Crane Flies

Over the past month or so homes in the UK have been invaded by daddy long legs.

Daddy long legs surprisingly isn’t a real name for any creature. It’s actually a colloquial term for several different types of creatures.

These include.

The opolines order of spider which are often referred to as Harvest men.

Also the Pholciade order of spider which are often referred to as Cellar spiders.

and finally the Crane Fly a winged insect belonging to the order of Tipulidae.

The creature I’m talking about in this article is the third on the sheet. The Crane Fly.

Crane Flies have been literally everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

Opening the window at night was a constant stress. I would have been happy to never open it but my girlfriend seems to think that if we don’t the air supply in the room will suddenly run out. So every night the window would be open, and every night we’d end up entertaining around 4 billion Crane flies. You think she would have learnt from the Moth Invasion we had suffered only weeks before but she hadn't and so we ended up with crane flies. Everywhere.

I'm not naturally disposed to crane-fly invasions, and so every time some flew in. I would stand up barking that Satan himself had come in the room and I would force my girlfriend to deal with it. In the end I think I caused her to hate Crane flies as well.

Crane flies are very hard to love. The moths which had invaded beforehand I had grown to love. Some more than others, but the diversity and beauty between each one gave me an appreciation. Also most moths don't fly around like they’d just downed 12 tequila shots. Moths fly towards light and generally stick to that. Crane flies seem to fly occasionally towards light, occasionally towards the window, occasionally towards the ceiling and occasionally into your face. Essentially a crane fly looks a little bit like a spider that morphed two of its legs into wings, nobody wants that flying into their face. I assure you.

I decided to do a little bit of research on them in order to make them seem a little more tolerable.

I learnt that in America Crane Flies are often referred to as Mosqiutio eaters or skeeter eaters, which is a shakey term for them consdiering it is believed that Crane Flies don’t really eat in the two weeks they’re fully grown, let alone eat mosquitos.

The lfie span of a crane fly is pretty simple. The crane fly hatches out of its egg into a small larvae called Leatherjackets..They remain in this Leatherjacket state for a few months, mainly eating your grass roots. Which is one of the many reasons grass sometimes goes yellow.

Once big enough they then go into a cocoon like status and finally sometime during autumn they come out of their coccoon a fully fledged creepy looking crane fly.

Crane Flies only live in their adult state for roughly two weeks. In that two weeks all they really need to do is find a crane fly of the opposite gender and mate with it, because those darling crane flies wouldn’t want us to be without them the year after.

Really what will happen is they will probably shock a bunch of people, evade some birds, lose some legs and feed some spiders.

From personal experience crane flies are fucking hard to kill, you really really have to mean it if you are going to kill a crane fly. You can’t fuck about.  If you whip them with a t-shirt and haven’t seen its corpse, it generally means it isn’t dead and it will come back, drunker and more in your face. They’ll also dirty your room with their discarded legs.

Crane flies legs are flimsy and weak so that they can then snap them off and get out of a tight spot e.g. a spiders web or your pathetic attempt at killing them.

Interestingly the males hatch out a little bit before the female. Which means the males basically sneak up on the females before their wings have fully developed and impregnate them. Great, raping flying monsters with detachable legs. Just what everyone wants. The females then traumatised by what has happened lay their eggs and go lie in a dark corner never to be seen again.

Luckily I think Crane Fly season is over for this year and we can all rest in peace (or at least we’d be able to if it wasn’t now spider season instead).

If you really hate reading check out this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/the-life-cycle-of-a-crane-fly/7189.html

it’s a clip from Autumn Watch and it’s where I gleaned a lot of my information from. Gotta love Bill Oddie!

E3 was today and I didn't watch it.

Good old E3 was today. You know that gaming expedition that they have every year....the huge one where they announce all kinds of games. Anyway yes that was on today. I attempted to watch a live stream of the thing but my internet connection decided it didn't want to be as well informed as my fellow friends and so refused to stream the event. Therefore I regrettably will have to look back at the event tomorrow, when all the information I could ever want about it is up and ready for me to just slide through.

