Category: General

I dunno what it is about allergies that make me feel so wretched. I think it’s the futility of it. At least, if you’ve got a cold you know your body is fighting to get rid of the cold, but allergies it’s pure unadulterated stupidity on the part of your body’s immune system.

“Oooh, I know, let’s attack dust. That’s a great idea”.

Today – and since lauren moved out, the dust monster has loomed large in the house, and my mornings have largely been spent trying to deal with constant sneezing. It doesn’t help that it was cold enough here yesterday for me to stick the heating on; which has of course spurred on a whole new level of feeling ropey, and thanks to our heatings novely ‘lack of thermostat’ (what kind of fucking idiot fits a heating system with no thermostats?!) it’s now the temperature of the sun in the house. Gaaah.

At any rate, I’m about to head out and, well, see if I can mortgage myself to the hilt.

Possibly higher than the hilt.

Still, that should be fun.

In other news, I really don’t understand Scan. I’m greatful that I don’t, because I thought that my memory – which was quite definately fubar, was going to wing it’s way back to me in a great annoying demonstration of annoyingness, but instead what’s arrived is new Warranty Replacement memory. This is my favourite brand. For years I ran my computers entirely on Warranty Replacement harddisks :-)

In other, other news this is very entertaining; and this (rather longer, in fact feature length longer) is truly awesome and stunning (thanks James).

So, today’s the first day on my own again; I know I got used to it when Lauren was working away from home, and I’ve actually been tentatively looking forward to it; having a place of my own; but the first ‘chunk’ of time is always a bit hard.

Especially since I spent last night (at work) reading Tipping the Velvet, and decided I wanted to see how they handled it in the TV series (since I’ve got the DVD but had never seen past the first episode for reasons which I can’t be bothered to go in to now).

It appears that either my DVD PC didn’t like the Hackers DVD, or was just having an off day, ‘cos it played fine with the Tipping the Velvet disk. Of course, the problem with that is that it does make me feel very single; again. That and reading of last night. I dunno. I feel very on my own today. I can’t go out ‘cos someone’s meant to be coming from Freecycle to collect something – although there’s 100% absence of ringing, and they were meant to ring in the afternoon. Is 5pm afternoon? I’d call it evening. Bah.

Some days I’m tempted to just throw stuff in the bin because dealing with people who can’t be bothereed to ring to say they’re not coming. In this case I won’t, because I happen to rather like my MacSE – I just haven’t used it for 4 years. In fact, once I got it working that was pretty much me done. It’s cute though. And it still goes ‘PLUNG!” and displays a happy mac. Complains about a missing co-processor tho’

‘sucse me while I backpedal furiously. They just rang. Still not bloody afternoon though :-P

Oooh, look who’s tired and cranky.

I dunno. My head’s all weird today, I think I’ve watched and read vastly too much Tipping the Velvet, and that combined with my tired brain and my new found singularity, well, it’s combined to make me a bit… off balance. That and the start of my new job. And so on.

Tomorrow I need to send of lots of forms and probably head into Bristol and see about getting a Mortgage. Geeze. That’s fracking terrifying. Then tuesday I can head to the big smoke and see about finding a house. I found out though that I had the wrong base site. It didn’t say on the e-mail offer, but it turns out I’ll actually be at the other base site. Which potentially changes, slightly, my living plans.

Although, again, a quick look at property prices reminds me how stupidly and depressingly insane they are. Bah.

I’ve got a night shift tonight, I did however clean the kitchen today. Although I stopped about 1600 after thinking “this is a fucking stupid thing to do you daft mare” – specifically cleaning when I was alreayd tired *before* doing a night shift. It’s not the work of a genius.

On the plus side I finally got my offical job offer through, I’m *Hoping* this will enable me to get a mortgage. I’m hoping. On the minus side I think I’ve pulled several hundred muscles and I ache in places that I didn’t even know I had places. My body wants to sleep in the worst way. I actually got take away tonight just because I couldn’t face attempting to cook.

