Backwards birthdays

Don't you hate it when you wake up in the morning feeling like... wait, wait, stop, I've done the Ke$ha joke before. Start over!

It's been a full 7 years now since I dropped out of school (and, by extension, society), and yet in my half-asleep dazed state this morning I still managed to whimper “but mummy, I don't WANT to go to school, I'm tiiiired!”. I'm just never going to be free of it, am I? I'll be 83, dreaming about that damn school bus. Assuming science doesn't find a cure for dreams by then, that is.

The framework and background time fillers have, as predicted, been slightly lacking this week, so I'm very fortunate that I've been able to be amused by some of the apparently backwards happenings around me, starting with a lovely parcel I got on Tuesday! See, I always thought that you were supposed to RECEIVE presents on your birthday, instead I've been sent a lovely bonus one from Alex before I've even sent hers! My parents seem to have got the whole birthday concept a bit wrong too, considering that they got a nice watch for the wrong brother. He might well need it now he's a big senior at school, but isn't a watch meant to be a 21^st sort of present? Maybe they thought if there were watches all round I'd feel left out, so just decided to prioritise the littlest son. Ha, now he knows how it feels!

You know, I'm not entirely sure I've got the right message out of watching House. I'm sure the writers thought they were getting across a responsible message about the dangers of painkiller abuse, instead I seem to have taken the view that it took him 5 years to have any adverse effects from them, therefore a month or so of scoffing them like smarties isn't going to do any damage. Actually come to think of it, the “being mean to a girl for an extended period of time until she finally admits she wants you” moral of the Cuddy arc has worked out pretty well for me too.

Oh, and for all who laughed under your breath about my hatching Bulbasaur eggs last entry? Calm nature with perfect HP, Defence and Special Attack IVs, making it one of the best in the world on the day that its revealed grass drain moves have received a power boost for the next gen. HA.

Three's a crowd

It's been a big few weeks for me. My third set of social adventures. I can't really be relied on to get the specifics right, but it's pretty widely accepted that it had been three years since I had any sort of socialising with friends, and now I've had my third lot in a row! Also, I umm... bought three games at the weekend? OK no, I've stretched it too far.

I'm absolutely knackered now, but definitely worth it. It's so hard to express just how much things like today mean to me, for something that would normally be the absolute highlight of an entire year to just take up a single blog entry just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm just very grateful that I have friends able and prepared to help me escape into some semblance of what the real world might be like, even just for a day.

So for today's adventures, it had been decided long in advance that today's OT session would be an outing out to a (very) local tea room for some drinks and shortbread, I just decided in my infinite wisdom that it might be nice to bring my lovely friend along to share in and make the most of what would be a pretty historic outing for me. Of course, it wasn't until the last minute that it dawned on me that the bigger the scale I'd made it, the bigger the potential fall, but it all worked out more or less for the best. The snacks and company were all good, and when I inevitably get grumpy and tired over the next few weeks I can have another wonderful achievement and step forward waved in my general direction as an example of the good kind of progress I'm making.

Plus, the outing wasn't all there was to today! Seeing as its become something of a meme unto itself that I always watch Eurotrip with friends, it seemed fitting to break it out, even if there were minor concerns over whether we'd be able to find a suitable scene to pause on should parents, OT or brothers walk in. Mieke is still ludicrously hot, Michelle Trachtenberg still can't act, and Scotty still doesn't know. It really is surprisingly good considering the entire premise for the movie (and, admittedly, the only reason I bought it in the first place) is apparently “holy crap Dawn from Buffy's got hot!”.

And we had one of my home-grown leeks from the garden in our tea. I'm struggling somewhat to weave it nicely into the narrative following the previous revelation (and since for some reason my mind's lingering on the image) so I'll just chuck it out there. Leeks are tasty.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.

The night before the morning after

Apparently I'm 5 years old. I couldn't sleep last night because I was excited about santa my friend coming, so at 3:30am instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling I decided I was going to do something productive. Thus, I wrote my to do list:

TO DO LIST: ₢ 3.30am ^{note: (that's a clock. Its even pointing to the right time! I don't know where I'm going to be able to find something to represent a bee later on though.)}

1. Jet (will solve self)

2. Paypal! Tshirts.

3. NOT THE BEES

4. ARGH MY EYES

5. Seek filter for letter idea. See if crazy.

6. Comes after 5.

7. Solve World Hunger. (potential avenue of investigation: crops that grow horizontally. Plant up side of buildings to save space.)

Then I got hundreds of post it notes and wrote NOT THE BEES, ARGH MY EYES, AAAARGH on them, along with pictures of angry bees, and stuck them all over my flat for my mum to find in the morning. Then I went back to bed.

