I wonder if budget airlines hate families because children create too much work for airline flight crews onboard their planes.  Perhaps they don’t like cleaning up the sticky messes that seem to follow young children, or the crying that can be heard over the noisy budget aircraft engines, whatever it is the budget airlines seem to be really targeting those with families as a source of additional funds.

Recently I was flying with two budget airlines, Easy Jet and Ryan Air – of the two Easy Jet is usually the nearest to a professional flight crew with their onboard staff friendly, polite and even helpful (not something always to be said about Ryan Air crew) – and with me on the trip were my two young children and partner.  Anyone with any experience of young children knows that it’s impossible to travel light, so the baggage restrictions required additional payment for checked in luggage before we even left home.  Once at the airport we were met with making a decision about whether or not to purchase priority boarding passes which would allow us to board the plane with anyone else who had such a pass rather than wait at the back with those who didn’t.  It’s bad enough that parents have to buy these, but what’s worse is that they even charge you for the children to have them.  Surely it would be more customer friendly to have them provided free of charge for children under 10 if they are accompanied by a priority boarding pass holder.  I guess customer friendly does not translate well in terms of profit. 

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The amount of priority boarders on our flights far outnumbered the travellers who chose to just take their chances once the priority travellers were seated.  This means that if we hadn’t of paid the additional fees, we would have risked being separated throughout the plane journey.  Isn’t it stressful enough for parents flying with young children without adding separation anxiety to the equation?

Apart from paying for the children, who couldn’t be left in the airport alone if we had decided to just pay for adults and not the children (hence the place where they have a stranglehold over the additional costs that families must pay), my main complaint about this new way of creating additional income doesn’t actually benefit all the travellers.  Getting through a packed departure lounge with young children is quite a feat of physical and mental agility, so the chances of being near the front of the boarding line were minimal.  Because the children are young and needed assistance on steep airport stairs out to the aircraft, not to mention the distance we had to walk to the plane and helping the children board the plane, there were a number of people who were not priority boarders who just rushed past ourselves and other parents who also had small children or babies.  If the airlines must screw as much money out of easy targets like parents, why can’t they at least have the decency to give those parents time to board their children safely before allowing non-priority boarding passengers through to the aircraft? 

I love to travel and believe it’s one of the best forms of education that I can give my children, but if the budget airlines are going to continue to penalize families, it’s going to be cheaper to travel by regular airlines because their cheaper children’s fares, more generous luggage allowance, plus small children being automatically priority boarders will make it a better choice both in terms of finance, and stress.

Living with someone is never easy.

Living with someone who doesn’t have the same standards of courtesy and common decency is extremely taxing.

For example, I had been on a family vacation to Australia. I had a wonderful time with my family – and my partner even came along. The holiday was time well spent, as I have not seen much of my parents in the past few years and my partner enjoyed being out of the country for the first time.

During our Australian visit, we took a tour of the Yarra Wine Valley, as my parents (and my partner’s parents both enjoy wine). Along the route, we stopped at several small vineyards, most of which do not have American distributors. I enjoyed some fantastic wine and even learned how to taste distinct flavors. (Let me just tell you, tasting pepper in a cabernet sauvignon was a REAL shock!)

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At any rate, I purchased a bottle of crisp, oaky white wine from a small family-owned vineyard. It was an AMAZING bottle! And a lovely reminder of how much fun I had with my family and my partner that day.

Upon returning to the States, I placed my bottle of wine on the wine rack in my apartment. The wine rack usually holds olive oil and a pepper grinder. My household doesn’t usually consume wine, but favors beer and mixed drinks. Occasionally, one might find a cheap bottle of wine on the rack, but not often. At any rate, after I placed the bottle on the rack, I pointed it out to my roommate and said, “Hey, this was a fantastic bottle of wine. I am going to give it to my partner’s parents as a wedding anniversary gift.” My roommate agreed that was a fine idea.

Not long after that (we’re talking less than a month), I woke up one morning feeling a bit thirsty, so I went to the refrigerator to get the water pitcher. BUT WHAT DID I SEE?!?!?!?! A VERY, VERY, +VERY+ EXPENSIVE BOTTLE OF UN-IMPORTABLE ++OPENED++ PARTIALLY CONSUMED, AUSTRALIAN WINE SITTING NEXT TO THE WATER PITCHER!!!!!!

At that point, it was about 6am. My roommate had been out the previous day consuming mass amounts of cheap alcohol (as my roommate is wont to do on weekends) and was probably feeling particularly hung-over that morning. I knew my roomie was in bed and probably not exactly awake. So, I screamed at the top of my lungs several profanities, which I strung together in a most unmannerly way and punctuated each phrase with a guttural scream. I am quite sure each screamed punctuation pierced through my roommate’s head. I felt much better after that and I am not sorry I gave my roomie a severe headache.

Now I have to go shopping for another present to give to my partner’s parents.

