Have a look at this. Seriously, ignoring the spelling, aren’t Manx and Irish the same?
Mr. Waffle
Give me a boy at seven
New acquaintance: And where did your husband go to school?
Me: Jesuit School X.
New acquaintance: Oh lovely, clever, sensitive boys.
I understand that Mr. Waffle’s school produced many chess champions but that they failed to star in rugby.
For scrabble lovers
Headline from the Irish Times during the week: “Xilinx records Nasdaq gains.”
FURTHER AND BETTER VERMIN
The house is overrun with animals. Not nice ones. Despite forking out €243 to Mr. Rentokil, we seem to have an above average number of houseflies. So appealing in any property. This did, however, give my loving husband an opportunity to kill a fly in a most satisfactory manner. He was chasing a fly on the landing with our can of useless spray (this is the problem with everything being safe, it’s also useless) and the fly was lolling about in the air soaking up the aromas with no apparent ill effects. The fly was, however, scared of the folded Irish Times that Mr. Waffle was using to supplement the fly spray (“Help, help, the liberal Dublin media, the organ of record is coming to get me with its tales of traffic chaos in the capital”) and flew blindly into a spider’s web and was trapped. Mr. Waffle noted with satisfaction, the spider efficiently bundling up its prey – one fly down. Mr. Waffle had only recently been complaining that the huge number of spiders we have on the payroll had been failing to deliver in terms of fly catching figures and that, going forward, in the absence of improved catching capacity we might have to look at overall spider numbers with a view to effecting savings in the current economic conditions. The memo obviously leaked to the spiders and they are on their mettle.
Meanwhile, we are also fighting a rear-guard action on operation wasp. Despite laying down powder, spraying, putting out a glass of coke for them to drown in and blocking up access to their nest with a highly sophisticated barrier (a combination of an old baby’s bib and tinfoil, since you ask). They are still coming. They buzz around outside hopefully (“They used to live here, they’d never have moved without telling us…call the rest of the gang”) and, increasingly and distressingly, they also buzz around inside the house. Our reluctant conclusion is that there must be some other form of access to the nest from inside the house.
And last, but by no means least, my blog is beset by spammers. At least they can’t sting me, I suppose.
Guilty day off
I took Friday off work and Mr. Waffle and I went walking in the Wicklow hills. The weather was beautiful and the views were beautiful. All we could hear, high in the hills was birdsong, bees and a particularly loud boy racer whizzing around the twisting road visible in the distance. I would post a picture but we left the camera behind. Oh yes, take only memories, leave only footprints. In my case quite deep, squelchy footprints. The bog hasn’t dried up much despite the extraordinarily fine weather. Regretfully, on returning home, I decided it was time to consign my Nike runners, purchased in Bosnia in 1995, to the bin.
We had tea in the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. I cannot really say how they are at peace and reconciliation but I wouldn’t really recommend it as a tea stop. Inappropriately, it was there that we decided to dispose of our principles and buy the boys toy guns for their birthday. I thought that you should be the first to know.
We had a lovely day in the warm sunshine as our children toiled at school and, as punishment, when we got home, we found this note from the school in their bags:
If only we hadn’t sneaked off on our own, none of this would have happened.
The new men have lunch
My husband met a friend for lunch. The friend’s eldest child has just started school. Friend’s wife is French and, upon discovering that Irish children were not given a hot meal in school as they are in France, threw her hands in the air and declared that she would have nothing to do with this bizarre sandwich ritual. Mr. Waffle is sandwich maker in chief chez nous as he is awake at dawn and I find it, ahem, difficult to get up in the morning. He gave lunch box filling tips to his friend. When he got home, he went straight to the computer to send him a link to the food dudes healthy lunchbox programme. Very gratifying.
