Death defying; it's a roller coaster

Last week at the DDs I got yelled at. It was by a guy who's been there for years and is seemingly well-regarded. During the break, at the long table where he'd set up with his laptop, I made an off colour observation. We'd been discussing the between-session psychic game where we the audience select an item in the room and the psychic has to guess if an object is the selected object. Is it the chair? No. Is it the whiteboard? Yes. We couldn't work out how they did it and so I went on a riff about how to prevent their passing on hidden communiqués they should be locked naked in the Magneto clear plastic prison and have clear plastic furniture. I then theorised that when seated in clear plastic chairs that if you looked up through the underside of the chair you would see their squished up genitalia through the luctie like it was an under-sea display through a glass bottomed boat. I think Yelly was offended because the people I was referring to were people in the DDs with us. Though I'd only placed them in that hypothetical position of naked clear plastic seat sitting because they were the practitioners of the psychic game where the pair would trick us into thinking they has special powers and I joked that nudity would perhaps .

I know, it all sounds barking mad. When the yelling happened---which consisted of Yelly shriek-yelling I'd gone too far and he then packing up his laptop to relocate the another part of the room---I sat there in stunned silence not saying a word. It took about three minutes for normal conversation levels to resume. This of course fucked the night in the bum and I while I stuck out the rest of the night I fucked off for home the moment it ended, slinking into the dark rather than troop off to the pub with the rest.

On the drive home I was riven with self doubt and embarrassment. I even started wondering if my enjoyment and seeming getting on with people was a sad delusion on my part and what if the reality was that I was an unwelcome intrusion on their world and that they were putting up with me through polite sufferance. The whole incident made me feel like shit and that I was shit.

I moped about it over the next couple of days but I was buoyed by theWife, who said I was not a shit, and S--- from DD, who, while he was not there on the night Yelly had his yell-yell and thus could only go by my interpretation of what happened, made me feel better when he said Yelly was a cock spank and likely always had been. That and Yelly was probably jealous of my fierce beauty.

I admit I was pretty apprehensive about going to the next session of DD. Would he mention it? Would I? I wanted to man up and take him aside to ask him that the next time he needed to remonstrate with me that he take me aside to do it and not emasculate me quite so publicly. But in the end my worries were for naught as he did not show. Oh and I had an awesome fucking time.

I know it seems dumb to treat such a frenetic over-the-top reaction as a just critique of me the clearly subhuman shit who everyone hates, but what can I say? At heart I'm just a Pumbaa.

UPDATE: I should note though that apart from that horrid unpleasantness to have someone spray off at you in sharp anger I had a great time. I made some new connections and had some pleasing chats. Then the next week these good feelings of comradeship 

I'm like putty

I am a massive soft cock when it comes to wrangling kids—though I should note in this sense I am using wrangle as per its herding animals meaning as opposed to noisy bickering or quarrelling. 

Having been yelled at by bigger people as a child I do not wish to inflict that on children, especially my own. So I try and keep anger in check whenever I can, especially given the tendency of men in my family of being quick to anger and often excessively so (1).

So when it comes to good cop, bad cop in the house then yes I am fully the good cop. Indeed I suspect it's probably the case that other fathers of my age also wear the mantle of good cop because we've realised being a scary dad is far more counter productive.  And like a good good cop I use the threat of bad cop, theWife, frequently when trying to influence him—'Mummy wouldn't like that, Chooky...'

theBoy is not yet five but he's learned an array of techniques to manage me in order to get his way. The other day he was watching Kung Fu Panda. He decided he didn't want to watch it any more and asked me to come out of the kitchen and change it to ABC Kids. As I got to the remote he shouted out 'WAIT! I love this bit!', which was where Panda rockets up and over a wall on a firework powered chair. I was busy so I told him 'Okay, Chooky, you keep watching this then because I'm not coming back.'

I returned to the kitchen and after the chair meets fireworks bit of the movie finished he came to find me.

