you know your on a diet when

for the last two months i have been on a calorie controlled diet thingy. Now for a chocolate and cake loving fatso like myself this is no mean feet. But it seems to have worked. For the first month i was perminantly starving, grumpy , and muttering to myself about how sodding unfair it all was and in a total panic about what to eat. Then my clothes began to let me breath. Instead of eating chocolate, i would sniff it longingly and then actually give it back and not ram it into my podgy little mouth. So far i have lost just over a stone. Two weeks ago i slipped and fell straight into a domino's pizza offer, but apart from that i think i have survived this relatively unscathed.
some things have changed mind you.
You know your on a diet when,
In iceland doing the weekly shop you start to check the calorie content on the packets of biscuits before sighing and putting them back.
When someone says a type of food you can immediately tell them exactly how many calories are in it.
If someone asks you if you want a bite of something, you reply " no but can i have a sniff"
Your plate of carefully measured out food looks like everyone else s left overs.
Instead of just serving up tea You have to carefully weigh out everything and then panic if it goes one over your allotted amount.
You find a new respect for vegetables and your one veg a day  becomes, six pieces of fruit and two lots of veg a day.
see i'm not obsessed honest, well maybe a bit.

that certain day that comes once a year

yesterday i turned forty . i also waved my son off to yet more karate practice and swimming. i fed cats i did two loads of washing and caught up on all the things i had recorded on the sky box. i tidied the house well when i say tidied that just means i moved piles of mess from one room to another where i wouldn't have to look at it.
You see i don't do birthdays. I havent done birthdays for years now. It has also taken that amount of time for me to train the people near me not to ask the " what do you want for your birthday ?" question. I hate that question. it annoys me to my very core. If i want anything i will either save up and get it myself or i will go without, it's that simple. Birthdays have always been a disaster.
When i was younger and was still looking forward to them, my parentals would hide the gifts in the bottom of an old 1920's wardrobe they had. Until one year that is when the key broke in the lock and no one could get the presents out. It took hours, when your a child no presents on that so called special day pretty much equals the end of your world. It only happened to me, never my siblings.
Then there were the children's parties where you have to invite your class mates to celebrate with you. I was not a popular child at school. I was the fat awkward one who was painfully shy. the teachers thought i was a joy, the children didn't. But when you invite them they will come and pretend that they like you. Funny what cake can do isn't it. I remember one year i had been given roller skates, i loved these things and hadn't even had a chance to try them on. i was saving them for a quiet moment. I didnt want them spoilt, so they had stayed in the box. Then the class mates descended, routed through the things i had been given. The thing with children , well these ones anyway was that even though most of these things were still in boxes and i hadn't had time to play with them that didn't matter. boxes were opened things were taken and played with , my roller skates were worn and then broken before i had had a chance to enjoy them. That was the last party i ever had.
So when anyone asks me what i intend to do for my birthday, i don't give them an answer. I'm not about to go out and drink myself into a coma. I'm not about to party the night away. After all it's just another day.

the cat poo chronicles

Fluffy was not at school today, apparently there was a teachers training day. So yesterday he went off with a friend of his armed with his karate kit, his swimming kit, two tennis rackets and a football. They had so much fun that he ended up staying the night. So what has this got to do with cat poo i hear you ask. Well this morning we get up, throw on some clothes and wander down stairs where the cats have been all night.
As soon as we open the door to the front room the smell hits us. The squiting kitten has done it again but none of us can see where. Slowly we come into the room , each of us studying the furniture with a sense of dread.
the cats are circling our feet meowing " feed me " sir looks across at me and mumbles half asleep,
"Can't see any of the furniture." and we continue on slowly watching the floor for tell tale splats. That's when my phone rings. It's fluffy asking if his friend can come round for the day. I had to say yes after all if was only fair. he had spent the day and night over at his friends. We had half an hour to discover the mess and air out the whole of downstairs.
I opened as many windows as i could find, while still on the phone. Sir disappeared into the kitchen and came back armed with cleaning wipes kitchen roll and gloves. I watched as he knelt under my desk and pointed to the source of the smell. the kitten had crapped right under my desk. we had less than twenty minutes to clear it and pray the smell went away.
The thing with poo is once you find the main problem you end up finding a map of wear it has been walked over the floor boards and then lovingly squashed into the cat blanket. cat blanket was thrown into the washing machine, floor was scrubbed, poo was scraped , words were said mostly along the lines of " that fucking cat will end up as bloody dog food." and " the smell isn't going "
It got to the point where we were leaving the room waiting for a few seconds and then coming back into it sniffing and then spraying a bit more. it seemed like seconds to go and finally the smell was cleared. we had gotten away with it. Just as fluffy and his friend turned up. Luckily no one said anything about the smell.
kittens are cute but my god are they hard work.

