Anniversary

Today is our first wedding anniversary. Yey!

Yesterday we made the heart-shaped chocolate cake and ate some (nom!). James took a photo before we ate it though so I will try to obtain that for your viewage.

This morning I have made the marinade for the pork and it is now infusing! I started to read the recipe and realised that I was supposed to marinade overnight. Never mind! We will have to go out later to buy some string to wrap the roll of pork in. I realised that we only have “multi-purpose twine” which looks a bit plasticy. Don’t want to experience a Bridget Jones style garden twine food disaster!

In a bit I intend to make some (hopefully) delicious Canadian-style pancakes for James to remind him of our wonderful honeymoon in Toronto where we feasted on pancakes at brunch several times. Then for dinner later we will have the pork with some potatoes and cauli. The potatoes are organic but the cauli isn’t, however it was supporting local business because i bought it from the green-grocers rather than Tesco. The man in the wine shop helped me select a bottle of wine suitable for drinkage with pork dishes to go with the meal.

Sadly the weather is a bit pants today but i’m sure we’ll still be able to go out and have some fun around the place this afternoon. Excellent!

Lovely Weekend Ahead (hopefully)

As mentioned yesterday, I have found this week quite a strain. I have been feeling rather icky after last weekend’s seizure. Sometimes the effects are more sustained than other times.

This weekend however is going to be splendid. I have booked this afternoon off work and plan to do a few things. Firstly I will go home and gather a shopping list of the ingredients I need to make excellent anniversary foods, such as heart-shaped chocolate raspberry cake and roast loin of pork with special roast potatoes. Then (after watching Neighbours and probably eating Supernoodles for lunch) I will head into town to purchase as many of said ingredients from local shops with local produce! I will visit Magdalen Road and use the butchers, bakers, fish mongers and deli there and will pick up my organic vegetable box from The Bran Tub health shop provided by Rod and Ben’s Organic Seasonal Foods. This is the first time I have ordered from Rod and Ben’s. I thought I would give it a try following good reports from people such as Becky who use similar (but not the same) services. I also have a couple of parcels to pick up from the parcel place.

Later I am hoping to pop into The Mount Radford pub to bid farewell to a work colleague who will be greatly missed. Often i’m fairly indifferent about people who come and go at work but not this time. Good luck Helen.

Marking my territory

Look at this cool thingy I made for James:

Brain Misbehavin’

So, to go into a bit more detail re. my previous post, I give below a report of the latest seizure developments:

(As you already know)
Date: 10th May 2006
Time: Approx 7.30pm
Location: Double Locks pub, Exeter.
Time since previous seizure: Approx 1 yr 2 months.
Injuries incurred: Bitten lip and general mouth cutting. As usual 2 week recovery time for mouth injury.
Notes: Although time since proper seizure noted as 1 yr 2 months, plenty of ‘auras’ were experienced in between.

Date: 23rd June 2006
Time: 1.10am
Location: In bed, asleep, the flat.
Time since previous seizure: Approx 6 weeks.
Injuries incurred: Bitten lip and general mouth cutting again. 2 week recovery time for mouth injury.
Notes: Not much to say really.

Date: 8th July 2006
Time: Approx 7am
Location: In bed, asleep, Becky’s flat in Bristol.
Time since previous seizure: Approx 2 weeks.
Injuries incurred: None.
Notes: It woke me up and I remember some of the seizure but obviously slipped into unconciousness during. Had a period of general confusion afterwards, thinking it was a good idea to wander into Becky’s room and wake her up. She kindly made tea for us and no major hang over resulted thankfully due to quick tea injection.

Date: 13th July 2006
Time: 2am
Location: In bed, asleep, the flat.
Time since previous seizure: 5 days.
Injuries incurred: Finger nail sized cuts in the palms (nails are now cut short), strange blisters/sores on the 3rd and 4th toes of my right foot, two bumps on the head.
Notes: James tried to prevent me from falling out of bed but it was quite difficult for him. He prevented me from leaving the flat to embark upon “the search for more toilets”.

Date: 17th July 2006
Time: 7am
Location: In bed, just woken, the flat.
Time since previous seizure: 5 days.
Injuries incurred: None, other than an aching neck.
Notes: Was awake, knew it was going to happen so woke up James. Wasn’t too bad and I didn’t lose conciousness. Decided to stay home from work anyway as i had no meetings. Turned out to be a good idea. James stayed home until lunch time, at which we decided it was ok for him to go into work.

