Miss Millie…

Miss Millie H. Carter would like it to be known that she went to a most excellent party on Sunday wearing a pink dress.

Bagtime blues

Don’t you just hate it when the bag you’re carrying Millie’s shoes in turns out not to be a bag at all but merely a cylinder of polythene with handles at one hand and a fold at the other?

Ooh, I do!

Rain rain rain today (and wind wind wind, for that matter) so whilst AmberG was bundled up in in the buggy under her raincover Millie and I had to brave the full force of the elements.  It was so wet, however, that she wore wellies out and I put her shoes in a bag to change into once she was safely at school.

Or I thought it was a bag.  We were pretty lucky not to lose them, since after dropping AmberG at the nursery the shoes fell out of the bag.  It was sheer luck that I noticed them and thought, “How queer!” (or something to that effect).  Since I was holding this very small bag by its handles the shoes falling out like that would be…well, queer!

I grabbed them off the floor, put them back in the bag…and they fell straight back onto the floor!

Turns out that the bag, as already explained, wasn’t your boring old traditional idea of a bag: this was a modern and exciting reinterpretation of the  whole “bag” concept – so radical a reinterpretation, in fact, that it had quite lost its original function.  Stick a designer label on it, call it an iBag or something and you could make a fortune!

While we’re on the subject of shoes, I read somewhere recently that you could clean and shine shoes with a banana skin, so while home alone with Millie’s shoes and a banana skin on Saturday night I decided to try this out.

Admittedly, my tests were far from exhaustive, but have led me to conclude that you cannot clean and shine shoes with a banana skin.

Aaah! :-)

I’m not usually susceptible to “cute” but…

Click on the picture to see more.

Christmas is coming!!!!!!!!

Millie’s started looking forward to Christmas.  Or rather , Millie’s sanity is slowly beginning to dribble away as the reality of Christmas becomes apparent to her little four-year-old brain.

The Lovely Melanie told her about the glories of pigs-in-blankets the other day and she’s once more proven herself to be undeniably my daughter by getting excited about those.  Then, this morning she suggested that what we could do, what we might want to try, what would be nice was if we turned the computer on and had a look on the internet for a Christmas tree for her room.

I managed to wriggle out of that by promising to take her into town tomorrow to look for a SMALL tree for her room (I’m told the Pound Shop does them) and perhaps some sparkly baubles.  I caught her smelling and licking a sparkly bauble at AmberG’s nursery the other day, did I mention that?

And it’s not even December yet.

AmberG is remarkably unphased by the onset of the Yuletide meltdown.  She’s more interested in the fantastic new game she’s invented which involves tempting Millie with some of whatever she’s got in her hand. Then when Millie, like a moth to a flame or a fish to a hook – choose your analogy – comes to take advantage of this tempting offer she snatches her hand back and shouts “Mine!”

I’m quite impressed with Amber’s angling skills, particularly since she knows that Millie always falls for it…

A gift…

I am so good to you people – you don’t deserve me!

To prove it, HERE is a .zip file containing .lrc lyric files for all the songs on Richard Hawley’s wondrous, staggering, heartbreaking, swoonsome album Truelove’s Gutter – easily my favourite album of 2009.

I haven’t been able to find them anywhere on the web so I’ve listened to, transcribed and timed them all myself.

My apologies to Richard Hawley if I’ve misheard any of his fine words.

Privatised rail: industry vs passengers

Here’s a beautifully simple article about the UK railway system that sums up the problem (both what and who) perfectly.

And I highly recommend keeping an eye on The Other Taxpayers’ Alliance – not only is it an excellent read, but regularly punctures the propaganda of the s0-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, whose lies and spin in support of an extremely right-wing agenda seem to be sloshing around the media more and more of late – keep an eye open and see how many stories you can spot.  They shouldn’t be too hard to spot, since they always in some way support  less taxation for the rich, the evils of the EU and the unquestionable wisdom of big business.

Hooray! It’s the Milky Way!

The stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy (where we live) is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, and is considered to be, on average, about 1,000 light years thick.

It is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars and possibly up to 400 billion stars, the exact figure depending on the number of very low-mass stars, which is highly uncertain.

And it is very pretty, too. 😀

Isn’t this fantastic?  Astronomers and physicists from just a few decades ago would have sold their souls to see pictures like this, and you get it dropped in your laps when all you really wanted was another funny story about some small children…