I freaking called it!
I have billions of good ideas and no concept of how to take them to fruition. Fine and dandy.
What bugs me is that I later see these good ideas coming into reality at a minimum of five years after I was flat-out told that my concepts were impossible for one reason or another.
In my teen years, I dreamed up an animation program that any idiot could use [specifically, an idiot like me who has no freaking clue how to animate]. Just recently, I bought a Blue-Ray movie with a give-away. Said give-away was Aardman’s animation program that is allegedly easy to use.
I’m betting not as easy as they think, but damn, it’s getting there.
I also thought that the sides of skyscrapers could be employed as solar collectors. Now, some genius has invented A solar panel that doubles as a window.
Amazing.
I won’t drag you through the details of all my other genius ideas [mostly because I’ve forgotten half of them] but I will share some of my current ones.
Bamboo is the cash crop of the future. Seriously, it’s like the duct tape of the plant world. Not that I see a future made of duct tape and bamboo, but mostly bamboo would be fine. Seriously, you can eat it, make clothes out of it [Though only socks and jocks have been spotted thus far], turn it into paper, build with it and out of it and use it as a container. As a bonus, it grows like blue fuck and only needs a little space. No more clearing out old growth forests! Yay!
Automated medication delivery. We seriously need a system where, once you have to take a medication for life, it gets delivered automatically when you’re near to running out. It would save thousands. Lives, dollars, hours, you name it. And it would cut down on disease vectors because you no longer have to hang around for ages on end for a two-minute visit for a new scrip.
Across the board apps. Imagine this: you buy an app for your phone. Instantly, your at-home Mac and iPad also have that app installed. If you have an app on one device, why shouldn’t it be on all your linked ones. Apple only do this for Pads and Phones, but why not include the desktops? I for one, would like Message to be available on my desktop as well.
Keep an eye out for these innovations. And remember that I freaking called it.
Best. Belly laugh. Ever.
I have an in-joke with my progeny we call “the Fartarsing Competition” which is generally aimed at any kind of road-building activity that’s mostly inactivity designed to impede traffic flow for months on end. You know. Road works.
On our way home from an outing, today, I decided to narrate the local crew allegedly doing something in regards to drainage.
Me: [Bad David Attenborough impression] “We now join the inaction in progress. I see five gentlemen standing around having a gassbag, one fellow wandering around the area of alleged construction and three gentlemen standing around supervising his aimless meanderings. And, yes, there is a gentleman sitting in the shade having a *biscuit*. Excellent fartarsing all around, gentlemen.”
Mayhem: [Perfect Announcer Voice] “And now… Ducks.”
ROFL.
I was laughing so hard my eldest was pleading with me to pull over lest we crash. He had such perfect timing, such a perfect nonsequiteur…
It was art.
The seasons are changing…
Lucky America [and possibly most of the northern hemisphere], you get things like spring and autumn. You get a gradual and even picturesque seague into the warmer or colder weather.
Not Australia.
In Australia, Nature [who I am frequently reminded is a Mother] just flicks a switch between winter [biting cold, lazy winds, and the sort of rain that was trying for sleet but couldn’t be bothered] and summer [Searing heat, bone-dry droughts interspersed with the kinds of floods that Noah was told to watch out for, and absolute shit tons of these crunchy, stupid beetles whose last mission on this planet is to die in such a way that they can latch on to the underside of your foot in the most painful way possible].
Now, we do technically have spring and autumn. That’s the month or so when Nature flicks the switch back and forth so that you can never tell if it’s a minimum-layers day or an all-the-fucking-layers-at-once day. And sometimes, she switches in the middle of the day, the cow.
Now that the switch seems to be leaning increasingly towards summer, I have something of an open invitation to some people.
Dear Everybody Who Says, “So much for global warming, eh?” When They Spot the First Sign of Winter Weather:
Global warming likes to go south for the winter. I heartily invite you to come down here in the middle of the scorching heat and cases of sun-stroke to deny it. If we’re in a good mood, we might just give you a head start before we stake you down, naked, in our backyards until your exposed flesh is extra crispy.
I think we’d be doing humanity a service, don’t you?
