Day2Day

If you download the little program for updating LiveJournal without a web page then by default it will run itself on startup and place a little icon in the system tray. When you right click the icon it offers a "What are my friends doing?" link that launches your LiveJournal Friends page. I use it a lot. It's not what I'd call the link, though.

There are all kinds of people posting to LiveJournal, and for the most part my friends aren't the kind who update regularly with "what I did today". My friends write interesting stuff. Sure, they use the events of the day to bounce off, but they talk about breasts and fridges and parking and millipedes. This stuff is way more interesting than knowing what they had for breakfast. That's not to say there is nothing of interest to be found in retelling the day, but for the most part the mundane in excruciating detail is, well, mundane. You need humour, or ranting or some other ingredient to set it off and make it worth reading.

So as I sit here thinking "I havent' done anything worth writing about all weekend" I realise I'm using the wrong approach. I should be finding something of interest to write about -- not telling you what I'm doing. Only I'm still a bit stuck for ideas.

I thought of writing about Thursday, given that I was too tired to write about it on Thursday. That was the monthly pub meeting and I got to meet Damien (dmw) and Juliette as well as the regular crowd. I had a good time. But, again, it doesn't bear writing about without turning into "I went to the pub. It was good. Maureen and Paul were at the pub. We had drinks." etc, etc, bleurgh.

So instead of it all, you get rambling musings on how I have nothing to say. Plus a photo. Enjoy.


For those not in the know, this is Juliette and Damien and not, as Ang assumed, Maureen and Paul. For those who ARE in the know: stop laughing.

I finally got my appointment date for my wisdom tooth removal. Late August. I have to wait a further five months! And I can't get doctor in Peterborough until after that or else I no longer qualify for treatment at this particular hospital. What a pain in the neck.

Still, at least August doesn't get in the way of my convention and holiday plans for the year.

I have Super Franky in the office Grand National sweepstake. What sort of a name is Super Franky?! Oh well, fingers crossed.

I've gotta write a document about all the things we didn't like about this project. It's going to be quite long and whingey. I've gotta get it done today. I wanna go home. I'm bored.

I thought about peppering it with dilbert quotes and stuff to make it vaguely entertaining but that might be looked down on. And I'm not sure I can get up the enthusiasm to do the research for it anyway.

I didn't feel so lethargic (ooh, look, there's 'lethargic' mood icon) when I got on the train this morning. But we got delayed for 40 minutes due to a fire at Vauxhall and I was having a nice sleep when they interrupted me by arriving at Waterloo. I tried coffee to wake me up when I got off the bus, but all that's done is bring back the twitch (right eye, today).

And I want to know what this bruise on my right hand is. Where the hell did that come from?

But mostly I just want to go home and sleep cos I was up late last night.

"That was MY 3w!" I exclaimed as ang_grrr played a perfectly legitimate move on Literati.

"Don't shout at me!" she returned in plaintive Yahoo Messenger letters, "I have expensive hair!"

And two things struck me. First the "I actually could use a haircut," thought, followed closely by the "I wonder if I'm being overcharged for haircuts" thought. You see, I don't have enough experience in these things. When I was little my mum cut my hair. As a child I have two recollections of visiting a hairdresser. The first was because Alison Fisher was having her hair cut and couldn't come out to play until it was done. I was invited along to watch. It was rather dull. The second time was to have my ears pierced. They laughed at me when I jumped as the stud was stapled into my earlobe but I didn't cry. My eyes stung rather a lot, but I didn't cry.

When I left home I had my mum cut my hair when I visited during holidays. Then, for a long time I just didn't get any haircuts. My hair got long. Sometimes I would hack away at the fringe with scissors, sometimes I would grow it out. Now and then I'd get mu mum to trim off the split ends but my default hair was style: long. I tied it back, mostly. I experimented with hair colouring. But it remained long. Long hair is annoying. Unless you have patience or lots of practise it is very difficult to plait. Anything less than a plait gets annoying. For example, bits escaped and waved around my face. At its longest I would find myself sitting on it and yanking my head as I turned to look at something. Washing it was a pain and it took forever to dry but hairdryers had a tendency to make it overly dry and thus frizzy.

One day, walking along a high street I passed a hairdressers and thought "What if I were to go in and get all my hair cut off?". I doubled back and went in. They chopped it down to just below my shoulders where I expected it would stay if I sat at a desk and looked down. It didn't, it flopped around my face. I also discovered that when bored I had a habit of fiddling with the ends of my hair behind my back. I missed it. Standing in queues left my hands with nothing to do. It was short enough that it didn't stay back when tied back and was really quite irritating. I let it grow again and all the old annoyances came back. You know, the ones like cleaning out a plug of hair from the plughole after a shower, or pulling loose strands of long hair from inside clothes every time you get an itch.

We had some clippers - things made for keeping crew cut style hair in order without the aid of a hairdresser. In the heat of summer we shaved the underneath of my hair but it didn't help much and it grew back quickly when I stopped maintaining it. Eventually I went to a hairdressers again last year and asked them to cut it short. After asking if I were sure a couple of times they suggested a not-too-short layered style. An actual style. It had been a long time since I had one of those and whilst my mum was both handy and well meaning, she was no hairdresser. So they cut my hair and I liked how it came out. I warned them that it has a tendency to part itself down the middle - even at the fringe and they tried to keep it in place by blow drying and using gel and gunk and whatever. It lasted until I had walked about 50 metres from the shop. But the parted fringe looks fine and the rest I liked. I think they charged me �35. That was in October last year.

