Forever Amber

The Mysterious Incident of the Dog Turd in the Nighttime

Skribit question: How much would you sell Rubinman for?

Did I ever tell you about the time I found a turd on the kitchen worktop? The kitchen worktop WHERE WE PREPARE OUR FOOD? THAT WE EAT? No? Well, picture this, people...

It's early one morning. You've just dragged your unwilling self from bed, in response to the constant barking that's been coming from the kitchen for ten minutes now. You stagger downstairs, rubbing your eyes and asking yourself once again, "Why did we buy a puppy?" Did I mention it's EARLY?

You reach the kitchen and open the door to reveal its occupant: a puppy Rubinman, who for some reason doesn't seem quite as ecstatic to see you as he normally does. In fact, he almost looks guilty. Brushing this thought aside, you trudge your weary way to the back door, to let the Rubinman out for his morning ablutions, and as you turn the key in the lock, you happen to glance idly at the kitchen counter to your right, and on that kitchen counter (THAT YOU PREPARE YOUR FOOD ON! YOUR FOOD THAT YOU EAT!) you see a TURD. Once more for dramatic effect, ladies and gentlemen: A TURD.

You instantly stop what you're doing, scarcely able to believe your eyes. Surely not... it can't be... it just can't be. But it is. Someone has crapped on your worktop - and you suspect that someone may still be in the room, looking guilty. You look at the Rubinman. He looks at you. You both look at the turd. You look back at the Rubinman, who seems to say, "Turd? What turd? I don't know nothin' bout no turd, dude. And anyway, lookit the size of me. Am a PUPPY! How would little puppy me even get up there? Better ask Terry, is all I'm sayin'..."

You consider this matter further as you let the dog out and remove the offending... turd. Then you scrub down the kitchen with bleach, about fifty times in a row. Then you have a shower - again with the bleach. Then you have another shower. As you stand there, scrubbing the palms of your hands with a nailbrush and wondering if you and your home will ever feel clean again, you ponder the matter. For the Rubinman has a point, you see. There appears to be no way that he, being a puppy, could have made it up to the worktop and back down again. Seriously, how could the Rubinman have done it?

So you finish your shower and you go to the bedroom, where Terry is still sleeping soundly, mercifully unaware of the scenes of horror that have just taken place in the kitchen.

"Terry, did you by any chance  crap on the kitchen worktop last night?" you ask, trying to make the question sound as casual as possible. Terry says... Actually, maybe let's just draw a veil over what Terry had to say in response to that question.

So. It wasn't Terry. It wasn't me. Rubin says it wasn't him, but the thing is, I just don't believe him. He was found at the scene of the crime. He was in the habit of crapping in the kitchen at the time. And to be perfectly honest, it wouldn't have been the first time we'd found a dog turd in a place it really shouldn't have been. He had previous convictions, basically. I mean, it just didn't look good for him, did it?

As for how it got there, well, you know the phrase, "Don't play with your food"? When Rubin was a puppy, you could easily have exchanged the words "your food" in that sentence with .... Yeah, so this totally wasn't the kind of answer you were expecting to your innocent "How much would you sell Rubinman for?" question, was it? In fact, you'll probably be scarred for life now. I know I am.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, in the years that have passed since The Mysterious Incident of the Dog Turd in the Nighttime, that turd has continued to haunt me. Images of it have popped, unbidden, into my head from time to time - most often when I try to prepare food on the kitchen worktops, to be honest. Thank God we replaced those bad boys is all I can say! So when I received the Skribit question, "How much would you sell Rubinman for?" and I started to write a long, gushy entry about how Rubin is my prechus fur-baby, and no amount of money would ever persuade me to part with him, I suddenly remembered The Turd.

That's why my answer to the question is: when can you pick him up? We'll even throw in the yoda costume for free...

No, I'm kidding. Rubinman is not for sale. And after reading this, would you really want to buy him?

(P.S: Rubin's account of The Mysterious Incident of the Dog Turd in the Nighttime can be found here.)

Skribit! The answers to the easy questions....

So, that whole Skribit thing, that worked out really well, no? I mean, it's not like I got you all to ask me questions, and then just promptly forgot all about it or anything, because that would've totally sucked.

OK, OK - I didn't forget about it, but I did ignore it, and I hold my hands up in shame. Here's the thing, though: in order to go on holiday to Florida for two weeks next month, I've basically had to do an entire month's work of work in advance (long story), so that I still get paid while I'm lying in the sun and shopping at Sephora. This, also, has sucked, and it continues to suck, which hasn't left me with a whole lot of time for Skribit questions. Or, anything, come to think of it.

All of which is my long-winded way of saying that I'm now going to try and let myself off the hook by answering the easiest questions from the Skribit box The other ones - the ones which require me to actually think - will be answered too, but not today. So, without further ado, your questions, my answers...

The peanut image from the header! Am I the only one who doesn't see it anymore? I miss it :(

The peanuts are back! And now there's not just peanuts in the header, but ALL KINDS OF NUTS! Forever Amber: now with added nuts! Yeah, I managed to totally screw up the header one night when I was trying to do something very simple to the template, and by the time I noticed they were gone, I was so frustrated that I decided just to work on the assumption that no one would ever miss them. But you did! And so Terry was immediately dispatched to sort out the header, which just goes to show that I may not be good at answering the Skribit questions, but I DO read them...

If you weren't a redhead, what would you be?

Well, both of my parents have dark hair, so if I hadn't been born a redhead, I'd probably have been a brunette. Would I have kept it that way? Probably not. Not that there's anything wrong with brunettes, of course, but I think if I hadn't been born a redhead, I'd have dyed it... red. No, I'm being serious. It makes me feel special. And it annoys all of the people who find my blog having searched for the phrase "redhead's aren't human" and stuff like that. (actual search term used to find this blog. Sometimes humanity scares me.)

