The Lottery

 My current kitchen. 

Note the lack of space for simultaneous prep of healthy suppers and baking.

 I'm listening to the radio at the moment. There is a phone-in on at the moment about whether money makes you happy. I cannot believe how many people are ringing in to say they would not want to win the lottery!

We don't really play the lottery. The Grumpster and I chose a set of numbers each when the Lottery started in 1994, based on things like the phone number, door number, birthdays, lucky numbers and the odd dream-like vision. Not understanding the lottery fully at the time, we felt obliged to buy our two tickets every Saturday, because obviously the week we didn't put the numbers in would certainly be the week our numbers would come up. We became slaves to it.

The Grumpster would attack me as I walked through the door, hands full of shopping bags with an urgent 'Have you bought the lottery tickets?'  Inevitably I would feel my heart drop into my stomach, I would struggle to gasp in oxygen, I would feel tears pricking the corners of my eyes. I would barely manage to whisper 'No' in reply before he was grabbing his coat and car keys and running for his life into the darkness (or gorgeous sunshine for May/June/July-we had hot summers back then).

We kept this going for quite some time. If we knew we were going to be busy on the Saturday, we'd plan ahead and buy our tickets on the Friday. We couldn't afford to buy a number of weeks ahead (we had a 30K mortgage to pay-we were positively poor!) and for some unfathomable reason we felt we felt it was perhaps frivolous-or maybe too addictive to buy more than one day ahead, so there were occasional slip-ups. A mistaken Saturday evening would go as follows:-

Grumpster (mixing concrete to scree the floor/slapping paint on a badly-plastered wall) : 'What time does the Lottery close tonight?'
Me (Heating up microwave food on the skanky kitchen floor as the worktops were out for about 8 months) : 'Oh my Goodness!-I'll run up to the Spar and see if we aren't too late.'
Grumpster (grumpily) : 'Well that will be our numbers coming out of the machine tonight then'

(I must note that I'm pretty sure the lottery was played at random times depending on the TV schedule, we can't have been that crap at remembering a fixed time for 'last orders')

Shortly after my empty-handed return, we would sit, scooping our curries out of the black plastic trays that they were heated up in, eyes fixed on the screen with the multi-coloured balls rolling mesmerically before our eyes. Under my breath I'd be muttering 'not my numbers' over and over again like a woman posessed, The Grumpster to my side, his steely-face willing our numbers to stay in the huge bowl. As the first number was drawn up the tube, our nerves would reach the sort of height normally experienced in the face of abject danger. My eyes would be dancing like bees around a daisy as I tried to read the number on the side as it rolled down the little slope. A small bounce at the end of the run, and I could again breathe. Not my number. No missed millions this week. By the time I'd tuned my brain back into the TV I'd be relieved to see four balls sitting at the bottom of the screen, none with our numbers, not even a tennner missed, and a pound richer. The Grumpster, true to form however, would still be bemoaning his luck 'Our bloody numbers never come up'! Oh, how half empty his glass is!

At some stage, possibly a year into the lottery, someone (I suspect Mother-of-The Grumpster) gave us a small gift. It was intended to be useful to us, but proved to be more ruinous to our Lottery journey than anything. It was a pen. Cheap, not very tactile and too clumsy to use, but there was more to it than the pen 'feature'. The pen was the standard length of a biro, maybe a little skinnier which contributed to it's unusability as a pen, which was then compounded by the main feature- a large, globe-like sphere which rattled it's cargo of mini balls around with every movement. Yes, you got it, it was a  Lottery-number-selector-pen! The idea was, you held it with the globe-end pointing down, shook the balls to ensure random-ness, and then flipped it over, pen-end down, and there, in the shaft, would be six balls, randomly chosen from the 49 available, for us to copy onto a lottery-form and morph into a winning ticket!

