Benjamin’s Great Surprise

Just rubbing this in…

The picture of the week is really not a clue. I googled ‘Benjamin’s Great Surprise’ and clicked on images. Then I picked the one that reminded me of Benji the most. So if that confused you Benji, even for a minute, good! That was intentional.

Just a little update on your treasure hunt coming along reasonably well, with 4 present ideas for now. And here’s a clue to add to your two existing ones (one was mentioned on here, the other purely oral… giggity): ‘Germany’

Also, just a little update on everything I want to put in here but don’t quite have enough interesting material to actually do it:
Mum is coming over in September and we are going to Skye. I have planned a trip to Slovakia in October and we will go to a spa. I really need to get the brewing thing going as catnip is now a forest (maybe a post tomorrow). I’m going to look into online universities.

This and That Three

Too many things to write and not enough order in my head to put anything together about any particular topic so this will just be a general update on everything.

Treasure hunts and birthdays are coming up. One very very soon, on April 2nd, and I will be severely lacking in minions as Benji is going to Stanford this week and is back on said day. Ugh. An important flatmate one on June 5th, it will also need a wine glass to go with it. And another one in a different country on June 1st. So if anyone has any useful treasure hunt tips, gimme gimme!

The adventure season has started and my head is filled with trips I want to go on and boats I want to make for the boating competition. Well, not of actual ideas for the boat. Unfortunately my head is non stop contemplating thinking about ideas but not actually thinking about them. Gah!
I’m also looking up tickets to random holiday destinations: Ireland in June, Israel/Jordan in June/July, Slovakia in, well, whenever there’s a reasonably priced ticket. I’m also going to Prague/Nymburk with the hockey team in June, so June is going to cost me… Now we need to shove in the infamous trip to the wallaby island one of the weekends…

You may wonder about Israel, especially if you’re name is Jelena (hi there!). I cracked an invite, as a +1, to a wedding on July 1st. This is scary because it will be crazy religious, as they do in Jerusalem, and all separate men and women shenanigans. Not only this will give me enough material to make fun of Benji and his background for the rest of my life, but it also gives me an opportunity to create numerous awkward situations by saying things like: “So why is it that you guys always have to have sex through a hole in the blanket, I mean, Benji really insists on doing it that way but I feel like I have to find a loophole while I’m here because I just find it plain silly!”
I am a bit freaked out by the fact that in this tropical climate I will have to be wearing a dress that covers knees, elbows and collarbones! On the other hand, I’m really looking forward to walking on the Dead Sea, and swimming with dolphins in the Red.

In other news, I got contacted by a husband of a third cousin once removed of mine (I think), thanks to my blog which I was convinced no one read (except the two regulars). Yay! There’s an opportunity to find out more about the Parnica folk! I really need to speak to mum soon. (Hint! Hint!)

And fortunately not much going on on the writing front so this section will be short and to the point! I dont have time!

Back with more next week!

Mum week…

My mum had visited again. This time she brought with her two ex-colleagues from my primary school, basically two of my teachers.

I didn’t let that intimidate me, and Benji and I took them on a trip in a motherfucking beast of a car, Ford Mondeo Titanium X, which turned out to be a piece of shit. Knowing next to bugger all about cars I wonder if this was related partially to the fact that it was a Diesel engine but just the size of the car was an annoyance. All I wanted was a 5-door 5-seater and I was going to get a VW Golf or similar but got upgraded yet again and had the honour of taking this car on its second ever rental (how’s that for pressure?)! It had only done a 100ish miles, it had no scratches and no key!!!

I decided that since the other two visitors hadn’t been anywhere in Scotland I wanted to take mum somewhere she hadn’t been either, for a change, and headed down the M8 straight for Linlithgow palace. This would have been a good move, providing Linlithgow was along the M8 and not the M9. The navigator, who shall not be named but his initials are Benjamin Rosman managed to correct his blunder and took us down a scenic, yet very tiny road across to Linlithgow. At this point I was still pretty freaked out about the car and it wasn’t pretty when we got up the hill to the palace, only to find the entrance blocked by a hearse and having to do a 28-point turn in the narrow sloping street. It also didn’t help that the car has bloody sensors front and back and the motherfuckers start beeping about a meter away from anything. Gah!
We eventually found a pay and display car park next door and spent about an hour and a half in Linlithgow palace, which was a good move as my mum loved it!!! It was a ruin but pretty big and we just wondered around and explored the rooms and towers while drinking coffee.

