Happy Christmas.

(Reposted from my facebook.)

A picture of my home. Drew it there while supping Guinness watching the departure board. While you're here, let me tell you a story...
Last year I boarded a flight in Edinburgh on December 23rd. It was the last flight to leave before the airport closed due to the bad snow. Midair, somewhere over Dundalk, we were told Dublin Airport had closed. Again, snow. We pricked about a bit above Ireland, I joined to the sky high pub and eventually we landed in Cork, easily the furthest away from where I wanted to be possible. Hung about on the tarmac for a while, pilot had to figure out what to do. With every other airport in Ireland closed, they let us out. Said they (Ryanair) would organise buses to Dublin. Not instilled with confidence and fearing they'd charge me to board the bus (Ryanair), I went rogue. I phoned a friend from Cork, got my options. A quick taxi into Cork train station later, I'd a ticket to Dublin in my pocket and I was sprinting along the platform to get the last train to Dublin. Train was delayed several times. Ireland's countryside looked like Alaska as we crawled through Limerick. I got off the train five hours later, still not done. Made my way to Abbey Street and sat on my suitcase for an hour in the snow waiting for the last bus to Carrickmacross. Last plane. Last train. Last bus. I felt a bit like Indiana Jones, slowly getting home by dumb luck. Bus arrived. I stood up. A little old woman appeared out of nowhere and tried to get on the bus before me. Tried. She didn't. Two hours later I was home. Changed me socks, put on the telly.
Today's flight is actually ahead of schedule. It's almost... Too easy. Happy Christmas, facebook folk!

AWKWARD.

I'm an optometrist. I test people's eyes. I like to think I'm quite good at it. It's not like I can juggle lenses or do contact tonometry just using my thumbs (I'd like to see you try), but I reckon I'm good at making people enjoy their tests.
I take my time. I explain the red and green numbers (if they ask). I make jokes. I'll draw an astigmatic cornea on the back of an envelope. I start at the big letter E and say "Well if you can't see that one sur' we may both go home". Once a man didn't get it. But it's okay, he came in without wearing his contact lenses and didn't tell me. We didn't go home.

While it looks like I'm friendly, warm and informative, a lot of it is, for want of a better word, an act. They're hidden behind a big machine spinning lenses on front of them hearing me talk away, asking them to look at some dots while in reality I'm typing up notes about their grandfather going blind after getting hit by a combine harvester. I can do it automatically, ask questions, change the lenses without even thinking. They say the red numbers  look sharper? I twiddle the dial to the left. I take away the big lensey machine (it's an autophoroptor, if ye wanna google it), eye contact resumes and we have a bit more of a chat.

But sometimes I mess up. An example? Fine, keep reading.

Everytime I bring someone into my room I ask them how they are. I'm genuinely interested, I like to know if a person's going to be a pleasure to test or if they're about to explode with every gripe they've bottled up this past two years. I ask one of two questions usually.

(1)- And how're you?
I'm not sure why I start with an 'And'. It's probably grammatically incorrect but I've not been pulled up on it yet. With this question, I emphasise the 'you' part, almost like how Joey Tribbiani says "How you doin'?" Again, I like to show these people I give a fuck. Most of the time, I do.
(2)- And how're you today?
BIG DIFFERENCE. Putting 'today' in the mix is something I do for people I've seen before. It tells them that I know I've seen them before, that I remember them and how they were two weeks ago  and that I want to know how in God's name they are doing today. If Joey Tribbiani ever said "How you doin' today?", that's probably how I'd say it.

Anyway, people tend to answer in two ways. First one is a simple "Grand" or maybe a "Cold". I say "Good stuff" and on we go.
Some other people say their "Grand" or "Cold" and then ask how I am. I say, WITHOUT FAIL, "Not too bad" and, again, on we go. Clockwork.