It will never be comparable.

And I could just KICK my roommate in the shins. Hard. REALLY HARD.

It’s coming up to the end of the year and I’m starting to look back on what I’ve accomplished during 2007, and have I done all that I hoped I would.  Fat chance!  Well there are some areas where I have done really well, especially in the professional field where I’ve now managed to create a nice little freelance niche and finally I’m starting to get paid for my efforts.  Ok, so there’s still some work to do in that area in terms of increasing the financial reward for my work, but it’s coming along nicely. 

My boys are doing well, developing more or less as they should into little people.  Neither of them can read but one knows his alphabet and the other is starting to read short words.  Both of them are verbally bi-lingual and both can count to the age appropriate amounts in both languages.  They can even put their laundry where it needs to go – this is probably one of my major accomplishments of the entire year!  I’m still happily married to my partner so I guess that part of life is also going well!

Where the wheel seems to fall off my achievement wagon is in the self-improvement area, particularly the weight lose and taking care of self bits.  I have lost some weight this year, more than any other year, but still nowhere near what I’d hoped to.  In the rundown to Christmas I have no illusions of losing more weight, instead I’m just going to try and do the best I can not to gain weight and put the weight loss dream on hold until the New Year.  As far as taking care of myself is concerned, I think that’s a pretty big failure and something I must address in the New Year.  All of these self-improvement books and programmes telling parents to put themselves first are all very well, but they do make those of us who try but always seem to manage to still come last when it comes down to how much time is left for how much needs to be done feel like we’re doing a lousy job.  Next year I swear I’m going to find time to put make sure my socks match every morning and start to feel like a professional person should, instead of dragging a comb through my hair as I zip up one jacket and push two kids and a partner out the door every day!

Ok so I know they don’t have anything against me personally, it’s more of general hatred of parents!  Nor is this financial destruction of parents confined to Disney (but in my case, Disney is a major offender!)! Yesterday I was out Christmas shopping and as the mother of two little boys I was obviously wandering around a lot of toy stores, Christmas wish lists in hand.  

My attention was grabbed by some pretty faerie dolls and some glitzy pink princess stuff, but unfortunately nothing anywhere close was on the lists – but I did note a rather nice collectable Barbie that I thought would look nice in my collection and thought that if my funds lasted that far, perhaps I could treat myself to a Christmas present this year.  After-all I reasoned, the lists aren’t too long.

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Mental note to self, financial cost of items is not relative to length of list!  I soon realized that merchandisers have turned Christmas shopping for kids into a nightmare.  Now I love Christmas, I love the tinsel and the carols, I even love the shopping and wrapping.  But I draw the line at paying £10 for something that costs £5 if it isn’t associated with a movie or TV programme.  Problem is, when it’s on your child’s list in blue crayon and underlined 3 times – drawing the line is a fantasy and you pay the £10.  I wonder if merchandisers have children.  I wish them at least a half dozen so they get the message about what their marketing does to stress levels on a parent struggling to make Christmas wishes come true on a fixed and limited budget!

I wandered through aisles and aisles of cars and trains picking up this, putting down that and eventually realized that I wasn’t going to get the 2 major items on the list from that store so bought what I had and trudged to the checkout.  There a non-cheery assistant shoved my purchases in a bag and demanded the right amount of money whilst mumbling that she was too busy to check with another one of their branches if they had the missing items I was looking for in stock, and ignoring the way I wished her a merry Christmas through clenched teeth!

Three stores (not connected to the first store – if they can’t be bothered to make a call, they aren’t getting my £50!) later I had another beef with the merchandisers.  Why is it necessary to make a big commercial ding-dong about an item, and then have it in short supply?  Huh?  If you’re going to spend all that money on advertising, then at least spend the money to make sure there’s enough of them around!  I did get one item eventually, thanks to one helpful store ringing around several branches and locating me one in a nearby town, and the other, well that’s going to be left for another day when perhaps I’ll have found my Christmas spirit which is currently lost in a pile of receipts in a bag in the closet!  Oh, and unless there really is a Santa, the Barbie doll doesn’t seem to have any chance of coming my way any time soon either!

What has our schooling taught us.  After spending the best part of at least eleven years sitting in classrooms, bored out of our minds, what skills have been passed down from the curriculum into our tiny minds in order to help our lives in the twenty-first century?  Have I used Algebra or Pythagorus recently?  No.  Or have I been dissecting Handel’s ‘The Messiah’ in order to further my job prospects?  Mmm.  Or do the internal workings of the worm provide me the practical knowledge in which to carry out basic tasks?  Er…

That is the problem with school.  So many of us were taught so many subjects with theories that can lift off any household’s roof with hot air.  But how many of us were taught anything of practical value.  How about trying to make a healthy and tasty meal on a minimal budget?  How about the basic workings of a car or replacing the tap on a bathroom sink?  Actually, was anything that would have been of immense practical use to our modern lives ever taught to us in school?  All I can remember is irrelevance and boredom.

