Tag: slice of life

Not the way I'd planned to spend a long weekend

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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…

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weekend update

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http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/bradgate-apr2006/

  

Katy and I went to Leicester for the weekend. We left on friday, after going to the gym in the morning and made good time to get there, considering how late we left. The weekend was ok. I survived sleeping in that tiny bed better than most weekends, which was a good thing, although my back did make its feelings felt by the end of our stay. We went walking to Old John in Bradgate park. It was a nice, if foggy, day but good walking weather nonetheless.

We also went to see Stu's new kitchen, where I had my first cup of tea in… years, really. Since his kitchen is still in shambles, really, it was a bit funny to see him get teabags from one room, milk from another and sugar from a third one still :) We also left with the most hideous smily-face mugs that I've ever seen, but for some bizarre reason, Katy is enamoured with them and so now they hang on a mug tree in our kitchen… *shudders*

Back at work today, and hopefully it will be an uneventful week. We need to sort out the paperwork for my Certificate of Approval † this week, as soon as we get the forms. Once we have that, we can finalize the rest of the mountain of paperwork that is apparently required to get married in this country. Gotta love the bureaucrats…

†I don't know if I've mentioned it or not but we found out last week that since I'm not a British or EU citizen, I need approval of the Home Office to get married in the UK… You'd think that I wouldn't need to, seeing that Canada is part of the Commonwealth after all, but noooooooooooo. Also, it can take between 3 weeks and 3 months to get the paperwork filled out, and costs the nice sum of £135 just to get a small sheet of paper. Joy.

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Last night, this morning

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The unexpected blackout of yesterday had a few happy consequences:

1. Katy and I had a nice and extremely tasty candlelight meal at the pub.

It was crammed full of Hinxton folk who also didn't have electricity. When the lights came back on around 8:30, people asked for them to be dimmed back down in the dining room :D It seems that everybody preferred the atmosphere without the lights (well, except the chef in the kitchen who was apparently not a happy bunny having to cook everything with only 3 pans – still, he did a damn good job)

2. A nice meal was followed by a nice evening with no lights on (well, as few as possible)

3. Since the servers melted at work, combined with a long Easter weekend, the audience for my Thursday morning presentation was greatly reduced from it's normal (and intimidating) size. My talk was well received, which makes me happy.

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well that's just peachy

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I don't know if I mentioned this or nor already but they're building a new building at the EBI to alleviate the chronic shortage of office space. As such, parts of the grounds are now a construction site.

Today, a contractor cut through a power cable so everything at work ground to a complete halt as UPSes started chirping their doom-and-gloom birdcalls. When the switches for the phones and network ran out of juice, everybody decided to call it quits and go home. I thought I could go home and finish working on the presentation I'm supposed to be giving tomorrow morning.

Except that apparently, that power cable is more important than I thought cause we don't have any electricity at home at the moment. The only reason I can get online at present is because my laptop is battery powered and I have a USB modem. This, however, will not last for ever.

We are not amused.

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Life isn't always ha-ha-hee-hee

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Today started out as being a nice day. The sun was out, the horses were clip-clopping outside our bedroom window (seriously) and things looked good. We went to the pub last night for a good meal (though I ate too much) and a nice night overall. This morning, we got a nice surprise in the post when we found out that our landlady had deposited our security deposit and had only taken £120 out for various gripes. While we could probably contest that in the court of common sense, honestly, I can live with it and this now means that I don't have to think about her ever again.

We set our sights towards Saffron Walden to go investigate the town center. Things were going well too, until a unthinking gesture on my part basically shot our day from one end of the spectrum right to the other. In the blink of an eye, our day tailspinned, crashed and is now a small, charred pile of smouldering ashes.

And all I wanted was a stupid butter croissant.

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Weekend pictures

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More here: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/leics25032006/

We survived the weekend, hoorah hooray. My back is killing me from sleeping in Katy's old bed in Leicester. It was mother's day here in the UK this weekend (though it's in May across the ocean) so we drove down on friday after work and spent the weekend there. Saturday was a busy day with going to Ikea to get the last of the stuff we wanted and then into town to pick up a few sundry items. We went to put flowers on Katy's gran's grave on Sunday prior to stuffing our faces full of Sunday lunch. Katy's mom was feeling under the weather because of a cold so the usual military precision of serving dinner was off and we had to play musical dinner plates a few times to ensure that everybody got the right plate. It all got sorted out in the end, after some comedy value :)

This week should be fairly sedate and hopefully we can get most of the touch-ups done to the house decor this weekend.

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Good news, bad news

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+ Katy and I went to Argos last night to replace our new TV with an even newer one that finally doesn't sound like it's clicking like a dog on a hardwood floor.

– The wall-mounting bracket doesn't fit this new TV. We'll need to get a new one. Joy

+ The meeting with our landlady wasn't as painful as it could have been

– She was still nitpicky and we don't know when we'll get the money.

+ We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means curry.

– We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means two big people sleeping in one small bed.

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Do I have a sticker on my forehead that says stupid?

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I receive tons of spam of the nature “I am the son/daughter/accountant/dog of a middle-eastern/african/russian dictator/president/general. I have a gajillion dollars just burning a hole in my pocket. Here, complete stranger that has been referred to me by my best friend's cousin's neighour's mistress' dog, have some of it.”

They're all fairly typical: poorly written ALL IN CAPS to make it look more official. My favourite bit though is always when they include an email address in the message that is different from the sender email address – which is usually their real account but they're just too stupid to masquerade it.

If I wanted to, I could probably create a more plausible scenario to scam people. Damn my morals. Anyway, I got one that made me giggle. It was telling me that I'd won a lottery (that never sold tickets) and that the draw had picked my work email (which I never give out outside of actual work functions). All I needed was to email all my personal banking details and identity information to a nice lady and she'd have the money wired into my account. How nice of her. Fairly typical scam so far. The amusing bit is that I won a UK lottery, but I need to send all my info to an address ending with sympatico.ca (for those of you who might not know, that's a Canadian ISP for home internet). Made me giggle, anyway.

I got everything I wanted to do this weekend done:

  • bought two new pair of jeans
  • sorted through the mountain of paperwork in the office
  • went to the gym on sunday

All in all, a quiet weekend.

One of Katy's friends is being a bit of a pain in the ass at the moment. She was supposed to help us clean and decorate the apartment before we moved and also help us with the actual move. We never saw or heard her. It's been 3 weeks now. We know she's still alive because she has no trouble calling and seeing common friends of Katy. Her phone is just mysteriously breaking down when we try and get in touch. I'm at the point where I don't really want anything to do with her anymore but the annoying thing is that she has some of Katy's books and CDs, and my old digital camera that she “bought” but hasn't actually paid for yet (and that's been close to 2 months now). We've now send email to those common friends to try and kick some sense into her backside so she'll get in touch with us. See what happens how.

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