Happy Valentines

Happy Valentines day to all you lovely people who I love.
(That'll be me then...)

To all couples - I hope you have a lovely day, and manage to get the correct presents and are rewarded with love rather than cold indifference.

To all singles - have an even better day than the couples, and remember that it is fully acceptable to make vomiting noises at any loved up people that you may see - regardless of whether you know them or not.

An annoying trip out

I am annoying.
I present this to you as fact, because I am fully aware of it.
I will go out of my way to annoy people, because I find it amusing.
Particularly if I can get away with annoying my parents.
The last time that I did this in a major way was last week.
My dad is doing some pub-guide book, and so he has a list of pubs he needs to go to. One of these is the very lovely Waterfall Hotel at Glen Maye.

Because it is also a restaurant, dad decided we should all go out for Sunday lunch, so me and my family all went down.
The drive down was fairly uneventful. My brother was playing up, so I let him have one of my earphones and we listened to Doctor Who soundtrack. We occasionally had a little chat about said programme, but on the whole, it was quite dull.

Then we got to the Waterfall. Because we were early, we decided to go for a walk in the glen.
I like glens. They are full of tools of annoyingness. And when I am in an annoying mood, which I was, it is like all my Christmases have come at once.

My first task was to get Michael as muddy as possible.

There had been a lot of rain recently, so the path was full of puddles, and there was mud EVERYWHERE.
I set Michael off on a race. I had no intention of running myself, but I knew that if Michael ran enough he would kick mud up onto his trousers.

Which he did.

Then there’s the old waterwheel case. You can get in, but it is muddy inside. Very muddy.

So I pushed Michael slightly, so he stepped in and got mud all over his nice shoes.

Because I had to get close enough to push Michael in, I also had muddy shoes.

No problem - I just wiped them on Michael.

The glen goes down to the sea which, yet again, presents a plethora of possibilities. (Check out my alliteration skills).
The river runs out onto and through the beach. So what better game is there than to get Michael to stand on the edge of the river and chuck stones as close to him as possible in order to try and get him splashed?

The answer?
Throwing stones as close as possible to my dad.

And what’s better than this?
Orchestrating things SO CAREFULLY that soon it is just dad and Michael throwing stones into the river, trying to splash each other, while I laugh evilly and watch at a safe distance while they both pick up bigger and bigger stones.

Result - Michael and dad have wet trousers and shoes, Michael also has a wet jumper and I am perfectly dry.

After all this excitement I was just hungry, so I left it well alone until after I had eaten. On a side note - food was lovely - I fully recommend. (And yes, I ate my burger with a knife and fork.)

Then we got back in the car. I find cars boring at the best of times, so after a while I started a game of ‘next one to see’. It’s a fairly simple game. One person chooses a thing - then the next one to see it wins. Then they get to choose the next thing. Simple, yet effective.
Though, playing with Michael can sometimes be a chore…

Around the same time I decided to start a conversation about what animals I would like to hug.

The one that I decided was my favourite was a cow.
So I made up a song.

‘Have you ever hugged a cow?
Let it moo in your little ear?
Looked into it’s big brown eyes?
MOOOOOO! MOOOOOO!’

I sang this song over and over and over and over.

This went on for quite some time. And then, because it, like me, is fairly simple, Michael picked up on the words. So there was two of us, in the back of the car, singing this song over and over again. I then decided to turn it into a round.
Mum and Dad did not join in.

After a while I got bored and we went back to playing ‘next one to see.’
I picked seagull.
And suddenly, there were NO frickin’ seagulls to be found.

Usually the little buggers are everywhere. You can’t go out without seeing at least thirty a minute.
Not to worry though. I decided to try and attract them.
By getting my brother to make seagull noises.
Very loudly.

When that didn’t work, I encouraged him to be louder.
Much MUCH louder.

Still no sign, so I told Michael we needed to change tactic.
We needed to sound like seagulls that had found food.
This involved us making seagull noises and occasionally shouting ‘Look! Toast!’

This still proved useless.
Fortunately, I had one trick left up my sleeve.
I needed Michael to sound like a seagull in pain.
Unfortunately, my brother didn’t know what a pained seagull sounded like.
So he just started screaming.
While flapping his arms.

Over and over.
It was epic.
No one could get him to stop.

Eventually he settled down.
Until he saw a seagull.
For some reason his brain failed, and mixed up the game with his previous actions. Instead of going:

This happened:

Nearly all the way home.
(Added bonus - when I started writing this post, I couldn’t remember the words to the cow song so I had to ask Michael. And he hasn’t stopped singing it since then. YES!)
(Added added bonus - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2onR1vwQgNE