But a wee while ago the clock broke. A wee while ago the clock went out the window.
Names have been changed to protect anonymity. Not mine, though. I'm an idiot and I can admit this.
Noel: Peter, is it? Peter come on in for your eye test.
(In room)
Noel: Peter, rest yourself on the big chair there a wee while. How're you?
Peter: Not too bad. Yourself?
Noel: Not too, eh, I mean, not too, eh, grand. I'm grand.

HE USED MY LINE AGAINST ME. Bastard.
Anyway, the rest of the test went well, he got his new glasses a while later and was over the moon with them. Saw stuff he hadn't seen in years. Shook my hand and all. I felt sorry for planning to call him a bastard in a blog post I'd soon write.
But the blog post I did indeed write. It's up there. See?

Some oxygen I could live without.

(I wrote earlier on facebook that this post would be in 3D. It's not. I just wrote that to rope you in. How can a blog post be in 3D anyway? Cop on. May as well keep reading while you're here, though, you'd look like an awful dope otherwise.)

So here I am. Home. Back in Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. Just a quick visit, mind. I'm going back to Edinburgh tomorrow for a week and then coming back back here for Christmas on the 23rd. I've already spent a few days in Dublin, met some folk, bailed out a few pub landlords. The usual. But, while Dublin is where I find most of the people I know best, Dublin is not home.
This is home:

Long aul picture, I know. And you can barely see the house. But we'll plough on.
So this morning I woke up to find my mother clearing out the porch to make way for Christmas decorations. Once she knows I'll be home in the next month or two, she likes to leave all big jobs (cutting the hedge, moving cattle, setting up the wireless printer) until I get home. I'm a big strapping lad, there's not much I can't do. Next time she plans to come to Edinburgh I should stop washing the dishes and not iron for a month (not that I iron anyway, but she doesn't read this).
So aye, the porch, that bit of brick and glass that connects the front door and the hall is, 11 months a year, COLONISED by plants. And I hate every every fucking one of them. They're the ugliest, most horrible ways to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen I know of. And this post is dedicated to them.

NUMBER ONE:

Look at this anaemic looking thing. It's barely trying. We' good people that we are, have given it a whole pot to play about in and it does sweet fuck all. It grows four or five flowers, most of which look to be trying to escape the pot and even less leaves. You couldn't even make a salad of that thing. Hold on until we look at another angle:

Still not much, is it? And the stalks are weird. They look like spaghetti. I don't like this plant.

NUMBER TWO:

This looks a bit like the pot threw up. It seems to be some kind of leafy mould that, given time, would creep across the floorboards and cover the entire ground floor of the house. It's the most sickly colour of green ever too, like what you'd get if the accounting department of evolution got to design a plant. Efficient, but about as boring as Tuesday evening telly.

NUMBER THREE:

Like number one, this plant is just plain lazy. It's looked this way for year, not bothering to add on an extra inch up top or maybe get all leafy for the boy plants who live nearby. It just sits there, not really doing anything. Might tie a bow around it for Christmas. That'd piss it off something serious, like when the lesbian girl in the movies gets all dolled up by the cheerleaders. I'm not thinking of any specific film here, but I think it happened in The Mighty Ducks or maybe Little Giants. I don't know, I wasn't paying much attention, I got a Gameboy that Christmas.

NUMBER FOUR:

Fuck, I'm regretting taking so many pictures of plants earlier on. This one, in hindsight, doesn't look so bad. Hold on until I go up the stairs and try to remember what made me hate it so bad.
Oh yes, THE SMELL. This is some kind of lemon plant. May as well call it a marshmallow plant because it doesn't smell like that either. It smells, instead, like death. And I don't use italics lightly. It smells like piney disinfectant. My mother says it keeps flies away. It keeps me away too, I would've moved home years ago if it wasn't for this gypsy of a plant. Burn in hell, lemon plant.


NUMBER FIVE:

I feel a bit bad slating this plant, because it was in my granny's house and we took it after she died. So I won't get personal with this one, and slate the fact that it can't speak English or that it has no job. Instead I'll keep it simple. I hate this cactus. Every time I've came within a foot of this cactus I've gotten ten or twelve wee pricks in my fingertips. And it's ugly. Moving on.

