The Thessaliad Redux

For the first time in my ever-lovin' life, I'm glad that there's a Tube strike a-comin'. Means I can tell management where to stick it when they want me to work on a bank holiday. It's bad enough wanting me to do so in the first place; expecting me to get here during a public transport FUBAR? Nooooo. So no, I am going to have my four days' worth of bedrest, THANK YOU, GREEDY FUCKS FROM TFL.

So ... changes to Livejournal. I am displeased. I have since backed everything up here on Dreamwidth with a view to maybe hopefully one day moving the hell off LJ for good. Please see this FAQ for a more coherent explanation of why than I am in any state to give just now. Really, I'm not angry - I haven't paid for a LJ account in a long time, so it's not like I'm losing out - but I am frustrated. I've made a lot of good friends on LJ over the years and I don't want to lose them. Some I won't; I'm following more people on DW now than I used to when I first started cross-posting. The rest ... well, I can't expect everyone to move. Particularly not those who barely use their LJs at all anymore. Well, everyone on my LJ flist has OpenID access to my DW account, so that's a start. Still, if I have to look at that gods-awful comments page design for much longer, I'm going to go insane. There are supposed to be ways to change it if you use a S2 layout like mine, but ... not so much in this case, it appears. I tried. I failed.

So anyway, big question is, those of you I'm not already following on DW, would you mind please letting me know if you have a DW account and, if so, what name you're going by so I can follow you? And I think I have a metric buttload of invite codes if anyone wants one and we still need them. Thanks.

Ugh. All I want for Christmas is a two-day nap. And maybe Skyrim. But I'll settle for a 15-hour nap and Dragon Age, since I need time to do things like laundry. I also need to reorganise my books again; my leaving the house half-asleep every morning and staggering in half-dead at night during the week means that my books tend not to go back into my overstuffed bookshelf (which is not overstuffed anymore but will be when I get reorganised) but end up ... spreading out. They end up on my nightstand. A lot of them end up on the floor by my bed. A few have ended up sharing my bed with me, curling up with my stuffed animals. I'm sure that there could be poetical comments made about my taking literature as my lover but some people would take that to the literal place - no pun intended - instead of the poetical and SO MUCH NO THAT SOUNDS PAINFUL.

Oh, and there needs to be Sims again. I have neglected my Sims. And possibly mining in Warcrack. Ever since blowing 4250 gold on Artisan Riding, I've felt a bit impoverished.

Right. I should do some work today. Really I should.

So the van-man arrived, with all the stuff, and lugged it up the stairs for me. Some of it is going to have a more or less immediate trip to the bin and other bits are going to charity but the rest of it I actually found homes for. My window sill is still stacked with books, but given that at least two of the boxes were full of nothing but books and that I emptied the books out of the wire chest of drawers to make room for clothes, I think that's actually pretty impressive. Speaking of the clothes, I forgot I owned some of these things. Swimsuit yay! And I must remember to get the zipper fixed on my DoomBoots. Still, just about everything has a home now and this is generally good.

Of course, there are still boxes. And a ginormous suitcase (which I should probably return, though that's going to be a bitch to arrange). The boxes can go just as soon as all the charity-bound stuff ends up at the relevant charity places and the rest of it goes to the bin, but that means there's a night of boxes all over the floor. I mean all of my floor. It's kind of a slalom to get anywhere at the moment. At least the bed's free of stuff so I've got somewhere to sleep tonight. Still, tomorrow's going to be a lot of work getting the rest of my space cleared. So much for a weekend that even slightly involves mad scientist perfumery.

Well, never mind; at least things are mostly sorted and probably going to be completely sorted by tomorrow. I say 'probably' because I am desperately hoping to sleep in tomorrow. I do not in any way feel like I got enough sleep last night, and I am owed at least one day this week where I get to stay in bed 'til midday. Sooooooooo tired.

Well, that wasn't as painful as I thought it would be...