Date: 17th July 2006
Time: Approx 3pm
Time since previous seizure: 8 hours.
Location: Leaving the en-suite, trying to reach the bed or something. I was confused and can’t remember well.
Injuries incurred: 2 bumps on the head, scrape and bruise on the right foot, bruise on right knee, bruise just above right knee, large bruise and scrape on right forearm, HUMONGOUS bruise and scrape on right upper arm, bruise on right elbow.
Notes: I don’t remember much about this one at all. The last thing i remember is being in the bathroom and thinking to myself “i’m going to have a seizure” but i didn’t have time to do anything much. I woke up (I think…this is very hazy) on the bedroom floor, head towards the door and foot kind of kicking the bedside table. I think i must have fallen down here and hit my arm on the door which was propped open with a doorstop. I had the worst hangover ever known and i remember lying there just kind of whining James’s name until my confusion had subsided enough to know where i was. I got up and immediately forgot that I had been on the floor and wandered through to the lounge where i did the familiar thing of sitting at my computer. IRC was highlighted so i thought i would tell James that a few minutes ago i felt like i was going to have a seizure but thankfully i hadn’t (you kind of reset to the last thing you accurately thought…kind of a mental “restore settings from last working configuration”). James is always window 4 in my irssi so i tried to Alt-4 and say “James” however this somehow came out as

1555.53 [+Greeneyez] 44jame

in #exeter.I then typed the following:

[Greeneyez] o’t 44lkrrrrrrrrrrpleqwe p09^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^

which at the time I honestly and truly believed to say “I don’t feel well please help” but I immediately felt bad because I thought to myself “that’s going to make James think I’ve had a seizure when I haven’t and that’ll make him worry and want to come home” so I never actually pressed enter to send that message to James. As it happened, the initial “44jame” going uncorrected in #exeter for so long was enough to make him call the house land line from work (he’s so amazing isn’t he), long before i was fully capable for making a concious decision to call him myself, so you could say IRC to the rescue there. I managed to answer the phone and although I sounded completely normal in my own head, James immediately identified that i was in classic post-seizure foggy world and told me to go to bed until he got home. I did as he said, still feeling awful. He didn’t take long to get home and took care of me with tea and painkillers. Later things became clearer in my head and judging by the injuries and how i was feeling I realised that the only explanation was a proper seizure and not just an aura.

James has asked me what it is like to feel like you really don’t know what’s going on and it’s hard to describe. You don’t know what’s going on, but you don’t necessarily know that you don’t know what’s going on, if that makes sense. You may think that doing something completely foolhardy or odd is a good idea, like shaking your brother awake at 3am to ask him what “his plans” are, or leaving the flat at 2am to “search for more toilets”.

So how do i feel about this increased frequency of incidents? Well, obviously not entirely ecstatic. As previously explained, cavernomas leak blood and the leaked blood causes seizures. This leads me to conclude that my cavernoma has recently done a bit of leaking into my happy brain cells thus pissing them off. If only we could apply an elastoplast to the cavernoma to prevent further bleeding (scarily referred to as ‘hemorrhaging’ amongst medical peeps), or maybe use one of those dentist sucky vacuume tube things to remove any blood sloshing around in there. Sadly these suggestions don’t go down well with the aforementioned medical peeps.

Thoughts pass through the mind of “do you ever hear about old people with epilepsy…not really…does that mean…they all die relatively young?” etc. It’s not a good train of thought but deep down i know it’s silly because millions of people live with epilepsy all the time. I just have to acclimatise myself back into being a more regular sufferer having got used to a blissfully long period without any effects.

Some pics

Bought some new trainers today. Black and hot pink seem to be the fashion judging from what’s on sale so that’s what I’ve gone for. Teehee! Here is a pic of them.

James’s hair is now getting quite long. I sneaked this picture of him after he let me test the length with one of my hair bobbles. Teehee!

Big Update

Oops no update in a while. It’s just been quite busy yet uneventful and I don’t want to bore people with rubbish updates!

Briefly, the things that have happened since I last wrote are:

1. Dan and Sarah’s housewarming. They have a new place of residence in Bristol, having left the bright lights of Chippenham. We had lots of fun, playing games, having a few drinks and some pizzas. You can see the photos here.

