The Weather

Let’s get this over and done with shall we (and I mean that in more ways than one). The weather can best be described as ‘erratic’. Over the Easter Weekend there was a lot of rain, but also bursts of bright blue sky, and the sunshine this meerkat craves. The sun’s light and warmth can go a long way towards making everything feel better, and after what feels like yet another long winter (with spring not really yet kicking in properly), I am craving warmer weather to lift the mood. Hopefully we’ll move out of April Showers, and into better conditions once May arrives.

The Mario Movie

In my previous Muse, I spoke of my eager anticipation of the Super Mario Bros Movie. Would it be the cathartic release, the healing balm that soothed the burn inflicted by the original film, some 30 years prior? In short, whilst the new movie was not brilliant, it was considerably better than the original effort, and I write about it in more detail here. A lot of critics haven’t warmed to it, but fans have loved it, and the film is on course to be one of the most successful animated movies ever. In light of this, sequels seem pretty much inevitable. This meerkat is most happy with this!

The (Impending) Wedding

April sees the first of two family weddings this year. The occasion promises to be a typical clan gathering, with all the merriment and excitement I am used to. It’s fairly local, which is always handy, and I’ve turned the occasion into a long weekend for myself, which is always nice! The early starts for work are something I am reasonably used to, but they are quite knackering at times. I have no idea how merry I’ll personally be come the end of wedding activities, so I apologise for any drunk tweeting or posting I make (not that I’ll be doing much of that during a wedding!).

The Milestone

The other day, I cracked a major marker in my quest to post every day in 2023. I have made at least one post every day for over one hundred days, so that’s a nearly a third of the year with Meerkat Musings content! Aren’t you kats lucky?!

The Decision

In the last Muse, I spoke at length about a new tattoo. Due to the price of what I wanted, I am now reconsidering my options. A Mario-themed tattoo is still very much on the cards, but how that plays out… well, there are two main options I’m looking at:

Both are of the power-up mushroom, but whereas the top one is from Super Mario Bros 3, the bottom one is a more general depiction, that turns up in a lot of Mario lore. The top one would probably be more costly, as it’s more detailed, but it would look great. Depending on the cost, I could get another (the lightsaber is still an option).

I keep threatening to get some of my personal art tattooed onto my body, but is the world ready for this?:

The Judgement

I had written up a chunk of Muse on the belligerence of a customer, and then, following another conversation with them, deleted it. I was about to act in haste, and I had judged the customer quite harshly. Granted, to be… well, not exactly shouted at, but to have anger unreasonably directed at you… we can all agree that’s not pleasant. The customer had every right to be angry, but the problem lay not with anything we’d done at the store, and all we wanted to do was help. Our options were limited, but we made some suggestions, and we passed them on. None of the options were especially good, but like I said, we were limited.

After a short passage of time, the customer called back with a different, less pressing issue, and they apologised, and that, as far as I am concerned, drew a line under things, even though the original problem had not yet been resolved. We would continue to try, and would do our jobs as best we could, despite the problem originating with the warehouse, many, many miles away.

It goes to show that giving one’s self time to cool down can be beneficial. This is in no small part why I am no longer engaging with some of the more toxic commentators and bloggers I’ve encountered. It took me a long time to realise that nothing good can come from it.

The Cough

One of my colleagues has recently had a horrible, hacking cough, and now I have a cough, which is well on the way to being horrible and hacking. She swears blind that by the time I caught it, she couldn’t have been the one to pass it on, but here we are. I have the cough, and it is damaging my calm. I hate the wrenching feeling of an uncontrolled dry retching, and have taken cough medicines, but so far the cough is still with me. All I can do is keep taking the medication, and hope it goes away quickly. I have the wedding to go to soon, I don’t want to be hacking my guts up mid-ceremony! There’s a chance it could be hay-fever related, and if so, a loooooooooong hay-fever spell awaits me.

The Dreams

This meerkat continues to have surreal nocturnal experiences. The other night brought a trio of dreams that were each unique. One involved me being one of the characters from Kung Fu Panda (the bird who accidentally assists in the villain’s escape in the first film). Sure enough, the events of the film repeated themselves, but with some new, additional villainous characters, who wanted to recruit Tai Lung to their cause (or manipulate him, I’m not sure).

The next dream (well, maybe the next dream, the order of these is fuzzy) involved a colleague and I at a small pizza place – think a London high street – where he ordered me a pizza and a hot chocolate as an extra to what I was ordering. My own order arrived at the same time, but my pizza had the consistency of Yorkshire pudding batter, and was thus very gloopy.

Finally, I had a dream that felt so real, I had to clue myself into how I was dreaming. I was seated at my dining table, with some of my cousins and my mum in attendance, talking about nothing in particular. The strangest aspect of this was the aforementioned realism. I honestly believed I was awake, and that this conversation was happening. It was something about the sky through the window that clued me in to how I was dreaming.

I did mention lucid dreaming the other week, though I haven’t explored this in any great detail. This was the opposite, where I couldn’t distinguish the dream world from reality.

Speaking of dreams, there was yet another couple of weird ones. In one, I was flying to somewhere exotic with my family, and because we’d forgotten something, the plane got turned around for us to get what we needed. Somehow, I don’t think that happens in real life… then, in another dream, my wife, daughter and I were forced to live out of a hotel, following a major leak in our home. I recall asking how long the hotel’s restaurant was open for, and there were a bunch of dogs in the foyer that had frozen in place, as though watching something.

With the ruminations on the dreamscape complete, this feels like a natural point to wrap up this Muse. What adventures do the next couple of weeks hold?