Are Pregnant women sexy?

Well are they?

It’s a tough one isn’t it? Only one person could possibly try and answer a question like “Are pregnant women sexy?” without hiding in a wardrobe…

ME!

Want to know the answer? Click here to go to ‘In The PowderRoom’ and find out. I may be biased but I really do think this one is worth the extra click!

p.s. Kathy and Kristy – I haven’t forgotten you, I’m just a little behind with things at the moment…

10K Run - Training Report #3

The quiet streets suddenly echo at the sounds of my flat feet slapping hard against the tarmac. My shins cry with every landing.

Yes, I’m running again.

Foolishly, I have completely inadequate trainers on.

As I have never in all my life been accused of being either athletic or fashionable, the kind of footwear I use for the gym has never been a concern. Currently, I have two pairs of trainers (if you are reading this from across The Pond you probably call them something else, use Google if you haven’t figured it out yet) and neither of them are what you would call – good ones.

The pair in my gym bag at work is ok. They are very basic Nikes and were in a sale, due to being three years out of season when I bought them, ten years ago. I’m told they would be absolutely fine for playing tennis in, but not much good for running. Who knew there was a difference?

My pair at home, however, is something special. I bought them four years ago in an emergency when we were going on holiday and I’d failed to bring my gym pair. They cost a monumental £5 and were from Asda (To save you ‘Merkins some Google time just call it Wal-Mart). I can assure you they were overpriced. I might was well slip on a Verruca sock for all the use they are. Not only are the souls shallower than Paris Hilton’s but they are almost a full size smaller than whatever the little label stitched into them says they are. In short, they were absolutely fine for playing badminton with my kids at Center Parcs, but running further than the length of my nose in them gets painful.

My toes, curled up against their will, dig into whatever that soft bit of skin is that they join onto and with absolutely no cushioning under me at all, my shins receive the full force of my oversized waistline upon them.

There is no way out of it; I’m going to have to go shopping for some running shoes.

How do you even start with that? What kind of trainers are good for running in? What’s the difference? How do I know if I’m wearing running shoes or tennis shoes? I’m feeling stressed just thinking about it.

But I need something better because I’m hurting. I went out yesterday and ran 7Km and my legs are wrecked, my shins splintered to smithereens. There’s no way I can take a step further than 7K until I have some better footwear on, I’m not even sure I should repeat my current distance in them.  Do any of you sporty readers have any suggestions as to what decent but cheap trainers I can buy and from where?

I’m prepared to hazard a guess that running hasn’t suddenly made me a fashionista but can it be making me an athlete?

Surely not.  

A moment to treasure

The clock silently reveals that the time is two o’clock in the morning but nobody knows that because everybody is sleeping.

Not everyone.

A sixth sense tells your slumbering mind that something has changed. A hand carefully nudges your shoulder to confirm this.

“Dad.” A whispered voice enters your conscience and you slowly open one bleary eye.

“Dad.” There it is again.

Your vision slowly focuses on the young boy standing by your bed.

“I was having a nightmare”

No further words are said. No further words are needed.

You close the eye and pull back the cover.

A small body climbs into the bed and you feel its warmth as it snuggles up into you. You wrap your arms around the child and pull him closer.

Four seconds later, your son is snoring.

Five minutes should be enough.

You wait. You can barely stay awake but you’re quite enjoying the moment. Perhaps another two minutes.

Wordlessly you pull back the duvet and tap his shoulder. He knows what to do, he’s been here before. 

You follow him back to his own bed and tuck him in.

He smiles as you kiss his cheek and is asleep before you can walk through his door.

Being a father can be hard.

But sometimes.

Sometimes.

It really is worth it.

When plumbing goes a little bit crappy

Hello and welcome to a new week, here in Blogland.

How many of you home-owners have ever asked yourself “How hard can it be to change a radiator?” This question is generally asked after ringing around a few plumbers and trying to get a quote. 

Plumbers will never give you a quote over the phone, they have to come and have a look and they are prepared to do that in four weeks’ time as long as you promise to make them a cup of tea.

Plumbers are very strict about this.

This is odd because as far as I’m concerned plumbers are just normal people like you and I, the only difference is that they have a good tool kit.

So eventually you get bored of trying, especially when the only quotes you get seem very steep. How dare anybody charge that much, just to come to your house and swap a radiator over?

It was exactly those two questions above that led me to buy a new-fangled, double-barrelled radiator off the Internet this week and decide to fit it myself. I’d finally caved in after three years of being moaned at. Our bedroom needed a new rad. Every single night (even in the hottest part of Summer) my wife runs through the bedroom adding layer upon layer of entirely unsexy thermal pyjama before bouncing about in the bed like an epileptic fly in a desperate attempt to warm up her zone.

These layers would absolutely not come off which makes certain night time manoeuvres a bit of a challenge. I’d had enough, I had to man up and get plumbing. I do, as it happens, have quite a good toolkit myself.

