Hattie and the fort: Part 2

I can't quite believe the amount of enthusiasm that was shown in response to my blog post Hattie and the fort Part 1. I feel at once humbled and awesome.

I shall provide a full blog post charting the contest once it closes on 10th June and I have received all the submissions.

But now, without further ado, here is my fort journey:





This was my first, practice, attempt. My team mate, Dexter, is pictured, thus abiding by the official fort contest rules. This was a rather more elegant fort than my official entry, however since this fort was built on the bed without a view of the television, I felt rather strongly that this submission would be cheating if I passed it off as a genuine TV oriented fort. Yes, readers, I care about you that much that I would not want to cheat you.

Here is Dexter's solo attempt in our wardrobe - he is experienced in the building of slap-dash multi pile-on clothes forts.





And here, here is my official fort - TV facing in the sitting room




As I stated earlier, the craftsmanship of this fort is not quite as sophisticated as my first attempt, but it was wonderful nonetheless. And yes, that's a lamp, a MOTHERFUCKING LAMP in my fort. I am also wearing my onesie for extra cool points. It may not look like much, but I assure you that being in my fort felt like this:




I hope you all had as much fun as I did! Contest closes on Thursday, kids. Forts forever!

Hattie and the fort: Part 1

The other night, I asked my Man if one day we could build a fort in the sitting room and sit in it all day watching movies and eating pizza.

After 17 seconds of silence and his blank stare, I asked again. 'Fort? In the sitting room?'

'Honey, you're 26'.

'I know but forts are amazing and so much fun!'

Silence. 'Honey, you're 26'.

'So? I cannot and will not believe that anyone, regardless of age, does not enjoy a fort'.

Silence. And disbelief.

I went on. 'Seriously, forts are so fun! You can smoosh in and make a roof with blankets and shit and watch stuff on TV and be all comfy and awesome at the same time'.

He'd left the room before I'd reached the end of the word 'seriously'.

I followed him into his office. 'Come on, you know you want to. Of course you enjoy a fort'.

'Sweetheart, I have work to do'.

'I get it. I bet you're thinking of Evangeline Lilly, and thinking that Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame, would not enjoy a fort. But you know what? I bet she would!'

To clarify - Evangeline Lilly had a valid reason to be included in our conversation. A few months ago, after watching a gazillion back to back episodes of Lost, Man turned to me with a gravely serious look and said 'Hats, please don't laugh at me, but I honestly think I used to date Evangeline Lilly.' A tortured, supressed peep rose from my belly and made my eyes water, but I managed to compose myself enough to squeak 'Go on'. Turns out, 15 years ago, he'd dated a girl called Evan who was American and, apparently, the spit of Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame. 'See, Evan could be short for Evangeline!' he declared with child-like glee. I made it a whole 3 seconds before I exploded, guffawing in his face.

Now, every time there is some sort of contretemps over something I suggest, I ask 'Oh, did Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame, not do that?' He can also now use it to punctuate tales from his life, such as 'It reminds me of the time when I used to date Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame'. Guys, guess what? Claim to fame - my Man used to bang Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame!

However, a few weeks later he sheepishly admitted, 'actually, I think her surname was _______, but maybe she changed it!' We googled Evan the mystery girlfriend and her picture appeared, and sure enough did she look quite like Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame, enough to get the two mixed up. Its more fun pretending they're the same person though, so his ex girlfriend is still Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame.

Anyway, I assured him that Evangeline Lilly, of Lost fame, would enjoy a fort. Unfortunately this was not enough to convince him to partake, so my fort assembly will be a solo effort. This is how I imagine my fort will look.


He's actually away on business overnight this Friday, so I shall make my fort, and it will be great. I will post photo updates this weekend.

And in the meantime, I encourage you to all build forts of your own! I am of a school of beliefs which posits that everyone, everwhere, regardless of age, enjoys a fort. Why sanction the joy of forts to schoolchildren up to the age of ten but no older? Its a travesty and one I will challenge to the death. I don't have many readers yet but if you send me pictures I will give a prize to the person/team who builds the best fort!

