draliman on life

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World.

You win a pet monkey but this isn’t just any old monkey. It can do one trick for you whenever you want from getting a pop out of the fridge to washing your hair. What would be the trick?
Ooh, ohh, a helper monkey! Here he is, ready for action.

Ready for action

I think maybe he should be tasked to the job of dusting, as this is the (negative) imprint he made on the shelf when I removed him for his photo op.

Monkey imprint

Or possibly he should be tasked to cooking after last week’s little accident. Note to self: never put eggs on to boil and then go off to play Fallout 4 on the PS4. Because after 3 hours they explode.

Oops

What caring thing are you going to do for yourself today?
Nothing,really. Just a normal Sunday.

What colour do you feel most comfortable wearing?
Blue. And while it’s not really a colour, rather the lack thereof, black. Very occasionally I’ll wear something with a splash of some other colour on it, usually if it’s a lovely sunny day.

Complete this sentence:  When I travel I love to…
… come home :-). It’s nice sometimes to visit somewhere new but it’s always nice to come home.

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World.

Who was your best friend in elementary school?
I met a lad way back in infants school (at around age 6, 7 maybe?) and we were friends all the way through secondary school. As is often the way, we began to grow apart, I went off to university and I haven’t seen him for nearly 30 years now.

On the other hand, a chap I “knew” as a baby (our dads were friends) who I lost touch with because he went to a different primary school, became my best friend in secondary school and we’re still close friends now.

What things could people do for you on a really bad day that would really help you?
What I want is to be left alone. If that’s the best thing for me, I don’t know. I don’t have many “really bad days” though :-).

If you could make a 15 second speech to the entire world, what would you say?
I’ve had it with you lot. I’m going back home to Tau Ceti 7. You’re all mad, mad I say!

Would you rather be an amazing dancer or an amazing singer?
Singer, I think.

Were you ever singing along to the car stereo, thinking you’re doing an awesome job, and then turned down the volume to bask in your own singing prowess? Don’t do it. It’s bad. It would be nice to do that and be singing in tune.

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World.

If you had to have your vision corrected would you rather: glasses or contacts?  Or what do you use if you need to have your vision corrected?
I’ve been wearing glasses since I was a little ‘un. I started off with the chunky free NHS glasses.

I’m on the right (1985), taken in Germany.
Photo copyright BBC I would assume.

Later I had some money and got better glasses, and later still I decided to try contact lenses. They were annoying, scratchy and a big hassle. And I kept falling asleep in lectures. They stuck to my eyeballs :-(. You do NOT want to fall asleep with contacts in.

I’m back to glasses now after a run-in with conjunctivitis in the 90s. And recently I got my first pair of varifocals. Because I’m old and so are my eyes.

If you had to describe your day as a traffic sign, what would it be?
Maybe, road works/under construction.

When I was little I used to think this was a bloke with an infeasibly large shovel, rather than a chap with a regular shovel stuck in a mound of dirt.

Was school easy or difficult for you? How so?
Well, I hated it. Whoever said “school days are the best days of your life” was a dirty rotten liar. I was quite good academically and it had its moments, but by and large I wouldn’t go through school again for anything.

Now university… that was a different kettle of fish entirely! Now, those really are the best days of your life 🙂

Would you rather take a 1 or 2 week vacation with an organized tour or take a cruise of your choice?
That’s a tricky one. On the one hand, the idea of having a holiday where everything is organised and I don’t have to worry about anything sounds quite appealing. On the other, I’ve never been on a cruise and it sounds quite fun. My parents go on cruises now they’re retired and thoroughly enjoy themselves, and cruises are pretty well organised too, so I think I’ll take the cruise, please!

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World.

Name one thing not many people know about you.
Ooh. Potentially if I mention something not many people now about me on here, 6 billion people will know it. Not that I have the many followers.

Yet (bwahahaha).

Okay then. In my mid-teens I had both big toenails permanently removed as they were massively in-growing and infected. I’ll spare you the gory details, but as it turns out big toenails are optional. So that’s one thing you really did not want to know about me.

If a distant uncle dies and you were always his favourite and leaves you $50,000 (any currency) in his will, what would you do?

Copyright some music company probably

It would be nice to say “pay off my mortgage” but I’d need more than a fifth of that inheritance to pay off even 1 year :-(. So let’s go cray-cray with it!

Let’s have a Ford Focus RS for starters. And that’s pretty much it. Turns out $50,000 isn’t that much after all. Though owning a car outright would give me £300 a month more disposable income, so the car’s an investment really :-).  I’ll use the rest for a little holiday to New Zealand to see the Hobbits.

Where do you hide junk when people come over?
In my bedroom of course. Unfortunately when my parents came over the other week they wanted to see my new bed and I ended up with a minor ear-bashing regarding “piles of stuff everywhere”. Remember the Golden Rule – mothers go everywhere.

Complete this sentence:  I want to learn more about…
Me! Who am I really? What makes me tick? What do I really want under the surface?

I know. It’s a can of worms.

Here are my answers to Cee’s questions for her Share Your World series.

If you could hire someone to help you, would it be with cleaning, cooking, or yard work?
I don’t really need a cook, it’s the just the one of me :-(. I’ve never been exactly sure what “yard work” is, but I’m thinking it’s what we call “gardening”? If so, I only have a dinky garden so no help needed there either (though it’s never really particularly trim and tidy to be honest).

So I’ll have a cleaner, please. It would be nice if someone could dig out the vacuum cleaner from under whatever pile of stuff it’s buried in :-).

Ooh, ooh, there it is!

