June 2002

June 30th, 2002. ... so i jumped up and down a bit

Sunday, about 12. I'm relaxing in the bath, thinking vaguely about shaving my legs, when the phone rings. Arrrgh.

It is, of course, Work, asking why website xxx is no longer working and can I do something about it. Yesterday, I went into the office to fix things which I shouldn't have messed up -- I should have spotted that changing Z would break innumerable other things, and I should have warned the boss not to go ahead with it. But I didn't, because I hadn't bothered to fully investigate the way the servers had been set up, so I didn't realise it would happen. I feel like the extra in Dilbert who won an award for spending days of overtime fixing her own mistakes.

In other news, i went to the B&S gig on Thursday and had a damn good time. It wasn't their best gig, but it was a lot better than the last one I saw them at, in Edinburgh. Nobody was dancing much, so I jumped up and down a bit.

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June 27th, 2002. Skiver

So tonight, I'm leaving work early (woo!) and going through to Glasgow to yet another Belle & Sebastian gig. Woo!

This is the first time I've worn nail varnish at work. I wonder if my boss has noticed.

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June 26th, 2002. Blast from the past

Hunting around for stuff this morning, I managed to find an old Auteurs album, on tape, that I hadn't listened to for years. I put it on whilst walking to work. Ooh, it's just like being a teenager again.

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June 23rd, 2002. Ring (not the movie)

I don't wear much jewellery. Never have. I take after my mother, who who only wears her wedding ring and has never even had her ears pierced.

The other week -- after wandering round the city with Kristin looking for presents for Jeremy (because he's going back to Australia) -- I bought a ring. Nothing special, just a polished stone ring from the National Museum shop. I've been wearing it most of the time since I bought it.

I've noticed -- when I wake up in the morning now, without it on -- that I've started to realise more when it's missing that when it's there. It's becoming a part of my body-image. When I wake up in the morning, hand underneath my pillows, I have a negative spot on my left middle finger, where there is something missing. I didn't think a change like that to my mental maps could happen so fast.

In other body-image news: walking through my local shopping centre today, I suddenly realised just how mirrored its interior is. And I hate it. I don't want to have to see myself all the time.

I guess this piece of good news is vaguely related too. Well, I did say "vaguely". I am always surprised that some people still don't support equality for all people. Maybe I'm just being idealistic.

Oh, last night's dream: a race of space aliens were living in Holyrood Park, which is just by my flat. They were silver-coloured, a bit like Cybermen but fatter and more organic. I would look up at the cliffs, and they would be stood on the edge waving at me. They wanted me to go back to their home planet with them; they said I would be worshipped or something; but it was all a big plot and I managed to run away.

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June 21st, 2002. Things that make you go...

Ew Ew Ew Ew Ew Ew Ew

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June 21st, 2002. Gosh!

I'm posting this from WORK!

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June 20th, 2002. And suddenly ... darkness

Wake up in the morning, gulp down a cup of tea, stumble towards the shower. I flick the bathroom light switch.

plink

With a flash, the bathroom light has burned out.

This is a bit of a problem, because my bathroom is basically underground. No windows at all. I hunted round for lightbulbs. I was sure I had a couple of spare lightbulbs kicking around. But they weren't anywhere.

I hate having to change the bathroom lightbulb, too, because it means balancing carefully on the edge of the bath and unscrewing a heavy glass cover to get at the bulb. I'm always thinking it's going to drop to the floor and smash, probably taking me over with it.

And showering in the dark isn't much fun either.

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June 19th, 2002. Impasse

The other week I was struck with a sudden spurt of enthusiasm for handicraft-type stuff, and I decided I should make myself a bag. I need a new handbag -- the strap on the last one got worn through by a slightly-rusted metal loop -- and making one would be fun and an ideal way to have something a bit different. It surely can't be that hard to knock up a basic shopping-bag style thing, out of some decent thickness canvas or hessian or something, which i can sling over my shoulder. To decorate it, I decided I would get my mother to hunt out some of my old swimming badges (the oval-pointy shaped ones) and sew them on, a vertical line on either side.

I knew this would be a good idea when, a couple of days after I thought of it, I saw a girl with swimming badges sewed onto the seat of her trousers. I mean, nowadays, two people can be a fashion movement. So, I phoned my mother and asked her to find them, if she hadn't chucked them out.

"Why do you want them?" she asked. "To sew them on things, of course. What else are they for?" "I'll send them to you," she said, "if you tell me the address of your website."

So, it looks like the handbag might be off the menu for a while. I really don't want my mother coming here and lookin round every page on the website. And I know that if she did find it, she would look round every page and read every bit of information. I know she would. I don't want her knowing that much about me.

I've just dropped biscuit crumbs in the keyboard.

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June 14th, 2002. Drunk? Me?

So, tomorrow, Jeremy is holding a picnic in Glasgow so we can all say goodbye to him. He's coming all the way up from London to Glasgow so we can hug him before he goes back to Australia. Not just an excuse to get completely drunk, of course. Oh, no. Definitely not.

It should be fun, as long as I can avoid two or three people I don't like much who will probably turn up. Hopefully there will be a big pile of people and I'll be able to keep well away from any that I don't like.

