"Doing chores, and meeting the neighbours"

So here's Amber again in one of my artsy shots. I am cheaply mimicking the documentary style shots of National Geo to bring you images of the peeps of Paisley...and I will try and also bring the language into it as well. ...also on the cheap cheep cheep.  So the above image is of Amber and groceries. She is walking through the hallway through the bottom half of her building which opens up into a courtyard which is overgrown with weeds. The hallway smells like an even mix of dog, cat, and human urine.  A heady yet nostalgic odor which brings to mind  Hastings street in Vancouver in the summer time. The concrete is cracked and heavily textured by time and neglect. I dig it, even if it does smell of wee.

Amber lives here because the rent is very cheap, which helps her save money for school. She is taking international development. So really, this is the ideal anthropological environment for a student learning about such things as she is.






Today, we are doing laundry.... This is the washing machine. It is teensy. It fits on the kitchen counter like a mix-master or a slow-cooker. It uses very little water and energy, and leaves my trousers smelling of flowers. We put the washing in on the right, and spin it dry on the left. Amber paid about 100£ for it, and it seems to do the trick! We do small batches, and hang everything to dry in the kitchen. We could hang it outside, but NEDS* (non-educated delinquents) steal shit all the time.

This is what the power meter looks like, and you get this key thingy which is kind of like a credit card and you can put money on it almost anywhere and then you come home and put they key in it and you have power. With two of us, washing and living...it takes about 1.20£/day.

I like this system, because it teaches you to turn the lights off when your not using them (among other things), which is a good habit.  It makes one conscientious of power use habits.

This is what the power bar for our computers looks like. Each plug has it's own switch.  I like that. Again....efficiency.

Now on with the neighbours. This is Shawn. He lives downstairs, and is a nice quiet fellow, he's prolly about 27 and works at a bar/lounge at the Glasgow airport. He's very soft spoken and unassuming. In this photo, he is looking very skeptical about how this machine is supposed to make him look more like a man.

 On this perticular morning, he and Paul* see below, have been trying to get the damn thing going so they can remove the weeds from the pavement, some of which have reached over and above a foot in height.

While they have been deciding what to do about that, I have cleared Amber's section with a flat shovel. Now I have a lovely little spot to do my tai chi in the morning. Hopefully, it can remain a NED free zone....but I think I am delusional in this case.

Here we have Shawn (in red), and Paul(in blue). Paul is the commander. Captain Paul. He is good at delegating various laborious aspects to his neighbours and directing their actions forthwith. On this occasion, not only did he manage to get Shawn to weed-whack, but also, he managed to finagle the fellow across the street (Alec) to mow the lawn for him....truly a Jedi master. Amber was quick to point out that their shirts had brand names like "Everlast" on them, which was ironic considering how long their chore escapade 'lasted'.

Does this not look like a Jedi master to you?  Light saber in one hand (ciggy or fag), and the other doing the Jedi salute.

Here's Paul (he's a welder by trade), in "Galvie" the shopping cart, which he was quick to point out was "useless" for using as a barbeque because of the neuro-toxin created by the burning of the nickle plated coating, which would give you "flu-like symptoms before a horrid death". ..called "The Galvie Flu"...I learn something new every day...apparently they use shopping carts for barbeques here?...................again with the Jedi salute.

Part of our chores was trying to find out the fowl stench that was following me everywhere I went. It was first noticed by Chris who said "There's an aweful smell, familiar but aweful, and it's coming from you , but i can't tell if it's you, cause you usually don't smell like that". Then I kept smelling it, and the smell followed me all the way here to Scotland, and pretty soon I felt like I truly had earned the nomeclature "Smelly Kelly" until one day I picked up my new belt and inhaled what I expected to be the aroma of new leather, but which actually was the aroma of 10 day rotted whale carcass. BINGO! That was the stench....so Amber and I thought it might be wise to soak it in hot water to see what it would do. It shrivelled up in our holy water...due to it's allegiance to the dark stinky lord.....it stank up our kitchen, so we chucked it. No more belt.

So once the chores were done Amber and I headed down to our local cafe "The Grumpy Monkey" which is a partially misleading name being as they are not curmudgeon there, but being humans , like me, they are part of the great ape family. It is owned by my other new friend Paul and his brother. They seem pretty nice as well....I should warn them about galvanized shopping carts however...

Till next time.....avoid barbecuing with carts made of unknown metals.

 Next: "THE TOP SECRET PROJECT"...creeper value rating: HIGH