First thing I did when I got home was start trying to make space for things. It turns out that if I shift bits and pieces, I can actually fit all my sourcebooks on the top shelf of my wardrobe, which has cleared a nice little swatch of floor space. I'm a little concerned about this bookshelf lark, mind, as the place where I meant to put it will kind of involve having it block the bathroom light switch, but I'm sure I can manage something. Haven't moved the bed yet, after all, and I can probably turn the wardrobe around and it really is like Tetris and the theme tune is stuck in my head argh argh argh.

Something came in the post for me today - I think it must be my first lot of fragrance oils. Minor problem in that I wasn't home to collect them so I got one of those 'collect at the post office' cards. The post office to which they were sent is only open from 8am to 1pm on a Saturday (and only 8am to midday during the week, and closed altogether on Sundays) so it's currently a question of whether I want to risk sneaking out dot on eight to try to pick up my stuff before the kindly folk from Argos bring my bookshelf. Which means having to get up extremely early however you slice it. Hello, the suck, this has it. There are serious issues with having so much of the stuff I want needing to be delivered and having to be at work to pay for it all in the first place. Woe. Well, I'll work something out.

Exhausted. It's been one of those weeks. I have a bit more tidying to do before tomorrow but damnit, that can wait for awhile. Not sure what to do about dinner but given how I feel right now, I'm thinking that ordering out is in fact the only way to go. I just cannot feature cooking right this second. Seriously, just ... no.

Now at work, with coffee, considering Flat-mageddon. I really can't think about anything else right now because ... well. Seriously. I'm sure I'll be glad to have this stuff back when I get it but ... well ... there are problems. There are issues. Most of them involve storage space. Or rather, lack of storage space. Yes, I admit I was the one saying that a studio flat was going to be a great idea but I severely underestimated the amount of books. How the hell did I fit this stuff into a Peugeot, mitchy? Is your car a TARDIS? Anyway, currently most of my books (including my extensive Stephen King collection, which consists of almost everything the man has ever written up to about Desperation with a few of the ones after that because I like his short story collections and Duma Key didn't entirely suck) are piled up on my windowsill. This is problematic as it does not actually allow a lot of light into my flat, at least not by that window. The others are jammed into a bookshelf which in turn is jammed crossways into the little remaining space between the foot of my bed and my desk. Or stacked up on my nightstand. My clothes? Well, mostly I've crammed them into the wardrobe and called it good, beyond the laundry bag next to the dryer and the ones on the drying rack that I haven't put away yet.

I have one bookshelf. I have no chest of drawers. I have very little in the way of actual space. And now there's going to be more stuff. Which, fair enough, it shouldn't be cluttering up another's space and I'm sure I can get rid of some of it but ... where am I going to find the space for what I want to keep? And where am I going to put the boxes etc while I sort shit out? I'm just glad pick-up is going to be on Saturday because frankly, I'm going to need more than an evening to sort this mess out.

The clothes ... eh, I can deal with the clothes. The clothes will be tried on. If they fit, they can stay. I'm sure I can dig up clothes hangers from somewhere. If they don't, then the local charity shop will have a lovely bundle of donation. It's the books that are the problem. I know what I'm like about books. I am going to want to keep a lot of them. However, there is no room left in my single bookshelf and if I pile more of them up on the windowsills, it's going to turn into a "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR!" situation. I need a bookshelf.

Problem? I have no space to put a bookshelf. What I really need to do is get rid of the double bed. I do not need a double bed. What the hell would I need a double bed for? The inventory on the flat actually specified a sofa bed. I could have lived with that. But no; I get a double bed with a kind of crappy mattress and all I want is more space. I am honestly considering just chucking the double bed and replacing it with a single bed. I've got another five months minimum in this flat, and would be happy to keep it longer if I just had more space. Surely when it comes time for me to move, I can replace the double bed and take a pretty single bed of my own purchasing away with me. Or I could just store it somewhere, I guess.

...Well, I suppose there is one spot for a bookshelf. Currently it houses my drying rack, but there's a spot in the bathroom for that. And if I got rid of my current bookshelf, I could probably wrangle space for another one. Moving my sourcebooks to the floor of my wardrobe might free up a bit more space as well. Now I just need to find a suitable bookshelf. I did try Freecycle and the like, but most of them are relying on pick-up, which ... well, no. I should see what's available at Argos. A couple of tall, narrow bookshelves ought to do the trick, I figure. I'm sure I could find them suitable homes. Maybe if I moved my wardrobe. Maybe if I at least turned my bed around (sure, the foot of the bed would end up nearly in the kitchenette, but I think it'd free up a bit more space and perhaps discourage me from using the foot of my bed as impromptu desk space).

