How can it be so difficult?

This is proving to be a really tough thing to do....

I haven't done it for many, many years...

It is less enjoyable than having a tooth pulled...

It involves saying how great I am, which I find hard despite calling myself "legendary". Those of you who really know me will know that I don't really enjoy talking about how wonderful I am.

You see, for the first time in 18 years I have been asked for a CV!

Holy crap.

The Aliens are coming!

I went into my local games shop yesterday and saw a pack of these guys:

They are around half and inch tall and have a variety of weapons (this pistol being the smallest). I painted this guy last night to see how they come up - I will be adding ground-work later. Now I want a small army of them to try to take over the world. In the true spirit of cheap sci-fi movies I will make a flying saucer out of something suitable - not a hub-cap, but something similar - that can hang on a piece of string over the battlefield. I already have a suitable force of humans to fight them! I will have to base the battlefield on Hyde Park or somewhere similar. Aliens always land in places like that don't they? It is either Hyde Park or Central Park...

BTW, the table is very old and shows the wear of at least 4 generations!

Monday!

The weekend passed in a haze of slobbing around doing as little as possible - and wasn't it good!

Today is Number One Son's 16th birthday, so I am finishing at lunchtime to go and help sort out his mini party. Sadly he has got an art exam today and tomorrow so we can't do anything too dramatic today, but we are going to pay for him and a few friends to go out to dinner soon to make up for it.

16. How did that happen?

You know I am sure he grew in the night -he looked bigger this morning - not that he needs to get much bigger, he is only about an inch shorter than I am!

So,what else?

Oh, I was sent this link this morning. It is a website that cleans the inside of your monitor. Give it a go, it really works!

http://www.raincitystory.com/flash/screenclean.swf

Have a great Monday!

Quick rant...

Some of you might remember my rant about McDonalds not allowing cyclists to use the drive-thru service:

http://rock-chef.blogspot.com/2008/04/mcstoopid.html

Well a couple of nights ago I was watching a TV show about Eddie Izzard doing his mega marathon runs around the UK. I love Eddie, and this has made me admire him even more, but there was a McDonalds scene that had Mrs RC pointing and saying "look, look!"

He (on foot) and his camera crew (on a tricycle) were allowed to use the drive-thru!

Maybe I should try again, just to be annoying?

Have a good weekend...

Spring...

...is well and truly here! As I took the photo, I was being splattered with warm rain.

Sure sounds like an English Spring!


So, it is Friday again! This week shot past, but I don't think I am alone in that feeling.

Not much planned for the weekend, although it feels wrong. Number One Son will be 16 on Monday, but he has got an exam on Monday and Tuesday, and therefore wants to put things off until after that. Was I that sensible at his age? Hell no! He certainly got the Mrs RC sensible gene!

Have a great weekend, I promise my blog will be more interesting next week!

Thursday...

Thursday often seems to be a sort of "non-day". Not in the middle, but not Friday. It just fills in the space between Humpday and Friday.

But today is a great day. For a change I started the day by taking the dog for a walk. This is normally Mrs RC's job (I do the evening walk) but today she had other things to deal with. The walk was really nice and set me up for the day.

It is quiet at work now - I am able to cruise along at my own speed, with The Lord of the Rings playing on a TV nearby.

My mom and dad are talking again. You would think that a couple who divorced 35 years ago would have sorted themselves out by now wouldn't you?

Looks like Mrs RC and her sister have found a really nice retirement home for my FIL. His cancer is very advanced but he is still able to enjoy life, so a nice place close by will be great - much better than having him living on the other side of the country.

Had a wonderful lunch too! Nachos with chili beef, salsa, refried beans etc, followed by a big slice of cheesecake. Oh yeah.

Well, work calls again! Hope your Thursday is at least as good as mine is!


UPDATE!

Today just gets better and better! Just found out that I won £50 on the lottery last night! Not life-changing, of course, but much better than a poke in the eye!

Musical Time Travel - Musical Heaven

Musical Time Travel - Musical Hell...

The Sketch

Here is a really dodgy photo of the sketch that my 11 year old did of Number One Son. Bear in mind that the original is only about an inch across...

Mega busy day, I am pooped. Need food...

More tomorrow...

Cor, what a day!

I didn't want to get up this morning, my butt was glued to the bed.

But I dragged myself out, scoffed some breakfast and set off into the morning sunshine.

The morning passed as a blur of assorted stuff.

