Despite having pressing tasks..

..I thought idle thoughts. Like these.

Blugly
= blogger not cutting it in looks department
Bloggles
= blogger whose prose suggests extreme attractiveness, though less so in reality. Cf: beer goggles. The opposite of blugly.
Blollocks
= what I write most of the time

More please.

PS Don't know why last post posted twice.

Blimey!

Wow, suddenly alot of commentage.  Hello, Heather, fellow Swiss exile. Sorry, Sabina - Swiss person - all this mockery of your motherland comes from a place in the heart, you understand. As for the rest of you, you can keep your RSS feedback loop whatsit.  Too much technikery and I break out in a sweat, and I'm in a happy place right now.

Went to the temple of the prince of darkness, sorry, Asda, sorry, Walmart yesterday - and bought a travel cot.  The idea is that our friends with offspring might visit us...and it is another useful camping accessory*.  It was £27.95 and made in China, probably by displaced ethnic minorities forced into pitifully-paid McJobs by the effects of globalisation on their traditional way of life in a rural outpost where alcoholism and the suicide rate is high.  But we bought it anyway.

*You say: Are you really going camping with a 3 month old infant?
I say: bring it on because we are ROCK hard

Blimey!

Wow, suddenly alot of commentage.  Hello, Heather, fellow Swiss exile. Sorry, Sabina - Swiss person - all this mockery of your motherland comes from a place in the heart, you understand. As for the rest of you, you can keep your RSS feedback loop whatsit.  Too much technikery and I break out in a sweat, and I'm in a happy place right now.

Went to the temple of the prince of darkness, sorry, Asda, sorry, Walmart yesterday - and bought a travel cot.  The idea is that our friends with offspring might visit us...and it is another useful camping accessory*.  It was £27.95 and made in China, probably by displaced ethnic minorities forced into pitifully-paid McJobs by the effects of globalisation on their traditional way of life in a rural outpost where alcoholism and the suicide rate is high.  But we bought it anyway.

*You say: Are you really going camping with a 3 month old infant?
I say: bring it on because we are ROCK hard

Bet you didn't know he was Swiss

Albert Hofmann (1906 - ), first person to synthesise and experiment with LSD.

So it's not all yodelling and silly costumes, then.

Big baby

Had Emma weighed yesterday and it's official: she's enormous.  She weighs 5.8kg (which is nearly 13lb to you Luddites. We're metric now.  Get over it.)  That's nearly 6 bags of sugar, a family sack of potatoes or 2 medium watermelons.  You see, despite being more or less totally innumerate, I find numbers pretty interesting.  Did you know they are still looking for prime numbers? And that you can get software that will search for them while you tippety-tap doing other things, like blogging for instance.  If one comes up - we're talking numbers to the power of zillions, here - all kinds of alarms go off followed by a clandestine phone call from the Pentagon and a cash offer.  Not that I have this on my computer, and perhaps I've watched the Matrix once too often.

In answer to those car boot queries, some items are highly collectable - vinyl, especially, and not even in that good nick. Small, ratty-faced men (DJs? Though why did they walk off with The Chicken Song?) come round at 7am and buy bag-loads.  And the 40-something ladies - Eastern European? - seemed to love the decorative item that might end up in a display category of some sort: hence C&D mug.  Not that I wish to generalise...

Triumphant scoffs

Do a car boot sale. Do it, do it, doitdoitdoitdoitdoit! It is a win-win-win situation, people.  You get rid of all your tat.  People PAY you for it. It's fantastic for people-watching.  And you pick up the odd item yourself, which, of course, was once somebody else's tat and you are saving it from a landfill site. I found an aluminium kettle, the type that goes on a gas ring and whistles, for 50p. It's coming camping with us.
On the downside, you have to get up at 5.30 am but when you have a baby in your life, all the world's an altered time zone.  And the loos are a horror story, but on a par with a rock festival in a field or, er, camping generally.

I'm still in shock that we managed to sell pretty much everything. Some 40-something Russian twins (I'm not making this up) bought a pair of speakers for a quid.  And all the items that were of any real value at all were snapped up within 5 minutes of our arrival by a professional car booter, who then sold them with a 500% mark up 5 stalls down.  Bye bye, Charles and Di mug, bye bye ugly vase! We made £80, or thereabouts, which I call a brisk trade.
Next jobs to tackle:  clean windows and fix leaking bath.  After that, we just need to get packing. 

The Swiss noose is tightening.

