Once Upon A Halloween

If you're not aware, The Whacko Blogs is doing their first ever annual Halloween Ball, and are looking for the best in Halloween fiction, plus a Halloween costumes.  So, I decide that it was about time to take part.

Firstly, my story!

"Unseen"

 It was a dark and stormy night.
 Wind rattled the window panes as he looked out into the darkness.
 Nothing there.
 He turned, to look at the others in the room.  Sure enough, they sat, eating and talking, totally ignoring him as usual.
 He sighed and walked through into the kitchen..
 The kitchen was full of dirty pots and pans, and was unremarkable except for the unusually large amount of sweets sat in a bowl.
 It must be Halloween, he mused, unless it's Christmas and the sweets are for gorging on whilst watching one of those dreadfully nice films.  No, he decided, can't be Christmas - no tree.
 Nothing of interest here.
 Without making the slightest disturbance, in moments he was then sat in a dark pit, surrounded by lumps of dirty coal.
 Now this is the life.  This reminds me of when I was young.  When I was... more active.
 He passed some time, reminiscing in the coal shelter,


 Later on, he went back into the house.  Two of the others were drinking and laughing. whilst the third was at the front door, inviting a small robot and a ghost to help themselves to sweets.
 That isn't a real ghost, he said to himself, I should know what a real ghost is.


 It was the middle of the night.  He sat on one of the beds in the house, next to one of the others while they slept, totally unaware of his presence.
 Time to have a little fun.
 He blew in their ear.  They muttered and shifted in their sleep.
 A few seconds went by - he blew in their other ear.  This time a sleepy hand swung up as the person neatly slapped themselves in the face.
 Laughing at them from only a few inches away, the humans eyes opened and they yelled in shock as they finally saw him - at such a close distance he couldn't be missed.
 "Dammit it Felix!  Okay, I'll feed you!"
 Felix the cat padded through to the kitchen while the human, abandoning sleep, followed them to dish out some cat food.



I hope you enjoyed this story!  And now, here's my Halloween costume.

This is what happens when you decide to take a photo after a beer.  All I can smell is cinnamon.

If you're taking part in either contest let me know in the contests!  For more, check out The Whackos Blog post!

And if you'd like to see me do the proper thing and just eat the damn shower gel...

I tried to defect!

I've had enough.

I've tried for so long to work with Google Chrome.  But I can't put up with it any more.

I love Google Chrome.  I find it more responsive than Internet Explorer, I prefer the user interface, it's by far my preferred browser.  But it has a bug in it.

You see, Chrome comes with a copy of Adobe Flash Player built into it.  If you don't know what Flash is, basically it's a type of code used all over the Internet, best known in the area of animations, sounds and videos, but has spread to do other stuff too.  If you don't have a Flash Player in your internet browser, you'll have problems.

But the problem with Chrome is that it, as well as having a copy of Flash built in, it installs another copy, and the two conflict.

A lot.

As a result, generally what happens is Chrome freezes, and then goes on to freeze my PC, requiring a reboot.  And I've just had enough of it.

And yes, I know the "fix" is to go into chrome://plugins and disable one of the Flash plugins.  I can't get it to work, regardless of whichever one I disable.

So I went to good old Internet Explorer, and put the thoughts of Chrome behind me.

For about two days.

Back on Chrome.

In other less geeky news, my son hasn't been too well this week - he's had a bad cold so we've been dosing him up with a variety of medicines, from an inhaler to antibiotics to ibuprofen and paracetamol.  But of course when he's feeling really sick the last thing he wants is to take medicines.  On Monday we tried to bribe him with chocolate so he would have his ibuprofen.  He actually gave the chocolate back, and I'm sure if he'd had the vocabulary he would have accompanied it with "I might like chocolate, but I'm not going to pay that price!"

What else? Well, I have an insane amount of books to sell, so if anyone wants a huge pile of books, mainly in fairly decent condition, let me know.  Lots of sci-fi, warhammer 40k, quite a few vampiry ones (those are my other halfs let me assure you), some funny books... I've made the decision to sell off my books and make the move to e-books.  There isn't a logical reason to keep the books when I can get the ones I'm actually going to read online, and then access it from whatever phone or tablet I have with me.  I've tried using a variety of online book selling systems, but they all seem to give me rubbish prices for them - I realise that I'm not going to get full price for second hand books, but 50p for a virtually new book (eg read once) that sells for £10 seems too low.  If it was a £1 I'd go for it, but 50p is just too slow.

And keeping on the topic of books, my mum has just written a new one all about Halloween - it's got Halloween games in it, stories, all kinds of stuff about the Samhain festival.  If you want to find out more head over to their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RavenMagical) - if you send them a message on Facebook with your postal address they'll send you a catalogue (they operate in a mail order format) and you even get a free gift with your first order!

Peace and Harmony and video editing

I was watching Peppa Pig with my son the other day, and it was a brilliant episode called International Day.  Basically all the kids at Peppa's playgroup dress up as different countries and start fighting.  Madame Gazelle breaks up the quarrel, saying "Stop quarrelling! Do you think this is how the countries of the world behave?"

I can't help but feel there was a hidden message in that one somewhere :)

It's Halloween (or Samhain indeed)!  And I have a bowl of chocolate in my hallway.  It's been really hard these last few days to let those packets of funsize chocolate treats go uneaten, but we've largely managed.

And now we've only had four kids!  Shocking.  I guess I know what I'm having for breakfast.

(Actually I'll be having marmite on toast I expect - I got a squeezy jar of Marmite at the weekend, it is wonderful!)

After watching What's Up Elle's YouTube channel, I've been really keen to try some of her trademark cloning for myself.  Being a cheapskate - sorry, being someone wanting to achieve value for money - I'm trying to work out how to do it with free software!  I've got half an idea so far with an old version of Windows Movie Maker (Microsoft basically took out a load of features from Windows Movie Maker when it was updated to Windows Live Movie Maker, so the old version is actually more powerful) but I've been messing about with it for quite a while now and I want to get an hour of Birth of the Federation (with the All The Ages mod) in before bedtime.

Currently I'm playing the Ferengi and I've got a nice little corner of the galaxy in my command with a load of minor races under my belt, I've only encountered the Federation so far who are behaving themselves, probably because if push came to shove I think I could take them.