I'm told it's summer, but....

Greetings faithful reader.

Having been unceremoniously ejected from the not-yet marital bed for taking up too much room (I think that it's perfectly acceptable to emulate a starfish when asleep, don't you?). I thought I'd come and blog a bit.

I don't know what the weather is like in your part of the world but excepting yesterday it's been cold and wet, wet, wet for a week now. And not in a "love is all around" type fashion.

Our water feature was turned into a bog garden at great effort from myself and Tallulah using a big pile of dirt at the bottom of the garden. I was personally hoping to find a body there as the police would presumably have a better chance of tracking down the houses' previous tenants and at some point during the trial I could have raised the question of the cracks in the water feature as they were led away to jail.

The Big Brother avoidance has gone well - I've not watched any of it yet. It's particularly easy to avoid this year as the producers seem to have simply chosen tabloid fodder (I know you won't believe me when I say this, but this wasn't always so - up until the end of series 4 they would put some relatively intelligent people in but the producers found that the lack of idiots was affecting their cash cow).

I have, however, been watching the Apprentice and I have to say that I was shocked at the result. How a goggle-eyed upper class twerp that rents out rooms and lighting equipment to schools and who freezes with fear every five minutes is a better candidate than a hardworking sales manager and single mother I don't understand. I can only assume that Sir Alan needs someone who can speak toff.

Spanglepuss has been kind enough to send me a photograph of a historic condom which she wants me to post, so here it is: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/obstetrics_gynaecology_and_contraception/1989-865.aspx . I'm not sure why I've been sent this and I'm slightly concerned because another faithful reader has sent me a photograph of her (Spanglepuss's) boyfriend's bottom. Is there some kind of message here - a test for a newly engaged man to gauge his gay percentage?

If you're really interested I'd say that my gay percentage is about 20% raising to near 40% if I've been listening to a Russell T Davies podcast as that tends to make me slightly camp and welsh for a few hours (my Welsh percentage is normally about 25% but can peak at 50% in times of stress).

Ten ten till meet again.

Pond scum...

I would like to offer you, my gentle readers, a cautionary tale and a piece of advice.

The advice is: stay away from water features.

Over a year ago Tallulah (three l's and an h) purchased a small house with a concrete channel (it would be somewhat of an exagerration to call it a pond) across the garden.

Said channel held water very nicely for a few months and then (as a result of an over enthusiastic power-washing [can we have it back if you're reading this, spanglepuss] and/or lawnmowing session) it sprung a leak.

Various pieces of advice were offered by friends and relatives and a couple of plans were tried with little success - apparently there is a difference between waterproof and water resistant, who'd have thought it?

So, Tallulah and I decided to take our plight to the experts.

I've now learned that a water feature expert (and this was news to me) is someone who can paraphrase the sentence "you could try it fixing it that way but it would be very expensive and probably wouldn't work" in at least 6 different ways in the course of a conversation.

It also appears that there is absolutely no way to fix a pond and if one ever springs a leak you might as well destoy it and start again. Pond recycling research is an area that appears to have been underfunded for a number of years - possibly along with re-usable condoms.

To cut what appears to be becoming a long story short Tallulah (three l's and an h) and I are going to try lining our frankly puny feature with something that I keep calling 'Butyl kryptonite' (it probably isn't called kryptonite but is about as expensive and difficult to find) and hope for the best.

I would also like to send a message out to all water feature experts everywhere:
Chill out.
Take a breather.
Have a long walk in the park, smell the flowers and just try to forget the relative inadequacies of non underlaid EPDN and PVC liners. It'll all work out, chaps!

Ona totally unrelated note - here is a webpage about installing a computer in a stuffed beaver http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/13/compubeaver-case-mod-the-pc-stuffed-beaver/