Just think how much richer my life would be with the knowledge of successful cooking.  How much cheaper my repair bills would be when my car needs to be serviced?  And imagine not having to panic when my toilet overflows.  But no, instead I was taught how to use a pipette in the chemistry lab.  Wow, the practicalities allows me to use a bottle of eye drops properly, it was worth that one hour of my life.

And so today, my house is a tip, my car does not run properly and a boiled egg is a treat beyond my own means.  But if you want to work out the square root of the hypotenuse, I am your star pupil!

Warning: The following post contains monopoly, a man killed over a play station and a cook.

I had an argument whilst playing a board game the other day. I was playing something called settlers – it’s a board game that’s a cross between monopoly and Risk. Anyway, I made a deal with one of the other players and I used a loophole to try and win the game. He said it meant I had lied, I said that by the letter of the wording I was fully within my rights as a player to do it. The argument got rather heated… but nothing like what happened to this other guy.

This guy called Paul McDonald got killed by his friend in an argument over a playstation. I kid you not! Check out the source here – strange world and strange people one killed over row on playstation game. Serious. Now I remember having playing lord of the rings risk (the boardgame) and being double crossed by this girl (more…)

We all remember cartoons and television programs that we watched in our youth. We sometimes think about them and occasionally when catching up with old friends they come up in conversation and we might talk about how good they were. However, have you ever watched an old childhood favourite show? Be very careful  before doing so, you may ruin some very happy memories! I used to watch a show called “Cities of Gold” an adventure tale of some kids seeking the lost citys of gold and the main child’s father. It was brilliant! Complicated plotline, intricate story turns and detail, and good dialogue. I watched it again as an adult and oh my word! It was so SLOW! I was shocked! I remembered it as being a high powered fast paced action filled cartoon – it really wasn’t, I just felt that way about it at the time.

As a youngster my opinions of things were so different to how they are now, and those changes in me mean that the show will never be as good now as it was then.

The message of this then? Don’t go and watch anything you idolised as a child once you are a child no longer, you’ll only ruin your memories of it. (I am told the exception to this rule is something called “Jason and the wheeled Warriors” apparently)

Till you have to renew it, I never realised how much hastle and expensive renewing your passport can be! I mean…. I already have a passport, but its coming up to expire and I wanted to get it sorted now as many countries won’t let you enter if you have less than six months left on your passport. So I got all the documents, filled it out, had my photo’s done at a photo machine inside an airport and took it all to the post office. It turns out the photos I had done are NOT passport standard! I tried to have another done in the automated machine insdie the post office and they came out bum too! In the end I went down to the Chemist where it is done by a human and they came out fine. It really makes me think, a machine still can’t do things as well as a human perhaps. Also the passport office are really strict! If you are having a passport from scratch as of April 2007 it can take up to 6 weeks and you can be called in for an interview before they issue you with one. Serious. So if you are going on holiday, make sure you get your passport done in plenty of time, otherwise it may end up costing a lot of money and possibly your holiday. As it is it costs £66. Happy holidays!

I think one of the things about going traveling to exotic places is companionship. Imagine making it to a deserted island, with white sand and palm trees - beautiful. Now imagine having no one to share it with. Those places in the sun that are advertised on the TV are always advertised with couples, never with singles. Why? Because for humans it is so important to have someone by your side to validate our lives, someone to bear witness and make that which is possibly only in our field of experience real by having someone to share it with.

I think this probably all a little too much for a post that started out as me thinking about going on holiday, but I think it's true. I think it is why we seek long term companionship, for that person who was there 10/20/50years ago can remember our memories with us.

Wendy is going to drive me crazy one day, keeps asking if we can do anything extra with the acne treatment page.
ARGH!!! One of these days I'm going to… Hai Ram! I think what I need to do, is win the lottery next week, aye!?

"Tick tock, Tick Tock, Goes the Clock!"

"I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!"

I remember through my childhood being brought up on a wealth of children’s stories and fairy tales. Not just English ones either, ones from Africa and alot from India. The Indian tales were my favorite; they had so many 'cool gods' as I used to say! Flying monkeys, blue men with many arms that rode on the backs of cows, frightening turtles! I loved those stories more than any other. The thing which tickled me more than anything else though was when I became older and began reading science fiction, was the stories of time. Arthur C Clarke did one of my favourate. Looking back though, I think that the reason was because in my early years of listening to stories, time was always a major element of the plot line. Characters didn't have enough of it, or it had already passed them by or…. it goes on and on.

I think it is all a reminder for real life. We have only a certain amount of time in our lives. I think it important that we use it well and wisely… Actually foolishly too, but as long as it is actively used and not simply let to pass through our fingers.

They do this thing called accent treatment at this clinic which we now get discounts

at by our workplace. Great. Just what I wanted. Well lets face it, we can't all be as beautiful as I am!