An impatient patient am I

I've been on sick leave for most of the week now and I finally have to admit I make a bad patient! I'm walking wounded, which means a tendency to be bored, which I've managed to keep at bay until today. So, I thought I'd do a bit of minor housekeeping of the personal kind, like perhaps shave three days worth of stubble.

My efforts at anything more substantial have been thwarted by a Fate which wants me to rest and get well.

Take yesterday, for example. I decide that all the visitors who are finding their way to the Blog because I mentioned a B&Q gazebo a few times, and who are looking for instructions on how to put that feckin' thing up, could probably benefit from my experience. So I lug the boxed gazebo out the back and start photographing its component parts. So far so good except for the rain-clouds which, before too long, turn to rain. So I box the whole thing up again and save my draft instructions in Blogger and then realise I'm actually in another cold sweat from the exertion and this bug is NOT going to let me ignore it. Cue stomach discomfort and chills for the rest of the afternoon. I'll finish my materpiece another time.

Today, I thought I'd try something less physically demanding, so I started looking at filling in a tax form. The main receipt I was looking for is no-where to be found, so I sent a text to Herself, who was at work, asking where it might be.

"In the boot of my car," is the response.

"Ah," I send back, and shelve that plan, as the boot of the car is with the rest of the car -- three kilometres away.

So I think scanning some photographs my father took with his disposable camera on his birthday a few weeks back might make for a relaxing, non-exerting, hour or so. But after three scans I find the pics are just too rough and grainy for my scanner to deal with properly. Another minor project on the back burner then.

No chills and no major stomach problems today, but this resting lark is becoming old. The chins are clear of stubble anyway. I suppose I'll just go back to watching television.

At least I have my health

Following on from cheesy dreams and toothache, I found myself on Monday suffering with stomach ache. And when a stomach the size of mine aches, that's a BIG ache!

There's a gastro- bug going around at the moment and I seem to have got a version. It seemed in my case to only exhibit cramps rather than resolving into anything messier. All the same, I was in bed shivering like a jelly by 9.30 and though I went to work yesterday feeling only a little sore, I decided to take today off to chase off the very last of the bug.

Update on the seagulls: Three of us were looking out the window at the puzzling seagulls on Monday when a small brown blob of fluff on webbed feet scuttled across the roof tiles! The pair evidently have at least one chick, possibly two. Yesterday the parents spent quite a long time away but came back in the late afternoon. I suppose they were out shopping.

Cheese before bedtime

"Excuse me!" I said over the garden wall. "Excuse me!"

The waiter didn't reappear. I was furious.

In the background, the cats jumped around a pair of chattering magpies that fluttered about in pibald circles on the lawn. I left them to dance and stepped back in through the back door into the crowded kitchen.

"Babe," I said. "That fellow is ripping you off!"

The waiter had peered over the garden wall in his white shirt and black waistcoat and told Herself that there had been too much salt used with the meal. It would cost another €1 on top of the bill.

He had already charged €0.90c for the same reason on our previous bill. If it happened again, I was going to challenge it. And it had.

"Where's the bill?" I asked. Herself handed me a booklet that fell in fan-folds onto the floor as I fumbled with it.

"Look!" I said. "They charge so much already that they can give you a whole waiter's book as a bill!"

I flicked through the white pages and came to a multi-coloured one which listed the menu and the accompanying prices. The menu clearly stated that the prices already included the cost of salt.

"I knew it!"

I pulled a salt cellar from the counter and tried to explain.

"This is our salt cellar," I said. "How are they supposed to know how much salt we've used anyhow? Do they weigh it beforehand? Do they?"

The crowd milled about and I lost sight of Herself. She was somewhere to the front of the house, speaking with someone at the open front door.

I went out the back door and looked fruitlessly over the wall for the waiter. My father's neighbour, Billy D, gazed out over his shoulder through next door's kitchen window at the melee of cats and magpies.

I awoke to Herself sitting on the side of the bed.

"I'm glad we turned that mattress yesterday," she said. "I didn't move the whole night."

I groaned, thinking about the cheese sandwiches I had had before bed. Always a good idea at the time, but always the cause of the strangest dreams. I told Herself about the salt.

"I didn't move either," I said. "I was weighed down by a block of cheese."

None can compare with the cliffs of.... Tallaght?

Tallaght Town Centre and two large gulls appear to have made a home recently on top of one of the pitched rooftops. I can see one of them from my office window, on the north face of the clock tower of County Hall, one sitting in the niche of a louvred ventilator. When its mate appears, the two greet each other with many "Shree! Shree! Shree!" calls that remind one of being at the seaside.

Someone speculates that perhaps the sitter is one of this year's young, still being fed by a dutiful parent.

I don't know enough about them to judge, but it looks to me like they're considering nesting on the rooftop. It is sheltered from the prevailing wind. It overlooks a courtyard that isn't accessible to the public. There are several fast-food restaurants in the area from which an enterprising gull might, conceivably, glean enough discarded food to raise a chick.

The nesting theory gained a little ground yesterday when the sitting gull maintained its position even during the worst of a number of thunderstorms that swept the area.

We are quite a way from the sea, though, and I wonder if nesting is a viable option. I shall bring my binoculars tomorrow. If nothing else, it should worry my colleagues in the opposite side of the building as I peer out the window and focus in one something unseen over their heads.

[Pic by User:Dschwen at Wikipedia Commons. Republished under terms of GNU Free Documentation Licence]