We finally got to go on our traditional New Year’s Day outing – only 13 days late thanks to health and weather – to Bristol Zoo.

Last year, we went to Dudley Zoo but because I spent most of the time making sure the kids didn’t fling themselves into the tiger enclosure or hurl themselves down the steep steps or get themselves adopted by the chimpanzees (and let’s face it, it would have been months before anyone would have noticed them in THAT enclosure…), Akra got all the best photographs.

So this year, I had a cunning plan. HE got to be responsible for the children so I could focus more on having fun with my camera.

Guess what. He ended up with all the best photographs. Harrumph.

By the way, I think if Paintshop Pro’s Smart Photo Fix was really smart, it’d retake the photo from a better angle for you and stop the animal moving… I’m just saying…

There are some days that are not worth getting out of bed for. We all have them. And this was mine, today:

• Li’l Bhaji woke up this morning at 4.30am, threw up a lot, called out “I’ve been sick!” then quite cheerfully watched while we cleaned him and the bed up. Returned to sleep instantly and has been bright and chirpy ever since with no further signs of illness. We, however, are stumbling through the day in a sleep deprived fog.
• Cats or foxes had got to our overflow rubbish bags and (with the help of strong winds) strewn the rubbish over most of the garden.
• The washing machine has been well used and abused over the last few weeks anyway, but it was this morning that it started making a god-awful squeaky falling apart sort of noise and the drum started slipping instead of spinning.
• I tried booking our camping trips for the summer. The first site’s booking system is completely down. “Can you call back in half an hour?” Five hours later it’s still down. The second site I booked online and then only after I’d confirmed everything and hit send have I realised that the prices are much higher than I’d budgeted for.
• The two daylight energy saver bulbs I’d bought for the kitchen (the last bastion of non-energy saver lights downstairs, plus I’ve been hoping to thwart some of the winter blues this year) arrived today. I plugged them in, switched them on, one of them blew. That doesn’t sound that impressive until I tell you that unlike normal bulbs which just make a gentle “plink” sound before knocking out the circuit in the fuse box, this one made an almighty bang – I was genuinely surprised it hadn’t exploded glass anywhere (although it’s still intact and looks fine). Not only did it knock out the fuse it also appears to have destroyed the wall switch as you can no longer flick it back to off.
• I’ve just noticed that someone seems to have attempted to break into our garden store. Didn’t succeed though – can that go into the tick column for the day?
• I have raging PMS and a sleep-deprivation headache

I’d declare it “bottle of wine” night as a consolation prize… but I just have this sinking feeling that the cork will disintegrate on touch and I’ll be picking bits out of my teeth after every sip…

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The thing that mystifies me most of all, out of all the conundrums that life regularly throws at me with abandon, is why … if it’s going to rain at all in a day … WHY do the heavens always open just around three o’clock in the afternoon?

Don’t believe me? Then ask a parent of a school age child and you’ll find them nodding away in complete agreement.

Three o’clock is that magic time of the day known as “pick up time”. The time where every second ticks slowly by as you stand in the playground waiting for the home-time bell, shivering and usually wet, trying to make intelligent-sounding conversation while avoiding playground politics with other parents (most of whom you have nothing else in common with other than the fact their offspring goes to the same school as your own).

Conversely, it hardly ever rains at 9am. Why is that? If it rained at 9am rather than at 3pm, I get to send Akra Jr in early (they let them go straight in – heaven forbid they get a chill and lower the school’s attendance records. It’s only parents who are allowed to get pneumonia in the playground), so of course it doesn’t rain then.

There’s probably some logical climatological explanation to do with the clouds forming and warming up as the day progresses before they can release precipitation, but I prefer using Occam’s Razor in situations such as these.

The simplest explanation can only be that the universe is out to get me.

Read more about things that mystify others at participating Bloghuh? blogs this week:

Aprosexic
Blue Witch
bob’s yer uncle
Changing Places
Depthmarker
In the Aquarium
Jen&HerBoat
Kitchen Witch
La Que Sabe
London Daily Photo
Purple Pen
Quixotic Evil
Santiago Dreaming
Tabula Rasa
Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?

My hand slipped.

Just when the mouse was hovering over “buy”.

I then accidentally typed in my name, address and credit card details (damn those pre-filled forms…)

Then the mouse just flung itself over to the “checkout” button.

I just don’t know how it happened, yer ‘onour.

In my defence I had saved up for a good 60% of the cost and only needed a little creative accounting in order to make the most of the January Sale price. So my guilty feelings are slightly mitigated. I’m just out of practise spending so much money on something purely selfish.

I’ll let you guess in the comments what it might be… the clue is in the category.

