Oct 6 2013

The Wampa ate my cheese…

Ok, so it didn’t really (I’m reliably informed that Wampas are carnivores and don’t like cheese) but Star Wars is beginning to take over the fridge to the extent that I can’t fit that much in it anymore. In fact the Hoth system appears to encompass the chest freezer as well. I need to send a droid probe in to find out exactly what’s going on but we seem to have Han Solo hiding under a bag of peas and a pack of frozen chicken.

Anyone know of a good way to evict Wampa, tauntaun, Luke and Han Solo? Maybe I need to send the Empire’s Imperial Fleet and AT-ATs in to get them out? On the other hand perhaps I shouldn’t even suggest that in case I come home to find an AT-AT in the freezer too.

20131006-141208.jpgCan you see the problem?

20131006-141255.jpgThey’re taking over

20131006-141338.jpgThey had better not eat my chocolates…

By Scifiwife
0
Sep 1 2013

Marvel and DC lessons at sea are just Top trumps

We recently came home from holiday on an overnight ferry. Once on board we, of course, wandered around, found the bar, the restaurant and the shop. What most adult couples probably don’t do is buy two packets of Top Trumps to play. Of course Scifi hubby couldn’t resist when he saw both Marvel and DC Top Trumps for sale. So we spent the evening sat in the bar arguing about who is stronger Batman or Superman, the Thing or Hulk and whether Batman/Bruce Wayne and Superman/Clerk Kent should have the same scores as their alter egos.

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The DC set uses some really nice art by an artist called Ariel Olivetti who we actually met at New York Comic Con last year and have a Batman/Joker commission from on our wall. So whilst we argued about whether Lois Lane really only scores 5/10 for intelligence I could at least admire Superman.

It’s amazing how detailed, and passionate some of the debates became with the DC set. According to the cards Harley Quinn is the same (low) intelligence level as Lois. Ok so Lois is sooooo stupid she can’t work out that Clark is Superman but she’s also an award winning journalist so surely not that stupid. Harley Quinn was a psychiatrist before she went loony, so again, not so stupid really. The Riddler scores 6/10 yet designs puzzles that confound Batman. Commissioner Gordon is smarter than the lot of them – a little unlikely.

I managed to prove that can’t tell the different Robins apart so got a long lecture on who they all are and how to tell at a glance – apparently the clue is in the cloak. They are: Dick Grayson (who becomes Knightwing), Jason Todd (murdered by the Joker but resurrected by Ra’s Al Ghul and becomes the Red Hood), Timothy Drake, Stephanie Brown (yes Stephanie – a blonde and female Robin), Damian Wayne (the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia Ghul) and Carrie Kelly (also female and this time ginger). I include this level of detail as writing it down will hopefully (?) make me remember it. Apparently these are crucial facts that everyone should know.

The Marvel art wasn’t as nice but I did get a crash course into the Marvel Universe which I don’t know at all beyond Spider-Man and the Avengers. It seems to me that almost every character has a matching DC character but I still have no idea of which came first and who copied who. Scifi hubby has only recently started reading Marvel stuff in any great quantity so I finally found things he doesn’t know. For example I still don’t have a clue who Luke Cage is. I got the full back story on the movie that now isn’t being made but no backstory for the guy himself. Also discovered my hubby has a love of Antman. Yes you read that right, there’s a character who can go from the size of an ant to the size of a giant. Interesting superpower…

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By the end of the evening I held a hand with Batman, Superman, Joker, Bane and Commissioner Gordon so winning became a forgone conclusion. *Victory was mine mwhahaha…*

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When we got home and emptied the coolbox I discovered it had Han Solo and a Tauntaun hiding at the bottom. Just a guess but I think I might find them in the fridge soon joining Luke and the Wampa…

Aug 2 2013

Sonic screwdrivers at the ready we’ve been invaded by scarecrows

We’ve been visiting my parents for a few days and noticed that one of the local villages had a scarecrow festival going on. So Mum and I thought it would be fun to go along and have a look. What I wasn’t expecting was the quantity of scifi related scarecrows we found. I should have taken Scifi hubby with me.

The village had been invaded by Cybermen and Darleks but luckily Dr Who himself was there to keep them in check…

20130801-230204.jpgVarious cartoon and movie characters were littered around the village…

20130801-230314.jpgGulliver was being strapped down by the Lilliputians…

20130801-230436.jpgEven scifi dog tried to join in – can you spot the real dog?…

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Jul 14 2013

A man cave AND my office…

We’re finally unpacked! Most of the boxes are gone. We can (mostly) find everything and we are ready for visitors which is just as we’ll as the have some friends coming to stay on Friday.

