YOU'VE RUINED MY LIFE

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

Picasso is wrong. All the time I'm wondering "Why the fuck is it doing that?".

after a lot of dicking around and a fair bit of putting it off, what with having a new baby and stuff, i finally have a motorbike licence.

now all i need is a few thousand spare euros for a nice big fast plastic bike...and i don't mean one of those piece-of-shit old-man touring bikes like you ride k? i mean, like, something with exup or ninja or destroyer-of-worlds in it's name.

we spent most of today at the beach and had a lovely little sea-food lunch in a taverna by the sea. i have a proper little english-boy tan...my neck and shoulders are kinda (very) pink with white bits where my vest was...time to start wearing sun-block again i think.

then we came back to naoussa and went to the park so iolanthe could see the baby ducks which have just hatched, where she fell under one of the town taps (we have these tap thingies spewing water all over town) and got soaked (and very unhappy).

now, nearly 7 hours later, iolanthe is asleep, dylan has finally finished screaming the house down and has also gone to sleep, and i'm off to cover wife in baby oil.

g'night xxx

wiping your arse takes less time than removing all the stickers which were left on your leg while you were taking the shit.

so, um, now we have two.

little dylan rocked up this morning...i'm very tired now, need some sleep. more piccies later.

xxx 

i had one of my wisdom teeth pulled out this morning.

all good, but wifey says i have to relax for a bit longer so it doesn't start spurting blood...something about my blood pressure going up if i'm running around with a baby on my arm...

it's been 2 hours since i dropped the baby off upstairs with the in-laws and i don't know what to do with myself. i don't remember when i last had this much time to fill any way i wanted.

problem is, it's pissing down with rain...so that rules out a lot. wife doesn't really want me to drive for a bit longer which rules out pretty much everything else.

plus i want a chocolate bar, which will probably get stuck inside the hole where the tooth was or bust open the stitch...and a cigarette but my mouth is still numb so i'd have to hold my lips around it with my fingers and it all just gets too complicated...

since the sun came back out this year i'm spending more and more of the day outside. i'm not complaining which is just as well since i'm not given any say in the matter.

i spent my afternoon in the park with our daughter, the human lawn-mower, who spent most of her time ripping up daisies accompanied by a relentless chorus of "all done...all done...all done...all done...all done...all done" as she ripped them out of the ground and tossed them to one side.

when she wasn't ridding our little park of daisies, she was harrasing the peacocks.

i have a hard life... 

this week it's carnival here...

this means everyone gets drunk and dances in the middle of the fucking road when i'm trying to drive or ride somewhere.

i love it. no really, i do.

i've decided that i should really get a motorbike licence...seeing as we have a motorbike and all that.

however, we have a 50cc twist-and-go, but if i'm getting a licence at all i may as well get one for any size bike. so tomorrow i'm off for my first lesson on a 600cc, or a 650cc...i'm not sure - it's big and plastic and unfortunately it's bright orange...but it's a bit faster than ours.

should be fun...although the bastards will probably just have me going in and out of cones in 1st gear...

• uh-oh, i think i smell a poo
• no, that was me. that was why i closed the window...to keep the smell in for maximum effect

they're fucking crooks too.

i swear to god, we could not find a mechanic anywhere with enough brain cells to remove a broken bolt with a reverse tap and i have no idea how to get hold of one around here...in the end the car ended up with a new wheel hub thingy...ya know, the bit you bolt the wheel to...250 euros! (plus the 70 for the new tyre which had absolutely no business going pop just because i slammed it into a pothole) i didn't pay for it so i not care very much but still, jesus. they did at least have the part shipped up from athens and fitted to the car in less than 24 hours though.

anyway, the nice lady from eurobank approved our HP application so we're getting a suzuki sx4...paperwork is being sorted out now and the car should be ready to pick up in about 2 weeks.

