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Damon is a chimp

Argh! Can't believe that we let the Yankees win last night! I only watched the first three innings (well, kinda- I was stitching dragonfly wings onto wire frames at the time which meant I only saw about 50% of those three innings but I saw all the important bits at least) and I really thought we had a good chance. Didn't think we'd win by much but I did think we'd win. We answered all the early hits and runs so tell me this, why do we let a traitorous hat-tipping chimp get the better of us a couple of innings later and not go out there and lay some smack down? What has happened to our arse kicking capabilities?
I'm holding out for a win tonight and I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that it will be a big one to make up for last night. It likely going to be another close match but am thinking it will be more of a hitters game than a pitchers tonight. Hope so anyway- am staying up again to watch it so they'd better make it worth my while!

One long daymare

I had horrible dreams last night.
I can't remember them all that well other than they played on my job insecurities and the awful mess that was Indonesia. What I can remember is that it involved stress and tears and sadness and now that I've woken up none of it seems to have gone away. I've been feeling gloomy all day and even chocolate has failed to help. Does everyone get this after dreams? The husband always says that he can never remember dreams, nor do they affect him unless they wake him up for some reason whereas I have been feeling sorry for myself ever since I woke up.
But then I dream almost every night. They are generally vivid and lengthy and I seem to get a lot of dejavu from them. So I'm either mental, in touch with the spirit world or vastly more intelligent in some weird synaptic way. I always been a problem solver and I love puzzles and patterns and I'm more capable at jobs involving visual stimulation (hence I suck at music and have a bit of a tin ear) so it probably is just my brain going into overdrive and reshuffling all the pictures and memories but I mean really, am I the only one who gets it this strongly?

Machine made

After two hours we have knitting- machine made knitting! The knitting machine is a sight to behold. It looks like some sort of archaic torture device with strange bits of bungee wire poking out at odd angles. Some would say that it is a torture device. Its certainly not the easiest thing in the world to use. It basically involves winding wool around many tiny hooks and swearing at great length until, with a little luck, some knitting comes out of the other end. So far we have managed to break it six times, increase and decrease stitches (sort of- one time involved me breaking it) and binding off. We can't work out how to cast on properly which means that when you remove the comb thing that weighs the knitting down (and keeps the wool tights so it pulls through the machine rather than bunching up into a big knotted mass) it all unravels.
But soon we shall have mastered this monster and everyone will be receiving either square or rectangular presents for xmas. Theoretically I should be able to knit jumpers on this thing but me thinks that I will be keeping it simple for now.
So, everyone alright for scarves at the moment? I've got some really er...stunning purple wool that's looking for a good home :)

The morning after the night before

Well the party seemed to go well- at least the small amount of it that I was there for. Can't believe that I got struck down by a migraine! Grrr. Not fair. The husband was much less well behaved than me and he managed to stay up until about 3 this morning. And there was all these wonderful people in our house who I wanted to talk to! Thank you so much to all of you who turned up- it was great to see yous all. I am going to now have to make a second trip round to see all of you again however so that I can catch up on the bits that I missed out on.
I have to say however that I was very stupid in one respect- I completely forgot that we had ice lollies in the freezer. They are my ultimate hangover cure (Rowentrees fruit pastille lollies for preference) and would probably help with head pain. My cooling beanbags seemed to do the job but not quickly enough- was hoping to get back down to the party. Ice lolly would surely have done the job! Highly recommended to anyone who is feeling less that shiny today.

Knitting-tastic

Ah! So much wool... Have been having a rummage through my stash and have discovered two things. Firstly, I have much more than I thought I had and secondly, that its still not enough. I do have a lot of bits however which I shall be attempting to offload over the next couple of weeks. We are running a charity fundraising event through our knitting group in a couple of weeks (all non-knitters welcome, needles and wool provided, tea and coffee free) so should be able to get rid of a bit of it then. I really hope that we get a good turn out for it. It involves knitting up lots of tiny bobble hats to go on top of innocent smoothies- they then sell these through Sainsburys and 47p per bottle sold goes to Age Concern. Rather a cool idea I thought. They even supply wool and bobbles so all you need to do it knit it up and its the easiest pattern in the whole world. So I'm going to be recruiting all the boys to come along and at least attempt one bobble hat- it is for charity after all! (You have been warned...)

WE'RE GETTING OUR KITTENS TODAY!!!

