After a guy called to my door selling scratch cards for charity, a thought occurred to me. How much would I be happy to pay for one?

I hadn’t much money this particular day but I was going to buy one anyway. My mind suddenly changed, when after inquiring about the price, I was told these scratchys would cost me five euro. Now, maybe I’m just a scabby fucker, but five euro!? Even the guy sitting outside SuperValu every Saturday doesn’t charge that much. Needless to say I refused to buy one and closed my door quickly.

There is another side to this story that made me question why I said no. The charity this man was collecting for was one that worked with alcohol addicted teenagers . Could it be that I’m not very sympathetic to the plight of drink addicted teenagers? Could I just not give a shit about teenagers, sick children maybe, but teenagers no way. No, I concluded I am probably just jealous! (But seriously, isn’t being addicted to alcohol what the teenage years is all about?).

The truth is, if the man said two euro I would definitely have bought one, five euro, forget about it.

I was driving on the motorway yesterday, when I saw something I’d never seen before.

It made me realise that times are changing. The days of letting your child go to the loo on the side of the road are well and truly dead.

It makes me laugh though, I remember being brought on long journeys as a child. I was always warned a hundred times before we set off ‘Go to the toilet’, ‘Have you gone to the toilet?’, ‘Go again just to be sure’. But it never mattered how many times I went, after twenty minutes in the car, I needed to go again.

This lead to the inevitable piss-stop on the side of the road, which consisted of the car door blocking one side of my arse and my mother blocking the other side. I have to admit I never felt any shame, it broke up a long trip anyway!

But yesterday, when I saw a man and a woman emptying a potty on the side of the M7, it just got me thinking. I know parents don’t want their child’s butt put on show, but the last thing you can see driving at 120km’s an hour is a little pink ass. Or maybe people are now so paranoid about paedophiles they think they’re stalking the sides of our motorways with cameras, waiting for a child to stop for a loo break?

I don’t know what’s going on but I have to wonder where we go from here. Maybe the next step is to have a loo built into your car or have a portaloo fixed on to a trailer so it can be brought anywhere.

But the strange thing about what I saw yesterday is that I couldn’t actually see any kids in the car.

Dirty fuckers!

I have just watched the RTE nine o clock news and am now convinced my wariness of their two economic reporters is definitely justified.

The uneasiness I have been experiencing in regards to these guys has been occurring for over a year now. It could also be the result of watching too much RTE news bulletins. But I have heard a few other people remark on this issue too.

Last year, before the ‘economic slowdown’ occurred, these two reporters in particular kept going on and on about how the economy was fucked. It seemed every time I sat down for my lunch one of these doom and gloom guys popped his head up just to piss me off (and put me off my sambo), they were like a tag team. I was always expecting to see something interesting on the news, maybe a segment on a war-torn country or a brutal murder, anything that was news worthy. But no, it was all about our bleak future. They predicted that soon none of us would have an arse in our trousers. A regression back to eighties was suggested,oh the era of second hand clothes and skinny kids would return to prevail once again.

After a while their passion about their predictions began to fascinate me. We all knew that the Celtic tiger was going to get tired and things would start slowing, but we didn’t harp on about it, depressing everyone for miles around. No, I figured these guys were way too fierce in their hope that we all become poor, there had to be something I was missing.

So watching the news tonight has given me the answers I never thought I’d find (at least in my over active mind).

One of the reporters was in the studio to report that scare mongering and false rumors hit the Irish financial world on Paddy’s Day. This made a certain bank lose a lot money causing their shares to fall sharply and thus allowing their shares to be bought up cheaply.

Hmmm, it has suddenly become clear to me, these two reporters been telling us all constantly over the past year that our economy was fucked. Had their relentless end-of-the-world crying really have been a cunning ploy? I had presumed that they had looked so smug lately because their predictions had finally become reality. But now it’s sooo obvious, it was all about the scare mongering! They’re both probably out there right now buying up all the cheap property and stocks they can. By this time next year they’ll be multi-millionaires!

The clever feckers!

I didn’t realise what a God send the laptop was until I had to start using this bloody computer again. It’s just soooooo slow!! Plus I’ve to go upstairs to the freezing and extremely messy spare room every time I want to use it.

I guess I’ve been spoilt with the laptop, our laptop went everywhere around the house. Mr S constantly disappeared into the toilet with it, I sat it on the kitchen table during the day and then brought it into the sitting room later in the evening.

But now its dead, Mr S killed it, and then tried to resuscitate it by taking it apart to fix it himself, and killed it even more.

