How to Change a Lightbulb.

This is an instructional blog post. It tells you how to do stuff. It has 3 whole pictures.

This is Percy.

Isn't he lovely? Well this was him when he was new (to us) and was still fairly clean and worked properly and stuff. He's been working fairly hard for his keep since then. He's had some new belts and a new wheel bearing and is still going. For both of these things I took him (with company and moral support) to a overall-wearing Mechanic in a Garage and tried to look knowledgeable and not like an idiot girl who doesn't really know how a car works. 

I understand the basics, but cars are currently beyond the range of things I'll happily tinker with. Too much can go bad if you tinker incorrectly. I'll change the wiper blades, top up the oil and tape things back down again. That's about the limit. When I find a ramp to get him on I'll probably get in there and attempt to fix the little tube that goes from the screenwash to the scooshers on the front windscreen. After that I give in and go find a Boy. 

He has a list of small "boo-boos" that'll need seeing to fairly soon, and most definitely before he starts thinking about an MOT. I'm going with the baby-steps approach of dealing with one of these things at a time. Today I found myself finishing work an hour early and being sent to Halfords on an errand. Shopping for distilled water, no less. For tiny shrimp that we'll be selling at the shop that is one of my jobs. I live a varied and unpredictable life. 

Where was I? At Halfords. 5L of distilled water. Check. Ooh, Percy needs a lightbulb. I secretly quite like the way that Halfords has small flip charts where you can find the make and age of your car and know what item you need to buy without having to ask and look dumb. So here I am in the lightbulb section, having identified the lightbulb I need, yet thinking to myself "How in heck do I change the lightbulb in the car headlight?" 

So this is how I did it. My idiot's guide to changing a lightbulb. 

#1 Pay for your heavy pointless purchases and then bamboozle the bloke behind the till by asking if you can leave it behind and come back for it in an hour or so. 

#2 Walk home, not carrying heavy pointless purchase. 

#3 Make tea, drink tea (insert optional Terry Pratchet reading here). 

#4 Change. This bit is important. Female drivers have a statistically inaccurate reputation for being bad drivers, bad parkers and being more concerned with fluffy steering wheel covers and not having to walk too far in high heels than about keeping the car running. I don't want to ever be mentally placed in this box by anyone. I can park (I drive possibly the smallest 5-seater car there is these days, I really can't get away with not being able to park it). I feel at this point it's important to look a bit scruffy. Not too manly, just capable-looking. For this I went for hoody, jacket, and a pair of fairly baggy jeans made baggier by being at least a size to big. Not the most attractive look, but it works in this one scenario. In fact, these are my go-to jeans whenever I need to go ask someone else to fix something I can't quite manage. 

#5 Now having achieved the Look, you can drive to Halfords. Park, and pull the bonnet-opening thingy so it'll be ready to open once you've found a bloke and a light-bulb. 

#6 Wander in looking collected and look for someone in the right uniform. "I'd like a lightbulb and someone to change it". When asked what the car is, say it quickly, pronouncing everything right as if it's just one of your fleet of Mechanical Things That You Know All About.

#7 Find a bloke in a high-vis vest and take him to the car. Open the bonnet without having to feel around for the catch for too long, or ask him how to. Apologise for the rust. Explain that this is Important Structural Rust. Turn on the light so he can see that it's not on, and turn it back off again so you don't fry him. It's generally seen as impolite, and they possibly charge extra. 

#8 Find some form of fruit, I went for little oranges, and discuss brake pads, and alternators and your car's entire service history, whilst eating aforementioned fruit and looking not too interested (but paying enough attention that you'll be able to do it yourself the next time). Fruit is essential in the car. I once carried an apple around in the car for a number of weeks, intending to eat it and never did. My argument was that the presence of the fruit made the general environment slightly healthier and therefore did a little to counteract the universal unhealthiness of driving somewhere that you could probably get to by other means if you tried hard enough and had all day. 

#9 Listen to the high-vis man sing a few verses of Kumbyah for your listening pleasure. 

#10 Make generic "Thank you, I'd have done it myself, but I'm so busy. I'm totally capable of this, really" noises. "Cheers" may sound suitable at this point.

#11 Cough up the £3 for the pack of two lightbulbs (and take a mental note to stow the spare away in the glove compartment with the emergency biscuits and the manly car stuff) and £4 for the man to change it. Remember your pointless distilled water and feel momentarily grumpy about having to carry an extra 5 kilos to work on Monday morning. 

#12 Tell no-one. Drive home with the window open and announce that you have come home victorious having changed the lightbulb in the car. Mention nothing of the Kumbyah-ing high-vis man. Resolve to bloody-well do it yourself next time. 

• Did you know that Haynes don't make a Manual for a Daewoo Matiz but they do have one for the U.S.S. Enterprise? Like that's any good to me. 

Home

I'm home. It was lovely. The return to Real Life starts bright and early tomorrow morning. I've been doing a fair amount of writing and thinking and suchlike whilst I've had the time and space to do so, and at least some of it will eventually wander it's way in to type and spring up on here for your reading pleasure. 

Maybe even pictures. 