After Linlithgow we headed for Falkirk wheel, since it was kind of on the way, and found it not working. It was being maintained before the start of the season next week. We had some food though and took a walk up to the Union canal and took a few photos. This was the first wheel visit for Benji. Before we left I made sure I bullied him to yet another slide action. This one was easy as I went first and told him how slooooooooow it was.

After Falkirk we headed straight for St Andrews as we all know how unstable the daylight is at this time of year. I wanted to make it before it gets dark. This is how, finally, after five and a half years of living in Scotland, I finally saw St Andrews. It is a fairly small place and most of it is shopping streets which I’m not terribly interested in. We walked to the castle though, and from there to the ruins of the cathedral and the sun came out to make our photos nice and yellow.

After about an hour and a half I suggested we head off to see a bit of the costal road before it gets dark so we did. We drove to Crail first, and had a look around. We walked to the harbour and found public toilets! This was extremely lucky!

From Crail we drove to Anstruther in search for the best chippie in the country. It was dusky when we got there and we found the restaurant in the harbour. We sat in for dinner and by the time we were done it was completely dark outside. Everyone liked the food though, that was good!

The rest of the trip was marked by darkness, both night-wise and phone-wise. Both of our phones had died and we had to find out way in the tricky road system of the Kingdom of Fife. Somehow we found Kirkcaldy and that was where it all went wrong. Even though we followed the signs for the Forth Road Bridge very carefully they disappeared and we ended up Flying Dutchmaning it around town until eventually we stopped at a petrol station where a kindly BMW driver offered to lead us there. It must have been the first time the guy had a tail (even though I was hooning it as much as my unbalanced car allowed)!
We made it home safe and sound, with no scratches but a barbecued clutch instead (I call it the Linlithgow-Car-Park-Rubbish-Car-Not-Coping-With -Hills-Incident)! Revenge!!! Mwahahahahahaha!

Happy Stoopid Valentine’s Day!

Once again, it’s Stoopid Valentine’s Day! Like once a year isn’t enough!

On Stoopid Valentine’s Day, Stoopid Benji Rosman gets stoopid cards and presents! This year, the card has been particularly stoopid:

 

I found this so stoopid it clashed with funny around the edges and it is very hard to be angry when one’s laughing so I had to let Stoopid Benji off the hook. Also, after the stoopid card followed a present that was actually very anti-stoopid! It was everything I want from a present: beautiful, practical, colourful, light-emitting, squishy. It was… a chameleon!!!

The chameleon’s name in Huey and he is a nightlight that changes colour according to the surface it’s on. How freaking amazing it that???
There are more colours but some are harder to get and others don’t come out so accurately in photos.

            

Huey has joined the ghosts in my newly re-shuffled room, I had to do this for his sake because I’m OCD like that. Nevertheless, Whiski can now finally access my wardrobe and loom at us from above so it all works out fine!

Birthday whining!

This post is all about birthday whine glasses. Whine glasses are glasses the primary purpose of which is to drink wine from them, while being whined at, from the glass itself, by me. Ok not really but that’s the closest I can get to explain why I entitled the article Birthday whining. I just did, and now there’s trouble! Gah!

Anyways, our household seems to have a reputation for broken wine glasses and a very angry Helle in consequence, so I have decided to make personalised glasses for everyone in order to a/ have more wine glasses and b/ finally determine who is doing all the breaking and then redirect Helle’s wrath (and whines – oh yeah… lightbulb!) in their general direction. This obviously won’t work if Helle keeps drinking her horrible green algae stuff from glasses that are not her own.

To be fair, poor Helle doesn’t have a glass of her own yet, as her birthday is not until June.