So exciting. But we already had our numbers, and as I have previously explained, burdened by an enormous 30K mortgage, we could never have afforded to buy three tickets each week, but we had the pen (of fortune?) and we couldn't discount the possibility that this pen would make us winners! We could afford to pay someone else to scree our floor and paint our walls, and maybe pay off the gigantic mortgage under which we were forever shadowed! But neither of us wanted to give up our own numbers, because of course, they would then be guaranteed to come up. Until a solution to the affordability of three tickets-a-week issue was found (lottery win?) the pen was abandoned.

Given to aimless tom-foolery as we all are in the you-don't-know-how-lucky-you-are days of no children, one evening, the pen surfaced, and made it's way into our bored hands. We decided to see how many times we would have to go through the shake/tip sequence until one of our sets of numbers came up. I don't recall at which point we gave up, but suffice to say we never got our numbers. In fact, not even three of our numbers in any one attempt. For me, this became the point where I decided not to ever panic over losing something I didn't have in the first place. The Grumpster, for all his pessimism continued to ensure the tickets were regularly bought for quite some time after this. I think it all fizzled away once the Wednesday draw was started. £4 per week was too much, even for him.

One day, a couple of years after we gave up on the lottery, we bumped into a friend who was going to the local shop. He was off to collect some lottery winnings. 'Six numbers' he told us! Why was he going to the local newsagent to collect the wonga? Because he had two lines of numbers that he always used, and each had come up trumps for a tenner. His numbers had been chosen as randomly as ours, and I was left feeling that he was one of the unluckiest people I knew, how easily he could have put those six numbers on the same line, but I have a feeling if he had......

Anyway, the original premise for this Blog was that on the phone-in, quite a few people said they would hate to have the amounts of money generated by a lottery win! Are they mad? I would love to have a load of money. All I actually want is a house here in my current location, with enough bedrooms for the boys to have one room each and my daughter to have one with a bit more space, a bedroom for guests, a kitchen big enough for me to put aside my baking while I prepare a healthy lunch (yeah right-but if I had that kitchen I would cook properly!), a room entirely devoted to washing and ironing with a sub-room off that, never to be seen by visitors, where the boys' football boots, enormous school-bags, plethera of coats for various weather-conditions and perhaps a little dog could live....

Yes, I really would be very happy to win the lottery, if only we could get into the habit of buying a ticket!


For now, not in any state of riches, take care. Lucy.

Mr Wenger, you may thank me at your leisure!

Just a quickie. The Grumpster is watching the Arsenal v Porto Champions League game. I am listening in the small, healthy-food/baking-prohibitive kitchen. On my DAB radio. Anyone who is interested in sport and has left 5 Live on whilst watching a match on Terrestrial TV will have noticed that the streaming on a DAB radio is about 2 seconds (maybe more) ahead of that on the TV. I use this fact to help in crucial World Cup games etc by leaving the radio on loud whilst watching to enhance my enjoyment of the sporting experience. When something exciting/terrifying is happening, I drown out the TV commentary and focus on what is happening on the radio ahead of what I can see, thus preventing me from getting too excited by something which may ultimately let me down. In a nutshell, it somehow lessens the disappointment (which comes a lot with the teams I support- Arsenal/Portsmouth/England).

The Grumpster (like most) finds the same thing immensely annoying.  He likes to let hope dwell in his heart. I think it feeds his Grumpy side as he can really moan when it goes belly-up. To avoid irritation tonight, the lounge door has been firmly shut to prevent any spoilers, but our daughter keeps going to see him and leaving the door open. I have therefore, out of the kindness of my heart, kept the radio on a low volume to ensure he enjoys the game 'to the Max'.

However, I had been busy (doing nothing) and wasn't listening to the commentary for a few minutes when the lounge door opened and I could hear The Grumpster pleading with aforementioned youngster to shut the door. I couldn't resist yelling 'Yeah-Go Arsenal!' at the top of my voice to annoy him, and not a word of a lie, When I stopped, the commentator could be heard yelling 'And Arsenal have an equaliser...' My plan had backfired in a weird sort of favourable way! The joke hadn't worked at all, but I took solace in my psychic affect on the Gunners.

So Mr Wenger, read my previous post re: money, and make the cheque payable to........

