Nebulous Mooch

These days I’m terribly into hypnotherapy. I used to be quite a hypnosis sceptic. It just didn’t seem plausible to me that you could make someone cluck like a chicken every time you snap your fingers. My only exposure to hypnotism was from television shows, but I did work in a health clinic owned by a hypnotherapist before and some of my best friends have been hypnotized.

A friend of mine got hypnotherapy once. Her experience also led me to believe it was a load of hogwash. She said that the whole time the therapist was trying to hypnotize her an ice cream truck was driving around the neighborhood playing ice-cream-truck songs. It was so distracting that she couldn’t go into a trance. Finally, she pretended to be hypnotized so she could leave.

My mother also had a friend who used hypnosis to stop smoking. She still smokes.

Now, you understand my scepticism, don’t you?

Recently, I started watching hypnosis videos on YouTube and I’m completely fascinated. I don’t have a television most of my entertainment comes from YouTube.

There’s this thing you can do called instant induction. From what I’ve seen on the YouTube videos to put someone into trance via instant induction all you have to do is grab them and say sleep in a jarring way. We’ve been trying it around the house. So far neither of us has gone into a trance, but I’ve been scared half to death on several occasions.

Since our instant inductions weren’t working out, I decided to try watching videos about how to put someone into a trance. One night, I was engrossed in watching one of these videos with my husband. When I paused the video to as something about it, I was shocked to discover my husband was in a trance. I kept hitting his leg and saying, “Stop messing around and open your eyes.” He kept trying to open them, but couldn’t. Finally, I hit him enough times to snap him out of it. I’m still not sure if he was lying or not. Anyway, here’s the video.

About two weeks ago, I watched a fascinating documentary. It was about these Swedish twins named Ursula and Sabina Eriksson who hurled themselves into traffic on the motorway in 2008. The story is quite long and involved so I’m not going to explain it to you in detail. In brief, they ran out in front of speeding cars, but miraculously survived. When discharged from the hospital Sabina stabbed a man to death and then jumped from a bridge onto another busy road. She broke both ankles and fractured her skull. You can read all about it here.

Anyway, when she was prosecuted for her crimes she received several psychiatric evaluations. One of her diagnosis was that she had a puff of madness–meaning she was mad for a short time, but now she’s fine. Can you believe that? You could use that excuse for almost anything.

“Sorry, about that. I just had a puff of madness.”

“You didn’t take me seriously when I said that, did you? I was having a puff of madness at the time so I really didn’t mean it.”

If she could get only five years in jail for killing a man because she had a puff of madness, I should be able to get out of a few small mistakes using the same excuse.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like the idea of getting an award. Yeah, it’s nice to be appreciated for something you’ve done well, but I could do without the whole awards ceremony thing. I think it’s because of the traumatic experience I had in third grade.

When I was eight I entered a fire prevention contest. I had to draw a poster to help educate children about fire safety, and my poster was one of the winners. A fire truck came to the school to pick me up. The firemen came to my classroom and announced that I’d won and they were there take me to the award ceremony. My whole class went outside to see me off. It should’ve been very exciting, but it wasn’t. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten a very unfortunate haircut.

On the way to the fire house one of the firemen referred to me as “he” and I didn’t correct him. At the ceremony when my name was called to get my award, some boys in the front row loudly exclaimed, “It’s a girl,” and all I wanted to do was run out of the room, but I couldn’t. I spent the whole rest of the day holding back tears. Since that day I never wanted anything to do with award ceremonies ever again. Well, until the other day that is.

My husband was nominated for some jazz award. I’m so terrible because I don’t even know what the award was.

Anyway even though we usually behave like hermits, we decided to go to the ceremony/jam session. Though my husband was nominated he never got any kind of notice or invitation to the ceremony. He only found out about the ceremony because he did a gig with the person who nominated him the day before.

The awards looked like someone had sawed off a couple of table legs and painted them gold.

When they read the list of nominees not everyone’s names were on the list. People were yelling out from the audience, “What about me. I was nominated too.”

The person who announced the award left a list of the nominees and who voted for whom on the stage. Of course, everyone who was nominated got a good look at it during the jam session. It turns out that the nominees who didn’t get their names read out weren’t on the list because no one had voted for them. That’s a drag.

And, the best part of the whole evening was watching a twenty minute tap dance routine done on a carpeted floor by a guy who only knew three moves. Classic, as my husband would say, just classic.

I’ll post pictures from the evening tomorrow.

About six months ago I decided that when I finally owned my own house I would get some chickens and a goat. This may be shocking to some of you considering my general fear of animals, especially animals that flap, hop or have horizonally slit pupils like the devil.

