Month: February 2025

Avatar Ian’s holiday snaps – #2

And so it continues.

In Florida there are a lot of gift shops. A LOT. They want all of your disposable income and they will do whatever it takes to get you in their store. A lot of them advertise ridiculous statements such as “gifts as low as $1.99” or “five t-shirts for $9.99” and it’s all lies. You’ll go in to be greeted by five kids t-shirts for $9.99 or the kinds of cheap mugs that not even an auntie with bad eyesight would pick up and consider. All lies.

Initially I ignored these places because I knew what would be inside. Later on I relented for a laugh and, you know what? I was right. Laden with plastics of all shapes and sizes, pirated Disney goods, the kind of nonsense every gift shop has. It was a treasure trove of bobbins.

What made me sit up and notice though were the buildings themselves. Nothing in Florida looks new, in fact everything has this worn out faded murky visage which you get used to after a while.

This shop made me laugh because you notice it straight away and every time I walked past I would think, “mwear!” to myself. The best mwear in all of town. Ladies love top of the line mwear; purchase one today for your gal, fellas!

I also keep saying it in a Matt Berry voice for maximum effect.

Avatar Pet Peeves: Soap and Towel

We did an episode of A Breath of Fresh Beans a while back about pet peeves. You know, things that wind you up beyond all reason that other people probably don’t know or care about. In the podcast I think mine was to do with people putting those metal letters back to front in cast iron gates, and Phil at work tangling up all the phone cords.

Anyway, another one occurred to me the other day – one that’s annoyed me to an admittedly ridiculous degree for several years now – and I thought I’d share it here so that you can be certain exactly how skewed my priorities really are.

A few years back some of the toilets at work were refurbished. There’s now a big mirror above all the sinks, underneath which is concealed soap and paper towel dispensers. You know the sort of thing. To help you find all the hidden bathroom accessories there are little labels on the mirror to show you where they are.

Here’s what they look like.

There are only these two labels, and they each appear about three times across the width of the mirror. I mean, come on, you’ve spotted the first problem already, right? The “soap” one is in Helvetica and the “Towel” one is in Futura. Bloody hell, guys, you’re only making two labels, can you try to pick the same font for both of them?

Then there’s the word “Towel”. For some reason they’ve made the T and the L bold, but not the rest. Look at the thicker the stroke width on those letters compared to the others. Why would you do that?

It would surely be easier to get it right than to get it this wrong. When you open your graphic design software to make two grey circles with a word inside each, it would surely be easier to get the font the same across both of them, instead of three different fonts mixed up in two words. How do you even manage that level of ineptitude?

Anyway, I know you don’t care, and I know it doesn’t matter, but it absolutely boils my piss, and I thought you should know.

Avatar The best home owner job

We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.

But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.

I will open the bidding with pressure washing.

Pressure washing is brilliant.

I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.

The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.

Avatar Ian’s holiday snaps – #1

The best part of being on holiday is taking photos of things that people have zero interest in and then forcing them to look at them once you get home. It’s a legitimate way of being annoying because they instinctively want to know about your time away and you can show them through 10,000 photos of a camel.

Not that I’m on holiday with a camel. Far from it, me ‘n’ the V have been sunning it in Florida for almost two weeks. We’ve done a lot of walking, I’ve drank dozens of watered down sodas and eaten my way through many burgers, tasty barbecue ribs and steaks.

I thought it best to ease you into the holiday snaps with a couple of posts, tossed off in my quieter moments, showing all the excitement of Orlando.

First up is this one. This is a fantastic photo of me emerging from the 7/11 with my Frosty blue ice thing. It was a hot day and I needed some cool refreshment. To my delight, this only cost a dollar for some reason (it was advertised as costing more) so I had to capitalise on the moment. I was on my way to pick up lunch from Subway, a blinding buy one footlong and get another free offer which we used several times. That was a good day.