T'eyla Minh

I haven't updated since April and now that I am, it's to get stuff off my chest – I actually drafted this entry on 30th June and it’s taken me so long to post it that I’ve had to amend it. :P

Mostly I haven't done anything exciting since April because I'm still bloody skint - other than decorating the lounge, and I already shared the pics of that on Facebook. :P (We finally got around to hanging pictures over a month later – after filling all the holes we were rather loath to put more in the walls!)

Anyway, here is my venting, in no particular order...

( Vents are actually one of the problems... )

It's not all doom and gloom, though. :P

I am still enjoying my job. Everyone is very stressed at the moment because of the new Strengthening Families Framework which has been in place since March, because we are crashing in blindly for the most part and communication at all levels seems to have ground to a halt. The good thing is we're all in the same boat, so we are all offloading at each other in work rather than taking it home with us - and they're actually valid things to be stressed about, rather than the petty stupidities that caused such major issues in Legal.

There are a few colleague issues creeping through the cracks - a couple of my colleagues can be a bit annoying, and one of them is your classic example of doing the bare minimum rather than trying to exceed in any way then complaining that she won't pass her PDR... but it's nothing I can't deal with, and I'm learning to rise above it - it helps that the team has a really good relationship (both working and personal) and everyone mucks in to help each other out. It's such a breath of fresh air after my experiences at both Legal AND Ladywood, and makes me very glad that I chose to work at South rather than anywhere else.

Being skint does mean that Paul and I are catching on boxsets. Our Farscape rewatch is on temporary hiatus, as is the JC rewatch as I just keep forgetting about it and series 5 was such a mess of fail, but we are now on season 4 of Frasier and have just finished both Bates Motel and Fargo. We've just made a start on American Horror Story: Asylum as well, which is already looking as creepy/WTF as the first season.

( My Frasier ramblings got long... )

I really wish I had the time and mental capacity to do in-depth rewatches for everything, like I’ve done for Jonathan Creek, but I think I’m up to my fifth 90’s show boxset now (Frasier, X-Files, Buffy, Farscape, Creek) and there are not enough hours in my life, especially given the sheer amount of episodes! If you tally them up it’s a cumulative 36 seasons, over 800 episodes, and I do not even want to think how many hours. I did attempt it for TXF but only got three episodes in before I gave up, and as much as I’d love to attempt it for ‘Scape, I think it might actually break me within half a season. :P

This is why I have a tendency to ignore most modern-day series, or for those I do watch I only do so without such a vested interest. I have too many old fandoms still vying for supremacy, and too many work-in-progress fics for most of them, to start investing energy into shiny new ones. :P

Aaaaanyway, I think this is quite long enough. I had intended to post some fic somewhere whilst I was off, and didn’t quite get around to it… but hopefully I will actually manage to get the JC stuff online this year. :P

Over and out.

Okay. So on Thursday I got it into my head to Make A Change. I have been suffering lately with... well, I suppose one might call it "ennui". I get this thing sometimes where I just want to DO SOMETHING, like get a new job or move house or shift furniture around (see also: "spatial cleansing" tag). So on Thursday night, out of morbid curiosity, I had a look to see what sort of typing jobs there might be in Birmingham which paid reasonably well.

Obviously there was bugger all in Birmingham - plenty of "typing from home" stuff and a lot of temporary / part-time positions, but most of the full-time positions are on what I was earning in BCC when I first started, and quite frankly I'm struggling as it is. Then I spotted one via Reed for an audio typist position at a legal firm in London, for £20K a year.

First I was like,"Okay, what's the catch here?" and then figured out that actually, £20K in London is probably the equivalent to what I'm on now here, and if I were to live in London I would be worse off, and if I didn't it would all go on hotel/lodging and travel. Aside from that, (a) job stuff is terrifying and (b) 147 people had already applied for it.

So instead I started house-hunting again. After several fruitless hours Paul and I discovered a "three-bedroom cottage" on Barn Road, which is literally five minutes away from where we are now, for £525 a month. For Kings Heath / Moseley that's insanely reasonable. There was no photograph on the website (always a bit dubious) and the website for the actual letting agent (Easy Lettings) was rubbish, and aside from that we couldn't find it anywhere else on the internet except the one "catch-all" website it was listed on.