Lucy

ps-anyone who reads this may be starting to understand why The Grumpster is so grumpy...He's grumpy now as while I have been doing this, the children have left a trail of destruction throughout the house. Time I got going!

Web-love

Why oh why did I think it would be a good idea to sign up for an OU course that involved spreadsheets and creating my own Website??? I have made no secret of the fact that I am not to be combined with most post-war technology yet I persist. I believe my new moblie phone may be to blame. To refresh, I bought a phone called an HTC HD2 which was recommended to me by a friend's husband. He then sold his a week after I bought it, citing the complexity of the phone and the many functions which he would never use as reasons for flogging it on (thus using the remaining 18 months of his contract on the old phone he had been so desperate to replace in the first place). I on the other hand, was able to use the phone most successfully for many of it's recommended uses, and even The Grumpster was calling me names like 'nerdy geek-face'. I think a false sense of communication confidence had overtaken me.

So I needed another 60 points to complete my degree, and signed up for a course called The Environmental Web'. The 'web' part is nothing to do with spiders, more to be associated with the world-wide variety, but Hey! No problem for moi-I own an HTC HD2 and I can take photos on it and upload them to my Facebook page almost instantly. Modern technology has caught up with me, I have joined the communication generation. Computers-schmuters, IT will no longer stand in my way, I can now do anything.

Except anything required of me on my course.

In just under two months, I need to send via the computer (rather than post or even hand delivery at midnight as in the former years of my degree) typed answers to questions on a word document, a spreadsheet of something, and 6 graphs done on spreadsheets. Yes 6! Zipped?  How on earth am I going to manage that??? Before that, I need to participate in an online Tutor-group forum and I tried my bloody hardest and I could NOT log in to the said forum so my contribution is going to be pretty poor. I tried to join all the clever people who had gone in on the course forum to say a little bit about themselves and ended up putting my two-penneth in the middle of someone called Lisa's offering. I can only hope to do something similarly stupid on the tutor-monitored, mark-grabbing forum, just as someone's adding something really profound and claim it as my own. But only if I can work out how to log in.

The course website is something to be feared. In the centre, highlighted in blue, dominating the page is a section which I am going to refer to as my Mother. The course planner. Every chapter, paragraph and activity is listed, week-by-week with a little check box next to each to show your progress. Or not. And because I am such an old lady I don't know whether it is something my Tutor can access to see if I am working hard. I can hardly tell him 'Well I am working so bloody hard at the computer stuff I haven't read the environment bits' Instead I am going to check them off, convincingly, bit-by-bit to look genuine, and then nod knowingly at the day school in March as all the brainboxes and whizzkids discuss the issues associated with the course.

I am also doing my Maths GCSE. We use paper for that. The tutor uses an interactive whiteboard to show us how to do hard sums and we copy the method onto paper. Maths used to be my nemesis, it is fast becoming my friend. I should soon be able to calculate what percentage of my OU course I have been unable to do and express it as a fraction or a decimal. But I won't be able to put it on my course forum....

I must go now as The Grumpster and I are going to watch TV. I will leave him in charge of the remote control.
Lucy.

Guitar Hero

The title refers to The Grumpster, who treated us all to a Playstation 3 recently. I have kept away from this new gadget as much as possible, prefering to nerd away with my new, now-functioning mobile phone. However, there is no escaping the noise from this new addition, it's driving me mad!

The first is the noise of ripples of applause, the swipe of stick on ball and a whispering commentator. A golf game in other words. It's rather pleasant to observe but I can only imagine that it is boring to play. There is one facility on it however which caught my fancy, one which allows the player to create their own image for the on-screen player,a  facility which forces the player to think in great depth about their appearance. On the screen is a series of breakdowns of a poor guy's face (don't know why I'm saying poor guy as it's Tiger Woods-read as rich man if you like!) into it's constituent parts, nose, brows, mouth chin etc. By clicking on any one of these, you are able to create on a 'dummy' face your likeness. For the first time, men (the prime audience for the game as only men have time to play for hours on end) are being forced to really think about their appearance, something which their female counterparts are miserably programmed to analyse about themselves on a daily basis. What fun! Throughout the process, The Grumpster was analysed, picked apart, stretched, fuzzed/defuzzzed and subjected to a series of tans and fades until we agreed the best likeness. It even had his hairstyle. It has been commented upon that the picture looks like a fugitive with mad staring eyes but when you eye The Grumpster up closely.... 