I will be watching the Xbox One press conference in full though. Mainly because I have a Xbox 360 and it'll be the first thing that appears on the menu when I boot it tomorrow. Also because it annoys my girlfriend who will probably make snarky comments about the entire thing. To be honest it's the snarky comments that will make it more amusing and less painfully cheesy.

As a result of having seen the Xbox conference I suspect we will then watch the PS4 one and then speak at length about which one we would theoretically buy if a spare $400 turned up in our bank accounts.

Having glimmered over what trailers seem to have been put up so far on youtube I can confirm that thus far plants vs zombies 2 is the most exciting game for me personally to learn about. Simple yet satisfying. Anyway  tomorrow or somewhere around tomorrow I will write a wonderful review on the whole ordeal. Good night chaps.

How going to the job centre can turn a superhero into a nothing.

Ok so I'm not actually a superhero but that isn't the point. I went to Peru recently. Which was great. Amazing in fact. Anyway not to sound too pretentious but while I was there atop  the Andes I did things I'd have never dreamt of doing whilst in dreary England. Some of them were genuine wow factors that will contribute to the collection of stories I will one day tell the grand kids.

For example I climbed, well clambered, up some of the Andes. No it wasn't a rock climbing event. We'd actually been horse riding and had the misfortune of being tricked into doing a pretty fucking dangerous walk.  The walk involved climbing up the side of rock faces which were pretty much bordering on vertical. More over the rock we were climbing up happened to be limestone.

If you aren't familar with limestone it's a sedimentary rock and it's weak as anything. Meaning it literally would crumble in our hands. If we didn't make the leap on the first go, the chances were the leap wouldn't be there to make the second time round. It was like playing an impossible video game and only having one chance to do so.

Super-meat boy. A fucking hard game. Imagine this with one life.

To add to the thrill we didn't have any climbing equipment on us. Which made it the equivalent of playing Halo Reach on legendary mode with every single skull on. (Skulls make the game harder. MUCH harder. In case you didn't know). Still somehow we made it and naturally this boosted my "I can do ANYTHING" ego.

There were a few stories that while they won't be contributing to the tales for the Grandkids did contribute to my overall sense of invincibility. Try having food poisoning develop whilst on a two hour train and then a 2 hour car ride with the most deadly taxi driver known to South America. That's 4 hours of throwing up and attempting to not let anything happen the other end. It's a challenge, trust me but once you've done that. You feel like you are unstoppable.

I returned to England with a sense of exhilaration. I was invincible  I'd swam with piranhas! That would  work in my favour when looking for employment. I'd wow prospective employers with my travelling tales. I was all ready and all fired up.

A couple of days after my arrival I immediately got into the swing of things and applied for a few jobs. I also applied for job seekers allowance to tide me over in my quest.

This was the first pitfall. My introduction to the Job centre was not a pleasant one. I had an interview that day and the woman with the pseudo smile was running late. It meant I had to move my Job centre appointment to another time. When I returned two days later I was greeted by the same woman who at the time I believed was quite friendly. Only it turned out her "friendliness" was just her being patronising and condescending  When I told her that among bar jobs and retail jobs I also wanted to look for jobs in the journalistic field she gave me a look and told me to be realistic. I found this comment to be abhorrent and unnecessary. I was being realistic. I was looking for anything but I was more interested in the journalism field having you know studied a relevant degree at University. I left the job centre filled with rage and a bleak mind.

My second encounter with the job centre was equally as poor. I had been given my own personal advisor and he started off okay. Till he told me I probably wouldn't get anything and then told me off for absent mindedly tapping. Okay the tapping was annoying I'll grant but there is no need to be an arse about it. Just tell me in a polite person to person manner. Not like I'm some child who just stole candy from Woolworths (RIP). I left that day ranting and raving and filled with anger.