In a way I hope it’s a quiet night, but in other ways I hope it’s the busyest night; no, actually I hope it’s a quiet night, and ideally that Angelina Jolie (or Milla Jojovich, I’m not picky) pop by and give me a nice long massage. Aye.

Still my hard work yesterday and today have lead to the house being much tidier. At the moment I can breathe too. I’ve discovered a slight problem with the video machine in the lounge though, it pauses on chapter changes. I have yet to work out why, but then my brain is but a pot of treacle at the moment, and moving thoughts around in it is somewhat solow.

At any rate, yeah, I’m awake and here. Just about. This week is international house hunting week. Or at least, Kate’s House Hunting Week. Wish me luck…

Yesterday and the day before blur together into one long and confused mass of a day. That’s because at Awake+10 hours I started my night shift, finishing at Awake+22 hours. By Awake+23 hours I was at home, breakfasted and helping load the van with Lauren’s stuff.

At awake+25 hours I went to sleep, in the van, very uncomfortably. Tip for people; don’t try and sleep in a Merc Sprinter van, the seats are entirely the wrong shape. When we hit huntingdon we unloaded human-chain fashion. Nikki moving boxes to the back of the van and us three loading them into Lauren and Chrissy’s house. To say their lounge was full is an understatement. When we left you couldn’t reach the stairs. As I climbed into the front seat of the van my body felt beaten and tired.

We drove back. At awake+32 hours I got home, unloaded the chair that Chrissy wanted disposed of due to lack of space – and started tidying. At awake +36 hours I had a habitable lounge, my hifi set up, the floor hoovered, the Laserdisk / PC / Cable box all connected up. I had the PC in my office reconnected, scarily sans firewall. I snuggled down in the chair and chatted to James. I finally went to bed at 1am, 39 hours after I first woke up – and slept ’til 12:30 today. I’m on a night shift again, so I’m going to take it a bit gently today – but I do need to go clean the kitchen and try and rid the house of some of the dust. I can’t breathe through my nose – the allergy to dust isn’t that bad most of the time, but at the moment it’s rough – but I can actually *smell* the disturbed dust – which is never good.

The square under the TV stand is one of the worst in the lounge – it’s never been moved in all the time we were here – last night I moved it around as much as I could – so it’s now a thin triangle of dust I can’t reach. I did manage to clean most of the areas under the bookcases periodically, but you can still see where I hadn’t for a while.

Of course, my mum said “I could come and visit…” which would be great, but for the slight fact I’ve still not told her about the guitar…

Anyway, first thing I clicked on on the Interweb: Banksy’s Warehouse Show in LA. Enjoy.

So yesterday was another challenging day at work; I had two nurses I was ‘working with’; both of whom had different agendas – which culminated in lots of things not getting done, or being done too late. It’s impossible to prioritise when two people give you conflicting directions; and frustrating when they both tell you to do the same thing (separately). Although it’s fun when you get to say “I’ve done that already”.

Still.

It made the shift drag a bit, but the ward is one of these busy ones – especially with one patient who was confused, violent and wandering (he made it as far as the main exit to the hospital where he was stopped by security; it’s lucky he’s confused, otherwise he might have noticed there was an exit in our building – and he’d probably not have been stopped). He’d poked a nurse in the eye (who’d not even met him yet); kicked another one and thrown a punch at another. Still, with me I just backed away whenever I saw the very early signs of aggression kicking in, and seemed to get away with it.

One of the things I have noticed is my memory improving. For years I’ve had the worst memory – I’ve been one of those people who’d often walk to a room and stand there looking like a pillock trying to work out what I was doing. Now I’m finding that I’m remembering more – and it’s spread to my personal life. I feel much more organised, ‘cos I’m not so dopey about what I need to remember to do (of course, buidling the hackintosh was a prime example of that not being true as I went up and down the stairs discovering things I’d not thought to bring down to where I was building it).