Right; this isn't getting me anywhere. I'll go back to typing up letters and hunt for bookshelves between letters and ... overthink the whole thing, I suppose. I will do this shit, really!

I am procrastinating. Heavily. Because today is Clean All The Things Day. See, I do try to keep things as tidy as possible in here, but let's face it; clutter happens. I could just let clutter keep happening until I can't see the floor anymore and then clean it up, but ... nah. Instead, I have Clean All The Things Day, which mostly involves doing the laundry, picking up the books that have accumulated on the floor by my bed, cleaning out the fridge of the stuff I somehow didn't get around to eating during the course of the week and taking out the rubbish. I should probably actually go out into meatspace to do the grocery shopping this week too, as it's stopped raining and I've got a jar full of coins to dump into the Coinstar machine over at the Sainsbury's. Besides, the people who pack the groceries for the online delivery gave me somewhat squished tomatoes last time. Boo.

But first, coffee and procrastination. Because it's the weekend, damnit, and I'm not spending all my free time after a pretty slogtastic week at work doing yet more work. Besides, it's only midday and I haven't finished my coffee yet.

So ... yeah, there have been random acts of BPAL lately. Random acts of BPAL are awesome when you find people giving the kinds of bargains that I've been finding lately. Of course, my wishlist is still unmitigatedly huge, and there are a few I cannot find and am desperate enough to own that I'm actually considering ordering the imp's ears from the actual site? But for the most part, I'm hacking through my wishlist pretty comprehensively. So for those of you who care, here's what the collection looks like. All those with asterisks by them are the ones that are currently en route. Double asterisks mean that they're actually in London but because Paypal is run by lunatics, they ended up at dodgyhoodoo's place and I am picking them up Wednesday, when I return the book he loaned me forever ago and we discuss the man-with-van I'm hiring to pick up my variegated and miscellaneous junk from his place next weekend.

Edit for clarification note: this list represents what I have actually have, whether it's on its way or sitting in my little panda-face bag. The wishlist will be covered in a separate post. *g*

( Hold on to your socks, people; this is going to get long. )

All the double-asterisk ones except the bottle of Summer's Last Will and Testament come from the fact that some kind soul essentially threw a whole bunch of decants of Neil Gaiman scents that didn't work for her into a bag and said, "Selling them as a job lot for $8. Take my imps, please". Since more than half of them were on my wishlist, how the hell could I refuse? And I'm finally getting an imp of Alecto; boo-ya!

My problem now is storage space. Currently my little panda-face bag is fine for imp storage, but that's not going to cut it when the rest of my imps get here. It's already about half full, my little panda-face bag. Might have to see if I can find a good storage box while I'm out today. And then I need to find someplace to put the storage box. Tiny flat, y'see. Tiiiiiny flat. I'm thinking that the RPG sourcebooks maybe ought to live at the bottom of my wardrobe from now on. I'd say on top of my wardrobe but it's a cheap plywood thing and I'm a little bit afraid that the 'ceiling' would just cave in under the sheer weight of the things. Anyway, after that, I could maybe move my end table over to next to the rickety rescued bookshelf and have the space by my bed have room for another bookshelf or something - anything to give me more storage space in general. Possibly a DVD rack for the various DVDs and game boxes that clutter up the spot by my makeshift desk. These are all probably things I should have done ages ago, but I didn't have a solution then and I sure as hell don't have a solution now. Though I suppose I'm closer now than I was. Basically MOAR FURNITURE. Bah.

Right. I really should do at least part of Clean All The Things Day so that I can take out the rubbish on my way out to the grocery shopping before the rain sets in again. And I'll see what I can do about the storage space situation while I'm at it. (I r a mof'ing adult, yo.)

So ... today kind of sucked and then there was less of the suckage. Which is always a bonus because day of entire suck is never fun.