UPDATE 4/06/10: So there's been quite a bit of interest in the fort contest on twitter! The rules are as follows:

- Teams may be no more than 3 people
- Teams must register their official team names in the comments section of my blog or via DM on twitter (@awoollyhat)
- Photos must include at least one team member sitting in the fort, then sent to hc.london@yahoo.com for the judging panel to assess
- closing date for contest is 10/06/10 (that's 10th of June to any American readers)

MAY THE FORT BE WITH YOU!
-

Hattie dreams big

Last night, whilst playing on my iPad (did I mention that I now have an iPad?) me and Man discovered the joy and sheer amazingness of a game called Angry Birds. It involves a fleet of birds which you slingshot with deft precision at a group of green pig faces among meticulously arranged slabs of ice, wood and stone. The aim is to squish the pig to death, either by a direct hit from one of the birds or from a subsequent toppling of their crudely fashioned war forts. There's an assortment of hilarious sound effects, including smug pig snorts when the birds have failed in their mission, giggles when the birds succeed, and excited 'wheeeeee's when the corpulent feathered warriors are flung through the air. It's awesome in it's simplicity, and we played for a good 3 hours, taking turns (at which Man was amazed, as I do not share well. My true colours shone screaming through eventually though when I insisted on 7 or 8 turns in a row to his 1).

Anyone with an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad (did I mention I have an iPad? No? I have an iPad!) should understand the importance of this purchase if they wish to lead a happy life. Those without Apple products are surely destined to live out the rest of their days in grey boredom due to the lack of Angry Birds.

Exhausted after our perilous and gallant ordeal against the smug green oinkers, of course it was the time to indulge in some deep conversation about our life aims. Man posited his which were all very mature, well thought out and admirable. He said he would also love me to be happy with my lot, and was hoping that before long I would have more colourful ambitions in life than winning all the cups on Mario Kart.

I was understandably outraged that he though this little of me! That he thought these were my only dreams! Obviously Mario Kart is great and accounts for perhaps 30% of all the meaning in my life, but my only aspiration? I was hurt and, after I'd hit him, told him thus. He then gently reminded me that during a recent similar conversation, when he'd asked me what I'd like to have achieved in a year's time, my response had been 'I like to think I'd have won gold cups in all the Mario Kart Grand Prixes'.

Oh. My. God. He was right! My biggest goals in life were linked to success at a video game on the Wii in which only I partake. I need new goals, and I need them fast!

So readers, here is my new list of goals of what I want to have achieved in a year's time:

- 1,000 subscribers to my blog
- finished recording my album with my band
- be King of Blogworld
- have a decent income from a job I actually care about
- win all the cups in Mario Kart
- win Angry Birds
- have a pet Griffin
- gone up a cup size
- eaten a lot of steak
- have something named after me; perhaps a pub, Polar Bear or missile silo
- been a guest starring patient on an episode of House
- have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry/Awesomeness
- gone to the moon

There you go, Man. Put that in your pipe and smoke it - Hattie now dreams BIG!

I have to go and play Mario Karts now.

Disclaimer: if I only achieve one of the first 4 goals that'd be ok too.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I have an iPad

Hi everyone - I have an iPad and I am currently blogging from my blogging app for iPad. I have an iPad because my awesome boyfriend knew I thought iPads were awesome so he bought me an iPad. It's so awesome having an iPad I can't even tell you. I love my iPad. I also love my boyfriend, but mostly I love my iPad.

Will post properly later from my iPad!

Location:My iPad

Danger: the antidote to misery!

EDIT: 7/09/2010 You can now listen as you read along with my partner in crime and collaboration, Peeteer Smith, narrating in his special way!

Picture the scene. You've had a pretty crap few days, during which time you've questioned your very purpose on this earth, where your life is going, and panicked about the future to such an extent that never leaving the house again and spending an eternity on the sofa watching Come Dine With Me marathons seems like the only viable option. You look like this:



Then you decide 'Enough of this self-pity! Self-pity, be gone! I have cool things to do like be awesome and play Wii!'