In the end we have split the collection between a bedroom and the cellar. The landlord came to look at the water in the cellar and decided it was simply due to the change in temperature as the house is new and hasn’t been lived in before. We’ve had a dehumidifier running for three weeks and its thankfully dried out. It was enough to panic Scifiwife hubby though so all paper based collectibles and the statues are in my office and the ‘toys’ etc are in the cellar.

20130714-115815.jpgMy office

20130714-115733.jpgThe man-cave

Scifi hubby has spent the last three weeks unwrapping the collection which has been a traumatic experience to say the least. He has now found everything but we had a week when he raced around like a headless chicken as he remembered something else that he hadn’t seen yet. He would be happily unpacking a box of books when he would suddenly shout ‘BATARANGS’ and then fly around the house looking in every box until he found them. Now bear in mind that there we 381 boxes so this whole process could take some time and for some reason seemed to mostly start at 11pm. In fact it took three days to find the batarangs with lots of swearing, complaints about removal men and pathetic random cries of ‘batarangs’ like a small child looking for a lost toy.

Meanwhile I unpacked the whole of the rest of the house, sorted the food shopping, cooked meals oh and started my new job. I’d get pulled into the occasional batarang hunt but it seemed my lines of ‘it will turn up once you’ve unpacked everything’ were more like a red flag to a bull than helpful.

We were really lucky in terms of damage and loss. The only thing that is completely missing is the digital TV box which is easy to replace at least. From a house perspective there’s a broken clock, broken radio and damaged computer speakers. From the collection there was one painting with broken glass but no damage to the painting and four damaged books. That’s it! No broken statues, smushed comics, damaged paintings, lost autographs or batarangs. Well done removal men. Now we’ve just got to hope that the insurers understand the value of books as it is, predictably, four hard to get hold of books that are battered.

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Wampa update – we remembered to collect him from the old house and he has now taken up residence in our new fridge along with Luke and Han Solo. There’s almost more toys than food in the fridge now…

Jun 19 2013

The traumas of moving house

Moving house is always difficult. Packing, labelling, loading, driving, unloading, unpacking, working out where to put everything, finding the missing screws for the bed, hunting for the power cables, trying to stop the cat escaping back to the old house the list goes on and on. Throw in 38 degree temperatures and a HUGE batman/comic collection and you’ve got a recipe for a very stressed Scifi hubby.

He barely lets me into his ‘office’ and the cat is banned completely so imagine his face as five removal men descended on Monday and “manhandled” all of his preciouses into boxes. To be fair to the removal men they were very careful, used several trees of tissue paper and enough bubble wrap to keep the whole of the city of London in ‘stress bubble paper’ for several years. All the boxes have ‘fragile’ and ‘this way up’ stickers and there was no nasty crashing noises. I guess the proof will be in the unwrapping…

20130619-101324.jpgWe have 381 packages of stuff. Yes really. At a rough estimate over half of this is his collection which partly says he has a lot of stuff and partly shows how the removal men have wrapped each Batman so well that you only get six into each box. The removal guys have two wagons; a small one which seemed to have all our household furniture and boxes in and a huge shipping container on wheels which seems to mostly contain Batmen.

20130619-101208.jpgWe had planned on putting most of his office into the basement of the new house but we opened the doors last night to discover it the cellar was damp. He’s now trying to work out how to get all of his stuff into one of the bedrooms. The floor space is actually slightly bigger than he had before but the ceiling slopes so he’s lost of lot of storage space up two walls. I think it will all fit but its a bit like a giant Tetris puzzle at the moment.

We still need to go back to the old house to do some final cleaning and give the keys back to the landlord. Just as well really as I’ve realised that we left the Wampa and Luke in the fridge!

Jun 4 2013

Maybe I should retreat into my shell and hide

I had decided not to post any more about Scifi hubby and the snails (see here) as I thought it was just encouraging him. However he hasn’t actually stopped painting them. If a snail is stupid enough to come near our house it will be spotted, gently captured and sent away with a fresh paint job. We are a snail paint shop. He then sends me a photo expecting me to pat him on the head and tell him how clever he is, hence no more blogging about snails.

That was until today. Yesterday a particularly large and brave stupid snail actually came right up to our front door and I duly received a photo of Iron Man snail.

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I didn’t think much of it until I was walking home from work today and passed a group of children in the playground near our house, they were walking across the grass carefully cupping their hands – which were full of snails! Except for one child who only had one snail in his hands and the other kids were all looking at it and laughing. You guessed it. It was Iron Man snail!