… and we all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Akra Jr was desperate to go back to school to see his friends. Li’l Bhaji was desperate to go back to nursery (and still hasn’t managed to go – still the dregs of the stomach bug rumble on…). I was desperate to have a few minutes of the day to call my own again. We’d all outstayed each others’ welcome.

And in general, I have to admit that it’s been a good day. Li’l Bhaji predictably wasn’t impressed that he had to stay at home, but he pottered about happily enough and I even managed to persuade him to take a long lunchtime nap. Akra Jr had a great day at school apart from the new school dinners which apparently are “disgusting” (I’ve been told by those more experienced than I that school dinners are the key to reducing food fussiness – let’s hope that kicks in quick, eh?).

It was nice to see the familiar faces in the playground again and I even managed to snatch a bit of adult conversation between hand-tuggings. The regular routines drift back into place, comfortable in their familiarity.

So, what’s the betting we’ll all be begging for the holidays again by the end of the week?

A few months ago, our local council changed our bin system. We got brand spanking new wheelie bins (hurrah, double the size of our old bins and plenty of space for recycling with doorstep glass collection at last – no more bin bags hanging around) but at the same time they downgraded our grey bin collection (the non-recyclables) to a fortnightly collection.

Now technically, as the grey bin is double the size of our old “standard” sized bin, this shouldn’t be a problem. Only with our old bin, we just put out any excess bin liners we generated. With this system, any bin bags put out will not only be left behind, but “invalidate” the whole collection (i.e. they won’t take any of your rubbish). If the lid on the wheelie isn’t closed completely (if you stuff it that bit too far and it’s open a crack) it will also get left behind.

The green bins have equally become far more complicated. The booklet that tells you what you can and can’t recycle needs to be kept permanently by the door as reference because they’ve changed many of the things you used to be able to recycle under the old scheme and I can never remember which way around it is. We can now recycle more plastic (1 PET, 2 HDPE and 3 PVC), but they won’t accept any brown or black plastic regardless of labelling where previously you only had to look for numbers 1 and 2. They won’t accept foil any more. They do accept egg cartons now, but won’t take cardboard. The list goes on.

I get confused – how will the elderly cope or those not particularly invested in recycling? Again, if you get one thing wrong, the whole collection gets rejected. Not quite so much of an issue with the recycling (as you just pick out the offending item) but still a pain when you have to wait another fortnight to try again.

Now in general, this system should work okay for us. We are committed to recycling. We don’t buy a lot of overpackaged produce or foods. We have a waste disposal unit in our sink. We do have a toddler in nappies still (we postponed training after a stomach bug put us back at square one) but unlike a newborn you get through far fewer nappies a day. We only have two small children rather than teens so our rubbish generation is comparitively low to many families.

However, we’re struggling. Most times our bin is three quarters full with still a week to go before collection. With a bit of squashing down we can usually cope until the next fortnight. I’m dreading the smell in the summer with rubbish left in the heat for a fortnight rather than a week – but at least the foxes and cats can’t rip it to shreds when you put a chicken carcass in now.

Then Christmas happened. To be fair, we’d expected a trip to the tip just after the big day anyway – with all the best recycling will in the world, there’s still an awful lot of toy packaging that is non-recyclable (why can’t manufacturers change this?!) and that tipped (tipped… geddit…) us over the edge. That was fair enough – inconvenient but fair. Then Boxing Day evening, Li’l Bhaji started throwing up, the rest of us followed and as the vomitting subsided the diahhroea began (sorry, that’s probably too much info, isn’t it?).

We recovered fairly quickly – all of us, that is, except Li’l Bhaji – the one in nappies. Ten days it’s taken for him to recover (we think he’s better now, but not holding our breath) and you can imagine the rubbish generation we’ve created. I just know what you’re going to say – real nappies – but we have given them a good trial of several leading brands when Akra Jr was small and they didn’t work for us at all, and to be fair the sickness bug hit our small washing machine hard too, there’d have been no way to have fit the extra washing in for the nappies as well.

Still, at least we have a car and they don’t charge to visit the tip … yet.

Apparently, over 70% of Worcester residents want the county to return to weekly rubbish collections for the grey bin. There are reports of festering piles of rubbish that have been left behind (presumably because they’d made the heinous mistake of not making the lid close properly) allowing an explosion of maggots and rats. Unfortunately, it seems the council have over-extended themselves somewhat as it’ll now cost them £400,000 to return the collection to a weekly system.

And guess who’ll have to pay for that?

You should be aware that if you succumb to temptation and click through to What The Duck, you could well lose a couple of hours reading all the archived comic strips, piss yourself laughing and end up instant messaging every other strip to all your mates.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Brickfactory site is a nice little find I’ve made recently for all the Lego lovers out there. It’s a database of scanned lego instructions (or maps, as Akra Jr calls them) and stickers which can be searched by item code, name, year or theme.

