9th November, 2008 (1:20 pm)
The Day With The Return (10)
O HAI interwebs!
Ah, man, it’s been so long, hasn’t it? I suck donkey balls: you know it, I know it. A gazillion things have happened, some good, some not so good, some middling it with a meh, but the upshot is I’m still alive - give me a woo and a hoo - and the bad gunky - whilst not completely abated - is definitely on the retreat.
It would take far more time than I actually have available right now to update you on everything, so I’m going to be lame and do a quick bullet list. Yeah, that’s right. I suck and I’m lazy.
- We went to Disneyland Paris! (I know - it’s old news because the photo already gave that away but play along). I will report on this properly for prosperity, but suffice to say the trip was glorious and helped to de-gunkify me, as well as restore my faith in friendship. Those of you who have been reading here for some time may recall that we went to Majorca with ‘friends’ when S had just turned two years old. BIG. MISTAKE. My advice continues to be that you should NEVER go on holiday with friends if you’d actually wish to remain friends - trust me, I learned this the hard way. That said, our friends in France insisted that we meet up and do the trip together and I’m so, so glad that we did. Their son is BFF with little S, so it meant that they had each other when we hit the parks, and then the Mummies and Daddies had each other for drinks and laughter when the boys went to sleep. :) It was perfect and I loved every single second of it from seeing S actually cry with joy when he met Pooh bear to watching Jack and Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas lead the Halloween Parade to seeing M’s face the first time he stepped off Space Mountain. Only down sides were the ridiculously hideous Tower of Terror ride (wtf? HATED IT), my riproaringly sore feet and the fact that I came home with the flu.
- Yes, I had the flu. Not a head cold or the sniffles but the real flu, the flu with the shaking and the sweats and fever and complete inability to get warm. Thought I was going to fucking die at one point. I was out of commission for over a week and felt like death for most of that time.
- M’s employers are asshats. Those of you who follow me on Twitter and had intermittent updates during my absence will already know that, but since being promoted in September and moving to a new section, they’ve changed his shift pattern three times. This is beyond frustrating when you have a kidlet to organise and another household job to juggle and has meant we had to reschedule/miss/have him take leave to do things we’d booked months and months ago - like our Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon tickets, for example, and also the Christening of our BFFs’ (we’re BFFs with both my friend from University and her husband hence the seemingly misplaced apostrophe :)) two kids. They seem completely oblivious of the havoc it causes. It also means that we’ll be M-less on Christmas Eve day, Christmas Day day, Boxing Day night and New Year’s Eve day. Harrumph. :( (An aside: he did his first ‘proper’ night shift last night, coming in today at 8am. He didn’t fall asleep as much as trip into bed and pass out. Bless).
- This is incredibly remiss of me, but I bought an iPhone about two months ago and failed to tell you. My bad. *hangs head* Grax convinced me with his vlog summary, and I haven’t been disappointed with my purchase. The battery life is pants (although marginally improved by fiddling about with the settings like brightness, 3G etc.), it’s crap that you can’t send or receive picture messages direct to the phone (have to go via email instead) and the fact you have to manually import Contacts (can’t save anything to SIM - everything’s kept on the phone, which is a pain in the ass if, like me, you swap cards to a cheaper phone when you’re out on the beer in case you lose the phone in a drunken stupor) is bollocks but other than all that, it rocks. I’m saving about £15-£20 a month from my old package on Vodafone, and I’m able to browse online a lot more. Score.
- Dead Space arrived. I didn’t get a freebie copy like everyone else on the Community Day did (clearly they didn’t like me - sob :() so I had to buy it. That said, it rocks - even though I am only an hour or so in but am already running low on fucking health and ammo. Maybe the fact I suck at the game is why EA didn’t send me a copy?
- I’ve started about three million new layouts for this place and all are shit. My angel hasn’t had new clothes since late 2006, which is a crazy long time to go without a facelift considering I used to change layouts here as frequently as my underwear. Yet nothing looks right. I did come up with something and then found a frighteningly similar layout at Perfection. That person clearly did theirs before mine so I do not call shenanigans, but ffs, that was the only layout that seemed okay! So back to the designing board I do go.
- I hate 5th November. I loathe fireworks. I say it every single year but I do HATE the fucking things. M was working so I ended up having to fulfill his promise to our son and take S to an organised fireworks display on Friday night. I spent the evening trying not to cry each time they BANGED and avoiding the sweet but decidedly odd little eight-year-old who took a distinct shine to me.
- My writing has stalled again. Am perpetually procrastinating. The way I’m going this book will only be published posthumously - and only then if someone much better than I finishes the fucking thing.
- Finally, S sat with me again and observed the Armistice Day two minute silence. I’m so proud of the boy he’s becoming.
That’ll have to do. My fingers are cramping from the hitherto lack of keyboard use and I think I’m boring myself, which means I’m definitely boring you. To close, I have to wish Val a happy pregnancy, Tanya a happy wedding and Teesee a belated happy birthday. There’s probably someone or something I’ve forgotten so if so, please congratulate/link yourself in my comments and we’ll pretend that it’s from me, mmkay?
Finally: how’s you? What you been up to?
Comments: (10)
16th September, 2008 (8:06 pm)
The Day I Won’t Ever Be a Grown-up Again (14)
That is the very last time I EVER try and be a grown-up.
I’m not bad with money. I used to be - I used to fucking shocking. But we learned the hard way, dragging our sorry asses out of debt over several years thanks to a (then) booming house market, hard work from us both and a job change for me, and I will never go back to that dark, horrible, scary place again. We still have debt but it’s less than the UK average, and we manage it well. Our credit score is impeccable. I haven’t paid credit card interest for a couple of years now (having wised up to always moving the balance when the honeymoon period expires) and at the end of each year our overall debt is always lower than the year that preceded it. It’s slow but it’s right and I know we’ll get there in the end.