'Come and change it to ABC Kids!' he demanded. 

'No, Chooky, I said I was going to change it but you decided not to change it so I'm not going back. It's irritating.'

Then he played one of his manage daddy moves. He grabbed me by the hand and ever so gently pulled on it. 'Come on, Daddy' he said, grinning.

I'm putty so I gave in. 

He led me ever so sweetly and gently to where the remotes were piled next to one of his three toy pirate ships and handed me the correct remote to use. He smiled, again sweet and gentle, then walked over to the beanbag in anticipation of my switching it to ABC Kids.

He flopped backwards into the beanbag then turned in place and pointed at me.

'NOW DO IT!' he yelled.

I couldn't help myself. I laughed richly and changed it over.

Like putty...

(1) Due I think to a combo of genetics and upbringing. At the very least I can influence on upbringing. When I think back on a often unhappy childhood I suspect a chunk of my anger was situational and physiological. I was in what I perceived to be unhappy circumstances which in turn with a not great bod led to feelings of sads at a young age. Now, even wracked with an often not tremendous sense of health, I am doing better. I think it's 'cos I have a Chooky and I can give and receive as much love as each of us can handle. So fuck the world; best revenge is doing well and so forth.

Where Mikey gives up whacking theBoy's noggin with a rolled up Time magazine

Though theBoy is nearly five I still watch over him in the bath. All the literature says you should never leave a kid unattended in a bath right up until at least five years of age. The other thing is too that theBoy uses oil in place of soap and it leaves the bath’s surface extra slippery. So any time he stands or he’s placed in I hover in case I need to grab him.

He has a lot of bath toys in there to entertain himself with while I have a magazine or my loaner phone. But most of the time he will ask for a story instead and so we do a storyverse session.

Lately he’s been asking for a story involving Humpty and Stumpty being caught in a moment of acute personal danger but without the seeming ability to call for help.

The other day the lads were in a sinking boat, headed for the waterfall, and they had no phone with them to call theBoy with because inevitably when they’re in danger I have them call theBoy pleading for assistance. theBoy inevitably refuses to take the call because ‘he’s too busy’. Last night he was in his workshop building bunker buster robots—robots designed to enter bad guys lairs and grab them—for a new client—the International Court of Justice.

So Humpty and Stumpty were sinking and heading for a waterfall. All they had were themselves and a couple of paddles.

In a previous similar story I had a seagull flying above them and it just happened to have a mobile phone in its beak which it dropped, was caught by Humpty, and he then rang theBoy for him. This story theBoy wasn’t having any of it. When the seagull appeared I asked theBoy what it had in its beak and theBoy decided it wasn’t a phone but a big fat worm. The seagull accidentally dropped the worm and Humpty, having received the apparent boon of a seagull delivered mobile phone, caught it. He tried dialling the worm only to discover he’d mooshed a worm up instead, gooey worm innards dripping over his finger.

At that point the seagull, now miffed at dropping its food and some bastard in a sinking boat mooshing it, attacked Humpty.

I’m a fan of prop work in storyverse and I had my Time magazine in hand. So I started lightly battering theBoy with the magazine whilst screaming gull noises at the top of my voice. I decided I would keep lightly battering his large bath-dwelling melon until he told me to stop. Only he didn’t tell me to stop. He just looked at me grinning as I made loud seagull noises and softly whacked him on his head.

So I gave up.

Sometimes during a story I’ll pause the action and go to a guest panel for advice. Since the boys were heading for a waterfall in their sinking canoe the panel consisted of Bear Grylls, Fozzie Bear, and a Sasquatch. Bear Grylls gave sage advice about their using the paddles to jam them against a boulder on the lip of the waterfall and heave themselves out of the sinking boat and onto the boulder and then wave their paddles to signal for help. Fozzie bear was useless and made painful failed pun attempts around the subject of waterfalls. The Sasquatch simply grunted.

