Kates Journal

When I was chatting to Kathryn we were talking about pay – and I calculated my rate of pay, on average, per hour last month. It was the most depressing thing I’ve done for a long, long time.

Having come home and thought about posting it – I thought I’d do the sum using the actual figure on my payslip – I get paid £7.81 after tax, per hour (or £10.14 before tax. At least I make double figures).

*sighs*

I kinda wish I’d not worked it out now.

So, I’ve not been drinking so much coffee recently, but today I ended up having my usual breakfast cup, and a huge mocha in Starbucks (don’t all tell me off at once…), then some ice-tea in a cafe on the Strand and finally another huge mocha from Upper Crust before catching the early morning train back. See, I needed to stay awake ‘cos I’m on nights tomorrow (well, technically today), so I need to sleep late – aiming for 5, 5:30ish heading to bed.

But all that coffee’s keeping me awake in a woozy ‘are my legs still attached’ / ‘I don’t feel 100% brilliant’ kind of way. I was pretty good…until I got home. But where was I? And what was I doing in the Strand?

Before I tell you, I have to introduce to what I originally thought might be a myth in my bathroom. But it turned out to be a moth:

It came in late a couple of nights ago, and lurked there until the morning when I scooped it into a glass and set it free. I also have the urge to share this with you:

My choice of cheese seems less, well, appealing when described like that.

So yeah.

Well, this weekend has been something that’s been approaching and which I’ve been both excited and nervous about. See, this weekend I met Kathryn’s mom. She’s over from the U.S. for a week (I think, my vague memory is vague on details), before heading off on holiday further afield, and so I had a chance to meet her.

Given how much I care about Kathryn, meeting her mom was kinda important – and so I’ve been nervously waiting for it… Kathryn came down yesterday (well, technically the day before, given that it’s technically Sunday) and we uh, well, went to Kwik-Fit. Normally I ring round and find the best price for tyres, but I only decided I wanted new tyres on the way to the station (I was going to get part-worn’s, but at around 1500 miles a month it’s probably a false economy), hence Kwik-Fit was used. Brick now has semi-decent, good tyres. This is better than the cracked sidewall and had-reached-chunks-flaking-off-of-the-tread-10-year-old-remoulds that were on there. Uh, then we headed home and curled up watching Shooting Fish (the DVD edit of which is different to the theatrical release, sadly. I am slightly annoyed by that).

Aaaanyhow, so, we got up this morning and headed in to London (for those of you wondering how this fits in with my economising; today was my last fling before stopping. The last prescheduled events day) (random aside – can you tell I’m tired? – the nipod is working well, and interesting to have because I put not only music I really like on it, but stuff I thought I should listen to more, which means I’ve just really enjoyed Maria Mena, Mogwai and Metric – all of which I was aware I liked, but I’ve never really listened to enough. Anyhow.). We went to meet Kathryn’s mom at Heathrow. Normally I drive there, but a quick costing of tickets indicated it was cheaper for us to get the train there and then go from Heathrow (after Kathryn patiently pointed out to me that Heathrow has both a train and an Underground station. I’m convinced I was being terribly irritating, unintentionally, because my brain wasn’t working and I kept trying to help but getting things wrong ;-) ).

Despite British Network Rail’s new time telling system which appears to be based on Hexadecimal we got there on time.

Or more accurately, we knew her plane was late and we got there before it arrived, which was our aim.

Meeting Kathryn’s mom turned out to be not nearly as scary as my fears about it – mostly because Kathryn’s mom is really lovely, and very friendly, and also she failed to have any pointy sticks (nor the opinion of my friend Sophie, who’s always said she’d interrogate any lesbian suitors for her daughter far more thoroughly than any heterosexual suitors… because ’she knows what lesbians are like’). And we went on to have a really nice day in London, munching on incredibly fine food at a cafe near Paddington before Kathryn and I headed off and obtained tickets for Evita… snapping this photo on the way:

…I’ve not been to a musical for years – and the last one was so long ago and I was so young that I can’t actually remember it – although I have a feeling it might have been a production of Kiss Me, Kate. Anyhow, Evita was just plain enjoyment for me, and it was nice to get dressed up in a posh frock (well, moderately) and go out. :-)

Afterwards we headed to another cafe where we had, uh, largely the same food – and chatted s’more; before we wandered back to their hotel and eventually I headed home.