Okay, so the situation is this: my hospital now finds itself not as much in need of a float secretary as it was. However, they have no desire to lose me as an employee - something about how "there is dead weight here but you are so very much not it" - so they found me a department that needs my help. It's predominantly a typing position, which is fine with me; it's what I'm good at, after all. However, there are two admins in that department and they are both ... well ... 'blindingly incompetent and wilfully negligent' seems to be putting it mildly. Office manager turned around to the one of them that was actually in this week and said, "Look; she'll do the typing, you'll do the admin". Which makes sense because the only available desk in the hospital is in a completely different building across the bloody square again. But that was the message - I do the typing, they do every other bit of admin crap, because they're the ones with the access to the doctors.

So today, I'm merrily typing away and it comes up that there's a few patients who did not attend their appointments and need to have new ones booked. There's only three or four of them, so no problem, right? I take the patients' names and hospital numbers and email them to this guy, figuring that he can probably talk to the consultants and get these patients slotted in somewhere. So he emails me back saying, "What, don't you have access to the patient bookings?" My response: "Yes, but ... you're the one with the access to the doctors and they're the ones who can tell you if there needs to be a clinic overbooking. That's a thing I can't do, seeing as I'm the one sitting in a desk in an entirely different building." His response: "You have all the information you need; call patient bookings if it needs overbooking and sort it out." Except ... no, because I don't know which clinic should be overbooked to fit these people, how urgent it is, how soon the consultants want them seen ... and besides, I am the one doing the typing, for fuck's sake! Plus his attitude stinks about the whole thing, like I'm dumping excess work on him when I'm the one actually freeing him up to do the admin stuff he's shirking. Besides, I know for a solid fact that he spends most of his time on any given day reading kickboxing chat forums online. I admit to going online when I'm at work but it's not continuously and I get the work done.

It didn't help that there was a situation that started yesterday that presisposed me to being pissed off with this guy. See, I got saddled with typing up a couple of discharge summaries. The consultant changes registrars on a far-too-regular basis to keep up with, and they're all crap at putting their full names anywhere on the tapes, in the notes, anywhere that would help me edit the signatory on the letter template. So since it was coming up to the end of the day and I had no idea who this registrar was who had dictated these discharge summaries, I emailed the admin guy and said, "Okay; I've typed these up but I don't know the name of the registrar, since he only put an abbreviation of his first name on the envelope in which he stashed the tape. Since you're the one in the same building as the doctors, could you make some inquiries as to who actually dictated these discharge summaries and edit the signatory line accordingly, please?" Then I went home for the day.

So this morning, I got an email from the consultant bitching me out for not changing the signatory on the discharge summaries. It seems that the admin guy, either at a loss himself or (more likely) not being bothered to make anything like an inquiry about it, just sent the hospital numbers of the patients on to the consultant with no comment about the email I'd sent and the fact that I knew full well that the signatory line was wrong and needed to get someone who could ask the fucking doctors to sort it out. So I got into shit from the consultant because he couldn't so much as ask a fucking question. And then this bullshit about the patient bookings. The boy is lazy as unholy fuck. And don't even get me started about his on-again, off-again colleague in that department. The entire place is chaos because those two can't be bothered to keep things even remotely orderly, and then they expect me to sort it out when I'm not even in the fucking building.

So, since I had no intention of doing their jobs for them as well as their own and had some serious issues with this guy's attitude, I spoke to my office manager, who calls me 'a godsend' on a weekly basis. I explained the situation as calmly as I was able and told her point-blank that I was not in any way satisfied with this guy's performance or ... well, any of it. She's terrified of losing me so she's going to sort it out as soon as humanly possible. So ... score. Still, it made for a stressful day.

