Builder: you must want to shoot me, let me explain …[5 minutes creative explanation]
I wonder why he assumed I would choose a gun in a country who’s weapon of choice this summer is the knife. That aside, his cute Reading accent, entertaining excuses, with the lack of urgency for the renovations made the whole situation mildly amusing.
When the smell of car, smell of book, or smell of plastic just isn’t enough to please the peoplewho come within sniffing distance of your life.
When you long for the-day-after-a-night-in-the-pub smokey scent in your hair,
Try the new tobacco scented shower gel
you know it makes scents.
Not a popular Scottish music festival. A testosterone fuelled five-aside football tournament in Palmers park.
The exciteness levels have been raised from the bog-standard, yet rare, red to the yet-more-rare blood-red level.
Defining characteristics of blood-red excitement level are
Today I am focussing all my emotional energy on striving to achieve the dizziest heights of most strikingly ordinariness. The cats have already fallen into snore-laden sleep.
I’ll let you kno ho it goes, though it ont be anything special, so maybe I ont let you kno ho it goes. e’ll see if its orthy, after a bout of affly indecisveness of extremely ordinary proportions and hacking my mini-hammer on the wwwwww key.
why I love England #2: The BBC
Public funded broadbcasting in the public interest rather than in the interest of making profit. With journalists all over the world who assume their audience has some intelligence and ask insightful rather than tabloid questions. I suspect that I have a crush on Jeremy Paxman. They produce high quality drama, comedy productions and Dr. Who. They backed Red Dwarf on BBC2 and Top Gear. They employed Dennis Potter and delivered Blue Peter who provided me with my first and enduring female role model in Valerie Singleton and gave me profound appreciation of the potential of squeezy bottles and sticky-backed-plastic to contribute to orld happiness.
Stephen fry quoted on Wikipedia’s entry about Valerie Singleton:
I have been pondering this business of fame since I was young enough to know Valerie Singleton from the Queen (for Americans and other non-Britons I should explain: one is a remote, god-like, autocratic woman endowed with powerful charismatic charm and the other is a constitutional monarch recently played on screen by Helen Mirren
What more could a girl want from broadcasting?
Not a euphemism for light sabres. 
Also known in the US as ‘Energy bars’. Not a way of describing the throughput of electricity to an electronic device.
High sugar-content (energy) biscuits in a bar shape marketed in the US as a lifestyle accessory for highly active people (Walkers, cyclists, etc). Similar products in the UK appear to be marketed as breakfast bars and stocked next to the breakfast cereals in supermarkets. I suspect they are breakfast replacements for fast-moving executives, children and aspiring anorexics.
I’m trying a few as possible lifestyle accessories for my GREEK SAILING HOLIDAY. Huuuuurrrraaaahhhhh!
A local Holland and Barratt shop lured me in with this ‘Love bar’. I subsequently discovered that the advertising is naughty because Gillian McKieth cannot legally call herself a Doctor in the UK. Her Dr. qualification is reportedly from a correspondence course with a non-acredited US University. The Guardian reported on her naughty non-truths and misleading product information back in 2007. In 2008 she’s still using the title Dr. on product packaging and making questionable claims about their ‘health’ impact…
when smell of book, or smell of plastic just isn’t enough for the women in your life, try smell of car …
Removing the darkness and the dampness
The helpful builders
when they turn-up*
will replace the original, rotting, leaky, kitchen roof
The roof does provide a home for many forms of damp-loving wildlife, most notably moss, but I’ll be sacrificing thier habitat for a dry kitchen with sky-light.
Luxury!
* an English colleague has informed me that ‘not turning up on schedule’ is the sign of a highly professional English builder.
Sunday Times and online Times article ‘Sex and the Sixities’ by India Knight includes the following rousing calls to womanhood:
“the essence of modern womanhood, the one hard-to-define component that makes us all want to cheer the loudest…” is “…possibility that we may, at 62, perhaps look like Helen Mirren in a bikini”
“a 62-year-old woman looking hot, properly hot, not hot for her age or hot as in fanciable, even though you know you shouldn’t is a thing that simply can’t be celebrated enough.”
‘Mirren in her red bikini says more, more succinctly, about what women want and can achieve than any amount of turgid feminist preaching ever could’
Gosh, I don’t think I know people who think spending time and skill to dress for the occasion is shallow, but India thinks that view might be held by some Times readers because she considerately quashes it “if you think that’s shallow, I would humbly posit that you understand nothing at all about real women’s hopes and ambitions.” Trying to following India’s humble reasoning, leads to the suspicion that if I don’t want to look like Helen Mirren in a Bikini then I may not be a real woman, Ooops! I think I may have fallen over.