2. Industrial action at work! This was a strike that was arranged as part of the protest against proposed changes to the pension scheme. I didn’t take part in the strike mainly because I’m not a Union member and didn’t have much info about what was going on. I’m not sure pensions will even exist by the time I come to that age anyway.

3. My parents-in-law came to visit for the weekend. We had a lovely time and James and I cooked some lovely food for the Saturday evening which I think was well received. Then on the Sunday we went for lunch at The Fisherman’s Cot.

4. On Easter Saturday we travelled up to Bath for the day and met up with Rose. We had tea at Rose’s sister Poppy’s house, visited the Roman Baths and enjoyed lunch out in town. Then in the evening we were kindly catered for by Rose’s father at the family home – some lovely spaghetti bolognaise. You can see the photos here.

5. Last weekend we hung out with Becky and Dave and enjoyed dinner at The Magic Wok. They bravely ate “the special” which turned out to be immense quantities of food. We then retired to our flat and watched The Manchurian Candidate on dvd that we had got from the mail order rental service we have recently joined.

6. I purchased some more reasonably priced tickets to see Madonna at Cardiff Millennium Stadium. We will be sitting quite far back but that is because I was insisted upon actually sitting and not standing. I am looking forward to that a lot!

7. This last week, James spent 3 days in Paris on the latest VM Ware conference. Whilst he was away, Mum came down to stay with me. I took Friday off and we drove around quite a lot of Devon checking the place out. Lots of fun!

8. Then yesterday James, Dave G, Dave B and I cycled to the Double Locks with the view to partaking in their Beer Festival. It was very popular and there was an extremely loud band playing. We managed to sit far enough away to be able to hear ourselves think. We were planning to meet Reagan there at 6pm but after an hour or so it was starting to go very cloudy and quite chilly. I had forgotten quite how small the inside of Double Locks pub is – there was no hope for an inside table. As we were really really cold we decided to cycle back home and find dinner elsewhere, so we never managed to meet up with Reagan but he didn’t seem to mind. We ended up going to Tyepyedong Noodle Bar on Sidwell Street. This was very lovely indeed. Great service and yummy food. I demanded their takeaway menu and you can view it here in pdf format. The item that may be difficult to read is one I wrote on because it was an addition to the menu that they hadn’t yet put onto the take-away menu sheets. It is:

Chicken Yakitori – 3 skewers of chicken in bbq sauce. £3.20.

We ordered some of that and it was delicious.

Next weekend is the Queen Convention and I am really looking forward to that. Sadly I can’t get the whole of Friday off work because I have a meeting that morning. I have booked the rest of the day off as flexi-leave which will enable me to leave as soon as the meeting has finished, rather than a half-day leave that would require me to stay until lunch-time if the meeting was shorter.

UPDATE: tyepyedong Noodle Bar have updated their menu. tyepyedong Menu

Work blues

Yesterday’s day at work was pretty depressing. Didn’t really like the way something was done but you just pick yourself up and carry on don’t you.

Yesterday was also Valentine’s Day and a round-about 6 year anniversary for James and I <3
James took me to see Starlight Express at the Princess Theatre in Torquay. Took us a bit to find the place and we had to run to not miss the start but we got there in the end. It was brilliant. They did a really good job of it despite having such a small stage. This was the 3rd time I’d seen it and each time it has been a different revision of the show. Of course I prefer the original version (which was much longer) but it’s all still good.

At the weekend James and I bought two new fish – Teeny and Blackie. Both are algae-eaters. Teeny has been put in the little tank and Blackie in the larger tank. Blackie disappeared for a while but he’s started coming out and swimming about a little bit now. I have realised that he isn’t as black in colour as I thought and actually has quite a few speckles. I’m now thinking of changing his name to Spotty instead. We shall see.

This weekend we are off to the North with Mum and Dad’s new PC. We have installed everything we can think of and it seems to be working really well. Google Earth runs brilliantly so Dad will be pleased. I have booked a flexi day off work on Friday because I have a lot of flexi time on my clock and it seems as good a time as any to use some of it up. The weekends where we travel go so quickly anyway. Hopefully I will be able to force myself down the gym at some point. Maybe if I wake up early and get James to drop me off at the gym on his way to work it will make the day longer. My gym regime is going pretty well and I’m still enjoying it. My legs feel quite strong now although I’m not fit yet – running for the theatre last night proved that!

Yey, time for holidays! Also there was a BUS CRASH!!

