28th December, 2008 (9:48 pm)
The Day After Christmas ‘08 (6)
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
What do you mean I’m late?
You know, I’ve barely even looked at my Mac these last few days, let alone attempted to sit down and write anything on it. When I jumped on this morning I had over 400 accounts to review at CodeGrrl and nearly 50 accounts to approve at SHHF, and I don’t think that the numbers ever reached that high even when I went to NYC, or Spain for a week. It’s weird because I never felt all that busy even though I clearly have been. I finished work on the 19th and besides making mince pies with S (yum) sometime that weekend, I don’t recall what the hell I did until the 23rd arrived, bringing along our friends from France with it. They stayed overnight - drink! Chinese food! Playing games! Yay! - and then Christmas Eve we went to my parents for Christmas dinner which was lovely, even though the goose-fat potatoes and gravy kicked off a gallstone attack at half five Christmas morning. We left around six that evening, came home, and then I realised that I hadn’t wrapped three boxes worth of gifts in the garage. I wrapped presents for what felt like a gazillion years and then - fuck me - it was Christmas Day. How did that happen?
We’ve had a good break though and as always, it was pretty low key. This year it was just the three of us, as our in-laws had been pre-booked to go to M’s sister’s for the day, and so we enjoyed a small but perfect lunch squeezed around our tiny dining table, spruced up with festive linen and crowned with the bunch of flowers S insisted on buying me - bless. :) The lounge, however, was a different story. It looked as though David Tennant had thrown up everywhere, the entire room littered with figures and games and stickers and props and toiletries all along the Doctor Who theme. For example: my parents bought him this insane remote control Dalek, which - when it’s not careering into your shins or smashing into your coffee table - tells you that you’ll make a good Dalek before, as contrary as a WAG on Rodeo Drive, it turns and tries to exterminate you. Awesome.
‘We’ bought S the Leapfrog Tag Reading pen, which he loves. I’m so, so chuffed. There’s very little about me that I think should be passed on to other, mouldable human beings, but my love of books is probably the one thing I hope he inherits and takes into adulthood. We bought three books to go along with it - SpongeBob, Cars and the Kung-Fu Panda - and he’s lapping them up, reading them utterly unprompted and unassisted and periodically throughout the day. Yay. Other than that, mostly everyone gave him Doctor Who goodies, which means I have had to clear out one of the trays from his toy unit in the lounge solely to house his DW figure collection which - and I wish I was making this up - sports NINE Tenth Doctor figures. That’s right - nine. And of those nine, six are IDENTICAL! I’m just so relieved that I bought him two Nightmare Before Christmas playsets to balance it out. :)
As for me? Amidst the wonderful plethora of books (Hornby, King, Tropper), CDs (Take That - woot! - and Snow Patrol) and DVDs (Blackadder Collection - although even though he lives in the same house of me and has done so for twelve years, M didn’t know I’d already had it) I had GHD straighteners - which I’ve been coveting like a fat girl in a cake shop for ages - and a new hairdryer which puts my current circa-1987 one to SHAME. I also received Lips, which I’m enjoying in a this-is-fun-but-serves-no-purpose kind of way that makes Guitar Hero look like a Mensa entry exam. Coupled with family gifts - which includes my early XBox 360 guitar, a mic stand and a guitar tree - it looks like a recording studio in here. A bad one, admittedly, but a studio all the same. And now that I can wield the axe and sing the lyrics at the same time, I know you’re jealous of my awesomeness.
Oh, and before I forget - special love and kisses to Claire, Raq and Sharon who never fail to make me feel loved and appreciated this time of year. You guys are just as awesome as I am. Seriously.
Of course - and as always - about 2.4 seconds after S unwrapped his final gift I suffered crippling post-Christmas spending guilt. It’s a cliche but CHRIST I feel bad when I see the excess of paper and wrapping and food. I started out so well, too; because of the current climate, and me not knowing if I’m going to have a job in six months’ time (fixed-term contract expires - bummer), we had strict spending limits on S and on each other, but then as M’s total crept up - which was probably because the total for my gifts did first - and then I felt bad for S, who by mid-December we’d spent the least on, and kept adding to his pile, too. So in the end we spent a gazillion pounds on things that, whilst lovely, seem silly and overpriced. It’s hard to regret it when your kid is beaming and I know we can kind of afford it but … meh. You know, it’s just as well I’m utterly faithless: I think if I did believe in God and Jesus and the whole nativity thing, I’d be devastated at what a fucking mess Christmas has become.
Anyway. Shall I move on?
To summarise: Christmas was good. Kinda quiet, but good. Between you and me I’m still a little badgunkified, but all that’s going to be regurgitated within the safe confines of a password-protected entry in the next few weeks. It’s just me being me: a miserable, moany misanthropist who probably needs to learn how to calm the fuck down and unclench. Heh. In the meantime, make me feel better. Talk to me! Tell me your best present and worst of the year and the readers of FA.com can vote for the best and crappiest gifts of 2008!
Hope your Christmas break - no matter how/ if you celebrate it - was peaceful and fun. May your 2009 be all you deserve it to be. :)
Comments: (6)
11th November, 2008 (9:26 pm)
The Day With the Rock God Wannabe (8)
My son just spontaneously sang out the opening verse of Welcome to the Jungle, complete with Axel Rose-esque screeching and air guitar.
Be still my heart - I’m so proud.
One day, baby - when Mummy’s joined the fake band in the sky - all these air guitar games will be yours. Take good care of them, son.
Comments: (8)
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)
4th October, 2008 (11:30 am)
The Day I Hated Konami (6)
I hate Konami.
I don’t really. Obviously. They gave the world two of my favourite games series of all time - Silent Hill and Metal Gear - but wtf, the arsing about with the PAL release of Silent Hill: Homecoming has just been farcical. One minute it’s aligned with the US release, the next it’s a week later, the next it’s after fucking Christmas. JUST GIVE ME A DATE YOU BASTARDS. It’s bad enough knowing that my US friends have already ripped the shrink-wrap off of this gorgeous, gross little game, but it’s worse still not to know when I’m going to get the chance to do the same. As I type this, Amazon UK aren’t even listing the game (least not when you search for ’silent hill’ anyways - but then Amazon aren’t overly reliable with game releases), whereas Play.com states 31st October. That seems to be the date sported by most sites, but it pisses me off that I don’t actually know . . . and I’ll kill myself if I get my heart set on the 31st only to find the game pushed back again.
I’ve put in my pre-order for Dead Space though, so I should be kicking the shit out of corpses and aliens within a fortnight. I know I’ve oversold this game to death but seriously - when did I ever lie to you? Didn’t I tell you that the Bee Movie sucked? See - I’d never lie to you. And this game is awesome. Char believes me - you should too.
Methinks that all this senseless zombie killing may be good for my bad gunky - I could do with some cathartic ass-kicking.
Comments: (6)
28th August, 2008 (8:23 am)
The Day With the Wii Mii Weee (6)
In 24 hours I’ve put on three pounds (wtf?) but dropped my Wii Fit age from 32 (my actual age) to 29?
I think my board’s blind. Not to mention batshit crazy.
Comments: (6)
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