The second game on this machine is interesting. The Grumpster has been wandering around some hot jungle armed with various implements designed to end the lives of jungle baddies. These are convieniently dressed in grey from head to toe so that The Grumpster will have no trouble spotting them. They also shout at him when they have seen him, even when their jungle-unfriendly costume hasn't alerted him to their presence, allowing him to pick them off easily before stealing items of theirs which he deems useful and wandering off to find their endlessly appearing comrades. I know it's only a game but I get very cross with him when he walks over their dead bodies. He should have some respect. He has a buddy in this game, who follows him around like a child and talks to him in an urgent voice but seems to serve very little purpose. Neither of them appear to be killable which is nice as The Grumpster gets to play for as long as he fancies but it worries me that it is not ideal preparation for a situation in which The Grumpster gets lost in a similar environment in the real world with a subservient friend and an enemy who despite having been issued a stupid uniform (clearly British forces-why are they the enemy?) are likely to be better trained than him.

And then there's Guitar Hero. The Grumpster and his mini-me's are learning to share by taking turns to stand in full view of the lounge window with a small, Early Learning-sized guitar strapped to their chest, following a set routine to music. Sort of. Gone are chords and strings, replaced by coloured buttons on the fret and a big clicky-flap thing. The idea is you travel along a conveyor-belt of guitar frets on the TV screen pressing the coloured buttons on your 'guitar' as they flash past you whilst strumming this flappy job, in time to guitar classics such as Knights of Cydonia and School's out for Summer. Music it is not, however I have to say it is the game which gives me the greatest pleasure. Not that I play it, I played the guitar when I was a teenager and I can honestly say this game bears no relation to the real thing whatsoever but watching The Grumpster is an absolute delight! He attempts to maintain a nonplussed expression on his face but his determination to 'Rock' is there for all to see. Without even looking at the TV screen I am able to track the peaks and troughs of difficulty by the amount of tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, I can sense a missed note with each frustrated grimace, but best of all is the 'I know it's sad but I can't help it' expression which is extracted with nothing more than a well-timed snigger from myself. On a romantic note though, last week, after 'unlocking' a new song by playing the 'career' mode (the worst career he has ever had as he gets paid in songs) he turned to the rest of us (I'm sure he winked) and said 'this one's for you Luce'. Swoon.

He's been on Amazon looking at other games as well. He wants to invite me into the lounge (I am now an outcast) to join the PS gang, and knowing my prowess at singing, has had a good look at Singstar for me. I might be tempted, there is no equipment required other than a microphone and it requires no coordination to play, you just have to sing in time and tune, a doddle for me, and it would be the only game I could beat him at every time. Strange he hasn't bought it yet! I must just add that I've never seen a cricket game for the PS-I'd be good at that too -well, the bits where thay break for tea anyway. My lounge pass will undoubtedly expire on a permanent basis the moment he comes through the door with a F1 game-it will happen soon I am sure and I can already hear his reasoning  'well I thought it might keep the boys happy...'

Well, this year I am doing my honours course for my OU degree, and have had a successful afternoon study-dodging, for that my followers three, I thank you!
Lucy. :-)

An Explanation. (I think!)

Yesterday, the Grumpster had a clever idea. I was writing yesterday's entry for my blog when some standard family disruption reared it's head (tea/fight/phone call/injury) and I was called away to rescue/prevent/lecture about the situation. It was hours before I got to the computer to finish, and as I came into the dining room where the complicated laptop lives, The Grumpster was sat reading what I had written. Adept as I am at multi-tasking, I simultaneously moaned about my headache whilst harrying him from the desk so that I could finish up quickly and sit on my backside eating crap and watching the TV. At this point, The Grumpster made a suggestion which would save my head from worsening at the same time as securing an early pass to the lounge. (Plus I realised, the opportunity to get to sleep before midnight). Why not leave the blog at the point where I had stopped earlier? Just leave it! Add no more!