Today is my last day of work before the holidays and it should be a fairly easy going day. I’ve done some of the work I intended to do today already and have a few things left to do this morning.
Then this afternoon we are having a team ROC meeting which is normally very stress free these days. We will probably have coffee and mince pies and people will mostly discuss the work that the Dream Team do (waste stuff). I normally say a couple of words about what i do but not much because no one is really that interested.

Then as soon as it is 4pm I am going to race home and get the last few things i need into my suitcase ready to go. Must remember to take the rubbish out to the bins, switch the dishwasher off standby (it is washing now whilst i am at work), shut down my PC, turn down the heating thermostat slightly and give the fish some food. Also must remember to go and get the fish a feeding block on the way home and drop the keys off to Reagan so that he can feed them whilst we are away.

Crazy stuff happened yesterday after work! Quite an exciting evening. Firstly, I left work and walked over to Polsloe Road to the Doctors. On Tuesday morning we had dropped off my repeat prescription request so I was going to go and pick it up. Got there after 20 mins walk and they told me that they had sent it directly to Boots as normal despite me crossing that part out on the request. They said i should have specifically said i wanted to collect. They are probably right. Anyway it doesn’t make much difference as we have to go to Boots to pick up the pills anyway. I called James and told him what had happened and he said he’d stop off at Boots to pick them up.

Walked another 20 mins into town - a nice waste of time in all. I realised that really i should get something nice to wear for John’s 60th Birthday party so I popped into Monsoon. I’ve seen quite a few nice skirts and tops in there recently but resisted because they are pretty pricey. In the end I got a skirt, top and wooly cardigan to wear for his party. Whilst i was there i also got some jeans because my current pairs are threatening to all wear out at the same time. All in all came to just under £200 but I haven’t bought any clothes in ages and this should last a while. I made sure i bought clothes that were nice enough to wear out to stuff but also not too dressy for work, so double usage!

Popped into M&S and witnessed a mother having a right go at her 3 children in the hoisery department. Some people are weird. Intended to go to the fish shop but totally forgot so will have to go today. Went home and caught the last 10 mins of Neighbours and watched the news a bit.

It was about 6:40pm and i was watching the beginning of Spotlight whilst chatting on IRC a bit. James was still out because he was picking up parcels and going to Boots to get my prescription (which incidentally they didn’t have because it had been sent to the High Street Boots first and wouldn’t arrive at the normal Boots until sometime today *sigh*). Suddenly there was a massively loud crashing noise that really startled me and it sounded like it was coming from just outside my window. I stood up and looked out and a bus had crashed into the blue Cannon Hygiene van that is always parked in the loading bay outside the Devon County Council community centre building accross the road and careered into the the building. It had pushed the van out into the road and smashed in the back of it. The front of the bus was all mangled and the windscreen was totally shattered. Bricks had crumbled away from the wall and the building windows were smashed. Later i saw that the wall was dangerously buckling inwards.

I stood shocked for a second and then grabbed for the phone that was on my desk. I could see people moving inside the bus but i was pretty sure no one would have managed to call 999 yet so I thought i better had do. I was so shocked seeing what had happened that i was pretty rubbish when calling. The guy said “do you want police, fire or ambulance” and i said “I don’t know! There’s been a bus crash!”. The man calmly said “Ok, you’ll probably want the police first off.” and put me through to the police. I told the police what had happened and that there were people on the bus and stuff and they said they’d send round a unit straight away.

I looked out the window again and a few people were off the bus and running away because they thought it might blow up or something. I grabbed my keys and home phone and mobile and went out to see if i could help people. I was shaking and could hardly get the key in the door to lock behind me. The police arrived within about a minute and started stopping traffic further down the road and sorting out passengers. It soon became evident that everyone who’d been on the bus was pretty much ok. The driver was looking pretty startled as most of the front of the bus where he would have been sitting was destroyed. Here is a pic that i took from the window. It doesn’t show the damage quite so well because it was dark but you can see where it’s gone so high that it’s taken bits off wall out. When they moved the bus you could see that the wall was pretty much fubared.

The police called for the fire brigade because the bus and van were obviously going to need moving but the fire brigade would have to make sure there wasn’t any chance of it blowing up and stuff. I decided to go back upstairs because no one was hurt and stuff and they just needed to clear it all away. I searched my pockets for my keys and couldn’t find them! I was well worried. Luckily the front door of Augusta Court had done it’s typical thing of not swinging shut properly so i was able to get inside. A woman was just entering the building as well and i blathered something about losing my keys. She gave me a funny look as though i was mad. When i got upstairs i saw that i’d left the keys in the door! I’d locked it and then just left the keys in the lock! I was obviously quite distracted!

