Shuffling Chunks

SOLD (stc)

2006-10-21T05:12:00.000+01:00

Mmm, new things to play with.

I've moved to here, 'though I've yet to edit the template and play with all the fun stuff, but it's so late and I need to sleeeeep.

Soap Reaction PtI

2006-10-20T21:16:00.000+01:00

Oh my GOD. I didn't see that one coming!

Moving

2006-10-20T17:54:00.000+01:00

I'm thinking of moving already. The carpets smell of dog here, and I'll always be a wordpress girl at heart.

In other news, today I have mostly been sniffing and coughing. I took the day off work - something I hate doing when there are just two of us in the office - and despite my illness being very much genuine and apparent (to the point that I carry the evidence on my sleeve) I can't help but feel terribly guilty.

I have to take back what I said about One Summer. I'm really enjoying Billy and Icky's adventures now. And it wasn't until the menu screen popped up last night that I realised there are two discs to watch. And, of course, I only had the first. Gah! So I thought I'd catch up my weekly dose of The Apprentice USA (probably my most favourite thing on the tellybox at the moment) only to find that some the idiotic scheduler decided to broadcast the last four episodes within a week? Suddenly, instead of five candidates, I am seeing the final two. Not happy.. not happy at all, and not least of all because I prided myself on my ability to predict who'd be getting the next cab home. How am I going to impress the cats now?

Today's Room 101: Drivers that hover at the top of Every. Single. Bastard ramp in a multi-storey car park.

Letterbox

2006-10-18T17:22:00.000+01:00

The letterbox has just flapped. On the doormat lies a leaflet:

LEAFLET DISTRIBUTORS REQUIRED
TEL: 020 1234 5678

Hmm.

One for the history books

2006-10-18T14:52:00.000+01:00

I should mention that on Tuesday I felt like poo and was therefore unusually inactive. Typical that this should be the day that will go down in history for all to view, forever. Just my fucking luck.

But enough with the excuses.

12.01am: Watched the end of Final Destination 3 without so much as blinking. Quite an achievement for me.

12.45am: Photoshop therapy to relieve annoyance caused by The Ginger neighbours' incredulous response to my polite complaint about their 8-hours-a-day barking dogs; this response being a letter of complaint about my cats terrorising their guinea pigs and exacerbating Mrs Ginger's cat allegy by sitting on their plastic garden furniture. How do you respond to THAT?

3.20am: Headwrote varying replies to The Gingers' letter in bed. Slept and dreamt of things that don't bother me when in a wakeful state, but patently do when I'm in slumberland. Bizarre.

8.00am: (Whilst asleep) Automated responses to things.

12.15pm: Awoke to the sound of the television and with the feeling that Fern Britton had been presenting This Morning from the comfort of my chest. Coughed up some nasty looking stuff. Lit a cigarette and put it out after failing to inhale.

13.10pm: Checked my email, deleting pleas from orphaned Ivory Coast potential-multi-millionaires who "felt like emptying themselves to me". And offers of genuine "R0l Ex" watches at discount prices. Splendid.

-Jeremy Kyle Show interlude-

3.15pm: Picked up Daughter Two from school and drove to town to collect Daughter One. Popped into Ottakars en route to buy Daughter One the latest Eoin Colfer book. Was very tempted to buy Best of Jackie Annual for myself, but opted to add it to my Christmas Wishlist instead.

5.10pm: Went to local Sainsburys and purchased the following:

Bag of potatoes
Toulouse sausages
Broccoli and cauliflower
Gravy granules
Aunt Bessies Yorkshire Puddings
Aunt Bessies Roast Potatoes
Chocolate Cake

6.30pm: Made dinner, nipping between the living room and kitchen watching the Eggheads almost lose. Spoke briefly to Bestmate and arranged to go over to her house at 8pm to watch a movie.

7.20pm: Ate dinner (Sausage and mustard mash swimming in gravy) with a small slice of chocky cake for dessert.

7.30pm: Watched Eastenders, whilst thinking how much better Coronation Street is and how I wished it was Wednesday instead. Waited for Ruby's head to explode; it seemed to get fatter by the minute. It didn't happen. God, what a shite programme.

8.00pm: Watched the start of Holby City whilst thinking how depressing it was. Woke to the disturbing sound of Nigel from Eastenders (now a doctor in Holby, but always the dopey Womble lookylikey to me) sobbing uncontrollably.

9.00pm: Phoned Bestmate to say that I wouldn't be round at 8.00pm. Obviously. Explained that I was still coughing up small aliens and that I'd take a rain check. Surfed the net some. Feeling a little nostalgic today, so promised myself a trip to the Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising before the month is over.