At lunchtime I popped into the town for some odds and ends - bought Mrs RC a new body butter from Body Shop - she is a big fan of these things - the new one is Sweet Lemon and smells like a lemon meringue pie. Yummy! :-)

This afternoon one of my classes was presenting posters that we had designed about threatened ecosystems. I did one on a reef in the South China Sea. Despite initial nerves this went well - I tend to be OK after the first couple of sentences, so I started off saying that this assignment had really brought out the old hippy in me, and the followed up with the line from Jurassic Park about nature finding a way. After that I was off and really enjoyed myself.

So now it is time to head for home and find if my mom and dad are talking to each other yet...

Don't ask...

Why can't I draw?

Seems I am the only person in the family that can't draw.

My wife is great, and can draw and paint more or less anything.

My younger daughter has been drawing great stuff since she was tiny.

My elder son is developing into a great artist too, and is turning out some great pictures for his school work.

But somehow I never noticed that my younger son had the talent too! Until yesterday, that is.
We were sitting around chatting about "stuff" and the Little Guy was sitting there doodling.

Suddenly Mrs RC looked at what he was doing.

"Wow, look at this!"

We all looked.

He had drawn a portrait of Number One Son, one of those portraits that not only really looks like the person, but also captures their personality, somehow catching a signature "look" with just a few lines.

It is great. I am going to steal it and put it into a little frame.

So the Little Guy joins the ranks of family artists.

Why can't I draw?

Musical Time Travel - 15?

This song reminds me of one of the best concerts I have ever been to.



Rory Gallagher is no longer with us, but was a great guitarist and entertainer.

I went to see him in Canterbury, with my best friend. We both lived on the coast, around 8 miles away and were travelling by bus.

The concert was amazing and we stayed right to the end, missing the last bus home.

Too poor to afford a taxi (the rates are ridiculous at times like that) we started walking. This was OK at first, but we got slower as the adrenaline subsided. Hunger and thirst kicked in. Then we saw a pick-up truck coming. For a laugh, or maybe desperation, my friend stuck out his thumb.

To our amazement they stopped.

There were 3 guys in the front. If we wanted a lift we could get in the back.

Cool!

We jumped in.

And landed on the stuff in the back - the guys were builders, so there were shovels, buckets, bricks, planks of wood, forks....

Off we went!

It was the most terrifying ride I have ever had - we must have been doing 60 (the whole journey only took a few minutes) and spent the entire time bouncing around with the other stuff in the back, trying not to land on anything too pointy...

It was a great ending to a great evening!

I haven't seen that friend for a few years now - wonder where he is?

St Patrick's Day

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Everyone in England seems to celebrate Ireland's Patron Saint these days, but ignores its own, good old St George!

I blame this on the proloferation of Irish theme pubs! I think we need a world wide chain of English theme pubs! The would feature:

• Compulsory pipe smoking;
• Warm beer;
• Terrible food;
• Limited allowable topics of conversation, such as cricket and "damn foreigners".

Sounds great, huh?

Who needs Irish pubs anyway? All they have is Guiness, laughter, good music, whisky...

Musical Time Travel - Waiting for a Baby

This was in the charts when we were waiting for our 3rd child to appear - she was 2 weeks late in the end. This song always reminds me of that time...

Wednesday already!

Well this week has been mega busy so far, but should settle down a bit from here.

I am feeling a bit better than I was the other day, but still not perfect - hoping to shake it soon.

I changed the title of my blog again. I am now "Legendary", according to a couple of our students, so have decided to go with this for a while now.

More musical time travelling later! Bye for now! Have a great day!

Musical Time Travel - Getting Wrinkles...

My wife introduced me to this band - she has always had an ear for a good group and this is one of their best songs. I have always loved it, but in recent years, as the wrinkles have started to stack up it becomes increasingly relevant.

I think this song really captures the beauty of growing old with someone you love, both developing wrinkles and bits that creak a bit and accepting that as part of life.

Anyway, here is the song:

Exhausted...

Update: OK, not exhausted - I think I have got whatever the boys had last week and the girls had this morning! Just staggered to the drug store for some drugs...

The weekend was amazingly busy, but I did get to chill out and watch a couple of very good movies...

I had never heard of this before, and wonder why! It is really my kind of movie! It is a fairlytale, with all the nastiness that you would expect from a true fairytale . All sorts of people pop up - Robert de Niro, Peter O'Toole, Ricky Gervaise - playing strange and wonderful characters. Think Princess Bride with a bigger story and a much bigger budget.

