Tuesday, August 5, 2008

An Odd Potty and the Harvestman


Changing the nappy this morning and glancing down at the potty on the floor I couldn’t resist posting a photo. It is the most absurdly ugly thing I have seen in years and I have certainly never seen anything quite so grotesque in the baby market before.

It is not that it is just ugly it’s the fact that someone actually designed it (déjà vu here) to be so ugly. The colours are awful, the print layers are out of sync and the actual artwork seems to have been done by a 4 year old. Maybe it was a prize in a design your own potty competion, winner gets to realize his or her potty design. I now know what it is, the wife worked it out, it’s a motor bike, but I don’t know why it is. It may not seem much like a motorbike but really, it is. I thought the thing on the side was a recumbent dragon, but it is seemingly a kick-start pedal. Not only are the colours out of sync horizontally they are also out vertically too. It looks like it might even have been done with a felt pen. Even the headlight is not round. And anyway, who was it made for? The wee’un when sitting on it can’t tell it’s a motorbike partly because she can’t see the design from up there but mainly because oddly enough, toddlers don’t usually have much experience in riding motorbikes. You can’t see it in the photo but it also has a flat back tyre. It is also, when full of baby poo and pee, impossible to pick up as it has no hand holds. This is going to become a family heirloom I can feel it.

Cleaning out the B&B today I removed a couple of dozed harvestmen from the corners. One type of these beautiful creatures has really wacky defense mechanism. If you go too near it bounces and starts whizzing round on it’s web. The longer you stay close the more it does it and to a certain point the faster it goes. I got the magnifying glass out to look closer but it moves so fast that it is difficult to see it, it’s all blurry. The question that springs to mind is what actually eats harvestman? Not exactly a lot of meat on a harvestman. They seem to like the corners of windows which is not surprising really as we probably have the dirtiest kitchen windows in italy. We have, from the outside, rain splash which makes them first wet and then dusty. Then the cats rear up on their hind legs, damp front paws against the glass looking in at the food and streaking the windows with mud as they slide down onto all fours again. Then the dog comes along and rubs its wet nose in horizontal streaks against the glass. If we are really lucky the neighbour’s slobberdog comes to steal the cat’s grub and spray slobber all over the glass at the same time. And as if this wasn’t enough the howler covered from top to toe in most of europe’s complement of dirt and sticky stuff as usual bangs on the window with her horrendously sticky mitts to attract the dog’s attention and at the same time licks the glass with her huge prehensile tapir-sized tongue. Clean windows last less than a day. So I give up.

Rant of the day: A pox on Tele2. Is it not possible in this day and age (sound like my parents) to have an internet connection that actually works for more than a week?! Are these people so stupid they cannot work out the technology? And perhaps, when the server is down or the connection is lost and all that , that afterwards they could actually send you a message apologising for their total incompetence which might make me more well disposed towards them. Because if they continue like this due to the amount of cursing I’m doing, parts of their anatomies will start to wither.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Firstly in reply to your comment on my LJ, yes 30th birthdays should be banned, totally agree!
As for man flu sorry severe infections, thank you for correcting my error, I shall have to read the medical journals more to keep up with these revelations :p

Now onto the subject of the potty, I have figured out the reaoning for the terrible design, it is an added aid to toilet training! No person, child or not would want to be associated for long with it due to the headaches the colours give you, so therefore children will learn to use the toilet quicker to get away from the potty. See? solved it :p

Your dirty window story got me laughing. My dad has patio doors that he is obssesive about keeping clean, it used to drive him mental when my girls visited, sticky hand prints on the inside of the glass, cats paw prints on the outside and dog drool, the dog was a bit daft and thought it could get inside if it licked the glass hard enough.

Ps. I know that your connection is a bit slow so thanks for being patient with my LJ the pics must have slowed your connection terribly.