How's life?

So how's life with you folks? There's nothing too exciting happening in my life at the moment. The cats are driving me nuts today. I have a dog gate across the entrance to the living room, to stop Alfie heading into the hallway and falling down the stairs. For some reason, which ever side of the locked dog gate the cats find themselves on, they want to be on the other side. Liberty's the worst. I'll let her in, and two minutes later, she'll demand to be let out again. She walks about six inches into the hallway, then demands to return to the living room. Grr!

I may try and get back into the swing of the old blogging business this week. I've decided that I couldn't give a monkey's intestine about Google and their murdering of my page rank on my blogs. Better yet - I can see again! A few weeks ago, Leo stole my reading glasses and bashed them about the room, leaving them scratched and useless. I finally got around to visiting the optician on Thursday afternoon, and picked up a new pair of reading glasses an hour after my eye test. I hadn't realised how much I was struggling to read without my specs. Hurrah for Specsavers!

I'm just trying out a new blogging feature called Zemanta, which I'm using via a Firefox extension. Not quite sure what it does, although it just tried to change Alfie's name into a link to the Jude Law and Michael Caine films of the same name. Ah, I see. It adds links and inserts a reblog button into my post. Hmm. Not too sure about this. I'll try it for a few days.

Guilty of mouse murder

I checked the trap around 7 AM today. I could see, in the shadows behind the fridge, that the yellow bar had dropped, meaning the trap had been sprung. I turned the light on, and there was a poor little mouse in the trap, dead. We all know mice are dirty, stinking vermin. They're destructive, and spread diseases that are harmful, even fatal, to humans. So why do I feel so guilty? Heck, I even feel guilty every time I mash a fly, and I hate those things more than mice. Oh well, it's done now.

One amusing little aside to the mouse incident, arrived in the form of yet another Wayne-ism. I told my dopey cousin about the mouse. Guess what Wayne said? 'Aw. At least it's only a cute little mouse. It could be worse'. 'Yes', I said. 'In a couple of weeks time, when one mouse has become a dozen, it'll be a lot worse'.

Wayne has only owned one pet in his whole life. Many years ago, he had a little pet mouse called Ifor Bach (Welsh for Little Ivor). Well, Wayne used to let Ifor Bach out of his cage, to enjoy a run around the bedsit he then lived in. The trouble with that, is that Wayne would then have great trouble locating and re-caging Ifor Bach. So, inevitably, the mouse vanished one day, a week or so before Wayne was due to move to a new flat. He assumed the mouse had exited via the window, and perished. So, he headed off to his new flat.

About a month later, Wayne and I were in the Uplands Tavern, during the days when it was known as Streets. His ex-landlord came up to us. 'What was that mess you left in the bedsit, Wayne? There was even a bl**dy mouse running around in there'. Luckily, the ex-landlord realised it was a pet mouse, caught it and found it a home. Or so he said. I'm not so sure, as I always thought that man had very shifty eyes. Still, I can't condemn him, mouse murderer as I am.

I'm now so paranoid, I'm going to re-bait and re-set the trap tonight. I'm not expecting to find another mouse in rigor mortis. Blinking well hope not, anyway. If I do, I will officially declare myself a skank, and have a sign made for my front door, which says 'Welcome to Skanksville'. Funny how one little mouse can leave someone feeling so paranoid and unclean.

Oh well. Laters....

MOUSE!!!

Help! Leo clambered in through the kitchen window in the wee hours, with a live mouse. He appeared outside my bedroom window, with a wriggling mouse in his jaws, so I ignored him. I had no idea the kitchen window was open.

The evil, vile rodent is now running around my house. Last seen scuttling under my fridge. I think I'm on the verge of a major coronary. Or a nervous breakdown. I need to go for a pee, but I have to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. What the eff do I do? Pee in a flower vase?

