Well, we're home. And by home, I mean HOME! All my stuff is unpacked and put away and everything. As happy as I am to be home (because, I DO tend to start getting panic attacky when I'm not in my own surroundings), I'm kind of sad that it's over already. You know, like all the build up to Christmas and BOOM! it's over. [sigh]
Having left Stoke and Bally's quite wonderful Sky TV (complete with good ol' Sky Sports), I've found myself in London with people who have access to ESPN instead, so I've traded one load of Premier League football for another. Which is odd.
ESPN are a weird bunch. 5:30pm on Saturday seems like a very strange time for football anyway, but that's not the issue. The problem is their closedown time. ESPN (over here, at least) ends for the night at 4am. Ordinarily that's not a problem (seriously, what's on at 4am? They show more German football than anything else!), but, say, if you're bored and feel like watching the MLS Cup final (kickoff was 2am GMT), it'd be nice to be able to do so in full. Not, for example, watch LA Galaxy boss the first half, Real Salt Lake come back in the second, and then be left with no idea what happened during extra time and penalties because the channel decided to shut down for the night five minutes in.
Fucknuts.
Apparently RSL won, which is moderately saddening. (I was supporting the Galaxy, due to a lingering loyalty towards David Beckham from his Manchester United days...)
contemplative1. I watched Twilight (the first one) last week. I remain immune to the charms of Mr Pattinson (I tried typing RPattz but I just can't) as my heart belongs to Eric, but it was OK. Bella was one of the most unlikeable people ever, though. She takes everything and gives nothing. (And doesn't deserve her friends.) Self-obsessed little twit.
2. I need to fit in a visit to the cinema to see 2012. H's friend JP and his partner have suggested Twilight: New Moon. Groan.
3. I am on annual leave for a week, starting tomorrow. Yay!
4. I have to log in to work on Wednesday morning to cover some reports which have failed to go to the customers in my absence several times, so am basically restoring their faith. Boo!
5. H and I will do our monthly restaurant visit thing sometime this week. Maybe tomorrow. Yay!
6. I have to lose 4lb by the weekend. While on holiday. *Mission Impossible theme plays*
7. At the weekend, I will be meeting Callie Helen at Collectormania and seeing George Takei, John Barrowman, Anthony Michael Hall and Misha Collins. Wheeeee!
8. I am really tired and must go to bed now.
The stars aligned this weekend, as the football team Andy supports (Middlesbrough) played the football team I support (Nottingham Forest) for the first time in over ten years. We'd said we'd go, and go we did. I sat with the Middlesbrough fans, which meant I had to cheer when they scored a goal... after five minutes. The Forest keeper could only palm a fierce shot back out to one of their strikers, who knocked it past him. Bah.
At half-time, the three presenters of the BBC's Top Gear programme came on to the field to promote their roadshow, which happened to be taking place in Middlesbrough that weekend. They arrived wearing the shirts of Middlesbrough's local rivals, Newcastle United, but soon changed them after the booing. 3000 tickets (I think) were made available to fans of the home side (as Jeremy Clarkson himself said, "But Nottingham - you can't come!", which riled the Forest supporters considerably).
The Forest team stepped up a gear in the second half, and managed to equalise when Robert Earnshaw fired in a beautiful free-kick from just outside the area. I had to not cheer this time, and did a pretty good 'turn away in disgust' (honestly, I should make my living on the stage, darlings) whilst my brain jumped around like a balloonatic. That's my word, by the way... but you can use it if you like. Honours were even - which helped on the journey back!
Tomorrow I'm going to see Ed Byrne perform stand-up comedy in my home town. More on that story later.
gratefulAlmost ready to leave for the airport. I'm showered and packed, just waiting for Patrick to get out of the shower and we can be on our way.
I had a fabulous lie-in until 10am so I feel fantastic, and I'm off tomorrow, as well. Yay!
Since I still can't yet run (without pain following, anyway), I'm going to drag my bike out today and see whether I can manage cycling. If I can, it'll be great, because I'm getting very little exercise beyond running about at work, which, y'know. Also my textbooks have FINALLY arrived (there seems to have been a mix-up with the couriers) and so I now have 2 fabby core textbooks! Hurrah indeed.