La lalala la la, ala la lalala la...dum dee dum...dum dee dum. Yay! Have been a-dancin' around all morning. Am so very very excited. If it wasn't for fact that we have so much tidying to do in order to get the house ready for them then it would all be purrfect.
We also have the pleasure of attending a puli party which will involve much playing with puppy dogs, throwing sticks, making them sit for biscuits and hiding sausages in the shrubbery. (I can hear you laughing from here you sick people you).
We are also going to the wool department at John Lewis' which is pretty close to heaven for me. If only they'd let me pile it into one big heap and then dive in on top... Ikea also beckons which is less fun but it will mean that a few loose ends will get tied up around the house including me getting my work desk back so I can get the sewing machine out. Its been hidden under piles of school books for too long now. My mum has lent me a knitting machine so I will be up there creating away in my free time- everyone will now be getting blankets and throws and all things square for xmas.
Yay! again.
Tonight we get to watch the red soxs game, relax in that very special way and eat cake with Ian and Tom in celebration of Ians birthday (which was yesterday). I shall be supervising the cake eating only of course, though I had a great deal of fun making it. I tried to ice it with nice thick white icing so I could draw red sox on it but I turned my back and most of the icing ran off the cake, off the plate and all over the sideboard. So now its more sort of glazed, but I'm sure it will taste fine!

I'm so bored

Just having a quick break from work- have eaten biscuits, slurped my coffee and am now looking for further distraction. Unfortunately none of yous have seen fit to send me any e-mails this morning so I've had to resort to writing a blog post about HOW BORED I AM!
I really want to get this part of the project finished today. I have a bunch of specimens to go away in a collection but the names are either missing from the database, spelt incorrectly or don't seem to exist so its taking a very long time to do each species with much faffing around with paperwork and about a dozen books. Nothing is cross-referenced which is just ridiculous, hence all the swearing coming out of my office door. At this rate there is no way I'll get it done...boo! I really don't want to have to pick it all up again on Monday but then its that or go mad!! Mad I tell you!!!

Ahem.

Things to rant about

Okay, so to be honest I'm merely killing time whilst on my lunch break and so have nothing amusing, interesting or necessarily important to say.
Other than to exclaim over how wonderful Wikipedia is (but then everyone knows that don't they?), tell y'all how excited I am that we will be getting our kittens in FOUR DAYS!!! (eeeeeee!!!) and to say that I have now nearly finished puli handbag number 2. I am super impressed with myself for this as I have done it in double quick time. Its about 83% done- I have posted the large chunk today so that my mum can get started on the next step of handbag construction. I will be trying to finish off the last of it tonight and then I'm going to take a short break and do something for me. Have a hankering to finish the green monster so that I can flounce round with it on at my party though I'm not sure that this is a realistic goal.
Ahh, the trials of being grown up with a full time job!
Speaking of which......had better get back to it!

It's breaking my heart

How do you explain a frustration of the heart? How do you put into words how you feel when you are having one of those days where you are just filled with equal amounts of self pity and self loathing? When all you want to do is punch something, or scream, or break down in tears and sob for hours? When you have no idea why you are feeling like this and every time you try and pin down your thoughts you end up even more confused than you where when you started.
Is this just me? Is this just a girl thing? What the fuck is going on? Why can't life just be simple and easy, and happy, and full of love and joy, and friends and fun, and music and dancing, and much much laughter.
Why the self doubt, the second guessing and why oh why, did I choose to listen to Ryan Adams at a time like this. It only makes it worse when he steals my heart for the millionth time.....(sigh).

It's the end of the world!

Argh! I can't get into my herald e-mail account! They shut it down to do maintenance yesterday but now its completely buggered and we can't get into it. It's like someone has cut off one of my limbs. Its not even like I have any particular need to get in there its just that I CAN'T! Its so annoying- incredibly annoying- superly hugely fantastically annoying.
The worst part is is the compulsion to check the damn thing every half hour. I even woke up early this morning and one of my first thoughts was 'I wonder if my e-mails working'. Ordinarily I don't really bother with checking it at weekends (I mean, its not like I actually get that many e-mails (short pause for moment of self-pity)) so all this fuss is driving me mad.

Its all over- I really have been sucked in...

