A Room Full of Elephants

You've no doubt heard the expression about there being an "elephant in the room".

It refers to the awkwardness/awareness of a topic or situation that is obvious but taboo/uncomfortable to speak of, and so all mention of it is avoided.

Well I feel like I have an entire herd of elephants in my room at the moment. It's a very strange feeling. It's almost as if a cosmic Bruce Forsyth has paraded an exhibition of thoughts, ideas, emotions and situations from my past... Generation Game style before me.

It's bad enough trying to wriggle your way past the elephant(s) in your room as it is... but if you are unlucky, sometimes your elephants take notice of you and start moving in your general direction.

That's what it has been like for me... I've been minding my own business, when all of a sudden three or four things crop up from the past that clamour for a review.

All I want is to get my fair slice of cheese... but it seems I'll have to traverse a room full of mousetraps to get anywhere near it. I kind of feel a lot like this mouse:

There is one major difference however, in life what sometimes looks like the cheese can often turn out to be the mousetrap (and the reverse is also true).

So should I run from my pachyderm problem? Or should I let one or more of these emotions/situations gravitate into my personal comfort zone, or even embrace one?

Who knows?

Life's full of mysteries... consider this one of them!

A Little Light Relief

As I'm sure you have noticed, a lot of the outbound traffic from my blog of late has either been sombre or theologically heavy going... sometimes it's been both.

I thought it was high time to post something on a somewhat lighter if not brighter note...

My mother has struck again! I was hoping to do my laundry as usual on Saturday evening (I don't think my colleagues would approve if I turned up naked), and was struggling to find any detergent (we normally use liquitabs). So I pestered mum about where they might be. Now, seeing as she had become thoroughly absorbed in a chat room, it is fair to say that she was not overly impressed. She insisted - with a heavy dose of righteous indignation, that there were definitely some liquitabs in the cupboard and that I needed to look harder... and that she would be pretty cheesed off, if she had to come in and find them for me.

Needless to say, I didn't take the hint.

So into the kitchen stomped Mum, who promptly produced a pack of liquitabs from the cupboard... looked me squarely in the eyes and said "what do you think these are?"

To which I pointed out that what she had in her hands were dishwasher tabs, not washing machine ones.

Blank look for about 10 seconds.

Which was followed by a mild profanity and the admission that she had been doing all her laundry for a week with the dishwasher detergent.

As a friend later pointed out... at least her smalls were all squeaky clean!

It's not even as if they look remotely the same though:

Would you get them confused?