Rick's b.log - 2013/12/16
It is the 28th of April 2024 You are 13.59.130.130, pleased to meet you!

Happy Birthday to me!

I'm 40.

Too old to look at animated adolescents and be thinking "waifu!"...

For what it's worth - the characters are Nozomi from "Love Live!" (with an interesting Kansai accent), Nae from "Robotics;Notes" (here she is 20, in "Steins;Gate" she was a young child), and the evil Zeniba from "Spirited Away" (Ghibli).

[What were you expecting? Madoka? Too much saccharine...at least until Kyubey turns up, then... well...]

Thanks to John for the email; the wishes on the ROOL forum; and Ewen, Ted, Mary, and Mom for the cards. Mom's was nice, saying that 40 is not too young and not too old. Ewen took it a stage further suggesting as how I'm now 40, I am old enough to watch younger people behaving badly, and yet still young enough to show them how it is done. ☺

I took some Japanese sweets to work. My God, they're an unadventurous lot. For a country famed for eating frogs legs and snails and god-only-knows-what-bit-of-a-pig (all of which can be found in the local supermarket), they seemed unwilling to try something written in squiggles despite containing a bloody great picture of a lemon on the pack (like, almost life size) and smelling of lemon. Gee... Could it possibly taste of... oh, I dunno... melon?
I left some Satsuki flyers, but maybe a rural community isn't the best place to bring Japanese stuff? After all, a disturbing number of people don't know what the next town down the road is because it is in another département. WTF?

[you can buy this product here]

Banged arm

Home, night, lay in bed, propped up on my elbows. AGONY!
Was at the doctor's waiting room for quarter past nine the following morning. After some poking and podding he said it was unlikely to be broken. He gave a prescription for some pills to reduce swelling and a gel, plus six boxes of paracetamol.

I didn't take the pill. It is, in French, "acide tiaprofenique". I was given something similar a few years ago when I had my molars out. It reduces swelling. Unfortunately it caused a strange reaction in me - I almost wet myself on the way home, twice, and peed gallons all day. So I think you can understand why I'll leave that well alone.
I told the chemist to give me one box of paracetamol. Six would last me years.

Now the gel. After a mild "Huh?" moment as I discovered it had Ricin oil in it - I looked it up and that's just a medical term for Castor oil. Anyway. It is a gel. In an aerosol container. You push the nozzle and the gel oozes out. Not as a spray, but as gel.
Is it just me, or is this maybe a little over-engineered? What's wrong with a squeezy tube?

[oooh, squirty gel!]

Animation #3

Your comments:

Rick, 17th December 2013, 20:29

Shock! Horror! Astonishment! Yahoo!    I left a small pile of Satsuki flyers. Today, only three remained.  Maybe everybody associates "Japanese" with "stuff wrapped in seaweed"?  Don't much like the taste of it myself, but for those that do, Satsuki has that covered (duh!): http://www.satsuki.fr/algues.htm

opal, 18th December 2013, 21:17

Happy Birthday, Rick!  Thanks for all this years of interesting and unique writing.  Keep being as young as you are now!