But like everyone else, we’ve been having to adjust to the rising costs of, well, everything in the latter half of this year. The last couple of months have seen two trips abroad, a little one’s birthday and accompanying party which all means that we stretched ourselves a little too thin. Yes, it’s our fault because no, we didn’t have to be so extravagant for S’s birthday, and we certainly didn’t need two vacations. But up until six months ago our disposal income could’ve coped with this. Today it cannot.
To compensate, I arranged for us to extend our overdraft by an extra £250 (about $450) to tide us over. And because I’m a responsible adult and trying to decrease our debt, not increase it, I put an expiry on it to ensure that come payday, the extra debt would be gone and we’d be none the worse off for having it.
THIS IS THE STUPIDEST IDEA I HAVE EVER HAD.
As the rest of this is kinda rambling and ranty and really without purpose, I’ve put the rest under the cut. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Comments: (14)
24th May, 2008 (11:31 pm)
The Day Where A Lot Can Happen (7)
A lot can happen in a week.
The only way I can properly update you and not have my fingers fall off due to excessive typing is to default to bulletpoints. Yeah - lazy, isn’t it? But it’s that or completely forget to write this stuff down, so what you going to do about it, eh? NOTHING. That’s what.
- I should be out tonight. As I type this, I should be dancing inappropriately with a man I’m not married to and lining my guts with enough gin to ensure that my body rejects it, heaving and heavy, in the early hours of the morning. I’m doing neither of these things because S beat me to the vomiting; he puked all over his bed last night, following it up with rip-roaring diarrhoea that’s lasted forty-eight hours and counting. Awesome - not least because he was in my bed last night. So at midnight I was giving S an impromptu shower (much to his apparent annoyance) to slough off the vomit and M was changing the sheets and making a moonlight trip to the garage to put the bedding in the washing machine.
- My Japanese exam was shit. As many people do that “omg I suckz at my examz!11″ psyche-out and then pass (annoying, isn’t it?) I’ll save you the uncertainity by assuring you that no, I’m not exaggerating. It was shit - as was I - and I’m gonna fail. I’d care but let’s face it - I can’t do everything I do and expect to do all of it well. Some days I struggle to take a piss I’m so busy, and if some has to give I’d rather it be my silly language hobby, as much as I love it, than lose my job, my child or my mind.
- Work’s been bedlam. Like, crazy. I didn’t see my desk for nine consecutive days and that had nothing to do with leave - I was simply out of the office and in meetings all over the fucking country. I have next week off - see the next bullet - but it’s crap timing and if we haven’t have already booked our flights I would’ve cancelled my leave and try to make a dent in my To Do list I’m that busy. Everytime I think of what I have to do my stomach cramps up with guilt and concern.
Comments: (7)
22nd April, 2008 (12:24 am)
The Bit About the Green-Eyed Monster (11)
Just before going off to bed (as I type this, I’m in a dark room with no TV I was that ready to go up) I found myself at the Web Designer Rockstar Chart. I now want to hurl my pathetic, talentless carcass off of a very tall building.
There’s a company in that chart that was setup by a girl I went to University with. I always fucking hated her - her and her gorgeous cropped hair, porcelain skin and perfect fucking teeth. Now I know why. Bitch.
Comments: (11)
25th October, 2007 (8:51 pm)
The Day With The Political Incorrectness (7)
Yesterday I had to report a colleague.
Working in my field is pretty damned difficult a lot of the time - moreso than you’d expect, really, considering I’m supposed to be all soft and nice and caring. Equalities is one of those areas where there are numerous assumptions about you - few flattering - and I frequently find myself silently cursing the rest of equality brigade, not least because I’m in a position where, realistically, being nice and caring is going to land me (and the people I work with) in court.
Despite this, I like to think that I’m pretty easy-going most of the time. Jumping down people’s throat and banging the EQUALITY! DRUM! does little to inspire or change people’s perceptions, and I’ve spent all of my working life working on the drip-drip principal that if you work alongside people to explain why we need to, for example, change flexible leave policies, people are more likely to understand the reasoning behind it rather than simply assume it’s another stupid-arse equality thing. Jumping in with two feet and shitting over everyone else’s work rarely gets the message across and quite often means you’re alone at lunchtime.
I did say most of the time, though. Easy-goingness aside, I still have a job to do, and I still believe in what I do. And I won’t sit by as people break the fucking law not three feet from my desk.
I don’t suppose many people in the UK need re-capping of the Big Brother Race Rows, but if there’s ever a lesson to be learnt from those furors it’s DON’T SAY STUPID THINGS IN PUBLIC. There are curious things like LAWS and LEGISLATION that protect our rights. They don’t exist because, one day, someone thought they would be fun - they’re fundamentally needed for people who experience racism and discrimination and prejudice every single day of their lives. And if you don’t believe me, you’re a fucking asshole. Honest.
I have a colleague who is, essentially, a discriminatory, racist, disabilist, nasty cow. It’s a nightmare. I don’t know if she’s really that ignorant, or simply pretends to be in order to rile me. In truth, I don’t care: it’s my bloody job - and you KNOW it’s my job - and even if it wasn’t, I still call you on it, you stupid cow. What you said was horrendous, and even if I was passing you in the street I’d tell you as much . . . as it is you work with me, so I grassed your ass to your boss. Hah! I don’t even care that you know that - I have nothing to be ashamed of. You, on the other hand, do.
Anyway, as you can imagine, it’s not exactly given the office a warm and cosy atmosphere.
It’s tough being an equality warrior.
Comments: (7)
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