So on Saturday we walked down to Barn Road to look and see if there were any houses to let. Riiiight at the very end of the road we did indeed find a house to let, with an agency called Midland Housing. On getting back we Googled them. They're asking for £800pcm, which frankly is extortionate for a three-bedroomed house, but I presume it's because the postcode falls under the all-holy Moseley and thus they can charge what they like. I think they'll be sitting on that one for a looooong time.

That was disappointing, to say the least, as if it had been anything up to £600 we would actually have considered it, if only because it was a lovely house and would be SO EASY to move into. Boo. :(

I've spent a couple more hours tonight searching on rightmove.co.uk, scouting out all of Birmingham and the outskirts (including Bearwood - there are loads of houses on the road where I grew up, and at least Sandwell Council aren't complete bastards like BCC), and have come to the conclusion that if I want to live in a nice area, in a house with a decently-sized kitchen and windows which are not pointlessly tiny, I need to pay about £100 more than if I don't. There are plenty of good-sized, affordable and attractive houses - and they're all in the shit bits of Birmingham. I don't want to live in Erdington/Sheldon/Perry Barr/Hockley/Handsworth/etc. I know that doesn't leave me much option, but I don't want to end up somewhere awful, with terrible neighbours or a high street where I have to look over my shoulder...

I am probably insanely over particular. We tried searching Kings Heath and Moseley and came up with nothing (except tiny houses, obviously), and there was a BEAUTIFUL place on Russell Road in an old Georgian house with the most AMAZING kitchen I have ever seen... but it was a shared house. The rent was stupidly cheap, too. I want to live in that kitchen. :(

Soooo yes. Still fruitlessly hunting. I am also constrained by my inability to drive and my reliance on public transport, so every time I find a house which is affordable, in a nice area and looks remotely promising, it turns out to be in the Arse End of Nowhere. Considering we can't afford a proper place to live until they either bring back 100% mortgages (not looking likely), we win the lottery or someone gives us money for a deposit, renting is currently the only option and even THAT is being scuppered, mostly by my desire to actually live somewhere I feel safe at night and can bloody well get to.

BEING A GROWN-UP IS HARD.

PS: Seriously, landlords/builders/converters, stop it now with the tiny kitchens. Or with the massive kitchens with NO BLOODY CUPBOARDS. Is it such an alien concept that people actually WANT TO COOK THINGS? Jesus.

I have no idea when I last updated or what it was about, but here is what I've been up to...

( Birthday Stuffs )

After that Paul and I both had a week off work. The beginning of the week mostly involved doing nothing, going to Aldi, and watching Duckula, in my case anyway. I've got through the first two discs so far.

On Thursday we headed off to London for a couple of days. ( London Stuffs )

In other, more positive news, TAX REFUND, BABY!!! Apparently for 2008-2009 I overpaid over a grand in tax! Considering I had to extend my overdraft again last month just in case I spent too much money in London, this little windfall is very much appreciated. In addition, I achieved my pay increment at work and should be getting a chunk of backpay tomorrow in my wages, which initially I was going to spend on an eye test and new lenses. Instead I'm going to use the tax refund to pay a chunk off the credit card and pay for the eye test, and hopefully spend the backpayment on something NICE for a change. :)

I anticipate something horrible will happen to me in due course when Fate realises she made a horrible error in judgement. But in the meantime, it's nice to have a bit of luck for once.

Also, I started watching Damages on Monday night and I'm about nine episodes in. Quite enjoying it, though I can't decide if Patty Hewes is pure genius or pure evil... Whichever it is, Glenn Close is sheer awesomeness incarnate, but we already knew that. :)

I think that'll do. :)

Okay, so I sat down about an hour ago do so some embroidery, having been distracted by Shiny Internets for about three hours prior to that, only to discover that the bloody instruction sheet has gone missing.

Every single other thing is still where it should be on the sofa: all four hanks of thread, the sewing chart, the colour photograph of the design, the needle, for Christ's sake, and my pencil, scissors and stitch-ripper. I've just lost the key and instructions telling me which threads I should use for which colours.

Just... WTF? HOW? It's a frelling A3 piece of paper!

I've searched the living room, bedroom and kitchen to no avail.

After a few fruitless minutes on Google I eventually established who the original artist was, and you can buy the chart for the design, thankfully, for about £4.50 ($6.99), but I'd rather not have to resort to that, especially as it's a downloadable design and I don't have a printer, so would have to sit there and copy out the bloody symbols by hand. Which, no.

