Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Lovely Wolverhampton

They have built a £300,000 superloo just up the road from work.

I walked past it the other day on my way back from Subway.

"Oh, there's that superloo that was on the news...that attendant looks bored..."

"...and there's a small boy peeing in the doorway of the shop next door while his mother tells him to hurry up..."

Lovely, lovely Wolverhampton...

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Cafe Champagne

On Sunday night, after we had gone for a wander around the streets of Wolverhampton, Anthony decided he fancied a curry so we drove off to Cafe Champagne.

It's an Indian Fusion restaurant that everyone at work keeps raving about so we thought we'd go along and see what all the fuss was about.

We parked a few doors down and walked down to the restaurant passing a green Mini on the way.

Get inside, ask for a table for two and follow the waiter into the restaurant.

That's when it happens...

"Kate!"

I look round startled.

"Kate, over here!"

I turn round to face the long table of 10-15 people (celebrating a birthday as the banners and balloons would seem to indicate) and RichieFingers appears from behind a pillar.

That's the thing about going to restaurants that everyone else loves, they'll probably be there too!

Richie confirmed that it was his Mini, that it was the birthday of his girlfriend's sister, and that work had been slowish that day.

He also asked me not to call him Richie.

Why?

"Because whenever Nik orders takeaway she does it under her surname which is James. They've been calling me James here for the last 2/3 years".

Sure enough, when Anthony went to pay the waiter asked him how he knew "James".

Oh, and the food was delicious indeed. I had lovely venison and enjoyed it muchly.

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The scariest thing is that when I mentioned this to Campbelli yesterday she said "Oh! We nearly went there last night too. But we didn't cos I'd had a big roast lunch."

I think that would have been a little freaky. An unplanned work meet-up in an Indian restaurant where RichieFingers is known as "James".

Monday, June 19, 2006

Miscarriage

How miscarriage can hit very hard.

I taped this today but I don't know when I'm going to watch/listen to it (videoed it off Sky).

On Friday it'll be a year since my first miscarriage, feels both longer and shorter. The test results came back and there's no hormonal or blood related problems on the first batch of tests. Have to have another couple of tests done though.

Jayne from the uni branch is working with us for the next few months and she's six months pregnant. Today wasn't too bad, have to see how the rest of this week goes. If I'm having a bad day I tend to avoid the pregnant customers, or the ones with little babies, so I'm not quite sure how it's going to happen with Jayne there. I can't exactly walk away from her. But Bod understands and told me to let her know if I need to be upstairs or something. She was the one who brought it up too. I wish everyone had a boss as understanding as mine.

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This isn't why I haven't posted all week, that was cos Anthony was working 7-4 and so he was here all week. This week he's doing 11-9 (that's 11pm...) so I shall be catching up on sleep and hopefully posting more too. And I only have 4 more days of work before I'm on holiday for a whole eight days straight!!!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Money, Money, Money...

When I went to see the bank the other day I was all prepared for an argument and then no resolution.

Instead I got my overdraft extended to £300 and a note on the system about my circumstances. To get the £35 dropped I need to phone my branch of Lloyds (Canterbury) but the lady I saw said it shouldn't be a problem.

I didn't really want my overdraft extended so much, and I certainly don't want the loan she was saying I could now have.

But the overdraft extension has meant I didn't have to pay my last £5 in to get my rent paid, that I could buy some proper food for my lunches, and that I could buy a bottle of pink M&S wine to drink after work yesterday.

The first 48 hours of an overdraft are the worst for me. That's the time when I start thinking about new CD's and DVD's and books. I've got past that now and it's only a week til payday when I can buy things I have budgeted for and feel a sense of achievement rather than feeling guilty for once again spending money I don't actually have.

Intelligent Yogurt

I thought I'd better post about this before someone took the comment about Campbelli's intelligence and yogurt the wrong way and thought I was saying she was as intelligent as a yogurt.

The other day I bought two Tesco's healthy living yogurts to have for lunch. It was hot and I wasn't in an eating mood but I thought I'd better have something. So I bought a peach one and a raspberry one.

Both stated that they were only 85 calories yet the raspberry one was worth 1.5 WeightWatchers Points while the peach one was only worth one.

This confused me so I started reading the labels carefully.

Although they both had the same number of calories (well kilocalories if you want to be pedantic or were in Chemistry lessons with me at school), the raspberry one had 5 more kilojoules than the peach one. This is presumably due to the fact that the raspberry one had 0.4g more sugar in it than the peach one.

What's all this rubblish got to do with Campbelli's intelligence?

Well she did the WeightWatchers thing a couple of years ago and is still a healthy eating queen (she tells me off all the time too). I'm just so impressed that she can do the complicated maths required to work out how many points are in what so that she could stick to her points allowance and get to the weight she wanted to be.

So here's to the fantastically intelligent Campbelli and her mathematic skills.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god, it's actually working!

I clicked out of habit, expecting the "this page cannot be found" page, and instead I actually got "create post"!!!