Apparently the social construction of ‘woman’ once meant “no longer being a girl, which translated into bad clothes, bad hair, bad make-up and, if you were especially unfortunate, a bad figure.” and “Worse, having reproduced meant that in the eyes of society you no longer existed as a sexual being“. It seems that India believes promoting yourself as a ‘sexual being’ , sexbot, should be an aspirational goal for real women and it is equated to looking young. If you don’t look sexy you look old. Whhhooooops! I definitely fell over this time.
India’s view also implies that, normal, aspiring real women have no financial or legal obstacles to not looking youthful and sexy because ‘deregulated’‘ ‘minor surgical procedures’ are ‘nothing that is outside most people’ league’ . It is all part of the groundwork for achieving ‘a triumphant assertion of easy, carefree femininity’. While fake women should embrace the freedom and “life-changing power of hair dye“. As a self-identified, terminally-fake, woman I ”might know better if they [I] made an attempt at living in the real world“. Maybe downtown Reading is actually a figment of my nasty, demented, Ivory-tower, imagination? Deary me, I must get out more and take my zimmer-frame.
If ‘looking good’ is primarily equated to looking youthful and sexy I have no intention of developing an interest. or skill, in it. When looking good is constructed to promote wrinkles and twisty silver hairs ideally with a dash, or spring, of surrealist creativity, then I’ll be swinging my funky-stuff with the melting clocks but not with the people who aspire to portray themselves as sexbots.
For now, if I place myself in India’s analytical framework I find that I am:
At least India has clearly given me the escape route to achieve real-woman status that luckily I can choose not to aspire to, I must
Unlike Alan’s outstanding advice I wont be aligning the value-set outlined in India’s article.
* the sound of me and my zimmer-frame colliding with the ground when dropping out of our Ivory tower.
A castle isn’t complete without a moat.
In April I booked builders to install a moat in June. In mid july I haven’t yet seen them.
Without a moat how can the Wendy House remain defended from being undermined?
Since leaving my parents’ home in the early 1980′s I’ve hankered after a classic wool dressing gown bordered with coloured-chord. Over the years I’ve compromised with fluffy-cotton dressing gowns, Kimonos and stylish smoking jackets. Finally, the exceptional Jackson’s summer sale delivered the real thing. Extra-large mens’ was the smallest size available. The shop assistant said that they had ordered the ‘Lloyd Attree and Smith’ (Gentlemans outfitters since 1857) dressing gowns based on regular requests from customers. Unfortunately, when the dressing gowns arrived the customers were not prepared to pay the full retail price.
Jacksons will not be restocking these Lloyd Attree and Smith 100% wool dressing gowns.
Much to the mature, mens department, shop assistant’s amusement I tried-on the XL dressing gown. It did not trail on the floor though I will have to roll the sleeves up by about 6 inches to keep them out of my breakfast.
I treated myself to the warm stylish, oversized, high quality gown and a couple of white hankerchiefs in readiness for the impending onset of winter… …it really is a wonderful experience in the early dawn, wrapped in wool beneath the dew-covered conservatory with a hot mug of tea.
As you know, I don’t need the help of heels to fall-over and scrape my knee, uppity curbs are sufficient, it is a wendy-way of being…
Sophie King received £7,200 compensation for ‘pain, suffering and loss of amenity’ due to a broken ankle resulting from a fall when the heel of her newly purchased shoe broke. The Guardian’s Ariane Sherine thinks Sophie deserved a broken ankle and should repay the damages. At least one fledgeling member of the UK caring(?), medical, profession agrees with Ariane’s view that women should expect to suffer pain for conforming to patriarchal, consumerist, pressures to wear sub-standard dangerous products, in this case, high-heeled shoes. Both the Guardian and medical blog point out that Sophie, the victim, was 5 ft 9. The sheer audacity to be a girl AND tall without recognising that she expected to suffer substandard, dangerous goods, while maintaining her social obligation to conform to patriarchal ‘sexy’ values.
This is a classic example of the patriarchal approach to dealing with systematic abuse against women by requiring an adjustment to the behaviour of the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. Legally referred to as ‘contributory negligence’ , infamously called-out in 1980′s UK when a man convicted of rape was not given even a custodial sentence by Judge pickles because the woman (victim) was negligent in her behaviour by wearing a mini-skirt. Huh?!
I’m glad that this time, the legal system protected the victim, Sophie King.