It’s good though, although I still have my moments. Half way up an old nightingale ward, having walked from the other end of the ward, I remembered exactly who it was I’d wanted to another set of obs on, necessitating a quick turn around mid-walk and walking back down the ward with the obs machine I’d just taken in the other direction.

But the list is staying in my head, which is good.

And last night, despite the rain I had a really nice ride home. Despite for the third ride in a row someone attempting to drive through me (they were in the Left turn only lane, and decided to go straight on, despite the fact I was there. I’ve now managed to get used to the different position of the horn on the later switch block, only because I’ve needed it so many times). I’m also getting used to riding through really heavy traffic again – people seemingly unaware of what a box junction is. That bugs me, it’s not complex. If you can’t clear the box then you can’t enter it. STOP QUEUING ACROSS MY FRACKING EXIT YOU DUMBASS. Still, I can wiggle the bike through most spaces. Of course, the rain last night probably didn’t do the boxes I was bringing home a lot of good, I’ll go look later. After lunch I need to do a mass-mailout of stuff.

The job situation is now reaching ‘taking the piss’; the occupational health department have stated that they’ve not got enough information on my latex allergy. I’m not *actually* allergic to bloody latex, I’m allergic to the accelerants used to make latex gloves; and even then only very slightly. I get itchy / red skin if I wear the gloves. That’s it. So I don’t. That’s the precautions they gave me, but it says on the print out I sent them “see comments”. I bet the comments are “contacted Ms Elliott and explained precautions over the telephone” – but because it said “see comments” and the comments weren’t included they want the comments. I am *never* going to get moved before the holiday.

No way.

So I guess I’ll be moving stuff into my mum’s garage. Which means explaining to my mum the presence of an Electric Guitar. And what looks like 3 motorbikes (there’s only 2 really, it’s an optical illusion). And of course, no internet. I don’t know how to speed this up. I am beginning to begrudge saying anything. In fact, I’m beginning to begrudge telling occy health in the first place, because otherwise I could just have turned up and gone ‘oh, I seem to have got a latex allergy’.

Currently my computer room looks like this:

Which is okay, because my screen looks like this:

You know, the next machine may have to be a new Mac. Mmm. Mac. We’ll see though, it seems nice and quick – which is pretty suprising, but then it’s all clean and not crudded up with my crap. Of course, I’m going to *have* to use iTunes now I’m on a mac, pretty much, although I probably will have a look round for something more ‘lightweight’. I’ve also ended up with an *entire* *spare* Sempron 2800 system, which I shall be making into the machine of lounge location. Yes.

So, we shall be continuning. It would be nice to have my USB keyboard working, it worked *before*, but seems to be playing up now, so I’m currently using the old and much battered keyboard (which I note needs a clean). It would also be nice to be able to turn around in the chair without hitting something, but we’ll see how we go with that.

So, as I was footling, trying to get all Mac OS Xified – as I’m wont to do with new OS’s, it’s a bit of a new experience. But it is very shiny and I’m easily swayed by shiny.

Oooh. Must hurry, need to get lunched and gone by 1, and I need to go to the shops first.

Anyway, so I was footling and the doorbell went, and there outside was Nikki and Kate with a Congratulatory present. In keeping with the requirements specified by Nikki and Kate when giving me the prezzie, meet Emma Zed:

My PC. Still dead. Still random crashes. Potential components on my hit list – the graphics card and the DVD Drive.

In favour of the DVD Drive – Ubuntu won’t install or run from the disk in that drive. The disk works in the other drive. Windows crashes horribly in that drive and my convenient ready set up DVD from which I install Windows normally (I’ve packed all my other disks, because I’m an idiot) crashed horribly mid install – using that drive. Ubuntu reports errors when that drive is connected. If the drive was passing duff data around like santa giving out prezzies, then it could have screwed up drivers during the original and all subsequent installs. It would also explain the failure of my housemates XP disk to work.