The journey home turned out to be a trifle eventful; first the train I was going to catch was cancelled – not a huge problem, there was another 20 minutes later (which meant 20 more minutes with Kathryn :-) ), everyone seemed to be running to get on to the train which seemed odd, but the reason became apparent once I was there. I got one of the last few seats, and watched as people just kept arriving.

Eventually, sardine like, the train driver having tried to convince people going to the first three stations to take a different train (leaving 10 minutes later) we pulled out. Not that I cared, I had a nice seat and there was no one who might conceivably be considered a ‘give up your seat for’ person on the train; at least not within my range of vision which granted was limited by asses and rucksacks. However, within my hearing range was an argument which turned into a full-on brawl with some drunk bloke pulling another drunk bloke out of the train, where they proceeded to kick merry hell out of each other until one collapsed onto the station platform.

I’d just decided that I really ought to check on the bloke who’d lost the fight, given his lying prostrate on the ground and not getting-back-up-ness (given my code of conduct I’m required, actually, to stop and help people who need the aid of a nurse) when the train doors shut and we pulled away. Fortunately his friends appeared to have phones and so on and so forth, but really. Some people should not be allowed alcohol.

Also disturbing – the bloke I sat down opposite, whilst he was polite to me, he had two tattoos, one of crossed confederate flags with ‘THE [SOUTH?] WILL RISE AGAIN’ and the second tattoo which said ‘[covered by shirt sleeve]… to the blacks’. Which as an ending to a tattoo when combined with a pair of confederate flags, well, somehow left me feeling faintly unnerved.

Ah well. At any rate, I had a fantastic day; and am now phenomenally tired.

I got my electricity bill today. Sadly it masqueraded as a gas bill, and I expected when I opened it to see a figure requesting a 2 figure amount. When I looked and saw the three figure amount I nearly fainted. Once I realised it was my electricity bill I entered a state which merely could be described as ‘oh god how am I going to pay that’.

It’s actually about what I expected….only it’s about 1,800kWh short. Or 160 quid. For some reason they’ve used the average for the months when I wasn’t living here (I presume) and for when the house was unoccupied (I’d suspect 6-8 months of emptyness). It has made me look at my electricity usage – although there’s not much I can cut back on I suspect I might be able to get away with switching the water heater on in the morning – although I may only get a luke warm shower, it’s better than 3kW for 12 hours which is what I *have* been doing.

And whilst I know that I couldn’t really have cut back over winter – I could over the last month have been a bit more frugal in my heater use.

But I suspect that one of the main costs is the washing machine – or more the tumble drier. Whilst I can now hang clothes out; this winter has been a fracking nightmare for drying stuff, the dryer often having to run for hours at a time so as to get stuff to *completely* dry before I took it out. Being a combined washer drier, the drier isn’t 100% stunning.

At any rate, fortunately for me NHS Professionals rang today, and I should be getting my fast-track application for me to do bank/pseudo-agency work; but until I’ve cleared my bills and credit card debts, the Pyoor Financial Recovery scheme will be operating. This means: no eating out, no more ‘I’m feeling a bit bored so I’ll buy a book/DVD/fun thing’, eating a less exciting (but still balanced) diet, no more trips to see friends (although I’m still going to go and see Kathryn; it’s not that she’s more important than the rest of you guys…but…well, you understand), and only the specific list of things I need to do to keep the car on the road, the tyre for the bike (I need to maintain being able to get to work), and a couple of commitments I made before this debacle began.
I will probably start riding the bike again, if I can make it run okay, because it burns less fuel.

I do, however, have to change the tyres on the car. They’re all cracky and nasty and they’re looking distinctly past it. I’ve racked up 3,000 miles on tyres that were I not so bloody broke I’d've ditched the day I got the car, so I think my luck has been pushed far enough. I will hopefully get them changed tomorrow.

*sighs*

I got my pay slip today and y’know what? It was bloody depressing. By the time I’d deducted all the things that need to come out of it I’m back to being broke and the month’s not even started.
It’s really quite stressful.

On the plus side, Kathryn’s back tomorrow. *smiles*

Other news: I’ve been sharing this link with people, whilst some of the statements are a bit of a reach, it’s still quite scary. And this is just downright depressing.