9.20pm: Watched the end of the Horizon documentary on Isabelle Dinoire, who in 1995* became the first face transplant patient, then at

10.00pm: Switched over to Channel4 for The Madness of Boy George. Fab! Great to see Marc Almond looking so well.

11.00pm: Watched the first two episodes of One Summer, which had arrived via Lovefilm earlier that morning. It seemed terribly dated, and not nearly as fantastic as it was when first screened in 1983.

Gosh, don't you wish you had my life.

*I'm leaving this typo so you can see just how nostaligic I was feeling yesterday. s'easy to lose a decade here and there. It should, of course, read 2005.

Meoww

2006-10-13T16:12:00.000+01:00

Nope, no wurds today.

WWJD?

2006-10-11T19:13:00.000+01:00

Going to hell

2006-10-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

If He didn't like what I was doing He'd have stopped the pissing rain, and let me go out to play, right?

Inbox 2

2006-10-10T14:30:00.000+01:00

Donald Rumsfeld briefed the President this morning. He told Bush that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.

To everyone's amazement, the colour ran from Bush's face, then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost whimpering.

Finally, he composed himself and asked Rumsfeld, "Just exactly how many is a brazillion?"

Waste

2006-10-09T15:23:00.000+01:00

I have just eaten a truly naughty, overfilled, made-by-the-food-devil-himself, hot chicken, bacon and sweetcorn panini but if it weren't for the empty wrapper in my hand (and the mayonnaise splodge on my trousers) I'd never have known it. Food amnesia. I just hate it when that happens.

Severing my tongue

2006-10-08T02:52:00.000+01:00

Do I have "Bait me" tattooed across my forehead or summat?

Last week I had to endure a cab ride home whilst being told what a poor, unfortunate, misunderstood chap Ian Huntley is; how he's the real Soham victim. Yeah right. More than a little unnerving coming from a cab driver who declared his unlicensed status partway through the journey.

Yesterday I'm informed by someone I barely know that I can't possibly be as smart as he; I was "publicly" (sic) educated whilst he was blessed with a "private" education, donchaknow. (I went to a comprehensive school.) "Ah, so you were a public schoolboy then?", here doing my best to stifle my surprise. "No, I told ya already," came the shirty reply, "I went to a private school." Sigh..

Inbox

2006-10-06T11:30:00.000+01:00

Jim and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.

One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Jim suddenly jumped into the deep end. He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled Jim out.

When the director of Nursing became aware of Edna's heroic act, she considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, "Edna, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is you're being discharged; since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of another patient, I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is that Jim, the patient you saved, hung himself in his bathroom with the belt to his robe right after you saved him. I am sorry, but he's dead."

Edna replied, "He didn't hang himself; I put him there to dry. How soon can I go home?"

Sourcy

2006-10-06T09:52:00.000+01:00

Spotted the following in the Last.fm source code for my profile this morning:

<div id="widget" style="display: none;">
<input id="safariIsWank" value="" type="hidden"></div>

Not a fan, then..?

Joke over..

2006-10-05T10:23:00.000+01:00

..very funny! Now who's stolen my cocking 'hash' key?

Haven & Hell

2006-10-05T04:55:00.000+01:00

Okay, so perhaps it was a little over-optimistic of me to expect this weekend's South Coast camping trip to be anything other than fucking disasterous. I'd done the Butlins malarkey way back.. and Pontins even wayer back.. and stupidly thought Haven was a slightly improved version of the same.. CHPs* with jobs, or something..

*That's 'Council House People', not 'Californian Highway Patrol' officers, as they are called by those less unPC than me. (ahh, pants! My Safari browser won't let me make this potentially offensive comment almost unnoticably small. sorry. :) )

Anyway, where was I..? Camping.. during the tail end of the hurricane that struck Brighton at the weekend. Probably Hurricane Chardonnay. Or to be precise, I was trying to help pack away an eight man tunnel tent that was doing it's very best to become a four man wind sail. Free flight to France, anyone?

This was preceded by a night spent hurling undercooked hotdoggery down a filthy, stinking campsite bog. And like that wasn't bad enough, some pyjama'ed hag was hovering outside the entrance waiting for the final throw. So that she might take a private poo. Probably a planned middle-of-the-night poo, come to think of it. Hah, don't suppose she expected me to return to the toilet after her exit(s) for round two of chuck the sausage down the sewer. Not a pleasant experience.

