But SHADOWS is still going

 

Well I feel like death on toast.  Old, decrepit death on burnt, spongy toast that was nasty chemical-laden mattress bread in its heyday.  I also have laryngitis.  Well, half laryngitis.  I can croak, but it hurts.  There will be a cough later.  Joy.

            Yes, I missed service ring this morning.

            No voice lesson tomorrow.

            No second-Monday at Old Eden tomorrow.*

            Not in a good mood. 

            I did, however, meet Colin and Anthea while I was out hurtling hellhounds in slo-mo this morning.**  Colin has the lurgy as well so they were also moving in slo-mo.***  Oh, you sound much worse than he does, said Anthea admiringly.  Thanks, I rasped. 

            Clearly more bad jokes are needed.  All of you who read the forum will have seen (almost all of) these.  And if you're feeling healthy and sharp and brainy you are permitted to skip.  The rest of you will enjoy seeing them again. 

blondviolinist:

A piece of string walks into a bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender looks him up and down and says "We don't serve your kind in here." The string walks back outside, stomps around, and ties himself all up. He then walks back into the bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender says "Aren't you the piece of string that was just in here a moment ago?" "Nope," the string replies. "I'm a frayed knot." 

Us old married women are allowed to laugh and laugh at the following.  The rest of you have to pretend to be stern and poker-faced.  Mrrrnghmph.

LRK:

"Mrs Svensson, why did you shoot your husband with a bow and arrow?"

"Because I didn't want to wake the children."

Or another:

"My husband is a sailor – he's only home one month a year."

"That's awful! I'd never stand for that!"

"Oh, I don't know… a month passes so quickly…" † 

And here's a joke from me.  I can't remember where it comes from, except that I picked it up somewhere in the last few months of cramming physics and maths, probably several times: 

"We don't serve your kind here," said the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.†† 

* * *

* This, I admit, may be as much blessing as curse.  Not my favourite bells in the universe, especially not in January when even nice bells may be dyspeptic.  But having not rung tower bells in seven days I'm starting to twitch.  

** You have dogs, they have to go out.  If you're incapacitated, you stuff a broomstick down your spine, tie the leads to your hands, and go out anyway. (My dog minder, bless her, took them out yesterday.)   Next time, I'm adopting an elderly, three-legged Chihuahua.  Or maybe I'll go the amphibians in tanks route.  No, probably not.  I think the wingless fruit flies in the refrigerator would creep me out.  I have enough trouble with the mealworms for the robins. 

Ajlr

Oh, Robin, that ring… *haz a envy*

It's good, isn't it?  ::Preens::   It provides a little cheering-up in the present dark days uggggh.  I tell myself that winter is the logical time to have flu:  flu in the summer feels really unjust.  But I'm ready to notice that the days are literally getting longer.  Any time now guys, Apollo, Helios, Surya, whoever.

            My fabulous ring has one fairly fabulous drawback however, as some of you with jewellery fetishes will have already twigged, which is that it's a ratbag to keep clean—all that surface area, those big flat facets—and the backs are worse, as they always are, because you have to fight your way through the setting, but if you don't clean the backs the fronts look dull.  I've been doing the job with one of those soft mini toothbrushes that I can poke into the back, but it's a fiddly business.  Do any of you have any personal experience and/or recommendations about the ultrasonic jewellery cleaners?  I know they get mixed reviews, but I've been the noxious chemicals route and I really don't want to do that again. 

. . . but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can't all be robins.

I'm not sure if you have street lights anywhere near you, but it's quite common for some birds – blackbirds, particularly – to sit near the lights at night and sing. And as blackbirds are also among the first to nest each year, so they're pairing-up now, that may well be a male blackbird starting to proclaim his territory that you're hearing in the early hours. 

Blackbirds.  Thank you.  That's it.  I even thought it sounded rather like blackbirds, but I can just about tell an eagle from a dodo on a good day^ and blackbirds at night?  But there is a streetlight at the end of my little cul de sac^^ as well as several down on the main road.^^^ 

Mrs Redboots 

I envy you your husband in his lovely choices of presents. Mine has to be told what to buy me (but then, to be fair, he does!). A lovely ring. 