All of this aside, I thought goats and chickens could be a good addition to our household. We could have free eggs whenever we wanted and I like egg. We could also have free milk for making kefir and yogurt and butter and cheese and whatever else I can make with milk. I even picked out the ideal goat breed. Nigerian dwarf goats would be my goats of choice. They’re suppose to get make enough milk to feed a family and they’re small. I would have two. They would need to keep each other company.

My passion for raising goats has waned recently. Not because I realized I’d have to milk them every day–imagine me milking a goat–or because I’d have to clean up after them, or because they’re smelly and they make that goat noise all the time, but because I tasted some goat yogurt.

I bought some goat yorgurt. I like to try new things. We can eat some yogurt on out exciting Candida diet to try to get some probiotic into our systems. We can also have a moderate amount of grains so the other day I had oatmeal for breakfast. I mixed it with some goat yogurt and blueberries. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t try this at home. It was disgusting. Goats don’t make the same nice tastey yogurt like that cows do. Instead, goat milk makes something similar to goat cheese. Goat cheese is good, but it’s not good in your oatmeal.

Anyway, I’ve had it in for goats ever since they ruined my oatmeal. I’ve decided there will be no goats for me because I just can’t put up with that kind of unpredictability in my dairy products.

I’m still considering chickens. I’ve recently found out that you can tell what color eggs a hen will produce by looking at her earlobes. I didn’t even know chickens had earlobes. Maybe they have lips too.

Photo by Just Chaos.

We went to Stonehenge yesterday. We were so very pleased when we discovered that the parking was free. We thought maybe seeing Stonehenge would be free too. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

After making our way across a busy road we found the whole area surrounded by a large fence with no way to get in. This is strange we thought. Than we realized you have to pay to get in. To avoid having tourists darting out in front of cars they’ve built a tunnel under the road. Those aliens were really forward thinking.

Since we paid nearly 7 pounds each to get in we were determined to stay in there as long as possible. We listened to our audio tour devices. We learned all about lintels and sarsens and longed for the good old days when you could rent a hammer to break a piece off one of the stones to keep as a souvenir.

Some of us slept on the grass under a hat in a fruitless attempt to avoid sunburn.

Some of us walked around trying to look gangsta.

And some of us swore we could see alien faces carved into the stones.

Overall I say it was pretty good. The stones where like giant teeth in the gums of the earth or at least that’s how they described them on the audio tour. I think I’ll give Stonehenge two thumbs up.

World Cup fever is sweeping the nation still, which means there’s a ton of English flags flying and lots of people buying beer in the supermarket. I don’t have a television so I haven’t seen any of the soccer football games, but judging by the cheering and yelling that’s been going on in the flat above us, I’m guessing it’s pretty exciting.

Honestly, I’ve never really been a sports person. I left Seoul just before the Korea, Japan world cup. I remember people saying things to me like, “I can’t believe you’re not staying for the World Cup.” Staying in Seoul for the World Cup seemed like a nightmare to me. Seoul already has too many people in it.

Apparently, the World Cup only happens every four years–like the Olympics before they split it up. I don’t care for the Olympics either. Actually, I can pretty safely say that I hate the Olympics. Does that make me less likable? It probably does but at least I’m honest.

If you have World Cup fever too you might be interested in this link featuring pictures of World Cup balls over the years. Check it out if you like looking at pictures of balls.

The weed situation in our driveway is completely out of control. Seeing it everyday brings me such shame. The other day I got a ride home from church and I wanted to ask them to drop me off a few houses away from my house so they wouldn’t see me walk up my weed infested driveway.

Imagine me walking up it with my head down in shame. To make matters worse our neighbors’ parents have been out in their driveway for two days now weeding and mulching and planting. If I were my father I’d say something like, “When you’re finished there you can come over and take care of mine.” Then I’d laugh a big hearty laugh, but I’m not my father. Instead, I say nothing as I walk embarrassed to the door. I wish my parents would come weed my driveway, but that would be an expensive trip and I could only afford to offer them a free meal in exchange for their labor. Normally if they come to my house I make them pay for their food.

I could weed the driveway. I’ve tried but there are just too many weeds. England is way too lush. The weeds just keep growing and growing. What do they think this is fertile soil with a few random stones scattered about or something?

I don’t want to buy weed killer because it seems dangerous to me. Our upstairs neighbors’ young children are in our driveway sometimes and lots of dogs come sniffing around our driveway daily. My natural weed killing attempts last year left me filling annoyed and frustrated. My husbands thinks we should just buy a weed wacker. I guess that’s an idea.

Until we buy that weed wacker, we’ll just have to be the Sanford and Son of the neighborhood.  I know they had a junkyard and not a weedy driveway, but every time I look outside the living room window the Sanford and Son theme song goes through my head.