while i've been away

so it seems another life time since i last wrote or did anything, actually it's been about a month. I'm not quite so jibbery now. In fact i keep singing to myself " I can see clearly now the drugs kicked in." so slowly but surely i am returning to some form of normality what ever the hell that is.
House still looks like a huge bomb got dropped and then covered every available surface with cat hair, but i tackle things like that one step at a time. First i swear at it and try to ignore it. Then i complain about it and hope that someone else will do it. Finally i end up doing it grudgingly grumpily but it gets done, until the next time anyone runs out of under wear or the cat sits on something and covers it in a layer of fur.
the fluffy one joined Karate he is now an orange belt and is loving his new found sport. It helps that one of his friends goes to the same thing.
Oh and we have not one cat but two. She has been with us for about two weeks now and is eleven weeks old. we have called her widget. i think she must be the fartiest kitten ever known to man. so far she has thrown up on fluffy's lunch box ( we didn't tell him ) and managed to either wipe her bum or actually trail poo round the kitchen and front room. Procrastination man has been poo'd on twice i have escaped the poo i just clear it up. Next week i am looking at taking out shares in vanish and fabreeze . but she is very sweet when she isn't being farty, the ratio of accidental poo to dirt tray poo is now getting back on track and psycho kitty is liking the company.
so that's me getting better doing things and trying to get back on track. i might just get keep taking the tablets tattooed somewhere well either that or the word arse.

until next time.

battle pants

my mind is at war. for a while now i have felt unwell, down, something hasn't been right. Little things seem like mountains i have to climb. The unexpected turns me into a scared angry person. I see shadows out of the corners of my eyes and then when i turn nothing is there. I seem to sleep alot of the time or not at all. I can't focus or settle i am distracted. The more i think the less i feel and then huge waves of angst hit me , my heart pounds i want to cry or scream or do something but i don't.
On the outside i seem fine but my mind is at war.
I will get better. i have little white pills that at the moment make me dizzy and sick and give me a feeling of falling down, but that will go. I will get better not cured but ok again.

i say a little pray for sleep

Right insomnia you and i need to have words.
Is there any chance that tonight you will let me sleep in more than two hours bursts ?
I really don't want to be waking up on the hour every bloody single silent hour tonight.
I don't want my pj bottoms to be making their way up every crevice imaginable, slowly strangling my intestines. While the legs look like i belong to the masons. It's not a good look for anyone.
If i go with night wear option two and  wear a night shirt i would like it to stay in one place, and for that place not to be permanently around my ears.
It would be nice if the cat would realize that if my legs do twitch at night, it's not because i want to wake up with her attached to my big toe. I would like to be able to stick one of both feet out of the end of the bed without fear of small furry attack .
I would also like you to see to it that i get my allotted side of the bed, all of it not the three millimeters i am usually given. It would also be nice if i didn't have so much cover. The hot flushes of middle age are rapidly gaining on me i don't need to be cocooned.
See i don't ask for much do i?
really on the grand scale of things i want very little.
Just sleep.

Being Pants

I remember when i first joined twitter. It was two or so years ago now. I had drunk too much coffee and was awake at 4.30am, so i thought why not.I finally had internet access after years of fighting against it. I'm not one for change, but sometimes it's like trying to hold back a tidal wave. Whatever happens your bound to get wet so you may as well stand back and let the inevitable happen. Anyhow that was the idea, give twitter a chance, find a voice. After all i had things to say didn't i? So why not do it somewhere that no one knows you, you know no one and then you can say what ever you want to. Well that was the idea back then.
For a while that worked. I wasn't just someone who didn't see or hear from anyone for days on end. I had a window to the outside world. Suddenly with Twitter @Pantsbum was born. I was free to say what i wanted. I could swear and i did. i could have opinions people would normally suck their teeth at in real life, but here i didn't care. It was a case of look out world the pants have landed in all their couldn't give a shit glory.

So what happened?

Suddenly ( not in the overnight success sense ) I was popular. People found me amusing and not an embarrassment. After years, decades even of trying to conform i found i didn't have to. I was free. For a while i had a voice and i wasn't ashamed of using it.
But then the inevitable happens. People complain. I get phone calls from family members telling me that in no uncertain terms that my opinion isn't welcome. I shouldn't be writing the things that i do. Strangers sometimes take that line. I even had people that i didn't know telling me to go jump off a cliff no one wants to read my blog, my tweets. I'm a pathetic individual ect ect. why don't i just go and die?
So i get a little angry, but those storms are weathered. I don't write about my anger the way i used to. I go back to sucking it up and saying nothing, the way i always did. But i loose my touch, my ability to say what i feel. I can't do that anymore. I find myself over analyzing everything. Can i have this thought ? Would this thought be approved of or would it be deemed inappropriate for general release ?
thinking back the death knell came when someone whose opinion i valued, who had encouraged me to start my blog, and even found me someone who could help me set it up, told me he thought i had lost my touch. Thinking back he was right. We don't speak anymore, haven't for about a year now, because i threw my collective toys out of my pram and in a not very adult way blanked him after that. I was a fool and now he will probably never know how much i am grateful to him for the encouragement he gave all those years ago. It's good when people believe in you and those are the people that matter above all others.

So where am i now ?

After a year of very unfunny , not particularly ranty and completely uninspired tweetings and the odd blog, i have discovered some things about myself.

I need to stop trying and just start being.
I need to stop listening to the ones who say i can't and start believing in the ones who say i can.
I may not always be someone's cup of tea and that's fine.
I am an embarrassment and that's fine to.
I need to stop being ashamed of who i am.
So now is the time to stop hiding.
I'm not perfect. Perfection is overrated.
I'm a forty year old who wears hightops, likes jumpers with skulls on them and listens to anything from classical to drum and base and dubstep.
It's ok not to be popular and most importantly of all I'm fine with being me.
I will still be pants just pants reborn.
P- persistent
A- and
N- not
T- taking
S- shit

That's being Pants.