This was another movie that passed under my radar. Two Victorian magicians become rivals in an escalating case of one-upmanship. The story gradually unravels and you find yourself constantly trying to work out the ending, which I almost did.

Two really good movies in a weekend! I really needed them too...

Musical Time Travel - Finding True Love

This song was on an album that Mrs RC and I played a lot when we were first together.



It has remained very special to us through the years, and was even played at our wedding 16 years later! I think it is a great song and says so much that I could never find the words for.

Musical Time Travel - Later Teens

By the age of 18 I worshipped Rush....



Always amazed me how 3 guys could produce such a full sound...

Much as I loved Rush, I do love a comment that Jack Black made when the movie Pick of Destiny came out. He listed all the bands who had owned it, and then added that Rush didn't have it - if they did their lyrics wouldn't have been so lame!

But lame lyrics never got in the way of great Rock!

Musical Time Travel - early teens

There will probably be a couple more for this period.

This is a track that I had on an album called USA:



John Wetton, the bass player, became one of my real heroes and greatly affected the way I play bass. When everyone else my age was listening to The Osmonds, I would crank this up - the louder the better!

Musical Time Travel - Back to College

This is the song that was always playing in the cafe that we hung around in when I was at college:



As a huge Bowie fan I never minded.

While at college I had a huge crush on one of the girls. I was totally wasting my time, of course, (she went for older guys with cars and money).

This was also a time when I was in lots of bands - bass players, especially ones that wanted to play Rock and not Jazz-funk, were in short supply so I was often in 3 bands at once! I got very good at learning new songs very fast! I also played a wide range of gigs, some great, some crushingly embarassing but all a great learning experience...

Musical Time Travel

WIGSF has been taking us on a musical world tour, which has been great fun. I wanted to do something different and decided on musical time travel - songs that remind me of a particular time of my life.

Song number one is:



I didn't really know what the song was about when I was, what, 5 or 6? I loved it and can remember playing with plastic Army Men with this song on the radio... Yes, I never grew out of toy soldiers.

I was aware of the Vietnam War going on, though. I was so puzzled about why American hardware was failing to beat the VC and NVA - now I know that the answer is not a simple one!

This was a time when my mom worked in the local corner shop, and I ate rather too much chocolate. I was short and chubby!

My favourite TV programs were Jerry Anderson stuff like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, plus all the westerns and war movies that I watched with my dad. I guess watching the war movies added to my wonder at the situation in Vietnam - if John Wayne and the Green Berets couldn't clean things up, what hope was there?

Stay tuned for a song from my College days!

Friday!

Friday has arrived yet again!

This week has been very productive, the main weight off my mind being the completion of my last assignment for the year!

YAY ME!!!!!

Is it OK for guys to say that? It is more of a girl thing, isn't it? Ah well, a while back some of my readers made me an honorary girly so I will say it anyway!

YAY ME!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, I am a guy who is secure it his sexuality. I don't need to act macho all the time :-)

Anyway, what was I going to talk about? Oh yes! I heard a discussion about jealousy, especially jealousy of wives/partners.

A guy was jealous of his wife's ability to fall asleep quickly while he spent an hour or so trying to doze off. This is the opposite of Mrs RC and I - I am asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow...

A woman was jealous of her boyfriend's endless happiness! I found this one strange - surely his endless joy was a sign that she was a wonderful person to be with which should make her feel good? But no, clearly not!

Is there something about my wife that I am jealous of? Well there is one thing about her that I wish I had - her ability to push herself beyond all normal limits. If she decides that something needs to be done, it will get done come hell or high water. I just don't have that, but sometimes wish I did.

What about you? Does your husband/wife/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend/BFF do or have something that you are jealous of? Please tell!

Why wasn't school like that when I was a kid?

Yesterday evening I took Number One Son Who will be 16 at the end of the month) to the school that he will be going to in September. It is a great school, with the added bonus that it is right across the road from where I work.

So, it seems that the first 2 weeks of the new school year will be devoted to ice-breaking and team building, including staying at a manor house in the country for 3 days doing stuff like rock climbing, abseiling, zip lines and rafting. He is even more fired up about the new school than he was before! Why wasn't school that good when I was a kid? Well, I guess part of being a parent is wanting your kids to have a better time than you had yourself - he is certainly doing that!