Luckily the second time I went to my advisor he had started to take me seriously and actually turned out to be as useful as the job centre can be, which by anyone's standards isn't very high. I know it isn't their fault, its the systems, but I don't understand the system enough to know what it is in the system to blame. Damn that system. So cunning and clever. Always hiding from the blame by putting innocent scapegoats in front of it. Todays choice of goat being the job centre employees. Poor goats.

The 2011 Funfair

Lets talk about the fair!

Ok in order to really understand the fair you’ll  have to be told the entire story  about the fair that was around last year.

Last year (2011) a funfair came to town. Anybody that knows me will know how easily excitable I can become, especially when I see something as amazing as a fun-fair coming to town. To add to this general fun-fair excitement there were signs stating that if you paid a fiver you got to go on UNLIMITED rides. Now anyone who has been to a funfair will have probably  (unless somehow very lucky) have experienced the horrendous prices per ride. So as you can imagine being offered to pay only five pounds at the start for unlimited access to all the rides in the fair was exceptionally enticing. So I got to this fair. Thought to myself “what a cracking bargain this will be!”

Got inside the fair, only to discover that the joke was actually on me.

At the fair there was pretty much nothing. There were food stands, expensive side show games, a hideous jungle gym style thing, that horrible ride that goes sideways and makes you feel like death, a huge slide, a “ghost” train and the Ferris wheel.

Most of these rides were actually monotonously dull or just rides I didn’t like in general. If memory serves I remember the Ferris wheel being ok, but getting off the Ferris wheel once it had been round took ages. Plus it was cold. REALLY cold. 

The only semi decent thing was probably the horrible sideways ride. Only I really don’t like that as a ride. Especially when my best friend Sozzy Glo had suffered grievous hand injuries from that sort of ride at a previous fair. 

So really all we were left with was the Ghost Train. Now because there weren’t any other decent rides the queue for the ghost train was quite large. I may have been a 22 year old woman, but I had never actually been on a ghost train at a funfair in my life before and I wasn’t sure what to expect. While we were in the queue we heard two different reviews of the train. One girl came off screaming and adamant that this was the most scary thing she had ever been on, while another girl came off and said “that was shit, there was nothing”. Unsure of who to believe I approached the train with caution and got on alongside my friend Jade. When the train set off I became nervous. What if things were waiting to jump out at me like a jack in the box? I then began screaming in anticipation. Jade however was not screaming. She was just laughing. At me.

I kept screaming the whole way round, because I was convinced that SOMETHING was going to happen.  Around 30 seconds later the Ghost Train came to an end. Nothing had happened. I had just screamed around the whole thing for NOTHING. Literally NOTHING was in there. Oh god I am such a fool. 

There is a time and place for everything. Even tractors.

The best time for a tractor to be on the road is never.

This tractor could be riding on   field. Instead it's clogging up a road. 

I'm joking.

No I'm not but I do realise that my dreams of roads without the monstrosities are not realistic ones.
Tractors however do need to learn that there are just certain times of the day when it really is not acceptable for them to come out of their farms. These include:

1. Rush hour: Rush hour is a terrible time for anyone in a motorized vehicle, except maybe motorbikes but they can jog on. Everyone is going somewhere and if you are like me you'll probably going to be late to that somewhere. The traffic is already dire. Tractors make it even more dire and also make everyone angry because they are thinking "what the hell is this tractor doing out here during rush hour!".



2. Night time: Ok you might be confused by this one. You might be thinking, but Soup-emu night time isn't busy, surely this is the best time for tractors? Well you are partly right, and I'll admit on some roads tractors probably should be around at night in preference to the day. On fast roads though, tractors need to stay clear. The reason for this is simple,  imagine yourself zooming happily down the motorway at 70mph or beyond without a care in the world all of a sudden in front of you is this HUGE tractor. I know they are meant to be well lit, but sometimes you just aren't expecting this drawn out over-sized snail to appear in front of you. In other words DANGEROUS very DANGEROUS. If you hit the back of a tractor good night to you and your car (or rather bad night, depending on your view).

Caution isn't strong enough a warning for something this horrible.

