UPDATE: Sex: Male. Weight: 3.9kg. Name: Oisín. Rank: Brigadier General. Serial Number: 17082007KE

I’m in Kathy’s. They phoned me to come over at 4:00. And they were on the road to the baby-factory at 4:30. So the waiting is either over or just beginning depending on what way you look at it.

Either way, Kathy is smiling through it. She nearly cried when the specialist mentioned inducing the baby. She won’t have to go through that now. And there’s no worry about traffic. This time of the morning is what the estate agents go by when advertising property - Only 40 minutes from Dublin. Easy access to the M50. All true at 4:00 in the morning.

I’ll update you during the day when I get news. Well, there’ll be one update with sex, weight, name, rank and serial number. This is not a Twitter type thing.

The only part of the plan going awry is the mural project. Seán lost patience and started on his own last weekend. So the materials have been confiscated.

We’ll just have to think of something else.

Guest Blaggards is inspired by Mr. Mulley’s latest foray into blogland - Guest Bloggers.

My first guest is John Joe Ryan, painter & decorator, pigeon breeder and water diviner. This local entrepreneur is well known amongst pigeon fanciers as the man who reared Ryan’s Fancy from a egg to become the county’s 3-time champion tumbler in the 1970’s. But I’ll let John Joe tell you more. (Note: John Joe is not one for typing so the following was dictated to myself, so don’t blame him for spelling errors).

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What’s in this for me? [Pause] Right. I’ll do it. But if ya shaft me like ya did over the front room job, I’ll feking have your guts for garters, ya bollix. Do ya hear me? [Pause] Right. Here we go.

Me name is John Joseph Ryan. Me parents called me John Joe and it stuck. Some people called me J.J. but the mother put a stop to that fairly lively. She never liked initials, her being Ursula and all.

The painting started when I was about 11. [Pause] I fukin did start at 11. Stop butting in ya hairy hoor. [Pause] I suppose ya could say the paint was in me blood. I came from a long line of painters, and to cap it all I was the 7th son of a 7th son and everyone said I was gifted at it. [Pause] No, the water divining came from the mother’s side.

That brings me on to the mother’s family. The Reddys. A big family of them there was too. When me granda, Pat Reddy, married Alice Dunne there was killings at the wedding. Fierce sledging altogether broke out when Fr. O’Connor of all people said that me granny was Dunne before she was Reddy. [Pause] Oh, yeah. The lads.

I got into the pigeons the year of the Great Snow. There wasn’t sight nor light to be had of a turkey for the Christmas what with the farmers keeping them locked in sheds because of the cold. I’d be sent out to get a bird for the table but all I’d ever come home with was a pigeon or two. The father and meself started training them to use elastic bands like chest expanders. They wasn’t a decent drumstick on the table that year but at least we all got a bit of breast. [Pause] Would ya wait. I’m getting to that.

It was then I coped on I was handy enough at catching them live and we were eating well. But after weeks of grubbing one of them up and him using the elastic, didn’t I let the feker loose by mistake. He flew up and up and up, and then the weight got to him and he came crashing back down, rolling and cartwheeling to beat the band. And that’s how I came to breed a champion tumbler. [Pause] But there’s more. [Pause] But I didn’t get to tell ya about the time, with nothing but a boiling kettle and a litter of kittens, I made a fortune selling Sphynx cats to the folks above in Dublin. [Pause] What ya mean, see me next week? Now, me bucko. Right now or I’ll …

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Check back next week for more Guest Blaggards.

I’ve posted some pieces about my neighbours previously but I’ve just realised I never mentioned my favourite. He’s Irish but has a very uncommon name. One of those, no seriously, what’s your name? ones. His daughter has recently discovered Google so let’s call him Constantin Opel for now. That makes him sound either Turkish or a car but it suits - he’s a delight on the road.

Constantin doesn’t drink. He can’t really. He needs to stay sober with a wife and daughter who are walking advertisements for the Darwin Awards. Retired a few years back, he works part-time to meet the bills for damages.

Let me say at this point that while Mrs. and Ms. Opel may be accident prone and not the brightest stars in the firmament, they too are wonderful neighbours. Kind and generous.

Ms. Opel was unwittingly generous to my builders on one on the few sunny days we’ve had. I was wondering why all 7 lads, including the machine driver and the guy marking out the footpaths, were needed on the scaffolding when I heard her father roar for fek sake, girl. Would ya put something on. A knickers at least. Them lads can see ya. Ah daddy, don’t be stupid. No-one can see me with the hedge.

He handed her her glasses and pointed to the high scaffolding. Surprisingly they didn’t crack with the shriek. She hasn’t been seen out since. I might buy her a burka for the laugh.

Ms. Opel’s little boy is the apple of his granny’s eye. He loves nothing more than going places with nana. Mrs. Opel left him in the car with her keys to play with last week while she popped back into the house to fetch something. Never give a child the key fob when you have central locking. Front door pulled behind her, car locked and alarmed, Mrs. Opel came to me for aid. I broke a fly window and got the car open.

I’m sure it happens to many people. But just once. This was the 5th time it happened to Mrs. Opel.

Last winter a handyman pointed out a new stone was needed for the sitting room fireplace. In his innocence of Mrs. Opel’s innocence he neglected to tell her it had to be a fire-stone. One she took from the rockery fitted just fine and that evening as she dozed by the flames the stone gave. A piece shot out and bounced off the TV cracking the screen and burned a hole in the carpet.