Which are your favourite items in your wardrobe (tops, skirts, dresses, shoes, jackets)?

Given that I edit a blog about shoes, and seem to be stuck in a cycle of buying at least one new pair a month, I think I'd have to say the shoes. Other than that, I'm quite partial to outerwear of all descriptions, and am building up an impressive collection of dresses that I never get the opportunity to wear. Go me!

Edinburgh trams - why?

Dude, search me. I think just because people are lazy? And maybe because Princes Street can feel quite long when you're wearing high heels and carrying a lot of shopping....

So, there you have it. The Skribit box is almost empty. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Now you can go fill it up again with more questions...I promise I'll try and answer them in a timely fashion this time. Maybe with illustrations and everything.*

* Maybe not.

Their Parents Must Be So Proud

Today Terry and I didn't have time to go to the gym, so I decided to do my bit for the ol' waistline by going out for a run around the streets of the Ghetto.

Within ten minutes of leaving the house I was invited to "get my boobies out". About thirty seconds later I was called a "ho" (No, I didn't obey the first command, in case you're wondering if that was why...). And OK, both of these comments came from pre-teens, but seriously: the fact that I can't even go for a walk run within a few hundred metres of my own front door without being verbally abused by kids who clearly aren't mature enough to be allowed out in public without a minder is pretty disgusting to me. Seriously.

On the plus side, though, at least I can give up running now.

Kitchen complete! Sanity lost!

It's taken four weeks, a lot of cursing and the last remaining shreds of my sanity, but at last - at long, freaking last - we have a fully functional, shiny new kitchen. You know, like normal people.

Photographing a really small kitchen = much harder than you'd think, which is why you get two pictures featuring more or less the same view. I promise we DID do the other half, too, it's just that I couldn't really get a decent picture of it without hovering somewhere near the ceiling. I did take a video of it too, but I'm going to take a wild guess that my kitchen isn't of so much interest to you that you'd want to watch it in glorious Technicolour, even although it has consumed Terry's every waking thought for the past four weeks. Mad props to Terry, by the way, for his kitchen fitting skillz, and to my dad, for giving up his Sunday to cut worktops: always a good way to spend a weekend, I find. (I went shopping while this went on, of course. So I can take no credit AT ALL for anything that's happened in the house this month, but I DO have a really nice new coat.)

As well as the kitchen, we also have shiny new floors throughout the house, and will be moving into the garden shed now, so we can keep them that way FOREVER. It's the only way, really. I mean, last night, for instance, after the final boards had gone down and I was lovingly cleaning the new kitchen, I happened to glance out of the window to see this:

Clearly someone had been digging in our long plant pot thingy (which, actually, I have no idea why we even have that, or what's in it. That's the old flooring beside it by the way. We don't just have random bits of rubbish in our garden. Well, not ALL the time, anyway). Now, I knew the culprit couldn't be far away, and sure enough:

Rubin then proceeded to walk around the shiny new kitchen, placing his dirty paws on the shiny new doors, and wiping his dirty face on... everything. And why had he been eating the dirt in the plant pot thingy? Because Terry put FISH OIL in it. It's testament to how stupid trusting I am that I have no idea why he did this, despite questioning him about it twice now:

CONVERSATION 1:

AMBER: Terry, Rubin seems to be eating dirt from the plant pot. WHY?

TERRY: Oh, that'll be because I poured fish oil into it.

AMBER: Okay!

CONVERSATION 2:

AMBER: Terry, Rubin's still eating dirt from that plant pot. Why did you say you poured fish oil into it again?

TERRY: Well, it was better than pouring it down the sink.

AMBER: Oh! Okay!

And this is why no plant or flower we've owned has ever lived for more than a few weeks. And why Rubin's been smelling of fish oil for the past few days, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, the house is now complete. And I promise that this is the last post you will have to read about my house decorating woes for ... oh, how about forever? Because that sounds good to me round about now...

There Goes the Neighbourhood

Summer. We've got it. And I know I whine incessantly about the cold when we don't got it, and it really is very lovely to be able to leave the house without the ol' snowsuit, but God, summer doesn't half get the crazies out.

For instance:

At the football pitch I pass when walking the dog:

A gang of teenagers racing two cars (ACTUAL cars, not toy ones, by the way. Like, real, live cars. That people can travel in.) around the grass pitch (Cars! On the grass! Where children were playing!) and blaring out music at top volume as they went.

In front of the pub I passed not two minutes later:

A gentleman who looked to be in his sixties, wearing nothing but what looked like a pair of boxer shorts, Doc Marten boots and a smile. In MAY. In SCOTLAND. I mean, it's warm, but it's not that freaking warm, people... (Actually, call me old fashioned, but I don't think it's EVER warm enough for boxer shorts in public. Am I wrong?)

From the house I passed one minute after THAT:

Music blaring at the sound level commonly known as "louder than hell".

At the ice cream van parked in our street:

A small white dog barking hysterically at all of the children standing in line, almost as if said dog thought he was a WOLF and that, I dunno, he could frighten them all into handing over their ice creams or something?

At the local beauty spot we walked the dog in yesterday:

Two teenage boys shattering the silence of the pleasant, country meadow-thing with an MP3 player which was blaring music through speakers. SPEAKERS. Why do MP3 players come with speakers now? That's why God Apple made headphones, surely? And if I wanted to listen to a teenager's choice of music, I wouldn't drive all the way to the local beauty spot, you know? No, I'd just walk round the corner, to where they race their cars on the football pitch...

At the very steep hill in the middle of the aforementioned beauty spot:

A red haired girl sailing down the hillside on her ass, emitting a high pitched squealing noise as she went, much to the surprise of the two teenagers who were making out on the other side of the hill.