Very useful for if you’ve lost the instructions to an old, much-loved lego model or (if like us) they tend to get a bit shredded and mutilated. Also, if you have some instructions to a set he doesn’t have, how about scanning it and sending it to them?

This site has been a bit unstable lately, I apologise if (over the last couple of days) you’ve arrived to a blank page or it’s timed out on loading.

The Prattle has always had a fairly high amount of comment spam thrown at it, but as I loathe having anything which might deter genuine readers commenting, up to now I’ve mainly dealt with that via the Akismet anti-comment spam plugin.

Unfortunately, the burst rate of spam per second has become so high, that the connections my host’s server has had to make to Askimet’s server has put an incredible strain on the server load, often slowing it right down to the point where it is unable to respond to any other requests. To all intents and purposes, the spam rate becomes a Denial of Service attack.

Fortunately, my host has been very understanding and patient, but obviously it’s a situation that can’t continue. Each time the server has to be reset, it takes down other websites, email services… all because of my little blog. So, I’ve (well, actually my techie husband, Akra) had to make some changes which hopefully won’t affect you, but you should know about them in case they do.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand this list, I will explain the implications afterwards.

• The Bad Behavior plugin has been installed. This detects malicious automated software and prevents it connecting to the site before Akismet even kicks in. This reduced server load significantly, but not enough in our case.
• Around twenty of the worst offenders have had their IP address blocked from commenting. Obviously, this can only be a temporary measure until they change their IP addresses again, but was a handy sticking plaster while we sorted the rest out.
• Akra has written some clever code that detects any automated commenters (i.e. people who haven’t physically sat here at the site and typed their comment in and pressed “Submit”). For those that are interested, this involves using constantly changing hidden form fields.

The net effect (hopefully) is that you shouldn’t notice any difference whatsoever, except that the site may just run a little bit quicker for you. We’ve been very careful to make the chances of a false positive minimal. If you never commented here before, then your first comment will still have to be approved, but I’m fairly quick at that most days. Other users should notice no difference.

However, there is a tiny chance that one of the IP addresses banned may be a proxy server or some other randomly allocated genuine IP address. So please, if you have any problems at all adding comments, could you email me at Pewari AT may DOT be so I can get it sorted out as swiftly as possible? I would also appreciate you adding a quick test comment to the bottom of this post – even if you normally lurk. Thank you.

The good news is, that after months of clearing out thousands of comments from Akismet purgatory daily, this morning I have only three.

Something’s working.

It’s one of life’s great ironies with children that any late night you might take is always followed with an exceptionally early morning.

The start of the New Year was no exception to that rule.

Still battling with the stomach bug, we had a quiet New Year at home (not that we’d have gone out partying without it – we prefer to wait until restaurants and babysitters return to sensible prices and have a night out later on in the month instead) and went to sleep somewhere around 1am, listening to the sounds of fireworks all around.

So it was almost inevitable that Li’l Bhaji would want attention and to start his day at 6am, despite it being a full hour before his normal wake time and two hours before their Bunny clock was due to wake up (its ears pop up and eyes open when they’re allowed to come jump on our bed and get us started – before that they generally play together in their rooms – at least, that’s the theory).

Not quite the lazy start to the year that we’d hoped for! Still, we suspected that we’d been overly optimistic.

- – -

Looking back at last year’s New Year’s Day entry, I was rather shocked to discover that I actually kept 2 out of 3 of my resolutions. I did finish that damn book (albeit in November for NaNoWriMo and I still have to edit it, but hey … finished is finished… first draft at least), and my completed Wheel of the Year entry is up on Flickr for all to see. The house decluttering didn’t quite make it, although I did do a lot new clutter just found its way back, but I seem to care less these days, so that’s okay then!

With that track record, I really feel like I should aim high for this year, but my ideas for what I’d like to do in 2007 don’t really have quantifiable goals for me to measure, which does make it harder to see if you’ve succeeded.

See, my theme for 2007 is going to be relationships.

I know this is one of my weaknesses – I can get so focussed on other things (general routines of life, projects, the eternal business of bringing up young children) that I then lose sight of the people who make life most worth living and special.

So I’m going to be making the extra effort to get a babysitter at least once a month and go out with the love of my life, Akra.

I’m going to try and do more fun activities with the kids and have more energy and time for them.

I’m going to be better at keeping in touch with old friends and I’m going to go out of my way to make some new local ones rather than constantly relying on the Internet for my social input.

Most importantly, I’m going to have fun every step along the way.

What are your plans for 2007?