As an antidote to them, have this…

It’s a bit huge today, lots of photos and all, so rather than inflict them on my entire f-list, the post is under a cut. But for all of you to enjoy, here’s a picyture…

So, Kathryn (bluwyngz) came down last week, in fact, a week ago today. Having ensconced ourselves in Slough – funds for the journey to Bristol and back (and foodage while there) being somewhat lacking from my bank account (hell, funds for anything are lacking and a certain NHS related staffing are working at that special speed at which the NHS functions – thus preventing me from obtaining bank shifts which is somewhat frustrating). Anyhow. I was a little concerned by this turn of events – Slough being hardly a cultural mecca – and fearing that Kathryn might get somewhat bored with, well, Slough.

But actually it all turned out fabulously. The weather was kind to us, and we headed out to Windsor Great Park – on the way there encountering this rather nice picture and then…

The park itself is pretty vast, considering I live all of 20 minutes away and had no idea about it’s existence (I’m sure someone (jordax, probably) has told me about it, but hey, I have a short memory) and yet is bigger than Windsor itself, well, I’m surprised. Anyhow, we wandered in and here in all their (edited) glory are some of the pics.

It was gorgeously sunny, and the current

snapshot_hunter comp is ‘dappled’ so I spent ages trying to get ‘dappled’ shots:

Given that it’s a big old park with lots of big old trees, there’s plenty of storm damaged trees – with their broken jagged points scoring the sun bleached sky.

I spent ages photographing this tree, but I never did quite get the shot I was after.

Of course, since it was sunny++, I could actually use the Macro on my camera. I’ve not played with it very much, it needs a lot of light, and obviously, tiny focal distance. People who’ve seen my ladybird (ladybug) shot from the urbex set know I’ve been playing with it, but hey, here’s some tree bark which had a gorgeous texture:

So, playing with the macro in a park leads to ‘flowers’, obviously. But not being in a great position (I was on the rather steep bank of a little dinky stream) meant that I wasn’t that great at checking the focus on some shots. This was intended to be a shot of the purple flower, but I really love the way it’s come out, actually. The focus is not where you expect, and the grass looks fantastic :-)

I debated whether that was ‘dappled’ but really, it just doesn’t scream ‘dappled’ at me. It wasn’t the last time I played with the macro function, oh no:

However, on the dappled front I have to say I felt this next shot achieved dappled quite well; in fact, assuming the competition’s not closed, this’ll be my entry.

I won’t say as it’s the very definition of dappled, but it’s pretty much dappled as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, we continued our quest (which was, I suspect, to have a very nice walk in the park) and both continued to snap away with our respective cameras…

And I continued to play a game I’d not even realised I was playing – I think it was called ‘how many macro shots can you take in a day’?

This was another shot I took in my quest to get dapplement, but I wasn’t quite so keen on this one…

One of my other hobbies of the day was candid shots of Kathryn. Sadly, quite a lot of these came out with her being small and far away, or alternatively ‘not hugely flattering’. In many ways the next shot went horribly wrong, but I actually really like the result:

Shortly after this, we decided to rise above it all…by climbing a tree. I love climbing, I used to scale rocks and walls and trees as a kid, and though there was a latent fear of heights lurking in my conciousness I overpowered it by sheer force of will. Apparently, my will isn’t quite so strong these days; that and I’d forgotten about it until I got into the tree.

And when I say ‘climbing a tree’, Kathryn climbed, with grace – or at least agility, she shot up the tree, perching high up in the branches

I for my part kinda scrabbled in – intially and rather startlingly dropping to the ground (having first impacted the trunk of the tree as I threw myself to clear the sign which I *really* didn’t want to land on) – it was only a few feet (about 5?) to the bottom branch, but my arms really weren’t that keen on the concept of me going into it. A second attempt lead to me scrabbling and in a terribly undignified way landing up on my desired branch. Happy I was, and then I looked at the teeny tiny drop and my brain said ‘no Kate, you’re scared’. Having beat the fear into a small mushy pulp I then attempted to ascend… a bit of scrabbling later and my fear gland worked it’s magic again, and I decided to stay where I was. Comfortable on the lowest branch. There I sat, happily contemplating ways to screw my subconscious out of ever speaking to me again, and enjoying the rather pleased sensation of having at least made it *into* the tree.

Clearly tree climbing is something I shall have to re-skill at, because it was great fun – although I don’t bounce *quite* so well as I used to, and we won’t discuss my descent which left me with scrapes and bruises that had my colleagues at work much amused.