Shoe manufacturers systematically target physically-dangerous (high-heeled) shoes at women, not men. It is a clear case of female-gender abuse. A trap targeted only at female health. On planet Wendy an insightful, talented, lawyer would bring a class action against the shoe industry for being the instrument of perpetrating systematic violence against women.
The travel company has provided a trip dossier that includes a very specific pre-holiday check-list on what to pack! Useful and appealing to my listophilia:
I’m a tad concerned about the lack of underwear and nightwear worn by my fellow passengers, self, and the skipper. Publically displayed jiggly-bits can put one off one’s beer or book. The lack of ’dressing’ requirements for evenings in the Taverna, or Temple visiting, is also a tiny disappointment. Luckily for the male guests there are no requirements to bring skirts or dresses. All the listed gear fits into this holdall with space to spare, for an unlisted skirt, underwear, binoculars and possibly a pretty dress. I’m still waiting for my promised paper airline ticket to arrive…
In paper letters English service providers have more than once assumed that I am a ‘sir’. Yet another example of the multiple daily affirmations of womans’ ‘in’ and ‘out’ of approved place.
This is the first letter that has assumed that I am actually a group of men. The letter is from Her Majesties Customs and Revenue (HMCR). It is addressed to an accountancy company who are trying to complete my tax returns. It was sent to my home address rather than the accountants address. The person dealing with my tax return is a woman, not a group of men. I am disappointed, sadly not suprised, that the default assumption for letter addressing here in England appears to be – if you do not know a persons gender assume male rather than use the addressees personal or company name.
In the letter HMRC ask why I want to make a self-assessed tax return. If they can’t get my gender and single status correct, they cant get my name matched with my address, and my accountants name matched with her address, they haven’t given me confidence in their ability to accurately complete the complex mathematical calculations necessary to estimate how much tax I should pay them.
Completing a self-assessment is a double-check of HMCR calculations.
Darling and I have trouble communicating multiple U’s. Darling’s w-key is getting fussy about being pressed, it requires twice the pressure of any other key before it ill register a letter. The increasing dodgyness of the keyboard as one of the core early symptoms of Tinkerbell’s stealth senility and eventual NMI Parity death.
After over 2 years of daily blogging and travelling all over the place (and Spokane) maybe Darling is seeking retirement perks.
While packing a day-bag to attend a local water-festival I noticed that my Oakley prescription sunglasses were not, as expected, nestled amongst my collection of spectacles dating back to 1979, in my spectacle drawer.
There was a minor panic outbreak because I will need these glasses for my rapidly impending Greek Sailing Holiday. I quickly searched all sensible places where I may have put a pair of sunglasses. They weren’t anywhere sensible. The following morning I double-checked all the sensible places, the following morning I looked in a few down-right silly places to put sun glasses (e.g. spare tea caddy).
3 days later, my morning random search for the oakleys included my winter-jumper draw. There they were, between two wool jumpers…..
The passport under the sink and the sunglasses between the woolly-jumpers are two of the Wendy House mysteries that may never be explained…
Bros: he was alright except for the lists
Wendy: the lists?
Bros: Yes, the lists, you remember how he would make lists all the time for even trivial things?
Wendy: errr, yes, of course, the lists
It appears that my brother has not yet noticed my pocket-size book of lists that has travelled all over the world (and Reading) with me. Nor has he recognised the intrinsic Wendy-appeal of someone that blazenly employs lists in public.
Google analytics reported visitor loyalty (probably unique IP addresses?) for one week in July 2008 as significantly* BIGGER than during one week in January 2007.
January 2007 (July 2008) :
Up to 29 (101) visitors (unique IP addresses) , other than my good-self, return frequently enough for me to assume they drop-by on a daily basis. Out of pure, unfettered, cussedness I am also assuming that at least half of these loyal visitors are naughty, naughty, spam-bots or or other bots of an icky nature, as opposed to pleasantly pert bots. This assumption still leaves me with about 50 regular, daily, visitors who may actually be people!
* Significance in a formal Statistical sense identified by using Excel’s t-test function for a one-tailed, independent groups t-test that lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis, h0, p< 0.001
h0 ‘= there are no more people reading my blog regularly in July 2008 than in January 2007′
The result is statistically very powerful but I have low confidence levels in it because of the low signal-noise ratio introduced by the way the variable (a loyal blog reading person) is operationalised (unique IP address) that introduces a lot of noise mostly from bots.
Even worse than low statistical confidence is my inappropriate test-selection. Inappropriate because although the data fulfills some of the assumtions of the independent groups t-test e.g. parametric, it is sufficiently naughty to potentially violate other assumptions such as truely independent groups.