That evening's entertainment consisted of no bingo (as advertisied), children's games (Guess Your Daddy, etc), a band (that amusingly we were asked to "welcome back on the stage" for their encore despite them never leaving..) and a 'wedding party' style disco. Thankfully someone sat in front of me for 'Oops Upside Your Head' and by the time the Macarena came around, I really couldn't have given less of a shit what misshapes I was throwing.

So that really was my Haven experience. Not for the faint-hearted, and probably best left to the fat, hairy, two-sizes-too-small-football-shirt-wearing brigade. And their 'husbands'.

Sometimes

2006-10-04T20:14:00.000+01:00

Piece of cake

2006-10-04T11:42:00.000+01:00

Or apple pie. The switch to the iMac has been a doddle, so far. I have everything I wanted and needed installed, and a few things that I thought I might have to live without (DivX player, for one).

The standard mail client could be better, but I hope to have entourage in a few days, so no biggie.

And using Photoshop CS2 is a dream, with a movie playing in the background and still no lag! Heck, I could go out to the kitchen, make a coffee and smoke a fag during the time it took my old dinosaur PC to rotate a 3mb image through 180 degrees.

The Safari browser is pretty basic, but again, so easy to use. Not sure how long I can cope without my tabbed browser windows though. But Firefox is so damned leaky, I don't know if I ever want to revisit that problem again.

Overall, it's an absolute pleasure to work on.. even if that damned @ key is in the wrong place!

I may be some time..

2006-10-03T21:27:00.000+01:00

No Brainer

2006-10-02T23:35:00.000+01:00

"Oh, I don't mind daddy-long-legs; It's spiders I hate"

I have a big problem with this statement. Someone please tell me how it is that you can throw a fit at the sight of ugly walking insect that at least appears to know which direction it is travelling, yet not bat an eyelid when an almost identical looking creature, armed with the power of flight, is powering it's way towards your face with flailing arms and legs? I really Don't. Get. It.

Spiders hide behind the sofa. Daddy-long-legs blindly hurtle towards your open screaming mouth or try crashing the Rovers Return via your television set.
Spiders make webs and catch other less favourable, germ-speading insects. Daddy-long-legs randomly drop their limbs on your spotless kitchen work surfaces.
Spiders fall in the bath and die. Daddy-long-legs lurk in the toilet pan waiting till you've planted your arse on the seat before launching themselves upwards.

Daddy-long-legs are to spiders as 'the nutter in the high street' is to normal people. The crane fly is a spider on acid.. It's the unpredictable mad bag lady of the insect world.. It's everything but okay.

Who tidied blogger?

2006-10-02T01:54:00.000+01:00

An observation: One of my major irritations with my previous blogger experiences was the 'Next Blog' feature in the top frame (up there ^^ on the right). It would more often than not redirect to abandoned bloghomes. It looks like this feature has now been set up to send blogspot surfers to recently updated blogs. I'm liking this a lot. Just thought I'd mention that.

The future is white

2006-10-02T00:53:00.000+01:00

The future's white, glossy and sexy. After toying with the idea (and bank accounts) for several years, I have finally taken the plunge and placed my order for a shiny, spanking new imac. I am of course talking about the Apple desktop computer and not the hair removal cream, which would leave me white, smooth and.. um.. smooth.

See, I reasoned that if I were to invest in a pooter upgrade, then I needed to feel that I had something new. Previous money spent on my peecee left me feeling rather disappointed; same crumbs in the keyboard, same lump of dirty blutak on the monitor and maybe.. maybe slightly faster, but I only know this because my PC is telling me so.

And so enters the new 20 inch 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo! Hubba hubba!

I shouldn't have these feeling about electronic equipment, I know, but spangly new gadgets combined with the thought of belly-flopping into previously unexplored realms just does it for me.

So I'm busy now surfing the interweb for "My other computer is a Mac" wallpaper for my work PC, and developing my superior Mac User sneer. Despite my order still sitting in a system somewhere in Appleland, I'm wallowing in my new-found Mac owner status already and it feels.. mmmmm.. gooooooood.

Lost in space

2006-09-30T00:06:00.000+01:00

I managed just 9 days on myspace. But I can no longer afford the coffee-cigarette-painkiller combination necessary to sustain my patience. Jeeezus, what a flaky piece of crap that place is. But people seem to just love it. Huh?

So back here again. It's been a while.. A few pseudo-lives ago. Maybe I can stay here without getting all jumpy and paranoid over IP addresses and without feeling that I ought to be putting any effort into my blog posts. It's supposed to be fun, right..?

Exodus

2006-09-29T23:30:00.000+01:00

number 742.