Road Trip!

So, it's only three weeks and one day until the Boy Wonder and I skip the country to travel the US and enjoy all the southern hospitality our cholestorol levels can handle. We began our planning process by booking flights to NY which was fine, and we thought we could fly down to New Orleans, buy a car and carry on our trip up the Mississippi towards Chicago. Then we decided that it might be more fun to buy a car in NY and drive down to New Orleans. Then we realised that it was ridiculously hard to buy a car in the US without an address to register it to and that insurance is similarly hard to come-by but also extortionately expensive, because even though we can both prove that we have clean UK driving records, US insurance would be offered to us on the basis that we have no driving history. So, we are now in the process of working out how much it will cost us to ship our car, the Popemobile, to the US, driving it around amongst monsters three times its size, and then shipping it back, which seems to be a pretty convulted way of getting a bargain, but nonetheless we are undeterred and will continue to try to beg and plead with various institutions in the hope that they will succumb to our charms and offer us insurance which won't eat up our entire budget! So, as the designated home worker, the Boy Wonder has been valiantly ringing the US for the last week in an attempt to make some sense of the needlessly confusing process which seems designed to prevent us from doing what on the face of it seems simple. At least we won't be homesick for red tape...

Everybody loves toast

One of the topics that elicits most conversation in our house is the Boy Wonder's toast stand. I think it was around the time that he was made redundant that the Boy Wonder started coming up with ideas for new businesses he could start, which included such well-formed ideas as 'Let's have a shop full of cool stuff' and 'We should open a record shop where we only sell funky records' (which is pretty much the same as the 'cool stuff' idea, only a little more targetted). However, the idea that will not die is the toast stand. The concept is pretty simple - a toast stand at the station where you can buy hot, buttered toast to eat either while you wait for your train, or indeed on the train if your timing's right. The major flaw in the plan, as I see it, is that start-up would require the business owner to get up and be at the station by around 6 every morning for the beginning of rush hour and the commuter trains. There is nothing about the Boy Wonder, the last 10 years I have spend with him or his stated plans for the future which makes me think that he is capable of such early morning endeavour, and if by some miracle of circadian rythms he actually managed to get himself there in time, the resultant personality failure which occurs when he is low on caffeine is completely inappropriate for customer-facing purposes. Having said that, we have discussed the potential for this venture with several people (the very nature of our conversations being cyclical at best, plus the Boy Wonder feels much maligned at my unerring disbelief in his capacity for early rising)and to date we have not had a single detractor. I put this down largely to great marketing - the slogan 'Everybody Loves Toast' seems to be almost universally accepted as both a snappy advertising message and a universal truth - and the enthusiasm that the Boy Wonder conveys when holding forth on this topic. Unfortunately, said enthusiasm is not limited to the setting-up of such an endeavour (in fact, it pretty much skirts ronud the edge of anything useful like that) and instead is allowed to roam freely amongst all toast related subjects, resulting in plans for the invention (requiring a not-inconsiderable R&D budget) of a bread pen which could be used to write marketing messages on toast and several 'specialist' breads and spreads which would require a fleet of bakers and specialist spread manufacturers to be on hand at all times to provide exotic alternatives to white sliced and jam. I have been accused, mostly by the Boy Wonder, of being insuficiently excited by this project, which is probably true but is also probably down to the fact that it's not quite a pipe dream and therefore because it's vaguely within reach, I feel as though discussing the best design for the patent pending Boy Wonder Toast corners (for holding the toast so that it doesn't get your fingers greasy but also doesn't re-absorb its own sweat and go soggy) is probably best done once you actually have a business to use them. Also, I suspect it's because it's a pretty good idea which would have relatively low start-up and running costs and could actually become a profitable franchise, but it's neither the kind of thing we're cut out for nor the kind of thing we would actually want to do, so it's been relegated to the level of amusing after dinner conversation where I'm sure it will stay.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something awkward this way comes...

I go to the doctor's fairly regularly - not that I am at death's door, but I am female which comes with a lot of medical stuff as standard - and I have occasionally come across the strange social scenario in which you meet someone you know whilst at the doctors. I've never really got a handle on what you can say - even the classic 'How are you?' seems inappropriate when you're speaking to someone who's either visiting a doctor or accompanying someone to the doctor. A normally innocuous question is sudddenly offensively intrusive when asked at the doctor's, and once you've not asked how someone is, there aren't really any other questions which can be safely asked in the knowledge that the person might be about to receive devastating news, or even just have to wee in a pot or endure some stranger rummaging around in their pants as 'routine'. Then there's a whole range of follow up awkwardness, where you don't want to mention to anyone else that you've seen the person at the doc's but at the same time feel like you're being slightly deceptive especially if you don't know what they were in for in the first place. In short, I would prefer it if everyone agreed that we are all strangers at the surgery - I don't want to be in the waiting room with an unpleasantly warm tube of piss trying to hold it in such a way that a casual acquaintance can't work out what's in it; I don't want to put myself through these paroxysms of social etiquette only to have my toolish neighbour come barrelling up to me and start trying to guess what I'm there for (no, really - he did this once); and I don't want to end up staring into the middle distance (because they don't seem to have magazines any more, presumably due to the risk of cross-infection) trying not to look at someone I vaguely know because I don't want to be intrusive only to then wonder whether they think I'm rude for not asking how they are.

A game which shouldn't be described

After a few drinks with the Gift the other night, we somehow got onto the topic of weird sounding children's programmes which inevitably declined into the traditional game of coming up with porn alternatives for film titles, only slightly altered to fit around first animal-based and then general children's film and TV (which is the main reason the game is not christened with any easy-to-misinterpret snappy name and bears full description at all times lest we find ourselves misunderstood). The normal pitfalls were all present - the double dip of distress at your sudden inability to think of a single film followed up quickly by a list of films which already sound dirty, or are a single word thus requiring a lot more explanation than the inherent humour allows - alongside new ones borne of the fact that I barely like films and can't remember the real titles of them anyway. All the more surprising then that I was the surprise winner (well - I christened myself, but only because soliciting nominations from my husband and the Gift seemed tacky, pointless and would inevitably open up the possibility of them not picking me) with my reworking of the popular children's classic about a boy and his bear to create the monster that is 'Genital Ben'.