Category: General

I’d forgotten how unutterably frustrating and upsetting it is not to be able to sleep. I’ve led in bed for 45 minutes with the only thoughts in my mind being how tired I am and how physically tired I feel and my brain trying to will me to sleep. I get up now and feel the urge to sleep. But laying there it’s completely elusive. I counted breaths, I counted anything I could, I curled around Kathryn, Kathryn curled around me. But sleep remains elusive. I still feel slimey from napping in my clothes yesterday (in bed) but it was cold, I was tired.

I will be exhausted today, because I feel exhausted now. I feel like crying. I do not take sleep deprevation well, and though I remember insomnia from university, days and days of sleeping for a few hours here and there, and spending hours creating on the computer, I do not remember the exhaustion, the frustration, and the desperate desire to sleep. My eyes are tired and close while I type, I’ve picked up the ATNC manual but I am not conviced I can read it. I miss the lounge where I could have curled up on the Sofa with the manual and the little standard lamp and waited for sleep to overcome me. Now I sit in the upright chair in the computer room, scrunching as much as I can, but sleep won’t come here.

Bollocks. I should’ve known better than to nap the day after nights.

It’s 3:06am, and I’m regretting the nap I took yesterday afternoon, or perhaps the large latte (from Krispy Kreme, no less, I had a moment of weakness that lasted approximately from the minute Kathryn rang saying she was at Tesco’s to the moment that I got to the Krispy Kreme doughnuts place), or perhaps it was the crappy microwave meals we’ve been eating and the fact my stomach’s churning somewhat.

Perhaps the real reason is my body has no idea what time it is. In the last 5 weeks I’ve moved time forward 12 hours to work nights (1 week), back 4 hours to be in the States (3 weeks), forward 8 hours to be back here (6 days), 12 hours forward to work nights (8 days) and now back, well, I’ve tried to get it back to UK time. I caught a cold for the first time in months, my stomach’s not happy (although that might well be microwave food, which has never agreed with me terribly well), and I feel cold and tired. Although it quite possibly is just cold.

Because I’ve not been sat in the Lounge, but instead perched under the covers on the bed during the day I’ve got that feeling I get when I’m ill, slightly icky, slimey, just ick. I feel like I need a shower. I doubt that’d help though. I should be sleeping and am hoping that this journal post will kill enough time that my tired body will over-rule my over-tired brain which is keeping me up.

I did have a little go at playing Russia Block (a tetris clone) on my mp4 player, but it has an annoying mis-code. The power-off button is used as a control button, and if you press it a second too long the darn thing switches off. Also, given it’s cheapness I’m pretty sure that the buttons are going to be fairly poor quality, so playing tetris on it probably isn’t a great idea. My main idea for killing time is to strip and sort the Clamshell laptop – it’s got a dodgy power supply connector – I’m presuming that it’s broken at the mainboard, the problem being that that means I have to get to the main board, and they’re not exactly user friendly in design.

Although that was a cute idea – I’ve realised while I’ve been typing that the Torx drivers required are in the shed. The shed is at the end of the garden. So I don’t think that’s a terribly good idea. I think I’ll watch some Grand Designs and see if I can re-find sleep in a bit. I was hoping that someone USian would be online, but I only know Sarah’s IM (yay for LJ) but she’s not online. So I’m lurking on IM and bored…and tired. I need to read ATNC tomorrow; go to Lidl and get a couple of Orchids and a USB Hub (because I’ve reached the stage on the Mac where there aren’t enough ports, so the printer, keyboard and mouse can all share one…

Hrm. Rambly tired post. Yay for me. I think I’ll stop now. At least the music’s good.

Hey, and welcome to the new people on LJ who’ve friended me. If I’ve not friended you back, and you use the Cyrillic alphabet then, uh, sorry… While I’m sure you’re interesting people I’ve no idea what you’re saying – and attempting to translate your language using Google results in a journal that reads much like the ‘Catalogue’ (or manual as I optmistically call it) for my MP4 player. I have vague plans to learn Russian (hell, I want a Ural so that’s a handy skill); but haven’t done so yet (I used to know the Russian Alphabet, and that’s about as far as I got), but until then, hey! Hope you’re enjoying the English (or Ehglisn as the manual calls it) language version of my journal :)

Anyhow, it’s 1524 and I should be working on ATNC. I’ve been doing it all afternoon (I got up somewhat late and then watched Cutting Edge’s: The Ambulance, 8 Minutes to Disaster) but my builder just unleashed the power of dust on me (with a +4 goggles modifier, I fear). To give you an idea, the windows in the rest of the house are shut, the doors ‘twixt the cutting and here were shut, the door between the kitchen (where he’s cutting) and the rest of the house has been taped over with plastic, then plaster board’s been applied over that.