Directions. And very small knitted things.

Listen up you ugly lot! This one's for you. I want your brains (in the least zombie-like fashion).

To get things moving, here's a picture of a very tiny green teddy bear with a purple moustache. Thought you might like it.

I had to pay that hand model so much for this. 

Did you like it? Go on, you know you did. Don't see one of them every day now, do you? No. I am indeed good to you.

Which is what I want to blog about today. I am not cool, or hip, or trendy or any of these things which one might secretly aspire to be (although never publicly acknowledge for in doing so would topple the façade of coolness). Following the same bizarre logic, a lack of desire to be cool, may indirectly make me so but I seriously doubt it. Enough of this teenage nonsense anyway. I pay my own (share of the) council tax and once bought salad dressing. I am well on the way to becoming that terrible thing of which I don't often like to speak - an adult. Thankfully it has not happened yet. Either because I keep moving the bar or because I am still an idiot kid.

Not long ago, a driving license and car ownership were criteria for entry to the adult hood, but now I skirt dangerously close to these things, they are no longer suitable milestones. Maybe I'll go for getting married, or having babies as sensible adulthood detection devices? Those things seem suitable woolly and distant. Yes, safety, that'll do.

I wandered again. I was meant to be telling you about my lack of cool and desire to remain so. I do however (you may have noticed this) have a blog. Once upon a time this may have been trespassing on the boundaries of cool, but everyone and their Mum is blogging now (the verb "to blog" still strikes a small amount of fear in me, but I've never fathomed why) so I'll probably get away with it.
I started the blog to recount my culture shock of a summer in a caravan and all the country things I got up to. I'll confess life, exhaustion, laziness and a poor internet connection conspired against me and I delivered rather weakly on this one.

Then I came home and got all jobless on you. Temporarily (thank God) so. I got busy - I blogged less. I ran a festival - I blogged not at all. Now I am busy but ever so slightly less so. I seem to be giving you fairly sporadic updates on whatever happens to come out of my fingertips when I sit down to type.

What are you getting at, Kid? Ok, so the deal is this. I will blog at random, offloading whatever happens to have been onloaded on to my poor underworked brain on any one day... unless ... you suggest otherwise.

Ideas on a post card! (or, you know, comment on the blog post like a normal person). Or talk to me.
And tell your friends. Tell them to read me. Read me, read me please!

Here's another tiny teddy. Enjoy.

So flippin' teeny!

Scroll down for spoilers.


And then some.



Ok. I give in.


Today it is snowing. In precisely one week I will be back in my precious summer caravan (well, one of them) - and I'll be sleeping there!

Stickmen

Exactly a month ago it was not indeed Monday, as it is today. Due to the nature of March being a 31 day month (remember the rhyme, people?) and the number 31 not dividing equally by seven, exactly a month ago it was a Friday. It's now 9:44 am in my particular time zone and on the Friday in question I was sitting at a desk - my second ever day at the office job. I sneaked off at lunchtime and spent the afternoon sweeping and shifting furniture. That evening hundreds of funny-lookin' people descended on our campus area and we put on a three day nigh-on non-stop folk dance festival to keep them entertained. It was mental: great fun, great stress and a great feeling of accomplishment. What was the point - to give a bunch of people a whole weekend of intense fun and complete real-life escapism, and to do it because you knew it was a thing that would be appreciated.

I won an award for my part of the organising caboodle. I found out about the award the day after the dinner at which I ought to have received it. Such is my current level of personal organisation. Collecting the award it's an A6 piece of card with some cool studenty graphics and "Kings Commendation" writing in cool slanty capitals. It looks pretty disappointing but I won't mention that when I use it to bulk up my c.v.

So, we put all the furniture back, kicked the last few people out of the building, played A+E taxi for our one and only injured participant (frankly, a miraculous number given the dancing:injury ratio) and opened a bottle of very good wine, bought at the vineyard no less. We've paid most of the bills and recovered for the exhaustion and post-festival lurgies. Next year, we'll jump in a bus and go enjoy what someone else has organised for us.

But before then. One last spin-off.
Part of our corporate image, and our t-shirt and merch designs featured scenes of happy little stick figures trying their sticky hands at a variety of folk dance forms. After a while they got bored and tried to take up folky instruments. In the end they ran out of inspiration and just stood around helping people differentiate between the make and female toilets.
We printed one heck of a lot of the critters and I'll find them following me around for the rest of my days I imagine. But the punters seemed to like them.

So... we've gone mainstream. Internet companies like spreadshirt take my humble design, we choose what products we want to plaster the design on the the front of and ... Hey Presto, we're in business.
T-shirts! Lots of em. Big ones.

Little teeny ones. 

Bags. Babygrows. Blankets. Basically t-shirts and stuff beginning with B. 

Seriously, this baby model is wearing lip gloss. Can't be right. 

All on a happy little website. You buy stuff then you'll have exciting stuff and I'll get about 10p for my trouble. I'll try not to spend it all at once. Happiness all round. 

Here it is, boys and girls. Share the stick-man-merchandise love. 

http://mcstickman.spreadshirt.co.uk/