While we are on the subject of barefaced spam scams here is one from a company called e-page

I consider myself a hardened woman when it comes to Internet scams.

I have sneered at offers arriving via Myspace, suggesting that I come and sing at a wedding in Nigeria (and by the way can I give them my paypal details so that they can forward my expenses).

Would I like to invest in a rock solid company based near the Goldcoast...? Er, no.

But this is the first time I have received hardcopy spam!

Just look at this bill that a company has sent me (for the second time in four months).

It is supposed to be payment for my inclusion in a professional on-line directory. It is clever..I could have inadvertantly clicked on something whilst surfing, I told myself.

But surely not for nearly 300 euros!

Then I found the small print (next to the red smear!) They say it is facultative which presumably means that they cannot be held to account legally. I note that they have a toll paying phone line for when the victims try to phone up and ask to cancel something they didnt ask for in the first place.

The loneliness of the long distance cyclist

Here is Darling D performing one of her own songs with her trio.

It was at a cyclists' convention, and their performance followed a rather long film in a rather cold hall about next year's race...and my chair was rather hard...

Just as well they were worth waiting for.

spam fritters

Ok, I give in. I am now getting an average of two spamming comments a day, sometimes in chinese, mostly without any sense (even business...). They are usually right back in old posts that people are most unlikely to visit. If anyone can tell me what these spammers have to gain, I would like to know. However, you will have to tell me using word verification now! Sorry.

But it is just taking too much time to follow these idiots round and sweep up their droppings.

Quiet time with the autistic musicians this morning. We tinkled some fairy bells and pressed hundreds of buttons on the keyboard and suddenly Ode to Joy pumped out majestically much to our surprise and delight. There are many new surprises stored in that keyboard. I am quite enjoying not knowing how it works. And another busy time this weekend with a two day workshop on SOUL MUSIC.

Do you like good music? Yeah yeah!

No nose is bad news

At last. I got to see my autistic musicians again this week.

Last week didn’t really count. I managed to get there after sliding up and down hills with Mysweet driving me in his car because my own is too silly for country ice (heavy, rear wheel drive, and automatic- a very old Mercedes which would not be worth repairing, no matter how slight the damage!) We then turned round and came straight back home again because the school was in chaos, having just re-opened and most of the students not being there.

So I looked forward to this Thursday with mixed feelings.

I have lost the boy with the red hair for an indefinite period. His behaviour is out of control and violent now, and he is in hospital. I am told that this is a phenomenon which is often seen here at his age. Adolescence and the surging of hormones are difficult enough to deal with no matter where you are on the autistic spectrum. The effects here seem to be more dramatic.

But still awaiting me was the boy who makes a sound like a chainsaw. He has become the boy who eats everything. And I mean everything. You cannot turn your back on him. He has tried the paint on a car parked unwisely outside the music room. Anything that is small enough to get in his mouth or soft enough to be bitten into chunks is fair game. He does swallow some of it and it passes through without incident, as I was informed by one of the helpers as I expressed my anxieties. I worry more about the toxic aspect of all this, remembering toddlers and poisonous newspapers, (I did catch him with half a magazine in his hand, chewing purposefully). So we all try to watch him carefully.

We now share the music room with two psychologists who use it as a marionette theatre to act out the preoccupations of the students. They have a selection of handmade beautifully sculpted puppets. The marionettes are about 2 foot tall and their faces are made of painted pink sponge. They are rather delicate, and the psychologists hide them away behind a curtain, under a sheet. I had just finished plugging in the keyboard. When I looked round, the chainsaw boy was standing by the curtain, chewing very contentedly. The large head of a puppet was sticking out of the curtain, looking like a pink sponge cake…but it had no nose.

Don’t tell anyone. Maybe they won’t notice.

The warming effect of chocolate

Sometimes, when it is really cold, the only thing to do is to wrap up warm in front of the fire, and practise for the synchronised chocolate eating competition...

White out

It has been an exciting couple of days here. We decided to walk to the nearest shops on Wednesday. We were running out of milk, and we get bad tempered in our house if we don't start the day with a milky coffee. Darling d came along because she gets bad tempered if she doesnt have enough sweeties.

We live at the top of a small hill, and the car can't quite manage it....

I am the one attached to Porridge with a knitted bee hive on my head made of Porridge hair.

Mission was safely accomplished and we returned with the little that could be carried on foot.

We cancelled everything and got in more wood...and more wood.. and huddled round the wood stoves. I have to say that my feelings towards them have changed from outright hostility at the amount of attention they demand to a kind of mild affection, but I daresay that will pass with the snows.

Supplies were again getting rather low today, so we wondered if we should attempt the hill in the car. After all, we saw the tracks of our neighbours who didnt seem to have any difficulty. It was time for some panic buying. The skies were relatively clear, the roads salted (apart from our hill) and the snows were melting slightly in the afternoon "heat" of 1°C.

We arrived at the shops without incident and loaded up with everything one might need for several weeks isolation. When we emerged from the shops, a cloud resembling a Stephen King horror film set was blackening the sky. Five centimetres of snow fell in the short time it took for us to get back to our hill. We managed to get three quarters of the way up before the wheels started to spin and the car flailed from side to side. We were forced to abandon it and carry the shopping through the blizzard. Those tiny brave points of light in the gloom are the headlights.

While we were at the shops, Darling d had stopped by to see a friend in the hope that we would pass by later and collect her. Mysweet decided to back down the hill, because the road is narrow with two big ditches either side of it. He thought that this might be the only chance to get Darling d before all of this stuff started to freeze.

I called him to see whether he had arrived safely, and he told me he was hovering over a ditch at the bottom of the hill and was trying to dig away the ice. Of course Porridge and I raced down the hill to offer our assistance by way of supervising and making helpful remarks.

He managed to move the car to safety and we walked up the hill to our house. Darling d is still stuck in the town at the house of a young gentleman friend of hers. Now, how did she manage to organise that?

The arrival of Pink Piggie

Porridge is on a diet. She is now on a regime of pig-bitingly expensive lite biscuits for over weight dogs (so it says on the packet). I haven't told her this since I don't want to undermine her self confidence, but the vet has recommended it...

I suspect that she is supplementing her diet, because our next door neighbour keeps hanging balls of grease and nuts in his bushes for the birds, and he keeps finding the empty nets on the ground very soon afterwards. Also, around the fire at night strange and terrible smells circulate, causing the three of us to hurl unkind accusations at each other before glaring at Porridge, who is pretending to be asleep.

In spite of this, I felt that she deserved a treat. So when the purveyor of the expensive biscuits sent me a free voucher because I had spent such a lot of money with them, I raced to their shop, determined to spend the exact value of the voucher and certainly no more .

And then I saw it.

I could hear Mysweet's voice in my imagination shouting "Cherche.. Pink Piggie!!", and hurling it across the room. You will gather (correctly) from this that Porridge is a bi-lingual dog.

I thought it would make a nice change from chicken, which is our usual meaty toy.

Luckily Darling D was there to take photos of the historic and joyful meeting between the three parties concerned.