Nine Steps to Using a Paddling Pool

Sometimes, you just gotta cool down.

These last few days it's been really quite warm, so we've had the paddling pool out for my son to play in.  It's fascinating how he doesn't appear to have any reaction to the coolness of the pool water versus the general temperature, whilst both myself and my wife, when tempted to the water, find it unacceptably cold.  I've theorised that the body acclimatises to the water in a number of steps, as follows:

Step 1: Touching the water with your toe, you say something along the lines of "OH MY GOD THAT'S TOO COLD!!!" and, resistant to your childs' commands, you decide to next to the paddling pool and read a book.

Step 2: Sat next to the pool, you think about just how hot it is, and summarise that it might actually be quite nice to have a paddle.

Step 3: You stand in the pool.  After a few seconds you become used to the water and find that paddling is relatively pleasant, but when you get accidentally splashed up to the knee you flee the pool squealing "It's SO COLD!!!""

Step 4: You reluctantly return to the pool, cautious of splashes.

Step 5: After persistent requests from your child, you kneel down in the pool.  That's cold.

Step 6: Then you sit in the pool. Now THAT'S cold.

Step 7: Your child finds a jug from somewhere, and chucks an entire jug of icy water at you. Blinded and shaking from the freezing water working its way down your torso, you sit in the pool clutching your face, hoping to be able to open your eyes sometime the next day.

Step 8: Your child takes advantage of your inability to see by pouring what seems to be the contents of the Arctic Sea on the back of your head.

Step 9: Congratulations, you are now acclimatised to the water!



Today the weather is far worse, and I look forward to a day determinedly inside :)

Register to Vote

Time's against us, so I'll be brief.  If you want to vote in the UK general election, but haven't registered to vote, you've got today to do it.  Don't leave it till the last minute - remember last time when the website went down because everyone tried to register?  Go to https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote and register.

I do believe that voting is important, regardless of whether you vote for someone or if you turn up and deliberately spoil your ballot paper as a protest, because we are very fortunate to live in a place and time where citizens have the ability to vote.  There are still countries in the world where voting isn't possible, voting is restricted to certain people, or where the voting process is rigged.

Plus as one of the people will be sat in a polling station all day on election day helping voters, it makes my day go a lot quicker if people show up!

Don't forget also if you've moved house that you need to sort out your vote with the local council, otherwise you might be eligible to vote somewhere across the country.

For more about the rare breed that sits in polling stations, check out my 5 things you might not know about working in a polling station post :)

Product Testing

As a guy, I find that the bathroom products I own do not relate to what I use.

You see, a safe gift for a man, for birthdays or Christmas (or indeed any other festival which involves giving presents) is "The Shower Gel Box Set".

The Shower Gel Box Set, which for me is often from Lynx, will include shower gel, a can of deodorant, but then often one other item, like shaving gel or after shave balm (never both - I presume they think that I'm either happy to use shaving gel and not both with after shave, or shave my bare dry rough face and use after shave balm to reduce the resulting redness).

Now my shaving regime, which is haphazard at best, generally involves a dry face, an electric razor, and then finishing up with a manual razor to pick off any stray hairs that the electric razor missed.  This is complemented by the occasional use of tweezers, because whilst the two razors do keep on top of 29,999 of the 30,000 hairs on my face, there will be one that somehow evades both trimmers, and in a matter of hours grows to about four inches long.  I sometimes wonder if my chin, becoming bored with the traditional beard, puts all of its effort into just one hair.

So as a result I tend to use up shower gel a lot quicker than I use shaving gels.  I decided to do some research, by been undertaking a number of tests of various bathroom products.

I decided to try showering and using the various products below instead of shower gel.  Mainly I chose to do this because I had run out of shower gel, but I felt that the research would be worthwhile regardless.

Test one - shampoo.  Well, of course shampoo was fine.  Anyone who uses the little shampoo/conditioners and shower gels in hotels know that they can quite happily swap one for the other and see no difference whatsoever.

Test two - Johnson's Top to Toe Baby Bath.  Basically bubble bath, but can be rubbed on children also.  Again, absolutely fine, you wouldn't notice any difference from normal shower gel except it doesn't contain lavender or volcanic rocks.

Test three - Facial Wash.  Again, absolutely fine.  We're essentially talking about shower gel for your face after all, which the last time I checked was made out of skin, just like the rest of the stuff covering your body.

Now it gets slightly more interesting...

Test four - shaving gel.  Absolutely fine!  Yes, shaving gel, perfectly fine for showering with.  Slightly thicker than shower gel, but nothing shocking.

Test five - after shave balm.  Again, absolutely fine, very similar to the shaving gel, slightly thicker than shower gel but no problem.

Test six - hair gel.  I was expecting this one to be dreadful - it was okay!  And the traces left in my hair helped to make it look slightly more exciting than usual.

Test seven - hand cream (not the Norwegian one in the photo, I should say) - this was the only one that wasn't ideal.  It stuck to my skin, moisturising it by creating a barrier between my skin and the shower (which to be quite honest I always thought could perhaps help with moisture deprivation) and took a bit of effort to get rid of.

So in summary, almost anything in your bathroom cabinet you can shower with.

Although perhaps not mouthwash.

