Pushing the Elderly in McDonald's

My 14-year-old daughter is OK as far as 14-year-old daughters go, but she is awful when it comes to pushing herself forward. She's had since October to arrange a work placement for July and recently I received a letter from her school asking why she hadn't done so. It would have helped if she had told me about it coolly and calmly in October, rather than telling me in total panic a few days ago.

The letter I received included a website where details of available work placements could be found. My daughter said she'd tried this website at school and it was useless as it had hardly any placements on it. I went to look anyway and found so many it took about 15 minutes to read through them all. She'd already expressed an interest in social work and I found one for that, but the person dealing with it was unavailable until Monday so I tried another one in the care field. After trying that, I went back to the social work one and pushed myself forward a little on the phone, resulting in me being given another number to try.

The end result of this is that my daughter now has two work placements on offer, one working with disabled young adults in a social work setting and another working with the elderly at a nursing home. She has therefore decided to do one week at each. What she likes best about them is that both of the places she works from are situated round the corner from McDonald's.

What she likes least is the fact that when she is at the nursing home she will have to tie her hair back and remove her jewellery, including her belly piercing. She also isn't too keen on the fact that when she's on the social work placement she'll have to work from 9-5, not to mention that she will have to work on her birthday, which falls on the second day of the first work placement week.

My daughter is clearly going to go FAR once she finishes her education and has to work for a living.

Google Mood Ring (Dark Blue): Impassioned, delighted, whiff of romance

Oh No! Not the F Word Again!

Yesterday, my almost eight-year-old son lost a tooth at school. When it was time for bed he realised he'd forgotten to bring it home, so had to write a note to the Tooth Fairy. In the note, he said he would leave the tooth the following night and could he please have his money.

Today, he left the tooth at school again. When he went to bed he wrote another note, explaining the situation and promising to leave the tooth under his pillow tomorrow night.

He read the note out to me and I almost fell through the floor when he calmly said, "I'm sorry Tooth Fairy, I'm afraid it's the F word again". I braced myself for what might be to come ... you can imagine my relief when he went on to say "Yes, I FORGOT it today as well".

Sky-Blue-Pink With Yellow Dots On

Whenever I am in a hurry, I always encounter delays that normally never happen and they nearly always involve supermarkets. Sod's Law is rife in my part of the world and yesterday it reared its ugly head again.

I had about eighty minutes to get to the supermarket and back so I could play in an online cribbage tournament. Anyway, all went very well, I whizzed round the aisles grabbing this, that and the other (I like grabbing a bit of the other) and reached the check-out with half-an-hour to spare.

I am always careful when I choose which check-out to go to and, oddly enough, I tend to go for one with the shortest line This is what I did today. There were only two people ahead of me, neither of whom was buying very much, but there may as well have been a hundred and two. The woman at the front of the queue was paying with a card and, of course, the card refused to go through. In the end she decided she would have to leave the supermarket and go outside to the hole-in-the-wall to draw some cash out.

I went to another till where there was only one person waiting and what do you know? They decided that they didn't like the hole in their loaf of bread after all, so I had to wait while an assistant went to fetch another one. When I finally reached the cigarette counter, I couldn't believe what I saw. There hadn't been that many people in the supermarket, but suddenly it was absolutely teeming. A school had obviously closed for the morning session because it looked as if an entire classroom was queuing up to buy cigarettes, sweets, drinks - you name it.

There was a slight gap between one group of kids clustered around one of the fridges and the queue, so I slipped in between and hoped nobody would notice, just in case they were really in the queue I was joining. This meant there were only four people in front of me, a group of teenagers who all seemed to be together. One of them was an African girl wearing a pair of beige trousers and the strangest shoes I've ever seen. They had very pointed toes and were white with pink and yellow spots and a bright blue ribbon. To say they looked peculiar with the trousers would be an understatement. I couldn't stop staring at them.

When I finally made my way out, I had to run to the bus-stop. Needless to say, I'd missed the bus I'd intended catching and had to wait for the next one. Miraculously, there was no one on it so it went straight to my destination without stopping. I made it back with four minutes to spare before my tournament started. I needn't have bothered as it happens, I went out in the first round.

What puzzles me is, why is it that when I have time to kill before my bus goes, I find empty check-outs by the dozen and no queues at the cigarette counter? I have never been able to work that one out.

Overnight Facelift

It's getting on for 11 am but I'm not fully awake yet. All this getting-up at the crack of dawn to take my son to school is doing my head in. He was an hour late getting there today and even then I felt like I was going out in the middle of the night.

Of course, it didn't help that I was up most of the night trying to sort out this blog. I just couldn't stand looking at that ghastly Blogger template any longer, so I went on a hunt for a new one. I found a few that I liked, but they always had something that either didn't work properly or wasn't quite right. I finally found one I did like, but it had those ghastly frames and there is no way I want those. I don't stay long on sites with frames.

Anyway, I like to see one large expanse of type, it works better for speed-readers and as far as I'm concerned it looks better. Apart from anything else, I need as much writing space as I can get, not a silly little window that you have to scroll down every ten seconds. It would probably be easier if I used the scroll ball thing on my mouse, but I never remember, I'm too used to doing it the old-fashioned way with the slider bars (much to my young son's annoyance, he's forever telling me to use the ball thing). Talking of slider bars, mine are still not showing coloured in the published version, but they are on the preview. I don't understand that at all.