At that point the Seagull flew in and attacked the Sasquatch. So I started lightly beating theBoy on the head with my Time magazine again alternating seagull screaming with Sasquatch hooting as the hirsuite hominid attempted to fend off the bird. Again I decided to keep the head whacking up until theBoy told me to stop. He did not and my voice, now strained from animal sounds, croaked to a halt.

Eventually though you’ll be pleased to know theBoy stopped his working on bunker buster robots for the International Court of Justice and went and rescued his friends.

We recently had a big clean out of the shed, with our several old (and large) CRT TVs taken away by waste removal specialists to be legally and properly disposed of. theWife also took advantage of this removal to take away the dying lower half of our king-sized ensemble bed and replace it with a slatted frame. We were doing post-bath Storyverse on the new big bed when theWife hustled us out so she could finish making it. theBoy wanted to know where the session would continue—loungeroom or end room. He stood in the narrow corridor and pointed to each possibility.

‘The toilet!’ I shouted and pushed him into the separate toilet room instead. We jammed in, him next to the toilet, and me with my back against the door. We picked up where we’d left off, more Humpty and Stumpty in danger action, only theBoy kept getting distracted by the toilet and lifting the lid to run his hands along the porcelain rim. When theWife gave us the wave to come back into the big bed I had to rub his hands down with anti-bacterial hand wash gel because of all his toilet touching.

So … less stories as told in the toilet (1) next time…

(1) Well ... toilet room. That sounds weird. What do you call the room where it's dedicated to just a toilet? Water closet?

My Family Stickers

You may have seen the My Family™ stickers in operation. They’re the silhouette stick figure decals people stick on their back car window that in theory serve as avatars for the typical conglomerate within the vehicle. Mum, dad, two kids, the dog. That sort of thing.

You do have to hand it to the creator. They’ve been heartily embraced by middle and lower-middle Australia and to me it seems as if every second family-type car has them on their window.

I wonder too how the stickers work when the family arrangement gets more complex? 

If there’s a separation does the dad sticker peel away easily? What about the boyfriend? Does he get stuck in dad’s place? What if mum decides she likes the ladies after-all and her new girlfriend moves in? If a family later blends with another do they simply add more kids to the line? How about polygamists? Is it Dad / Mum / Mum / Mum / Kid / Kid / Kid / Kid / Kid? They’re going to run out of fucking window.

Recently I was following a car with the stickers on. The My Family family was emblazoned, left to right, on the left side of the window and seemed on the surface a typical arrangement of Dad / Mum / Kid / Kid / Pet. 

Only they’d left their previous decal—a tramp stamp like butterfly decal— in the lower middle of the window.

So it fully looked like Mothra was coming for them...

Tele-cherry broken

Across the world various nerds are racing to design, assemble then test the fuck out of cybersex suits. Suits with receptors and tingling things that can be triggered remotely allowing lovers separated at a distance still erotically interact by literally pressing their buttons (on their control device). I'm presuming when this becomes feasible that it shall be called tele-sex or something similar.

I get a lift to the occasional nerd night from C---. I'm not too out of the way for it to be an imposition and we get to have a three minute chat about stuff on the way to and from. Genteel, erudite convos about world events, technology, and tits and shit. Anyhoo C--- pings me a text as he leaves his house and I pack my bag of nerd stuff'n'snacks and head on out to wait for him.

On the last such occasion I was sitting at the desktop computer on the Dr Evil chair when the leaving now text arrived. For some reason the chair was set to a low height and I was perched on the edge, leaning forward, my loaner iPhone in the pocket of my over-sized jumper. My jumper was so large and billowy it allowed the pocket and phone to slide over to the inner side of my leg, the phone slung against my junk and thigh. Thus it was the position of my body and the choice of attire colluded to have it so the iPhone fully buzzed the end of my nob when the text rolled on in.

So naturally I spent the time waiting for C--- by the rear of my car port texting him back to tell him the story of how he just broke my tele-cherry.

