20: Robot stamping

"Take me to your art dealer."

Day 20 and we continue to preemptively unwrap goodies.

14: We three kings from space

I, robot of Orientar.

As a kid, I used to spend Christmas Eve in a church pew, desperately wondering where the heck Orientar was.

Which just goes to show how little it takes to confuse the almighty heckfire out of a kid. Or a grown-up for that matter.

Truly I tell you, little changes over time. We just get taller. Some of us.

Maybe the search for Orientar's perfect light is why my itchy feet are still proceeding through time, space, and rainy islands. Maybe that's a bunch of crap I just made up due to Compulsive Typing Disorder (CTD), a ailment for which the prognosis is poor.

Anyway, as any lapsed Lutheran worth her salt can tell you, it's high time to set up the Nativity. And knock it down. And set it back up again. And knock it down.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Etc.

That's just the way we Orientarians roll.

The Space-Being and the Iron Man

Chaos HQ is currently preoccupied with giants and robots. There are more of these creatures about urban world than you might expect. So we scour the city for them.

Giants and robots generally don't camouflage well. But grown-ups are usually too busy to notice them.

Ana's fascination with robots goes back a long time. She has been constructing robots from foil and empty boxes for months.

But her fascination with giants is newer. It began last week when a nice man showed up to install fire-proofing stuff around our door-frame at the behest of the local residents' association.

"Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, and that."

 Her eyes grew wide as the man explained his task.

Then she exclaimed: "It's not for fire, it's to keep out the giant robots!"

You see, Ana may be four but she is no turnip.

And of course the nice man did nothing to dissuade her of this notion. Nor did I. In fact we both did our utmost to egg her on.

Since that fateful moment she has become like the neighbourhood watch, only cuter. She is a curtain-twitcher at home, and remains vigilant when out in the big world. She sees robots from her bedroom window on a regular basis, and has an eagle eye for spotting them all over London.

Occasionally we hit the jackpot and locate an awesome giant robot like this one, thus killing two electronic birds with one virtual stone.

This guy happens to live at the British Library, where a continual stream of deep-in-thought people flows by him, unblinking, unnoticing.

Amazing how the human eye can miss the giant in the room. Which makes me thank my lucky stars for doorway fire-proofing stuff. Were it not for that, I might now have a household giant metal man infestation on my hands.