This week at work, I’ve broken the chair I’ve been using since October. Completely, categorically broken it. The central piston (for raising/lowering the seat) has cracked through the plastic baseplate, and now hits the floor. This has resulted in a chair that is politely known as “broken”. Or in my terminology, it’s “totally fucked”.

Thankfully the directors are OK about it – it’s wear and tear (and me being a weighty bastard) rather than that I’ve wilfully abused/broken the chair.

But because I know that at least some of the blame is due to being rather bulkier than most people, I had a look at the specs for some new office chairs as a replacement. And I know Argos isn’t exactly the centre of the office-furniture world, but it’s a useful reference point.

So looking through the chairs they’ve got listed, and all of them seem to have a ‘recommended max weight’ of 110kg – 17ish stone. You can see what I mean by looking at this one. And don’t just think it’s the cheap-ass ones – even this one for £150 has the same limitaton.

I know I’m not an average size – I’d need to lose four stone just to get down to that ‘max recommended weight’ – but equally I’m not massively obese. Fairly solid, I think it’s fair to say, but not supersized or owt. So why is it that chairs just aren’t available (in Argos, I know, I know) that are designed to support – or at least not fuck up and break – for someone my size?

Following on from that hornet sting over the weekend – from which thankfully I haven’t had any unpleasant side-effects, results, or pain – I can honestly say the following from experience.

• Hornet stings hurt like fuck. It’s not agony, nor broken-bone type pain, but it’s certainly bloody unpleasant.
• Anti-histamines don’t do a great deal are bloody marvellous. (This got edited, because I didn’t think they’d done much, but on thinking more about it, the anti-histamine cream and tablet probably contributed a lot to it not being unpleasant for longer. Also, the tablets have helped with reducing the itching, a couple of days later)
• Once everything else is done, they itch like a total bastard.

I’m in the “itching” stage at the moment. Don’t know whether it signifies anything else, but Jesus God, it’s irritating.

When it rains heavily (particularly when it does so at night) having the animals becomes distinctly harder work than any other time. This weekend has been a perfect demonstration of that – we had a proper thunderstorm on Saturday night / Sunday morning, and heavy rain last night/this morning.

Hound has decided that heavy rain equals Thunder, and skitters round the room to lay next to my side of the bed. I don’t mind this too much – she’s been really good this weekend on this score, without getting stressy and stupid, let alone trying to burrow through the wall as she has done on previous occasions. But she still makes enough noise to wake me up, which isn’t great. Saturday night we ended up moving into the living room again (for some reason one of Hound’s “safe places”) because it was proper thunder etc., and it’s easier to have her in there than down the side of the bed.

Sunday night we had heavy rain, so Hound came round to my side of the bed again. This time though it was Psycho Cat that was the pain in the arse – having got utterly soaked, he decided that the best way to warm up and dry off was to snug into the back of my knees, and then turn round repeatedly so that everything dried off evenly. It has to be said that there is little worse than being woken up by the sensation of cold wet cat fur in the back of your nice warm legs.

The little shit even then went back out again once he dried off and warmed up, and was whining again by 7am that he was cold and wet and why wouldn’t anyone do anything. I seriously wonder sometimes whether it wouldn’t be easier to just drown the little fucker and be done with it.

So all told

Until this weekend, I’d never even seen a hornet.

This weekend though, we’ve had five of the buzzy bastards in the house, including one which stung me. Not, it has to be said, the most positive introduction to the species.

We don’t know where they’ve been coming from – no signs of a nest anywhere around etc., but they’re definitely making their presence felt.

The sting was kind-of my own fault – Herself told me there was one in the bathroom, and I went in to splat the sodding thing. Being aware that it was a flying buzzing thing, I was looking in the air for it, not on the floor – and so I stood near it, which was apparently enough provocation to the fucker.

I’ve never been stung before either, so had no idea what to expect – or even whether I was allergic to the stings or not. (Fortunately, it looks like I’m not) Liberal dollops of antihistamine cream and some ibuprofen later, all’s been OK today. But I can tell you for sure that the sting hurts like a motherfucker.

Hopefully that’ll be my last dealing with hornets. But if they are making a home somewhere close by, it probably won’t be. I’ll be damn sure to be wearing shoes next time though.

Currently, our largest local(ish) Sainsbury’s store is undergoing a major refurbishment – a project which looks like it’s going to roughly double the size of the store.

Not that you’d know it from the Sainsbury’s  information page about the Longwater store.

You’d think that information like “we’re refitting this store” would be useful – and positively easy to add to a webpage, wouldn’t you? But no, no mention of it.

As it is, the improvements mean that the main carpark has been reduced to (at most) half its previous size, along with being completely replanned. But that’s OK, because there’s a big simple overflow carpark over the other side of the access road.

Except – um – there’s not. Because in a fit of total planning genius, they’ve also ripped that up to re-plan it and generally fuck about with it.

So of that 694 spaces listed on the information page ( 647 normal spaces, 22 disabled and 22 ‘parent-and-child’) there’s about 250 left. Of course, all the disabled and ‘parent-and-child’ ones are kept available, it’s just the other ones that’ve been epically reduced.

So fuck you, Sainsburys.

I love the story on the BBC this week about a council who’ve used the word “shit”  in their adverts about dog-fouling. (even though it’s starred out to “S**T”) Supposedly a number of people have complained about the word “S**T” appearing in print. Which strikes me as pretty Mary Whitehouse at the best of times.

Way back when I was working with the council in Oldham, this was something that we discussed heavily. One of my projects there was working on a lexicon of expressions that people actually used, and then translating them into council-ese. For example “roadworks” becomes “Highways maintenance”, “bins” becomes “refuse collection” and the like. I always said – and could prove with the search logs (pardon the pun) – that “dog shit” was the most common search-term when people were looking for information about dog-fouling, reporting issues with dog-shit etc. But the powers-that-be in the council at the time were very sure – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that having “shit” in the lexicon was A Bad Thing, and would lead to Bad Press – another Very Bad Thing.  Considering that most people at the time used the word “Shit” as pretty much synonymous with that council in general anyway, I always figured they were on a hiding to nothing on that one.

Personally I could never figure out why people thought – and obviously still do think – that councils can’t use words like shit, when they’re the ones that most (if not all) of their constituents/inhabitants use.

*sigh* People are strange.