Mario Strikers stole my husband

The husband has now been awake for approx 2 hours. 99% of that time has been spent playing Mario Strikers on the Wii. In order to keep myself entertained I have had three cups of tea, some cereal and have littered facebook and the internet in general with messages for anyone and everyone that I know as I MISS YOU ALL RIGHT NOW!
I attempted to read funny excerpts from my messages, or even ones that other people had left for me. This worked for the first line or so but then I realised that the attention had once again snapped back to the TV screen. I've been told off twice for getting in the way of play and I still couldn't tear him away from it with pictures of someones bathroom that they had decorated with Red Soxs stuff (it is so cool; I particularly liked the baseball bat towel rail and I even offered to deck ours out like that). As a final test I saucily flashed a big of leg to see whether unexpected nudity would do the trick. The fact that I am now typing this up should tell you how well that worked.

Facebook photos are just an embarassment

At least all mine are.
Have just discovered the Spetses 07 tour photos and whilst everyone else looks great in all their photos I look terrible. Really terrible. It's either that or I have a really warped perspective on what I actually look like. Is it a bit like listening to your own voice on recordings? I'd swear that mine is nothing like me- its always much deeper which is rather worrying as I already think that my voice is a bit deep for a girl.
Oh god, can't believe that I've actually thought about this- and at length.
But its true, I'm just not the goddess that I consider myself to be when I can't see myself. Whenever I look in the mirror or see pictures of myself I'm always surprised that anyone was enough of a sucker to marry me (love you honey, but really, I still don't get what it is you see in me). On a good day I've gotta be a 6 max and that's only because I make the effort to tell all the boys just how wonderful they all are which wins me extra points via ego stroking, but on a day-to-day basis then maybe only a 4 or a 4.something, if I'm feeling generous.
I shall just have to use the husbands scale at all times which has me sitting at a ten regardless of lighting, clothes, alcoholic intake, time, day or potential for getting naked.
I realise that this is a horribly girly comment to make and NO I'm NOT fishing for compliments just before you all reach the island of conclusions, but it would be nice if someone else told me it once in a while. I've been chatted up once in the last four years and that was by a guy who was so drunk he had to hold onto a table to remain upright. Like that made me feel real special.
Hmm have spiralled off on a badly explained tangent. It's just unfair that everyone else can be so photogenic and I'm not at all. And now all the pictures have been published on the web!
I might as well just give up completely and start wearing the husbands clothes, stop shaving my legs and throw out anything I own with glitter on it. No one is ever going to consider me attractive ever again. I'm officially a wife- someone who cleans up after the boys have been out drinking, cooks the fry up in the morning, can be called upon to reliably repair clothes and ask to recommend gift ideas for other girls.
Great.
Any ideas how I get out of this one without resorting to a divorce (I do rather like the husband after all)???

House update

Our bathroom is nearly finished!!!. Can’t believe it really. It will be the first room on our house to have been completed. We only have some minor tweaking to do and then we can put the sides on the bath, slap down some flooring and walk out whistling sweet Dixie.

I’ve been painting for the last two evenings and tonight I shall go home and put the finishing touches on. It has been transformed from a dark blue swamp to a sparkly light blue pool in a mere matter of months...

Now onto the next job.

If only DIY didn’t have the capacity to get even more tedious, just when you thought that it had already reached that level. Every time I reach breaking point with it I find that it has even more to offer in the way of frustrations, boredom and downright bloody mindedness. Next time I’m damn well going to save up and just pay someone to do it all for me- I shall receive as big a warm glow of satisfaction from that as I do from doing it myself!

I’m sure others will soon be joining me on this one.

The wonderful effects of caffeine

Hmmm, am completely bouncing off the walls at the moment and have a compulsion to witter madly about something- I'm just not sure what as I can't sit still or pin my thouhts down for more than two seconds flat. This will serve me right for having two cups of heart attack coffee in a row.
(But its sooooo good!)
I shall go and attack my ham sandwich with vigour to see if it has grounding properties and then come back and write something a bit more worthwhile.

Whilst I'm here

Need some help on this one- how do you go about signing off on e-mails. I mean, what is the etiquette when you know someone but you don't know them well enough to put 'xxx' at the end but you want to convey some sort of affection? And what does 'xxx' mean anyway? I'm assuming that this changes with regards to the person your writing to. I guess it can mean anything from 'kisses' to 'much love' to 'I want to fuck your brains out' but how do you know that the other person is going to interpret this correctly?
It's a real minefield for me at times, esp. when writing to men. I both love and loathe e-mail as a primary form of communication (which, lets face it, it has become). It's quick, easy, people are more willing to respond etc BUT it's also seems impersonal (facebook is a prime example of this), is often easy to misconstrue, take out of context and its very hard to really understand any emotional meaning sometimes. I much prefer just talking to people which has it's limitations as well I realise but at least you can be equally confused by both seeing and hearing what the other person is trying to say rather than missing half of the interaction to begin with. It's like doing a jigsaw without the picture to refer to.
Maybe it's just me overthinking things again; a common problem with me I realise as I have plenty of time to think whilst knitting or doing boring jobs at work, and I would say that this is particularly true with regards to messages to men folk. I think I'm crediting you (you know who) with far too much deep of character and potential for complexity. I was sorta talking about this the other day in fact, and the only two solutions to this that came out where that men are either too dum to notice or are just hoping that it will all go away.
I think it covers most bases.