But then, the sneaky good-feelings-killing elves come along and think 'Haha, she's such a dick for feeling better so soon, lets REALLY ruin her day!'

All of a sudden, there are traffic jams where its impossible for traffic jams to form - and you are blocked at the worst of it. People shamelessly pilfer your parking space. Other drivers are fucking crap at driving and stop you from going anywhere in a timely fashion. Everyone everywhere seems to have a vendetta against you, everything becomes personal and suddenly everyone in the world is hell bent on making sure you have the worst driving experience ever in the history of driving.

And that's just in the car! Shop keepers are slow and rude, someone will block you in the street who is the SLOWEST WALKER EVER, so slow indeed that they seem to be going backwards, its impossible to navigate around them and then a bird will most likely shit in your eye. Babies cry at you - not near you, AT you - and you can't find anything you need in your handbag as they seem to have all simultaneously been vapourised, you trip and fall, blood begins to ooze from shop windows and you might as well just give up the fight and take a nap on the pavement.

Before you know it, you are MISERABLE, and nothing can ever drag you out of the pit of despair you find yourself wallowing in.

Self-imposed danger! For when life is so miserable, cheating death is the only thing that will make you feel better! And the best thing is, danger is is always nearby!

Here are a few handy ways to put yourself in danger:

-reckless driving
-walking across the road without looking
-dining at MacDonalds
-shouting 'Pussies!' at the gang of tough looking youths on the street corner and not running away
-not washing your hands after a pooh
-meeting someone off myspace who lists their interests as human taxidermy and cannibalism

Suddenly, the misery is lifted because you are back in control and can dictate the lousy things than happen to you, and you can be all 'Fuck you world, I'm the king of life!'



Danger: the antidote to misery!

I am a malco - Part 1

EDIT: 6/09/2010 You can now listen along as you read with my partner in crime and collaboration, Peeteer Smith, narrating in his special way!

People sometimes say 'oh, so and so fell from the ugly tree when they were born' which is mean and I don't approve. Some REALLY mean people also say '... and hit every branch on the way down'. What a ridiculous thing to say! People do not fall from trees when they are born. They are squished out of their mum's area, sometimes accompanied by a pooh! Much more dignified!

Anyway, continuing this awfully high-brow topic, I think if such trees existed, I would have fallen from the Malco Tree. For those of you who don't share my awesome vocabulary, 'malco' is short for 'malcoordinated'. Which I have just looked up and apparently ISN'T IN THE DICTIONARY, but never the less was a well known term when I was growing up, used to describe someone who is not very good at coordination. Basically, if you were a malco, you were just crap at movement and holding things.

But it doesn't stop there. There is seemingly no end to the list of things at which I am crap!

Here's a short one:

- eating
- walking
- sitting still
- drinking
- putting (ie putting things on other things, not like crazy golf. I am amazing at crazy golf).
- moving

In short, I'm a walking disaster and you can't really take me anywhere without being hideously embarrassed at the special friend who's accompanying you in public.

I am crap at eating. I'd say a third of the time I miss my mouth. Our cream sofa is no longer cream, its a mottled collection of Thai Sweet Red Chilli Sauce Red, HP Sauce Brown, Pizza Grease Yellow and Chocolate Smidgeon Pooh Smear; a tribute to Jackson Pollock, if you will. Although its not a tribute at all, but a sad reminder to my ever suffering man that the woman with whom he is in a relationship is in fact some retarded lady-child, which I'm sure prompts him on a daily basis to seriously question his life choices and decisions.

I remember being at school and eating some toast at break time. My awesome friend Grace pointed out 'Dude, you've got a crumb there', pointing at my jumper. I looked down expecting to see this:

But actually I looked like this:


It was epic! I'd seemed to have amassed more crumbs on my jumper than constituted the piece of toast in the first place. It was quite a skill! But sadly one I have yet to leave behind in favour of the more adult skill of getting food into my mouth and it staying there *quickly adds 'power to make mass of food increase exponentially through process of botched mastication' to CV*.