Back from the country

Excuse lack of blog. Have just completed tour of the grandparents on the South coast. That was officially the last time they will see us, and Madame, before we head Alp-wards.

Talking of which, what is happening to my baby girl? All her hair is falling out.  It sticks to her sheets in a thick carpet, and if she's been dribbling in the night (it's not really an 'if': she dribbles constantly) the hair sticks to her face and she wakes up looking like the taliban.  As it is, her hair do reminds me of Robert der Niro in Taxi Driver, but I could do without the beard.

I am not really feeling emotional about going.  I hope that doesn't mean I'm defective like Dr Spock - Star Trek variety, not childcare expert, though he also has defects, I imagine.  At the moment I am too preoccupied by the hassle of the fine detail.  The Car Boot sale tomorrow, and right now our Ford Fiesta is creaking under the weight of an Everest of boxes. Wonder if the C&D mug will sell. Don't really care to be honest. Just care about going to bed now as we have to be up at 5.30am, so nighty night.

Panicking

Caramba.  Not only do I now have a permanent sick feeling when I think about the To Do list, but I'm now worried my next blog may be from prison.  I can already see the fat face of the female screw and hear the menace in her jangling keys.
 
I noticed something about a Consent to Let document among the junk mail from my mortgage company. Large, rusty cogs turned in my head (the ones that got me a degree from university: the rust is from breastmilk) and I had a conversation that went like this:
 
Me: "What's a Consent to Let? Does this mean I need Consent to Let my property?"
Woman: (crisply, like a headteacher to a naughty child) "Yes, or you're breaking the law. It's dependent on conditions and we don't always give it. It costs £75."  I then started bleating about moving to Switzerland, already found tenants etc etc but realised this was a stupid thing to say, in fact the whole conversation (at least my side of it) had been extremely stupid.
 
I will need to sell a lot of bric a brac at next Sunday's car boot sale to make 75 quid.  My chances are not great, though my Prince records might make me a tenner.  Other items on sale include:
a sombrero (never buy stuff on holiday)
a flamingo pink furry coat (the raving years)
a briefcase, new and unused (???)
assorted bits of china - including a mug commemorating the engagement of the Prince and Princess of Wales.  On second thoughts, I might hang on the that - it could be Emma's ticket to public school.

Settings changed?

I am feeling a frisson of nerdy excitement: I think my fiddling about on Haloscan last night may have yielded the right result, meaning that anonymous comments are now OK.
(Actually, it wasn't so much 'my' fiddling as Rob's fiddling.  Yet another string to his bow.  Other strings include baking and being incredibly fit.  Weep, girls, weep!)
 
 

Still procrastinating

Hole-y cheese!* Less than 3 weeks to go now, before all our stuff goes to Switzerland, followed by us, bodily, a week later.  Still haven't got my act together. We need a cooker and a 2nd hand bed from somewhere to keep the tenants in hot food and nocturnal happiness.  Regarding procurement of said items, I am putting all my eggs in the Car Boot sale basket.  This is the Car boot sale that has been endlessly chatted about, but remains unidentified. As usual, I am all mouth and no trousers.
 
Hans will not be gracing Tooting Mansions with his presence.  Oh well.
 
*As well as illegally housing Holocaust survivors' assets, Switzerland is also home to the Gruyere cheese.  There is a village of Gruyere, where people come by the busload to taste it and I imagine, laugh about the holes.  I know this because I am looking in the Lonely Planet for touristy things to do at weekend.
 
A  footnote to you potential commenters out there: I am trying to change my settings so you can comment anonymously, but this requires a new level of geekiness and I didn't understand the instructions.  I will press on and get over this somehow.

Rallied

Bless you, fans, for indulging my insecure moment back there. I am cheered up, flattered and if this weren't the Internet, I'd offer you a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive to say thank you.

I write today surrounded by piles of paper, diaries, stationary gone feral, files open and ephemera scattered over every surface. I like to attribute an arty significance to this, but it's only the havoc I create each and every time I need to get something done. And what has been today's achievement? I have arranged for some bloke from Croydon to clean the carpets. Just as well I don't have lives in my hands! Oh yeah, actually, I do. (I'm a nurse.)

Serge , by the way, will not be coming to live at Tooting Towers. Don't know why. The girls are still on, and have signed a contract to say so. They brought round another potential flatmate, Hans, who I don't think will bite. He was eyeing up the Ikea kitchen units in a snotty fashion.

There is still so much to do before we go. I am in deep denial.