09:00 Saturday 18^th February

 I’m at the wholesalers buying the last little piece that I need to fix things into place because the radiator is five centimetres narrower than the old one due to the old one being Imperial - apparently. Everything is going fine until I look quizzically at said extension piece and attempt to ask the man behind the counter how it works. He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. I’m just another numpty who thinks he can plumb. He refuses to divulge his trade’s secrets; he is cross enough that he has to let me buy the parts.

09:30

The heating is off and I’ve lugged my toolbox, rags, sheets and new rad up the stairs. The lockshield is uncovered and turned off after carefully marking it and counting the turns (this is apparently important though it has no further bearing in this tale because it seemed to make no difference at all). The other end is turned off manually and with a bowl under the pipe I make my first attempt at unscrewing the nut connecting the radiator to the valve thingy. All that happens is that the pipe starts to bend a bit. This is not necessarily looking good. To rectify this I screw the nut in the other direction to bend the pipe back and the nut starts to loosen. “Interesting” I say to myself, “The screw turns that way does it?”

Water comes into the story about now – lots of it.

I managed to get about a quarter of the water that had been in the radiator into a bowl, I’m not entirely sure where the rest went. Slowly, but surely, the radiator emptied.

10:30

I proudly walk through the kitchen and out into the back yard carrying the old radiator. I display my prize like a prehistoric hunter showing his family the Mammoth that he has caught for their lunch. With the radiator deposited outside, I return to the fold to demand my first cup of tea because I’m a plumber now and there are rules.

11:30

I give up trying to get the old ‘tail’ out of the radiator in a huff. Kiss clever wife who happens to know where there is a different plumber shop that I can go to in order to buy new ones from, so that I don’t have to face the wholesalers again.

12:30

Lunch. Sausage sandwiches. Tea. Nice.

13:30

Discover that there was one measurement that I had overlooked.

14:30

I finally finish bending and smacking pipes and crack a wry smile as I realise that the big switch-on has arrived at the same time that my In-Laws arrive. What a chance to earn some serious points? Stand by to be impressed folks.

14:45

Mother-In-Law shouts up from the lounge below where I am frantically trying to stop the cascading fountain of water – “There seems to be some water coming through the ceiling!”

There was.

But not a lot, thankfully.

I manage to stem the flow and empty out the radiator. Thankfully it was just bad plumbing, the pipes weren’t split. I remake the joints and refill the radiator.

Then I turn the water off and empty the radiator again because the joints are still leaking.

17:30

Jo returns home from a Zumbathon (don’t ask) excitedly skipping out of the car at the thought of the lovely house she was about to walk into. She stops. She sighs. Inside the lounge window is an orange bucket and a load of towels. This, she thinks, does not look promising.

18:30

We have a bedroom radiator that is hot and, on the whole, not leaking. I start tidying up, tip-toeing carefully past the rad.

I’d spent all day and almost wrecked the lounge ceiling (got away with that one as it was only a small amount of water that had seeped through the very edge by the wall). I was knackered. The kids were at their Grandma’s as she had stepped up and rescued them from boredom.

Suddenly it becomes clear why plumbers charge what they do. At the end of the day they earn their pay.

Maybe plumbers aren’t just like you and I with a toolkit after all.

Plumbers are just people like you and I but with a good toolkit AND they know how to use it. That knowledge is worth paying for.

The bedroom is properly tropical warm though – Jo keeps walking around it in just the two layers, showing off.

In search of truth - which you probably can't handle.

Quote of the day and a little Friday quiz for you.

We were in the lift, heading back to the office after a session in the gym.

My mate sheepishly gets my attention – a worried look on his face. Very worried.

And this is what he asked me – I’ll leave you to ponder your own answers over the weekend. His tone and manner exuded fear and confusion. 

“Glen… is it gay - do you think - that in the gym’s changing rooms, when I looked over at some fella getting changed and he spotted me, that he then sucked in his stomach a bit and squared his shoulders off?”

My friend’s disgusted face scowled as he demonstrated.

I wasn’t the only person in the lift stifling giggles at this point.

Yes mate – there is an element of gayness to that story, I’m just not entirely decided on who the gayer or the gayee was yet.

I’ll give you until Monday afternoon to make with the ‘Chocolate Hobnobs’ before I decide and accidentally out you.

In other news…

As if a Friday post of mild homophobia wasn’t bad enough, you should have seen the Google searches I found myself doing yesterday, when I was writing a ‘Regular Guy’ post about pregnancy scheduled for later in the month.

First of all I’d searched for “name of fetish for pregnant women” (maiesiophilia), and then I decided to double check a spelling and ensure I had the right drug in mind, so I Googled ‘Rohypnol’. This all makes sense within the context of the article (I think) but I can see how to the untrained eye (or more worryingly the trained one) it could look peculiar.

It occurred to me that the Internet police would be having alarm bells ringing in their office at this point so to throw them off the scent I followed that up by entering “cheap rope”, “handcuffs” and “how to convert your cellar into a dungeon”. That should keep them off my back.

I’d rather they thought I was some kind of pshyco than a blogger that can’t spell.