Popstars, photographers and fashion designers

There's a game that you can play in some corners of the internet, where you take this selection of scenes from The Wicker Man, and are challenged to come up with a unifying plot that could believably link all of the absurdity. I had a similar sort of moment tonight – is there any context I could provide to “Don't make me jump, I had a sharp thing up my nose!” that would make it make any sense at all? At least I amused my mum with that line out of context, she didn't appreciate that I was trying to see how the air could come out both ways when you used a football pump.

I've just had a typical regular week for me really; chatting away nicely to popstars, photographers and fashion designers. Its just a pity I haven't seen my model friend around this week or that could round off the set nicely!

I had another OT appointment Wednesday – a different one, but the goal was still the same, to evilly force me to actually leave the house and venture into the scary wild world out there. Things actually went pretty well, we've discovered a little tea room type place that I can manage to get to, so we ventured over there and checked the opening times. Next session is properly booked in that we're going to go there for some coffee and shortbread, so... quite a big step, I've been out the house but not really managed to actually DO anything while I'm out there since we moved, 5 years ago now (ish).

It might prove something extra to do next week, I've got some more lovely socialising! As per usual we've left the details a bit vague up to the last minute, but I should be able to have a lovely visitor staying for most of the week, who I'm sure I'll play lots of tennis with and go on 10 mile hikes and other reasonable, accomplishable activities. Its not at all like we've made plans to sit on our arses and watch I Know What You Did Last Summer or anything. Nope.

The Sky at Night

Things are awfully quiet around the house this week. The brother is off camping with dad before he has to go back to school next week, so I guess this is a trial run of how quiet the house will be without him once the holidays are over. But then, considering I sleep through most of the school day, it probably won't bother me too much, just have a lot of barking at someone arriving home around the time I get up and have my 'breakfast'.

I had an OT session today (yesterday actually, its past midnight), and I think it went pretty well. Making it out is always held up as wonderful progress, and I did that fine – we had a very pleasant outing to the local village shop. I counted 5 squished hedgehogs along the road there though, le sigh, and its not exactly a long stretch of road – it couldn't be if I managed to make it out along it, could it? I was determined that since it was my outing, I would be the gentleman and I'd pay for the purchases: a Milky Way for the lady, and some Skittles for myself. Unfortunately things cost a lot more than they used to in the good old days, and somehow that managed to come to more than the 70p I had in change, so I had to borrow a pound coin instead of breaking a £10 note. It just couldn't be one of my adventures if something didn't go wrong, I'm just glad it was that instead of any of the more serious pitfalls my mind is convinced lie out there in the big scary world.

There are a lot of things that I've never had the chance to do in my life – go out drinking, go clubbing, go to a concert, but last night I finally managed to cross one fairly minor one off the list – saw a shooting star. It could have turned into a legendary “seemed liked a good idea at the time” adventure for me to venture off into the night in search of space rocks, but after a long wait and a strained neck looking up at the 10% of the sky that wasn't clouded over, I finally got a jolt when something bright streaked into my field of vision for a millisecond and faded away into the night sky. I wasn't counting on it giving me such a fright, but still, its something I've always wanted to see that, despite my interests in space and the cosmos all my life, I'd never managed to. What shall be crossed off the list next?

Its generally been a good week for me from a social aspect, from multiple angles! I've been chatty enough with my mum's friend while she's been here, and apparently I'm a perfectly charming young man – quiet down with that snickering at the back! Thanks to some gentle prodding (and padding at my ego) I've been brave enough to send some emails to some people who sound lovely and interesting, so hopefully with some gentle persuasion and bribery I'll finally be able to push my (public) followers into double figures, mwaha! Plus you know, all the regular benefits that friendship brings. And stuff.

I was going to say its just a pity that animals can't sign up as followers, in a flawless segue into talking about my other new friend, but I just remembered that there are actually quite a few on Twitter, most of whom have more followers than me. Quite sobering actually, when you think about it. Anyway, I've been spending more time with the adorable little neighbours kitten that everyone's telling me to stop encouraging, but he's far too adorable to stop! I went outside and sat on the stone bench at the bottom of the garden, and an adorable little bundle of black and white fluff bolted from out the trees and came to sit beside me, curl up and give me lots of cuddles and purring. I can't turn that down!

I'll be there for you

I'm on my own with my thoughts today – the rest of the family are off to a wedding, leaving me with an empty house to throw one of my legendary wild parties in. It might have been interesting to go, but I figured that seeing as it was a family wedding, the bridesmaids would be too much of a minefield. Plus, to make myself look presentable enough to be seen in public I'd have had to do something with my ever expanding beard, and that would have disturbed the family of sparrows currently nesting in it.

Do you ever think that Lily Allen comes home from a really nice date where nothing went wrong and thinks, damn, now I've got nothing to write a complaining song about? That's about how I feel just now. Yesterday I had a lovely friend over, for the first time in 3 years, and it was great. Where's the comedy to be gleaned from that?! We watched a film, wandered around the garden and played some Wii games, and it was great to just have some very nice company. I even cooked the tea for us all (even if it was only pasta and chicken), how domesticated am I? Such a grown-up, sane, normal human being thing to do, even if we did arrange beforehand to have a dedicated moment put aside for trading some Pokémon.

