Too Good For Kids Blog

Hi everybody,
Time has flown by once again, and it’s already 2 weeks since my last post. Today was a bit of a sad day as Tom and I went to a memorial service for one of the true gentlemen of the world, Dick Long. I met him through paragliding many years ago, and he provided years of sterling service to the british hang gliding and paragliding association as treasurer. Our thoughts are with Heather and the family.

On a happier note, we have been beavering away all year on a secret project, which is about to come to fruition in the next week or two, so watch this space. (that’s almost an excuse for not updating the blog, but we weren’t that busy on it.) We’ll let you know all the details as soon as we can.

In other news, the mighty All Blacks are up against the wallabies this weekend, in a Tri-Nations match played in Auckland. They are looking pretty good so far, so should win, especially at home. You can’t write the aussies off though.

That’s all for now, stay tuned to hear about the project - all will be revealed.
Brendan

Well, the obvious answer is no…it’s been seven…but you know how it is, I’ve been busy. And Jonny Fart Pants - thanks for the drunken message, you’re obviously enjoying the wine in south oz.
Anyway, since the last post, amongst other things, I’ve managed to watch Scotland thump England and France at Murrayfield in the six nations rugby, been on a trip to Prague to help with ‘research’ for a guide book, (and I agree with those who say the Czech Republic makes the best beer in the world; by rights the hangovers should have been industrial strength, but they never even happened. Which was nice.) I also went up north for a week recently, to Macduff, then to stay with Pam n Erlend in Contin, then over to Torridon for a few days. The weather was hot but windy, and the trip home through Glencoe was almost unbearably beautiful. The weather over the last few weeks has been excellent, and I can’t ever remember seeing the grass in the parks here as parched as it is now.

We’re getting a few sales through the website now, which is good, and since Christmas is only 4 months away we better get busy and put some more cool goodies up. I’ll try to post again before then as well.
see ya soon,
brendan in edinburgh.

Hello everybody,
I’m back at work after a nice long break,it was very relaxing over christmas and new year.
Then last week we had the shop christmas do; a bunch of us went up to the Craigellachie hotel up on the river Spey where we ate and drank ourselves into a satisfied heap in various corners. The hotel has a world famous whisky bar with around 700 different whiskys. which is a lot. The food was excellent as well, with lots of good Scottish produce, from pheasant to haddock and aberdeen angus steak.
A couple of us ventured up Ben Rinnes, the local high point. We had planned to take our paragliders up, but the wind was 20mph in the carpark, so we left them in the car. The summit was 2700ASL, but the wind up there was in the high 40’s, gusting to 55mph. the windchill brought the temp down to about -20c, and I could feel my lips starting to stick together. The cloud on the summit cleared to give us a view for a few minutes, which was nice, then we made a quick trip down and tucked into a bowl of soup at a local tea rooms.
not much happening on the website lately, cos of the winter break, but we’ll get back into it shortly,
adios,
brendan.

Hi everybody
I just spent about 30 minutes writing some stuff for here, but a customer came into the shop and the laptop went to sleep and locked up. I gotta do some stuff but I’ll write a wee bit for here soon.
brendan

The weeks seem to be shortening as the year goes on and daylight fades into memory. I mean the days are surely not as long, they can’t be. I get up, work all day and find there’s more to do when I go to bed. How’s that then?

My poor wife’s laid up in bed with troubled lungs - full of beasties and globules and crackles and wheezes, she’s not a happy girly. Her lungs hurt, her cough racks, her head pounds, and to top it all off, here ears are insulted by a barrage of husbandly nagging to sit and do nothing - nothing at all whatsoever, just sit there, lie there, don’t move, do nowt, don’t shift, relax…..pleeease!