What makes you laugh the most?
Either comedy TV or over-the-top gory TV/video games. I re-watched “Resident Evil – Afterlife” last night and I did enjoy watching zombie brains explode. “Planet Terror” is a real laugh-a-thon. And yesterday afternoon I was playing Fallout 4 and got caught underground with a bunch of ghouls and my automatic combat shotgun. You can imagine how that went heh heh 🙂

What was your favourite food when you were a child?
The only thing I can remember is chocolate, if that counts as a food. I ate loads. I was huge.

List at least five favourite flowers or plants.
Five? I don’t know many flower or plant names. Here goes.

• The big bush with the sort of clumps of little petals. I want to say rhododendron. Or hydrangea.
• That tree which is all big and has loads of green stuff on. You know the one.
• Lavender.
• Gorse in bloom. I love seeing it all over the moors and whatnot.
• Those little blue flowers. That look like bells. Can’t think of the name. Bell blues?

That’s all for this week!

Here we are again for Cee’s Share Your World.

Are you left or right handed?
I’m right handed. Very right handed. My left hand can do stuff but it needs to be trained.

This is the main reason I’m glad we drive on the left hand side of the road over here. I don’t like to take my right hand off the wheel, and since the wheel is on the right hand side of the car I don’t have to as I change gear with my left hand. If I ever rent a car abroad I’d be tempted to rent an automatic. They’re not as rare as they used to be so I expect most companies would have one!

If you had only one TV, would you prefer the TV in the living room or another room?
I do only have one TV (which is plugged in)! It’s in the living room. When did I last use it as a TV? Um, never. Everything I watch is recorded, catch-up or streamed. Here it is!

Entertainment Corner

Have you ever participated in a distance walking, swimming, running, or biking event? Tell your story.
Ha, no! It would place an unnecessary strain on the emergency services, having to airlift me to hospital after the first 2 miles.

Complete this sentence: Love is…
I’ve sat here for a while thinking about this. And I still have nothing to say. Love just is.

And with that cop-out of an answer I’ll leave you with this exciting discovery – it’s impossible to over-boil a hard-boiled egg! Last week I popped two eggs on to boil and went off to play Fallout 4. Two hours later I went back into the kitchen and saw to my horror the eggs still boiling away in the remaining two centimetres of water. They taste fine :-).

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World.

How many siblings do you have? What’s your birth order? 
I have one brother. He’s 18 months younger than me and lives about 7 miles away.

In a car would you rather drive or be a passenger?
Mostly I would rather drive. Maybe it’s a control thing. It is nice to be driven around sometimes, but that rarely happens as I live alone, so it’s nice for a change! On a long journey, I’d definitely prefer to drive, though. And I like my car!

When you lose electricity in a storm, do you light the candles or turn on the flashlight? How many of each do you own?
This rarely happens, though by coincidence it did happen a couple of weeks ago during extremely high winds. I like candles but I worry about the house catching fire 🙂 so I go for torches (that’s what we call “flashlights” over here).

I have one in my work bag, one in the car, one in my bedside table and two in the kitchen drawer. One of them is one of those which has different modes and can be hung up or arranged like a lamp – that one was very handy in the blackout for showering and whatnot.

List at least five of your favourite types of animals?  (any animal to domestic to wild to marine life)
I like small furry animals the best.

Cats, some of those cute little guys you get in Australia like koalas, quokka (quokkas?) and wombats. Here’s a link to a Daily Mail article with those guys in. I think pandas are cute and also meerkats (why is meerkat not in my spell checker? – it wants to change it to “beermat”). I think raccoons look quite cute too, at least in the picture I got from Goldfish’s online store.

How cute is that?

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World. We’ve reached double week numbers already! A fifth of the way through the year nearly.

What would you ask for if a genie granted you three wishes?

• A long and healthy life
• Tons of cash
• Babes

What experiences are most meaningful to you?
That’s tricky. I don’t really have “experiences” any more. I just shuffle through life. I enjoy sunny days out in “the nature” and family Christmases and whatnot.

As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a train driver! Every year as a kid we took the train to North Scotland to see my Gran and it seemed like it would be very exciting to drive the train. My brother and I sometimes made a “train” out of the furniture, and we had a Hornby model train set too.

I guess in reality it would quite boring, though.

Complete this sentence:  The best day of my life was…
I guess it was the day of my PhD viva. After the questioning I went across the corridor to the high pressure physics lab and wandered around waiting to be called. It was great to go back in and see them all stand, hold out their hands and say “Congratulations, Dr Phillips” :-). Word spread quickly – by the time we’d finished up and I’d gone back down to the office I shared with some other postgrads and postdocs, someone had already taped a piece of paper with “Dr” on over the “Mr”!

Here is my post for Cee’s Share Your World, where we answer questions posed by Cee.

Have you done something you truly want to do today?
Well, it’s only 8am. I guess I had a bit of a lie in which was something I wanted! I don’t usually “truly want to do” anything to be honest. Days come, days go…

What can you help the world with?
Well, nothing really. But this does remind me of a craze which swept our school back in the day. Someone would ask if they could “help” you and if you said “yes”, they’d turn your bag/pencil case upside down and empty it out all over the floor. I am proud to announce that I was part of the originating group for this!

So I could turn the world’s pencil case upside down and empty it out. Maybe it needs a bit of a clear out.

If life was ‘just a bowl of cherries’… which fruit other than a cherry would you be..?
I’d be a passion fruit, obviously… 😉

Quotes List: At least three of your favourite quotes?
Here are some quotes I used before for a quote challenge.

• Do or do not, there is no try (Master Yoda)
• In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded (Terry Pratchett)
• Be excellent to each other (Bill and Ted)