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June 11th, 2002. More overuse of the word "Gah!"

So, on Sunday, I was sat around at home idly playing with MT and seeing what some of the more obscure options do when Kristin phoned. "I'm having a crap weekend," she said, "want to come round some art galleries?"

So, I went out and we wandered down to Queen Street, to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, because they have three rather good exhibitions on at the moment. We got there. And it was shut.

Gah!

So, we walked back the way we came -- in the rain, of course -- and said "I know, let's go to the Fruitmarket Gallery, they'll be open even though it's Sunday." So we did. And they were open. But they didn't have any exhibitions on.

Gah!

So, we wandered round their wee shop and ooh'd and aah'd all the books and postcards, and Kristin said: "Why don't we go to the City Cafe and get some food?" So we did. We looked at the menu, and thought "mmm, desserts." We tried to order pancakes.

"Sorry, we're halfway through changing the menu. No pancakes."

"Ummm ... do you have any desserts?"

"Sorry, no. We've got rid of them all. We still have milkshakes, though."

"OK, I'll have a chocolate mint milkshake."

"Sorry, we only have chocolate, strawberry or vanilla. No mint."

Gah!

So, in the end we went to Favorit and had lots of cake there, whilst spying on all the other cafe-users and saying we wished we'd had our camera with us so we could photograph them all.

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June 9th, 2002. Why I should unplug the phone when I am expecting my parents to call

My mother has a fairly nice stereo. It's nothing special -- not one of those hi-fi enthusiast machine with everything separate, but it has all the ordinary functions and features and is worth a few hundred quid. She won it, a year or two ago. She was thinking about buying a new one to replace their mid-70s record player, when all of a sudden she won one that was worth a fair bit more than she was thinking of spending.

I, on the other hand, do not have a stereo. Well. I have a small portable, which was a christmas present when I was at university. The CD part has been broken for a few years, but it still plays tapes and the radio. The CD drive on my computer plays *some* of my CDs, but not very many; it's on its last legs.

So anyway. On the phone to the mother yesterday, she says: "Oh, by the way. What's a micro-hi-fi system?"

"Um ... a hi-fi system that's smaller than a mini hi-fi system? One of those that's a 6-inch cube and nothing else? I don't know. Why?"

"Oh, I was just wondering. I've won one, you see."

Gah!

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June 9th, 2002. Weird, even for me

In last night's bizarre dream, I was desperately trying to print out the President of Ireland's daily schedule (so I could give it to her personally), but my printer wouldn't work. Then, I had an argument with my dad as to whether I should buy a laser printer or not. I have no idea what any of that was about. Or, for that matter, the bit slightly earlier where people in wheelchairs kept getting eaten by giant plants.

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June 8th, 2002. Surely you can't be serious

I opened the paper today, and saw this cover-story on one of the inside sections:

"Shakira and me, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez"

"Eh?" I thought? Um, yes. OK. Of course, maybe I should get round to actually reading it before criticising.

I was taken with this story, though, because I think it makes a very good point about all this World Cup nonsense that we can't seem to get away from at the moment, about football and Argentina:

"France are having a terrible [World Cup], but when their players get home they will find a prosperous economy, excellent healthcare and public transport, delicious food and all the trappings of a civilised life. We have our problems, but as a nation we are J Paul Getty to Argentina's bag lady. It's a warning never to invest you national, or even your personal, self-esteem in sport." [by Simon Hoggart, (C) 2002 Guardian Newspapers Ltd. Go read the rest of it.]

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June 8th, 2002. Now that's what I call synchronicity

No sooner do I post here mentioning Scholl sandals, then they get mentioned in The Guardian as an example of something that suddenly becomes popular purely because it has been featured on the telly. It must be telepathy, you know.

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June 5th, 2002. Home handicrafts

June has come in, and everything is full of drizzle, still. Typical. I forgot to say "White rabbits!" until mid-morining, too.

This site probably isn't too useful to you unless you live in Oregon or want to make a skirt out of an old pair of trousers, but I just love the picture on the home page. I wish I could draw like that.

I'm tempted to try the trousers-into-skirt thing too, although it would take ages cos I don't have a sewing machine. I have several pairs of trousers which have developed holes in Unfortunate Places, which could do with a new lease of life. Reading the intructions, I realised that lots of skirts in the shops over the past year or so are deliberately designed to look like they have been hacked out of an old pair of trousers. Did anyone else spot this earlier, or was it just me that was in the dark?

Another fashion item that I've spotted in the shops recently that's been bugging me a little is Scholl sandals. Why are these suddenly all over the place? My mother had a pair of these, identical to the ones in all the fashion stores right now, twenty years ago. Of course, they can't have been fashionable in 1982, because mothers in their forties were wearing them. So why are they so popular now?

Of course, heavily-promoted and popular aren't quite the same thing. I should look at people's feet more. Maybe. It's a shame my mother's feet are so much smaller than mine, because she probably still has hers at the back of a cupboard somewhere.

Incidentally -- on the subject of my mother's feet -- when I was born, I'm told that the first thing my dad said was something like "deformed fingers and toes just like yours!" Now there's romance. And they're only slightly bent.

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