Slowly we’re getting our products up on the site, and quietly the sales are trickling in - we’re delighted to be getting them out of the door as quick as we get ‘em in - go postie go, deliver it yesterday, before they even order it, that’ll impress them. We think we have our new system sorted pretty well now, before the flood. We have been selling online for years now, so we know the pitfalls and what’s important to get right. The new back-end for this website should give us lots more flexibilty and we want to get it right at the start if possible. Fraser is our resident genius, except he’s not resident - he beavers from a domestic hidey-hole, trying to blank out the enticement of daytime telly and the lure of the sofa. I can’t do it myself - the soft plump cushions draw me ever nearer ’til I flump into their waiting embrace. That’s where I’m off to now, to snore for a bit, cos the wife keeps me awake in bed with her expectorations. Mmmm.

And then I woke up. What a terrible nightmare, even worse than the dreams of stock pouring into the shop and me struggling to find places to put it. Fortunately in the rugby on Saturday NZ managed to score some tries early on, cos Scotland threw everything at them in the second half. Their hard work was rewarded with a try at the end of the game, but they had one disallowed and NZ scored one that was juggled between a couple of players, which was a bit dodgy, so it could have been a lot closer score-wise.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Judd came up from Englandshire, and myself, Tom and Mark spent the day putting our Landyacht Simulator together and testing it. Mark has written some Landyacht Simulation software that you can drive sitting in a landyacht, and race against another person. It all worked well, all we need now is a show to take it to. W e can brand up the scenery anyway a sponsor needs. Check out this to see what we’re on about. The screen is much bigger now as well - 3m x 2m.
We had the first snow of the winter here on Friday - a couple of inches in the morning but it all disappeared by evening.
That’s all for now, I have to go and struggle with some stock.
brendan

This week started off busy and got a bit daft really - last week I made orders that I forgot to equate to realspace - the equivelant of my wife going off shopping with a skip trailing her to dump the bags in, and amnesia every half hour. Blimey there are boxes piled everywhere, the unopened ones are stuff we’ve seen before, and therefore pretty boring, but they are outweighed by far by new stuff. Screaming chickens, choking chickens, lazer balls, dashboard homer simpson dispensing street logic, body parts contained within squishy oozing rubber, mini fridges…….it’s a long list….

Brendan’s battling gamely checking it all and finding both shop and storage space for it all, but what he doesn’t know is that I’m gonna do the same thing all over again this week. Don’t tell him OK. It’ll be a nice surprise for him on Monday when he’s smirking away about the All Blacks cuffing Scotland at Murrayfield. Come to think of it I really ought to order something that will either smell really bad, or look vile and disgusting, but it’s hard to think of anything that can be worse for him than waking up in his own bedroom, and looking in the mirror. I’ll see what I can come up with.

Beautiful wife of mine has ignored my nagging about her chesty cough for long enough for the doc to call it pneumonia - blimey - then she’s gone and coughed so hard that she’s bruised her ribs, and goes around looking like Nelson, with her hand held across her chest. I had to teach her how to cough properly, as she wasn’t really giving it enough gusto, so I feel a bit guilty now.

Come on Scotland, let’s give those Samoans - sorry, I meant Kiwis, a fright on Saturday and let’s try and get the stadium more than half full. Meanwhile we’ll fill the website with brand noo shiny goodies and wait for all your orders. Allez L’Ecosse….

morning all,
i hope the 3 or 4 of you out of 6 billion that actually read this are all fit and well. mind you, 3 billion of the people on the planet have never even made a phone call, so the chances of them reading this are remote.
it’s a chilly day here in embra, big blue sky and the first frost i’ve seen this year. -4c overnight apparently. yesterday we got some .mov files of our wind-up creatures uploaded, just go to the side menu and follow - desk toys - wind-up creatures - and then click on the one you want to see. one or two don’t have a clip though.

we have a few more cool things arriving soon, one of them is a rubber bathmat that looks like a manhole cover. every home needs one.

last weekend was a mixed bag rugby-wise; nz won comfortably over ireland, and scotland lost to argentina. the sco-arg result was a bummer, as i thought scotland played really well and were unlucky to get a penalty try against them. bloody nz ref.
me and tom watched the nz-ire game and the aus-eng game in the roseburn bar; at times it was like watching tennis as the games were on at the same time. tom seemed a lot more pissed than i was, i don’t know if he had a hip flask or something but he kept going off to the toilet a lot…
NZ continue their grand slam quest this weekend against england at twickenham which i think nz will win but they will have to work hard for it.

that’s about it from me,
brendan

It’s been a bit of a slog this last week or two - what with trying to get the website looking half decent and populated, so that we could have a “semi-launch” on Monday 7th.

