» Road Trip

Old-bloke's weekend
Ahh... when I were I lad, we'd go down to the shore with stick with garden string tied to one end, dangling a mangled worm we picked out of the compost heap. Nowadays it's a great palaver with fancy rods with high tensile polymer fibres, big ice-boxes and gas guzzling SUVs to get us up the treacherous dirt road to the canal. Still, it's a good way to spend the afternoon with the chaps and some beer.

One weekend in early April (pike breeding season) a few years back, it was expected to be unusually good weather so we thought we'd make a bit of a thing of it and took our camping gear along as well so we could spend a good day and a half by the bank. The once-in-a-blue-moon tents came out, along with the thermal sleeping bags, firestarters, etc, and we headed off. The journey there was fine, and a good weekend was had by all, up until the Sunday afternoon when it unexpectedly started pissing down. I had caught a pretty good haul over the weekend and I was having a bit of trouble getting all of them in to my not-inconsiderably sized ice-box. In the inevitable scrappy packing that comes with rain, I just chucked everything hastily in the boot and headed off home.

About half-way home, I stopped at a motorway services for a meal and a coffee, and since the sun had come back out I thought I would let myself soak up a bit more cancer. When I got back to the car, I could actually smell it from a good few feet away and I knew something had gone wrong. I opened up the boot and a smell that would knock Satan's personal arse-licker unconscious billowed out at me. I pulled my gear away from the box and saw a strange dark reddish, lumpy soup layering the area around the box. After closer inspection, in between bouts of sever gagging, it turned out to be fish eggs from the masses of females that I had caught, which had evidently spilled their wombs due to the crush, and I hadn't closed the lid quite firmly enough.

Needless to say, the journey home was not one of the most pleasant roe drips I have experienced.
(Fri 15th Jul 2011, 3:43, More)

» Dodgy work ethics

Inspired decision
Me mates and I enjoy a bit of steampunk engineering, and most of the time we use one of our garages. This is fine since we usually tinker about making wee clockwork rodents. Occasionally we'll go for something a bit more adventurous such as doing contract work doing up cars and motorbikes with superfluous pipes, lenses, and a bit of a spraypaint job. It's bloody good fun, and we're getting pretty adept at "salvaging" scrap piping from construction sites at night.

Now for a quick aside; I used to work in the Lifescan packaging plant up in Inverness, and there was this one bloke who told me a story about a time of his at a music festival years earlier. He was on MASSIVE DRUGS when he starts hearing screams coming from one end of the campsite. The screams keep getting closer so he pops his head out to see what's happening, and to his horror there's a man on a fucking five foot tall, hydraulic spider-leg mech. My workmate looks up at the goggle-wearing pilot of this magnificent beast and promptly shits himself. At this, the pilot bends over and leers right in me mate's face, then buggers off again.

So, back to the garage; remembering this story, I wanted to try and make something similar myself. A quick look at our supplies told us that it'd be nigh impossible to pull off an eight, or even a six legged machine, so we drafted a plan for what basically looked like a metal plated Indian elephant. The way we managed to do it was by having the pilot in the front with the huge engine behind him. This way we only had to power the back legs. The pilot would not only have to manipulate the engine-powered legs but would also need to manually operate the unpowered front legs in time so as to not fall over.

Over about two years we managed to get it to a state where we reckoned we could fire it up for a quick test-run. The best place for this in Inverness was Bught Park, but we hadn't counted on the circus being around.

Since we were quite a shy bunch - not too surprising for a bunch of fringe geeks - we decided to do our test at night. Since the park is fairly big we were pretty confident that we wouldn't wake anyone, but like I said, we hadn't counted on the circus. So when we started the thing up it made a hell-shattering racket that woke up the circus workers, who being as they are, got pissed off immediately. They started throwing things at us, but I, the pilot, realised that I couldn't shut down my damn machine. The circusians eventually got so bonkers - they couldn't hear our protestations over the noise - that they used their fucking cannons to fire things at us. One by one, my friends ran away or were knocked out, but I was stuck. Eventually the nuts had run out of inanimate objects to fire and started shooting their goddamn midgets. One hit the midsection of the mech, and another hit just behind the front legs. My beautiful, awful elephant was fucked and fell over.

It was at this point that I realised the boiler in the engine might over-heat due to the vent being bent and blocking off escaping steam. It might over-heat to the extent that it would explode. It was also at this point that I noticed that the midgets (or dwarfs) we holding fucking spears even as they flew at me. One of the little shits was even dressed as a cunting bear, and I now knew I either had to dodge ewok or fix.

_{Please kill me}
(Thu 14th Jul 2011, 6:39, More)

» Surprise!

Simple and no fuss
One that had some great success back when I lived with my parents was to sit outside the bathroom when the landing light was off, and just wait for my father to have his piss then go to bed.

After leaving the bathroom, he would turn off the bathroom light then out of the silent darkness would come a quiet "boo".

Surprisingly effective.
(Fri 5th Apr 2013, 15:40, More)

» Dodgy work ethics

As a member of a martial arts club
I share the upkeep of our gym with another bloke since we both live nearby, and the club is a bit light in the pocket. After a Christmas party some of the guys got into the club with the other bloke's keys and started pissing around - quite sloshed you see.

They thought it would be a great idea to see how many people could hang off one of our punchbags at once, and funnily enough it was about half a dozen before the fucking things got ripped off the ceiling.

I had to repair this due to a H&S check the next week, but because of our lack of cash I had to improvise. Basically, I found a few planks next in a nearby fly-tipping spot, tied the punchbag's rope around them and had them rest on the beams in the ceiling. I then covered the hole with some newspaper and slapped some light blue paint on, and that was my dojo worker fix.
(Tue 12th Jul 2011, 15:52, More)

» Things you can't unsee...

To be clear, I love my job.
I work in elderly care. Lots of lovely people, and many unfortunate souls who suffer from dementia, all of whom I try to give the best care I can in the final times of their lives.

Now, some of these lovely elderly folk find themselves in a position where they believe they are being confronted with antagonistic strangers, or simply wonder what that warm, soft goo in their pants is. There are unofficial terms in the industry for people with recognisable responses to these situations, some of which I may or may not have seen myself.

Diggers.
Painters.
Eaters.
(Related to the above) Spitters.

We love your elderly relatives, but it can be difficult sometimes.
(Tue 17th Feb 2015, 1:23, More)