There was one template I found which was really good, it had some quotation on it about "The Crazy Ones" which apparently is used in an Apple Mac advert and it did seem to describe me very well. Only trouble is, instead of it having a picture of Amelia Earhart (who I always confuse with Amy Johnson, so it could have been her instead, but I think it was Amelia), it had an empty input window which forced one of those damn QuickTime pop-up windows in my face everytime I loaded my blog. I was able to get rid of it, but then I couldn't get the rest of it to look right.

In the end I decided it was easier to create my own, so that's what I did. I kept what little of the old Blogger one I wanted, which was basically just a few links, and did the rest from scratch. I'm actually quite pleased with the end result, I think it looks rather fetching and certainly better than the old one. I might decide to change the little coloured boxes to text links and host the puritan thing on my own site to get rid of all the colour, or maybe it's OK to leave it in. Be interesting to see if anyone lets me know!

Yesterday I took my son down the road to play with one of the girls in his class. They have a puppy and a kitten who match - a sable-coloured Weimaraner and a similar coloured tabby or something. Anyway, I was trying not to laugh because the dog was called Dylan, which not only sounds a strange name for a dog (especially a Weimeraner), but is also my grandson's name. I didn't find out what the kitten is called, not sure I want to know really in case it turns out to be Caitlin.

Mankind Needs Me to Go to Florida

This is the fourth morning in a row I have had to get up at a ridiculously ungodly hour to take my youngest child to school and I'm absolutely knackered. Getting up much before about 4pm has never been good for my soul and as far as I'm concerned, 8.45 am is about the time I should be thinking about going to bed. Not to mention the fact that 8.45 am is not really the time I should be getting up when my son starts school at 8.50.

Theoretically he could go on his own, but there's a road to cross and although it's only a very small road and he's very good at crossing roads of all sizes, there are a lot of idiots about who for some reason are allowed behind the wheels of cars, buses and other assorted vehicles.

It is now 9.54 am and I think I may have to go back to bed for a while. The only problem is that I'll probably not wake-up in time to collect my son from school at 3 o'clock. Once when I went back to bed it was almost 4 o'clock before I collected him. I had to pretend I'd set my clock an hour slow without realising it, so as far as I was concerned I was early and deserved congratulating.

Current research indicates that the average human being has an internal body clock of 24 hours 11 minutes. I am convinced that mine is more like 25 hours and this belief was strengthened when I read that this is often the case with highly intelligent members of the human race. However, it is thought that if we were unaware of the time of day, everyone's body clock would eventually lengthen to 25 hours (does that mean we'd all become cleverer as well?). It would appear that some humans have faulty 'clock' genes, which gives them different sleeping/waking cycles to everyone else.

Having a 25-hour body clock may not sound particularly problematic, but think about it for a minute. It means that if you are forced to go to get up at the same time every morning, you either have to go to bed an hour earlier each night (in theory, not in practice), or stay up an hour later (which means you are actually going to bed at the same time according to your body clock) and end-up never going to bed at all after about a week. It's the same as the average adult starting off by going to bed at (for example) 11pm and rising at 7am, then the following night going to bed at 10 pm, then at 9pm, then at 8 pm ... well, you get my drift. Eventually they'd be going to bed an hour before they got up.

Unfortunately, "I have a 25-hour body clock, live with it" is not considered a good enough reason for tardiness by education authorities, employers and ex-marital partners. It's a waste of time pointing out to these people that arriving at 10.20 for a 9.30 appointment actually means (in theory) that you are 10 minutes early, because they just can't grasp the logic at all.

It takes me several hours and several large mugs of coffee to fully wake-up, which usually doesn't happen until late afternoon/early evening. By about 9pm I am always fully awake, regardless of what time I got up (and this is the case even if I never went to bed) and by the early hours I am absolutely full of beans. I read somewhere (I read a lot of things "somewhere") that everyone is at their peak at the same time they were born, which in my case seems to be true because I always feel at my best around 2-3 am, which fits in nicely with my birth time of 2.30. This is the time when I want to go out and about - I love wandering around in the dark when there's no one else to bother me, but that's probably the Eccentric Bohemian Hermit in me.

I read something on the Internet a while ago about a German professor who spent years trying to work out why certain individuals, usually highly-intelligent ones who appeared to have a lot to offer to humanity, drifted aimlessly through life from job-to-job, partner-to-partner, home-to-home and so on, without ever achieving anything. He finally concluded that it was because they shared one thing in common - they all had 25 hour body clocks. In this case, it does seem very unfair that even though there is a medical condition which causes oversleeping and the subsequent problems arising from it, there isn't even a proper medical term for it. It would be really helpful if I could be late taking my son to school and blame it on some sort of "itis" instead of my faulty alarm clock.

Left to my own devices, I seem to keep the same hours as Americans in the Pacific time zone, which is 8 hours behind the UK. I often wonder whether I would start keeping normal hours if I moved to the West Coast, for instance, or whether I would just revert to type and start dropping behind again. It may be worth approaching the World Health Organisation to see if they would provide me with some sort of research grant to cover my travel costs and provide my friend Betty (who recently moved to Florida) with funds to cover my board and lodging (and hopefully with enough left over to cover a weekly trip to Disneyworld). After all, my experiences could greatly benefit mankind.

An amusing tale I wrote about a particular clock. It won a prize! (The story, not the clock).