In summary, we can probably ignore the statistical significance of the numbers because of all the non-number related issues.
Statistical escapades put aside, I am still convinced that the Wendy House has quite a few more regular readers now than in January 2007.
windows support answer to my query
No curmudgeonist moments for me today.
In less than a 24hr turnaround I got a response that was concise and useful. I also tried to report my ‘bug’ to Google, I couldn’t find a way to report it, I used their ‘questions’ section and, to my knowledge, no-one replied.
What is an English waterside ceremony?
Lots of people wearing gender-defined colourful, often impractical, clothes and hats travel to a small Oxfordshire town to shout at teams of very muscular young adults rowing boats rather fast on a straight-stretch of the River Thames. Pedestrians weave between cars* jammed in the roads while police people politely suggest, then instruct, that the pedestrians stay on the pavements. Not to mention the barrels of Pimms flowing, gallons of champagne popping, and glasses of Brakspear sinking in Public Houses, car parks, and by the riverside. 
It was the annual Henley Royal Regatta.
* I took the 850 arriva bus from Reading to High Wycombe, hopped off at Henley, and a jolly pleasant ride it was too.
Words of wisdom from my outrageously expensive and handsome young product-dispensing, ex-pro-brick-layer, hairdresser:
Your job should be something you are passionate about
As usual, I’ll be taking Alan’s tip very seriously and following up on this gem of wisdom
Without the aid of dyes, stains, or peroxides, my wonderful mop of hair has developed some ‘arctic blonde’ with sparkly twisty effects thrown in for good measure. It’s a pure swishy sparkly pleasure for anyone to squint at first thing in the morning and the pleasure’s all mine because, suprisingly enough, I’m still single!
in less than one hour of excited pre-holiday preparation I called the:
* Apparantly, my contents are insufficiently valuable for them to require that I upgrade the Wendy House stable-door bolts.
** This has nothing to do with my HOLIDAY, but I was on a roll with the phone-calling and wanted to keep the momentum going.
“how are the cats settling in?”
Thankyou to everyone who inquired after the wellbeing of my darling fluffballs. I am happy to confirm that they have quickly adapted to this Wendy House and are exhibiting a full range of healthy fluff-ball-ee activities, most notable of which is the Monaco-ish, formula-1-ish speed and agility, dangerous-staircase dash.
Dangerous-staircase dash
Starts in the garden where Sampo cues-up Matrix by strutting backward and forward in front of her just out of paws reach. Next, Sampo runs for the front-door gathering sufficient speed to arrive before Matrix, maintaining sufficient control to take the entrance-hall-front-room 90 degrees doorway-bend. Occassionally Sampo misses the bend and ends up in the bathroom where she is cornered by Matrix and has clearly lost the chase. After several months of practice she has the hall-front-room doorway-bend almost fully mastered.
The subtle curve on the approach to the foot of the stairs occassionally causes loss of footing on the bare floorboards and is invariably accompanied by liberal doses of meowing from both teams. The main course-obstacle is the dangerous-staircase u-turn. The dangerous-staircase u-turn either involves a headlong crash into the front-room wall for those missjudging their momentum, or falling down the first couple of steps for those misjudging their paw-friction. Sampo tends to crash into the wall due to belly-induced-momentum, Matrix tends to slip on the steps. Once past the first few steps, if Sampo is still ahead of Matirx she’s pounces safely to the finish line on the first-floor landing and is ready to start the next round. Fresh water, views of local trees and birds are provided on the landing at the end of the course for the competing kitties.
The cats are regularly able and willing to practice this tricky F1 course on a daily basis often changing chaser-chasee roles and investigating route variations including the dinning room table top, sofa-bends and comfy chair corner.
Ringside tickets are available.
Corporate bookings and sponsorship considered.
Not irritating graffiti or marks that appear on your fabulous benches. Benchmarking, to me, means sensible comparisons.
While I was wandering along the corridors of Technorati, I started to sulk because the Wendyhome blog only warranted an ‘Authority of 5′. I have no idea what an Authority of 5 means, but it sounded fairly lowly. My bottom lip protruded as I read the information provided by Technorati on who had linked to my blog. Then. OH YES… ….THEN, I noticed that Raymond Chen’s blog got a Technorati rating of 9. NINE.
Lets look at this relatively. I’m not related to Raymond but our blogs have relatively different readership and page-load numbers. If my blog is rated 5 and I had to subjectively estimate what Raymonds blog would rate on the same scale I would guesstimate Raymond’s blog would rate at an approximate 3 zillion 4 million 5 thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine point five. Taking regular daily hits into account and deducting 5 points for nitpickers.