Knickers to humane extermination. I'm off to town for some lethal mousetraps. Ugh. I feel really, really unclean. Serves me right for forgetting to close the window. It's the first time in years I've forgotten to close it at night, simply because I know what Leo's like for bringing live prey home. I feel sick. My home has a verminous little sh*t running around it. And a mouse! I'm afraid Alfie's going to find himself on his own for an hour or two. I MUST get me a mousetrap.

I don't WANT to kill the mouse. I really don't. Even though it's vile vermin, it's not actually its fault that it's vile vermin. But mice are dangerous. They're filthy, full of disease, and like to start house fires by chewing through cables. In my eyes, that makes them tiny, hairy little terrorists.

Do humane mousetraps work? Probably not. I've looked on the Wilkinson site, and they sell traps that allegedly kill instantly. If I stick one behind the fridge, my zoo can't get at it, but the mouse will smell the bait. I really don't want to commit mousicide. But one mouse soon becomes an army. Sorry, mouse. It's me or you, and I'm too big to fit in the trap.

Damn you, mouse. Why are you making me kill you? I have such a guilt trip on at the moment.

Doggy day is here!

Picking the doggy up in a couple of hours. My poor cats have no idea. They'll be so peeved! Just realised I have a minor cash flow problem until tomorrow, thanks to some direct debits leaving my account several days early. So I hope the RSPCA don't expect too huge a donation from me! Luckily, there's no adoption fee to pay. I've (ever so) slightly over-spent buying new doggy bits. OK, so I spent a small fortune on him. Oh well. It's about time someone did, poor bloke. Back later, to let you all know how he's settling.

Oh, just one more thing. Do I continue to call him Clancy? Or shall I rename him Alfie? He probably won't notice the difference, as he's very hard of hearing. What do you reckon? Clancy or Alfie? Hang on, I'll add a poll.

Doggy undelayed

Mary, the lady at the RSPCA, called me earlier. The animal shelter are going to lend me a gate to keep Clancy - or Alfie as he'll be from tomorrow - safe. So, I'm picking him at lunchtime tomorrow. My friends, Mel and Bob, are going to drive me there and back. Let's hope it's a nice day, so I can take him for a good sniff around the neighbourhood.

Feeling nervous

The lady from the RSPCA is coming here around tea-time, to do the the pre-adoption home visit. I keep having nightmare visions of her saying 'this flat is vile, you're vile, and I wouldn't send a rat to live here'. Silly, I know. Mary, the lady who's carrying out the home check, is very nice. All she'll want to see, I suppose, is if my garden is enclosed, which it is, and to see if the other pets on the premises are in good shape - and they are, especially Demon Kitty Leo. I guess I'm just suffering pre-adoption nerves.

Hopefully, the shelter will be open tomorrow, so I can go and collect my new friend. I'll probably bore you to tears over the next couple of weeks with doggy pics, and loads of inane posts saying 'guess what my clever little doggy did today? He had a poo! Isn't that clever?'

Please bear with me!

New poll

Just posted a new poll in my sidebar. Please take a second to vote. As a long-time cat owner, who is hopefully about to become a dog owner, too, I'm curious to see whether my readers prefer cats or dogs. Or perhaps you like both equally? Or maybe you don't like either. At the moment, I still prefer cats, although I'm really looking forward to caring for a certain cute little Cavalier King Charles spaniel. All I can say, is thank heavens I don't have a soft spot for Rottweilers or Great Danes!

Counting the days ...

I'm counting the days until my new baby arrives. Not that I'm pregnant, I hasten to add. I'm referring, of course, to this lovely little guy. Click the pic to get a better look at him.


I had my letter of permission from Swansea Housing Association today, confirming I can keep him. All I need now is for the RSPCA to approve me. I'm worried that the amount of steps, both inside and outside the premises, may prove my undoing, as little Clancy, hopefully soon to be Alfie, isn't in the best of health. That said, I'm more than happy to give him a lift up and down any steps, and I can gate the stairs off indoors, if there was a likelihood he might hurt himself. The little fellow only weighs 8 kg at the moment, bless him, so he'd hardly be a burden.

