Prepare For Vast Injection Of Wealth Back Into UK Economy

So I was sitting today thinking, hmm, I wonder how much money I have. Christmas has a way of limiting one's ability to survive January, so I just wanted to be sure that we were going to be okay.

At some point my change box caught my eye and I wondered, I wonder...?

I have a thing about change. I hate it. It jangles. It messes with the cut of my trousers. So when I come home from work or from speaking to men about dogs, I tend to dump any change from my pockets into the change box. Recently I noticed that this box was full to overflowing, and the lid was just sort of perched on it like a sailor's cap. Historically, at this point, I would find a new change box and take the old one upstairs to sit all dense and alone on a shelf somewhere.

Light bulb moment--if I can hardly lift this change box, then there must be quite a lot in it...maybe I won't take it upstairs, maybe I'll count it instead...

Thus the great counting began. The first step was sorting it. Handily enough, The Girl bought me an electric coin sorter last Christmas, back when the change box was half full, probably to encourage me to count it up then, when the legs of the table in the hall were not yet creaking and bowing. So I set to a kind of John Henry effort, working against the coin sorter; it was me versus the machine. I fed it coins and it whirred and growled and spat them out sorted; while it worked, I sorted coins too, filling bowls with little mounds of copper and silver and bronze.

(It won.)

Anyway; at some point, The Girl became enthused by the whole effort and reminded me about the change tin upstairs. She brought this down, as well as gathering the loose monetary contents of our various knicker drawers and bedside cabinets. She helped me sort the coins by feeding the coin sorter while I worked.

About an hour later, it was time to count. We put some music on and set to it. We stacked and bagged and tallied and added; in the end we counted just over £173 of change.

£173! Hahaha, oh, holy Christ that's a lot of change. We've filled a shoebox with the bags and envelopes. So I'm going to get it changed into a civilised stack of notes and enjoy this little gift from my past self in the January sales.

Finaway

All the presents are wrapped! Job done! Of course, anything I've wrapped looks awful, as if wrapped by someone without thumbs or eyes, but anything that The Girl has wrapped looks great. Together we achieve a kind of overall mediocrity that I for one am okay with.

Beginning to feel vaguely Christmassy now, which is good. The seasonal wrapping rituals are complete--like hiding my brothers good present inside another plausible but still kinda dissapointing one. Last year (or was it his birthday?) I wrapped his present in three or four inpenetrable layers of purple wallpaper. Hooray for little brothers!

Guess Where I'm Posting From

The games room! From my Wii and its unholy implementation of a web browser. This would be a lot easier if I had a keyboard and didn't have to resort to pointy-clickety-click. It's making me all tense.

Of limited appeal, then. Might be okay for emergency browsing purposes if I didn't have to sacrifice a chicken over the PC in the other room every time I need to connect.

stujeyi53wxum..'\\=gaASUEFKGJIYO''=!)(?«»dz€]fupkfteuyw2,n!!!1!!!

Oh Yeah, Also

The Girl bought me a lovely dressing gown to help me through those cold winter evenings up in the Temple Of Clarity. And it is a powerfully lovely dressing gown; it's brown with red and gold stitching. The whole thing weighs about three stone, and will probably deform my spine, but it will be worth it. Pure comfort. So now I have pure Christmas Spirit (the seasonal pants) and pure comfort (the robe). Christmas is shaping up well.

EXCEPT THAT OUR DECORATIONS ARE ONLY HALFWAY UP AND I HAVE PRESENTS YET TO BUY

Plato's Wall

Caught a nice pic of the moon tonight (took about twenty, in fact, but this was sharpest). See here!

Christmas Is Pants

I found my Christmas pants!

Not found, not found. My Christmas pants were returned. They were taken from me and hidden sometime last August, when The Girl noticed I was still wearing them, and tonight she unlocked the Great Vault and returned them to me.

It's hard to describe just how much pure, distilled Christmas Spirit these pants hold within their loosely-elasticated waistbands. I'll start by saying, a lot. You don't understand: up until now, I've been despondent, listless, lacking spirit, feeling more than a little bit humbuggerish about the whole thing.

Not anymore.

EDIT: Removed the picture. It was too disturbing.

EDIT: Just to be clear: it was a drawing. Just a really disturbing drawing. Of the pants.