Oh no, wait: that last one was me. AND I hurt my wrist when I fell.

Ah well,  no one's perfect...

Things Terry Can Fit In His Mouth Part 1: A Pickled Gherklin

Do you know what I spent a good part of the hottest Bank Holiday Monday I can ever remember (in fact, the ONLY hot Bank Holiday Monday I can ever remember) doing, people? Did you guess "gardening"? Yeah, well you guessed right, go to the top of the class. I was out there until 10pm last night, cutting, weeding, plucking, whining, crying, moaning... and then this morning I got up, looked out of the window, and a whole bunch of dandelions were standing there on the grass, thumbing their noses at me. I don't know how they did it, but somehow they must have grown overnight. It's like some kind of miracle or something. Do I win a prize?

Anyway, I also spent part of the bank holiday weekend taking pictures of Terry with various different things in his mouth. No, I haven't completely lost mind (YET) - this was the second most popular Scribbit suggestion over the weekend, and even although it was suggested by Terry himself, lots of you still voted for it (!) and who am I to deny you the pleasure of seeing Terry with pickled gherkins and other sundry items in his mouth?

And so it is that I present to you today, number one of a short series entitled "Things Terry Can Fit In His Mouth". This one is called "Pickled Gherkin". Because. well, it's a pickled gherkin. Enjoy! Oh, and if you're wondering what the MOST popular suggestion was, well, you'll have to check back later in the week. (It's one that requires me to write actual words, you see. With this one I can just post a picture and my work for the day is done...)

IMPORTANT! Don't try this at home kids! Terry is a professional who has trained for many years to be able to do this....

How We're Living

So, it turns out we COULD actually fit more kitchen stuff into the living room after all:

Kitchen sink: not even visible under all that MESS.

The rest of the kitchen stuff was delivered yesterday. The things in the picture above are the bits of the old kitchen that are currently sitting around in the living room before we turf them out into the back garden, where they will live in peace and harmony along with The Tree That Scratched Me. Or, at least, they will live there until the council come and take them away. IF, of course, the council agree to actually take them away, and that's not looking at all likely right now, let me tell you.

Conversation Terry had with the council:

Terry: Hi, I'd like to arrange a bulky uplift please. There's quite a lot of stuff because I'm putting in a new kitchen and throwing out the old one.

Council: No problem. What do you have for us?

Terry: Well, there's a cooker.

Council: Uh-huh, no problem.

Terry: A bunch of old worktops. They're pretty long.

Council: Sure!

Terry: There's laminate flooring that used to cover the floors of our entire house.

Council: No problem!

Terry: And the old kitchen units.

Council: Coolio!

Terry: A chair.

Council: Bring that chair on!

Terry: The kitchen sink.

Council: We love uplifting kitchen sinks!

Terry: Oh, and there's some small bits of wood that used to be the front of the kitchen drawers, but they're really small, so I don't know if they count.

Council: WHOA THERE, daddy-o! Did you say "small bits of wood?!"

Terry: Ummm, yes. Yes, I did. Old drawer fronts. Small, you know?

Council: We're not picking THEM up. They'll never fit into our van. And how will we carry them?

Terry: Well, I can pick them up in one hand, easily. They're small.

Council: Oh hell to the no. We're not taking them. What we'll need to do is send someone round to "assess" them, to see if there's the remotest possibility of us being able to uplift them for you. But I'll tell you now: there isn't.

Terry: Ummm. OK. But the cooker, worktops, large units, miles of laminate floor, office chair and kitchen sink: they're all OK?

Council: Oh yeah, they're no problem.

* headdesk *

So, once again we are faced with being "assessed" before the relevant authorities can help us. Great. And the beat goes on....

In other news, the more observant of you (and those not reading via RSS or email) may have noticed a fugly little doo-dah called "scribit" sitting in my sidebar. This is a new thing I am trying out, which basically allows you to ask me questions which I can then answer here on the blawg. Which means I don't actually have to think for myself, EVER. I am convinced this experiment will fail miserably, but until it does, if you have a burning question, or just something you would really, really like me to write about, ask away. (You just click the "What should I write about?" text to enter your suggestion.) All I ask is that you not make your questions:

a) rude

or

b) maths related. So none of that whole, "If a train leaves the station at 2pm travelling at 70mph...." nonsense, 'kay?

The First Cut Is the Deepest

People, we are fighting in a WAR. Yes, it's true, although by "we", of course, I mean "me". I am fighting in a war. My enemy? The garden. Yes, it is that time of year again: the time of year when I begin a relentless and monotonous cycle of fighting back the garden, only for it to grow like billy-o (Who IS Billy-O, by the way?), forcing me to fight it back AGAIN the very next week. * Deep sigh *

I hate our garden. I hate it with the kind of all-consuming hatred I generally reserve only for Crocs. It's not a very big garden, but despite not being very big, it somehow manages to be extremely high maintenance - which I guess makes it a lot like its owner, now I come to think about it.

Anyway, this year I put off that first important grass-cutting for as long as I could. As anyone who hates gardening will tell you, once you've given the grass that first cut, that's it, there's no going back. You will have to keep re-cutting it every few days now for the rest of the summer, in a boring and occasionally dangerous procedure that will give you absolutely no pleasure at all. It goes a little bit like this:

1. It rains all week
2. On Saturday morning, just as you're contemplating a long, leisurely lie in, the sky will clear for a few, brief hours, and the sun will come out.
3. While everyone else is enjoying this unexpected sunshine, you will have to rush to throw on your oldest clothes, and begin the backbreaking labour of GARDENING.
4. At some point during this hard labour you will burn your scalp. It will be painful to brush your hair for the next week. Despite this, you will forget to wear your hat again next week. Someone should slap you.
5. As you finish the aforementioned backbreaking labour, it will start to rain.
6. It will rain steadily for the next week, so you will not be able to actually use or appreciate the garden that you have so carefully tended.
7. Until the following Saturday, of course, at which point there will, once again, be a few precious hours of sunlight, all of which you will spend up to your knees in mud.

