Sunday Round-Up #5

I’m a little surprised I managed to make it to number five..

My abstract distraction this week is :

Takeaway food. My usual meal preparers are away at the moment, so rather than cook things myself I’ve been ordering dinner every night. And if I eat breakfast or lunch it tends to all be bought from the local Spar or Centra. Very unhealthy, quite expensive, but my god, it’s good.

Something that made me laugh this week :

This post by Twenty Major. This guy is simply hilarious, but a post all about whether or not to take a shit while waiting for someone to arrive? You can’t beat that sort of material. There really should be more posts on this topic in the blogosphere.

Curses on :

The ridiculous amount of people stopping to ask me for directions this week. I think I’ve had more people ask me for directions in this week alone than the rest of my life. Am I giving off some aura of local knowledge or something?

Bear in mind that I always have earphones in while walking, so why is it that old people never seem to notice this? Instead of tipping me on the shoulder or making a gesture to remove the earphones, they just start talking to me. I then have to ensure they’re actually trying to talk to me, remove my earphones, apologise (for minding my own fucking business), and ask them to repeat what they said. Then I have to explain that I’m a geographical ignoramus, and have no clue about directions. As an example of this, just a few weeks ago I learned what street O’Connell street is in Dublin city centre. I live just one bus ride from the city centre. And who taught me this little lesson? My friend from Wexford.

Also, curses on my laptop for breaking. The bastard screen was dodgy and flickering for quite a while, and it finally reached the point that I could no longer use it. I was told it would cost over €300 to fix it, so bollocks to that, the whole thing itself is probably not even worth that.

I’m pleased with :

My new laptop! Oh, she’s nice. When in the local computer place after they told me they couldn’t fix my old laptop, I told them I was interested in getting a new one. (This was an understatement, I was absolutely desperate to get a new one, I need it for work).

“What sorta thing are you looking for?”

“Well I was looking at the ones you have over there, they’re way too low spec for my liking, I need a minimum 3gb of RAM”

“Oh right” - At this point they realised I was a bit of a nerd and stopped treating me like the common computer illiterate fool, I love when this happens.

“I was looking online, you know laptopsdirect.ie? They’ve some good machines at good prices. “

“Yeah? What kinda stuff then? We could probably match it, or at least upgrade the ones you see there”

“Yeah, some good ones for around €700, we’re talking 250gb Hard-Drive, 3gb RAM, you know…I mean, I’d rather buy from here, local business, y’know?” (This was a lie, I couldn’t give a bollocks)

“Well we got this machine in the back here, let me have a look at the spec for you”

Basically, they admitted to me later that once someone comes in and sort of knows their stuff, they’re going to get a better deal. When people come in and don’t have a clue, they’re liable to pay over the odds for some piece of crap. They took in my old laptop for parts, but put the old hard-drive in a caddy for me, so it’s now being used as an external, and I keep all my data. I got money off my new laptop (apparently) for those parts though, which I was happy with, as the thing would only have been dumped on a shelf and forgotten about.

Anyway, I’ll make a proper post about the new laptop soon, as I’m not arsed putting it all in here, and it deserves a post of its own.

A pointless anecdote from this week :

There I am, on the bus. I put a bit of ‘Faith No More’ on my iPod, and start getting in the mood to listen to some heavy stuff. I think to myself, after this song I’ll stick on some ‘Children Of Bodom’. That’ll be grand.

I then look out the window and see some kid sitting at a bus stop, as emo as they come. Skinny jeans, stupid looking bright coloured shoes, proper emo fringe covering half his face. This annoyed me. I normally try to avoid judging by people’s clothes, but the whole emo thing on males just gets on my tits. I notice he’s wearing a band hoodie. Wonder what shitty band he’s sporting on his chest then?

I look down and he’s wearing a ‘Children Of Bodom’ hoodie. Bollocks.

Great guy/gal of this week :

The guy who made my lunch on Friday. On my way back from work there’s this shop that closes at 5pm, is pretty small, and generally looks like one of those cute, home-run shops. I get breakfast there the odd time, as they have hot deli food.

So about 4pm I head in after work, and it’s just the owner left working ( I do actually know it’s the owner), so they must not get much business around now. All the food girls are gone, and it looks like they’re closing down the deli.

“Am I too late to get a roll made, mate?” I say.

“Ah I’ll make you one up” He says, while looking around, making sure the place is empty.

There’s sausages, bacon, and pudding left over. Oh yes, I’ll have that. Haven’t had a breakfast roll in ages.

He clearly wasn’t comfortable doing this sort of thing, and while in the middle of making it, other people came in to the shop and had to wait, so he really was the only one left working. I expected a rushed, messy, crappy-ass roll, with stuff falling everywhere with every bite.

Oh how wrong I was.

It was fucking incredible. I don’t smoke but fuck me, I needed a cigarette after that roll.

Shop owner who made that roll <3

Product/Service I like this week :

Who knew you could order dominos pizza online? No more dealing with fools on the phone that speak no English and make you repeat your address and order again and again. Beautiful.

A quote :

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book

-Groucho Marx.

Thanks to Helena for that one.

And finally,

Favourite song this week :

Hibernation Statement - by The Redneck Manifesto.

One of my favourite bands, who are criminally underrated. They’re from Dublin, and have quite a few albums out, but these can be hard to find. The final one I got was found in a second hand cd shop, which I only went into while waiting for someone. I couldn’t believe my luck.

They’re yet another instrumental band, and I saw them live last December. They’re kind of “chill out” for me, but some songs can be quite heavy at times. The video for this song is brilliant too.

Enjoy.

I wanted to have this post published earlier, but alas, I have a hangover. Enough said.

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