Category: General

This weeks Snapshot Hunter entry: Home.

Whilst the original is still the best, the OSB’s new variant is much more rock and roll.

I was not 30 yesterday. Blimey, I’ve never seen it like that, y’know, staring at me. Oooh, that *is* a bit scary. In less than a year I won’t be in my 20s anymore.

How odd.

Anyway, I’m 29 now, as-of-yesterday. Thankyou all for your greetings, e-mails, cards and presents. My mom got me a funky bag – something less ruck-sacky for me to take to work and a new kitchen, well, when I finally get a quote. Kathryn got me a rather funky motorcycle-from-sparkplug model(?) (sculpture? piece of art :-) ).

Yesterday was a bit of an odd day, some of you know my dad’s birthday was three days before mine, and whilst I didn’t really mark the passing of that, other than with a few thoughts for my father, come my birthday – which kind of marked the end of the Elliott’s celebratory period – see, we’d always celebrate together, my dad and I, having a joint fun activity, cake and birthday dinner – well, I felt a bit, thoughtful.

Enough that one of the chaps at work asked me if I was okay, I kinda shrugged it off with tiredness, but really I was a bit distracted. My Birthday doesn’t entirely have happy memories for me anyway, my dad having collapsed a few years ago on my birthday – and us having spent the day in hospital. So, I kinda need distractions to keep me from dwelling on the bad things. At any rate, after work I headed off to my mom’s, which was somewhat tiring – I actually had to pull off the road and have a nap because I was starting to weave a bit while driving; never a good sign. Work is back to being exhausting, and that plus dealing with the car…
Nap done, I perked up and managed to make it to my moms, for presents, and assembling her TV stand, disassembling my dad’s old HiFi and swopping it for my mom’s new Kitchen midisystem. At any rate, my mom is happy with her new TV stand. James said it was kind of an odd birthday, but I always like doing stuff to make others happy. Of course, I’d still like to do a birthday dinner at some point :-)

In other news, I finally got the picture up in the stairs, I shall post a picture soonish. And I’ve pinched my dad’s old hifi – at least the amplifier and speakers. It’s a bit ‘flat’ compared to my old one, but hey. The speakers are, in fact, larger than my old Solovox ones, but they’re better quality and look a bit neater. I do need to get something somewhat smaller though.

Um, so yeah. Birthday was okay, not wildly brilliant but not awful… Mostly I’m looking forward to tomorrow… When I get to see Kathryn again :-)

This looks good.

This is an interesting idea, but then it’s Mark Thomas so what do you expect.

And this film is so good it’s not being shown in Slough :-/

And in lieu of getting to hear my Lucky Soul single (which isn’t here yet anyhow) I’ve been listening to their stuff again on *shudder* myspace (consider yourself warned about the link). Uh, it (their stuff) is good :-)

So, I had an awesome weekend, somewhat longer than intended, but awesome all the same.

After work on Friday I piled into Brick and with great speed ran to the first traffic jam. Several traffic jams later (and about 2 hours), I got off the M25 and onto the M11. Normally that journey takes less than an hour. I can’t say as I hugely enjoyed battling through the M25 traffic, but once I hit the M11 things went somewhat better, and I finally pulled up outside Kathryn’s house at about 1900. Piling back in the car we headed onward (or more accurately, backward) to Lauren and Chrissy’s whereupon a good time was had by all.

I sometimes forget how lucky I am to have the friends I do, but I truly am a lucky girl; Kathryn was introduced, Thai food was obtained, UHF watched, and a small black cat entertained. Having got to bed really quite late, we woke up and spent the day playing games and wandering round a beautiful bit of park/woodland/lake. Finally, we sat down and watched a mixture of Grand Designs and then Dr Who. That third episode of Dr Who – Really very good indeed.
It was a really, really enjoyable day. As night drew in, Kathryn and I hopped back in the car, I prayed to the god of Vauxhalls and we set off. See, on the way the ignition light which for the past few days had flickered on at idle – well, it went from flickering on to full on glowing at idle and occasionally flickering on at other times.

So I was  hoping that at the times it wasn’t on, it was actually charging – unfortunately, hope doesn’t charge a battery, electrons do. And there weren’t a lot of electrons going *in* to the battery. Having had to switch to the ‘spare’ battery (which I have now discovered is as dead as I was beginning to suspect) we limped to 29 miles from Kathryn’s house at which point the engine decided it had done it’s bit, and we were quite definately not going any further.