I feel a bit like the writers of the IT Crowd now – I've run out of amusing ideas. Oh snap, I went there! Etc. After my last epic monstrosipost took a lot out of me, I'm not really sure how to go on. Whining about my going out fears was supposed to be the nuclear option, and I wasted it the second I saw a particularly frightening looking gerbil. Metaphorically speaking. Maybe this is a post-apocalyptic blog now, to stretch that analogy well beyond any reasonable sort of breaking point?

Dreams, dreams, lala something littlest things...

More pretty followers! Welcome, my new friends, and thank you for taking an interest/increasing the pressure for me to write witty and insightful things! I didn't even have to resort to bribery either – I was pretty close to putting up some sort of coupons to try and force some new people to join. Present this exclusive code on MSN to prove that you've been reading to get 20% off your next bar of chocolate! Or something along those lines. Maybe that would help with the oh so mysterious anonymous people? If you unveil yourself I'll... give you some chocolate? It's an idea for the future anyway, as of just now my curiosity as to their ninja identities hasn't quite driven me to breaking point.

I've always known it doesn't take me long to run through my full range of anecdotes and run out of ways to make myself sound interesting, but I suppose its nice to put a number on it – 10 entries before the well runs dry. Maybe my brain is instead helpfully using up all my creativity for my sleep, finding new and interesting unrelated scenarios to place plane crashes into. I'm not afraid of heights or flying, I don't have any sort of issue when I'm awake with planes, but my subconscious seems determined to give me plenty of practice in dealing with highly improbably situations in which one has crashed nearby and I need to respond to it. We get planes flying over the house quite regularly though – maybe in my half-asleep status I'm just hearing one, and so my brain decides to accompany the noise that's leaked through to my dream with a full-blown situation?

Oh dear, entry 11 and there's so little going on in my waking life that I've had to resort to plumbing the depths of my dreams. At least I got off fairly lightly, I was dreading the potential consequences after I realised a little too late that it might not have been the smartest idea to start Resident Evil 4 before bed last night.

5 days til socialising! I'm a bit rusty when it comes to dealing with actual, live humans, so help me out here – they're generally between 9 and 15 feet tall, subside on nuts and small woodland creatures and are confused and frightened by open spaces, yes? I'd better select express delivery on that XXL sized cage to make sure it arrives on time.

Gardening (with Miley)

Well, on the list of 'things I didn't want to do today', phoning Amazon customer services to deal with the change in my bank card was one of them. So was getting poked in the eye, leaving the house and buying a Miley Cyrus CD (its a really long list), but fortunately for me the only one that I have to do is the Amazon one. I suppose the day is still young though, there's plenty of time for the other ones to sneak up on me.

Talking of Miley Cyrus, in a flawless segue, yesterday my little brother was hovering around in my room playing on the Wii, so I decided to play a very mature little joke on him. I put one of her songs on on Youtube and said wow, this is great isn't it, do you like this? The plan was that when he said yes I could jump out and say HA YOU LOVE HANNAH MONTANA... but unfortunately he said that he didn't like it and asked me to put it off, and got back to his motion-controlled table tennis. Abject failure, and as some sort of karmic reward I had a horrible, screeching version of “Can't be Tamed” stuck in my head for the rest of the day. I suppose I deserved that.

It's been 3 years since I saw any friends, so he's pretty much the only social company I have. I have a theory that we're actually pulling each other closer to the others mental ages, so he's 12, I'm 23, and we're probably mentally meeting roughly in the middle at about 15 just now. I'm very excited though about the prospect of seeing a lovely friend soon, I just have to try and remember what it is that regular people do together! Even the last time I saw anyone, it was a romantic visit, so I have doubts over whether I can entertain a visitor when the schedule doesn't include making out. I'll let you, dear readers, be the judge over whether that's a good thing or not.

Anyway, back to love of the brotherly variety, and yesterday we ended up with the house to ourselves. So naturally, the thing we got up to was... well, actually it was pretty much what you might expect, we pretended to be sumo wrestlers with my mum's gym ball and ran and bounced off each other at high speed. But that's not the point, the point was that after we'd done that and rolled around laughing on the floor for a bit, we did something actually mature and went out and did some gardening! In fairness it might have just been an excuse for him to play with the hose, but still it ended up a nice different sort of afternoon planting lots of leeks and tasting strawberries. It's little unexpected detours like that that really help me to smile about things again, even if I did spend all last night feeling ludicrously ill afterwards. Yet another message from the universe I think, help me out with some sort of metaphor about eating the home-grown strawberries of life?