So yeah, no real update despite two day trips in the pleasant weather, because this is just bloody infuriating. My only thought is that it somehow ended up in the bin and has been thrown away, but I don't see how it could have done because it wasn't even on the arm of the sofa or anything. I've checked under the cushions, under the sofa, under the chair, in envelopes I know full well have not been moved for months, in that stupid It-Must-Be-Somewhere mentality which hopes that turning the place upside down will result in the lost item miraculously appearing. Alas, I fear it's gone the same place as the metal tape measure, whch I've not seen in over a year.

STUPID BLOODY GREMLINS STOP EATING MY THINGS!

Grrrrrrr.

Note to self: stop trying to make amazing-looking cakes. They will never be as good as in your head. Your kitchen is not big enough, and your tools rubbish. You cannot make good enough satin icing. Stick to what you know and you'll stop being disappointed.

The icing I made yesterday evening, which was pretty much perfect, ended up drying out overnight and then I ran out halfway around the cake (it was too dry to merely place on top and mould over the edges, I had to do the top first and then the sides...) so half of the sides are just covered in the buttercream I used as filling.

Sod.

Ah well. It's the thought that counts, right?

I'll do a "2005 in review" post or something resembling one a bit later on, assuming I can remember anything about the year. I might take the time to link to old LJ entries like I did a while ago...

For now, though, a generic update about the Day Today.

I was quite tired this morning. Had quite a strange dream about getting the train to work... I was listening to my MP3 player on the train and nearly missed my stop, and then when I did get off the train there was a ramp from the platfrom up and out through the cemetery (note to self: take camera to get some pictures for deathly_decayed, if this is possible without being arrested). I was trying to get some money out of what I thought was a cash machine, but it turned out that it only dispensed floppy discs and ink cartridges. Quite bizarre, especially considering I managed to forget my debit card this morning...

Having finally got off my fat behind to sort out my bus pass by Direct Debit (why did I not do this before? For some reason, I thought they needed two passport photos, but it turned out they didn't... and then, as it transpired, I found 8 of them in a drawer, presumably done for just such a purpose) I am now considering changing to a Centro Card. I did a few sums this morning, and the basic outcome is this:

• using only the bus to and from work would ordinarily cost me approximately £88.00/month. That doesn't include other journeys. My bus pass is about £35.00/month, thus saving me £53.00/month.
  
• using the bus and train would potentially cost me either £102.00/month (with a return) or £96.00/month (with a single, only going home by train, not to work). That doesn't include random £1.60 fares to/from Bournville. A 3-zone CentroCard is £55.00/month, which saves me £41.00/month.

Definitely worth considering. TWM have already sent me February's card, and I have to give a month's notice, so I should probably sort it out mid-January...

Anyway, enough of the maths. Today, Amanda and Cynthia and both POs are on leave. I've been here since 8.15 this morning (can't do any typing - not that I have much to do - because the P and U drives are offline again...) and Sandra arrived at her usual 9.30, just as I was carrying two reams of paper along the corridor to go upstairs. She asked if I was struggling, but then turned right into the loos rather than, like, helping me.

She then proceeded to take down all of the Christmas decorations other than the stuff in my corner and the tree, which I've since taken down anyway. She even took down the old thank-you cards and postcards from our card-pillar, (except for one, for some reason), and buggered off again at about 11.00. As Paul noted, she apparently only came in to make the office miserable rather than do any work.

(ETA: She's back now. Having a personal phone call, but back nonetheless...)

Despite this, and the fact that I couldn't sleep last night (spent four days with Paul and missed him...) I'm in a surprisingly good mood. Possibly because I found about 50p hidden in my purse, so have enough to go home by train tonight. :)

( Resolutions from 2005 )

Enough of that. I'll make some more when I've done my lowdown. For now, I'd better sign this off and do some more photocopying. Yay, toner.

I've not been sleeping well the past couple of days, though not for any apparently obvious reason.  I just keep waking up at about 1am and finding it impossible to go back to sleep.  Which could account for my tiredness all of this week and the weird dreams I had last night...

( Dreams.  Not sure if I can put most of them into words, so bear with it. )

Yeah, it all made much more sense at the time.