NUMBER SIX:

Oh, here's a favourite. In that it's one of my favourite plants to hate. It looks dopey. No two ways about it. Its leaves are big and chunky and waxy and the whole thing looks like it was made with lego.

LEGO. I was never given Lego as a child, so I hate Lego. I had K'nex. Was still good, like, got to make lots of big things. Once made a helicopter. But K'nex couldn't make houses. It's overcoming such adversities like that that made me who I am today.

NUMBER SEVEN:

Ah, I've lost inspiration now. As much as I hate these plants, they've brought back a lot of memories. In the past half hour, I've been taken back to Christmas Eves in my granny's house, to building a (quite excellent) K'nex helicopter (with missiles) and some film I didn't bother paying attention to. So what if this wee chap couldn't be bothered growing over the rim of the pot. This rant has to end. And it will.

Right after...

NUMBER EIGHT:

SPIDER PLANT? SPIDER PLANT! I fucking ABHOR spider-plant. In fact, it was spider-plant that spurred me to write this whole thing. Spider-plant would, if left to it's own devices, take over the planet. If number two was some slow moving moss, spider-plant is like the xenomorphs from Alien. Sending off wee baby spider-plants to grow elsewhere, continuously growing, feeding. All those bits hanging down off it on the front are new spider-plants hanging by their horrible spider-plant umbilical cords to their bitch of a spider-plant mother.
I've a fire lit right now, if I could throw spider-plant in it right now (without consequences), I would (I don't think the mother has me Christmas present bought yet, have to keep her sweet).

Anyway, that's me for this evening. Good to get that off my chest. Flying back to Edinburgh tomorrow, and I'm back home here on the night of the 23rd. If I don't post before the big day, have yourselves a very fine Christmas. Toodles.

ABORT MISSION.

Went for a wee run, there. I've been working on my running for a while now. I'm new to it, but getting some good runs under my belt. Tonight won't be going under the belt. Tonight will be forgotten about (unless you count the internet as a place where people regularly go to read stuff, which it isn't).

So anyway, a quick introduction. I was off today. Woke up early, about half eight. Watched a little TV, drank coffee, ate breakfast. Went into the bank to talk about my current account.*
Came home, ate something, went back into town and did a little shopping.** On my way home I was a little hungry. Swung by Subway. Not the healthiest option EVER but I live in Scotland, at least it wasn't deep fried. Figured I'd get myself a six inch something or other. Turns out I've not asked for a six inch in so long that I forgot how to and ordered a footlong Tuna.*** Fuck it. I've eaten more. Wolfed it down in less than five minutes. Beat my chest with my right fist and burped involuntarily.
So I made my way home, put on a wash and went out for my run. After eight or nine minutes I got a bit of a pain underneath my ribs. "Stitch", I thought. So I slowed down for a while and changed the foot I exhaled on. It worked before. It didn't work today. I sped up. It hurt more. I slowed down. It hurt less. But the pain didn't go.
And then it hit me. I knew what was wrong. It was that fucking Subway I inhaled earlier.

I needed to be burped.
But 25 (nearly 26) years of being reared properly had me way too polite to be able to burp on cue. So I limped home and told myself that noone would have to know about the time I had to cut a run short because I had gas.

Whoops.



* "Doin' fine"- Woman in bank.
** "And there's your receipt"- Girl in HMV
*** "You sure? It's actually 29p cheaper if you get a drink with it?"- Chap in Subway

Gettin' up.

Been having a lot of trouble getting out of bed lately.
Coming close to 26, it's probably age catching up on me. On working days I leave everything until the last minute, hammering the snooze button like it made a joke about my mother. I lie there, thinking about exactly how much time it would take to have a shower. Trying to visualise where my black shoes are, and if I could tie them while barreling down the stairs, and how I can get another four minutes in bed if I'm willing to have my coffee by shoving a spoonful of granules into my mouth and necking the hot water. I've not been late for work yet, never have been (Only once since leaving college, kinda proud of that.) but I'm coming dangerously close.