Unable to resist an opportunity to abandon anything that requires me to sit upright and think for myself, I positioned the cursor over the box which says 'Publish Post' and left-clicked. It was done, I thought it was a bit rubbish really but I reassured myself that it would have impact if nothing else. I had a fairly good evening, enjoying pink wafer biscuits, a handful of Revels and a cup of tea. I then remembered that my younger son was being evacuated from school the next morning, and spent my 'early night' making labels and gas mask box etc to make him look like a real WW2 child, but I didn't return to my blog and it spent the night incomplete and exposed.

Well, this evening I was summoned through to the dining room by the Grumpster. Now this regularly happens in our house. I will be elbow-deep in washing up water or trapped behind a mound of ironing when I hear my name being called. I will try to avoid rushing too fast, to avoid creating an impression of being eager, and wait until at least the second summons before muttering a stream of whinges and obscenities to myself (purely for my own enjoyment) then shuffle off through the house to see why I am wanted. Nine times out of the proverbial ten, when I arrive at the required destination, I will be greeted by a child who is pinned to the ground by The Grumpster, yelling 'Don't tickle me', to which I am then requested to tickle said child, to the amusement of the ones-who-got-away, before returning to the drudgery from which I had been torn. Most of the time on the other occasions  the summons is issued from the lounge, where, upon my arrival I will be asked to observe on the television one of the many places that The Grumpster has visited with his work. I will be expected to look impressed, give a verbal acknowlegement to clarify that I wish I could go somewhere as wonderful as that, and agree that one day, when we are in a position to leave our own house without arranging a babysitter/packing five peoples' bags/telling unwilling party-members that they have to come with us because we will go to prison if we leave them at home on their own, he and I will go there together. However, nothing could have prepared me for what I was being summoned for this evening.  The Grumpster was sitting at the computer with my blog page open, and there, at the bottom of the page, was a picture of a tiny pencil telling me that I had 3 comments for yesterday's entry!!!

So people are, somehow, reading this bizarre collection of words and even though the comments pertained to the fact that the entry, typically, made no sense at all, (even less given that it was incomplete) I was delighted to see that they wanted to know what the whole thing meant. The Grumpster was even more delighted that he had been mentioned! Winners all round!

So anyway, it now means that I need to inject a little sense into my unfinished post. From memory ( I am too scared to leave this draft and re-read yesterday's post in case this alphabetti-spaghetti of a post is never found again) I had explained that my January blues had been delayed for two reasons, the first being the snow, the second being The Grumpster. I first need to reassure any worried readers that the Christmas decorations are safely in the attic-room with the damp and the things-we-keep-but-never-need, and I had no need to nag for it to be done! ( I have to add that we can't keep things in our loft but instead have a first-floor attic room over the garage room in which we have to store everything. This means that it would be unreasonable to nag The G. to do it as I could just as easily do it myself  due to there being no requirement to pull oneself from a rickety six-foot ladder, up a further five-feet through nothing to a rotten loft hatch as we did in our last home.)

Anyway, I digress. All you want to know (and all I came on here to explain today-still nursing the headache) is why The Grumpster, my husband, is the second reason for me only noticing that we were in the miserable grips of January yesterday. It actually isn't really interesting or even relevant but I will explain (this blog could hardly be described using those adjectives anyway) for anyone with an enquiring mind.  The Grumpster has a job which means he has to go away from home sometimes, and when he does, it is for huge amounts of time. In the last two years he has been away on and off for 19 months, and this means he has accrued a lot of holiday. And he needs to take it. So of all the lovely months of the year, he was allowed to take January off. You know-the month when you have the least money to spend, the least inclination to spend it and the worst weather to not spend it in. So we have been mooching about together for three weeks now, like some kind of extended Christmas without the expectation, popping out to school and back but otherwise pootling about without purpose. And then yesterday, he had to go into work to sort out some complicated work-like issue, and I was left alone with our three-year-old for the first time since mid-December and I didn't know what to do! And January smacked me in the face with full-force. The snow was almost gone, it was drizzling, everyone was back to their normal selves. And it all happened on the same day. Rubbish. Roll on summer!

