Resident (evil) mouse

The other day I was minding my own business as I was packing up my lunch for work the next day. I went to open the fridge and the next second I see a teeny, tiny brown streak dart out and dive under the washing machine. I got such a fright I froze, opened my mouth wide, squeaked a bit and waved my arms around until someone asked me what was wrong.

The next morning I woke up at about 4am and needed the bathroom. I turned on the light just in time to see the same miniature brown thing dive off the basin and out the bathroom, missing my feet by centimetres. Repeat performance of the above, but of course no one was around at 4am so I got over myself and went back to bed.

So my close encounter with a mouse got me thinking about what would happen if the world went resident evil on us, and it was a zombie jumping out at me instead of a mouse.  This is a perfectly normal thing for me to ponder of course!

I got to thinking about survival and I hit upon few problems.

Firstly I’m as blind as a bat without my glasses or contacts so what on earth would I do when I ran out of contacts and my glasses get either broken or my eyes got worse? It’s not like an optometrist would be kind enough to stay open just for me ….alas natural selection would take its course and I would be unselected pretty quickly.

The second major problem is that I don’t like dark places and scary things jumping out at me. Well ANYTHING jumping out at me for that moment, my resident mouse being a case in point. My standard coping techniques for things labelled as ‘scary’ are to either scream and render everyone in the vicinity temporarily deaf or freeze and pretend I’m not there. Neither are particularly effective as far as survival is concerned.

So after all this thinking it occurred to me that I'm very glad my visitor is a mouse; at least as long as it’s a mouse I can dye the grey hairs the shock gives me – if it was a zombie it would just eat me!

A messy start to new things

As I stood at the counter in the kitchen with flour in my hair and all over my clothes, my hands stuck in a sticky pile of goo, desperately trying to read what the hell I need to do next from the magazine just out of my line of sight … I got to pondering this business of starting new things.

I’m always starting new things, or at least trying to, everything from yoga home videos to baking bread. Well those are my two current projects. Yoga was particularly amusing as the very ‘one with the universy’ lady spouts about tilting your hips forwards and back and blah, blah, blah, I twisted around and ask my long suffering sister “my hips aren’t doing anything are they?” She just burst out laughing; I took that as a no….

I am queen of buying how to books and never quite getting round to using them or never quite understanding what is needed from me to successful do whatever has taken my fancy. I have books on paper making, calligraphy, recipe books all sitting on my book shelf looking very pretty, albeit slightly dusty from lack of use; especially the recipe books since I regularly try to teach myself to cook, but when it takes longer than 30 minutes to prepare and make I lose interest!

Why do I do this to myself I wonder? I used to think I’d randomly develop new interests when I felt I was stuck in a rut and then I’d abandon them once that feeling had passed. Okay that probably is the truth, but I’m starting to think that maybe I’m more butterfly than human; something will catch my interest and I’ll become very absorbed for about 5 seconds before fluttering off to the next thing that catches my interest …

So my options are that I am either permanently stuck in a muddy ditch or I’m an ADD butterfly, I’m not sure which is worse!

A destructive day trip to la la land ...

I have had a frantic, manic and panicky week, all thanks to one very unproductive Friday afternoon; well if I’m completely honest it was actually the whole day...

I am sure everyone can relate to the mind set I experienced on Friday (and the not-so-mild panicked week I dealt with as a result of it). It was one of those mornings that I swear someone had set an electric shock into my chair because no sooner was I sitting down at my little desk, trying very hard to mind my business, then I’d end up jumping up to deal with something or other that needed urgent attention. So by 12 o’clock my mind was programmed into a 5 minute attention span and I was feeling very ADD. I hate it when that happens. So I spent the rest of the day between various none work-related activities such as daydreaming, staring into space, having fascinating conversations with my colleagues, etc. Every now and again I’d try super hard to (re)motivate myself (but let’s face it guilt isn’t always a good motivator) but despite my best efforts my 5 minute attention spam lasted all day.

As a result of my ADD butterfly mood on Friday I officially had a workload that, if emails stacked up height-wise, would have been towering over me. Then Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday and ironically enough today) I had that feeling of a hamster on a treadmill trying to reach the peanut just out of reach but just not getting any closer! You have to know the feeling, your workload is piling up, and every time you blink you have a new email which you KNOW is more work and then you start to feel that  panic creeping up your throat making you want to scream, jump and have an epic ‘throwing your toys out of the cot’ moment… and if you let up that death grip on your somewhat shaky self control, for even a split second, your little world will come tumbling down and that toy throwing fit will ensue... 

I’m feeling stressed and frayed around the edges just thinking about it! So head down and focus, I am still swimming against the tide of work after all, just because I couldn’t keep my head out of la la land for an afternoon *sigh I’ll always be a dreamer!

An Introductory toast (with tea since I'm currently wined out ...)

In my world I always have a few loose screws rattling around my brain. Apparently that gives me an interesting few on life; well if not interesting at least mildly amusing! I may be taking people who are close to me (and therefore very biased in my favour) a little too literally but I’m going to go with it. After all of all the thousands of weird little thoughts and occurrences that happen in my brain and life on a weekly basis; at least a couple of them MUST be worth commenting on? Oh I hope so, otherwise it certainly doesn’t say much for me does it! 

Basically when I feel the urge to have a scribble, or when I find something particularly amusing (please keep in mind it’ll be out of context for you – so please be kind!) I will write about it; therefore whoever is fortunate (or unfortunate depending on your point of view) enough to come across my ramblings should hopefully get a giggle or two out of it for their frantic googling efforts!

So here is to ‘A few loose screws …’ a slightly eccentric girls take on the world … enjoy!