 I want it to be known that tractors are horrible to over-take at any time of the day. I know we are taught to but since I actually got my licence I cannot think of a time I have overtaken one. They are just so big, and there might be cars coming from the other side of the road, and what if I don't make it. So in the end I have to follow this tractor until it leaves or I get a safe chance to over take it  e.g. on a dual carriage way.

So there we have it in short when I see a tractor on the road my happiness bar goes down a few spaces.

The sun and all the guilt it brings along with it

Ladies and gentlemen. Boys and girls. The sun has arrived!

This type of news often brings large amounts of joy to the majority of mankind. Especially those that reside in the British ilses and only see the sun roughly four times a year. Sunshine over here in the Great British Islands causes a wave of reactions.

1. People are given the liberty to wear items of clothing that allows them to reveal some skin; shorts, skirts, bikinis, nothing. This is good for perverts who want to see girls scantly clad but it isn't so good for everyone who does not want to see that mans moobs.

2. Those with some money get to show off that convertible they spent a gazillion pounds and red rubies on. Which is nice for them considering that the only time they get to have the roof down is this time of the year.

3.  The population at the beach goes up from just people who walk their dogs to over ten thousand different people.

4.Everyone wants to spend every waking moment (and every sleeping moment sometimes) outdoors in order to attempt to go from being as pale as snow to a crisp bronze colour. Often this can result in snow-white to lobster red but people are always misguided and willing to try no matter what the consequences.

5. People suddenly think bicycles are an acceptable form of transport.

6. Every other status on facebook is something like "Wow! This weather is wonderful! What glorious sun!" or "LOL. Went out today to the beach with Sarah Myles and Judy Gording. We all 4got to put suncream on. Totally burnt now! lol xx"

7. There is some sort of expectation that as a human being you are meant to really love the sun. You are more or less expected to partake in at least one of the points listed above. At the very least you need to go outside once a day. If you chose to stay inside when it is sunny then you are a complete and utter fool. In fact are you even human?

The problem being that although I do like it to be sunny as apposed to cold, windy and shitting it down with rain. I'm not a sun worshiper. My mother finds this particually hard to deal with. She is constantly bugging me to go outside and enjoy the sunshine. Well rather she did. Now when I claim I like the sun because I don't spend every single waking moment outside she dismisses my claim.
"No you don't Emma you are always inside."
 That isn't the point but never mind. I just like it to be sunny but I'm quite happy for it to be sunny and for me to be inside.

A dream and the sickening reality

Here is the dream of how I think that I will be able to work just because I've said to myself that I will. Someone always comes and asks me how I am doing. In the dream I am doing very well. In fact I am doing so well that I have been able to clean my room, go to the gym and feed my dog.

In horrifying reality though I'm ashamed to say that the picture above depicts the truth. Instead of doing tonnes of work I do the polar opposite aka no work. I'm unsure why it is that liking every single post on facebook suddenly becomes the most interesting thing to do in the world or why I end up sending countless wall posts to people I really don't care about anymore. Or why my knowledge of buffaloes increases because all it does is lead to me procrastinating until the night before the deadline and then UBER PANIC MODE ensues.

Then this goes one of two ways. Either I complete my assignment with probably only minutes to spare before the deadline. So it is rushed and probably grammatically horrendous. It also means I end up buying thousands of pens because every single time I can never find a pen to write my name on the hand in sheet. So the SU shop has probably made a sweet fortune out of constant ineptness to carry a pen on me.

The other option is that I go into a complete meltdown and then don't hand anything in at all or half the words that were expected of me. This has luckily only occurred to me once, but still it was the worst once of my life. I spent the rest of the day wishing that the sofa would eat me up and that I would be freed from this tragic existence of bathing in the knowledge that I had definitely without question failed. I swamped around my flat in a mixture of over-tiredness and disgrace. My flatmates must have found my personal failing to be hilarious but they attempted to keep their opinions to themselves. Which was good cause I already pretty much wanted to end my life.

Ironically this post is being written when I need to do a fuck-ton of work. So I'd better scoot off and make an attempt at that.