One part of the talk that made me laugh was the statement that at night the kids would be put into their respective rooms and would stay there all night. Yep, this is a bunch of 16 year olds they are taking away and I guess some might have other ideas... Must be a big responsibility for the people in charge! I guess they don't want any girls getting pregnant on their watch!

As you might have noticed, I am feeling rather more up beat today. Hope you are also having a great day!

More soon!

Sigh...

Not really sure what to talk about today. Work is really busy, I am working on my final assignment for the year (reading about coral reefs which is pretty depressing...), and other stuff that is going on also makes for a rather depressed mood.

Sigh.

As I have said before, when I am cycling my mind often wanders.

I guess being close to death makes you think about it more. I got to thinking about life as a movie. If my life was a movie it wouldn't be amazingly exciting, but I hope it would have its laugh out loud moments, its lump in the throat moments and also maybe a few R-Rated moments. One thing I am sure of - I don't want to hang around once the credits start to roll - I hate watching the credits, even if they throw in a few bloopers to liven things up, or put a spoilter for the sequel at the end. I've already seen the spoiler and the sequel is far far better than the current movie. I want to get out of here, grab a huge bucket of popcorn and go into the next screen to see the sequel straight away! Yep, I'll be off, I don't give a monkeys who the director was - he sucked anyway!

Did that make any sense at all?

Have a great day!

Hunting...

So yesterday was Mrs RC's birthday.

I got home from work and it was her choice of food for dinner. She wanted Chinese takeaway. OK, there is one just around the corner, so off I went - walking, as it wasn't very far.

The place was dark. Closed on Mondays.

OK, there is another one across the train track, not far.

Closed on Mondays.

OK, there is another one a bit further on, the one I went to as teenager.

Closed on Mondays.

Damn it!

By now I was close to the town centre, within a stone's throw of the supermarket - yes my town only has one...

They do packs of takeaway-like meals. I would grab some of that, take it home and nuke it!

I went in.

It was 7.40.

The store closed at 8.00.

I approached the fridge that normally has these meals.

There were 2 guys from the store there. They had just finished clearing the fridge, putting everything into crates for overnight storage.

I stood and stared.

Another customer approached and asked about the stuff.

Too late, it has been packed for storage overnight.

I walked away. If I had said something Iwould probably have regretted it later, like when the Police arrived. So I left.

I called Mrs RC to tell her about what was going on. Just as she was telling me to come home, there was a bright light and a chorus or Angels singing - there in front of me was a Chinese Takeaway - and it was OPEN!

I rushed in!

I ordered the food!

I waited!

And waited!

And waited!

People ahead of me started complaining about the wait, and started muttering about asking for their money back!

Their food arrived, as did mine in the end.

The walk home was the fastest I have ever done it - I think I would have broken speed-walking records!

And the food?

How was it?

It was amazing! The best we have had in a long time! Or at least it seemed that way...


To be honest? I think it would have been easier to hunt down a mammoth... Cavemen had it easy!

Strangeness...

This weekend was very strange, a real mix of emotions.

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My FIL seems to have entered the final stage of prostate cancer. Plans for the weekend were all shunted around so that Mrs RC could see him in hospital. We know what is going to happen, it is just a case of how long, now. A sad time, he is a great guy.

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We discovered a new shop. Everything it sells is 99p. We walked past the first time, rejecting it out of hand. When we passed again, Number One Son pointed out that they had big bars of good chocolate in there. So in we went. They had all sorts of good brand stuff in there - all for 99p. My daughter found some shampoo that is normally £4.95! And they had Pepsi too! I staggered out loaded like a pack mule! At last, a shop that all of the kids enjoy visiting!

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Over the weekend I also had to look after Humphrey, my mom's pony.

I fed him and cleaned out is stable in the morning on Saturday, giving him an apple as usual when I arrived. In the afternoon I had to go back to stack his fresh delivery of straw and hay. Again, I gave him an apple. When he had finished the apple he very gently and carefully licked my fingers clean of apple juice. It was the first time he has done that to me, and I found it strangely moving for some reason. He is normally such a clumsy oaf, I had never thought he could be so gentle. Maybe it was his way of giving me a much needed hug?

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Today is Mrs RC's birthday. She loved her presents, and having the day entirely to herself, has gone off to do some retail therapy. She needs to take her mind off things, so I'm not complaining.