Bring on the sexy robots!

UPDATE: The alternate post title was 'Why do weird things keep happening to my nob?' This I think would also make a dandy title for the autobiography by The Amazing Mister Lifto from the Jim Rose Circus. Come on Amazing Mister Lifto, get cracking on that...

UPDATE2: The one time I tried phone sex my cat threw up. It ended the session. 

Damn you, Wikipedia

They announced the Eurovision winner in the recent news on the entry page and I saw it.

Nuts!

Naturally I had to text my Wiki-using Eurovision potentially watching peeps and let them know to go dark on expanding their mind through wiki this day.

For shame, Wikipedia. For shame.

A day in the life of a Sunday

I like Sundays but it has that slight taint of knowing you have to go back to work the next day. And as it happened I worked anyway as a bunch of stuff landed while I was off sick and I needed to clear some of it away.

There's this seeming trend of first-time published authors bragging in their dust jackets about how they now get to wear pyjamas to work. Since I was working at home then I did the same! And they're right, it is as awesome as they said it would be. Jammy, talented cock-spanks.

As I worked I could hear the rest of the family having a normal Sunday. Craft, running around, pottering. Still as far as working went it was pretty sweet to be in max. comfort with a heater going and decorative cats lolling in the Autumnal sun.

Later theBoy had a play date with a friend from day care. They ran back-and-forth between the lounge room and the bedroom, starting numerous activities and indulging in a number of costume changes. At one point a mini-Spiderman and a like-sized Batman could be seen playing together by the light blue play table that sits over the coffee table liberated from uni all those years ago.

I finished work in time to have a slow-mo light sabre fight with the boys in our narrow corridor, complete with impersonations of the crackle of clashing "blades". They had Chinglish 'fighting glowsticks' from Go-Lo. I had a cardboard tube. They won.

Also I set myself a mission. It took three sessions in total but all up I did an hour on the TPC, the death-dealing Octonaut (1) on loan from CERN; the organisation currently headed by the mysterious yet brainy beauty Dr. Cassovitch whose bewitching presence has set many a nerd heart a flutter. As a result of my hour-in-totes on the TPC my arse and thighs are pleasantly achey. I try and cycle more on weekend days to make up for half-hearted rides during the working week. That and as far as exercise goes, like working at home was, it's pretty sweet. I had the heater on in the shed as I rode and all the while I was riding I was watching Real Time on my tablet. There are worse ways to get fitter.

So I did some work and some play and now I'm blogging from the couch bed.

I'm a fucking mars bar (drops mic.)

Some lesser notes...

theBoy came into my just after seven am. I didn't have the heart to turn him away. So he snuggled in next to me and we told stories. If you're going to be woken early on a Sunday that's a nice thing to wake up for.

I've been taking bacteria capsules to help my motility. They've increased frequency and power of my solid-state emissions. Only when I do go it's fucking painful just before and well after. Today's was ... excessive and despite its volume did not grant me the sought-after PAG. I was on session one on the TPC by 9.30 am because of it as riding the bike seems to help dial back post-poo pain.

(1) Okay, it's an exercise bike. I just wanted the chance to write death-dealing Octonaut. Speaking of which, why is the octonaut with the Panzer tank commander's hat the only one wearing a full set of fucking clothes?! His fully clothed body implies the others are tackle or fish box out... (1a)

(1a) I have no idea if the lady-equiv. of tackle is a fish box but you have to admit fish box is both insulting and funny.

High praise from theWife

'You know one day you could be the friend of someone famous...'

Sunny times down the end room

I forget where I heard George Harrison say it but he said 'Here comes the sun' came about one day when it was Winter and he was hiding from some accountants. He just started plinking away and out it came. 

The end room gets morning sun. I nice fat sun beam sweeps across the carpet by the bay windows. So on Saturday mornings I spread the paper out on the couch bed and stick my ampleness up to catch some bathing rays. It's most excellent. 

theBoy wanted to hang with me. He turned up, his folded-up red Thomas emblazoned camp chair in hand. He then set it up in the sun where the beam was cast over his body but not his eyes. 

