Paul - the King of Tutt!

It's official, Paul is the King of Tutt!  He collects, hoards and squirrels stuff away in the shed, garage and loft, and is always on the lookout for more stuff to add to his collection!  He had thrown out some old rubbish recently, but when out on a walk recently he just couldn't resist picking up a old ceramic conductor from a field and bringing it home.
Ok, so imagine the conversation:
Paul: "Look what I found while I was out walking"
Bev looks at it carefully, then says: "It might look better once it's cleaned up"
Paul: "It's been cleaned it up - doesn't it make a nice ornament?"
Bev: "Err, actually, no - it looks like something you dug up out the ground!"
Paul wanders off looking pleased with himself while Bev laments that this is a "man-thing", despite the fact that the study is full of her rubbish!

So, we're not sure where he has hidden it, but the last we heard he was trying to sell it on eBay, and if he can't find anyone as nutty as himself to buy it, his brother wants to swap it for an old motorbike seat!  Eek, more crap!  We bears and Tony need room for our clothes and toys, and we don't want to get squashed under a pile of old tutt!  So, Paul and Bev, get the tutt under control, and leave some space for us bears!

No Heating!

No sooner had Paul gone for his angiogram than the heating stopped working!  Oh no! It was freezing outside, and with the temperature inside the house plummeting, we tried to persuade Bev to phone the hospital and ask them to wheel Paul to a phone so that he could tell her how to restart it, but to no avail.  So, us bears, Tony and Kitty had to shiver while Bev piled on her thermals and carried on working from home.
Paul came home at 7pm, looked at the boiler, fiddled with it using his good hand and managed to get it working (phew) !
It's interesting watching TV footage of the poor people in the Highlands who still have no electricity but we don't actually want to be sharing the experience!
To anyone in the Highlands who reads my mad rantings, we hope you get your electricity back again soon.  We do know what you are suffering - we're not letting our resident plumber out of the house again in case something goes wrong!

Paul and his angiogram

Well, Paul had his angiogram yesterday and everything seems fine apart from some minor furring-up of one of his heart arteries.  So, he doesn't need any further treatment at the moment, though he needs to stay on his tablets.  The low fat diet will help, as will taking more exercise, but at least it was nothing too serious and the procedure wasn't painful.  He is off work for a week and can't lift anything heavier than a pint with his right hand for 5 days!
And when he told us that, we all fell about laughing!  Why, you ask?  Because he had read the literature from the hospital and it said they were going to go through the groin.  Trying to be helpful, he shaved down there, gonads and all, in preparation for the procedure only to be told they were going in through the wrist!  So he now has a tender wrist and nether-regions that look like a plucked turkey!
Get well soon, Paul and thank you for cheering us up with the funny story about the shaved gonads.  Just remember that this is the wrong time of year to have an appendage that looks like a plucked turkey so don't go exposing yourself to anyone!

Oh no, no cakes or cheese!

Poor Paul is not a well man - he has been getting short of breath recently and has now been diagnosed with angina.  To put you in the picture, Paul is a man with a cake cupboard, a man who loves chocolate, cakes and ice cream, and who describes his desserts as his "main course"!   Understandably, he was upset when he was told that he could no longer eat cakes, cheese, chocolate or ice cream, but he is being very positive about things and  is sticking to his low-fat diet.  Actually, both humans are now on a low-fat diet - Paul to reduce his cholesterol and Bev to reduce her big bum.

Anyway, what about us bears?  We can't survive on a low-fat diet - we need daily deliveries of double pepperoni pizza and seal-meat to build up our layers of fat and keep us warm at this time of year!  I know we mostly stay indoors with the central heating on, but we still need our scrummy food!  Only Tony eats a low-fat diet, and that's because he eats lots of bananas and is training for the Olympics!

So, the cake cupboard is currently bare, which means we bears can't nibble the contents, but we will continue to have pizza, seal, chips, chocolate, cheese and ice cream secretly delivered to us, while the two humans eat their low-fat rubbish and Tony scoffs his bananas!

Paws crossed Paul gets better very soon!

Female Southern Hawker at Ashridge Park

Female Southern Hawker at Ashridge Park, a photo by Bev & Paul Mynott on Flickr.

Paul took this amazing photograph at Ashridge Park. We thought dragonflies were kinda cute, but this one is the ugliest bug we have ever seen! Hopefully a dragonfly's idea of beauty is different from ours, otherwise she'll never get a boyfriend!

OMG, What a Week!