I always wondered where the snails went after they were released, how embarrassed they are and whether the other snails laugh at them? Now I’m wondering if Scifi hubby has accidentally started the latest children’s craze and how far it will spread? Maybe moving house soon is a good thing…

    Explanatory note: You may have worked out that we don’t live in the UK or USA. The country we live in is a bit like I imagine the UK was like in the 1950s – in particular kids walk to school on their own from a very young age, they play outside after school, they don’t live on computer games, they still draw chalk pictures on the pavements, every residential area has a well used playground (and not used by drunks and druggies) and most of the kids don’t have TVs in their bedrooms. This probably explains a lot…
May 10 2013

Man crèche

Shopping with Scifi hubby can be a little like trying to shop with a four year old in tow. We have to go into every toy shop, check every aisle of hotwheels cars and every bookshop for graphic novels. He doesn’t want to stop to eat, or have coffee and doesn’t have a lot of patience with me clothes shopping. So you can understand that I was over the moon when our friends at Reed Comics offered to let me use their ‘man crèche’ facilities!

I’ve mentioned our friends who run the online comic shop before and they frequently save ‘our’ skins when no one else can source a specific book or toy. We were visiting their local area for a few days recently and had planned to see them for dinner when, knowing I wanted to go clothes shopping, they made this awesome suggestion. I could drop Scifi hubby off at their offices in the morning and collect him later and Scifi friend Mat could join him too. They would feed and water them and make sure they didn’t get into too much trouble. Cue lots of jokes about putting a ball pool in the spare office (Bazinga!), finding Batman playmats for him and what time nap time was.

Now of course there’s a risk to leaving Scifi hubby unsupervised in a comic shop all day. I knew that this would be a rather expensive crèche if he had all day to pore over everything in their stock and catalogues but boy was it worth it. I got a whole day shopping, found everything I wanted, stopped for lunch and didn’t look like a stressed parent by the end of it.

I returned to the offices to find out how much damage Scifi hubby had done to the bank balance and discovered him, in true crèche style, sitting on the floor playing with boxes.

20130510-101733.jpgFor a minute I had images of him preferring the boxes to the contents and that maybe I’d got away with it but apparently he had actually bought so much stuff that we couldn’t get it all home in the suitcases. The Reeds had kindly offered to store a whole pile of things for him until we visit by car later in the year. There’s now a ‘Scifi hubby corner’ in their offices. Thanks guys!

There’s a business idea in man crèche though – can I book him in for next time please?

Wampa update: he is still in the fridge and has now been joined by Luke Skywalker hanging from the roof…

May 4 2013

Scifi hubby thinks he’s Iron Man

We went to see Iron Man 3 this week. Having listened to weeks of hype about it and having a rather excited scifi hubby it was quite fun that for once the movie came out over here before the USA. Don’t tell scifi hubby but I actually quite like the Iron Man movies. This one was funnier than the others, and I think it was actually meant to be. The bad guys were bad, the good guy was troubled, the female ‘interest’ was good looking and Pepper got to wear the Iron Man suit. Lots of explosions, big guns and explosions on planes – the stuff that scifi wet dreams are made of.

I did find myself wondering why Iron Man didn’t just call in SHIELD to help. Hulk would have put short shrift to superheated, self healing people. Especially as, if you are a proper geek and sit through all the credits in an empty cinema as the staff hover up around you, you see Dr David Banner at the end. Sadly it turns out I like the movie more than scifi hubby does! He’s read the graphic novel that it’s based on so is muttering about it not being true to the book. Maybe I need to worry about him turning into a comic book traditionalist…

However, for a DC fan scifi hubby gets very excited about the Marvel movies. He’s got an arc reactor chest light that he connects to his tshirt, an Iron Man mask, the Mark 7 armour bracelets and he’s convinced that the Black Sabbath tshirt is a really clever reference – shame no one else ever seems to get it. He’s also just got a new phone case which make the phone look like the Iron Man armour and when it rings the light flashes. To top it off the ring tone is the Iron Man theme tune.

Marvel seems to now be expanding throughout the house. We’ve got omnibus books, hulk hands, Captain America’s shield and Thor’s hammer. He’s also just ordered a series of wall lights that look like the hammer, shield and Hulk’s fist. He’s going to have fun finding places to put all of them at the new house.