Here are the glasses of the few lucky ones who’s birthdays happened to happen since I had the idea:

Claire, 22nd December…

Her name is Clairette de Die (It’s a name of a wine and Claire’s nickname.)
smelly cheeses are her cloud nine (She’s French and likes cheese.)
She’s the No.1 of kidings, (Oh, kidings are a story on its own, but basically its franglish)
er aksent goes well wiz zis wine. (Again, she’s French.)

Ok, this one was a bit hurried as I had to make it before the big trip to South Africa and leave it hidden for Claire.

Benji, 27th December:

In his secret basement lab
his female robots get covered in smooches
and bake him cookies with their massive hands. (This is all Benji… chicks, robots, cookies… the android robots do have big hands, which is very scary.)
Benji likes kittehs a lot more than pooches. (This is just a fact.)

More to come with everyone’s birthdays… possibly featuring blue moustaches, board games, meercowls and inner city foxes!

The big secret has been revealed…

As I said in one of my previous posts, Presenting…, there was a thing I really wanted to write about but couldn’t, lest I spoiled a surprise.

The clues you were given (and their meanings) are:

– 12… the year 2012, a couple of years back I had decided to boycott Christmas (from now only c-word) and I do New Years presents instead so I don’t spoil the festive season for my flatmates
– coffee… refers to mugs, the presents were mugs, this was inspired by the move to the new flat, and the need for mugs (the need was resolved when we finished the move and now we are flooded with mugs)
– McGonagall… poems, the mugs are all decorated with illustrated poems referring to the shenanigans, strange obsessions and perversions of their owners
– baked goods… the mugs with their poems and pictures have been baked in the oven and are now also dishwasher friendly, or so they say!

Here are the pictures of them (with poems transcribed and explained) which I took using my brand new iPhone app Photosynth, they are not great but they are a strange sort of panorama, if you ask me. Maybe I’ll take better ones later.

“Oh Dave!” (A very common sigh when it comes to Dave, we were even considering rewording the famous Beatles song Hey Jude to Oh Dave, it worked fantastically) the most splendid of nights (Refers at the same time to Dave’s ICON role playing costume and his ability to misspell just about anything)
we all sigh often, in frustration.
Maybe video gaming (Recent episode of Dave’s hermitting period with his Star Wars game) and tights (Again, ICON and Dave’s “tunic” that didn’t quite cover his butt)
lead to premature dave-ulation. (Term adopted into our vocabulary after several incidents of  Dave counting his chickens before they’d hatched,… or didn’t hatch.)

Hide your socks, (Refers ro Claire’s and Philipp’s sock-stealing shenanigans) onions and fondue pot (onions and cheese, the deadly gas combination for Claire)
till zombies attack! (Coz shit happens…)
For  Claire, whether you need it or not,
uses biological weapons. (Again the gas, I couldn’t help but drawing a dart next to the gun in reference to Despicable Me’s dartgun/fartgun confusion, also we do call Claire dartgun!)

A ginger girl with a broken tail??? (Helle suffers from being ginger, also she recently broke her tailbone and had to walk around with a bum bagel!)
Sounds like a cruel joke yet it’s true! (It is!!!)
Helle likes her veg with a bit of snail. (She is vegetarian but curiously enough occasionally eats snails.)
An eye for an eye, a shoe for a shoe. (There’s an old deal that she has to throw out one of her gigillion pairs of shoes if she wants to get a new one.)

My personal favourite:
Felipe! Don’t give up on meat (Refers to Philipp’s vegetarian spells, the last one of which lasted a few months!)
for hummus,  broccoli and mango. (The famous hummus and broccoli incident where Philipp food poisoned himself)
For sausage is the truest treat
for a man who likes to fango. (Refers to a dubious sexual practice of Philipp and Benji’s called fango, its indescribable, undrawable, most likely involves a sausage or two, has many stages and involves Philipp bending over and Benji standing behind him.)

 

He stalks around in a wookie suit (Referring to Benji’s jewy hairiness)
and hot air comes out of his pores, (…and how he’s always warm, emitting heat)
for the big lump of hair on his head (The jewfro, duh!)
Benji sometimes walks into doors. (The Slovakian door incident, when Benji jumped into a revolving glass door and almost broke his schnoz.)

Whiski’s one, and possibly better photos, to come in the next few days so keep checking!!!