About half an hour in I got the vague impression there was dust getting in to the room – and looked at the floor between the bedroom and the lounge and noted a cloud of dust slowly rising. I got up, stuck my head in the office to see a room with a white-red tinge and looking for all the world like a set in some kind of dust-bowl film. Taking this as my cue to go outside I shut both doors (the bathroom with it’s tiled floor seems, thankfully, to have more or less escaped (although the ventilator’s open in that room) and went out the front door to our Mars Moonscape. A plume of red dust floated out from the corridor between our house and the neighbours. The minor is coated, the DAF being further away has, I think, escaped. From this mist, coughing, emerged my builder, who looked like he’d been an extra in a Sony Bravia advert.

Now he’s finished I’ve performed a degree of dust clearance by turning the fan on in the office with the window open, I’ve just stuck it in to the bedroom… it does appear to be achieving the desire of keeping the dust more or less airborn and floating some of it out the window.

Strangely the lounge doesn’t seem substantially different to how it was after the first day of building when they failed to tape up the door way (dust sheets are misnamed). In the words of their manager – it’s the kind of mistake his builders only make once, and the room will be cleaned (the carpet, sofa and chair cleaned with a professional furniture cleaner).

My black laptop is currently white. Very mac.

So, I watched Cutting Edge – which features ambulance crews I know. It’s interesting; seeing it from the view of an emergency nurse I think it’s probably not an unreasonable view of the crews on the road – of the dark humour we all maintain which keeps our sanity in check, of the way you laugh. But I can also see that the from the perspective of the general public it could be difficult to understand. When you’ve not met hundreds of people who’ve taken an overdose, often because of an argument with a partner, who massively overwhelm the number of people you’ll meet who have severe mental health problems, or who self harm, then the comments about overdosing because your partner left you almost certainly seem glib. Stella and Ian are a great crew, and I’d be very happy to see them turn up, and I know they are sympathetic with people – but their portrail didn’t seem that way… It’s difficult, in 45 minutes can you capture why people do the job they do.

I just read the ATNC description of Trauma / ER nurses and I’ll tell you something it ain’t that flattering. Looking at it objectively I can see myself there, described in some slightly uncomplimentary ways (Strong need to be needed? Check. Bored easily? Check. Short attention span? Check.), and I know that I sit in the coffee room and joke about the people I’ve treated. If I didn’t then I’d not be able to cope with doing chest compressions on someone nearly 10 years younger than me, when it’s obvious he’s dead but you just want to give it that one extra round to make sure that you’ve covered every possible base, ‘cos you shouldn’t die in your 20s. Or to care for the older patient who’s been left in bed 24/7 because the care home don’t have ‘the staff or equipment’ to give her the physio she should have had to get her back on her feet. Or to deal appropriately with abuse from someone who’s so drunk they’ve collapsed, been incontinent and yet still think the NHS owes them something.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances should perhaps be given the leeway to develop appropriate coping mechanisms, and the criticisms I’ve heard from some patients of the staff who were in cutting edge are frankly unfounded. I suspect most of them still think of Nurses, Doctors and Ambulance People as some kind of ministering angel, who’ll make it all better, and forget we are just ordinary soles who need to deal with our every day life, go shopping and cook dinner when we go home…

I think that may have been a bit of a sub-rant review… well, I blame it on coming off nights. That and the fact that our house is filled with dust.

So, this weekend’s been good; we’ve been down to see my mum, we’ve sorted out some of the mains wiring in the kitchen, there’s still some of the new fascias to go on, and the kitchen light is still in the wrong place; oh, and I remembered that we’re meant to be switching the old strip light for a couple of new halogen lights (not very energy efficient, but on a bulb-blowing basis they’ll probably be switched mostly over to ultra-bright LED lights).

I ordered tyres for the Jejy, door pulls and new wipers for Rebecca, all of which arrived today, so I headed over to HiQ who are my local supersnarky but actually very helpful exhaust place. While they laugh and the phrase “I’m not driving that thing in” was uttered, they jacked the car where I asked, and not on the Air Duct, they switched 4 of the tyres (warning me that the spare is *not* to be used except in an absolute emergency, and really it should be changed (it’s perished as hell, and that was the best of the tyres on the car)), and popped on the four hideous Camac tyres (well, they’re better than the 20 year old tyres, and I’ve got flipping Nankang on the mog; so much for my no-budget-tyres policy). Unfortunately they didn’t have the exhaust mounting rubber in stock, so I had to go down to Allparts, who exclaimed that they had (a)nothing listed and (b) nothing similar in the catalogue. 5 minutes later the guy came back with a mounting rubber which was exactly the same, except for a small lug on one side… Were I hastled I could’ve cut the lug off, but frankly, once the exhaust’s cold it can go on with that in place.

