Journal

Happy 50th Birthday, Mum!

I cant believe my mum is 50!

I mean, I know I was 30 almost two years ago now, but it just seems kind of weird that my mum has hit the half century.

I think it’s because she’s always been so full of life and fun that she doesn’t seem to have aged to me. I’m aware that I’m getting on a bit, but my mum just seems to have been stuck in a timewarp for the last fifteen years or so, where I’ve always just though of her as “around 40-ish”.

Sadly, being so far away, there wasn’t much we could do for her birthday other than ensure that she got her card on time and some flowers to go along with it. Next month Fliss and I will be up in Scotland for week, so we’ll be able to treat her to something more lavish while we’re there.

And she deserves it too – bringing up me couldn’t have been a walk in the park, it’s amazing that she doesn’t look twice her age! ;o)

Hope you have a great day mum!

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Note Book

The ghost town

Check out this site made by a russian girl who visited the area around the Chernobyl disaster. The pictures on the latter pages are truly chilling – it’s hard to imagine the kind of horror that must have been endured in those nearby settlements as the russian military evacuated people from their homes for ever.

Sadly she appears to have staged a few of the pictures, like the gas mask in the crib, for instance, and the fact that her bike is missing in all the city shots would suggest she might be embelishing her story a little, too.

Regardless of the truth behind her tale, the pictures are pretty impressive by themselves.

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Journal

Ready, Shreddy, Go!

After a hiatus of several months, I’m back eating cereal again in the mornings. Toward the end of last year I managed to eat myself sick of Rice Crispies after consuming several extra large boxes in the space of a month or so. Admittedly that was partly due to a promotion where you got these Cartoon Network bobblehead things and I was trying to decorate my monitors at work with them. I collected five of them during my Rice Krispie fest, which although two of them are doublers, gives some idea of the consumption rate.

Anyhow, new to the extreme breakfasting menu is Frosted Shreddies – a food product not exactly aimed at my age group (hey, neither are rice crispies), but very tasty all the same. I’m nearing the end of my first box and I’m still enjoying them, although all that sugar coating cant be too good for my teeth. I may switch to the regular version for my next box to save my teeth, but that would be kind of like Baywatch without the hot chicks – what would be the point?

The only downside is the promotion toys – they’re characters from Disney’s Brother Bear which looked like yet another of their formulaic morality tales from what I can remember of the trailer. Regardless of that, the quality of the toys is poor. Not that I’ve come to expect highly detailed, hand-crafted workmanship from toys found in a cereal box, but the bear I got has a facial expression indicating severe constipation (or rapid intrusion of the same region, it’s hard to tell) and the mold lines are painfully obvious.

Fortunately there’s not much room left on the top of my monitors anway, so the saving grace of Shreddies may well be their taste rather than their freebies.

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