Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Namaste & Jule [#12]


August is here then and now I'm living in Stokes Valley, - house-sitting. It's rather tasty, plenty of space, great views and lots of time to do my own thing. My only responsibilities apart from protecting the place from villains is to care for the resident cats, Alice and Roger.




Alice made friends pretty quickly, Roger on the other hand would suddenly freeze when I came in the room and stare at me, rigid, fork halfway to his mouth.(OK he doesn't actually eat with a knife and fork - he's a cat, but you know what I mean). He was a bit wierd at first, silently watching me with unblinking eyes like the penguin off Wallace and Grommit's 'The Wrong Trousers'. Anyway, the two scorchmarks in the back of my head from his Medussa glare are healing and after checking my references he's come to the conclusion that I'm actually not hostile. We've crossed the Rubicon and I'm now his friend and each night he jumps up onto my lap and makes himself comfortable. Phew, what a relief. I realise my blog should really be renamed 'cats and carpentry' but I don't have a job and so until then...
Some blokes have women who are attracted to them, I have cats! As long as you keep reading it, I'll keep writing this rubbish! That's Capitalism.

As I said I'm staying in Stokes Valley but I've popped down to Cathie's last week to finish the shed I was building for her out of pallets. I've also made a tremp de l'oeil of a wee panel door to brighten up her neighbours garage wall which is adjacent to her garden and looks like Hitlers bunker.

Curiouser and curiouser.
I'm not going to mention work prospects again until something definite happens, it's a waste of time sharing my near misses with the world! Suffice to say it's slow progress. (eg Heard back from one job I'd applied for - a 1 day a week part-time job at a publisher. They'd had 30 applications!). I seem to have spent half my adult life looking for work.

A funny thing happened to me the other day. Val had told me about a talk at her tramping club where a bloke was going to talk about cycling up in the Himalayas and she wondered if I'd be interested. Definitely I said (after having been there myself in 2001). Well the guy started his talk and was saying that there's some wonderful information available on the internet then the next slide popped up and it was a screen capture of my brother's website with a photo of him, me, Damien and Niall sat infront of a sign at 18,380 feet!

He'd used my brother's site as an invaluable travel guide for his trip. He was amazed and delighted to meet me afterwards too. Very funny.(Hence the reason for this post's title - 'Namaste' is Hindi for hello and 'Jule' is Ladakhi for hello. We called out to people namaste as we cycled along until we reached the Buddhist regions then changed to 'jule').

posted by col @ 9:05 pm

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