So now the 'mystery ' is revealed and I should imagine anyone who has spent an unhappy twenty minutes reading through this will be thinking 'is that it?!' and sadly, that is. And for anyone wondering whether we did get more snow, the answer is no. The miseries won. The snow which was ours by rights, forecast for us to enjoy, hung fire until it got further East before treating other people to a fun day.  Glory be! January really is truly miserable!  

My followers three, and anybody else who finds themselves in the awful position of reading this, Take Care, and I will spout a load more rubbish soon. Keep commenting!
Lucy.

January.

Glory Be! January's dull. It has to be the worst month of the twelve!!! Normally I start feeling this fed up on about the 4th of Jan, when the children go back to school and the boxes of Christmas decorations wait expectantly on the landing for the 'Can you out the bloody Christmas Decorations back in the loft?' row to erupt, but this year the feeling has only just hit. There are two reasons for this delay. The first is of course the snow. It's still here but it's not exciting any more. There's no discernable thaw, it is simply receding. When it was really thick though, it caused an exciting extension to Christmas as normal day-to-day life stopped,  the schools closed (except ours of course) everyone had something to talk about and those who weren't talking about it were out playing in it. The sledges that had sat in garages, redundant for years (unless your children do the same as mine in the summer and spray the garden with a hose until sodden then drag each other round in the ensuing mud) were suddenly liberated from behind the bikes, rakes and paint tins, and dragged up and down anything remotely slope-like. Even we went sledging at the weekend-even me! Then miserable swineherds started ringing radio shows etc suggesting that we do the same as countries like Canada and carry on as normal and before we knew it, the snowy gift was shunned,  the sledges went back in the garages for another 20 years, and all this in favour of office chairs, long commutes and classrooms. BOO, HISS. We have more snow forecast overnight here-up to 15cm but I bet those same misers are on the phone to God asking for it to be rain please, 'As we've had enough fun this year. Thankyou.'

Anyway, my second reason for the late onset of my January blues. The Grumpster.

Still Geeking....

So here I am again, still geeking (as the Grumpster has described my technological activities) and testing a new editor feature on my blog. And there is no discernable difference. -Hang on, change that, there is!  I can now change how the text looks!  How Exciting!  I don't know what most of the icons at the top of this box mean, other than B and I  (can you tell?!) but there is always an option for the Grumpster to experiment on my behalf. He knows so much more about computers than I do. Today, I decided to put some photos that I'd taken on my new phone onto the computer. Under his direct supervision. All went well until I plucked the lead that connected my phone to my computer from  it's umbilical housing. 'NO' yelled the G. 'You have to tell the computer that you are disconnecting it!!!' As if it's a dire emergency, he has already made his way across the house to the poor, shocked PC. I am sitting, frozen with fear, as if the machine might in some way retaliate against my foolishness. Well, there was nothing that could be done. The computer survived (I hope) and so has my phone, but I have been shown what to do, and will never be so foolish again. Phew!  

Everyone has been so excited by the snow this week, it's just incredible. We actually get snow here most winters but it generally never lays and when it does, by the time we have slipped out into the garage to get the sledge the drip-drip signal that it is going to disappear faster than it arrived is already well under way. This year however, we have had super-snow! It's been here for days, schools have closed (although ours was the only one in Somerset that opened on Thursday-we are so hard here!) and the shops look like they have been looted. So I am sad to report that the BBC are forecasting a thaw over the next couple of days. As I type, frantic shouts and drawer-opening sounds are happening in the boys' room above me. That is the noise of boys getting dressed. We are off sledging  before it's all gone. I will let you know how it has gone (hopefully from home and not an X-ray dept.) when I next geek.

Be careful and stay upright followers. Lucy.