concrete setting

So... I've got writer's block...
And, even worse, I've got painter's block!
In fact, I'm stuck.
Not your usual sort of being a little bit stuck in the mud, forget about that. When I say I'm stuck, I'm more thinking along the lines of fast setting concrete being poured around me. Actually, you can add in some steel re-enforcements for good measure there too. That is the kind of stuck I feel like at the moment.

It could have something to do with the Scottish weather getting to me. After all, it has been raining day after day after day. Whilst half of Europe is getting scorched and Greece is going up in flames, I have had feverish dreams of water coming up to my nostrils, whilst the never ending sound of rain lashing down on the domed roof light keeps reverberating in my head all night.
It has been getting so bad, that my friends no longer dare to bring up the subject of weather, unless it's under the guise of a joke along the lines of "Is it true the Scots tow their cars behind their boats?" (hahaha! very funny...)
There have been days when I truly started to believe that the only place wetter than my garden was the bottom of the sea. But when you are stuck in your little bubble, as I have been all summer, all that is outside of it seems to magnify.

Another reason for feeling stuck, a very weather-unrelated reason, is the fact that I'm now fastly approaching my 37th birthday and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Somehow I'm waiting for something amazing to happen, for all the lights to come on at once, and to finally find clarity in the dark.

I know a few things: I know I want to spend more time being creative, I want to paint... I'd love to write more (and hopefully improve that skill), I also really want to see a lot more of the world. But like someone who has been given a number of unusual ingredients, despite the fact that they can't cook to save their own life, I have no idea of how I should make some sort of a feasible plan out of the given and known factors.

Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake in bed, thinking of that one year road trip I'd like to go on. In my thoughts I'm crossing America coast to coast and up and down in an Airstream that has been kitted out as a mobile art studio. The idea is that I would record my travels, the places and people I meet through sketches and paintings. Of course, at the end of it all, I would rent a great bright and airy studio in one of America's bigger cities for a couple of months, to finish off those pieces which have only had the groundwork done. All the while I'm soaking up the atmosphere, I'm meeting new and interesting people, I see places I never knew existed before... The climax would of course be the exhibition of the work. This exhibition would be a very rich patchwork of portraits and landscapes, all of them with an accompanying story, almost like a richly illustrated travel log...

Ah... one can dream...

The WHAT??? (Mantyhose)

http://o.aolcdn.com/art/gat/asylum/3/1/mantyhose.html

Just visualise this: Beloved-6ft2, 16stone, hairy teddy bear-, in his morning routine struggle to get into his newly acquired "Mantyhose"!

It just doesn't bear thinking about. Mornings are bad enough when it comes to try and persuade him to actually "match" a tie to his shirt and trousers. It begs the question of how he would manage to add in to the equation a pair of patterned tights? The word "clown" springs to mind.

The next question is: What happens to all that lovely man-hair?
Is it acceptable to wear a very furry version of the Mantyhose?
Or do we submit our poor other halves to yet another chore of shaving, namely their legs?
(please please please say NO... I've shared my bed with a cyclist, and I can tell you, feeling a stubbly leg brushing against yours is neither pleasant, nor sexy!)

I'm sure Robin Hood looked very fetching in his tights, but something tells me that he would have baulked at these.

Somehow I just can't see it happening in this household, not any day soon anyway, unless they invent steel re-enforced toe-ends. The current situation is that Beloved manages to get something ladder-like (i.e. a great big hole around the toe area that tends to run upwards in a thin ladder-like shape) in his THICK SOCKS on a 2 daily basis, so how on earth he would cope with man-tights, God only knows.

And all the practicalities aside... Could you see your kids being taught the very serious subject of maths by a man strutting the latest fashionably patterned "Mantyhose"?

Clever Crawling monster?

When you set up a blog, you can "monetise" it.
All this means, is that you allow Google to use some of the space on your pages to add in adverts.
The mone(y) in monetise comes in in the shape of rewards, when your visitors click the adverts on your site. So far, so simple.
Being quite a rational and realistic person, I don't have great expectations from this particular money-making-scheme. There will be cause for celebration if it brings in enough rewards to buy myself a celebratory bar of chocolate.

Now, here comes the part that baffles me and has me in stitches in equal measures:
The whole system is supposed to be "intelligent"!
The theory is that you write your blog, publish it, and then.. the magic is supposed to happen.
Google sends its very clever Googlebots to "crawl" your site. Now, excuse me, but I can't help being unable to shake the image of little mechanical spiders crawling all over my page..YUCK!
They are a part of our new fandangled artificially intelligent brigade (yes, the one that could potentially take over the world, and destroy us, poor human beings).
You see, they are clever enough to figure out what I have written, and then they are supposed to link this up with appropriate adverts, presumably they will be of relevance to the content of my blog.
Now right there, my dear readers, is where the whole thing unravels!
So far, this site has boasted adverts for gay dating sites, double glazing companies, very doubtful miracle medication, and a few more which I really should have noted down but have unfortunately forgotten (I guess it would be appropriate to advertise something to prevent memory loss??).
If you have read this blog before, I challenge you to make the links that those very clever crawling monsters have come up with!

I must say though, this is just another example of the fact that as far as artificial intelligence goes, we really haven't got that far beyond artificial stupidity. So we can all sleep easy at night, because I really don't think we are about to be attacked by Clever Crawling Mechanical Monsters yet. Of all things that might threaten this world of ours, that really is the last thing I'll worry about.

So what will the next linked advert be?
Brain boosters?