Inside, I put the webcam on to it and a few people on IRC watched it with me. Some rubble clearing men arrived and a tow truck to take away the van. Later they managed to pull the bus away by tying some string round it and pulling it off somewhere.

After a good cup of tea i calmed down a bit but i didn’t manage as much packing for holiday as i hoped to because i felt a bit freaked even though no one was hurt. It was a strange accident really. Market Street is one way. It has loading bays on the right hand side with a full lane to pass by them so no need to swerve. The bus should have just sailed past to the left of the van. The road narrows to the left hand side a bit further up because of a pedestrian crossing with signals. They only recently put a load of anti-skid road surfacing there also. The bus however didn’t impact the van on the left hand side as if it just clipped it due to an inexperienced driver. It’s as if the driver fell asleep at the wheel or passed out or something because he impacted the van on it’s right hand side, wedging the bus into the building and pushing the van out to the left (as you can see on the photo). Unfortunately i didn’t see it happen but there were plenty of witnesses on the bus itself who could probably say whether the driver just seemed to lose it or something. Maybe it will be in the news if it turns out there were strange shinanigans other than just ‘accident’. He could have swerved to avoid a pedestrian of course or something similar.

Well it was all very exciting. Not sure i’ve ever had to ring 999 before!

Christmas is coming

Yes Christmas is close and I think I have now got all the presents we need to give people and a few for James. The only thing remaining to purchase is a Christmas card with ‘to my husband’ on it <3

This Friday it is the work Christmas party. Everyone leaves work at around 12 midday and heads over to the Buckerell Lodge hotel down the road for a Christmas meal. There’s apparently music and dancing later on in the evening and possible trips into town for drinking however I’m not sure of the format as last year I had to leave after the meal to travel to James’s parents’ house. This time we aren’t going anywhere next weekend but hopefully I can slip away anyway as I do not want to accidentally get tipsy around work colleagues as that could be disastrous knowing me! I’d only make a fool of myself by talking my usual rubbish!

This year we are planning to leave for my parents’ house on Thursday 22nd after work. We will then stay there until the evening of Christmas Day when we will then drive down to James’s parents’ house. Boxing Day is John Seward’s 60th birthday so we will be celebrating that with him. Then at 4am on the 27th we head off to Gatwick to catch a plane to southern Spain! Yey! There we shall reside until New Year’s Eve at which point we will race back to Bristol to party the new year in at Becky’s flat with a number of other friends also. Hopefully we will then have enough room in the car, having dropped off presents and Mum’s suitcase along the way, to give Dave G a lift back to Exeter.

At the moment Christel isn’t so well and is in hospital having what is hopefully a minor operation. James and I therefore send her best get well soon wishes. We shall hopefully be visiting her this evening in hospital if all goes to plan.

Wow so many things have happened!

As you can see it’s been quite a long time since i’ve been able to update the weblog. So many things have happened!

Firstly, of course, James and I got married on 17th September 2005. Pictures from the wedding are available here:

http://wedding.jamesoff.net/pics

Pictures from our honeymoon in Canada also available there. I have written a detailed account of our honeymoon (the decent for public viewing bits!) which i will add later on.

I have now been in work at Devon County Council for over 1 year! I’m glad i stuck with it despite it being difficult at the beginning.

Coming up in the next few weeks:
My birthday…hopefully people can come to the celebrations.
Hopefully visiting Becky in Bristol to see her new place.
Thanksgiving in Loughborough with Andi - must sort out accommodation.
Hopefully visiting Jed and Rose at their house in Canterbury. Woot!

James’ Birthday

On Monday, it was James’ birthday. Sadly, he had to go off to Lisbon that day for his conference so we didn’t really get to celebrate it. Therefore, tomorrow we are having a party!

Dan and Sarah are going to be staying with us so i’m going home at 4pm this afternoon in order to start the tidy-up! Let’s just hope i don’t fall asleep as soon as i make contact with the flat.

We will be going to ASK tomorrow night for some yummy food and then onto the pub for a few drinks. James didn’t really get a proper present from me because i got him the iPod at Christmas, so instead i have got him a present for our 5 year anniversary which is next week.