I'm trying to compile a list of what I need to get for him. Food, obviously, and feeding bowls, a collar and lead, his eye drops, a bed (I've already got a nice, fleecy pet blanket he can have), a grooming brush, a poop scoop and bags - have I missed anything? I doubt he's interested in toys, although he might like something soft to snuggle up with.

Be warned, though. If the doggy moves in with me, this blog will be filled with pleas for doggy advice for many months to come.

The doggy

Well, I met Clancy yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised. I was under the impression he was really decrepit and doddery. In fact, despite being neglected by his previous owner, he's very lively. I suspect he may be younger than 10. The RSPCA have had difficulty determining his age, because he was never exercised, and has lost muscle mass as a result. Also, he suffers from a dry eye condition that was left untreated for a long time, which has damaged his sight. Both these conditions could make him appear a lot older than he really is. I suspect he's more like 7-8, but I'm no expert.

I spent some time alone with him, and took him for a walk along a country trail. He loved it. Don't think he was impressed with my lack of lead skills, though - I kept tangling him up. I'd been given one of those rover leads, and found it hard to manage. Although his coordination seems a little bit off when he's just standing around, when he gets going, he really does get going! He does pull quite a bit on the lead, but I know how to deal with that. Plus he only weights eight kilos, so having him pull on the lead is a lot more tolerable than being dragged down the road by a fifty kilo Rottweiler.

I'm pleased that he can manage a fairly good walk. I'm a little bit concerned that he doesn't appear to be neutered, but he apparently has no interest in girl dogs. I forgot to ask about boy dogs! He's an incredibly happy little dog, considering he's had such a hard life. His tail doesn't stop wagging. Oh - and the good news is that Swansea Housing Association have granted me permission to keep him. So it's up to the RSPCA to decide now, whether they think I'm a fit doggy mummy or not! If so, Rhossili here we come...

Thanks!

Thanks for the birthday wishes for yesterday, folks. It's truly appreciated. Liz - many thanks for your kind offer of a coffee. Alas, I was unable to make it down to Mumbles. In fact, after going up to the RSPCA to meet the dog, I conked out on the couch!

Ouch!

Does anyone know what causes cramp? Better still, how can it be cured? I've been getting the most horrendous muscle cramps in my right calf over the last couple of days. It all started when I tried to get up off the sofa, whilst pinned down by two snoozing cats. I felt something twist in my leg, and then I had the most excruciating pain I think I've ever felt. Even worse than my stupid arthritis. I shuffled over to the baker's earlier, looking more like a drunken, geriatric yeti than a human being. It's been waking me up at night, too. I think I need to Google cramp, to see if I can find a solution.

Network nightmare

Been having a bit of a nightmare with my wireless router. Although it works ok with Vista, it seems to lose the settings every time I turn my laptop off. Getting a little fed up of tinkering and resetting, but I think I may have sorted it out now.

Great news, rotten cat

Just checked with the Dabs.com site. My new laptop is already on its way! Great news or what?

Not so great is the fact that my rotten cat, Leo, murdered a beautiful little baby robin this morning. It was just starting to get its adult colours. I know it's only natural, but I do wish he wouldn't do such vile, murderous things.

Good or bad news first?

I guess I'll give you the good news first. I've just ordered a new laptop from Dabs.com. The bad news is that it's another Acer. I came close to dropping my antique desktop, Godzilla, out of the window today. I clicked the Firefox window, then made the fatal mistake of clicking the Control Panel link as well. Because I asked Godzilla to do two things at once, being unable to multi-task, the hateful machine took seven minutes and forty three seconds to decide what to do. Life is much too short to waste sitting around waiting for an uncooperative computer to do its thing.

Although I'm pretty uneasy at ordering another Acer, I've decided to take the plunge. It's an Acer TravelMate, said to be a lot tougher and more reliable than the Aspire range. It's a lower spec than I originally wanted, but I had to grab what I could afford, i.e. a maximum of £300. Had I waited a couple of weeks, I could have bought a higher spec one. But is it really worth paying a lot for a laptop, when they seem to conk out after a couple of years?