Thank you!  Peter takes direction very well.  In this case he didn't have to—he had the idea and then it was the jeweller's problem.  But it was Peter who found this jeweller-who-listens twenty years ago, so the points are still all his.

And I would assume a blackbird – we are having them here in London, too. 

I want to say, good for them, and I suppose I do still mean good for them.  But the critters that manage most successfully to colonise human towns tend to be the thugs—blackbirds, foxes.  Rats.  Cockroaches.  Doesn't speak well of us, although we knew that.  At least blackbirds have a pretty song.  But I barely see my robin any more because the blackbirds have taken over.  I'd rather have my robin. 

But the other night I was staying with my parents, in Sussex, and I heard an owl. I was almost sure it was an owl . . . I haven't heard one there since my childhood . . .  But when we went out to the car to come home to London, the owl swooped overhead. 

What kind of owl?  Little owls are dead common around here, and we have tawny owls pretty much by the yard as well.  Occasionally if you're very very good you'll see a barn owl at twilight, if you're out wandering the countryside.  Absolute magic.  No mere Harry Potter snowy owls need apply.  They're also amazingly huge—you have that adrenaline rush at first sight which is both the thrill of it and a faint atavistic memory of pterosaurs or something when you think it might be coming for you.  Or at least a hellhound.  One of the things I'm not going to get around to, this life, is keeping a bird of prey.

            I'm currently having a fantasy about quail, though.  A tall thin tiered cage so they can fly and perch.  Nice little eggs.  This comes of faithfully reading COUNTRY SMALLHOLDING http://www.countrysmallholding.co.uk/  I should get out more. 

^ If it's alive, it's probably an eagle.   Unless we're in a Thursday Next novel.

^^ Which is approximately the only way in which I've done better than my semi-detached neighbour, who has a cellar, despite being farther up the hill than I am, as well as an attic, four bedrooms, a dining room and two sitting rooms, a larger garden, room to park three or four cars and a chunk out of my tiny sitting room and equally tiny office to run his frelling plumbing.  But he has the streetlight. 

            Of course I have the hyperactive security light belonging to Mr Military and family immediately across the road from me, which is apparently carefully aimed to dazzle into my windows and make sure I'm not trading world secrets with Martians or anything.+  Yes, there are very likely hellhounds on the bed/sofa.  Sue me. 

+ No, just handbell ringers.  

^^^ I've never caught him at it, but I swear there's one that sits on the wall six feet from my bedroom window and serenades the security light.  

^^^^ I rescued a small fluffy baby owl something a few years ago, sitting in the main road at the end of the mews' drive, waiting for something to happen.  What happened was that I got out of Wolfgang and moved it.  What I remember is blogging that I'd pulled my sleeves down over my hands to pick it up and someone who knows more than I do posted to the forum that its mum wouldn't have minded human smell on her offspring the way us mostly-clueless vague tree-hugging nature-lovers would expect. 

*** I don't know what their excuse is.  They have cats.  They can't possibly subscribe to the fallacy about fresh air being good for you?  In an English winter when you have the lurgy? 

† Negotiating acceptable comic rudeness is always a ratbag.  There's something in the rule of thumb that says you're only allowed to be gratuitously horrible about something you have personal experience of, so LRK and I can be rude about husbands.  It's not the only rule of thumb, but it's somewhere to start.  As I've told you before I was gobsmacked when I first started going out into the world as a published writer—a single published writer—and was accused of being a man-hater.  What?  Yes.  I have uppity heroines.  Siiiiigh.  I still get mail to this effect.  Hey, some of my best friends, etc, aside from being married to one.  For twenty years.

            I think these jokes are funny.  But I also think 'I'm a natural blonde, please speak slowly' is funny.  And I've only ever seen it on women's t shirts, not men's.   I was also a natural blonde through my twenties.

†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

You see it both ways—my way, and 'we don't serve faster than light neutrinos here' said the bartender.  I realise my way requires that your auditor has been cramming on maths and physics lately too, but this way spoils the joke, I think.  I'd rather undergo the humiliation of having it explained.