Much effort later, the RAC declared the alternator dead, and that there was no-where suitable they could take me; a friend of Kathryn’s collected us, and I rung work and admitted that I would not be in today due to my car’s complete and total desire to stay in a service station.

Normally, or at least historically, this would have lead to wailing, gnashing of teeth, swearing and kicking the tyres in a ‘curse you, you swine!’ kind of way, but somehow I have chilled out and just curling up with Kathryn seemed a more appropriate response. I suspect I was pissy; at least a little; but there’s no use crying over spent money.

Mostly I seem to have become fate’s bitch, my car won’t go anywhere, I can struggle and fight, but it won’t get me anywhere; better to accept my situation and simply attempt to move forward.

Of course it doesn’t *always* work like that :-)

But what was nice, was that today I woke up next to Kathryn, and that made me start the day on a high; I found the alternator; I had the best taxi journey ever (with a guy who appeared to have done every job, and who had travelled the world, and was just waiting to head off abroad again); I changed it without too much hastle – although I cheated and let the RAC guy I’d called tighten it and the bolts – I’m glad I booked ahead and called them because the battery was way too flat to start the car. And then I headed home.

I am now wrecked, but attempting to find it in myself to change the coolant which does, it must be said, look atrocious. On the plus (plus) side, I see Kathryn again on Wednesday.

On the minus side I may have to cancel my trip down to Bristol, I don’t know that I can afford the petrol now :(

So, music’s often had the power to beat my mind, or my body, into submission. Feeling down, or tired; throw the right music at my body and it’ll perk up. I just danced round the kitchen to Soulwax, unfortunately, while my body was listening to the commands of the music, my brain was on holiday somewhere. So I carefully chopped my only piece of my last onion, making beautiful slivers of onion, threw the nasty bits from each edge in the bin, shoopy shoopied, grabbed the chopped onion and threw that in the bin too.

Poo.

I’d been thinking about music, because it turns out that I won the limited edition, signed copy of Lucky Soul’s new single; a 7″ single, exactly the type of media that I can’t play until I’ve sorted a new amplifier, timed beautifully as I sat looking at my dying amplifier… (it’s getting worse).

Oh, and it turns out that while LoM may be over, there’s a follow up / spin off series.

*sighs*

People keep asking me to join social networking sites, or sites that I deem to be social networking sites. I had a play with Vox, and it seemed pleasant enough but more than I really wanted; MySpace looks like a teenager’s wet dream to me – it’s ugly as sin, impossible to navigate nicely and doesn’t actually work on any browser I’ve tried (I guess I could hook up the RiscPC and try WebsterXL or Browse; they’re the only ones I’ve got left). And last week Naomi at work asked me to join Facebook.

Somehow I just don’t see the point. I don’t really want all that stuff, I dunno whether it’s coming from the Acorn school of computing where you use small applications that are well designed to perform a specific task (I’ve got Flickr for photos and LJ for Journalling, and that’s me happy), as opposed to using one monolithic application which isn’t terribly good at anything, but does it all.

I get quite enough social networking out of LJ without having all the crap that seems to accompany MySpace/Facebook/All these other things. I’m sure I’m less visible, but I’m quite happy that way.

I’d think that I was getting stuck in a rut – but quite honestly I never did really do joining in. I’ve never been one for following fashion, and it seems to me that’s what most of this is.

Apparently a British MP is off in the fair land of Canada telling ’em not to privatise their health service. Just like we haven’t.

Actually, having done a bit more research it looks like it’s someone who was opposed to the sneaky, two-faced, lying disposal of our NHS to the private sector that this government is involved in.

The article about Canada is here.

By the way, for those of you planning to stay in this country, I seriously recommend you defend the NHS with every fibre in your being, because you will seriously miss it when it’s gone. Me, I plan to leave.

So, I said a few weeks back that me and my comrade decided to do a bit of urbexing. Here’s the pics:

Clicky for More and because I loves you all bonus shots from getting there. Obviously, for the sake of sanity, my nursing registration and purely practical reasons we didn’t go *inside* the building (frankly it’d’ve been bloody hard anyway. Not impossible, I shan’t say how you can get it, because I don’t want it trashed any further, but I did see a route in).