'Let's do Humpty and Stumpty,' he said (1).

Fuck that's funny. 

Earlier he was hiding behind the couch so just his eyes and above could be seen. He then did Alexi Sayle Dr Marten's Boots head pop ups (see from 1.28). Oh Gods how I laughed.

Last night when saying good night we did a riff on the Little Britain Goodnight sketch. 

Me—'I love you more than cancer!'

theBoy—'I love you more than biting!'

I reminded him about it this morning but before I did I asked if he could remember what he said. 

'I love you more than poo?' he guessed. 

Funny, funny stuff.

(1) In the Humpty and Stumpty. The boys plus theBoy were hiding under the doonah away from Rat, as Rat was hunting them for their eating his socks (story to come). Stumpty had to do a fart. I decided to make fart noises for as long as I could before theBoy interrupted me. I went for a minute then my lips went numb. I panted for breath. He started to speak and I recovered and did it some more then petered out, panting heavily. theBoy yelled 'pew' and started waving his hand under his nose. 'Get out Humpty!' he yelled, blaming the wrong brother which he always, always does. So, so funny.

A Eurovision drinking game

Take a sip each time an even smaller Babushka granny falls out of the last one (1).

(1) Yes, I am aware they're actually matryoshka dolls but for the purposes of the bit I've taken licence. Don't be all 'Disney's head be burnt not frozen' on me.

Fat Troller taunts theBoy

I fully admit I like to try and do voices whenever I can. I'm not awesome at it but nor do I bloweth the chunk. So when at play with theBoy I'm always using voices, accents, and other silly stuff. It helps in storyverse to do so because otherwise the dozens of characters that appear would all sound the same.

There's a kids' show on ABC3 called Mr Moon. It's Canadian (1).

I do not care for it. Nor does theBoy.

Sometimes when theBoy has a bath I put his toy plastic Fat Controller figure from the Thomas series on the lip of the sink. I then leave out the sliding door.

It's then the Fat Controller (as imitated by me), whom theBoy calls Fat Troller, taunts theBoy over theBoy's apparent love of Mr Moon—'You love Mister Moon! You love it! You want to make moon babies and cuddle with it!'  

I then peer around the door and see theBoy grinning at the Fat Controller.

'Excuse me, can you pass me Fat Troller?' he typically says. I of course hand it over, all the while yelling in the Troller voice 'No, he's a monster, he's going to drown me! Do not give me to him! He's a monster!'

And theBoy then drowns Fat Troller in his elephant mug and leaves his body bobbing there feet-side up.

theWife recently put a learning to read app on her iPhone. It lets the user trace the outline of a letter and, when they succeed, it bleats out a phrase of encouragement—'Well done! That's super!' However theWife found she could record over the top of the default phrases and set to work putting her own in. She invited theBoy to put a couple in too. For one of them—in a Fat Troller voice, no less—he shouted 'theBoy loves making moon babies!'

Yes ... he'd insulted himself through the medium of an iPhone kids' app.

What a Chooky!

(1) Eh?

Now that's a lunch and Mikey can't dress himself properly yet

We had a big morning tea today and there was a lot of leftovers. So at lunchtime I went grazing. 

I came back to my desk with a jam donut, a slice of cake and a small brown cupcake. I'd stacked them on the plate, largest to smallest; a pre-Turduckan conglomeration of desserts!

Aww yeah.

Later, when we were home, theWife asked how I'd gone with my choice of pants. I hadn't any of the proper pants to hand this morning so I 'd worn an admittedly thin-weave pair of black tracksuit pants.

It was an odd question. I responded with a wary 'fine ... why?'

It was then she revealed the pants in question, which she'd purchased for me, were not in fact tracksuit pants.

They were girls' pyjama pants.

Dressing fail.