YAY!

this very good. this mean i soon not have to drive that piece of shit mercedes ever again!

very tired now, must go to sleep. going to thessaloniki tomorrow for a trade show. 

i could write an essay on all the things i hate about mercedes. i now have one more item on the list.

we're getting a new car soon so i'm caring less and less about the one we're currently driving, which belongs to my brother-in-law who now lives in hong kong. so anyway the other day i decided to do a bit of off-roading to amuse the baby. 5 mins later i was out of the car changing a wheel after blowing out one of the front tyres.

yesterday i dropped off the fucked tyre to the little man who deals with these things, and today i went to get it back. now, it turns out that some fucktard at mercedes decided that it made perfect sense for the spare wheel to take shorter wheel nuts to hold it on (wtf), only i didn't know that...not my car and all that. it also turns out that the standard (too long) nuts go in really easily on the spare rim...they just don't come out again.

when the little man tried to take the spare wheel off the car with a wheel gun, two of the nuts got stuck halfway out and one of them snapped in half, leaving two just barely holding the wheel on.

now i have to take it to a fucking mercedes garage to get the broken bolt drilled out. it's already cost us 70 euros to fix the blow-out, plus god knows what to get the bolt removed...all on a car we intend to be selling in about 2 weeks. chuffed...

wow.

i saw this video on fazed. genuinely touching...i just hope that we manage to raise our kids to be even half as appreciative and understanding of the value of money and what it takes to earn it. i'll be very happy if we do.

then someone linked to this. meet audrey...the spoilt little shit who's mother ruined her 15th birthday party and her entire life by giving her a lexus. nothing pleased me more than seeing the mother send that car right back again...bet your fucking ass i'd have done the same thing just as quickly. asshole child.

nothing like waking up knackered and jet-lagged then driving a couple of hundred km to really finish you off.

back from england now. it rains too much in england. plus everything is too fucking expensive. it's good to be home. although i did do some nice shopping. some books and dvds and a router (the wood kind). and a nail gun, ya know, just...because :-)

ooh and i got a copy of vista, so we now have windows in english which is just fucking delicious...there is soooo much software which either doesn't install or doesn't work properly on localised copies of windows...these fuckers should be ashamed of themselves...a lot of the time it's big companies too who should really know better. not mentioning any names... but adobe are a bunch of asshats...

went to thessaloniki today for another ultrasound scan which was all fine.

blah...too tired for this now. still haven't gotten ourselves or the baby back into a proper sleep routine. speaking of which, wife can hear iolanthe upstairs terrorising pappou...i should really go and get her before she kills the poor old man from a heart attack... 

yesterday night, wife was getting iolanthe undressed to put her in the bath, and we found 1 hong kong dollar in her nappy.

i mean, it hadn't you know, been through the baby or anything, but still, there it was in her nappy.

and no, we have no fucking idea how it got there. 

iolanthe is nearly 18 months old now.

she refers to certain people by name. mama (that'd be wife), pappou (greek for grandad), yiayia (grandma)...they all get refered to by name.

me? so far she's just been yelling "ELA!" which in this context basically means OI! i mean, linguistically, it's about as close as a baby can get to shouting "OI CUNT, GET IN HERE AND FEED ME!".

but yesterday, for my birthday, she started calling me daddy... :-D

w00t !!

i know it's new years day today, but in greece, that's when santa brings presents, and it snowed its ass off today.

one problem though, they say in greece, that whatever you're doing at midnight as the year changes, you'll be doing for the rest of the year...it's traditional to be playing cards at midnight (and winning) so you're making money all year round. i was rocking the baby to sleep. doh!

btw, public service announcement...you know those little chocolate filled croissants you get in the supermarket? go and put them in your toastie maker. yes now. that is all. oh, and happy new year !!

do we have any syrup?
what???
you know, like maple syrup or golden syrup...
to put on your omelette???
yeah, never mind, i'll just use honey and philadelphia...

so we had another scan, and it turns out we're having a baby boy!

and he's going to be called dylan joseph. 

i now finally have a driving licence. and i'm only 32.

i've repressed most of the aggravation involved in getting the paperwork sorted out so i could get a greek licence...right now i just remember how easy it was to pass the test.

in greece you have to do 15 hours of lessons before you can sit your driving test. this turned out to be very handy...the roads here were not designed for cars...like i said before, in a lot of the little towns and villages, the roads were built before people had cars so having to spend 15 hours getting used to driving here proved to be very useful indeed.

the actual test was very easy...it was about 10 mins long and only included a 3-point-turn, a reverse-round-a-corner and reverse-parking. i seem to remember the english test having more in it, although a quick check on the dvla website seems to suggest otherwise, apart from it being about 40 mins long...that said, if i'd taken it in england, i'd have been doing it in london...bleugh...i had staples corner roundabout on the test-route they used the most from our (then) local test centre.

next up is a motorbike licence. we're going to england in january so i'll start that when we get back. and it's going to be a licence for a big bike...hopefully in the next 12-18 months we can afford something a bit bigger for daddy...i'm currently riding wifey's little 50cc twist-and-go :-)