This was supposed to be the humans' last week off before winter - time for them to chill out, calm down and build up their resistence to bugs, viruses and colds.  But instead of relaxing, everything has been an uphill struggle which has made them very tired and stressed indeed!
The alarm - this was removed while the house was being replumbed, but getting it reinstalled has been like an Icelandic saga lasting hundreds of years!   It has taken 4 visits (two visits where the wrong engineer or no engineer turned up), one visit where the alarm was reinstalled but couldn't be switched on and a final visit to actually make it work!   We've been back in the house since April, but it's taken another 4 and a half months to get the alarm reinstalled and working!
The car - this was serviced at the beginning of the week but the garage didn't spot that one of the tyres was the wrong type for the car.  When Paul took it to Kwik Fit in April, they wrecked the punctured tyre, told us we needed a new one and then fitted the wrong tyre!   That's one garage that won't be getting any repeat business from us, though Tony will be making a visit in his big boots and kicking the crap out of anyone he finds there.
The car - we've just discovered that we have to get the garage to fit new day running lamps at a cost £38 each!  Fitting of light bulbs must be done by a Peugeot dealer, which came as a surprise to our dealer as well as ourselves!   It took 3 "technicians" (mechanics to you and me) to get the front panel off the car, at which point they discovered they didn't have any bulbs in stock!
And our trip to The Natural History Museum on Tuesday was spoiled firstly by a lack of sensible directions to the disabled parking area which meant we drove round the building 3 times before finding a place to park, and secondly by receiving a call at 5pm to tell us our newly reinstalled alarm had been ringing since 11am but we weren't answering the home phone number!  Well we couldn't answer it coz we were in London, but no-one contacted us on our mobile phones!  What a bunch of muppets the alarm people are, but they are Group4 / G4, the people who excel in letting prisoners escape!

Is it us or has the world gone mad?   Are there no sensible people to talk to?   And where are the people who can do a professional job?   Everything seems thrown together, people appear to take no pride in their work and customer service is a dirty word these days!

At this rate, our humans will be going back to work for a rest!

January - National Organising Month - Part 2!

Paul excelled himself during National Organising Month - he not only lost his diary for most of the month, but having found it again on Sunday 30th January, he forgot to take it to work with him on Monday 31st!  Doh!
What a muppet!

January - National Organising Month!

January is National Organising Month, so Bev has been busily filling in her Filofax and To-Do list each day, making sure she keeps on top of everything.  Paul, on the other paw, has managed to lose his diary!  Doh!

So, a star to the woman with the Filofax and a dunce's hat to the man with the missing diary!

We're almost a bug-free house at last! Yipee!

Well, it looks as though that pesky 'flu bug has packed its bags and gone as Bev & Paul are beginning to feel a little bit better.  They are still very tired, but the chest infection (Paul) and ear and throat infection (Bev) have mostly gone, meaning that everyone is getting a good night's sleep at last - Thursday was declared to be the best night's sleep of the year so far!.  Even Kitty isn't sneezing any more!  Yipee! 

But after four weeks of nursing sickly humans and a cat, we bears are exhausted and in need of a long rest!  So, it's back to bed for us, with frequent deliveries of pepperoni pizzas and honey cider!  We bears know how to party, but don't tell the humans as we're not allowed to eat in bed coz we leave crumbs and greasy pawprints :-)

Paul is hearing voices! Oh no!

Ok, so we know that Paul is a little eccentric, but when he said he could hear voices coming out of the cat's body, we all freaked out!  This is not normal - either Kitty has found some way of storing his live prey in his tummy and they were chatting to each other or Bill's pet needs to visit a doctor PRONTO!

Bad Week for Bev and Paul

Well, this has been a bad week for our humans - firstly, Bev sat on the garden bench and broke it with her BIG bum, and then Paul got done for speeding on his way to work!  So they have both been rather grouchy all week.  And as it is our job to cheer them up, we bears are under strict instructions NOT to mention the police or diets!  No fear, we bears hate them both!

Paul and Viagra

Imagine Bev's surprise yesterday when she got an email from Paul with a link to a website selling Viagra!  She quickly realised that someone had used his hotmail account to send emails to his contacts, which unfortunately included his office!  Ooops!

Bev checked the email to find out where it had been sent from, and she discovered that it had come from Egypt!  She's still following this up, but in the meantime, if you have received an email from Paul with a link to a Canadian health website selling Viagra, please ignore it!  Unless, of course, you actually want to purchase some - can you order some for us boy bears and Tony as well, please?  Oh, and perhaps Kitty will want some too :-)  

Flu / Swine Flu / Bird Flu - who knows?