I'm even more shocked than I was when I flicked on MTV to discover Paris Hilton singing a little ditty while wearing a leopard print bikini and covered in artistic dabs of sand.

Yesterday I worked through half the England game (first half was my lunch break), serving about three people. Today I will be working through the British Grand Prix but hopefully serving a few more. After all, it's been sunny for a few days now and people must need new books to read in their gardens.

Hopefully this thing will still be working tonight and I can post a proper post, full of exciting comments on hedges, laundry, cross-stitching and Popular Psychology (one of my jobs today is to A-Z it again).

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Humph

I had planned to do a few posts yesterday, but after that last one Blogger started playing up again for me.

So my musings on yogurt and Campbelli's intelligence will have to wait til tonight.

Emily is here, on her fast overnight stopover to go see her bloke in Birmingham tomorrow after he lands from Kos. I met her at the station yesterday and we wandered home crushing the occasional person under her pink suitcase on wheels. She made the mistake of bringing me a book I hadn't read yet (and that's not out in the UK for the foreseeable future) so I popped her onto WoW so I could do some reading.

I think she enjoyed it, certainly she was still playing when I went to bed at 10.30 and I don't have any idea what time she went to bed. She has a body clock like mine, likes to get up late and stay up late. (she just appeared and apparently went up to bed at about 12.30, but only went to sleep a couple of hours later)

It was so nice and sunny yesterday I managed to get three big loads of laundry washed and dried outside. The cats liked it too since I let them out in the garden for a while. Esme spent lots of time climbing in the hedge, and Foley climbed up my drying bedspead and attemped to walk along the washing-line (without success).

Today I have to go and shout at the bank. They bounced my rent standing order because I was £3.47 short of the £390. So they've sent me a nice letter to inform me of this fact and they're going to charge me £35 for bouncing it. I really need to change banks, they're always hitting me with £30 charges for being £5-6 over and I'm never going to catch up at that rate. When I went in to see them to explain I was about to become the sole tenant etc and to ask for an overdraft extension to cover a few months to prevent me paying charges - they refused because I was "consistantly over" my current overdraft limit. In vain I tried to point out to them that this was because they keep charging me £30 a month for anything that is over my limit.

I also spotted that my Yahoo website payment (that used to come off the Yeti's card) of £2.50 attracts an overseas transaction charge of £1...bastards.

Better attempt to dislodge Emily from the bathroom and get myself out into the sunny world and off to work.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Molten Chocolate Babycakes

Yesterday I was heading down to Cookery clutching a copy of How To Be A Domestic Goddess to put on the shelf.

As I walked I flicked through it so see what yummy things I could find...

Kate (walking to Cookery) "Oooh....Molten Chocolate Babycakes!"

RichieFingers (Hiding behind the Film browser) "I've asked you not to call me that at work sweetie."

Sometimes I have to remind myself that there are people who have lives that are less fun than my job.

Grrrrrr...

I tried to post on Sunday night and Blogger ate it.

Monday morning...Blogger ate it.

Monday night...Blogger wouldn't even let me get to the Create Post page.

Tuesday morning...same again.

Tuesday night...didn't even try it!

Today...it seems to be working!

Now I just have to remember exactly what it was I wanted to blog about!

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Time

Time is odd for me at the moment. It's going all quick-slow-quick-slow-quick even more than it normally does.

I mean, there's the usual thing where my lunch hour goes 100 times faster than the hour I spend covering upstairs. But at the moment all time seems to be going really really fast. I last wrote here on Tuesday morning but it seems so much longer ago.

Things seem like they happened weeks ago rather than days ago. It feels like weeks since I went out with Anthony to meet his friends (and I was nervous) yet it was only Saturday night. Monday, we went to watch racing at Hednesford and that feels even longer ago.

Things I have been doing in this amazing long/short week include:

On Monday I managed to drop my phone into a glass of water. This was almost a total disaster but luckily it was saved by Anthony's quick thinking. The phone spent the night on the radiator and apart from a tiny bit of condensation in the screen on Tuesday morning it's been fine.

Tuesday I managed to forget that it was Tuesday as soon as I got home and therefore forgot to watch Lost. Since I'm off next Wednesday I shall just stay up on Tuesday night and watch two episodes back to back instead.

Other than that I have been playing WoW, thinking about selling things on eBay, actually selling a couple of PS2 games at the local CashConverters place, attempting to eat more fruit, playing with the cats, reading Sabriel, doing laundry and attempting to break bones by tripping down the stairs at work.

Tonight I am definately not going to play WoW, not even for a second or two.... I am going to watch the last ever episode of Charmed, do laundry, eat sensible dinner (not pizza) and do some sewing, probably.

Emily is coming to stay here for a night next week so that she can see her bloke in Birmingham (he's from Scotland so I'm not sure why he'll be in Birmingham but hey ho). I might let her meet Anthony, and I might even cook her some food.

PS: My hair currently looks very like that of my Yahoo Avatar. It's brown with blonde bits. It will be going blonder on the 21st June (day off after payday) and I promise to post an actual picture then.