Progress report of a sort
Okay, so I finally got off my divot and transferred my soon-to-be-released free book into MSWord 7 ‘cause that’s the only editor that exists for the nice folks at Smashwords 9_9
Now I’m just waiting for @xotxot to get back to me about the cover.
I’m getting nervous. As I usually do when my success at a plan is entirely dependant on someone else. I’ve had plans of mine fail purely because someone I was depending on couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t feel like doing me a favour.
The question I put to you is:
Should I concoct a cover in my typical Suck-O-Vision limited Inkscape skills, just in case? Or should I have faith that it will all work out somehow?
Balls!
Blather about my new chair to follow. I just thought I’d at least have an interesting title.
Achievement unlocked: Exercise for the day
Some have noted that my life is boring. Heaven forfend I get excitement, because excitement usually involves someone’s life going pants and me doing some variant of the quirkafleg.
[The quirkafleg is a series of spasmodic paroxysms directly related to extreme disgust, a violent tantrum, or a combination of the twain. Use the word and confuse your friends and family]
Anyway.
Today I got my exercise by Culching.
Culch is a fancy word for “potentially useful junk” and does actually exist in some dictionaries. Look it up. What you consider to be culch varies depending on your interests, hobbies or projects. It can be as mundane as free range cardboard or as exotic and varied as the contents of M5.
Culching is what you do when gathering culch.
Translation: I’ve been shopping.
Amongst my multitude of items - I’ll spare the more exotic details, there’s little more dull than a culcher explaining their culch - I managed to find some Pilates-style megaballs. One for me to use instead of my rapidly dilapidating chair, and one for the spawn to nick instead of my new flakking chair.
I also got an upper-body workout inflating the megaballs.
The old chair is in a sorry state. It’s lost one arm, most of its cushy padding, a small percentage of the original leather and the ability to reliably go up, down or lean back. Most of this attrition can be directly blamed on the spawn.
The problem now is what to do with the old chair. Do I let it decay? Turn it into a lawn ornament? Break it down for parts to increase my SABLE [Stash Above and Beyond Life Expectancy] to ridiculous proportions?
I can’t just throw it away.
It could come in handy.
Freakin’ Lurgi
The entire family - minus me and the the antisociallite Captain Useless - have been struck low with Lurgi this week.
Which, for me, means interrupted sleep, tired days, lots of coffee caramel mochachinos, and entire swathes of the Blah’s.
More ranting on the Blah’s after the cut.
I’m almost an Author
I’ve published my first story, RTFM.
I did the cover all by myself, in InkScape. So no nasty comments about the cover. I’m fragile [swoon].
Please go buy my book and help finance my trip into fully-fledged Authordom.
As I’ve said before, the difference between a Writer and an Author is that the Author gets paid.
5 more years off Purgatory…
I did a genuine good deed, tonight. The cat bought in a bird and, being a cat, demanded acknowledgement of her great feline feat.
Mayhem spotted it, I discouraged the cat from holding the poor creature, and together we bought the poor thing to the relative safety of the front room.
It was a small olive-green honeysucker, judging by the proboscis-like beak and its long tongue. I held it in my hands for quite some time, and kept Mayhem from patting the poor creature and scaring it the rest of the way to its little birdie grave.
Hubbie, at my badgering, looked up care and maintenance of cat-struck birds. Instructions that said to place the bird in a shoe box and stay with it until it began walking around.
Well, by the time Mayhem returned with a shoe box, the bird decided it had had enough of these giant noisy pink things and tried to take of on its own. Cue Benny Hill theme as my good self, Mayhem, a chair and a small cardboard box attempted to round up and free to the outside world a small bird about the same size as a mouse.
The good news is that the little olive honeysucker was last seen speeding into the night, hell for leather, little birdie brain determined to find a place of safety and freedom.
The bad news is that the cat was last seen sauntering determinedly after it.
The whole point is, even though I’m dreading hearing a feline’s triumphant meows of a victorious capture, I helped rescue a bird. I held in my hands a little miracle and aided in its survival. That’s one hell of a natural antidepressant. Without the side-effects of numbing the entire heart to the point where nothing can be felt at all.
I feel marvellous. After weeks of hating myself for various reasons, I feel over the moon. It’s wonderful therapy to do something tangibly good. Remember that, it might come in handy.