And the thing is, gardening is HARD WORK. On TV, they always make gardening look like a very genteel kind of activity, normally involving a pretty sun hat (gah) and one of those little pads which you kneel on while gently plucking some flowers, which you will later arrange tastefully around your beautiful home. Yes, Bree from Desperate Housewives, I am looking at you...

In real life, of course, gardening is nothing like that. NOTHING. Actually, gardening involves wearing your oldest clothes with a pair of wellies (mine have pink and orange flowers on them, but even so, people, EVEN SO!), and hauling a piece of machinery twice your weight over a piece of rain sodden ground until either it breaks or you do. Normally I am the one who breaks first. Then, this Sunday, as I roughened my hands and almost broke my back giving the garden that first tedious going over of the year, THIS happened:

Yes, that is my back: my battle scarred back, maimed by Public Enemy Number 1: the tree in our back garden. It reached out and maliciously scratched me as I bent down to work like a slave on the ground underneath it. It was the tree's fatal mistake, for if you are a tree, you really, really don't want to get on the wrong side of a woman who has an axe in her garden shed. I mean, I don't think I actually DO have an axe in my garden shed, but I could get one. And trust me, if these hostilities are ever repeated, I totally will. The flora and fauna are not my friends. The garden is not a green and pleasant place: it is the scene of my torment every single weekend in summer. Still, at least I didn't burn my head this time....

MOT DAY: Survived! Now, what to buy...

In slightly happier news after yesterday's whine-fest, my car has passed its MOT today. Yay! Party for Amber's car! Hooray for that lean, green machine, which would, quite frankly, have had a bit of a cheek to have expected me to spend any more money on it this year, especially mere weeks before I fly to Florida to buy up Sephora relax.

Now, with the money I thought I'd be spending on a new combobulator or flux capacitor or something, should I:

A. Buy this dress -

B.  Buy this dress:

C: Buy this dress:

D: Order all three dresses, try them on in the privacy of own home and then send two back. Or, you know. one back. Maybe.

or

E: Not buy any dresses. Slap self with a wet fish instead, because, seriously, when will I realise that I DO NOT EVER WEAR DRESSES. Or, indeed, go anywhere that would require me to wear a dress. I wear skinny jeans and vest tops every day, and hell, that's probably not going to change any time soon.

Buy I would really like to wear more dresses. Like, around the house or something.

Your assistance on this matter would be appreciated...

The Music of the Night

So, last night we did our usual "winding down from the weekend" thing: dinner, glass of wine, calling the police at midnight to complain about the EAR SPLITTING NOISE from people blasting out loud music from their houses... Just the usual, really.

This experience was slightly strange, though, for two reasons:

1. The music was coming from at least two streets away

2. It was Terry who finally flipped and and called the police about it, not me, Freaky Noise Hatin' Girl.

Being the party animals we are (Look, you try living in the Little House of Renovation Horrors and see how tired you are of an evening...), we had gone to bed at about midnight. Terry was settling Rubin down for the night, so it was I who heard the noise first. In fact, I heard it the second I walked into the bedroom.

THUMP! said the noise. THUMPTHUMPTHUMP! Then THUMP! it said again. Then it did that thing where it shut the hell up for a few minutes, making me think that maybe it was just a car stereo or something, and then THUMP! it said again.

Instantly, my head exploded.

Regular readers will not need me to explain to them how totally incandescent with rage excessive noise makes me. For the benefit of new readers: excessive noise makes me incandescent with rage. Seriously.

Well, I threw open the bedroom window and glared around the street, trying to work out where the THUMP! THUMP! of the booming baseline was coming from. It was at this point that I made my shocking discovery: the noise wasn't coming from our street at all. It was coming from some unspecified location far, far away - a distant galaxy perhaps - way the hell past our street and in the direction of the estate that lies beyond it.

Now, I know sound tends to carry at night, but in order to understand just how ear-splittingly loud this music would have to have been for us to have heard it from INSIDE OUR HOUSE  you have to know that there are no other streets really close to us. There's our house, then there's a row of houses opposite us, then there's a strip of freaking FORREST, which normally acts as a pretty good sound buffer, then there's a footpath, then there's the next door estate.

So, basically, this must have been one hell of a party is all I'm saying.

Anyway, I must have been even more tired than I realised, because rather than pacing the house hysterically for hours, ranting about how INCONSIDERATE and FREAKING STUPID other people are, I chose to rant hysterically for only about two minutes, before putting in my earplugs and trying to go to sleep. Which left Terry do deal with the onslaught of noise all by himself.

Now, Terry is a pretty placid person. Nothing really annoys him. Seriously, you could come and wash your car near our house any time with the stereo blaring, and Terry wouldn't bat an eyelid. I know this because most people do wash their cars with the stereos blaring. But Terry had just spent an entire week destroying and then recreating a kitchen with his bare hands, which is why it came to pass that I woke with a jolt some time later to hear him calling the police.

Yes, people, Terry had finally Had Enough. It was no more Mr Nice Guy for him. Sadly it was "No More Mr Nice Guy" for the police, either. The woman who answered the phone, you see, wanted to send someone round to our house to "assess the noise level". This person would call us first, she said. Did I mention that it was now about ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING? Well, it was. And we were not at all down with the idea of getting out of bed and sitting down with "noise assessors" in the middle of the night. I mean, what happened to the old method of dealing with loud parties, whereby the police would drive into the street in question, identify the source of the noise (which, given that we could hear it from MORE THAN TWO STREETS AND A FORREST AWAY, shouldn't have been the hardest job in the world, ya know?) and tell them to shut the hell up?  Seriously, the type of noise that can be heard from that far away is not the kind of noise that needs "assessing". It's the kind of noise that needs switching off. No?