Kathryn went on to climb another tree, me – feeling a little sore – I rested on a bough which had formed a natural hammock shape, lovely it was. The evening light was casting funky shadows and Kathryn was being silly…

As we headed back we encountered a bird we’d spent some time trying to get pictures of earlier; and this time we both got good shots of it

We also encountered some terribly irritating black-what-are-they-birds. Irritating because they were quite interesting, cute and had a policy of only flapping their wings or flying about if you were pointing the camera at another bird. To be fair, it was getting a bit less light, and quite a lot of mine – zoomed to maximum zoomage – came out rather blurry.

But there was one…

And then of course we did some urbexing (which I ramble about here)

So that was my days with Kathryn, in a very restrained journal-publishable not nearly as Kathryn-centred as it would be – way.

Anyhow, so since Kathryn’s been I’ve been trying to be a little more organised in my approach to the house, and my life – mostly because she’s introduced me to Performance Poetry, some other indiefeeds, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (which is similar in concept to Radio 4’s ‘The News Quiz’ – why isn’t that podcasted? Grr); and I’ve restarted listening to Coverville. Which means that I need time to listen to these things – but also I need to get on with the house, now I’ve managed to encourage my builder that I asked to quote to maybe send me a quote.

So, I dug up some enthusiasm and dug great chunks out of the walls in the spare room – and then went around filling them back in – hopefully post sanding (and there’s going to be a lot of sanding) it should look a hell-of-a-lot better. I still need to do more, but I’ve left it two days to try and ensure it’s really dry.

I also returned Gardenia from the wild rebels to a state of harmonious…well, I’d say democracy, but it’s more of a dictatorship. With the aid of the heavy artillery (namely a 25 quid lawnmower from Homebase, and a similarly cheap and nasty strimmer) the grass has been reduced from ‘field like’ to merely ’slightly untidy’. The weeds are also an even length now, too. I’m not sure you’re meant to mow beds filled entirely with weeds, but I kinda did. The mower is pretty effective – but the motor attrociously balanced leading to a feeling like riding a motorcycle flat-out down the motorway; vibey. And the strimmer is similarly equipped with the Vibratortron 3000 motor. I struggled to do too much with the strimmer because it actually made my hands hurt to keep in on too long. Still, thankfully the garden’s small enough – and once my mum’s had her way there probably won’t be much in the way of grass. Some, because I like grass, but not that much.

And finally in my enthusiastic streak, I attacked Brick’s headlamp switch. I’m not sure what made me decide to do that, but I’m incredibly grateful that I did – for whilst my old switch looked in good shape

That top – which appeared in such good shape hid a nasty, nasty secret.

For the last few days I’ve had this faint idea that I could smell burning electrics – just occasionally. I’d started to put it down to paranoia – but also started to bump up the list of things to do the need to look at the state of the slightly flakey headlamp switch (it’d made a crunching noise once, and since that day hadn’t quite worked right). I’m really thankful that I did look at it today. The insulation on the connector was black and charred, a big chunk of it missing completely; the headlamp connector as you can see above and below black and charred. The paper’s even clearly started to scorch.

There could have been an electrical fire – which would probably have been terminal; because it would have been under the dashboard – and just the sort of fire which puts and end to old cars. Anyway, the switch has gone, the connector’s been cleaned, and hopefully things are now sorted. Big thanks to PSL from the Vauxhall Viva Owners Club for the for-the-price-of-postage replacement switch.

Anyhow, if you made it this far, congratulations. I’ll try and be a bit more regular with my updates :-)

So, I went urbexing with Kathryn (I shall post about my fantastic 4 and a half days later); and this is the result.

Some dull locationy shots, and then some better shots…

The carpark entrance is blocked both by some barriers and some attractive concrete blocks. They’re also scattered around the back of the building (or, I guess, the side – since the back is a demolished factory).

The building’s pretty well sealed up – in fact, as we’ll see later it’s insanely well sealed up.

The little brick garden contains a little gift for rats and mice.

And so, on to the slightly more urbexy photos:

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Through a tiny little hole in the shutters you could see inside. It was empty:

These are the blocks – cylinders – which appeared to be filled with concrete. This partially disintegrated one shows the truth…

And here’s the excessive security surrounding what appeared to be an old side entrance to the building. I really don’t quite understand what an (ex)sofa supermarket needs with huge barbed wire fences and floodlights, but hey.

So, round real the back of the building was an almost completely demolished factory(?). Get yourself ready for some more cliches

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And here’s a bit of the local wildlife:

Slightly bigger versions are here.