It doesn’t appear to be my week.

First, one of our skylights started to leak during the heavy rain yesterday (we think it might have been due to some sort of grit/debris stopping the window closing properly – at least the seal seems intact – we can’t be sure until the next bout of rain) and now today my oven has given up the ghost.

An hour into cooking baked potatoes (normal temp of 180C) the kitchen got very smoky. Looked inside the oven to find the potatoes utterly incinerated and a bit behind the fan glowing red. I switched it off pretty sharpish and have flung open all windows and doors in an attempt to clear the smoke. The fan had been making a clanking noise for a while, but obviously something has gone very wrong – thermostat maybe as well as fan?

Of course it chose to break in May which is our most expensive month of the year excepting Christmas (Akra Jr’s, Li’l Bhaji’s and Akra’s birthdays in quick succession). It wouldn’t wait for time when we actually had money spare would it, oh no.

I thought my bank account was looking a bit healthier than it ought to be. There were a few unreconciled transactions in my accounts software back from February as well, but I just assumed that I’d paid them on Visa rather than on debit card as I’d thought. Then there was the cash withdrawals that weren’t showing… how odd. Perhaps I’d duplicated something somewhere.

My statements were only taking up one page a month as well – wow, finally got my act together and curbed my spending a bit. Fantastic.

Then I realised that the new debit card they gave me 3 months ago was actually for the joint account not my every day checking account. I’d cut up the wrong debit card and was gaily emptying the joint account instead. THREE MONTHS!

Have sheepishly phoned up the bank and asked for a new debit card. They reassured me that this sort of thing happens all the time, but I still feel pretty stupid.

WHY do they put those pillars in car parks?

You know the ones – the narrow metal girders (to save space) but then some evil bastard planner gave a twisted smirk and made the bases really wide, just low enough to be impossible to see. Then, to add insult to injury, they use bright yellow paint so the scrape shows up really nicely on the side of your car when you misjudge it.

Of course, it’s my own stupid fault. I should have not let the guy travelling inches from my bumper phase me and taken more time over getting into the space. To compound my error, I let instinct rule on hearing the sickening crunch sound and yelled “oh SHIT!” Which would have been okay, but my five year old was in the back.

Akra Jr hasn’t repeated it… yet.

Can’t afford to get it repaired at the moment, so my poor little Micra will have to remain scarred for a while. Still, top marks to Akra who cheerfully strolled in this evening brandishing a bottle of T-Cut Metallic and declaring “oh, it’s not that bad a scrape, is it?” and “don’t worry, it’s only a car!”.

I think I’ll keep him.

Most people who know me consider me to be a fairly organised and methodical person. I have routines. I have places things are kept. I usually keep on top of my paperwork.

I just have two achilles heels: keys and purses. They never seem to get put down in their correct homes if I have them, and I’m always losing them – to the point that Akra doesn’t bother trying to help me when I declare them lost, just rolls his eyes at me and lets me get on with the search of desperation.

Anyway, today was fairly normal. I only lost my front door keys once (I’d put them in my coat pocket rather than my jeans pocket while struggling in the front door armed with toddler and new fish for the biorb). Later on this evening, while doing my accounts I went to go find my purse (amazingly actually in my handbag where it belongs – obviously a freak occurrence) and while I was scrabbling around at the bottom of the bag I felt some keys.

Eh? That’s odd. My house keys are on the hook, as are my car keys… what keys are these? I don’t remember putting keys in my bag. I scrabble around some more. These mystery keys appear to be in the lining of the bag. With more investigation I discover that there is a teeny tiny zip hidden in the side of the lining and there’s an actual pocket there that I knew nothing about.

I extract the keys. It takes a few seconds for me to identify them. They’re my mother’s house keys. Now I’m fairly certain that I considered these lost … the move before last. That would be before Akra Jr was born – just over 5 years ago.

Oops.

Oh well, they’re obviously safe there. I put them back. If I forget where they are again, you will remind me, won’t you?

Things were not going well for our hero. Getting Bob home went okay with minimal bumps, but he appeared to have a scale missing once we got him in the tank – we can only assume that it got knocked at the shop during transfer from net to plastic bag. However, this wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was that the little fella refused to eat.

We followed instructions to the letter with the tank. Kept the lights off for the first 24hrs of our new guest and didn’t feed him until the following day. We opened the pack of special floating fish pellets that came with the tank under the guidance that this was the best possible food for our new pet and carefully measured out three meagre pellets into the bowl – aware that goldfish were renowned for not knowing when they were full and overeating until they made themselves ill and their tank rather manky in the process. Only, he didn’t exactly rush to eat them. Roundly ignored them, in fact.

We went out for the day (to see Chicken Little, no less) and on our return the pellets had vanished – hurrah, he’d found them and eaten them. Job done. Then the next day the pellets got ignored again – only this time they weren’t found later in the day and he spent most of the day, hiding away at the back of the tank behind the octopus. This didn’t bode well. Where was the “eat anything that’s vaguely digestable” goldfish I was promised in the manual, eh?

As anyone sane in the technological age (okay, that’s just me then… and you say it should read “insane”? Ooookay) does, my first stop was google. There was bound to be someone out there who could tell me if my fish was sick or whether this was normal fish pouty behaviour in a new tank, wasn’t there? Oooooh boy… wasn’t there just. I found a fish forum and posted a query – mentioning that damaged scale but commenting that as far as I could tell it had started to heal. Their cure for new fish lethargy and food refusal? Apparently, I should be testing the water daily, I should be getting hi-tech water testing lab equipment, I should be housing my 1 tiny goldfish in a tank half the size of the living room, it was obviously at death’s door and I only had myself to blame for being a BAD FISH OWNER!