Now, I have a dilemma.  I'm meant to be going somewhere with Aisha (randomly - whee!! Carmina Burana!) though I don't know what we're doing any more as the original plan was to see The Bourne Supremacy with her and Crystal, but Crystal's not coming... so we might be doing something else.  Anyway, she's going to bring all the details of her elective in LA, which I'm meant to be accompanying her on.  And it's April-May of next year.  Which I think is when I'm meant to be going to Athens with Vicky and her parents... though I'm not sure if that's been booked yet.

So, dilemma.  I'm not sure when Easter falls, or when the trip to Athens is, but I have a suspicion it's the month I'm meant to be going to LA with Aisha.  And if I had the choice between the two (LA being £100 more expensive, so I'm not bothered about that, as I was going to pay £500 for Athens anyway) I'd choose LA.

I mean, LA.  The American one.  Aisha's giving me this fantastic chance to go with her for a month to a place - not the first city of choice, I'll admit - I've wanted to go to for as long as I can remember.  But Vicky's giving me a chance to go with her on a trip to Athens the likes of which I wouldn't ordinarily go on...  I don't want to let either of them down, and technically I did promise Aisha first, and Vicky knows I'm meant to be going to LA with her, but that was when it was still planned for June, and she wanted to go with me because her friend Laura was really annoying when they went on a tour in London and she doesn't want to fall out with her...  And I know that Aisha and I always ended up arguing on DofE when we had to share a tent, but that's because we're both bossy and it was stressful...  Gah, I don't know.  I mean, LA wins over Athens hands-down, but it's a case of which person I let down...

So, what do I do?  All opinions and suggestions gratefully accepted.  Just be glad I didn't give you the other dilemma I'm stuck in...

Well, today I nearly got up early, but had a headache and ended up staying in bed until 11.22, which is when my mother got back from taking the car to Bearwood to be looked at.  During her absence (about an hour or thereabouts), I had a rather odd and poignant dream.  The only bit I really remember properly was that there was quite a large group of us (including, at one point, Pauline Fowler from 'Stenders...) and I was concerned that I'd left one of my (apparently many) bags behind, but Pauline had it.  And we were all wandering around a village on some kind of guided tour.  At one point we crossed over a stream using a little dark-stone bridge, and there was a fountain that didn't work properly.  Then we got to a house that looked exactly like my grandmother's old house, the one I pretty much spent half of my childhood in, right down to the garden and the shed that used to be at the bottom before they rebuilt it.

Inside the house, there were all the people that would have been there prior to the move - my grandmother and my uncle, I think, or someone that was meant to be him.  It was apparently some kind of other dimension or universe where things were the same, only different.  And the only bit I do remember clearly was going upstairs to where she had the extension built (half office, half bedroom) and her room was all arranged differently.  The office was different too, I think.  There were lots of photos on the walls, and some of them moved a la Harry Potter... one of them was an old 'shot' of me and my mother when I was... seven.  Pre-having to wear glasses.  I don't recall exactly what happened in it, but I was laughing and apologising and it was very strange, and when I woke up, I wasn't entirely sure if it was a real memory or not, because it was so vivid...

Other than that, in the office section, there were lots of photographs of my grandfather. And suddenly I got really emotional about them, crying my heart out and saying "I forgot what he looked like," and someone asked if he died when I was young, and I said, "No, I was sixteen, but I barely got to know him," and I just kept on repeating it, "I didn't get to know him."  And then the person that represented my grandmother picked up a telephone, and asked if I'd like to talk to him.  I said, "Don't do that, he's not here any more," and she told me that in this particular dimension, we could talk to those who had passed away.

I remember that I took the receiver, but then I woke up, so I didn't get to actually speak to him...  I didn't feel sad when I woke up, just... I don't know, it was odd.  Though the talking-to-the-dead-on-the-phone was really quite strange, because today I unearthed a bag of stuff from Christmas, including Robert Rankin's The Fandom of the Operator, that Lorna got me, which deals with that very subject...

Anyway.  I took some paracetemol and got rid of the headache, and today was spent trying to tidy my room again (I need more storage.  I also need more space in which to put said storage), including unearthing of aforesaid book.  At about 6.00 we walked down to Bearwood again to collect the car, taking note of the interesting and diverse houses along the way.  There's one to let right next to the water tower and opposite Warley Woods.  Probably hideously expensive, though, otherwise it'd've been snapped up already...

