow heaves and pushes and shoves and rolls and gets this fat ball back to the nest:

“Honey, I’m home – and look what I brought…we’ll be set up for the whole winter!”

^*1which is a small mesh tray attached to the pole we hang the feeders from.

^*2Petite? I wish – of course I am if petite just means short, but thighs like mine do not qualify for petite in my mind…

^*3 Like Alan Davies’s cats – which is hysterical!

Printing…the furry way

Well, I'm still poorly with my chest infection (something to do with me being chopped in half and having my lung collapsed apparently), but not so poorly that I can't blog a bit and let you know what's going on in my world. So here goes....

My cat is fascinated by the printer. It has a drop down front which automatically activates when you press the print button and he loves the way that the paper slides in the back and then gets spat out the front. He is so intrigued by it all, that he has spent all 3 years of his life trying to figure out what goes on inside this strange box that sits on the desk. In fact, he is so mystified by it that just the sound of the print head moving into position, or the noise the front makes when it drops (which is almost none by the way), is enough to bring him rushing from whatever part of the house he was making mischief in…He has over the years tried peering in through the back, peering in through the front, fishing with his paw in the paper feed tray, the same in the output tray and even trying to get his head stuck right inside the little slot in the front that the paper comes out of. All to no avail, he still hasn’t managed to work out that it’s just a printer…

The other day he excelled himself…

In a frenzy to figure out what was happening inside he shoved his whole arm (and most of his shoulder) up inside the printer from the front – there was a loud grinding noise, then a bang and then more grinding noises and sounds of paper being tortured. The cat just stayed there, fishing around inside as if nothing untoward was happening until I grabbed him and tossed him off the desk. The printer had by this time stopped (unsurprisingly), the red error light was flashing furiously and the little screen had a message on it:

“Warning” it said “Foreign object in print head”….then helpfully “Remove object and press OK”!

Well, I had already removed the cat (bet they never expected that in the factory they built the printer in) and so I pressed OK. It gave me another message:

“Please wait for a bit” …. No, seriously, that is exactly what it said – just that, in plain English. Anyway, so I did, waited – even though I wasn’t exactly certain how long ‘a bit’ was. Anyway, about a minute passed and the printer carried on as if nothing had happened. Of course the page came out with no black anywhere apart from the paw prints on the crumpled up bits but in the end that turned out to be caused by the cartridge floating loosely around inside the box having been displaced by the aforementioned foreign object. Put the cartridge back in and hey presto(!) Canon got themselves their biggest fan….

…well, wouldn’t you be if, after all that your printer still worked?

Poorly girl...

I have been sick and very poorly with a chest infection. At one point I thought I was going to die! Actually, that's not true - and I have to admit to it as my mother has told me a million times not to exaggerate! Anyway, walking and talking both became very difficult from the breathing point of view and that's when I was trying to do them separately! I even had to e-mail everyone I knew to tell them not to phone as I couldn't talk without coughing.

So, I have been on double strength antibiotics now for 5 days and finally am starting to feel a bit better.

So, forgive me for being a bad blog mamma - I'll get back to normality soon I'm sure.

Ah yes, and from a surgical point of view, even if its been two years since you had your diaphragm sliced in two, it still really hurts when you cough really bad!

Not just limber my hubby...

Hubby and I were lying in bed the other morning listening to the radio and drinking coffee which he had kindly brought me^*1. The news came on and there was a report on a study that had found that children who were spoiled at home are more likely to cause trouble in school – especially if they don’t get their own way^*2.

Do you know what hubby said? “Ah, another study from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious”…and that just cracked me up…

..sorry, but I had to share!


^*1 ...and just to make you all jealous, yes, he does this for me nearly every single day! (See, I'm always telling you he's a sweetie!)
^*2 Just in case you are interested… here and here are some of the articles in question.

And, just in case you don’t follow the links….I loved this bit:
“Mr Sinnott also condemned violent computer games for encouraging pupils to kill "pimps and prostitutes".” Where does he get games like that from? It’s not Lara Croft, that’s for sure!!!