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P.S. I’m refusing to give in to the usual scifi cliches for today (May the 4th) but I do still have a Wampa in the fridge…

Apr 24 2013

“At least it is not a model railway”

I’m getting behind with my Scifi wife updates. I’m blaming Scifi hubby for doing too many crazy things too often – oh, maybe changing jobs and moving house is a factor too! There’s now so many potential posts that I’m not quite sure where to start but I guess the main story at the moment though has got to be moving house.

I’ve got a new job (woohoo congratulations me!) so we are moving a couple of hours away from where we are now. As you can imagine moving house with Scifi hubby is not the easiest of experiences and his stress levels are through the roof. Last time we moved it was an international move and all our stuff went into storage for three months. I had recurring visions of all his toys coming alive ‘Toy Story’ style whilst in the storage depot and running amok through all the packing cases. No wonder we weren’t allowed to pack any liquids and especially alcohol as we would have had some very drunk Batmen…

20130424-174151.jpgThis is a scene they cut from the movie apparently 🙂

We still need to find a house but this time it should be a simple drive down the road – I hope! However the collection has grown somewhat since we last moved. I spent most of Sunday sat on a Yoda cushion with the laptop helping him write a list of EVERYTHING in his room and how much it would cost to replace. We only got about half way through before I got a completely numb bum, lost the will to live and ran screaming from the room (after hitting ‘save’ a few times to make sure I didn’t have to repeat it). Happily for me the weather forecast this weekend is bad so I can sit in there again and finish the inventory, aren’t I lucky?

We have also had the first of the removal companies come round to quote for the move. They have been warned there is a Batman collection to deal with but they clearly have no idea what this entails. The very nice German chap this week looked around the living room, saw a few Batman paintings and one glass cabinet with four Batman statues and I think he thought that was it. He started to write them all down individually and ask about value. I suggested that maybe he should think about volume and wait for the inventory for the value. I’m not sure he understood until he walked into Scifi hubby’s room. I wish I had taken a photo of his face. He almost tripped over Kermit the Frog, jumped when he saw the full size Joker mannequin and you could see the panic in his eyes for a moment. What I loved the most was that he simply took a deep breath and calmly said “well it could be worse – at least it is not a model railway”! Apparently that’s very common in Germany. Maybe I should be grateful?

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We now have the prospect of the actual packing to look forward to. Not to mention people coming to look at the apartment to see if they want to rent it once we leave – strangers in Scifi hubby’s room EEEK. Then there’s the unpacking. At this point I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and singing “lalalala” like my friend’s 3 year old twins when they don’t want to do something. We also have some very unfortunate/lucky friends who had booked to come and visit us before we knew we were moving. They will now be here in the midst of unpacking. Luckily he is a scifi fan so I’m thinking that the girls can go shopping and the boys can unwrap Batman toys 🙂

Meanwhile I’m finishing up at my current job, sorting the paperwork for my new job, trying to find a new house, dealing with relocation agencies and removal companies, trying to sort our current rental property out (all of which is in German), inventorying the rest of the apartment, ensuring the cat is up to date with her jabs so we don’t have to find a (probably French speaking) vet the second we move, working out how to de-register from the local authority area, redirect the post etc etc. AND I seem to have mistakenly wandered into spreadsheet hell.

I’ll add more of the recent Scifi hubby tales soon – some are quite high up on the Scifi hubby scale of craziness; for example, why exactly do I currently have a Wampa in my fridge? And will he have eaten Luke when I next open the door

Apr 12 2013

Someone’s been playing with my T-Rex…

My desk dinos always invoke comments from colleagues and visitors when they come to my office and see nine plastic dinosaurs around the place. My Director even squeezes them to make them roar occasionally. However, the latest addition seems to have found someone who likes playing with him secretly. Tommy the giant T-Rex was a valentine’s gift from Scifi hubby (see blog here) and he’s living in the plant pot in the corner of my office. For some reason of Scifi hubby logic Batman is riding Tommy.

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I was sat at my desk on Wednesday when the maintenance guys came round to water the plant and pull any dead leaves off it. They saw Tommy and laughed to each other in German. I think they were saying he was sweet but it could have been that this is the crazy lady’s office – my German still isn’t great. They sorted the plant around him, carefully watered it from the other side so Tommy didn’t get wet feet and went on to the next office.

I came into the office yesterday to find Batman hanging upside down by his ankle under Tommy. I assumed he had fallen off, took a photo thinking it was quite funny and ignored him.

20130412-171458.jpgThis afternoon I’ve come back to my desk after a meeting to discover Tommy eating Batman!

20130412-171533.jpgNobody is owning up to playing with them but SOMEONE IS PLAYING WITH MY T-REX! Maybe I can claim T-Rex harassment?!