michel roux? i think not

Last night Nelly and her mate Thumbs (she is permanently attached to her phone by the thumbs) had a sleep over, this involved eating vast amounts of Doritos (tangy cheese in flavour, vibrant orange in colour) and drinking lots of Tango (which we all know is like giving amphetamine to a druggy). They his the sugar rush at about 9pm while watching Lake Placid (brilliant monster movie about a man eating croc), they had given up on Inception as after 10 minutes no one knew what the heck was going on!

The sugar rush subsided and they headed off to a quiet bedtime.
I woke up to Nelly at my bedroom door asking, "Can we make brownies?" I agreed and laid in bed for....all of 2 minutes. I decided I ought to supervise or at least provide a fire fighting presence - if required!
In fact they did ok, and pretty much tidied up.
The thing that made the most mess was when they went to eat the brownies, they were so hard as to be inedible.
In the end they used them as hockey pucks on the kitchen floor.
I persuaded the girls to chuck them in the bin before their teeth and my floor tiles cracked.

My first is in bear but not in teddy....

evenin all,

Here's a little quiz for you. What goes..

beep, beep, beep, groan, huff, pad, pad, pad, click....beep beep beep, flush, pad pad pad, swish-knock, swish-knock, swish - knock, swish-knock, swish-knock, huff. beep beep beep. swish-knock, swish knock, swish-knock. bump, sproing, "give us a kiss, I'm off to work now" smooch, pad pad pad?

Answer - Mr Fink getting up for work.

beep = alarm clock he can't switch off. pad = the noise his feet make on the way to and from the bathroom. click = the bathroom door closing. beep - the blimin alarm clock again. flush = you don't really want me to explain that one do you? swish=knock - him opening the drawers, looking for socks or trousers or something. (bump and sproing are him knocking into and sitting on the bed to put his socks on! dirty minded lot).

I do love him, just slightly less at 6.45am - I'm not a morning person.

Shh, Just between you and I....

You'll be glad to hear I am entering the final round of my 2 week long bout with the Snot Fairy and the Man-Cold Goblin. Mr Fink however has succumbed for the second time to the Man-Cold Goblin.

My main problem was sleeping. As soon as I went horizontal, I started to cough and my nose just ran and ran. I had a bright idea to stop the nose-tap. I just bunched up some loo roll (Mr Fink had used all the lovely soft aloe-vera infused man-sized tissues and left me with the scratchy toilet paper) and plugged my nostril with it, turned on my side and drifted off to sleep. I awoke a couple of hours later, rested but with loo roll 'glued' to the inside of my nose. Boy! that makes your eyes water when you pull it off. Ye-ouch. The other problem, coughing, was easily sorted, just go to sleep sitting up. (as an asthma sufferer, I know this works wonders when your chest is wheezing). I wedged pillows round me for support, packed the cushions up behind me and settled my head back, in between the vertical bars of the iron bedstead head - which, cleverly, stops your head rolling from side to side as you nod off. Surprisingly comfy.

I woke up at 'stupid-o-clock' in the morning with my head stuck in the head rail of the bed and a crick in my neck. I must have tried to turn over, got my head caught between the metal uprights and nodded off again. How can you get your husband to take you seriously when you have to wake him in the dead of night saying, "Help, I've got my head stuck in the bed!"

I'm just glad the worst is over. (crossed fingers....toes.....eyes etc etc)

I L.M.A.O.

Shouty Grandad made me laugh on Saturday night. I dropped Little Fink off at his house for a sleep over. As I was leaving, she ran into the front bedroom of the bungalow, climbed up the radiator, onto the windowsill, opened the little top window and was shouting, "Goodbye".

As i was getting into my car, Shouty grandad stopped looking at Little Fink climbing all over the windowsill, turned to me and shouted,

"Oi Missis, you've forgotten your monkey!"

That Pharmacist is a hoot!

Poor Mr Fink, he has hurt his knee at either Hong-Kong-Kung-Fu (Ju-Jitsu) or Squash. Subsequently he is hobbling around and wincing.

I went to the chemists to get him some ibuprofen, the assistant advised me that he should take the pill with food. I commented that I didn't realise I had to feed him as well as buy his medicine. she said, "You could just throw him a biscuit!" This dint arf make me larf!

I'm feeling shattered, I woke up at 4am to the noise of what sounded like a combined harvester coming through the roof. When I got up, it was the Police helicopter hovering over the estate. It had it's search light on, obviously trying to locate a baddie or where one of the coppers had dropped his Happy Meal! When you see the searchlight beaming down through the darkness, you can see where these stories about alien abduction come from! I recon they are taking me in the night, working me like a dog till morning and that is why I'm so tired during the day! Needless to say Rip Van Winkle and Goldilocks slept through the whole thing!

Halt, Who goes there?

(The Oracle's No1 son has a pair of shoes like the ones drawn in the picture.)

Picture a man, somewhere beyond sight and sound....do do do do (wiggle fingers up and down).

Picture Mr Fink this morning at 5am (yes 5am in the morning). There was an almighty crash coming from somewhere within our house. It sounded like someone smashing the patio doors in or someone beating their way out of a wardrobe full of metal coat hangers with a sledgehammer.

I sat bolt upright in bed trying to work out if the noise could have been anything innocuous, Little Fink falling out of bed, books or teddies failing out of her bed or the cat falling out of her bed. Negatives all round. Dammit, must be something big and scary. Mr Fink wakes up all bleary eyed and says, "Are you going?" "Are you mental?" say I. (reminds me of a smashing Pam Ayres poem my friend chose to have read at her wedding. http://weddingwords.vox.com/library/post/yes-ill-marry-you-pam-ayres.html

We check Little Fink - no damage there. All windows and wardrobes intact - mystery....