To celebrate the 5 year anniversary we are going out for dinner at the Imperial Chef. It’s flippin expensive though but james said he didn’t care because 5 years = hooray! heheheh.

Love in the First Degree

James has just texted to say that he is on his way back from Heathrow now. He’s been away in Lisbon on a VM-Ware conference for 2 nights/3 days. To say that i have missed him is an understatement.

I found it really difficult just getting along without him. He’s been away before but this time it seemed worse somehow. Maybe it’s all the elation from planning the wedding and being excited about spending forever together but basically we’ve been really happy recently and being apart, even for a couple of days was really difficult.

It’s funny when i think back to the length of time i could go without seeing him whilst i was living away in the North. Most couples who’ve been together as long as we have, have had their own share of long-distance stuff and we had ours. Thinking back, i was a bit of a workaholic. I would do long hours at the office and then when i wasn’t there i’d come home and do a whole lot of computer stuff and work on the music with andi etc. A lot of being shut away and doing stuff to keep me busy. I didn’t really go out and enjoy myself with friends much, even though i knew plenty of people from work and stuff. I think i just coped with it in a subconcious way as i don’t remember making decisions to ‘keep myself busy’. It was just a reaction to the situation.

Now that i’m used to having him around and relying on each other, it feels really empty when one of us is away. I had trouble getting to sleep the last couple of nights just because i was on my own and i had a feeling of sadness somewhere in my cheast. How sickening! But it’s the absolute truth. I suppose it’s true heartache…and so close to Valentine’s Day as well!

Lucky James, i’ve made him a chocolate fudge cake for when he gets home. If it looks good when i’ve put all the icing on, i’ll take a pic and post it here. :)

Quiet Sunday

Today I had a nice quiet Sunday.

Woke up not too late - around 9am, then went to band practice at Andi’s a bit later. We recorded some stuff and hopefully it’ll sound good. Andi said “it went surprisingly well”. I think he was referring to my minimal coughing on the recording. I need to see whether i can do something about that because i naturally cough all the time. I think it runs in my family or something.

Then this evening i went to church. The songs were a bit pants this week but i registered my interest in doing something in the music group so i’ll see what comes of that.

Had pancakes with James and did a mini birthday celebration because of him going to Lisbon and missing both. Poor James. :(

Now i’m going to go to bed early because i’ve got meetings all this week and i find it easier to stay awake in them if i make sure i go to bed early every day during the week in question.

Bubble Bath

Another one of my presents from James was this AMAZING bubble bath. I have always wanted to have the sort of bubble bath which is two different layers you have to mix together. It’s just the funnest thing ever and gives me hours of entertainment.

Here it is BEFORE :

And here it is AFTER:

I also got some other lovely bath stuff. Hurray for inflatable bath pillow!:

and here’s a close up of Mr Ducky:

Marriage

I think this week i’ve had one of those STOP WAIT A MINUTE occurances whilst walking into the kitchen to put some pants in the washing machine. I think this one is inevitable when you are engaged and are planning a wedding:

WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING MARRYING JAMES??????

I think this can go one of two ways…either you

1. Run away screaming never to be married.

or

2. Realise that this person is the greatest person you’ve ever met and you wish you could spend every moment of every day with them forever.

If my answer to this was point 1, this would be a bit of a sucky way for James to find out about it! Luckily for everyone, the answer was more like point 2. James is by far and away the greatest thing that has ever happened in my life.

Hopefully see you all at the wedding if he feels the same way ;)

Illness

Poor James was really ill on Monday 1st November and had to stay at home :(

TIME IS MY ENEMY, YET IS A HEALER

Time is what affects me. There’s never really enough of it to go round. I don’t even have a family or even any pets yet I still feel as though there are too many responsibilities in my life for me to do everything to a satisfactory standard and still have time left over to enjoy myself. Unfortunately I tend to make the time to enjoy myself and then feel exceptionally guilty for not carrying out my responsibilities to a satisfactory standard rather than the converse where I end up with no time to myself. I think if I didn’t take the time out then I’d stop altogether so it’s best this way.

So many things have happened recently. Firstly James and I got engaged which is in itself very fantastic. We started with the planning straight away because we always agreed that engagements should be just that, engaged to be married. The date’s all set and the venues, but now the arrangements need to be made and it’s bearing down on me like a big weight at the moment because other things are getting in the way whenever I try to attend to it.