HBOS - ( can sometimes be heard pronounced ” itchy baws” by staff in Edinburgh) or Halifax Bank of Scotland Group - were having a charity auction to which we donated some prizes, and we thought it was a good opportunity to get some interest for the website. It also helped kick our butts a bit and I ended up doing some very late nights, that drifted into morning and became fuzzily focused next days. We got there though, and although it’s a bit rough around the edges, and needs 3 times more products listed than the current 93, it was there and working and open for business. BUY, BUY, BUY….The auction was great too - our donated prizes realised around 4 times their retail value, but the best part was that HBOS doubled whatever the auction realised for the charity. It makes you feel good getting money for nothing out of a bank, even if you give it away before you get it.

A lady came in to the shop today with a sad looking snake she bought from us - it’s wooden, and amazingly lifelike being made from thin shims glued onto a central leather spine, so it articulates and wriggles like a real snake. I remember seeing one of these shimmying out of a pram and was just about to stomp on it in a panic when the 3 year old owner picked it up.

This lady’s snake didn’t start out sad, but having bought it for her wee boy, he insisted, as wee boys do, on taking it into the bath. Alas the warm water seemed to soften the glue just enough to start dislodging the wooden shims, and it started peeling like a…..well, like a boiled snake . His mum told him she’d take it to the vet the next day, and hey presto, happy snake boy tonight. So don’t take your snake into the bath with you boys, or bits might come off all over the place. If you see a semi fleshed wooden snake on ebay you know where it came from.

We’re facing the problem now about which stuff to get onto the website first. We have some 400 other products in the shop - our real live shop, with a door that’s been open for 7 years, 2 big windows, stock piled up ready to buy, and hopefully a customer now and again. We’re constantly tempted away to other, new and therefore more interesting stuff, but blimey that means spending money - list the stuff we’ve got you idiot……but c’mon I want to shop…..I’m tired and I need a fix…..I’ll only order a few things….

Going to watch rugby tomorrow at Murrayfield, on a windy, windy day which suits Scotland fine cos they cannae kick for toffee, and Argentina have good hoof on their full back who paradoxically plays for Edinburgh. We’ll start the entertainment with a visit to the Roseburn Bar who will be showing simultaneously the All Blacks v Ireland and England v Australia matches. If Brendan’s buying I might even have a couple of beers, but I pay him so badly that I might have to have a few sneaky snifters on the way to and from the toilets. In the morning my wee lad Calum will take me on the bus, all the way across town to collect The Car from it’s MOT down in Leith. He loves the bus and especially up the stairs. He loves the ticket, and licking the windows and poking his nose into the business of the person behind/in front/at the side/walking past, but most of all he loves, just loves, dinging the bell.

And don’t we all?
adios amigos - bing bing

Hello again,
we’re still chipping away at the website; I’ve been going through checking the stock levels shown on the site match reality. It’s all glamour in the IT world.
We’ve got a some really good things on there - one of my favourites is the Aerobie Pro. These have been around for about 20 years or so now, and they are the only item to have been thrown across the Thames at the Houses of Parliament - around 1200 feet. I’ve managed to catch and throw one the length of two football fields, anyone can do this with a bit of practice. It’s weird seeing your throwing partner waving their arms around, then a few seconds or so later a wee red ring comes flying out of the midddle of nowhere and comes straight at you.

Another good flying thing is the Aerobie Super Disc, which is very similar to a frisbee, but has a lip the helps it fly straight and true. They are easier to throw straighter and further than an ordinary frisbee, and you can also use them as a plate ifyou’re camping or travelling.
Check these out by searching ‘aerobie‘ on www.toogoodforkids.com.
Remember,
You don’t stop playing when you get old, you get old when you stop playing.
Brendan.