Mr Fink bravely goes downstairs, stark, you know what, naked. I tell you, if there was a burglar in the house, he deserves a medal for facing Mr Fink in the altogether at 5am.

Mystery solved - 2 pictures are missing from the walls, the 2 collages I made of our first trip to see the outlaws in Spain, A3 clip frames with tickets, postcards, local papers etc in. they must have gone up in value for a burglar to break in and only steal them??

No. the truth was, I had put them up on the wall using those clever new sticky pads that you can peel off the wall when you have finished? Newsflash - They don't work. Both pictures were at the bottom of the stairs, smashed to bits. We cleared up and went back to bed.

Never a dull moment eh?

I LIKE IT DULL AT 5am THANK YOU!!!!!!

What's that noise?

All day Tuesday I kept as busy as I could, tidying up, putting things away, washing clothes etc. When I was taking some bits and pieces upstairs, I stood in our bedroom and could hear an unfamiliar noise...like a computer running or the heating being on. I tried to pin point the sound. It was most noticeable by our wardrobe but not coming from inside, perhaps the loft then? I'll get Mr Fink to check when he gets home.

I carried on, still aware of the noise but unable to locate the source.

Mr Fink came in and noticed it, checked the loft, nothing. We had tea and a few glasses of wine then he went to bed. He said he couldn't possibly sleep with that noise droning away all night so went round to the neighbour to ask them to check their loft and bedroom for anything that would make an alarm clock/electronic kind of noise. They humoured him and checked - nothing.

(A similar incident happened when Little Fink was about 2. We could hear a noise like feedback on a microphone coming from the living room. We checked everywhere, then became convinced it was the pother neighbours smoke alarm. We got in touch with them and it wasn't that - in the end we worked out it was Little Fink's karaoke tape recorded issuing a feedback noise! oops)

Mr Fink eventually fell asleep, I went to bed, could still hear the noise. About 4.30 am I went to the loo and it suddenly dawned on me (I have all my best ideas on the throne). I checked in the box of bits and bobs I had taken upstairs earlier in the day and lo and behold - the source of the noise was revealed...

An upside down Furby in the bottom of the box. I'm sorry to say he hasn't been the same since but I'm hoping to take him to The Oracle's Furby Hospital later so she can take a look at him!

What should I tell the neighbour when she asks?

Now wash your hands!

Picture the scene.
Little Fink and her sleepover buddy, AbuDhabi come down in the morning - Little Fink's intention is to show off her new found cooking skills and to make AbuDhabi scrambled eggs for breakfast.
It was hot last night so they are only in vest and knickers, standing barefoot on the kitchen floor, ready to start breaking eggs.
I took one look at them and said,
"That look, just does not have 'hygene' written on it - anywhere. Go put your clothes on!"

Kids, "But we've washed out hands!"

Oh YUCK, that's disgusting.

What is the most efficient way to wake me up and get me out of bed in the morning.

I didn't know this until this morning at 6.30am. The alarm had gone off for the first time, I reached my leg over the cover to cool down a bit. It slowly dawned on me that I had a cold, wet big toe??? My brain put two and two together and went from asleep...to "OH YUCK that is disgusting" in 0.4 seconds. I realised that earlier in the night, the cat must have been sick on the cover and I had put my foot in it. I hopped to the bathroom (didn't want to get furball on the floor as well!) and washed my foot, cleared up the mess and got back into bed. Mr Fink just pretended he hadn't noticed. (I bet he knew hours ago but just waited for me to discover it and clean it up!)

Ah well, my 3 weeks off work is nearly over, it is so hard to go back after time off. I've just checked the calendar and it would appear, because of school holidays, I don't work a full month again until September - how cool is that!

Also, I have found a groovy website "GeoCache". It's a treasure hunt type of thing, members hide a tupperware box full of trinkets and a log book somewhere, post the coordinates on the internet and you can go and find it (I get to play with my Sat Nav too!). You can swap a trinket, sign the log book and put the cache back. You can then record your find on the website. We had a quick look for one in the Car Park at Dymchurch but I didn't find it (time was tight). There is one close to where I live so, when the weather fairs up a bit, I'll be mooching about in the hedgerows looking for tupperware!

Half Asleep or Half Awake?

Do you find that you can have perfectly normal conversations with people when they appear to be awake but are actually fast asleep, even if they have their eyes open? And I don't mean in the second hour of that technical meeting when it's 30 degrees and the air con has packed up.
I mean when you go to tuck your child in just bfore you go to bed. Usually they are sleeping away - perhaps drooling a bit. Well last week I went to check on Little Fink prior to retiring for the evening. As I pulled the quilt over her, she sat bolt upright, eyes open, looked straight at me and said,
"But what's it all for?" laid down, closed her eyes and back to sleep.- How deep and spooky is that?
A similar thing happened this week, it was 0300 (oh three hundred - why oh? ...oh my gosh it's early) it was 3am and I had been woken up by Mr Fink moving about in his sleep, it looked to me like he was having a nightmare, I remembered him saying he can get very vivid ones so I decided to help him and wake him up from it. I patted his arm and spoke to him gently and after a little while he came to but I could tell he was mostly still asleep.
"Were you having a bad dream?" I asked gently.
"I dreamed SOMEBODY stroked my arm and WOKE ME UP" he said. Well, there's gratitude for you! Hey Ho.