We also went for a quick jaunt from junction to junction. Actually, once on the motorway Jejy’s pretty settled. I didn’t really push hard, but we nipped up to 65 and trundled before coming off at the next junction; I also opened the vents – the idea being to clear them out as much as possible before I (possibly we) clean out the car at some point (‘cos it’ll be distressing having twigs and leaves blown at us when we’ve cleaned ‘er). The car was almost instananeously filled with a wedding-day-like confetti of dried leaves, bits of acorn and accumulated dirt. Having got that over and done with I flipped the vents the other way and sprayed the windscreen with a similar array of shite before things settled down. You can now move the heater flaps with nary a crunch, so I think we’re getting there.

Last night, during my awake period, I managed to find FCP and get it installed, it does of course not recognise the EvolutionTV (which was a bit hopeful, really); the EvolutionTV however does do MPEG2 capture (thankfully, I feared it was MPEG4 only for a while) – and seems to be very good, actually. Quite to my surprise.

So I’ve captured the majority of footage from my mum’s ceremony and now only have ours to do (90 minutes! A lot of that is dancing though, I think the ceremony’s about 20 or so). I just need to edit my mums, and was planning to do some really basic playing with Garageband to see if I can make some nice appropriate music. Either that or we’ll be breaking out the classical music CDs :)

Oh, I also left a message for the Registrar for our ceremony here, and we booked a pub to go dancing in after the event. Shibby-Shibby :)

We’re positively storming through the list of things to do. Now I’m just waiting for the bloke to come and do a quote for the building work, and we’ll be sorted.

…how hard it is to get hold of 145R14 tyres. This obscure size happens to be that of the Morris Minor *AND* the DAF 44. Interestingly, it’s also the size of the Lupo 3L, but that doesn’t seem to have helped our cause a great deal, in so far as the 3L didn’t sell that well, and thus the Bridgestone magic tyres that fit it are apparently on back order.

I’ve now rung every tyreplace in the Slough phonebook, of which one has come back claiming that Continental make a 145R14 tyre (I’m not convinced, I’ve never heard of these, and last time this ‘oh, we can get such-and-such-a-brand’ happened I got there and that garage’d ordered the wrong size); and most of which have gone “we can’t get them”. My best option, as it stands, is to order them from Bull Motif (a moggie specialist) and get them fitted locally, a painfully expensive process (well, in all honesty, compared to most modern cars, no, it’s really cheap, but to me it seems painfully expensive), but marginally cheaper than the best local quote so far.

It’s frustrating, the DAF persists in this state of ‘so near, yet so far’. The tyres currently fitted I’ll take around the town in the dry, gently, but the motorway is definately out as the newest dates from 1994. The oldest, I suspect, is late 70’s (on the spare) and the two rear tyres are probably early 80’s as they have lack date codes and are a size that doesn’t exist at *all* anymore…

Still, it’s been fun pootling around Slough in the newly taxed DAF. And it gives poor old Rebecca a break from being the only car in the family. Anyhow, I’ve astonishingly failed to get any work done this morning, so I’m going to craft a quick e-mail filled with questions to (a) My sister and (b) the hotel where we’re getting civilised, and then I shall away with the fairies to lunch then work :)

(As a side point, Cory Doctorow just replied to my last post. How the hell did he *know* I’d written about Little Brother, behind a cut tag on my obscure journal?! The world is a strange strange place. I should have mentioned that I’d recommended it to Terry (via Sherry) for her to use as a resource in training teachers, but I forgot).