So my message today is; if you have a laptop, appreciate and look after it, and if you see a know-it-all, I can fix it, man coming towards it with a screwdriver, take your laptop and run away as fast as you can.

Oh, cardboard boxes!

I wrote a blog a while ago about how beds were better than trampolines. Well now I’ve found the best toy of all ‘The Cardboard Box’. O yes I know what my kids will be getting next Christmas; lots of cardboard boxes. All shapes, all sizes, it’ll be the best Christmas ever!

What brings me to this decision is seeing my two boys spend most of today playing with the packaging of our latest big purchase. They coloured in and decorated their new found rocket ships, they pushed each other up and the hall in crazy space battles before deciding to change the purpose altogether and put the rockets over their heads and run manically around the house! I’m also on orders to buy yellow paint tomorrow as one box will be transformed into Spongebob’s head (so we can be set for Halloween).

It’s a good thing they like cardboard boxes though because if this months mortgage isn’t paid they’re going to be seeing a lot more of them!! Hmmm what can I buy that would come in a box big enough to live in?

I feel compelled to write something about those poor Polish fellas that were murdered last week by those little scumbags in Dublin. I, like every other sane person in the country was shocked and disgusted by the violence of the murders. I was left wondering why this type of thing didn’t happen when I was younger. I began to remember what life was like growing up in my house.

There were no angels in my house for sure, but none of us, or anyone I knew, would have ever even contemplated stabbing someone. What makes it so hard to believe is that these kids thought that it was acceptable to do something so horrific. Looking back, it is clear to see that it was definitely my parents that kept me and my brothers on the straight and narrow. We all knew our parents were to be feared! I was never that afraid of the police because, truthfully, they had nothing on my parents. The police couldn’t give you a good kick up the ass (well they weren’t supposed to anyway), they didn’t give you the silent treatment for a week, they didn’t stop you going to the latest teenage disco in the local GAA club. And if for some reason or another any of us did get into trouble, which usually involved one of my brothers fighting, the police were never brought into it. I think it was a mixture of things that never brought the police to our doorstep; luck, a distrust of police, the shame of having a squad car outside our house. But the main reason, I believe is that my parents were determined to discipline and teach respect to their own kids, we were their kids and they would be the ones to deal with us.

Nowadays, there seems to be loads of parents leaving it up to the police to discipline their kids. Is it that parents are just not bothered or is it that kids have actually gotten worse? There has certainly always been rough kids around. When I was a teenager there were always fights between different gangs, schools and towns going on, it was just a part of life. It never went any further than kicking and punching, and certainly no one was ever stabbed. Things have definitely changed, kids need boundaries and they need their parents to put them firmly in their place, not the police.

Just read Kathy Foley’s article about Irish Bloggers in the Sunday Times. I’m glad to find that I’m not an intellectual. It has been a great worry to me in recent times that maybe I suffered from this terrible infliction, but now I can rest easy. I have come to this conclusion because to understand the language she uses in her article, I would need a dictionary.

I’m only new to blogging and I must admit I it’s hard to find the time to write most days. Unfortunately, I’m not a journalist so my day does not revolve around writing and having constant access to a computer. Plus I usually have to wrestle the laptop off Mr.S any time I want to use it.

But imagine if we did all started writing about our individual jobs just like the American examples she uses. You would then have blogs by retailers, hairdressers, accountants, IT workers etc, all talking about their jobs (no one would probably even read anyone else’s blog). Would this not mean that suddenly bloggers would be portrayed as a profession first and their personalities would become non-existent? According to the writer, in America there are ‘blogs on every topic imaginable-from architecture to zoology’, well that’s grand for all those zoologists in the country, all twenty of them. Does Kathy Foley realise that Ireland is a smaller country than America and that all the zoologists here probably know each other? Another point here is that we are not Americans. Might be a fairly obvious point but hey it’s got to be said! But seriously do you really want to start blogging about your job when you get home from work? Or read about someone else’s job? How boring. What I think this particular journalist is missing, which, in turn, is making her miss the point of a lot of blogs, is a sense of humour.

By evening time I find I have read the paper and watched the news, so when I pick up the laptop I’m usually looking for a little light heartedness even if it means making light of serious issues.

So after pondering over this article, I’ve come to a conclusion that maybe, just maybe, she’s pissed off that her blog didn’t win at the awards, and what annoys her most is that she’s soooo much more intellectual than everyone else and she still couldn’t win! It’s gotta hurt!