July, 2007:

Miraculously my good mood survived the night, although alas the good weather didn’t. Still, it hasn’t rained yet despite the black clouds, so I better take this opportunity to count some blessings before my good cheer gets washed away.

Star Wars Lego PS2 game
It’s been about two years since I even picked up the controller for my playstation; but the lure of Star Wars and Lego proved too much for me when I saw it on sale in the shop the other day. I have now completed the Star Wars IV: A New Hope section, and am currently battling to escape from Hoth. I think that makes me officially a Wookie.

Cash injection
When scanning the graph for the last post, I discovered the Scottish £5 note I’d left in there from this post. Free money! Of course I can’t spend it anywhere, but that’s not the point.

On the move
In the last three days Evan has learnt to roll over, crawl, and pull himself to standing from sitting. We now have a fully mobile baby. Looks like it’s time to move my broken glass and razor blades collection to a higher shelf.

Bond, James Bond
I am only three films off completing my James Bond dvd collection. Of the ones remaining to buy: Tomorrow Never Dies is next on the list, Casino Royal I’m waiting to come down in price, and I’m putting Live and Let Die off for as long as possible as all those voodoo shenanigans really freak me out.

The end of an era
The Coke iTunes promotion finishes on Thursday at midnight. While this means that my chances of wining an iPod are rapidly receding, it does mean that I will no longer have an obsessional fixation with the contest. No more eying up empty coke bottles on other peoples tables at cafes, no more getting up at 4am to type in codes, and no more seething bitterness when I read about other people winning my iPod. Given time and the correct detox regime I should be able to reduce my diet coke intake to around seven or eight litres a day.

And of course:

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You may have noticed that my blog has been a little more downbeat and negative recently. Even if you haven’t, I certainly have. Evan’s illness had something to do with it of course, but the grumpiness had set in well before then.

It’s the weather. For the past two months there has hardly been a single day when it hasn’t rained. And we’re not talk about the gentle pitter patter of raindrops here. No, it’s been absolutely pissing it down. And so, instead of spending a glorious summer frolicking outside in the suns gentle rays we’ve been stuck inside, glumly looking out of the window and dreaming of better days.

I’m convinced my performance as a parent is directly proportional to the amount of time I am able to spend outside the house. If I spend more than one day in a row without stepping out the front door I go from a relatively patient, creative, and fun loving father to somebody who puts a DVD of The Sound of Music on constant repeat, scatters some cheerios on the floor, and just lets the kids fend for themselves.

See. There’s a graph. That means it must be true.

When it rains not only are you prevented from doing outside activities, but you are prevented from doing a lot of inside things too. Because for every child friendly place you can think of that’s out of the rain you can guarantee that all of the other parents in the area have thought of it as well. The playgyms, the butterfly houses, the aquariums, the libraries, they’re all teeming with thousands of grouchy, stir crazy children. And what’s more, it’s now the school holidays so 85% of these children will be twice the size of Amy and not particularly concerned if they trample on her head on their way past her.

No, I don’t like it when it’s raining.

But today we had a brief reprise. The sun came out, and for longer than an hour too. We went for a walk, we played football, we sat on the grass, we got out of the bloody house for a change. It was good.

It won’t last of course. The forecast is for more torrential rain and the weatherman says it’s going to stay this way for the foreseeable future. But today we all got a bit of fresh air, and for now at least my mood has been lifted.

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It seems that we are members of the social elite without realizing it:

• Cost of having a child full time at Amy and Evan’s nursery: £7,800 pa
• Cost of having a child full time at Rishworth, a local high prestige private school: £8,460 pa
• Percentage difference: 8%

Rishworth school has a sports hall, tennis courts, sports fields, a swimming pool, and a performing arts center. Nursery has a plastic slide and some CD’s hung from a tree in the “sensory garden”. Doesn’t feel quite right somehow. Here’s some more numbers for you:

• Cost of having two children at nursery full time: £15,600 pa
• Our rough combined income (net): £32,000

To be honest I am being a little over-dramatic. We don’t actually send the kids to nursery full time, just three days a week. But still, currently nursery takes up 30% of our income. Add in the 21% that goes to our mortgage, and the 48% that’s blown on my Diet Coke addiction, and you can see that money is a bit tight at the moment.

I think I might buy myself an iPod to console myself.

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Evan was admitted to hospital last night. Breathing problems, just like last time. I could tell you the whole tale: Kerry’s increasing concern throughout the evening, my frustration at having to be at work, my colleagues kindness in covering for me when I eventually left, my in-laws support in going to the hospital with Kerry and then looking after Amy today. But there is no value in it for me to go over it all again. It wouldn’t be enjoyable, cathartic, or useful to write, and so I’m letting it lie.

