Let’s start off with this – I am Madam Miseryguts and I want the retail sale of fireworks banned. Not only because the freaking idiots letting them off every night for a month screw up my sleeping patterns, leave sh*t on my roof, scare kids/dogs/cats, set off fires so causing a high workload for Fire Service staff & leave the rest of us to foot the bill but because every year some backyard Rambo maims himself/someone else. One year that was nearly my brother D’s eye; I still remember blood, tears and my mother ranting (it was a justified rant and not at dad) & panicking.

If we aren’t paying for Len Brown’s personal gym at Town Hall then there is plenty of money to spend on public displays and plenty of appropriate places and vantage spots in Auckland.

Anyway, rant over. Last night we went to the FIL’s for a bonfire. FIL is a widower whose stepdaughter has JUMPED at the chance to live almost free in her mother’s old house, relegating the FIL to a small cottage on the property. This is regardless of the ammt of money FIL put in over his marriage to J (and I think he is only just realising that he’s been stiffed by the will. If it wasn’t for J snagging him, a married man at the time, there would be no house/orchard/business). I can’t stand this woman; she is mean, small minded, petty and grasping. Her husband is almost as bad and both like to blame breakages on anyone else – including my children who are so rarely there it’s a joke. So I was really looking forward to this evening. Yeah, right. Whoops, that’s another rant.

We didn’t really congregate with this D and her “friends”. We brought our own! Which sounds kind of bad, but really, no money changed hands!

I’ll leave you with this thought that I heard as part of a comedian’s soliloquy – is it unfair that we celebrate the activities of a domestic terrorist given today’s global situation? Is it just plain stupid?