Sisters are doing it!

For those that have been 29 for as long as I have, this is probably a familiar sound:

Sisterhood also exists among gnomes, so I'd like to use this post to introduce some of my siblings.

Agnes, the protagonist of the immensely popular Despicable Me franchise:

She may look like a cute little girl, but don't let looks deceive you. She's living proof that gnomes never grow up. Believe it or not, her true age is 47.

Then there's Babs. Her part in Chicken Run may not have been recognized with an Academy Award, but she does have the satisfaction of delivering the best one-liners of the movie.

Let's stick with the B a little longer, because there is also this lovely gnome called Bubbles:

Bubbles was my favorite Powerpuff Girl. She was brave, witty and very perceptive. I mean, who else could deliver such an accurate descriptions of her environment?
Yeah. We were flying to Mojo Jojo's house. I like flying. Oh, and then there were these really pretty clouds. And there was one that was shaped like a heart, and there was this one that looked like a pretty pony, and there was one that looked like a cloud...

In honor of her, I wanted to name my cat Bubbles, but my husband wouldn't let me, because it reminded him of Michael Jackson's pet primate. Needless to say he's now my ex-husband.

To conclude today's introduction, let me present DeeDee, a gnome of such magnitude, that the cartoon Dexter's Laboratory was created just so she could walk into the room and perform her favorite yell: hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Dexter!

She was also a very apt dancer:

Yeah, that tune is probably gonna stick with me til 2016.

So you see, the gnomish sisterhood consists of some very impressive females. And we've only come to the letter D yet!

Are you nuts? No, I'm bananas!

Seriously, I'm practically a breakfast cereal!

Although it is not the healthiest one, the banana is one of my favorite fruits. Probably because they're easy to peal and taste nice and sweet. My favorite way to consume it? Like this:

Bread with peanutbutter, banana and chocolate sprinkles... Best lunch in the whole world!

They're also great to snack on, in either the crunchy or the squishy variation:

Although I have to confess that the latter one is pretty artificial and tastes like chemically enhanced marshmallows.

 I don't stand alone in my love for bananas: it is shared by a whole lot of gnomes:

Oh noes! Almost forgot to mention the banana bike! (And its incredibly handsome pilot!!)

For pony!

Today is the start of what appears to be a great year: the year of the Pony!

Initially I had the idea of posting a picture of a pretty pony every day. But what I lack in sense I make up for in self knowledge: I'd forget in a week. Probably less. So here's one, just to get the year started.

In case anyone was wondering: I'm not from a pony vintage myself, I was born in the year of the Tiger. Good thing ponies and tigers go so well together!

Phone with an attitude

The first thing I changed on my phone was its welcome message. When I turned it on, the piece of plastic had the audacity to call itself my 'life companion'.

Ehm... No. You're a phone. My life companion happens to be the most wonderful guy in the whole world. And I'm not just typing that because he's sitting right next to me. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Ask anyone who knows me: I'm nowhere near as hooked on my mobile phone as my previous blogs may suggest. I find them useful pieces of technology, but I seriously wish the world would see them as just that and nothing more. Ever since the damn things were invented, people seem to think they need to be 'in touch' 24/7. When I look around me, they're everywhere: in the supermarket I hear people chatter into thin air about how they're walking in the supermarket (the receiver must really have no life whatsoever if they find that interesting?!), I see them sit in silence across the table in a restaurant, typing frantically at their screen without as much as communicate with the other person(s) present, heck, at work I even hear them blabbing away in the bloody toilet! And at the average birthday party every exciting story is met with "Oh yeah, read that on your Facebook page". Meaning there's nothing left to talk about.

What happened to this world that everything's become so shallow and so superficial? I'm glad I have real friends and entertain real relationships with them, as well as with my better half. Should ever the day come that I sit opposite him in a restaurant, completely ignoring him and only having eyes for the screen of my mobile, then I hope he has the common sense to slap me. Hard.

So I put my phone in its place and stripped it from the pretence of being my life companion. It now speaks gnomish upon startup:

I told you they was organised!

The one situation in which a man was right: Mr. Tweedy wasn't wrong, the chickens were organised!

The phone itself is organised for the most part (no, I did NOT install LPS on it!), and so is the storage box. Well, there's not much to organise yet, but it's a start!