My apologies to Kate, when I first met her, for tarring the whole US with the one-size-fits-all-America brush. Again. I can’t believe how awful I was when I met her, but thankfully she, being a very generous person actually allowed a second chance and eventually I learned to stop being mean about the US…

So I just spent 3 weeks in Washington state (Olympia, mostly; but also a little in Seattle and Bellingham, and one day in Vancouver B.C. :) ), meeting Kathryn’s friends and family, celebrating our commitment to each other, getting dresses…well, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Shall we start at the beginning? Yes, we shall…

So, the original purpose of our trip to the States, when it was first booked, was to go to Jessie and Justin’s wedding. Jessie and Justin being friends of Kathryn’s. Because we were going, and many of Kathryn’s friends / family can’t make it to the UK celebration we decided to have a commitment ceremony in the US as well (because the stress of one wedding just wasn’t enough for us :) ). Since this was to be at the end of the first week, and also because we had various things we wanted to get for the UK ceremony (dresses, rings…) which needed as much of the 3 weeks as possible, then we spent much of the first week running around like maniacs. We picked out colours, we picked out candles, we attempted to fold napkins… In between all of this, as we went around Olympia, Kathryn pointed out bits of her history…

I finally got to meet Kathryn’s Dad and his partner, who were really really lovely. It can’t be easy meeting the woman your daughter’s going to marry commit to, after they’ve chosen to commit to each other. Even more so when that person is from another country, and your daughter is intending to stay there for another year… It was faintly terrifying, but seemed to go very well, and actually I enjoyed the meeting.

Kathryn’s mom (and Terry, and family as a whole, and friends) were generally awesome, essentially doing everything for the celebration short of writing our vows. We made paper cranes, we helped set up the marquee and the lighting, but the pot-luck, the centre-pieces, the whole event really came together because of everything they did. Jan, our officiant, did the most beautiful job. It was, to be honest, just wonderful…

Of course, being as it was our celebration, apart from me poking around with the video camera now and then (which Terry and Stephanie took over, thankfully); we didn’t take any photos; so we’re waiting on them being sent to us by other people! We’ve got the video and despite it being shot on my ancient Hi8 camera the sounds not awful (you can hear what we’re saying) and the quality’s about Hi8’s usual adequateness.

Kathryn’s mom gave us the gift of 2 nights in a Guesthouse (Fertile Ground), so we were taken there after the ceremony and then headed into Olympia, the next day. Olympia is an interesting city, it’s pretty and appears to be terribly lefty-liberal in that way that I most definately like.

Lots of interesting shops lurk in the city’s down-town area, including orca books – a dangerously large new and used bookstore. Between there, the excellent restaurants, the record store (5 CDs) it would have been easy to spend a vast amount of money. We also spent a chunk of Saturday looking at Sand in the City (Olympia’s sand sculpture contest)…

Sunday we had brunch with Sherry (Kathryn’s mom), Terry and Terry’s mom. I think it was also this day that we headed out to see some friends of the family, for dinner (Salmon, grilled, mmmm). Sadly, during the trip out I got slightly car-sick. Not actually physically sick, but I just felt ‘off’ for the whole rest of the day. I was somewhat quieter than normal (even by my meeting-new-people standards), which was somewhat of a shame :(

The next week we spend some of just resting and relaxing; we headed up to Tumwater falls and Kathryn pointed out the abandoned brewery (sadly, due to not knowing WA’s trespass laws as well as the UKs we weren’t going to trespass to take photos of this terribly interesting building), we went up to Seattle to meet Rob, and to spend money in the Elliott Bay Book company. I finally got around to buying Little Brother – which it turns out is an *excellent* book. Mostly I ended up getting this because it was in hardback for $17, and because as I picked it up the shop-assistant-bloke said “it’s awesome”, and then we had a chat about the frustration of not being likely to see Cory Doctorow, despite living just near London. I spent the next 3 days avidly consuming the book in every spare moment. It is, in fact, excellent. Go read.

We also headed back to Tumwater falls (to a different park) to see if was possible to get near the abandoned brewery to take photos (without trespassing; the answer is no). Had the old railway bridge been intact (it’s completely removed) or the park have extended around to have a bridge over the river, then yes, it probably would have been possible. But as it is, without walking directly past No Trespassing signs, and clambering over a gate it’s not. Distressing as it is, we weren’t up for being arrested in the USA – it would have cut into our holiday time ;)

(look at it! Doesn’t it call out for a bit of urbexing?)

I find myself slightly struggling to organise exactly when things happened, but we went to Harbour Days (Oly’s harbour festival) – and spent a morning meandering around the arts/crafts stalls (of which there were many), and poking around a boat built in 1908.