Still on the theme of darkness and night fears: I can't go to sleep without reading until the print swims before my eyes. That's my cue to conk out, in fact. The problem is, books themselves no longer function as interesting, except as sedatives. My current nightcap of choice is Dr Spock's Baby and Child Care. I'm dying to read his chapter on "How Rock and Roll affects the Adolescent", only I can't get past the first page.

I used to be a horse

I didn't really. But maybe a controversial headline will make more people read my blog. I am feeling lonely here in the blogiverse.
To anyone bored enough to be already following the tedious minutiae of my mundane life, apologies for not blogging for a few days. I have been scuttling around after Her Majesty,and have had sudden freakout about almost-imminent departure. Even now I should be doing practical things like ordering cardboard boxes and comparing health insurance packages and writing inventories. The problem is, when faced with all these practical tasks, I get all Can't Be Bothered. Like this:
How about taking some clothes to the charity shop
Can't be bothered
Cancelling the milkman
Can't be bothered
Getting off the sofa for 5 minutes
Can't be bothered
and so it goes on. It's like a disease. No really, IT'S LIKE A DISEASE. There are homeopathic remedies for anxiety, I wonder if there's one for idleness?

Still, I'm sure everything will sort itself out.

I am getting fed up of this 2am and 5am feeding routine, too. Little Em is fine with just guzzling and then going back to sleep, it's just I lie awake for ages thinking all kinds of things, like what would I do if Rob died suddenly or if there were a nuclear holocaust. The dark has always done funny things to my brain.

It's all Greek to me

Well layer me with mince and call me a moussaka! I love a victorious underdog. I'm not sure what was the best part of the match for me - the pitch invader trying his best to be a human goal for Portugal, or the Rev'd Gary Linker's "and so it shall be, as it was in the beginning, for now and for evermore unto the...blah blah(??)." Perhaps he'd been at the Retsina.

Good things about Greece:
Birthplace of democracy
Fancy statues e.g. Elgin marbles
Aegean sea, and beautiful islands therein
Funny arms-outstretched-wobbly-fingers gesture of Greek football supporters

Bad things about Greece:
Retsina
Nana Miskouri
Leery Brits being idiots on beautiful Aegean islands

Emma had her first round of injections today. She screamed and got extremely cross. I've been cuddling her non-stop since and kissing her soft little head. She is brunette, like Rob. (Kind people would say my hair is 'ash blonde': everyone else says it's 'mouse'.) There is no smell in the world like freshly-washed baby hair.

It's raining tennis players

That Roger Federer is a lean, mean tennis machine..and if he didn't have quite such a squashed face, he would be very good looking. He's Swiss. He is a Good Thing about Switzerland. Other Good Things are:

Mountains and mountain activity
St Bernards
Chocolate
Picturesque towns, lots of them
History of humanitarian concern

Bad Things now.

Bureaucracy
Squirreling away of Nazi Gold
Endless referenda
The fact that using individual washing machines in communal apartment blocks is frowned upon. The norm is this: there is a washing machine for everyone in the basement, and you are given a slot to use it by the concierge, e.g. 7-8pm Monday nights.
I wish I'd known about this before spending £224 on cloth nappies (and about the fact they leak alot and aren't as eco as all that apparently. I can't even ride my high horse in those grounds. The Chinese have the most eco nappy solution: cut a slit in the infant's pants and spend all day chasing it with a mop.)

Anyone know anything about car boot sales? We are thinking of selling at one, but don't know the form.

Someone told me this last weekend

Q: How do you make a Swiss person laugh?
A: Hold a gun to his head and say "Laugh"

Rental happiness

Hurray, hurray and thrice hurray. Our renters - I can call them that now, my head held high - have bitten and are coming on Tuesday to sign contracts and all that. Two very nice women, and a possible third, Serge (bloke, also nice)will be living in our house. Suddenly it's all happening and we're really going. It makes me feel a bit sad and strange sometimes because I really love Tooting Broadway (stop sniggering at the back.) I will miss my friends, the park, the Cheap Booze And Fags sign outside the shop round the corner. Curry in bountiful supply. Riots on a Friday night outside the Gordon Bennett - ok, less so. I understand this might seem churlish compared to fresh air, mountains and exceptional public transport.
There was a bit of stroppiness from the girl tonight, but I've totally forgiven her now she realises going to bed at 7.15pm is acceptable. Last night she slept til 4.40am which made me weak with joy. Wonder if we're in for a repeat performance?