Motherfucker!

My boss has just e-mailed me from Texas to ask if I can feed his cockroaches for him. Why is this such a problem? Well, let me elaborate...
Firstly, I have sworn never to do this again. This is because it takes over three hours, is tedious, difficult, boring and above all other problems, it smells bad. This is because there are about 40 tanks full of cockroaches that try and escape when you open the lid. The previous food generally rots and fills the tank with mold, there are inevitably dead cockroaches joining in with that sticky mess and to top it off a sprinkling of Phorids (scuttle flies that you find on decomposing organic material, not necessarily disgusting in themselves but clouds of them buzzing round and crawling all over you is not fun).
Secondly, the girlfriend was supposed to be doing this for him. She is apparently too busy with her PhD write-up (which is a fair excuse) so it now comes to me. I've been asked as although I don't want to do it anymore than anyone else, my boss knows that I'm too nice to tell him to go fuck himself and his cockroaches to boot, as I will end up feeling guilty if they all die before he gets back. Which is what annoys me about it- I'm in a bind. I can't say no and I can't really say how I feel about the whole situation.
Yet another example of someone taking advantage of me because I hate confrontations and I'll do anything to avoid them. Including feeding the bloody cockroaches.

This is yet another reason why I should just avoid people altogether. Building a yurt in the welsh mountains somewhere and growing my own sheep is starting to look more and more appealing...

And it's complete!

Done, dusted, posted and outta here! All words that can be applied to the first puli handbag.
I'd thank god but I'm not sure whether anyone is listening so I'll just publish it on the web where millions are reading.
Am so pleased. All I need to do now is start the next one tonight and get it posted on Wednesday morning. Hah hah hah.
Think I might just go mad.

Okay, so I'm technically on work time...

But then again, I have just spent over three hours cleaning insect tanks. The last job involved removing maggoty cockroach corpses from the tarantula tanks where they hadn't finished eating their dinner. Eguh. Sometimes I really wonder why I do this for living...
However, I guess it beats flipping burgers, filing or dealing with the general public. I do get my own office, I can wear whatever I like, listen to music all day long with the best bit being that after about 6 I get the whole museum to myself and I can turn the volume right up and dance round the dinosaurs.
Not sure many people would take the maggoty cockroaches in exchange though so maybe I am just a bit weird after all.

One down, two to go

Have almost finished the first of three puli handbags that I have to knit for my mother. Can't believe that I got sucked into this. Guess it serves me right for being a clever dick and coming up with the design in the first place.
It wouldn't be so bad but I have to do one a week for the next couple of weeks and I'm already bored of knitting them. I have other much more exciting projects lined up that keep distracting me as well. I have finally picked my fluffy green shrug again and am now trying to get it off the needles and onto my back- only half a sleeve to go and its ready for stitching together.
So close and yet so far.... (For all those that have yet to see this fantastic monstrosity you need have no fear- there will be pictures soon enough).
There's about four other things sat around waiting for me to get back to them, including a shawl for my mother that I feel very guilty about not finishing. But pulis are apparently more important at the mo so i suppose I shouldn't waste my guilt quota for the month on that.
Also, I am still struggling with developing a method for making knitted dragonfly wings- answers on a postcard please!

THE BEGINING OF THE END

And so we start again, once more I shall resurrect this dying blog from the ashes and I fully expect to have to burn it all over again. But it shall provide me with some minor amusement in the interrim.
Hopefully this time I can persuade y'all to leave me some messages and keep it going for a bit longer. I know the Gill will appreciate it at the very least as I intend to put up some pictures of my knitting and post links for all the cool things that can be found on the web.
The wonderful, wonderful web.
What did we do before it? How did people relieve the tedium of their lives, break the monotony of work and generally skive off of all boring jobs? I really have no idea.