A bare bear

“In a world where everyone seems to be larger and louder than yourself, it is very comforting to have a small quiet companion”
~Peter Gray

I’d love to tell you he’s the bear that I’ve had since I was a child, but he’s not.

I do still have my childhood bear. He’s carefully packed away with every other stuffed animal, I’ve ever owned, at my parents house, but since Avery is my favourite, he stayed with me. There is an odd tale to how I got him though. I didn’t fall in love with him in a shop, and neither was he a gift from an admirer, but he was free.

Way back in the early naughties, I was in charge of buying stationery for my department at work. At the time Avery office labels were running a promotion where by if you saved up enough ‘points’ from their products, you could trade them in for a selection of free gifts.

Points were obtained by collecting the barcodes of their products, each of which had an assigned value, the larger packs having larger points values. One day I was looking through my collection of barcodes to see what I could ‘afford’ as the promotion was coming to an end, made my choice from what I had enough points for, filled in the form, enclosed my barcodes and waited.
28 days later Avery arrived at my door.

You can see where he got his name right? He’s lost his t-shirt somewhere along the way, but he’s still my favourite bear to snuggle with, and if I’m honest, I much prefer a bare bear.

O Noes! I haz become fanboi

It’s crept up on me more sneakily than a sneaky thing in a store full of sneakers. I have become everything I used to speak out against, I have become an Apple fanatic….

From the acquisition of my iPad eighteen months ago, it’s been all change, slowly, first my blackberry became an iPhone 4, which then became an iPhone 4S. My 20GB Sony MP3 player has been metamorphosed into a shiny new iPod touch.

Now to top it all off, my on it’s last legs, 4 year old Toshiba laptop, appears this morning to have grown up into a MacBook Air.

Oh hell.

Stop squeezing the pheasant

Meet Mosby, the squeaky toy pheasant that accompanied my BFF, my other half, myself and several others on a boozy night round Edinburgh.

Never has such a small and stupid toy caused so much merriment to so few, or was that the beer?

(Stop squeezing the pheasant mugs – are now available on my zazzle store)