He’s ok. He’s back home after having steroids, oxygen, and various nebulizers overnight. He’s still wheezy and breathing rapidly. We have our instructions on what to look for and reassurances that we did the right thing in seeking help. They say he’s just one of those children who’s lungs take a beating every time he’s ill. Just like Amy was, and she appears to have grown out of it now.

But still, the whole thing is very upsetting.

I hate it when my children become ill.

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Yesterday Amy, Evan, and I went to see my mum in Holmfirth. At the urging of Madonna, the Pussycat Dolls, and the other notorious public transport users that populated Live Earth I decided to be environmentally friendly and catch the bus.

While there are regular busses into Huddersfield from our village, services to the smaller towns and villages are pretty few and far between. I had looked the bus times up on the internet before I left home and was expecting one in around twenty minutes. But looking at the timetable at the bus stop it appeared that one wasn’t due for around an hour and a half.

There were two men standing nearby engaging in the sort of loud and robust conversation that only Yorkshire men can.

“This global warming thing is a pile of shite” one declared authoritatively. “Bloody melting ice-caps? Load of bollocks. If you get a ice cube out of the freezer and put it on the ground it’s going to melt isn’t it. It’s the same with them ice-caps, course they are bloody melting: they’re made of ice.”

This tickled me somewhat and I smiled as I industriously studied the timetable. I was just about to give it up for a bad job when the expert in climate change approached me.

“You look like you’ve got your hands full lad” He said kindly, gesturing towards Evan, Amy, and the changing bag I was holding. “Do you want me to flag down the bus when it comes? Sometimes it just drives right past you know.”

“No it’s ok” I answered “I don’t think it’s due for over an hour anyway”.

“No lad” he told me ” It’ll be here any minute now.” And as he spoke the bus miraculously rounded the corner. The man casually waved to the driver to stop and the kids and I were ushered quickly and efficiently onto the bus, settling comfortably on the back seat.

The bus had arrived 20 minutes before the internet said it would, and an hour and a half before the timetable on the shelter claimed. But this man appeared to have had some sort of supernatural insider knowledge.

I might have to rethink my attitude towards global warming.

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Can’t blog now. No time. Just got new HD flat screen TV. Have to watch re-runs of Property Ladder on Discovery Home and Leisure.

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A lot of you may already be familiar with freecycle, a sort of altruistic ebay where people offer to give away their unwanted stuff for free. You basically join an internet mailing group in your area and you can either post up or respond to offers of old bikes, fridges, children’s clothes, and just about anything you can imagine.

The theory is that if people give away the things that they no longer want rather than throwing them out this will reduce the amount of rubbish in landfill sites and be generally good for the environment.

Initially Kerry and I were incredibly enthusiastic about the whole thing. Here was a way to be environmentally friendly and fill our house up with free crap all at the same time! We signed up to four separate local groups and leapt on each email eagerly. Within the first week I managed to get a load of topsoil for my vegetable patch which would have probably cost me around fifty pounds to buy.

But the glittering wonder of freecycle soon became tarnished for us. Sure, there was stuff that we would have gladly given a new home to. But each time we responded to an advert the item had already been taken. We were being outwitted and outmanoeuvred by the freecycle ninjas. These are the shadowy lords of stealth and opportunity who sit in front of the site for hours on end hitting the refresh button, waiting to pounce on anything half decent that comes up. They are, no doubt, the same people who outsmart you on ebay by bidding £0.01 more than you in the last second of the auction. I know for a fact these people exist because I work with one of them. My friend Ian may not dress in black and yell out “TURTLE POWER!!” every three minutes; but the assortment of free sheds, wendy houses, flagstones, and climbing frames in his back garden are a testament to his membership of this secretive organisation.

I of course don’t have time to sit around constantly refreshing freecycle. I’m far too busy sitting around constantly refreshing my blog statcounter to do anything like that. But in truth it wasn’t the Freecycle ninjas that put us off the site. It’s the bloody wanted adverts.

As well as posting things to give away, you can also post requests for things you want people to give you. To say that some people abuse this would be an understatement. I have eventually had to unsubscribe from the mailing list because if I see one more “WANTED: laptop with windows XP and DVD writer” request I will end up climbing to the top of the church tower with a high-powered water pistol (we don’t really have many assault rifles in England).

The finest example of the sheer barefaced cheek of the Freecycle wanted ad poster I saw was: “WANTED: old Star Wars toys and figures for sons school project”. Yeah, right; what school project was that again? A how to sell stuff on ebay project?

Before I unsubscribed to the list I posted of my own wanted ad as a final expression of my bitterness:

WANTED: £50 notes

My daughter is currently doing a school project and needs a number of £50 notes. We could also use any £20, £10, and at a push £5 notes too. Am willing to collect.

Oh, and I also want a laptop

Unfortunately the moderators caught it before it went up. Knowing my luck even if I had got past the censors any offers I got would have all been in Scottish currency anyway, so there’s probably no great loss.

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