Steff and nonsense

It turns out that things during my talk didn't go as well as i thought...in fact I think I confused a lot of little children.
I got a lot of thank you messages from some of the classes - with a drawing of me, or something weather related, and a little note. As most of the drawings were of a blonde lass, this picture stood out somewhat:



As you can imagine, I was quite surprised to see that in one childs head I had grown a big long beard and was wearing a colourful pointy hat.
I started reading the note:

"I was very in prest when you sed ther was a littel man on the ground."

Ahhhh, that's why the poor thing was confused. Instead of talking about the Weather Observers, I had decided that a "little man on the ground" was much more 'child-friendly'. I had told them all about the little men on the ground who were all over the world, taking temperatures and measuring rainfall etc. This kid clearly thought it was a new brand of pixie.

At least it's just one child....

....apparently not...
About half of the letters mentioned the "Little Man on the Ground", including this one:



Oops.

Somehow I agreed to give a talk to about a million 7 year-olds, and I'm still not sure how this happened.

It was a normal day, and I was at my weather desk minding my own business, when a lass I don't really know bounded over to me. She started talking about a school with lots of children, saying they wanted to come and look round Al Jazeera, but couldn't as there were too many of them and I think I must have stopped listening as the next thing I remember her saying was, "So we thought you could go and talk to them."
Pardon?!
How did I get dragged into this?!
I was just about to ask her this, when I heard someone saying, "Yes, ok, that sounds fine"...and then I realised that that person was me.
Damn it.

So the next thing I know I was spending my day off with more children than I've ever seen in my life, telling them hilllllarious stories of satellite pictures and snow and thermometers and do you know what....they were actually quite sweet. They didn't even fall asleep.

I would liike to thank you all for your kindness and generosity in sending so much PG Tips...but i think now is the time to stop!
Last night I bought a bag of sugar and was unable to fit it in the cupboard due to the excessive number of teabags. When I counted them up I found I had well over 1500. That's more tea than I drank in the whole of my student years (when that's about all I did).
I am now looking into other uses for tea. According to ThinkQuest.org it is an excellent insect repellent and I'm looking forward to testing this theory this weekend...and don't think I'll be detered by the fact there are no insects here.

PG Tips is my friend

My New Year's present from my car was a rattle.

It's less than 3 weeks old, but everytime I went over a bump something rattled. And if you saw the state of the roads here, then you'll realise that it basically had a constant rattle. I was not impressed.

I took it back to the dealer, explained what was wrong with it and a little man took it away to look at it.
About 15 minutes later, he returned. "Nothing," he said.
"You can't find anything wrong?"
"Nothing," he said again.

I got back in my car, drove about a meter, over a bump, and there it was again.

I ran back to the mechanic, "Come on, come with me"
We jump in the car, straight over a bump and the car rattles again, "Seeee!"
He starts laughing, never a good sign for a mechanic I find.
He got out, wandered off and came back with a very small spanner....and tightens the aeriel.
How embarrassing.

On the plus side, it's not rattling anymore...