Which might be why I decided to burn off some energy by doing that furniture-moving I was talking about earlier today. Yes, I said it was going to be a thing I did over the weekend but I just wanted to make something more efficient and orderly and tidy today, I guess. So I pushed the bed right up against the wall on one side and shifted my desk around and reorganised my books and tidied up the laundry pile (I need a hamper so badly you have no idea) and cleaned out the fridge and now there is so much more floor space and it's wonderful. I might get a rug or something. The carpet in here is kind of blah and a little atrocious. 'Neutral decorating scheme' my arse. One thing I did have to ask myself, in the course of reorganising my books, how many Stephen King books I actually have. They just kept appearing, like they're breeding or something. It also occurs that a couple of those books were 'borrowed' from my mother (she was the original King fan in the family and then started telling me off for reading 'trash' when I was a kid/teenager until I pointed out that the book in my hands came from her bookshelf, so I got some of hers so she could have room for whatever the hell swords-n-sorcery fantasy stuff she's reading these days) and are actually older than I am. I own paperbacks that have been on this earth longer than I have. That's ... just a really weird concept, somehow.

My net connection's been a lot better today (I switched the little filter box thing and that seems to have improved matters, though there have been a couple of interrupts this evening), so I went on to play a little bit of Warcraft. First, I rerolled my gnome (gnooooooooome!) - this one's called SisterQ after my Chicago Cultist of Ecstasy - I figure that's what said Cultist would be playing, though way, waaaaaaay higher level. After about five levels of that, I realised that I'd forgotten that the first thing I rolled up just out of curiosity but never really played was a Human Hunter. So I thought I'd switch that on a bit, see what a non-magic-using class was like. It never ceases to surprise me when I find out I enjoy the hell out of a melee class. Normally I'm all about the magic-users, but ... well, in FFXI it was Dragoon, Dragon Age: Origins it was Rogue (still can't work up enthusiasm for it in DA2, though...) and now, in WoW ... Hunter all the way, baby. There's just something about being able to run around with a blunderbuss and have your pet do all your tanking for you. It beats the shit out of Beastmaster in FFXI, where you have to charm passing mobs as your pets and they eventually they turn on you and you have to kill them, sometimes in the middle of fighting another damn mob (and worse yet, you don't even get XP for the kill when it's your former pet). I will eventually stick with a character long enough to get out of single-digit levels, but for now I'm having fun just noodling around with it.

So, tired but triumphant with a side order of having-fun. I suppose it's not the worst way I could end the week.

The house looks ... better, at least. This is always and ever a good thing. There's not a whole lot I can do with my room because there's just not enough space to put anything, but what the hell. At least the washing up's all done, the cat box has been cleaned and most of the Yuki-strewn litter has been hoovered up off the floor. (Oh, cholten99 should be aware that one of the attachments has this huge crack down it that makes trying to hoover to any reasonable degree impossible. Arse.)

Now I have to go pick up dinner ingredients and stuff. While I'm out, I really need some decent candle holders. An old bottle of unidentifiable alcohol really doesn't cut it somehow, the benefits of improvisation notwithstanding. After all, this is a bedroom, not an Italian restaurant ... and it has to be a chianti bottle for Italian restaurants anyway. Also an oil burner -- I think I left mine at the old Tooting flat.

Headless-chicken-dash continues ... now.

Ganked from kixie, first sentences meme:

( This is how I started all my months last year... )

Riveting stuff, huh?

I'm so unbelievably boooooooored. I actually cleaned my room this morning -- well, to a point, anyway. Removed all the garbage, organised some of the stacks, and played everyone's favourite game, "Oh, So That's Where I Left It", where you invariably find that thing you've been looking for on and off for the last several months under a pile of random crap. (Today's prizes included my nail file, several batteries, a pair of clean socks, my black scrunchie, my spare glasses and that CD of Exalted stuff that dodgyhoodoo burned for me ages ago.) If this keeps up, all this boredom, I might actually have to (*gasp* shock horror) clean out my rucksack. Or worse ... my handbag.

I'm also hungry, but surprisingly, I have little interest in the small pile of junk food that's sitting on top of one of the bookshelves. Two bags of Japanese gummies, a half-bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans (those are for emergencies, writing binges and sharing with weaselbitch, who's funny when she's overcaffienated), five and a half bags of Pixy Stix (yes, still -- must remember to bring a bag to 7th Sea tomorrow), the cola sweets and a box of Pocky and I'm still not interested. I want real food -- something with vitamins in it.

I want vitamins, I'm not interested in junk food, and I'm cleaning. There is something very, very wrong with me. Anybody got a cure for normalcy?