The same goes for drinking - I often look like babies do when they teeth, however its not greeted with 'aw's or 'poor thing' or 'give her a thimble of brandy! That'll shut her up!'. Its met with wide eyed sneers of disbelief and sometimes pity, as perhaps I have an unidentified syndrome which means I am incapable of displaying motor skills more advanced than your average foetus.

The sad thing is that there are so many stories of my unrestrained malconess that I fear regaling them all here would be too much of a malco influx to anyone reading it. There was a tale of malco in my blog post 'Hattie's Diagnostic Prowess' if you have yet to read it and want to know more of what I'm prattling on about. I'll save the rest and drip feed you with tales of malco from my malco pez dispenser in due course.

Happy weekend everyone :D

I can ruin someone's life with a single look!

EDIT: 03/092010 You can now listen as you read along with my partner in crime and collaboration, Peeteer Smith, narrating in his special way!

Don't you hate it when you settle in to do your situps in the gym and the situp space is free so you are able to contort your body into embarrassing positions without feeling like a dick, but just as you start your moves and you look not unlike a jungle animal presenting and ready to be mounted, a large sweaty man comes and plonks himself next to you? Its not right and its not ok!

This happened to me yesterday (among an ever growing amount of other days) but yesterday was spectacularly and disturbingly different. Rotund man in tiny shorts and sweaty t-shirt lumbered over and splodged onto the mat next to me. I tried in vain to pick up the pace so that I could escape from the what had now become very smelly mat area. He had begun his routine which included yoga, which I'm sorry but is just UNACCEPTABLE in a communal gym area. Yoga requires the removal of shoes and socks, and in gyms this means, more often than not, sweaty pongy foots.

Foots are disgusting at the best of times, but this is pretty criminal. I don't want random people's fetid foot juice on mats where I may well be prostrate doing my floor routine before they've been sterilised. Not to mention the kind of foot boogers that could come into contact with my skin at any moment. Its vom inducing.

Anyway so this beast begins honking and snorting as the situps begin and I'm doing double time and nearly giving myself an aneurysm (one of the rare times when its not a tumour) in order to get out of there as quickly as possible. For some unknown reason that shall no doubt haunt me for years to come, I stole a sideways glance and noticed his silky smooth hair free legs. GROSS. I like my men to have hair where they are meant to have hair. Not saying that I would have liked this dude if he had hairy legs, but men are supposed to have hairy legs and men who don't have hairy legs are weird.

But it was then that, completely horrified, I realised this great hulking brick shithouse of a man was a woman.

You know when you're walking down the street minding your own business glancing here and there and all of a sudden your glance falls on someone with a really unfortunate and obvious growth on their face, and you really were just glancing randomly but then it looks like you're staring at their growth and you think 'FUUUUUCK they think I'm staring at their growth and that I think their growth is disgusting and therefore I'm a disgusting human being for not being more open-minded about growths' so you smile over-enthusiastically to make up for your faux-pas, only your over-enthusiasm makes your smile really creepy and then they're looking at you as if you're some kind of growth-fetishist and they just want to get the hell away from you because you're clearly mentally unhinged and weird? That's kind of how I felt when I saw that gross foot yoga man was actually a woman.

Only it was worse because at least growths are undoubtedly unusual. This lady was just broader, musclier and stockier than your average lady, and I'd been so narrow-minded as to assume that such a hulky constitution equalled man parts. So on this occasion I thought 'FUUUUUCK she can see the shock on my face and she knows that I thought she was a man and now my facial expression of obvious surprise has given the game away and prompted her to live the rest of her life as a bag of neuroses and low self-esteem, all because some bitch in the gym looked at her in a way that obviously meant that she was a disgusting gross foot yoga man but actually a woman and she'll need years of therapy for the incident when someone looked at her with an indeterminable yet undeniable look of surprise and she'll probably never leave the house again because of ME and I've DESTROYED HER LIFE and she knows all this!'

I'm pretty sure that's what she was thinking. And that's how I'm pretty sure I've managed to ruin someone's life with an innocent, yet unwittingly dangerous, look.

20/05/10 UPDATE: I just saw gross foot yoga woman who I thought was man - she's back! I haven't ruined her life! Yet...