Illusions

I can’t believe that yet another weekend is over. It’s almost November! I’m going to be retired and drawing my pension before I know it *thinks* maybe this isn’t all bad after all.

I had quite a busy weekend. I looked after my nephew on Friday night and that went fine. He still isn’t potty trained so had to sit on a towel most of the time, but I guess we all had to learn at some point in our lives – and some people regress as they get older…

I didn’t see my school friend on Saturday night in the end. Her husband’s grandparents had never met their latest child before and there was a last minute change of plans that meant they ended up meeting up on the Saturday night instead of Saturday morning. My friend is absolutely lovely and I’m sure she had no option about it, but I really wanted to see her and so was quite disappointed that it didn’t work out. It also just illustrated, again that in so many circumstances, family always wins through. I just don’t get that ‘first loyalty’ to family that some people have. I’m not saying that family isn’t important but it doesn’t mean that all other plans have to take second place to them. I don’t think that is actually what happened here – I don’t think my friend actually wanted to see them particularly but felt kind of obliged and it was the best way to ‘keep the peace’. She has always thought that all of her husband’s family are weird and one day, after they were married, he suddenly seemed to twig to this and said to her “my family just aren’t normal are they?” and she had to gently break it to him that they were perhaps on the off side. Having said that he is really nice and I used to meet up with him for lunch sometimes. Somehow his family’s weirdness seems to have missed him out.

Anyway, having said that, I then actually went over to my parents’ for dinner. My sister was going there so I went too. That was fine and I didn’t speak to my father much because he was watching the rugby. Two things to illustrate how odd my own father is though. First, he would rather be cooked in hot oil than support England. Fair enough, you can support whatever team you want, but I think his motivation is actually that his family (as in mum, me and my sister) are English and so that means he can’t support England. I think it’s his way of showing some sort of contempt at us being English. Weird. The other thing was that my nephew was walking around with an unopened tin of Pringles and we told him he wasn’t allowed to eat them (particularly as we had just finished dinner) and so he gave the tin to dad and dad opened them and gave him some. I said to dad that he wasn’t meant to have any and dad went into this rage and shouted “well, he gave it to me, what was I supposed to do?” Er… said “no”… My nephew is two and half years old and isn’t exactly some little terror. My father will always blame someone else, even if it is a small child. He is a very odd man.

On a lighter note, below is a video of another optical illusion and for some reason I really like the voice of the chap doing the commentary.