Talking of which - Naomi!  Bearwood photos!  Also, I'm holding your goldfish umbrella hostage until you finish my docs. :P

I've been playing Pandora's Box again recently, which is both enlightening and horrendously depressing.  All those places I'll never see.  The same was true on Sunday.  I was looking in the atlas (well, originally, I was leaning on it because my father doesn't own a table big enough to put a pad on, or at least, not one that I can see the television from...) to find out whereabouts Katie was, and it suddenly struck me that a) America is really frelling big (I mean, yeah, I knew that, but... wow, it really is) and b) if I want to see all of it, starting on the outside and spiralling in, after I've visited random people I already know, I think I may die before I get halfway...  If, one day, there is a report of some random ninety-year-old madwoman driving around America in a Cadillac terrorising the locals, it's probably me...

Anyway, I also phoned two of the places I have application forms for, one of which was engaged, and the other of which told me to go and get an application form.  Bah.  So that's tomorrow's task.  I've also made a doctor's appointment, and seriously, someone needs to rethink the entire registering-at-uni-and-having-to-register-again-when-you-get-home system.  Everything's on computers.  Computers can be connected to the Big Scary Internet. There's no reason for it to be this horrendously complicated...

Also?  When I am world leader, my first priority is funding scientific research so that I can wipe out every species of moth.  Seriously.  The bastard in my room last night was about an inch long and sitting on my bed.  So obviously, I ran and got my mother to kill it.  I would not survive living on my own, seriously.  I'd end up confined in a dark room as the house slowly filled with insects, then get paranoid they were in there with me, then freeze on the threshold of the room unable to do anything because there was a moth sitting on the wall or something.  Gah.

Right, as to the subject, now I'm not forced to read anything, I can read whatever I like, which is quite nice.  I feel like I've not read properly for ages, from over-reading of fanfiction and all the various randomness for uni, some of which I enjoyed, some of which I really didn't.  Being a lit student has killed my bookgeek.  So, my Reading Project of Doom:

~ Red Dragon
~ Silence of the Lambs
~Hannibal(all by Thomas Harris.  We got a new copy of Red Dragon the other day (a neighbour borrowed our first one and we've not seen it since) and I've been meaning to read them for a while.)
~ The Fandom of the Operator, as already mentioned.
~ Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
~ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
~ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabhan
~ Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (thank you, Asda.  That should keep me going for a while...
~ The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (preferably before October 15th, when we're seeing the show... it will, of course, bear no resemblance to the book whatsoever, but it's got Michael Crawford and it's bound to be very pretty...)
~ finish Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
~ Close-up on Sunset Boulevard by Sam Staggs (I've been meaning to read this for ages...)
~ Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
~ Phantom by Susan Kay (because it's been far too long...)
~ All the Discworlds, because I ought to.
~ The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, so I can watch the films and see what all the fuss is about...
~ Beauty by Susan Wilson (it's a modern take on Beauty and the Beast, of which a horrible movie was made in the mid-nineties that destroyed the lovely angst ending.  I've been telling Jenny about it and haven't read it for a while...)
~ Interview with the Vampire
~ The Vampire Lestat
~ Queen of the Damned (for the third damn time)
~ The Vampire Armand
~ Memnoch the Devil (all Anne Rice.  I've read the first two, attempted to read the third twice and failed both times, bought the fourth and never read it, and I think we have the fifth one somewhere.  Incidentally, I caught the last hour of QotD the other day, and my God, but that's a bad movie.  Claudia Black really was the best thing in it.  And she only has three lines, one of which is "Aargh!".  She makes a very very good vamp, I have to admit.  But then, we all remember goth!Aeryn in "The Choice", and honestly, I don't think she's ever looked prettier than when she was mopey and suicidal and sleep-deprived...)
~ Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
~ Pretty much all I can find by Dickens in the house, particularly Oliver Twist.
~ Probably a few others...

Heh.  I think that'll keep me going at least a year or so.  Will keep people updated, obviously.

Of course, aside from this, I have my Re-Watching Project of Doom, too, which includes all of Red Dwarf, The X-Files (season 5 showing on FX289!  Dude!  I'd forgotten how wonderful it was!!), Farscape, Buffy (not difficult with endless repeats), Angel season 5 at last, and all the random films I'd forgotten I owned, bought and home-taped alike...  Someone want to pay me to read and watch stuff?

and ohbuggeriwasmeanttotypeupmyessaytonight.

*head-->desk* repeat as appropriate.

plan of action: become blue peter presenter...