Posts (page 2)

• A life-size, replica silver stag's head
• Shoes made of magic
• Sequinned clothes
• A metallic leather oyster card holder
• A peacock blue Liberty diary (I spent far too much time in there last night and now I'm ruined)
• Fistfuls of bird and pony Christmas decorations
• A cakestand with a glass dome
• Bach's Preludes & Nocturnes
• A Tudor ruff

Failing all that, I will probably be happy with a sticker book and some crayons.

Show us a picture of your all time favorite President.

Kiam

Because not only did he buy the company, but his middle name was Kermit.

You know it's been a good night when you have an unexpected Jew-off with a man in a PVC corset and 'Drag Darth Vader boots' (he won) and you find sequins down your corset when you get home.

Disappointing

• I've had to drop Sociolinguistics to re-join the Spanish class, which contains actual Spanish people.  Surely this is an unfair advantage.

Compensation

• I'm going to do Philosophy instead - with a professor who is not only famous and respected in his field but who is also pictured on the university website wearing tweed!  And a cravat!  How scholarly.
• Philosophy is on a Tuesday and not a Friday.

Financially Embarrassed

• I was doing really well at being frugal and then in a fit of boredom  and stress, cut a swathe through ebay and Primark.

But Glamourous

• I do have lots of pretty things now (or will have very soon) including an antique ostrich feather fan, a cape, long leather gloves and a relatively slutty tight skirt.
• I'm not overdrawn yet, which means I can fund the purchase of more glitter and possibly some new shoes. 
• And I have exciting places to flaunt such trinkets.

Random pieces of joy

• My dad's back from his super long holiday.  Hooray!  Just in time to help me with my coursework. 
• One of my best and oldest friends is coming to visit in December AND we're going to see IAMX.  Eee!
• This will swiftly be followed by another glorious trip to Brighton (for which I MUST resume the saving scheme).

Pantomime Villain

• Tiscali.  How I hate you.  As soon as I've got time to deal with the bailiffs you will no doubt send round for non-payment, I will be cancelling my contract with you. 

D'you remember a week or so I wrote something about things that send me into an incensed rage?  Well, you can add Tiscali to that list.  I settled down happily last night to watch Heroes (this is a little-known, yet integral part of the Atonement preparations - and it was accompanied by an ENORMOUS bowl of meatballs and rice) all good, then tried to switch over to BBC3 to watch the next episode.

Sorry, this channel's not available right now.

In fact, that channel wasn't available for at least twenty minutes.  I don't know whether it became available after that because I threw the remote control across the room in temper and now it doesn't work, so I can't change channels.  The crappy box doesn't accomodate for that.

An engineer is booked to come out on Saturday anyway (because of their awful, awful service, where the broadband drops out every hour or so and the television channels will freeze up five minutes before the end of the show - assuming you could get to that channel in the first place) but really, I just want to cancel and tell them to stick their set top box where the sun don't shine.

So, having spent a pleasing amount of time reading customer reviews of Tiscali (general gist: AVOID AVOID AVOID) I've found what looks like a good internet provider in the form of Be*. 

Does anyone have any experience of them?

Also, I'll probably have to downgrade to freeview and buy a box for that.  I'm still not sure how that works though - will it matter that I don't have a aerial for the telly?

Help, guidance or something to stop me gnashing my teeth all gratefully received. 

I need your help, lovely bloggers.  There are books I have read, some as a child and others, more recently, of which certain scenes or characters left an impression on me but I'm damned if I can remember what their titles are.  So, putting my faith into the internet once again, I'll write down the bits I can remember and hopefully some of you can come to my aid. 

1.  This is the oldest and used to belong to one of the uvvers before it came into my possession.  The story involved a brother and sister, who had various adventures with the people they knew in their neighbourhood.  The incidents I can remember were that they went to visit a Chinese man, who would take his caged linnet out for walks.  He showed them a porcelain statuette of a lady and explained that it was used in the olden days for ladies who were too shy to talk to a doctor but they could circle the area in question where they were troubled so that the doctor could make his diagnosis.  Another time, the sister was being given a lift by a major (?) - I have the impression that all the action was set in the 30s - when he told her to take the wheel because he was going to sneeze.  He then gives her a bit of a lecture about how we close our eyes when we sneeze.  There was also another bit about a Christmas goose, which possibly turned up frozen, but I'm getting a bit hazy now.  I'm sure there must have been a story to the book, but I can just remember these odd episodes.

2.  When I was a little older, my dad used to get me books out the library every weekend.  I remember this one was by an author I particularly liked but I can't remember who, or what their other books were but if we can identify this one, I should be able to revisit the others from there.  The story was about a fairly plain woman, who shocked everyone by marrying a man thought to be a bit of a thug, who lived in a run-down house in the forest.  The husband turned out to be quite educated and they actually got along quite well.  One day, on a trip to the city he caught her looking at a $5 string of fake pearls in a shop window and later bought them to surprise her.  She was dismayed by this because she didn't think they could afford it and wasn't until much later that she found out they were real pearls and he was rich all along.  Hurrah!  I think this was set in the 20s (the cover possibly had a woman with a flapper style bob on, in muted blues and greens).