And I thought fish were supposed to be restful!

I got myself into a bit of a state, as Zip and Nada will attest. How crap was I? Couldn’t keep a £3 fish alive in a £100 aquarium?! On Sunday, I popped into the pet store to pick up some Stress Zyme (for the fish, it’s the one that’s stressed… honest) and chatted to the fish guy there. You know what it was? Go on … guess.

The fish preferred flake.

Practically hoovered up the stuff this morning and is now frisky and perky and exploring its tank. I am NEVER going to read fish keeping forums again.

*CRUNCH* *SQUELCH*

“Oh shit, I’ve just trodden on a snail.”

The footpath outside the front of our house is flanked on both sides (is that tautology?) with low bushes that are home to a host of creepy crawlies including it’s most popular residents: worms, slugs and snails. When Akra Jr was two years old, it used to take us half an hour to travel the few hundred yards along this path as he would insist on inspecting in detail each and every snail we came across.

Now, with the current wet weather, this path has become a slug and snail slalom. Most days I remember to weave the pushchair and us along, narrowly avoiding the squelch factor. Every now and then I forget.

Now, slugs I think are fair game, but I do feel sorry for the snails. Which is bizarre really, as snails are just slugs with a fancy home and better PR. Oh, apart from the extra squelch factor that slugs seem to have – their innards seem to be almost luminous and spread a lot further than the average snail.

RIP little snail. I *am* sorry.

I suppose it had to happen to me someday. Me, who virtually lives on a computer. Me, who used to work in a bank and gets frustrated when people don’t understand how to use cheques properly. Me, who is a gadget freak.

I had to ask someone how the paying in machine worked at our local bank, as out here in the wilds of Worcester they don’t have tellers on a Saturday.

In my defence, I’ve never bothered using them before. I prefer to have the teller do it all and I get the nice stamp in the paying in book to “prove” it’s gone in. I’d far rather queue for 5 minutes to deal with a real person (despite the fact that with all other banking I’d far rather use the internet or phone bank! I’m just a waddling contradiction, I am). All the same, it’s rather embarrassing when I score lower than a technophobe when trying to figure out how to use a simple machine.

Think I can get away with blaming the pregnancy hormones for this as well?

If you decide to chuck your body puff in the wash to give it a quick spruce up, remember to remove it before putting the whole load on the tumble dry cycle.

Fortunately, the meltdown of plastic was very self-contained and didn’t destroy the load it was in. I was lucky. This time.

… that I could possibly do anything so stupid, but here I am, overcoming my embarrassment… confessing.

I am not a confident driver, not a particularly good one either, but until now I have never had an accident that was my fault (although if I’m honest there’s been a couple of times I have been extremely lucky, but that’s another story). But I’ve got a little blasé about it all, especially about reversing as my little Micra has one of those reverse parking beeper thingies (yes, that’s the technical term) which I have become a bit over-reliant on.

So there I am, having wrestled a disgruntled Akra Jr into his carseat, reversing the Micra in Blockbuster’s carpark on Wednesday, only half listening to the beeps getting closer and closer together… then the continuous tone… then THUD.

Oh God. I’ve just hit the Landrover behind. I get out of the car with that sick feeling in your stomach. I don’t even have a pen or paper on me to leave a note for the driver. I check our bumpers. Very very fortunately for me I was going slowly enough that there was no damage to either bumper and as there is no angry owner running towards me shaking his fist, I drive away chastened and more focussed on what I’m doing.

I have no idea why I didn’t stop in time – obviously I thought I had more room than that and I wasn’t concentrating properly, but really I have no excuse, no extenuating circumstances. I was just utterly utterly stupid.

So, why am I confessing today (Friday)? It’s because Akra Jr has suddenly taken it into his head when he gets in the car to say “Beep beep beep beep beep ….. BANG!” then giggle insanely. Over and over again. Akra thinks it’s hilarious (and I believe has been secretly encouraging him). Luckily, Akra Jr has the world’s cutest giggle so I have to laugh along – I can’t help myself.

*blush*

I feel very very very stupid.

Remember me complaining that I was cursed with online shopping at the moment? That my Blackstar order had gone astray and I’d had to get them to send me out a new Buffy DVD?

Well it arrived today. Bloody good service considering I’d only reported it yesterday lunchtime. Opened the parcel, went to go put the DVD on the shelf… there was already a Buffy Season 6 there. I blinked. I counted the seasons. I double checked both boxes.

Yes, I had received it, unwrapped it and put it on the shelf to watch later and COMPLETELY BLANKED IT FROM MY MEMORY! Now, I know the rumour that they remove your brain with the placenta when you give birth, but this is ridiculous! I have absolutely no recollection of receiving that parcel and I didn’t delete the order confirmation email from my PC as I normally do when receiving an online purchase. Sorry Blackstar. Duplicate is back in the mail to you. Full marks for you being so quick to replace.

In other good online purchase news, my new Docs arrived today – far quicker than I expected them. So I can now thoroughly recommend Shoe-Shop.com for their highly efficient dispatch. No more achy feet! They fit perfectly. Here’s to the next 11 years worth of wear…