timboblog

It's a long long way (to Worthing)

This last week and a bit has been a right old up and down affair (not in the saucy sense though; that'd just be rude), veering from the sublime to the shit with unerring regularity. A nice boring patch of humdrum mundanity wouldn't go amiss every now and again, but what's the likelihood of that happening? Pretty fucking low.

So, to catalogue our escapades (as opposed to our espadrilles, which are very nice and shiny as it happens) let's get the proper shit stuff out of the way first. Hold on to your hats people, cos I've been ill again! Woohoo! Readers of this blog either think that I'm ill all the time, or that I'm a massive hypochondriac. I can assure you that neither of these is the case. It's true, I do like writing about being poorly, because it let's me get it off my chest (as it were). But re the hypochondria, well, I fucking wish I was a hypochondriac, then I wouldn't actually be as ill as I have been over the last year or so. Maybe I've just turned that corner into Bed-Ridden Old Bastard Avenue, or maybe it's something else even more sinister. Whatever, it sucks arse, and I don't much like it. I've spent the last four days on the sofa, throwing up occasionally, and generally feeling like a pile of manky bollocks. This morning I went into work and nearly fell off my chair, so I decided going home would be the safer option. I'm feeling a bit perkier now, but we shall see. To my complete lack of surprise my GP had no good advice to offer. Either I have an infection and have just been really unlucky over the last year with all this food poisoning, etc, OR I have something really wrong with me. He even suggested having an HIV test, which is all very kind of him, but probably not essential seeing as I've been with Mrs Timbo for almost seven years now. So unless someone craftily took advantage of me while I was busy checking the price of couscous in Waitrose the other day (if they did I didn't notice), then I can't rightly explain it. So it's probably not that, but please feel free to share your observations in the comments box. I'm all ears.

Annoyingly, I really intended to get loads of stuff done over the weekend, so being really fucking ill well and truly scuppered my plans. The only productive thing I managed in the 48-hour period from Saturday lunchtime to Monday lunchtime was waking up in a horrible sweat on the sofa at 3am on Sunday morning, with Great Balls of Fire (starring Dennis Quaid with a godawful haircut and a stupid face) on the telly and some knob playing Bob Marley at a stupid volume somewhere up the road, only to find that I'd left the rabbit out and about in the lounge for the last 12 hours and that in that time she'd set up her own makeshift latrine in the corner by the cd rack and proceeded to do large scale shits and pisses all over it, all of which meant that had to spend about twenty minutes trying very unsuccessfully to persuade her to get in her fucking hutch, followed by a good hour or so of cleaning up stinky rabbit wee. At least their poo isn't runny and icky.

So that was all good fun!

But it hasn't all been sickness and bodily excretions. We've also managed to take advantage of the amazing weather by doing a ton of walking and beaching. Mrs T has been to London and picked up some stonking blisters for her troubles, and I went for a walk on the South Downs with my Mum and brother, and as a result of which got right royally burnt to a cinder. Still, it was a lovely walk, and I saw lots of birdies and little furry animals and generally had a very lovely time. And last week me and my good lady ventured all the way down the coast to Worthing (which is a little bit further away from Brighton than I thought it was) and had a very nice walk all the way along the beach from Worthing to Shoreham power station (photos to come), then back to the main part of Shoreham because there was nowhere to cross back to the mainland, then back to where we'd just come from but on the right side of the water this time, and then all the way back to Portslade and then Hove. Unfortunately, due to the afore-mentioned misjudgement, coupled with the fact that we only got to Worthing at 5pm in the first place, this meant that we ended up getting home at about 11pm. Slightly later than we expected. Still, it was a lovely evening and a lovely walk for the most part. We'll just conveniently forget about the last two hours spent walking along a shitty main road in the dark...

What else? Oh yeah, the main computer totally fucked up (again) so I had to spend an entire evening sorting the bastard thing out. Thank the lord for partitioned hard drives!

I must start posting regularly again, because every ten days is pretty poor (although noticeably better than one post every six months), so there are gonna be some photo posts soonish because I've got a bunch of cracking photos that need to see daylight, and I'm going to go into detail about the new gaff, because we love it and want to show it off! Hurrah!

Lastly, many thanks for all the comments after the last post.  They are always appreciated (even if I don't always understand what you're on about), are generally informative and insightful (where else can I learn all there is to know about the world's greatest deodorants?) and have a tendency to put a smile on my face, which I am politely informed is for the most part 'a good thing',  although this must surely be a matter of opinion. Still, keep them coming! I love you all.

The dumptruck moanyscrote blues

You know what I find bloody annoying? (Apart from Lily Allen, Ricky Gervais, avocados that for some reason don't want to ripen, and, umm, a significant proportion of humanity, obviously.)

I will tell you.

Being stupidly tired when there is no chance of getting any rest/sleep, and then having insomnia  or not being able to sleep at the times when I do have the opportunity to rest is what I find Bloody Annoying. It fucks me off!