EDIT: Funny thing happened today. Funny odd. This guy--this monk--stopped me in the middle of the street, looking for a donation to help with his monastery's various good works. (I assume they were good works. I assume he wasn't looking for donations to help punch more children in the eyes.) This monk fellow was one of those proactive bucket-jangling types, the kind who make eye contact and put themselves in your way and ask you politely if you'd like to help them out. So I stopped, I let him talk. I encouraged him to get to the point (I was on my way into the town to do some Christmas shopping, and if I stop in one place for too long I lose the will to shop) and he produced a sheet of names and donations. The first twenty of which are made up, I thought, being a horrible cynic. Then I said it. The thing I've been feeling mildly shitty about since. I said,

"Listen, we already give to charity."

Implication being that a standing order for a few quid a month to the NSPCC completely absolves me of any obligation to charity in general. What I really wanted to say was,

"Listen, I don't want to give you any money, because I have no idea what mad cult I'd be helping to promote, and our five-second conversation has done nothing to lay that fairly fundamental concern to rest."

Which would have been a lot closer to the truth. So now there's a monk out there who thinks I'm a total asshole for entirely the wrong reason. And that's what makes me feel mildly shitty. Lesson learned here: be more honest with monks. Tell it like it is. Let them think you're an asshole for all the right reasons.

(In the end I dug deep and gave him a whole pound. A shiny one. In exchange for this pound, he offered me a book. The Teachings Of Swami Vuh...Vuh...something. Now I'm sure this was a genuine act of beatific kindness, and that's great, but I refused the book; not because I am allergic to the teachings of swamis, but because I've read plenty of that kind of thing over the years. Plenty. Took what I needed from it, left the rest. And I genuinely thought better leave it for the next guy.

"Not a reader then," he said after me, putting the book away.

That's right. I could only smile and walk on. Not a reader.)

EDIT: Maybe if I'd had my Christmas pants on things would have gone differently, for the pants give me quickness of mind. "Namasté, child," I'd have said. This would have put him at ease. And when he asked my name, I'd have said, nice as you like, "Siddhartha." And then I'd have disappeared in a big puff of smoke. Like Batman. That would have really messed with his head.

Oooo

Evidence of alien FTL experiments gone wrong!

Swatammauptothesedays

I've been keeping busy. A good portion of my spare brain-cycles are now taken up by Christmas, of course, and The Girl's birthday is only just over, but I've been managing a few other things on the side. Including: a story about Japanese tentacle porn (or better, the story of a man who searches for the true meaning behind Japanese tentacle porn, and his path of discovery leads him into an unsettling encounter with a real eldrich horror) that I've been working on purely for my own amusement, small excerpt here.

More bloggery to follow, I have a day off tomorrow (in keeping with my excellent 'four day weeks in December' plan).

Nerd Birthday

Well folks, today is The Girl's birthday. Birthdays have cakes, cakes have candles, but how, I ask you, how do you represent a number higher than about ten in mere candles? Well, I'll tell you how: we move beyond a simple wax tally into a proper place-value system. Folks, I give you 28:

Not entirely clear, but the left-hand chocolate knob says 'MSB'. You have to do this. You have to be thorough about these things.

Supercharged Werewolf Machine

Watch out folks!

They Have These New Calandars Now

I was out with The Girl, following her around the town, dragging my feet as usual and getting all wound up because I was tired, because the town was packed, and because I was carrying bags of Christmas shopping. So she disappeared into a card shop to buy cards (ignoring my suggestion of 'one card per household') and this left me sort of wandering about in front of the shop, checking my watch, throwing some of those powerfully un-Christmassy glowering presence vibes in the hope that this would expediate the card-choosing process.

I was just thinking "I wish Christmas would come every year and a half instead, I could really get into it" when I saw a calendar in a stand in front of the shop. "2008", it said. "Sixteen month calendar!" It wasn't alone. There was more of the same behind it.

THERE'S A SIXTEEN MONTH CALENDAR NOW? That's crazy! Convenient, but crazy! Who came up with this--Creationists? I'll bet the Young Earthers are behind it. It's actually not a bad way to stretch those 6000-or-so real, proven, it says so in this book years across that thirteen-billion year stretch of history their interpretation of the creation story so awkwardly fails to account for; just increase the number of months per year and you're away. Mark my words; next December (in sixteen months time) you'll see the first twenty-four month calendars.

Still, sixteen months. I'd be willing to concede this one if it bought me an extra four months between Christmasses.

Holy God, Somebody Must Stop The Japanese Before They Go Any Further

Look at this madness! Check out the video.

Day Off

Hooray for days off! The stupid look on my face is because I'm getting very slightly drunk!


The 300w light fitting just above me makes me look oilier than I actually am. I swear.