E-mail from my Brother : Meh......

Hi Fay,

How is it going?  Nothing much has happened this week unfortunately.  I haven’t been trying to catch any more rats, there haven’t been any workmen around to put in any bathrooms or put up any fences and I’ve largely spent my week trying to keep my sanity while winter rages outside and Sam rages inside.

I bought a backpack weed sprayer today that cost a small fortune.  It straps onto your back and make you look like a Ghostbuster.

The weed sprayer was made in Spain and had an exploded diagram of all the component parts labelled 1 to 292 with the information “Step 1: attach part 182 to 131”, “Step 2: Pump handle and use sprayer.”

I spent ten minutes trying to figure out which part was which and made the mistake of having music playing on Windows Media Player while I unpacked it.  It was mistake because the songs were on random and started playing a track from the 2004 film King Arthur.  

The instrumental was part of the score that started slowly and ramped up the tense music to reflect the tense and dangerous battle that was going on in the film.  For me that music just made me feel like finding Part 182 and attaching it to Part 131 was something from a Hollywood bomb disposal scene.  Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, where’s the part!?  Where’s the part!? He doesn’t know!  Teeeeeeeee-ension!  Dum, dum, DUM!  DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM!  Where’s the f*cking part!?  De dur!  Dum, dum, dum!  DUM!  DUM!  DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM! Violins!  

Part 182 was a hose, part 131 was the handle.  They’d over complicated the whole thing.

I went into the store and had asked for some advice on the actual weed killer.  I had been looking at the garden week killer stuff but on finding out that we had a bit more land the salesman took me out to the professional farmers section.  “This is the one you want,” he said gesturing to a shelf full of tiny plastic bottles.  One little bottle of Merlin’s Magic Plant Killy Potion cost $160 dollars.  I looked carefully at the bottle but could find no evidence of it being made from solid gold or that it had rubies studded in the cap of the bottle.  “Make sure you don’t put more that six millilitres per litre of water,” he said, “otherwise it’ll kill everything including the grass.”  Oh, so that tiny bottle would actually make up a swimming pool size of weed killer?  Cool.  But then I wondered on how I’m going to measure this stuff accurately into the water.  Six mills isn’t a lot.  Maybe I’ll just guess…

I’ve got my yearly eye check up tomorrow.  I hate those things but they won’t re-order my contact lenses unless I get them rechecked.  I hate them in the same way I hate having my haircut.   I don’t like someone invading my personal space and having some stranger shine a light into my eye and tell me not to blink just seems unnecessarily cruel.  I also find myself holding by breath when they lean in close to look down my optical nerve or what ever it is they feel the need to get so close to do.  I have this fear that I’ll breathe out and the optometrist will back off gagging at my fetid garlic fug.  It’s an irrational fear I know because I’ve trained myself up to breath out of my perforated ear drum.  Sure my ears are waggling when I do it, but I think it’s better than drawing attention to myself.

As I say, nothing much has been happening this week.  About this time during winter in the northern hemisphere there’s be some sort of mid-winter festival to cheer folks up.  Some people call it Christmas.  Down here there’s nothing.  Nothing until spring comes along.  Imagine a winter without a Christmas and that’s what it’s like at the moment.  Short days, long nights, cold, fog and drizzle.  The occasional weed killer backpack bomb disposal exercise for sure, but mostly it’s “meh”.

Love Mark,

xxx

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Meh, eh? About right for my week too!

As always ........