In favour of the graphics card being at fault – the double reboots – of which I’ve not seen one for a while, but which occur after the graphics splash and before the IDE system starts scanning the bus. Or sometimes after. The crashes have been noted to be linked to me using the nVidia graphics drivers, sometimes, but then sometimes not. During the last install the machine crashed with huge graphical insanity.

I’ve now been without my main PC for a month and I am JONESING FOR MY PC. The screen on the laptop is getting increasingly flakey indicating a need for disassembly and reseating of components – and the back of it needs reparing anyway. But it’s not that. It’s being without my data, without my music (well, I can listen on CD, but I get bored of CD-swapping and finding). I miss my other music that’s not on CD. I miss being able to pull out random amusing videos, and there’s websites I can’t remember the name of who are stored on my fave’s list. I WANT MY PC BACK.

What is more frustrating is that even though the desire is there to spend money I don’t have on something I can’t afford because it’s driving me nuts I can’t *do* it because I’m waiting for a package to be delivered – which I have no idea what it is, nor when it’s coming.

I still have a shiny good mood on, I’m just annoyed too.

So, last night I had a really hard shift, it wasn’t that there was lots to do, but somehow both me and Daisy, the other HCA, were both complaining that our legs hurt at the end of the shift. It’s a long-strangely shaped ward which needs lots of walking around – I think that’s why I was knackered. Anyway, stayed late because they suddenly became busy (wards do that), hopped on the bike and headed home.

Half way home I found that the speedo had stopped working. Sighing internally while trying to work out which gear I was in and therefore what speed I was doing, I thought about the most expensive single part on my ‘zed. The speedo drive. Only winning ‘most expensive’ because it appeared to have been destroyed at 65kms.

I got home. Lauren told me the Bank office had phoned and said I’d not turned up. And then said… “ward 11”. Well, no, I’d not been on Ward 11, because I’m not booked for Ward 11. *rolls eyes*.

Mind you, Ward 10 were suprised to have two HCAs, but also had down a Katie. Which is close enough to be me. Bleh. It wouldn’t suprise me if the Bank office had got it wrong, or booked me for two wards simultaneously. Then I tried to ring my old ward to talk to my mentor, and lo… no answer.

Anyhow, I wasn’t in the greatest of moods by now, and procedeed to stomp and whine around the house. Especially when the supplier I’d ordered the new processor for my system from decided to, well, not send me a confirmation of order e-mail – and also showed me as not having a username. Both of these, it turns out, are normal. I found out in my productive morning that they don’t create an account for you, you HAVE to remember your order number and they don’t send an e-mail confirmation. Fortunately the guy on the phone informed me that my Athlon is shipped and winging its way toward me at this very moment.

However, on the less positive front – the chain on the bike – I didn’t twig when I put it on, but it’s too long. I went to adjust it today and realised that it’s already on maximum adjustment and still not tight, so I need to ring Burwin and get a new chain sent; only I can’t find the recipt.

Grr.

Then I rang the doctor’s surgery – they’ve not got any record of an Occy Health request… so the job is going to continue on the delayed front. I’m gonna leave a message for my ex-mentor, which I feel guilty about, I wanted to talk to her personally, but I can’t do much about it really…

Somehow, the lack of progress on that front is really getting to me. And leaves me feeling vaguely frustrated. No, really quite frustrated. That and I can’t go anywhere to get food for tonight, ‘cos I’m waiting for this exciting delivery. I am, however, getting quite… bored of watching TV. Having put all the books away – and given that Lauren’s not sure where the first of the two post-DA books are I’m kinda stuck without my PC. This one needs to be repaired before taking it to Canada, which is also on hold until I get the other PC working. I should order the new battery for this one though, otherwise I’m back to run-quickly-between-powerpoints mode, which isn’t much fun.