The spec's not too bad. It has a 1.8 GhZ Dual Core AMD Athlon something or other processor, and the fact that it has neither an Intel processor or an Intel chipset, makes me quite happy. I've always preferred AMD to Intel hardware. It has 1 MB of RAM, not two, as I wanted, but that's no big issue. I can easily upgrade that myself when the time's right. The new laptop should be with me between Tuesday and Thursday. And this time, I'm DEFINITELY purchasing an extended warranty from Acer. At least I'll be able to get back to blogging properly, and working on my new project, which I'll tell you all more about soon.

Not a bad day!

I've had quite a fruitful day today, despite the vile, wet weather. I had an early appointment this morning, after which I found myself at a bit of a loose end in town. So I hopped on a bus to Morrisons. I ended up with a fair few bargains. I bought two packs of my beloved Nescafe Cappuccino sachets for £3 - they're normally £2.28 each. I then got two six-packs of Muller Corners for £2. They're normally £2.89 per six-pack in Tesco, or £2 for four individual pots. For non-Brits - I bought two six-packs of yogurt, with crunchy chocolatey bits, not two six-packs of beer!

I also got a lovely, hand painted, rustic-looking clock, shaped like a mother cat and two kittens, for just £2.99. If I can find the serial port adapter for my mouse, I'll take some pics of my little clock and post them - I really like it. Trouble is, Godzilla (my ancient PC) only has two USB ports, and no Ethernet connection, so the USB ports are occupied by my mouse and cable modem.

After dropping off my shopping at home, I headed back out to town, to make the most of my day ticket. I was on a mission - to buy a light summer coat. I didn't have one, just heavy winter coats, which are far too warm to wear comfortably at this time of year. After a bit of traipsing, I found a nice, black, three-quarter length trench coat, but it was £68. I wasn't prepared to plunder that much money from my laptop fund, and resigned myself to roasting to death every time it rains.

Then, I headed for Tesco. Lo and behold! What did I see? Hanging up in the clothing department, looking all sad and lonely, was a black, three-quarter length trench coat, almost identical to the one I saw but couldn't afford. 'I bet it's a size 8', I thought. But it wasn't. I won't say what size it was, but it was a size smaller than I normally take. 'Oh well', I thought, and grabbed it to try it on anyway. Guess what? It was a perfect fit. I braced myself for the hefty price tag. Imagine my delight when it was only £25. Okay, so it's not haute couture, but it's a classic design, black's never out of fashion, and the coat is now hanging up in my wardrobe. £25 is a far nicer price than £68, and there's hardly a difference between the two coats. I suspect that coat knew I was on my way and waited for me!

Anyway, that's my pleasant, if rather unexciting day. How has your day been?

Virgin Media problems?

Have any of you folks in the Swansea area had trouble with your Virgin Media broadband connection lately? Despite having 4 MB broadband, my connection has been crawling along. I've also been unable to access many websites. Pages either failed to load fully, or I got 'page not found' type error messages.

Guess what? I've fixed it. Yay! If you're a former NTL customer, and your broadband's acting up, go into your browser's tools, and enter the following proxy server address:

webcache.virginmedia.com

Set the port number to 8080, and you should be fine. But remember - this only works for ex-NTL and ex-Blue Yonder customers.

I'm still around!

A few of you have emailed me recently, wondering where I am. Don't worry - I'm fine. Thanks for your kind concern. My computer, on the other hand, is a total nightmare, still taking at least 20 minutes to boot up, and throwing more tantrums than a two-year-old who's had too much tartrazine. So I'm feeling a little uninspired. Also, I find sitting at a desk uncomfortable, due to the arthritis. I should have my new laptop soon. I hoped to have it by now, but I helped someone out of a financial crisis, and can't afford the new computer until they pay me back.

