Is love at 1st sight possible?

Hmmm…attraction, yes, lust, most definitely…but love? Nope, I think that has to develop over time once two people get better acquainted and get to know each other before making any big commitments like ‘luff”…

How did you choose your pet’s name?

First time around, Mum told us kids we had a new pet coming and we should pick a name for it – it was all a big mystery and previous pets had been four-legged and woolly so us kids didn’t really put too much effort into it and selected the most foolish name we could think of (in the early 80s) which is our our spaniel got the grand monicker of Claudia.

Some two decades later, I made a casual comment that the new spaniel pup were selected looked a lot like the cartoon character Pepe LePew. Kirk, our current big dog, got his name because Carmen’s brother had a big Rottweiler named Khan and I passed the comment once that Kirk kicks Khan’s butt any day (Trekkies will get it). Lulu our rescue dog was Lulu when we got her, and Deeta the Rottweiler pup that we are fostering at the moment is Deeta although I see that someone is getting all googoo eyes over her so I suspect that she might be adopted by the time I gte home next week and be up for a name change…she’s less common Rottweiler with a tail which is good because we’ve never been fans of tail docking for it’s one sake but even as a puppy, that tail is already a lethal weapon that can clear a coffee table of everything in second when she gets excited…

Deeta who’s still just little…

What are you considering giving up (cable, home phone)?

Nothing at the moment…we cut back on a lot of things when I left the Army went for more of a freelance employment path and a lot of that was really just stuff that we didn’t use that much or really miss now…things like SkyTV and keeping the spa on year-round (we hardly use it any way once the novelty of having one wore off unless the twins are here or we have guests). I don’t have a personal mobile phone any more because I hardly used it when I had one and we’ve trimmed back on magazine subscriptions too mainly because it was getting to a read once then file away forever scenario…Google is your friend for most things…

I gave up drinking for a long time, initially because I was riding big fast bikes and didn’t need the distraction – I found that once I broke the habit of drinking, it was easy peasy to not drink at all…of course, Pepsi profits took a big dive when I gave up giving up about a decade ago…When I was posted to Wellington in the mid-90s, coming from an environment that ran on hot black coffee, I cold-turkeyed off coffee for a good three years…the imediate effects I noticed were sleeping better and thinking clearer and I became a real tea connoisseur but over time it crept back into my diet, partly driven by increasing difficulty finding good tea blends….

How much do you pay your babysitter?

We’re on the flip side of this now and starting to wonder if we should be charging for our baby-sitting services!! No, not really…it’s always a joy to look after them and they are better entertainment than anything on TV. On this one, I don’t think that the minimum wage is a bad start point for determining babysitter pay; then again, you might opt for the good old babysitting pool where a bunch of people share mutual babysitting services…

How “young” is old enough to babysit?

Or maybe…when is too old…? Young enough here is governed by the law which prevents any children under 14 being left home alone so obviously a babysitter would need to be older than this… personally, I’d be looking at at least 16-17 so that you can be fairly confident that they could cope with likely emergencies…