3.  This is more recent and my ex and I had both read it and were subsequently unable to identify where it came from.  I keep thinking it's Douglas Coupland but I can't find it in any of his books.  Anyway, the author spent some time working for a large company and came to the realisation that people's fates were determined by the decor in their office, eg a blue carpet and white walls meant you were heading for redundancy or a green carpet and beige walls indicated promotion. 

I look forward to getting some answers!

It was my last French class last night, because I'm going back to my real classes next week and it's been a nice change to be regarded as one of the more intermediate students (rather than feeling like I should be sitting in the corner, wearing a pointed hat, like I do in Spanish) and because it's been a very, very long time since I learned French, so it's been good to know the knowledge was still in there.

Just how long it's been was brought to home to me in bitter clarity yesterday.  We were looking at making hotel bookings and asking about breakfast, parking, rooms with double beds and the internet (certainly not something I learnt back in the day) and one of my colleagues was asking why you couldn't say 'Peux-je...?' instead of 'Est-ce que je peux...?'  Le Professeur asked if there were any other ways of asking if you could do something and as a deeply embedded memory came drifting to the surface, I mumbled something about 'puis-je...?'

Non!  Nobody talks like that anymore.  That is old-fashioned French and if you say that, people with laugh at you!

Apparently I am so old, I am actually speaking an archaic form of a language.

I am Very Angry today but am doing my best to calm myself down.

When I got home last night, there was an email from college with my new timetable.  I wasn't too fussed because my tutor had already told me the days (Spanish on Mondays, Linguistics on Tuesdays) but I wanted to know when classes actually started because term starts on 29th September but lectures don't normally start until the week after.  This is still the case, which is fortunate because I'm busy all of next week anyway.  Unfortunately, they seemed to have mucked around with the timetable and now the linguistics classes are being held on Mondays.  Hence a clash with Spanish - except to avoid the clash, they've put on an extra Spanish class.  On a Friday.  So from 6 til 9, for just about every Friday until next May, I'm going to be stuck doing my stupid Spanish class.  AND all my friends from the last two years will be doing the Monday classes so I'll be in there on my own, with strangers, who won't want to do any of the activities with me because I'm crap at it, especially because I'm probably going to have to miss the first class because I'm going to a gig.... bah, rubbish.

Today's rage is directed at Fedex - after having spent about hour on the phone to the imbecile in the call centre, to try, yet again, to remove the fictitious second address from our account, I eventually asked to be put through to her supervisor.  She put me on hold, went away, came back and then pretended she couldn't hear me and hung up.  I've reported her to the customer services manager (who actually was helpful) and he is going to trace the call and deal with her 'appropriately'.  I hope she gets sacked and it is this hope which is doing something to appease me.

The quote for the windows still isn't ready, so I still don't know how much of my hard earned cash is going to go on that and how much will be left over for trinkets.

The irony of my situation is that before all this happened, I'd been thinking about an article I read in a magazine recently about dealing with anger.  The writer (a magazine editor) said she could deal very coolly with missed deadlines or things going badly wrong at work yet if her phone was ringing and she couldn't find it at the bottom of her bag then she'd fly into an absolute rage.  I completely related to this because the thing that gets me gnashing my teeth and swearing the most is either when I try to listen to my mp3 player and the headphones are all in a tangle or when the straighteners/curling irons/hairdryer/phone charger leads all get tangled up and I can't find the right plug.  Just thinking about it is vexing me.

So, what's getting on your goat today?

How do you know when a relationship has run its course and it's time to call it quits?

When he's moved in with someone else.

Right, onwards!

Drek

I met up with my financial adviser last week and my suggestion of putting away £100 or maybe £150 if I try very, very hard into my pension was met with him gently pushing the paper with the projections on it across the table to me.  In order to have any kind of a life when I'm old, I should be paying around £750 A MONTH into the fund.  This worries me so I'll just have to resume my scheme to Marry Well.

I have a lingering cough, which is getting on my nerves.  And everyone else's probably.

Glik

Despite not going to the gym at all last week and 'that' incident at Le Pain Quotidienne, I've lost half a stone since I joined.  I can only assume that some of my major organs are now made of bread and therefore have less density.

I have lots of exciting nights out planned, most of which will involve elaborate dresses and glitter.  Even more than usual!

Summer is over, but I managed to not spend all of it prone on the sofa, watching entire series of DVDs in one weekend.  I'm feeling quite motivated lately so I might even post the pictures of what I've been up to.