Constantin is very much a family man but there is one thing he will never forego - his Sunday morning golf. Mrs. Opel goes to mass then. Never a really religious woman, one morning out driving she came upon a beautiful old church and enjoyed the mass so much she took to going there every Sunday without fail for months. She raved to all the neighbours about her find. We were sick hearing of it, as was her husband.

One Sunday, when golf was cancelled due to the rain, he reluctantly agreed to join her. Mass had just started when he nudged her. You know the way we’re Catholics? Of course I do. You’re getting stupid in your old age. Maybe I am, but not so stupid that I can’t tell when I’m at a Church of Ireland service not a mass.

No. Still no news. Not a stir despite Kathy trying to hurry things along by trying a variety of tricks from old wives tales. And some from new wives tales too, which are a heck of a lot more fun I’m told.

My being confined to barracks the long weekend and the one just gone hasn’t actually been a bad thing. It gave me a full five days to work uninterrupted on a couple of things.

The inspiration for my main project was when Annie wrote: If you’re still using Internet Explorer please do the world wide web a favour and download Firefox instead. It’s free and it will get you laid.

The folks at Mozilla will adopt this as their tag line as soon as they find out. It beats my one hands down: Internet Explorer is just a big girl’s browse.

I figured the time had come to rebrand my business website. I had already repositioned myself. Rebrand. Reposition. What consummate corporate crap.

By repositioning, I mean I moved the desk to the far side of the room - not ideal, but a little further from the noise of the builders. The real work was in rebranding. I redesigned my logo, developed a new CSS theme, recoded the site in PHP and added all new content.

The new logo happened by accident. The intention was to recreate the existing one but with a new tag line. A font selected by mistake looked ten times better than the old one. Not that I ever doubted Darwin, I am now sure he was right. In logo terms, this was survival of the slickest.

The theme evolved to suit the logo. It might sound like buying a house to suit your curtains, but it worked.

Recoding in PHP wasn’t as tricky as I thought. Switching from Perl was pretty painless. If only learning spoken languages could be as easy. I still prefer Perl, but some customers baulk at my using it - usually as they’ve read some magazine article in the waiting room of the STD clinic or wherever and it was about PHP not Perl.

Now the content. And this is where Annie really inspired me. Okay, her Firefox slogan may be funny, and if your read her post, made out of frustration. But it is so true that Firefox is better than IE. So is Opera. So is Safari. I could go on.

So I took a chance and used a tone of humorous honesty throughout. I included a page entitled Mad Stuff that lists some of the jobs I’ve been asked to do e.g. research a topic on the Internet for a time-starved journalist and mail them a 100 word summary.

This is a big gamble. Mad Stuff certainly does not have a professional ring to it, but I’m hoping it will attract clicks out of curiosity.

I’m taking an even bigger flyer with a short list of things I don’t do. Too many folks out there are still IT illiterate and will call the first company they find on Google and ask for someone to come fix their printer, even if it is a webdesign house they’ve contacted. Hopefully this too will pull clicks and clarify things without alienating business.

The new site will be going live mid-week. Wish me luck. If it works, then Annie, you are owed scoops. If it doesn’t, then I’ll hunt you down and stuff, or maybe just switch back to the old one.

Micilín, the farmer, is walking his land in Galway when he spies a hill walker scooping water from a pool in the palm of his hand and drinking it.

Stad! Stad anois! Tá an t-uisce sin nimhiúil. Saghas baictéir atá ann, warned Micilín.

I’m sorry. I’m English. I don’t understand. Can you speak English?

I said, use both hands. It’s much quicker.

There are some things in this world you never see. Like an ugly baby or a small rat. Our upbringing dictates that we squeal oh, (s)he’s gorgeous and jayzez, it’s feking huge respectively. The exception, of course, is a baby rat.

As I wrote in Snippets #9 below, my great friend Kathy is expecting her second - not rat, the other one - on Wednesday and I am on call to take care of her first, Seán, while she does the whole grunt, deep breath, push, scream thing. Then, when she has her bag packed and heads off to the hospital, for whatever she has to do there, Seán and I can get to work on that kitchen wall mural he’s been planning. He has been thinking about it for weeks now - he sits on the floor for long periods with a crayon in each hand, with one eye on the wall and one on his mum. I’m guessing he wants it to be a surprise. No point making a start while she’s watching.

I’m looking forward to the project, but the waiting is killing me. Not least because we’ve just had a long weekend and being art-director-on-call I couldn’t risk a single beer. Ireland may have had the wettest weekend on record/CD/DVD/Download but I certainly had the driest.

Now before anyone jumps down my throat about all the worry daddy is going through, let me point out it was all his doing. I didn’t have it in for him, so to speak.

To exacerbate things, all the lovely-baby doctors swore on their stethoscopes that Kathy would be anything up to a week early. (They obviously never arranged to meet her for lunch). Hence I’ve had my crayons in the boot of the car since the middle of last week.

I’ve had the phone on tone and vibrate at night in case I sleep through the call to arts. And it’s kept fully charged. Some meetings have been rescheduled as they are too far away. An overnight case is packed. I continually check there’s plenty of fuel in the tank.

Kathy is wondering who is actually having the baby.

Well I suppose it will all be worth it the day I get to blubber oh, (s)he’s gorgeous. It can’t be long now - I seen a rat down by the river yesterday and jayzez, it was feking huge.