Apparently not, though. We have no idea whether the police did go out to the noise makers, but the THUMP! THUMP! went on until about 1.30am in the morning. Which sucked. And this, my friends, is why everyone in the world should own ear plugs...

In slightly better news, I found my gym mojo - it was hiding underneath the kitchen sink. Latest crazy running time: 45 minutes. I am back in the game, people! (What is the game, though?)

Oh, crap.

I really thought the whole kitchen situation couldn't get any worse. "It totally can't get any worse," said Terry, cheerfully wrenching a cabinet off the wall with his bare hands. And I believed him. Then last night I went downstairs and found this:

Which, really? Is WORSE.

And then there's this:

ALSO WORSE.

On the plus side, the whole no kitchen = no food thing means that a Chinese takeaway is on its way to us right now.  Even so: WORSE.

Spoke too soon...

Remember that whole, "Hey, I am totally not bothered by the renovation of the kitchen, and the fact that I haven't been able to use the ground floor of my house for three weeks now AT ALL" thing? Well, this was my cooker and food preparation area yesterday:

It's worse now. Oh, so much worse! And no, the empty wine bottle isn't empty because we drunk it in a fit of kitchen-inspired rage. In fact, I have no idea what Terry was doing with the empty wine bottle. And I don't want to know.

So, dinner at ours this week, anyone? ANYONE?

Luckily, that cooker is getting replaced soon, because I don't think I'd really want to use it again now. In fact, it's lucky that it's ALL getting replaced, because to be perfectly honest with you, when a house gets THIS MESSY, I just want to sell it and start over somewhere else. Somewhere clean, with a working kitchen and no sink in the living room. Speaking of which...

Kitchen sink watch 2008! Kitchen sink in da house! It's planning on crashing on that couch for a while longer, while it works through its issues and learns to accept that yes, it is a kitchen sink, and its role in life is to... do sinky things. In the kitchen. What really annoys me, meanwhile, is the fact that these pictures don't even come CLOSE to illustrating what a total and utter wreck we're living in right now. I mean, seriously, that picture just looks like we have a normal house, albeit one with a sink on the couch, doesn't it? What you can't see, of course, is the fact that the floor you can see here? Is the only clear area of floor in the entire room, the rest being taken up with mess. MESS.

Still, at least that whole wooden cutlery tray thing is working out pretty good for us:

Also pictured: Mr Potato Head. Hi, Mr Potato Head! It's just a shame we can't use you no more on account of no longer being able to, you know, EAT, thanks to the building site that is our kitchen. Hey, remember FOOD? Man, that stuff rocked. Oh, and yesterday? The toaster broke. Now we're having to use the grill to make toast, the food of champions, and given that I didn't even know we HAD a grill, that's not been much fun at all.

About three more weeks of this to go. Send food parcels to the usual address... (And also: wine)

Egg On My Face

Well, the weekend = good, but every so slightly bizarre.

Saturday started out in in the usual way: with a chef throwing bits of egg at me and expecting me to catch them in my mouth. I really wish I was joking about this, but nope, I was a performing seal for the night, folks. My life's ambition has been realised!

You see, when we were in Florida last year, Terry and I went to a teppanyaki  restaurant with my parents. It was great, and there was no catching of eggs in mouths AT ALL, which I find is usually a good sign when choosing where to eat of an evening, so when we discovered that a similar restaurant had opened in Edinburgh, naturally we decided to go along, and to take four of our friends with us. What we DIDN'T realise, of course, was that two of those friends would be forced to don chef's hats and spend part of their evening throwing uncooked eggs into the air and attempting to catch them ON THEIR HEADS, but hey, we're sure those friends will start speaking to us again soon.

And it could have been worse. It could have been ME who was forced to try and catch the eggs on my head, and as these were RAW eggs, that could've been messy. Like, really messy. Messier than the mess I actually made, when the chef went round the table and threw bits of cooked egg at us all, expecting us to catch them IN OUR MOUTHS.

Terry went first with this and, having spent a good chunk of his childhood practicing for just such an eventuality (And to think some people said that time was wasted!), managed to catch the piece of egg in his mouth first time. I really hope no one's eating while they're reading this, by the way. Especially not egg.

Then it was my turn.

Now, I should preface this story with the fact that I cannot catch at all. AT ALL. Not even with my hands. I spent a large part of my childhood pretending to have forgotten my gym kit, so that I wouldn't have to do sports at school, and when they DID force me to play basketball, I managed to perfect the fine art of running round the court looking like I was doing something, but actually keeping as far away from the ball as was humanly possible. Seriously, I was a MASTER at it.  (Interestingly, you'd think this would make me really good at dodgeball, but nope, if I try to play dodgeball I will get hit every time. Every. Time.)

So, what I'm basically trying to say here is that I can't catch. Or, indeed, throw. I was that kid that was always picked last for all the teams. If you try and throw something to me, nine times out of ten, I will totally miss it. The other time, I will be so surprised to have caught the thing, that I will instantly drop it in shock, often emitting a stupid, girlie squeak as I do it. So no, the "catching eggs in my mouth" thing was never going to work out. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and managed to bat the first egg sideways with my head, sending it all over our friend Gillian's coat. Sorry about that, Gillian, if you're reading this.

The second egg burst spectacularly on my left eyeball, in a scene which still makes Terry laugh even now when he remembers it. Luckily for me, the egg was cooked. Unluckily for Gillian, the third one I tried to catch hit me square in the middle of the forehead, and only just missed falling into her open handbag. (A word to the wise: never sit next to Amber at dinner.)