I've had a pretty uneventful week, apart from stepping in cat puke on Thursday morning. There's nothing quite like cold, squishy cat puke between the toes to wake you up! On the subject of cats, Liberty caught fleas at the PDSA, from a badly neglected Shih-Tzu which sat next to us. So I had the delight of chasing two cats around to de-flea them, as well as having to con them into taking some worm pills. Thank heavens for tuna!

Yeah, as you can see, my life is very interesting at the moment. So interesting, I've graduated from knitting baby hats for charity, to making myself a new cardigan. God! Just call me Granny Siani! Argh! The cardigan's nice, though, even if Liberty did sneeze all over it earlier.

Anyway, just letting you all know I'm still around. Hopefully, I'll have something interesting to say soon. If not, I'll have to start knitting tea cosies!

This and that

I've not posted much here in the last week, due to a combination of factors, most of which I won't bore you with. My health took a slight downturn early last week. It was nothing major, but it left me with very little energy for anything, other than lounging around and watching rubbish on the TV. I think I've watched more TV in the last few days than I would normally watch in six months. How people can sit in front of the box all day, I really don't know.

One good thing has come out of my enforced lounging around. I found the TV so diabolically boring most of the time, I decided to make a couple more baby hats for Save the Children. I kept going until I'd used up all my yarn oddments. I assumed I had about nine or ten little hats. When I counted them up, I had somehow made twenty two. How? I really don't know. I think the clicking of the needles must have hypnotised me.

I'm off out soon, to escape the infernal bashing, crashing and drilling coming from next door. My neighbours are having demolition construction work done. Ugh. I may as well head to the post office with my parcel of baby hats. Don't know how much it'll cost me to send them - they don't weigh much - no more than about 250 grams. Probably less than the cost of a large cappucino in a coffee shop. Oh well, time to make myself look human, if I'm off out...

Baby boy name meanings

Is there something in the air at the moment? I'm surprised at how many people I know, both online, and in my everyday life, who are expecting a new arrival in the next few months. One of my friends, who is expecting a baby boy in September, turned up at my house in a bit of a stew the other night. She was in the middle of surfing around the Internet, looking for baby name sites, when her Internet connection died. Her hubby was too busy watching football to do anything about it, so she left him to it.

Now, my friend is more than a little bit superstitious, and wants to give her son a name with a good, positive meaning. Her husband likes the name Damien, but it just reminds my friend of that evil child in The Omen movie. She likes the name Harry, but hubby thinks it's an old man's name! So, we spent a long time on Tuesday evening, looking up baby boy name meanings, to ensure her son gets a decent name that suits both parents. Current favourites are Jack, Calum and Matthew. My friend is determined that she will be the one to register the birth, otherwise the poor baby will end up with a middle name like Beckham or Rooney, given hubby's love of football. Here's hoping Jack Calum Matthew Harry Damien Beckham Rooney Jones arrives nice and safely!

Allergies and toiletries

No, this isn't a sponsored post! Just me wittering on in my usual vein. Just out of curiosity, do any of you suffer bad reactions to everyday toiletries and cleaning products? I'm thinking especially of washing-up liquid for dishes, bubble bath and shower gels. I've started having the most hideous reactions to some of these products recently. I've had everything from itching to full-blown rashes, some in very sensitive and unmentionable places. The hardest part of this problem, for me, is finding hypo-allergenic toiletries that don't cost the earth.

As far as toiletries go, I've made a wonderful discovery - something that the mums amongst you probably know all about. Baby toiletries are almost always hypo-allergenic. I've now kitted myself out with some gorgeous, lavender-scented baby bath - Boots' own brand, which is currently on a buy-one-get-one-free offer. I've also bought some Johnson's baby body wash. And guess what? Not an itch or rash in sight. Yay!

Another problem I have, is that my hands don't like soap, especially the kind found in cleaning products. Well, to my delight, I found a washing up liquid for sensitive skin yesterday - in Tesco of all places. It's called Surcare, and is actually cheaper than some of the big brand regular washing up liquids.

How many of you share similar problems? What products do you use to avoid having bad skin reactions? I'd be grateful for any recommendations, as I'm worried my problems could get worse, not better.