The first thing to get in the way was the trouble going down in my job. For some reason my boss decided to turn on me one day and although he claims he “didn’t mean it that way” and I misinterpreted what he said, either way he was acting like a total freak so I decided it was time to find a new job and leave. It was the only thing to do really. Thankfully I got a decent job on my second interview but the whole process of sneaking time off work, swotting up for the interview, going through with it and the aptitude tests and then finally having the agonising wait to see whether you’ve got it or not is a bit of a nightmare. Thank goodness I only had to go through that twice. I have high hopes for my new job. It seems much more challenging than my old job (from what I’m saying now, whether that’s good or bad is another matter!). I seemed to thrive on this in my old job so I’m hoping I’ll get that back. It also pays a lot more which is an added bonus but I need to stress that that isn’t the reason I’m leaving my current job. I always think happiness in the workplace is much more important than getting highly paid, although I’m not saying I’d work for free! I start my new job the week of the 18th October. I have another 3 weeks at South West Water and then I have one week off.

In that week, James and I are moving house – the second thing to get in the way! About a month ago Leaman’s got in touch with me to tell me that our landlord was selling up and did we want to buy the house for £270 thousand. “UM let me think…… would you take an offer of £85 thousand? No? I thought not…then no.” They gave us 2 months to get out so house hunting was on…again. Last time it was SO easy – we just found another Leaman’s property and got it straight away. This time it wasn’t so easy. We viewed several different places that all minged somewhat. I spent entire days ringing letting and estate agents to book viewings and enquire. We got beaten to it on 3 different properties and finally we are now settling for one I haven’t even seen because the market is so fast that James had to say yes pretty much straight after he’d seen it. Then it was mega stressful because in true letting agency style, they can’t confirm whether you’ve got the place or not for over 10 working days so you don’t know whether you should be looking for somewhere else or not. Luckily we managed to get the work references in *just* before I handed in my notice at SWW. Phew. I got pretty damn stressed out about the finding a place. I can’t stand the thought of not having anywhere to live. We have great friends who I’m sure would help us out however we have SO MUCH STUFF. Where would it all go unless we had somewhere to move into straight away? Moving is such a faff as well. It’s a nightmare. Anyway that will all be taking place during that week in-between jobs that I have. So that’s at least fallen quite well!

Another thing, although I wouldn’t say that it “gets in the way” because it’s totally my choice…is the band. Now, I love doing it but I still feel guilty when I turn up at *another* practice having done no new stuff *again*. I always say “yeh I’ll look at that one” and then I come along to the next practice and I’ve not had time. I quite often pick up my bass and play for a few minutes at a time and the other day I was quite proud coz I did lots of practice but what I’d really like to do is actually work on some of the stuff that Reagan and Andi have put together. The stuff I’ve done recently has been squished together in the space of about 10 minutes and is pants. I admit that myself. I listen to it back and I think “wtf?!”. Still, new stuff aside, we have decent live demos now and Andi has sent them out. We are hoping to have gigs soon so that’s going to be another thing I need to think about. I’m excited though because I love singing so much so it’s a good thing I’ve decided not to do Japanese this year to make more time for this.

Last thing that has transpired in the last few days is my health. Not the usual mad-crazy-epilepsy that makes me so special this time, but screwed up hormones and shit. Truly messed up. They thought it was really bad and made me stay in hospital in case I lost too much blood and needed a transfusion! It wasn’t a very nice experience in hospital and it upset me a bit. I know they are professionals and stuff but it’s not the kind of thing you ever feel comfortable with around people you don’t know. At the moment I’m on a course of pills that will make my blood clot better because basically it’s not doing that at the moment and then they want me back in for more blood tests and discussions about monitoring me in the future. Great. Just what I needed right now but at least I haven’t started my new job yet and if they can sort it out now then that’s for the best. Today I’ve been off work just to make sure the pills are working and I think they pretty much are now. I will continue to take the 6 a day of these ones until I run out in addition to some pain killers, vitamins and obviously my usual epilepsy stuff. Bleh.

Anyway…we shall move, settle in, set everything in their rightful positions, and I WILL take control of everything again and I WILL make sure that everything in my life runs to MY plan and no other plan. My new job WILL be fantastic and I will do it to my best ability and I WILL get some decisions in place for the wedding. That is my resolution.

The Sims 2!

Yesterday James bought me The Sims 2 as a get well present! It just about works but really i need a new graphics card to get the full benefit which we are going to order when we move house. YEY.

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