I can feel it in my bones.
Tag: ducks
Angry penguins…
The two people I'd asked to do our wedding invitations bailed because they're too busy. Understandable, but that doesn't mean I have to like that fact. One of them asked a friend if she could pinch hit. While we appreciate what she's doing, she's worried about getting sued for copyright infringement and the end product just isn't… what we want.
*sigh*
worries, indeed
Been a very bleh day today.
Not sleeping well because I have weird dreams. My stressometer (i.e. my left shoulder) is telling me that I need to unwind or muscles and sinew will soon start to pop and hurt again. Hit the gym today, which helped a bit, but what will help more is when things start settling down.
Way things have been though, that won't be for a while, if ever. I guess that's called life.
That's a PITA
I think I'll have to put my trip to canada on hold. I had planned to travel from the 20th to the 27th. However, the Home Office has put a damper on those plans.
We sent in an application for a certificate of approval, which is required to start the wedding registration process. I need that because I'm an evil Canadian and I want to get married on British soil. The forms say that it takes between 3 weeks and 3 months to get it. However, the form says that I can ask for my passport back if I need to travel.
What the form doesn't say is that it takes 10 working days to get my documents back if I send a fax to ask for them (so it's not even guaranteed that I get the flippin' passport back if I send the fax in today). The request *can* be expedited, but there's still no guarantee that I'll have my passport back on the day I need to travel.
Also, asking for my passport invalidates my ongoing request, which means that I'll need to submit a new CoA form when I come back. This also means that I'll have to pay another as the application fee is not refundable.
What I'm thinking of doing is waiting until the last possible moment to see if I get my application through. In theory, they say that it should be resolved within 3 weeks (and it'll be 3 weeks this Friday). If I'm lucky, I'll get everything back in time. If I see that it's not going to arrive, I'll call Air Canada and have my travel dates pushed back. The tickets are not refundable but there is a slight fee to have the dates pushed back (we did this with katy when she came in otcober 2004).
All signs point that this is going to be one of them weeks…
Mind the duck shit :)
Katy and I went to a BBQ last night at a coworker's place in North Cambridge. Surrounded by chickens and horses, we ate hogfat and Russian Cornish pasties. All in good fun. We ended up home rather late and it was hard getting out of bed this morning.
While dragging my feet to the cafeteria to grab a cup of coffee, I ran across my favourite fowl couple, Grace and Clarckson. In the cafeteria.
Apparently, it's quite common to see ducks wander in in the summertime, pick at the crumbs on the floor and waddle out.
Sa-weet!
Not the way I'd planned to spend a long weekend
Feeling meh at the moment. Don't really know why. I think I need sleep. I've not been sleeping well these past few days: weird dreams† and I'm waking up at like 5am. Not cool. I blame the change in the weather I've also been having annoying low-grade headaches, which I've come to associate with sudden changes in air pressure. I used to laugh about the whole concept until it started happening to me. Gotta love Karma…
We were supposed to spend a quiet weekend this weekend, but those plans, in our usual idiom, went flying out the window when we decided to invite Katy's parents over at the last minute. Katy was in a redecorating mood. In the last two days, the living room has been touched up, all the woodwork and trim done, and that bloody alcove painted (which meant that I had to unplug and replug everything electrical – again. blergh). I wasn't in the mood at all to do it, but it's done and I have to say that it looks nice and also means that I don't have to bother with it for the next little while.
We spent way too much money at B&Q to get the stuff we needed for this weekend. A large chunk of that went into a lawnmower, which is not a frivolous expense and we need to start tackling the wild kingdom in our backyard. We spent just as much though for supplies to re-grout our bathroom and get a shower curtain and rod. Again, looks nice, but I think it could have waited until we were a bit more flush.
Still in the spending-money category, I bought a new phone. Not because I wanted to, but because my motorola V3 RAZR, the one I bought just a little more than a year ago, died. After I renewed my contract and passed up the phone upgrade. After the warranty expired. Orange were totally useless about it and I spent waaay too much time on the phone with peons until I asked to speak to a supervisor that answered my question in 5 minutes. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Anyway, I could either spend £90 in “insurance” (which is a more polite way to mean “protection racket”) and get a replacement handset or spend £60 and get a new pay-as-you-go phone, ditch the SIM card and voila, instant handset.
All in all, it hasn't been the bestest weekend ever. On the plus side though, I did make a really nice stuffed chicken yesterday and there has been booze and chocolate.
Still, I think I'd have preferred to visit the Fitzwilliam and just chill with a book…
The universe is conspiring to piss me off today
I am not a happy bunny.
I'm so out of it today that I didn't even realize that it's my least favourite day of the week: meeting day, aka thursday. I get clued in when I see everybody heading to the group meeting while I'm shuffling into work so I throw off all my stuff in the shed and I scramble to get a coffee before the meeting.
I then proceed to sit through the most boring presentation in the universe.
This is a website. If you click here, you see this information. If you click there, you get that information. This is how you edit the website. If you click here, you can edit this page. If you click there, you can edit that page, which is quite a nice feature indeed. If you click here, you can create a new page. If you click there, you can edit your previous page to link to the new page you're working on, which is quite a nice feature indeed.
For 30 fucking minutes.
Which means that the cafeteria stopped serving breakfast, to which I wanted to treat myself in the hopes of feeling less pissed off, while I was listening to some webhead prattle on about a piece of software I don't care about.
Also in the vein of pissing Richard off day, I've still yet to hear back from the tax attorney filing my taxes this year, nor how much the Federal government will be sucking out of me (money which I don't really have), nor how much the tax attorney will charge me to try and minimize the sucking-of-money-I-don't-really-have.
I still don't know for sure if the people I've asked to do our wedding invitations are willing to take the job or not, so I think I'll have to start working on them myself.
And now gmail is down.
Blergh.
I want to go back to bed.
good news, bad news.
bad news: slept for shit last night, weird dreams and tossing and turning. Had a lot on my mind when I went to bed, which was most definitively not helped by the fact that I couldn't get that stupid Gay Dance song out of my head and was singing it all friggin night (which probably serves me right for downloading it in the first place). My phone is still pissing me off, as are my Canadian taxes.
good news:our kitten has been born last night:
We should be getting him in about 3 months.
We are not amused
Because of the bank holiday store hours, the only delivery slot we could get for our grocery shop delivery was 9pm-11pm last night. At 7:30, we get a phone call from Tesco saying that their delivery truck broke down (again!!!!) and they had to bring our order back to the store. They were running 2.5 hours late. We could either wait up for it (until potentially midnight), pick it up tomorrow, or have it delivered again on Thursday. Not impressed, but since we couldn't do much about it, we agreed to have it rescheduled – even if it meant changing our plans for Thursday night. Blergh.
The night passes and we go to bed round 10pm.
At 11pm, we're woken up by somebody knocking on our door and calling on our phone. It's the Tesco delivery people. Magically, the truck got repaired but nobody bothered to tell them that the order had been rescheduled. The guys were falling over themselves apologizing about having woken us up (and I think I scared them in my slippers and bathrobe) but still, not on…
I called Tesco to bitch this morning and found out that our order was still scheduled for Thursday, which means that if I hadn't called to complain, we'd have gotten another delivery. While cool in theory, we don't have the storage space to keep it and a lot of it would have gone to waste.
Add that to the fact that our broadband was on the fritz last night and that makes for a generally shite evening.
Grace and Clarkson
I had my camera with me this morning so I was able to snap a picture of the two duckies I see regularly on my way to work