New video is out - if you want to watch my forehead while I cook a meal, go and watch :)

Tomorrow

The life of a writer carries with it a heady mixture of stress and guilt.  Are you creating right now? Why not? Why are you wasting time not creating? Will you ever create again? Will you ever reach that place (fame, money, satisfaction, whatever it is that you want one day to be yours) that you tell yourself one day you'll get to?

If you are writing, what are you writing? Are you enjoying it? Are you writing something from your soul, or writing something to keep the wolves at bay?

If you have written, is it actually any good or are you just churning out some meaningless drivel that doesn't deserve the time it'll take someone to read it?

Tomorrow.  There's always tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the day that you write it. The piece of work that will elevate you, set you on your path to greatness. Everyone will say how you were discovered because of it. You got that writing job because of it. You're at one of those terribly middle-class evenings, chatting with your other writing acquaintances, supping on vintage wine (as though you'd know the difference) and commenting on the vol-au-vents, blissfully unaware of the other people lurking around the room that would desperately love to talk to you, just for a moment of your time, but your reputation precedes you and they can't even begin to build up the nerve.

Because of it.

So you place all your hopes on tomorrow.  But hope is dangerous, because without a plan, without action, hope is nothing more than a wish.  Hope is buying a lottery ticket. Hope is closing your eyes and running across a busy road as fast as you can.

Meanwhile you're watching repeats of an old TV show you used to like, telling yourself that it's because you need to watch and read to give yourself something to write about, but really it's just because the remote control is at the far end of the sofa.

You tell yourself, you're not going to write today, because you wrote yesterday, or earlier this week, or you are absolutely definitely going to write, but not right now, because you need to do that email, or buy those shoes on Amazon, or just finish just one more level on Candy Crush.

Yet day by day, those tomorrows are running out.

Friendly Advice

So, the other day we went to the mail sorting office in Hull.

This wasn't a day trip, allow me to elucidate, rather it was a journey in order to obtain one of the many parcels that my wife orders, probably of materials needed as part of her burgeoning Etsy shop (www.denkaidesigns.com).  All of the parcels seem to have one thing in common, that being that none of them fit through a letter box, and as the postman carefully times his deliveries to coincide with when no one is in the house, they end up back at the sorting office for me to collect.

Opposite the sorting office is some metal railings, from which you can look down into a muddy bit of the River Hull - back in the day it was probably some form of boat dock, but now it's just a load of mud.  My son decided to have a look through the railings at the muddy water for a minute, and not being in a particular rush, I joined him.

After a couple of seconds of looking at trolleys stuck in the mud (the nearest supermarket must be at least half a mile away - someone must have gone to a lot of effort to dump a trolley here) a helpful voice from behind us broke the silence.

"Excuse me - it's not very clean over there!"

I turned to see a chap addressing us.  I thanked him for his advice, and turned back to my son to tell him that it was about time to go to the sorting office.

The helpful voice sounded again.

"Yeah, I'm talking Weil's disease."

I turned around, surprised that he hadn't walked on, and once again I thanked him for his advice, although it did cross my mind that from the first piece of advice it hadn't been a massive leap of imagination to conjure up the possibility that he had been talking about some sort of infection, so the second piece was, to my mind, superfluous.  Again, I turned back to my son to ask him to come to the sorting office.

And yet, there was more to come.

"I would get his hands washed sharpish if I were you!"

Of course, I'm certain that the fellow was only giving advice in order to protect my son.  A nice gesture.  A helpful human being, by any account.

As a result I didn't even get my son to rub his hands on him, obviously with the man being so concerned with his well being I can only assume he'd be more than happy to have any germs removed by liberally scrubbing my sons hands on his face.  Always think twice before acting, that's what I say.

My activities

Hello!

I've been somewhat quiet recently, mainly due to my wife being halfway across the world and as a result me having a sudden need to do things like household chores and cooking.  Generally things have gone okay, although I have noticed that I've had a tendency to carry out some rather silly actions.  I've summarised them as follows:

Wednesday 26th April - left hob on for several hours, only realising when I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and feeling heat from the hob/oven area.

Thursday 27th April - left my keys in the outside of the door for about six hours, only discovering their location when I was locking up for the night.

Friday 28th - stabbed myself in the hand.

Saturday 29th - stabbed myself in the hand again (different knife though).

Sunday 30th - kneed my son in the face (accidentally)

Monday 1st - got hit in the face by my son, cutting my lip.

Tuesday 2nd - managed to open my car door on the back of my foot, knocking my shoe off.

Wednesday 3rd - burnt my hand on a hot pan, and later that day broke the door frame to the attic door, shoulder barging it open while forgetting that it was bolted shut.

So far since Wednesday I've managed not to do anything stupid, but watch this space...

What I have also been doing however is making a video for my wife's flosstube channel, including my first bit of cross stitch!  Feel free to check it out :)

TableTop Day 2017

TableTop Day 2017 was marked here by a good evening of games, food, and drink, playing some Exploding Kittens followed by 221B Baker Street, the Sherlock Holmes detective game!  Just wanted to post a few pictures:

Me interrogating a manual

Fuelled by beer, the detective sleuths down clues...

Obligatory board shot

Exploding Kittens!

Hopefully I'm trying out some D&D in the not too far distant future, which is something I've always fancied but never actually tried.

While I'm blogging, I'll just mention my wife's Etsy shop, www.denkaidesigns.com - although she's currently away in Australia, I'm keeping things going wrapping and posting orders for her, including these awesome cow freebies with every order :)