After that, the chef gave up on trying to turn me into an egg-catching sensation, and moved onto his other victims, all of whom managed to acquit themselves much better than I did.

That was just the start of the night, though.

After dinner, we went for drinks, and then at some point during the drinks, Ewen and Gillian announced that they had been invited to a birthday party later that night, and were willing to risk social embarrassment by taking Terry and I along with them. And we were really glad they did, because as we pulled into the street where the party was being held, there was a HIGHLAND COW standing in the middle of it. A highland cow.

A Highland Cow, yesterday
(Note: our cow didn't have the massive scary horns. It was a lady cow.)

And do you know,that highland cow trotted before our car up the hill, leading the way (almost) to the party we were headed to, and making me wonder what the HELL was in that egg I had eaten that was making me hallucinate being guided through the night by a COW. Then the cow turned into a nearby field and trotted off, presumably to go and tuck itself into its Highland Cow Home, wherever that may be. I sometimes still think of it now.

So, that was our Saturday, cows, eggs and all. How was your weekend?

A list I'm not even going to apologise for

I'm exhausted. No, seriously: EXHAUSTED. So, remember I told you about how I'm going to Florida in June? And how that's going to be lovely and relaxing and I can't wait? Well, that all may be true, but as it turns out, I will REALLY NEED THAT HOLIDAY because when you work for yourself, and particularly when your work involves churning out a ridiculous number of blog posts ever weekday, the run-up to any break is not so relaxing, really.

I, you see, am currently less than a quarter of the way through writing advance posts to cover the period I will be away on holiday. IN JUNE. I started doing this at the start of this month (APRIL! I started preparing for my June holiday in APRIL!) and let me tell you, that writing-my-posts-in-advance thing is getting pretty old already. My hope is that by the next time I decide to take a holiday, I will be rich enough to be able to just pay someone else to cover for me, but in the meantime, it's a case of all work and no play makes Forever Amber a pretty dull blog. Which is why today, my friends, you are getting a list. A list which is a follow up to my previous Five Things You Didn't Want to Know About Me post. I call it 'Five More Things You Didn't Want to Know About Me'. Here it is:

Five More Totally Random Things You Didn't Want to Know About Me

1. My fingernails grow freakishly quickly. Seriously, if I didn’t trim those bad boys every couple of days, I’d be like one of those old women with the long, gnarled nails that look like tree branches before a month was out:

This would be a good thing, obviously, if I was one of those women who enjoys carefully tending to her nails and looking after them like they were precious babies, but, er, I'm not one of those women. I am lazy. And I can't stand the feel of long nails on the keyboard, so I'm currently working a "hands-that-could-easily-belong-to-a-man" look instead.  And speaking of keyboards...

2. I can type very fast, but with no accuracy whatsoever. My most used key is the "back" button. Seriously, I used it about ten times in this bullet point alone. Gah.

3. I hardly ever watch TV. OK, that’s a lie: I watch Neighbours religiously, and I'd urge every last one of you to do the same, and I love me some Lost. The rest I can take or leave, and I will mostly leave. I have never been one of those people who is obsessed with TV shows, which sometimes makes social occasions difficult for me, because I just have to stand there dumbly while the people around me go, "Did you see Heroes? Did you see The Apprentice? Did you see Insert-TV-Show-of-Your-Choice*?" Me, I’d rather read a book. Speaking of which…

4. I read anything from 2 – 5 books every week. I’m a fast reader, and I’m also a compulsive reader: it’s pretty much my default activity, so if I’m at home and I’m not working or doing chores, I’ll be reading. When I go on holiday, my suitcase is weighed down with the number of books I have to take with me. Because of the volume of my reading, though, I tend to read a lot of rubbish: I can’t afford to buy a bunch of new books every single week, even at Amazon’s prices, so I’m forced to rely on the meager stock of our local library, which has pretty slim pickings indeed. This is why I sometimes end up with books I’m too embarrassed to be seen in public with…

5. If there was some kind of freaky disaster, and the only food left in the world was bread, I'd be OK with that. I could happily live on toast for the rest of my life if I absolutely had to. In fact, I could really fancy some now...

* Not an actual show. Although it wouldn't surprise me if it was, to be honest.

House project: going suspiciously smoothly

Now, I realise I've probably just jinxed not only our current "redecorating the house/making our lives temporarily unbearable" project, but all of the future ones we embark upon too, with the use of the above headline, but seriously, we're good. So far. I mean, I realise most of you probably expected Terry and I to drop through the floor, or blow the roof off or something like that in our continuing quest to own a House that Doesn't Suck, but really, we're totally blase about this now. It's like, "Kitchen sink in the living room? What kitchen sink in the livingroom? Be careful you don't trip over the cooker in the hall on your way out, now!"

That's not to say that the kitchen sink ISN'T still in the livingroom, obviously, because, well, it is. And the cooker, actually. But the upper level of the house now has a complete set of new floors, and we didn't even break anything to get them:

I'm now pretty much living upstairs full time, like some kind of mad old hermit lady, venturing downstairs only to watch Neighbours and go to the gym, and actually, not really to go to the gym because... meh. After that whole "running for 49 minutes and then almost dying" stunt, I kinda lost my mojo a bit. OK, a lot. There's only so much time you can spend running on the spot before you suddenly realise that hey, this is actually pretty damn boring, and it would appear that, for me, that time was 49 minutes. And two seconds. 

Anyway, Terry is downstairs banging at the kitchen ceiling with one of my old hairbrushes (I wish I was joking about that, but I'm not) so I must go and investigate. Wish me luck...

Things We Learned from Neighbours

As some of you already know, because Terry and I never really grew up and left our student days behind us, the absolute highlight of our day is the 1.45pm broadcast of Neighbours. Don't judge us until you've tried it and you, too, find yourself lying awake at night troubled by such questions as "Who will buy number 26?" and "How does Carmella do that thing with her mouth?"