I’ve worn glasses since I was 9 years old. That means I’ve spend 15 years of my life wearing glasses. That’s a long time. (Some people are probably trying to figure out if I’m really bad at math,  lying about my age or just a lot younger than I look right now. I’m not going to tell you the answer.)

Over the years I’ve had lots of different styles of glasses from giant round ones that take up two thirds of my face to tiny square ones that give me just a sliver of lens to look through.  I’ve even tried wearing contacts. That was pretty successful. It only took me a week to get one of the lenses stuck my eyeball and completely panic. After that I decided I look better in glasses.

My husband recently got lasik eye surgery to correct his vision. I have to admit that I was a little jealous at first. If I didn’t wear glasses that would mean I could wear all kinds of stylish sunglasses. I could have a whole collection of different sunglasses looks. I know that makes no sense–I don’t want to wear glasses so I can wear glasses–but it’s true.

When my husband had to put 563 million drops in his eyes after the surgery I stopped being jealous. I just don’t deal well with eye drops. I don’t deal well with someone using a laser to cut into my eye while I’m awake and looking at them either. Maybe I’m just too sensitive.  Maybe I deserve a new pair of glasses.

We used to have a mirror hanging over our mantle. It’s quite big and heavy. Here it is.

I didn’t get the whole thing in the picture because I didn’t want to get my messy desk in the picture too.

The mirror used to make a cracking noise every once in a while. The other day we took it off the wall to find out what was going on with it. The mirror was hanging on a bent nail that was pointing down. It was getting ready to jump off the wall and give us 7 years bad luck any day now. We don’t need any more bad luck  so we decided to try to fix this problem.

So we went to Home Base (it’s like Lowes) to get some anchors to put in the wall and hang this mirror up properly.

Stores like this are so confusing to me. It took forever to find what we were looking for. Then we stood in the aisle for a couple more forevers discussing which anchors we should get, red, green, yellow, metal…so many colors,  so many choices. Finally, a nice man from Yorkshire  who had experience in this kind of thing and was listening in to our conversation suggested the metal anchors so that ‘s what we bought.

We came home and my husband was determined to get that mirror up today. He’s really been missing looking at himself in it a million times a day. Thanks to his handy work we now have a hole in the wall that looks like this…

…and the mirror is still on the floor.

I can’t really blame my husband. I was complicit in the mirror hanging activities.  I helped…I got him the chair to stand on… Actually I didn’t. He got that…I got him the hammer…Wait. We don’t have a hammer…I watched carefully and gave useful advice while he tried to put the anchor in the wall. It turns out that the wall isn’t plaster board like we originally thought. Behind the plaster board is  something gritty and hard and beigh like the wall of a cave.

Anyway, now we’ll have to fix the hole and figure out some other way to put up this mirror.

Side Note: My husband saved all the grit and dust that fell from the wall when he tried to put the anchor in. He wants to take it to the hardware store with him and ask an employee there if they know what type of material it is. I don’t think they’ll know. He seems to think I’ll be going with him on this trip, but I don’t want to wander into a hardware store with a plastic container of what looks like sand and ask someone what they think it is. That would be even more embarrassing than picking black berries.

In high school, our foreign language choices were French or Spanish. That’s it. At the time I thought French was the language of snobs so I chose to take Spanish–a down to earth language of the people. That’s what I told my friends when they asked me why I wanted to learn Spanish.

The language I wanted to study in high school didn’t matter much. When I got my schedule at the beginning of the year in the slot where a language should’ve been my schedule contained the word typing. Typing? How was that going to help me get into college?

The typing teacher scared me, but I was overly timid. She was old and stern and didn’t take any funny business. If you were caught chewing gum in her class, she’d make you ball it up and stick it to your nose. We all sat at huge electric typewriters and did typing exercises. The room was filled with the racket of banging typewriters. Those things are really loud.

Maybe some of you aren’t familiar with electric typewriters. So here’s a demonstration.

What you type goes directly on the the paper. Crazy, huh? I don’t know how people ever lived like that! Now imagine thirty of those going all at once in a smallish classroom. That was typing class.

I  wander if that was the only class my typing teacher taught. If so, I don’t know how she managed to hold on to her sanity. I’d have gone crazy if I had to listen to that noise all day. That’s probably why she occasionally made us watch films on hygiene. I guess she thought we needed some tips on how to bathe or maybe she’d just do anything to get a break from all that noisy typing.

I never had the opportunity to take Spanish in high school. Foreign languages just weren’t in the cards for me. My adviser must’ve thought I was destined to be a secretary or something, because the following year I ended up in information processing class. Information processing just meant typing on a computer and learning shorthand. Since I do a lot of typing on a computer now, I guess those classes better prepared me for my future career than Spanish ever would’ve. Now all I have to do is find an opportunity to use shorthand.