I have massive eyebags (and I mean massive), I feel run down, my skin looks like shite, and I hardly ever want to do anything because I never seem to have the energy. The other day, while out with Mrs Timbo, I was quite literally The Crabbiest Person In The World Ever, and seemed to semi-regress to a childlike state of tantrums and sulks outside (and inside)  Homebase. Maybe that's just the effect Homebase has on me? Whatever, it was rubbish. So! All of this horrible nonsense at the same time as having LOADS TO DO. I need to sort out the new gaff, ebay all our old possessions to buggery, watch Lost (!) and have an actual real-life enjoyable (shock! gasp!) life with my girlfriend! This must all be achieved in the meagre sliver of time I am permitted away from work. Can't I swap the two around, and get a meagre sliver of time at work instead? That would be far more suitable.

I think I just need a holiday. Or a fortnight off. Or a run of early nights. And some exercise.

You see what's happening here? I'm creating lists! And my deodorant is rubbish. Somebody invent some decent deodorant that doesn't make your shirt armpits go crusty and that actually has some effect against sweat!

Good things are happening though. I know I moan, but that's just my nature. I mean, we have an ace new home, it's nearly summer, we're going on holiday next month, I'm taking photos again, and look! I'm blogging again!

I must be fucking ill.

The pushy rabbit

My screen has a blob on it (sigh). But happy new year all the same!

I hope you're all well and festive and copiously fuckered, depending on your individual personal taste. The royal and plural 'we' are rather the worse for wear having been stricken down by every fricking illness going, all at the same time too, at the exact time of the year where being really fucking ill tends to throw a big soggy towel over your whole party. You name it we've had it. We've probably still got it actually so I wouldn't get too near if I were you. You might catch something nasty.

I'm not hanging around for long as I've still got Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Bonnie & Clyde and in all probability Mary Poppins to watch. It is a busy time.

But as tis the season for giving, saying the word 'tis' and all that crap here's a widget thingy with which to watch Radiohead's New Year's Day webcast. We are not sad at all and so stayed in and watched the thing on the computer at the time (ie. midnight, January 1st 2008). So yeah, whatever, enjoy.

I love you all.

(Nb. Some of the stuff on the widget doesn't seem to work. Most of it does though so if you have any problems or complaints about it please don't come running to me. I didn't make it, it's not my fault, etc. The whole webcast is on YouTube too, but even that cuts off after 26 minutes so god knows what's going on, because I don't.)

The Daily Blog: Day 2

The boiler cupboard is now clean and didn't have anything alive in it, which is progress. Today is the final stage of Project Craphole whereupon I go through a whole bunch of shitty soggy gack under the sink and around the bin, try not to retch too much, and then add a sparkling flourish to the horrid lino flooring. The same horrid lino flooring that looks dirty even when it has no dirt on it. Who designed this rubbish?

I leave you with the definitive list of the scariest Australian animals I've come into contact with (as discussed yesterday evening with the missus) from least scary to most scary:

Kangaroo - not really scary, but they have big legs and are tall ie. a bit scary, kind of.
Goanna - a big lizard, bit like a dragon, therefore scaryish.
Red-back spider - titchy but evil-looking and very poisonous - eek!
Box Jellyfish - most poisonous jellyfish in the world. Enough said.
Reef shark - not strictly dangerous, but it's a shark so I'm scared (yet I swam after it, like a twat).
Brown snake - its poison is fatal, it is very long, and it chased our van very very slowly. Run away!
Saltwater crocodile - big, huge, massive teeth, evil carnivorous monster thing with eyes that glow red. And I unknowlingly walked through a river that was full of them. I should be dead!

The Daily Blog: Day 1

What is it? Tuesday? Already? If I was at work time would be going backwards, but I'm on holiday a week too late and have missed a teeny portion of good weather and a probably brilliant blogmeet and time is going forwards way too sodding quickly and it's rubbishly shit. Fuck fuck fuck.

It also appears that the shredder has blown a gasket, which puts paid to Charlotte's old-ntl-statement-shredding marathon. She'll be gutted and unless it miraculously starts working again I shall have to fork out for a new one. Piss arse fudge.

I have been cleaning the kitchen properly (meaning  that I'm doing more than just wiping the surface occasionally with a soggy rag) and have been horrified by a) the amount of filth that accumulates through simply doing nothing, b) the scale of the infestation that has been happily breeding away at the back of the kitchen cupboards, and c) how much out of date food I own. I digress: at the beginning of the clean-up all our cabinets were chockablock with gubbins and you couldn't have even fitted in a small pea if you'd tried; post clean-up I have almost no food left apart from some cans of tuna, a packet of 2-minute noodles and some sunflower oil. Oh yes, and some OXO cubes. I can hardly wait for dinner tonight!

Next on the cleaning agenda is the boiler cupboard. It has things in it that haven't been touched in almost five years. I'm scared shitless.