Masked Crimefighter? The Owlman!

If you can see the picture below, having seen repeated trailers for The Dark Knight Rises, and not think "That guy's trying to look like a supercriminal/crime-fighter", then you're endowed with special skills. Or you think I look like a slightly blue SAS dude. Why am I so attired? Well, there are two reasons. First, I realised why I have lately been coughing like a machine specially designed to cough. It's because I have been spending too much time in Dad's room. This EeePC is now so outdated that I can't add photos. The photo below will have been added after the post was written on the EeePC. Second, I have been painting my bedroom window. So today I picked up one of those masks - from a Jewson's about twenty miles away - to protect one from particulate matter in the air.

However, it would not have been Friday the Thirteenth without a little comedy. A little while ago I looked closely at the stickers on the two big circular bits. When I bought these they were in a plastic bag. I read it. It said they were the right bits. I didn't trust myself. I asked the guy at the desk. He thought so, but asked another guy to confirm it. He did so. I bought the stuff. Several hours later I saw the stickers: "Batch 98040 Use by May 2009". I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that nobody ever buys anything from that DIY place. I thought the container was dusty, but there was a wood workshop through an open door! Aiaiai!

The Dreaded Thirteenth began well, as I lay in bed outside, wondering what the hell that noise was. I had heard it some nights before, and written it off as a rusty bicycle that some jerk was pushing slowly up the road. It had recurred since then, and from about half past midnight on the "morning" of the Thirteenth, it had been intermittently preventing me from sleep. As time went on it changed location, and I could tell it was coming from about thirty feet away, in the very garden I was sleeping in. I hadn't heard anyone drag a dying bicycle through a hedge, so it had to be an animal. But what? The only novelty we'd had lately was the hedgehog, and why the hey-diddle-diddle would he be impersonating a rusty bike? Moreover, who taught him to do it?

So after enduring half an hour of this, I got up, and went to find out just what was making this distinctly un-soporific racket. The noise stopped. I stepped down the stairs into the Side Garden. I swung my torch below the steps, before me, to the left, to the right. The Hokey-Cokey failed, and I saw no creatures. I flailed about again with my under-powered lightsabre, and saw only the guinea pigs' enclosure. Nothing stirred save the stereotypical branches in the breeze. All was still. Then the bicycle squeaked! It was behind me. I turned. I'd like to be cinematic and say I spun round, but let's be honest. If you're half-asleep and looking for a mysterious animal, you'd turn round sluggishly. I did. Nothing. It squeaked again. Above and before me it squeaked again, demanding oil like some tiny, rusty demon. I aimed the torch up and espied an owl in a fir tree. He didn't take kindly to my pointing a torch at him, and so he squeaked all the more rustily.

Simultaneously grumpy at being kept up and with my thirst for knowledge slaked, I sloped off to bed. The young Long Eared Owl sloped off to a different tree where jerks would not point torches at him. It sounded as though he sat right outside a neighbour's window. Apologies to that neighbour if that's true. I then managed a fairly consistent sleep until five minutes before my alarm was supposed to wake me. I find alarms never wake me up. I either oversleep or I wake up before they go off, my unconscious mind being a slightly poor timekeeper.