In short, which Raymond is, relative to Average US adult male heights, that my blog got 5 on a scale that rates Raymonds blog as 9 is a significant achievement. My bottom lip retracted and the champagne bottles were popped. Hoorah. The Technorati Benchmarks are in my good books for today. Just for today mind, there’s no telling what tomorrow may bring…
One of the larger (circa 1862) houses in my street hosted a street-garden party where I ate oodles of triffle and met dozens of neighbours who chose to buy homes there because of the:
Each of us introduced ourselves by name and house number, I became ‘Wendy at n(a)’. My introduction received one of two common reactions:
Uncommonly, the Wendy House doesn’t have a frontage on the Street. It is hidden behind n+1 with the pathway approach unintuitively placed between n+1 and n(b) rather than intuitively between n and n(b). I discovered that a prior resident of this Wendy House, Marion:
My plan to become the wierd lady with the hats was generally well recieved. One neighbour may give me an old set of oak gates from a local house currently stored in his stables which haven’t been converted into a residence for a working woman.
Nestled in a quiet backstreet on the traffic island that is created downtown by the (A4) one-way system (London and Kings Roads) is this pleasant suprise. The Eldon Arms.
Midweek the inside the Eldon Arms was packed with the Ladies darts teams. The garden also looked pretty busy judging by the glasses returned to the bar by the very polite Reading University Agricultural students who had graduated earlier that day. I didn’t notice any music, there was a quiz (gambling) machine near the bar but no-one using it.
I tried the Henry’s Original IPA (3.6 ABV). Well kept, tasty and sufficiently weak for me to quoff 2 pints after work midweek. Result! Certainly an improvement on the more shop-purchasable ubiquitous, similar strength, Boddingtons.
Upon hearing of my expedition to this hostelry a local celebrity wrote:
hear you are paying a visit to the Eldon Arms. Good choice! It’s a lovely little old-fashioned backstreet pub, traditional and with friendly staff. I’m told that Anne and Brian are Reading’s longest-serving landlady and landlord, although I’m sure Bernie and Jane at The Retreat (a short stroll from The Eldon) are also hot contenders for this title.
The Eldon Arms is a Wadworth tied pub, so the selection of beers is mostly restricted to this brewery, but the choice is fine within this range and well kept. My favourite is Bishop’s Tipple, but at 5.5% ABV it’s not to be chugged too quickly! If you’re after something lighter and more summery, try the Horizon. Avoid Pint-Size Mild, if they have it, unless you like mild; personally, I don’t get on with it and this West Berks brew is a good reminder of why
I used to visit this pub frequently on a Wednesday night for their pub quiz, in the days when I worked at the Prudential and had the luxury of rolling in at 10 the next morning. Now I have to drive to south Oxfordshire for 8:30am I don’t go so often! Their quiz is quite a different experience from The Lyndhurst one as it is set and presented by the person who won it last week! It’s a bit like the Eurovision Song Contest in that respect. I’ve won it a couple of times and it’s quite fun to set it, as long as you have a fairly clear week and plenty of time to put it together! I’ve also deliberately pulled back to second place at least once to avoid having to set it when I knew I hadn’t the time! I really must go again soon
Well, that’s all I have. Feel free to ignore all of the above if you want to enjoy the experience of visiting with no preconceptions. However, if you’re reading this sentence then it’s probably too late
Happy pubbing
Red excitedness characteristics:
Why now?
Only 4 weeks before my Greek sailing holiday! I’ve made the lists & purchased the essentials. From here-on in its all about getting over-excited.
<Essay warning>
Not distributed within the mind, distributed across people and other things. The work of Yvonne Rogers in the 1990′s introduced me to the idea of distributed cognition. Here are some examples from my everyday life:
People, sensibly, strategically delegate the effort involved in constructing some memories to post-it notes, lists, calendars, address books, mobile phones, bag-contents, places, blogs, photoalbums, family and friends.
A die-hard cognitivist might say this is just context-cued recall. Both paradigms provide the means to describe human behaviour, but the approaches to psychological theory building and research are radically different. The cognitivist would attempt to identify the specific cues that work most effectively and assess them in a lab, one specific unusual context, rather than analyse everyday activities in commonly meaningful contexts. These different research techniques would yield different practical, application, recommendations.
The cognitivists make the research language and approach to understanding human behaviour their domain as specialists, ‘everyday’ approaches enable results to be readily recognisable, understandable and communicable to people outside of a specialist discourse. They also afford more meaningful pragmatic applications.
<Essay warning over>
My next essay will probably be on Reading’s buses…