And of course, the whole thing just wouldn't be complete without a cat:

Or a shiny owl, for that matter (please note how organised the 'anti-dust plug section' of the box is, may it be filled with shinies soon!):

Meh, I just noticed that my stylus isn't in the picture. And it's all cute and shiny too, so it definitely deserves a spot here! So here's a stock photo, just to get the whole picture:

I'm rather organised, albeit not to the extreme (if you'd see the mess in my bedroom, you'd probably agree!), but some things just need to be done right. Otherwise they just irk. And no, I don't have OCD.

Well, maybe a little:

(Serioulsy: how do you make cats sit still like that?? Mine would be all over the place!)

I know it's wrong to mock people who actually have this compulsion, but can you in all honesty tell me that you have never EVER sorted your M&M's by color?

For those who recognize this image, here's your next birthday present:

Guilty pleasure

We all have them. Or at least we all should have them. Guilty pleasures. Those secret little things that make your life just a teensy bit better. Like chocolate. But that's hardly a secret. Gnomes and chocolate go very well together, so that's rather predictable.

It's the things you don't usually tell your friends about that become your guilty pleasures. Like collecting your toe nails in a jar. I wanted to post an accompanying picture, but once I started googling I decided against it. Eww. So here's something slightly more appealing, also involving toe nails.

Why we hide them? Usually not because we practice The Unspeakable. But to avoid the disapproving looks of those around us. Once you've been 29 for a while, people start to expect you to conform to the norm and grow up. All I can say to that is:

My guilty pleasure involves bunnies. And kitties. And chickens. And ponies. And all of them look like gnomes. And they come wrapped in a nauseatingly bright context. It's called LPS, or Littlest Pet Shop, a lineup of Bambi-eyed colorful critters that you have to feed, bathe and entertain. The reward? More critters to feed, bathe and entertain.

They don't even DO anything. They just sit there and wait for you to click on them, so they can eat, have a bath or play. And then the whole thing starts over again. It's pointless, it's boring and incredibly repetitive. All you do is collect gnomish critters. Which happens to be addictive as heck. I've uninstalled (and reinstalled!) the game twice now. Even worse: I have it running on multiple devices, so I can befriend myself, get more rewards and hopefully more critters. So I can feed, bathe and entertain them as well.

Hmmm. Putting it that way, I myself don't even understand why I bother. I think it's about time I quit for good. Oeh!! Brb, almost unlocked a new Polar Bear!!

Message from the GODS

Hear ye, hear ye!

The GODS decided to make the following amendmends to the gnomish dictionary:

'Washcloth' was found to have too much overlap with 'multimedia pouch' and will therefore be eliminated.

This to accommodate for the word 'combobulated' (having it all together). After all, how can something be discombobulated if it was never combobulated in the first place? This illogicalness had to be rectified.

Furthermore, due to the unstoppable rise of technology and severe cases of multitasking the word 'bra' was found to be obsolete and will be replaced with its equivalent 'ipod holder'.

The words 'brassiere' or 'boob holder' can still be used for those occasions when no ipod is attached.

Please note that the correct spelling is ipod. In good gnomish fashion this will cover all ipods, be they iPods or not.

Being aware of how much gnomes like fiddling around with buttons, the GODS would like to add the following disclaimer, especially for the male part of (gnomish) society:

Boob holder = ipod holder ≠ boob = ipod!

It's here!

Empty blogs happen when gnomes get their hands on shiny stuff...

Dinosaurs

Some say dinosaurs were erased by a giant comet or a change in climate. Others say it was caused by Deccan Traps. There are even those that think it was the rise of the mammals that did them in.

Whatever it was, fact is that the dinosaurs were doing great for a long long time. And then all of a sudden they didn't anymore. In a relatively short space of time, they were all gone.

Apparently, history does like repeating itself, albeit in a smaller scale this time. The dinosaur generation in my family that was doing so well until recently, is suddenly going extinct: 3 down in as little as 3 weeks.
Apparently growing up means you end up being the dinosaur generation yourself. Meh.

Patience is a virtue!

But I'll be the first to admit it's a virtue I don't have.

I'm more of an 'I want it now' girl. (Still miss you, Freddie!)

Or an 'are we there yet' gnome.

As a kid, I couldn't imagine ever growing up, because every year it took forever til my birthday. In hindsight, the 'growing up' thing didn't really work out anyway, so maybe it was a sign. The good thing is, it gives you an excuse for staying 29 for a long, long time!