Just after Christmas I went back for a trim as it was getting kind of long. They trimmed it and washed it - not so much as I wanted them to but I didn't realise this until I got home. They charged me �25. It's somewhat overdue for a trim again and it's long enough to tie back. But they're usually booked up on Saturdays and I'm not taking a day off just for hair.

There's another problem as well. I once dyed my long hair black. "I don't like what you've done to your hair," my mum told me. But no one else objected and some said it looked good and I liked it. I got bored of the black and cycled through some other colours. When it was shorter the first colour I tried was a reddish gingery look. I liked it but when it started to grow out I decided to go for black.

I must have used a different product. This permanent black was a lot more permanent than the previous one that also claimed to be permanent. I also discovered that the black short hair looked an awful lot more harsh against my pale skin than the long black hair had. I immediately wanted it to go away and tried to cover it with dark brown. I think that was quite a big mistake. It stayed black and perhaps even penetrated further with the addition of the extra chemicals. It won't go away. I've tried and tried with many different varieties of colour, stopping just short of bleaching it because that scares me. The roots are showing and everything I try to cover it with takes at the roots giving a nice strong contrast with the black. Actually, the black has a dull brown sheen to it now, but it's still more black than any other colour. I tried using temporary black to make the roots match the rest but it washed out almost immediately. So I have multicoloured hair and it's getting longer and sillier by the day. But I don't think a crew cut would suit me, somehow.

I've mentioned the twitch before, haven't I? It's a "you're tired" indicator from my body. It's usually in my right eye or my right thumb, but not always. Like, frex, today. Today it's in my left knee. There's a muscle just next to my kneecap that's been hyperactive ever since I woke up this morning thinking "Is it really time to get up already?"

I'm not sure why I'm so tired. I went to bed at about 12.30 last night which isn't especially late. I would have gone sooner but someone pulled the "brb" trick on me on Yahoo Messenger mid conversation. Call me crazy but I expect someone saying "brb" to come back. After 50 minutes I decided otherwise. And if you're reading, you know who you are...

So that's seven hours it's been twitching, now. It's getting rather annoying. I KNOW I'm tired. I don't know WHY and it's not exactly possible to go and sleep right now.

After about fifteen minutes on hold I got through to NTL and booked a date for them to come out and install. Actually, no, after 15 minutes on hold they told me they had routed me through to the London offices because I was calling from London and put me on hold again to talk to people in Peterborough. But the upshot was the same.

They're supposed to be coming on the afternoon of my moving day. I think maybe that was a bad plan. I think I should have told them to come the following Monday - but I didn't want to take an extra day off work and I'm not sure whether my sister will be coming down to stay, yet. The plan is to make orders with various people who deliver things (mostly Argos) and find out when they will be bringing said things - then get my sister to stay for a week or so which means that I can go to work and not use up my holiday days. Natalie is a single mother and doesn't have a job and she's happy to do this. Well, she would be - she gets to watch my cable TV and play on the internet all day while she's there! It will be good to see her again - more so to see Denver who is coming up to a year old, now.

So maybe we'll be organised enough to be into the house and have the TV and video set up for cable to be plugged into by the time the engineer arrives (any time between 12 and 5, apparantly). And maybe we won't. But I can alway re-book it.

There was nothing in the loft really worth scavenging apart from a bathroom cabinet. I think my house may come replete with cabinet, and anyway it was from Raz's parents and he wants to keep it. I did find some empty boxes, though, which came in handy for stuffing kitchen and bathroom stuff into. Surely the packing is nearly done now...? Oh, and I took some of the shelves that Lee left behind when he went to Australia. Even if I don't put them up I can enjoy the knowledge that if I wanted to, I could. It's my wall and my shelf and I can do as I please with no landlord to say otherwise.

So now it's time to go sleep in preparation for work tomorrow. And I forgot to buy a train ticket so I have to leave the house early. Gah.

Well that all went surprisingly well, considering...

I went to Tesco in search of a particular model of video that I'd seen on their web site. They didn't have it. However this was not a bad thing because in being there I discovered that they had a special offer on TVs and I picked up a wide screen television that does NTSC and everything for �190 when I'd been looking at spending �300+.

Then we went to the retail park where I discovered the model of video I wanted was readily available at Comet. The vacuum cleaner I was planning to get wasn't so easily available - they had a display model out but no boxed ones and for once the staff weren't hovering with their "Do you need any help?" routine. This actually worked out well because the other vacuum cleaners were cheaper so I picked up a �30 model instead of a �110 one - if it breaks, so what? At �30 it's replaceable fairly easily.

So this left me with money I'd assumed would be spent by this point, which meant I got a better stereo than I'd been planning.

Oh, and I begrudgingly bought an iron and less begrudgingly picked up a toaster. I'm all kitted up with entertainment and toast. What more could I ask for from a shopping spree?

Now I'm going to climb into the loft and see what's up there that's worth packing... Again with the good luck wishes, please.

I used to hate having my photograph taken. The whole pose-and-smile thing feels so fake and uncomfortable that even now I rarely agree to it. There aren't many photographs of me that I'm happy with -- apart from those I take myself. The wonderful thing about a digital camera is you can look at what comes out, go "ugh" and make it disappear forever immediately. No negatives, no torn remains of the photograph - just gone, straight away.

And with the freedom to do that comes the freedom to play around until you get something you ARE happy with. Like, for example, this picture. Okay, so it's the terrifying "neutral stare" that Ang referred to. And my ankh got cut off. But apart from that, this is kinda cool.

Even if it does seem sort of conceited to be saying so.