Oh dear, poor Bev and Paul have been suffering from a ghastly bug / virus for the last 3 weeks.  We're not sure what kind of flu it is - piggy, bird or normal flu - but it has given them a nasty hacking cough and left them feeling lethargic. Even poor Kitty seems to be under the weather at the moment. 

Luckily, we bears have missed all these bugs and colds, though we do feel lethargic, but what's new?  We always lounge around in bed all day, get up for a snackette or two, and then go back to bed for a post-snackette snooze.  It sounds like our humans and Kitty have been working too hard and need to chill out more to avoid all those nasty bugs! 

Paul the OAP!

Well, what fun Bev and us bears had on Sunday morning.  We had our breakfast at Coventry, then drove up to Cannock.  When we got to the stadium, we wanted to park inside so that Bev didn't have to walk too far on her dodgy knee.  But when Paul asked about a parking space inside the stadium, the young lad asked his age and said if he was an OAP he could get in cheaper!  Well, we all fell about laughing at the thought of Paul as an OAP - we know he's a bit wrinkly and could do with a good iron, but he's no OAP :-)  That amused Bev and us bears all afternoon!

Paul & Kitty wrestling!

Here is a photograph of Paul and Kitty wrestling.  I think I know who is winning :-)

Paul's Climate Control Underpants!

At the weekend Paul decided he needed some new clothes and bought some Climate Control Underpants!  We bears were bemused and are trying to work out what these underpants can do to control the climate - our suggestions are:

• keep his wind under control, thereby reducing methane emissions and saving the polar bears
• need less washing as they come in an exciting range of beige and browns, which are very handy for disguising skid marks!

Feel free to add any suggestions of your own.

Anyway, here is a photograph of me modelling Paul's Climate Control Underpants - actually, the front pouch is excellent for holding my crown jewels AND snackettes, while the rear section is reinforced for storing methane until it can be safely be disposed of:

We are also recommending these underpants to Carlos, who, according to The Nice Lady from Stirling, suffers from exploding trousers! 

And what does Kitty think of Paul's new underwear?  He laughed so much his head almost fell off :-)

Missing knicker elastic!

As promised, I have some interesting gossip about Paul from recent racing events where he was a flag marshal.

Firstly, there was the incident with the missing underpants! He returned home minus any underwear, explaining it as follows - he had to go commando style because his knicker elastic snapped and his underpants started to fall down!

Then, there was the incident where he came back from the racing with "tender nipples", caused by his t-shirt rubbing on his chest!

Do we bears believe these stange tales or do we think we are missing out on some interesting action with the bimbettes at the motor racing! Yup, you've guessed it, we think we are missing out, so we're all off to the racing at the weekend for some snapped knicker elastic and tender nipples :-)

The good news, the Scottish news and the downright strange news!

Ok, we have lots of news this week, and some interesting photographs as well.

Firstly, the good news - Bev has a new job and started work on Monday.  She is thoroughly enjoying her new job and paws crossed it all works out well for her.

Then the Scottish news - The Nice Lady from Stirling was 80 last week, so we went up to see her and make sure the candles on her cake didn't set fire to the house.  She and Carlos were fine and happy to see us all.

And now for the downright strange news - Kitty has taken up car mechanics as his new hobby, and we have photographs to prove it.

Here is photographic proof that Kitty is showing an interest in what goes on "under the bonnet"!

Picnic Basket and a miracle!

Bev has spent the summer looking for a nice picnic basket that will carry food, plates, glasses, cutlery and food for her and Paul, us bears and Tony the Chimp.  We don't see the need for cutlery or plates coz we always eat with our paws, but you don't argue with Bev when she is on a mission.  With autumn approaching, she had given up looking for her picnic basket when a miracle happened!  Paul needed a rucksack / coolbag for his work lunches and purchased one in the sale at Millets.  But when he opened it up, to everyone's surprise he found plates, plastic wine glasses, napkins, a chopping board and cutlery!  So, Bev got her picnic basket / rucksack after all!

Ok, when are we having our next picnic and what yummy food are we taking?

Laundered money!

Doh - Paul managed to wash his wallet along with his clothes, so he now has some "laundered" money!  At least it's clean money, but the notes are a little crinkled - he should take a leaf out the Nice Lady from Stirling's book and iron the notes!  Yup, the Nice Lady, many moons ago, managed to wash a large amount of money in the washing machine, so having rescued it all, she proceeded to dry it in the oven and then iron the notes to make them look new!  By the time she had finished, the notes looked like she had just printed them in the basement :-)  Mind you, this is the woman who dropped her library book in the bath, so dried the book in the oven and then ironed the pages to avoid getting a row from the librarian!  We like you Nice Lady from Stirling - you're our kinda gal - a bit kooky but lots of fun!