Anyway, like the Famous Five before it, it recently came to my attention that there is many a life lesson to be learned from Australian soap operas, so,, just in case you're unfortunate enough to be at work while it's on, here they are:

1. One doctor is more than enough to cater to the medical needs of an entire community.
2. Most suburban Australian homes have an unlimited amount of bedrooms, so even although from the outside they look like they have four bedrooms max, they will comfortably accommodate two, sometimes three families.
3. This is lucky, because most of them actually DO contain two or three families.
4. Still only one doctor, though!
5. If you ever decide to talk about someone behind their back, they will almost always turn out to have been standing just behind the open door, listening.
6. When you walk into a house, it is absolutely fine to just leave the front door wide open, by the way. Nothing bad will happen because of this.
7. No, the real threat comes from fire, plane crashes and minor explosions, so watch out for those.
8. Lucky you’ve got that doctor on hand, eh?
9. In every suburban street, at least two people will be suffering from memory loss at any given time.
10. Often, this is due to a brain tumour.
11. Don’t worry about brain tumours, though: they are rarely fatal, and the operation to remove them will leave you with only one small sticking plaster on the side of your head.
12. Oh, and memory loss, obviously.
13. Your brain tumour will be removed by the same doctor who delivered your baby, amputated your leg (which you lost in the last major explosion) and treated your head cold.
14. Not the same doctor who prescribed you the drugs you ended up getting addicted to that time, though: that was just a fake doctor.
15. Your new neighbour will always have a dark secret.
16. You will find out what this secret is by listening at the open door of their house one day.
17. If the new neighbours have twins, the dark secret is that one of them is evil.
18. All sets of twins are governed by this good/evil rule.
19. This makes life really, really difficult, because identical twins are SO alike that not even their parents can tell them apart. Seriously.
20. So if a twin ever stars doing Bad Stuff (and a twin will, trust me), you should work on the assumption that it is the OTHER twin who is actually responsible.
21. But listen at their open door anyway, to be sure of this.
22. When your children decide to leave the quiet, yet intensely interesting, neighbourhood in which you live, you will never see them again, ever.
23. Not even if you get a brain tumour, have to have something amputated, have another child, re-marry, or die.
24. All of these things are likely to happen to you, so again, it’s a good job you’ve got that doctor on hand.
25. Don’t worry, though, because most children don’t move out of the neighbourhood: they just move into one of the houses next door. (See rule 2: unlimited bedrooms)
26. If they don’t do this, and actually do chose to leave the area altogether, don’t worry: give it a few weeks and you will soon have a bunch of totally new children living with you, that you just took in out of the kindness of your heart.
27. Most suburban families are happy to take relative strangers into their homes, even if there are lots of them, plus animals.
28. Speaking of animals, though, don’t worry too much about these either, because if you DO decide to get an animal – a sheep, say – you will hardly ever have to see it.
29. This is also true of babies and small children, interestingly enough.
30. Sometimes your child will go away for some reason (school trip/ visit to brother or sister who moved out of state / kidnapped by evil twin, etc) and return with a completely different face.
31. Say nothing about this: and be aware that it may happen again at any time.
32. Kidnapping can happen to anyone, and often does.
33. The kidnapped person is always returned safely to their family (although sometimes with a different face), so if the kidnapped person is you, try to chill.
34. All kidnapped persons are taken to a caravan in the bush.
35. Although this experience is traumatic, you will get over it pretty quickly – like, within a day or two.
36. This is true of all major traumas, even plane crashes and explosions.
37. If someone is missing, presumed dead, they won’t be.
38. They will always turn up again years later, so if the missing person was your husband or wife, and you remarried in the meantime, that’s going to be awkward, huh?
39. Although not really, because the missing person will undoubtedly have suffered memory loss – or you will have.
40. And most people marry four or five times in their lives anyway, so like plane crashes and brain tumours, it’s no biggie.
41. All of the major dramas of your life will be played out in a coffee shop.
42. Don’t bother to order coffee/food, though, because if you do, you will always have to leave seconds after it arrives.
43. Normally to go to the hospital, which everyone in your street will have reason to visit at least once every week.
44. So it’s a good idea to get to know that friendly neighbourhood doctor!

If there are any I've missed (and I'm sure there are), feel free to add them...

Rubinman: All by Himself

Apologies for the double-whammy of Rubin-related posts this week, but when he showed me this video he* made, I laughed so hard I actually cried. Also, I'm too lazy to write a real post today, so suck it up, people, suck it up. And look out for a guest appearance from my main man, Ted:

* OK, it was actually Terry who made the video. Don't tell Rubin I told you.

When your dog gets better press than you do

Imagine, if you will, readers that you have a blog. In fact, chances are you already do have a blog, so imagine you have a whole bunch of blogs: a veritable blog network, in fact! And imagine that every day you get up and you work long and hard on your blogs, slaving diligently over a hot keyboard for hours on end, and working long into the night to bring your loyal readers news from the world of fashion, beauty and random acts of stupidity.

You do all of this, not because you are a complete glutton for punishment (although that too), but because you keep on telling yourself that one day, one of these blogs will Get Noticed by ...er, someone important. Someone who will, say, feature them in a magazine or just give you wads of cash, for reasons that aren't yet 100% clear to you. "And then I shall be rich beyond my wildest dreams!" you tell yourself, laughing a manic laugh as you pour another mug of coffee and get back to burning that midnight oil.

So, say you do all of this, and then one day you open up your email and you find a message from a journalist telling you that your dog - that creature who still pees on the washing machine every time you go to the gym, and who once ate three of your shoes in one sitting - has just beaten you to the punch, and been featured in a magazine. BEFORE YOU.

Yeah, that would suck.