If the saying 'anything worth having is worth waiting for' is anything to go by, then my new phone is going to be super duper awesome. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to mobile phones, social media and stuff, I'm not exactly an Innovator. Not even an Early adopter. Or a member of the Early or even Late Majority. I'm a Laggard. And proud of it.

If it were up to me, I'd still be using my old Nokia 6600 quite happily.

I renewed my subscription with my provider several times, and each time I picked a new phone, only to leave it to gather dust in its box or give it away and continue using the old one. The 6600 was awesome. It had a color display, mp3 ringtones, a camera AND internet, so I was a mobile surfer before before it became a widespread phenomenon.* Oh, and it made phone calls too! I was lightyears ahead of the rest. That phone was totally cool, and so was I, once upon a time.
*Not that there were any sites accommodating viewing in a small screen in those days and downloading information took forever and cost a fortune, but that's totally beside the point.

I kind of like gadgets. Not that I ever use them to their full potential, but I like fiddling around with them. Knowing that if I chose to do so, I'd have access to a zillion options. But in the end of the day I never take the time or the trouble to properly familiarize myself with it, meaning I end up not using half the stuff that's on there and pretty much continue the current status quo. Which is buying a state-of-the art phone and hardly use it. 

This has a major drawback. The phones I got were awesome, but they weren't mainstream. In itself that's not a bad thing at all, as I pride myself in being unique. The downside is that when you have an utterly practical phone that's unpopular with the masses, there's no accessories! So, after 15 years of being unique yet blingless, I couldn't take it anymore. What kind of gnome was I without shinies on my phone?? I wanted pretty covers and stuffs too!

Luckily, pretty much *any* smartphone these days offers more gizmo's, thingamabobs and whatchamacallits than I can handle, so all I had to worry about this time was 'does it come with cool covers?' The answer is: yes, it does. So the phone's not even on its way yet, but just buying was enough of an excuse to order some shiny covers. And a sparkly anti-dust plug (another word I didn't know until recently). And even a storage box:

After all, we're organised!

Now all there's left to do, is wait for the damn thing to actually get here. Which is taking forever. As usual.

Shiny

When I started this blog, I promised it would be about shiny stuff as well. So far, I've failed to live up to that promise. So here's a shiny blog post!

Unfortunately, the biggest shiny of the season appears to have plummeted into the sun, so we'll have to make do with other shinies. Being a nerd, a great contribution to the shininess of this universe comes from the tv-series Firefly, which is credited for coining the term 'shiny' in the meaning of 'cool'. The Gnomish Overlords Dictionary Society (GODS) totally approved of this new entry, which sadly meant the word callipygian could no longer be accommodated. But in the context of gnomes, it was a bit of a pleonasm anyway.

Firefly was in fact so shiny, that the Big Bang Theory (another favorite nerd tv-show) pays homage to it on several occasions:

Despite Sheldon's begging, the show got cancelled anyway. Pity, as it was quite entertaining. I'll happily admit I'm easily pleased with any show that has that 'lovable rogue Nathan Fillion' in it (quote by yet again Sheldon), but honestly, it wasn't half bad. Not only is there still a humongous fan base to prove its popularity and cult status, there's also this clip:

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you deal with bad guy monologues. Take note, Mr. Bond! For years I've screamed at various heroes to just *SHOOT* the bastard rather than let them rant on about all sorts of evil stuff we already knew anyway. And here comes this hero that does just that: "I don't have time for this crap. Demsel in distress = bad guy dies." All it takes is 2 seconds, good judgment and a steady hand. So Team Browncoats, yay! (And not just because that coincidentally happens to be the color of chocolate as well!!)

Of course there is the more obvious use of the word shiny too. As it happens, this too impacts the world of gnomes greatly, which is aptly demonstrated by these gnomish felines:

Yeah, we gnomes have a cute and cheerful disposition, but our attention span appears to be somewhat limited...

But unsurprising, I digress. Let's stick to the topic, just because we can.

There's one type of shiny that didn't get mentioned yet, but which is equally favorite among gnomes, especially the female ones:

Good thing I'm a moderate girl. It doesn't have to be THAT big. I'll happily settle for something slightly simpler:

 

Probably not gonna happen either. Chocolate diamonds it is, then...

Out with the old, in with the new

It's been a long and taxing month, but... December is finally over! I was never a big fan of the holidays anyway, but this year was pretty much the worst I can remember.

So let's speak of 2013 no more and may 2014 bring joy, health and happiness to all!