That's on days I'm working, mind. On days off, it's an entirely different matter. Days off are getting ridiculous. Days off, my alarm goes off around 7.30. I snooze for an hour, turn my alarm off altogether, get up, boil the kettle, fall asleep again and finally get up around twelve or one. This, for someone reared on a farm, is unforgivable. The last day I had off I didn't even put on trousers until after four o'clock.

I try to do better. I set the heating to come on so over the covers doesn't seem so arctic compared to under. I put my phone on the other side of the room so I'm forced out of bed to turn it off. 
But all that changes tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday December 1st, I'm off. But I've a secret weapon.
I've an APPOINTMENT. Oh yes. A big swingin' appointment. Okay, it's just with some bird who rang me from the bank. Probably wants to sell me another credit card or pat me on the back for steering clear of my overdraft this long but it doesn't matter. Tomorrow I have a reason to get out of bed.

Tomorrow I have a purpose. And once the purpose is done I'll probably go back to bed. It's fucking cold out, like.

Didn't I tell ye...

...that I wouldn't be updating this much? I might write something about Weetabix in the next few days.

Derilique-t.

I don't like walking past homeless people.
I don't like giving money to homeless people either. I think it's something to do with not knowing what they'll do with it. A shit excuse, I know, I shouldn't care what they do with my fifty pee. I'm a bastard in many ways. This is one.
There's one chap always outside my Scotmid. Forlorn looking chap. Seems decent. Never shouts out to me or anything, just looks at me with his sad eyes. This chap I don't give money to in case he starts to expect me to give money every time. So I mutter "Sorry" every time and walk on with a concerned look on my face, as if I have my own troubles to deal with. A look that says "I've been told I've six months to live", or "I've just been struck off the register for waving my willy out the window of the bus on the way to work". In reality, my troubles tend to be more along the lines of having to put the duvet cover on my duvet this evening.

I couldn't quite pull off the look today, as I came out of the shop tearing open a threepack of Kinder Surprises, though.

His face was less forlorn, more "What a wanker".

Slightly longer smiley face.

I don't like how... hmm, how things take my smilies and make them into actual smiley faces.
This riles me.
I like my sideways smilie. I like being able to choose between a colon or an equals sign, a big or little p.
But nowadays my phone, facebook, gmail, all these "improvements" to my life insist on taking them and turning them into little... pictures. Sometimes animated pictures. And I hate them. They ruin my original meaning.
I put a lot of effort into what I write. I'm BRUTAL at talking in real life. I mumble, repeat myself and say "eh" a lot. But when I type, I can take my time, go back and change words until I'm happy. Fuck, that top paragraph up there was twice as long originally. I frequently go back and edit my text messages numerous times before sending them. In short, I like writing, and seeing what I've wrote.
And if I write 'equals-P', I fucking want 'equals-P', not a thumbnail of a yellow face.
So I've started putting spaces in my smilies so they don't get replaced. And now my smilies look slightly longer than usual. They look like horse smilies.
Okay, this isn't the biggest tragedy in the world. It's possibly the smallest, down there with how stamps taste funny and how the plastic bit at the end of my shoelace (iglet) has come off.
I suppose if I'm resorting to moan about this then my life probably ain't all that bad.


= P

So here we are.

This has been a long time coming.
I've been writing little updates, fragments on facebook for years now. Little one or two sentence bits, about how I enjoyed a film, how I despise the priority boarding people waiting to board a Ryanair flight, even how I nearly lost an eye frying an egg.
But I rarely write anything more than a paragraph long.
So here we are. I won't lie, this won't be updated on a daily basis. Weekly's even a bit optomistic. But I'll keep it posted with bits and pieces, some stuff I draw or cobble together with photoshop.
Oh, and I think I'll keep things anonymous for now. Would like to have a wealth of stuff written before telling folk I know in the real world where to find this.
Oh, and if you do know me and you've found this all by yourself, well done. Now where's that tenner I lent you?