Actually, it was pretty damn cool, too. Rubin, you see, has appeared in this month's edition of Dog's Today magazine, in an article about blogging. See, there's a picture of his blog and everything:

Writer Julie Hill says:

"Rubinman is a Bichon Frise who writes his own blog, and Rubin is another dog with character. I live with a Bichon, and from the photographs I recognise many of the traits of the breed, such as relaxing with tummy exposed and paws flopping. Rubin apparently has a distinctive odour, unfortunate toilet habits, and a taste for pulling the 'brains' out of tennis balls. His blog is offbeat and amusing."

So, I read all of that, and all I saw was, "Blah, blah, blah, blah...offbeat and amusing." And it made me smile because as much as I'd hate to try and take credit for Rubin's work, I did teach him everything he knows. About blogging, I mean. Not about peeing on the washing machine and having a distinctive odour. And then it hit me. "It's the dog who will make us rich!" I thought. "At last that bag of fur will start paying his way, and fame and fortune will be mine! I mean his." This thought has cheered me up greatly. And really, it almost made up for the person who called me a "pretentious asshole" in a StumbleUpon review last week...

Rubin, meanwhile, has let the "fame" go to his head, rather, I'm afraid. He’s asking for his own agent now and refusing to work unless he gets at least the minimum wage and five weeks' paid holiday. And he tried to chase an Alsatian last week. You can’t get the staff these days, you really can't.

Everything including the kitchen sink

So, this Saturday is my mum's birthday, so over the weekend I went to the shops, and this is what I bought:

Yes, platform pee-toes: the shoes of champions. So, yeah, Happy Birthday, mum! And don't worry about these not fitting too good, because, as luck would have it, they both fit me perfectly, so whew, disaster averted there, eh?

Oh, and I also bought an entire new kitchen and new flooring for the entire house. Because, you know, that whole "re-doing the bathroom" thing worked out so well, and was just SO! MUCH! FUN! that we thought, "Hell, let's put ourselves through another couple of months of that crap." I mean, it's not like we had plans, or anything...

Of course, I say I bought this brand, spanking new kitchen and flooring-for-the-entire-house: what I mean by that is we bought it, and what I mean by that is: Terry did it. I contributed financially, obviously, but in terms of actually organising the whole thing, Terry did it all the measuring and boring stuff, and I just walked around the store going, "I like that one. Let's get that one." I don't really "do" buying kitchens, you see. Me, I just buy shoes...

Anyway, what all of this means is that the next couple of months, they're not going to be so much fun for either of us, but particularly not for Terry, who will be installing the new kitchen and laminate-for-the-whole-house. Poor Terry. I will be suffering too, of course, because I am a compulsive neat freak, and this is how our living room looks right now:

That silver thing you can only just see at the top of the picture? Is the kitchen sink. And I just know that this sink is probably going to go all "bathroom radiator" on us and sit there for months now, unable to fulfill its destiny as a sink, because we'll be just too darn lazy busy to install it. God, I love it when we do home improvements, I really do.

The worst thing about this? That's not even half of the stuff. No, the rest of it doesn't arrive until May 1st, so we have AT LEAST one month of living like this ahead of us. If it's anything like the whole bathroom saga, we'll end up camping out in one room for the duration, like savages, although, looking on the bright side, at least I won't have to clean the house any more because seriously, what is the point? Fun times, folks, fun times. Most exciting purchase BY FAR, though: one of those trays that holds knives and forks and stuff, which is made completely out of wood. OF WOOD.

God, I'm getting boring in my old age, aren't I? Let's look at my shoes again:

Ah, much better!

Don't go knockin' on my door

Why must people keep knocking my door all the time? If it's not men wanting to know whether I want my driveway mono-blocked (Yes I do, but I don't want to pay for it, so go away) or kids selling tablet, it's people telling me that, hey, looks like my windows are about to cave right in, so it's lucky they were in the area because their dad just happens to have a double-glazing firm, and they could totally cut me a deal right then and there!

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, people, LEAVE ME ALONE. Can you not see I'm busy looking at shoes I can't afford on the internet doing my important work? Can you not HEAR how crazy my dog gets every time you set so much as ONE TOE on my non-monoblocked driveway (hey, maybe I should... Nah, forget it.), the sound sending him into the kind of hysterical rage that it takes us HOURS - well, minutes, anyway - to bring him down from?

Also: people who are collecting for charity? You knock on my door one more time late at night with your pious expression and your talk of how you need to take all of my money for "the chyyyyldren" and I'll set my dog on you, m'kay? And bearing in mind the fact that we haven't had any mail since Rubin rounded up the postman that time, believe me, that is not an idle threat. I will decide when and how I give to charity. ME. Not you. So don't even think about disturbing me in my important work to try and guilt-trip me into handing over a bunch of cash. What are you, highwaymen?

Anyway, I don't keep cash in the house. (Actually, I don't keep cash in the bank, either. I keep my cash in the form of shoes, in my wardrobe. And that;s how I like it.) I'm like the Queen that way. The only way you're getting money off me is if you start taking Visa. And even then you're not getting any money off me because I DON'T HAND OUT MONEY TO TOTAL STRANGERS WHO KNOCK ON MY DOOR LATE AT NIGHT, CAUSING MY DOG TO HAVE A CONNIPTION AND DISTURBING ME IN MY IMPORTANT WORK.

I will take some of that tablet, though.

P.S. Just speaking of Rubin, he finally decided to get his paw out and start updating his blog again, and today he has taken the lazy bloggers route by posting a short video clip of himself. You should go see. Oh COME ON, people, it's a freakin' TALKING DOG, what more do you want?

P.P.S He doesn't actually talk in the video though. Just thought I should make that clear in order to manage your expectations effectively. He only talks to special people, know what I mean?