I think that that was Saturday, and that Sunday we headed to the beach. I’m not normally one for laying on the beach doing sod-all (‘cept reading); but it was just a gorgeous day, not too hot, nor too cold, and so laying there reading (I as done with Little Brother, so was reading a Shape-shifter/werewolf/vampire detective/thriller novel for Young Adults. It was light and fluffy, but also absorbing enough to keep me very enterained (Moon called, by Patricia Briggs). Whilst I certainly should have been working on my ATNC course it’s sometimes nice to get away :)

The next week we headed back up to Seattle, via Ikea (a tourist attraction, alledgedly) spending the Ikea gift voucher given to us by one of the incredibly generous people who came to our ceremony… We spent more money in Easy Street records – and could have spent a lot more than that (it’s quite distressing really, how easy it would be to buy so much music), and then met up with Jessie and Co for her Hen night. One excellent Thai meal later and we went back to Jessie and Justin’s to sleep the night, before heading further up to Vancouver B.C.

By sheer freak of luck we arrived the second day of the Vancouver Fringe Festival and thus spent a very touristy day looking around Granville island (oh! the food!), yaletown (easy to get to by water-taxi), going to a show (Afterlife), picking up property papers (what?!) and eating all you can eat Sushi (oh, so good!).

Then we headed back down to Bellingham, spending a morning relaxing before Jessie and Justin’s wedding rehersal, and the next day, their wedding. Finally we made it back to Sea-Tac for our flight the next day…

…getting a quick chance to meet up with Sherry and Terry (who very kindly brought my Vibram FiveFinger KSO’s with them, allowing me to bring them back to the UK (“ooh, the world’s all textured”, more on that later)). So much happened that it’s impossible to remember it all. The really nice flight attendent on the way there giving us Champagne because we’re getting wed. People just being really friendly and generally exceptionally nice to us. Eating dinner with Sarah and Eric (Eric’s an awesome cook, Sarah’s great fun). I’ve missed out so much, just to keep it a reasonable length… and because it pops into my head in a random stream-of-conciousness way. So, yes.

Awesome time. Fantastic Holiday. Lovely people. :)

Update on the holiday to follow; pictures are on Flickr, as per usual. But if I’m feeling good I’ll link them in as I post :)

Studying rules that I’ve set myself mean that I can’t post today (I spent all my non-work time uploading the darn photos!).

I’ve attempted to catch up with LJ, having not looked at it at all for 3 weeks, but friends-page-doodad only goes back 320 posts, so if I’ve missed anything important, you’ll have to tell me :)

As per usual it's been a while since I've posted. As I write this it's 3:30am, and I
am actually at work. Shan't post from here though; this is an e-mail to myself to be
checked and hopefully posted later in the day.

So, the entirity of last week was a battle to get the house to a state where when
Paramito and my mum came we could actually - y'know - decorate. It took an awful lot
of effort to get the walls plastered and the room sorted - but we managed. And on
Saturday morning we cleared the edges of the room, and spent a lot of time
plastering.

I can't say as my plastering will ever win any awards - and even after sanding it's
not like it's beautiful. But it's adequate - and it looks so much better than what
was there. I'm really quite proud of the curve under the window - that is quite,
well, curvey.

With much help and assistance, the cupboard doors have been painted - Kathryn and I
slapping more coats and the varnish on ('cos it's ordinary emulsion). The framing's
had one coat of paint too, needs at least one more and then varnish. Hopefully after
that we can hang the doors - which should be pretty spiffy. What has been really
nice though is that we finally painted the (newly plastered) walls. The whole room
is now a soothing shade of Green instead of bare, disintegrating walls.

Unfortunately, this weekend we also discovered that, and this is revolting, a rat
has discovered our compost pile. In response to that we've bought a proper compost
bin which we'll be erecting. We're also trying to organise a skip before we leave,
to clear the garden of the vast amounts of building rubble, which I suspect are
providing shelter for the evil little rodent. Well, not so little. Ick.

It looks like there's a few 'same day' delivery and collection skip hire places. We
only want it for a day or two...

...however, fitting in loading the skip around the rest of the work that needs doing
in preparation for the wedding is somewhat of a challenge.

The list we made is about a mile long; and virtually everything on it is
non-optional. Both Kathryn and I have been laid back about the marriage and the
USCeremony - perhaps slightly too laid back. And now it's come back to bite us a
little...

...still, Kathryn finished the drawings for the invite yesterday, and I spent the
afternoon laying it out. Set it printing and brought them in to work to use the
guilotine. Of course, it was manic until 4:30 - and then my lazyness with not
ensuring the crop marks were correctly aligned bit me - I had to spent quite a bit
of time working out where to crop them because the crop marks aren't lined up on the
two sides.

Still, having a double sided printer finally paid off :)

I hate to imagine how much our invites would have cost from a professional printing
firm - and while it might have been nicer to have proper printed quality as opposed
to inkjet - I have to say that I think they're *gorgeous* and Kathryn's concept was
(and is) beautiful.