The meeting yesterday went really really well; I arrived early enough to set the room up and sort out an urn as well as the tea and coffee. We got all the forms filled in and finished reasonably quickly, so then we moved onto talking about our presentation. We will be creating 3 versions of it, with the longest one (about half an hour) saved for the District Conference that we'll be attending while we're over there. At this stage we're just playing about with our own parts, which will be roughly 6 slides each. We have to introduce the region, as well as ourselves, so I'm taking County Durham, the others will each have Newcastle/Gateshead, Northumberland and Tees Valley.
We also discussed uniform - we'll be expected to have a formal uniform for certain occasions e.g. Conference, and a less formal team uniform of (we think, maybe,) matching polo shirts. We decided on pale blue shirts with charcoal grey blazers/trousers, which will be a bit softer than black or navy.
Finally, I am knitting some gloves to go with my nice new hat. I bought some delicious cream coloured merino, so it'll be super-warm. I've almost finished the first glove; 2 fingers remaining, then I need to sew up the seam. And then I can start the second. I need to get on with it, it's turned damn cold recently.
Right, I should probably get off my lazy arse now and go poke about with the bike.
cheerfulAnother long day. I'm even more tired than yesterday as I went to bed at 3am and got up about 8:30am. It was a great day though. Got to sit next to Alan Tudyk and Mark Sheppard and talked to both of them. Jewel didn't sit next to me but I got to talk to her as well. I won an signed "Terafyn' Space Monkey" signed by Nathan in a Silent Auction and had Jewel sign it later. There's more to post about but again, tired. Flight home is tomorrow.
Very tired, had an awesome day with seeing Yan and Raphael Feldman (who are hysterically funny) and Morena Baccarin (who seemed a little overwhelmed?) and Adam Baldwin (AWESOME! and he sat next to me at the meet and greet Desert Party...SQUEEE!). I'll update more when I have time.
Btw, this is also a drunk post but I'm using my back button tonight...you know, habit.
Yesterday, work was so fucking horrific (and I was so fucking stressed) that by lunchtime I got wine with my meal. The afternoon was considerably better, mostly because I had mellowed out from the wine.
Today I will be out for most of the day with my America trip people, filling in CRB forms and goodness knows what else. It's ok though, there will be biscuits.
Also, I would post about the Doctor Who preview from Children In Need, but I'm all squeed out. WHAT?
chipperWas unable to get to sleep for a long time last night. Fortunately, so was H, and as we were under no pressure to get up early the next day, we just lay there and talked and snuggled. It was nice.
Today we have done bugger-all. Well, I made the usual cooked brekky, walked to Tesco and got Star Trek on DVD, but that's it. After working all that extra time on Friday, it was good to just chill out. We've mucked about on the computer, snuggled on the sofa watching TV... we might be productive tomorrow but there's no hurry as after one day of work on Monday, we're on annual leave again for a week. YAY!
This time of year may be dark and miserable, but all my holidays are coming up in short succession and that rocks.
We got to the hotel in LA around 5pm tonight. We hooked up with Laurie and her son and had dinner. They were still on EST so they went to rest after dinner. Patrick and I went outside for a cigarette and met a bunch of other people here for the convention so we stayed outside for a little while. Now, we're just hanging out in our room but we're getting excited for tomorrow.
Stupid blurty, still on EST, had to correct the date and time again.
We spent the afternoon at Sea World today. It's one place we always love to visit and we have to see the Shamu show. We did get soaked but luckily we dried off fairly quick but DAMN that water was cold. We're back at Deb's for the night and we decided to skip the San Diego Trolley Tour tomorrow so we could get an early start and hopefully miss rush hour traffic. I've decided to send some of my luggage back via UPS so we don't have to lug quite as much with us on Monday so we'll stop there before heading to LA and then we'll be at the hotel all weekend.
Okay, I know it doesn't look like I posted yesterday but I did, just take my word for it. I marked it private because it's a copy of the letter I sent to the Better Business Bureau in response to the stupid company who, so far, won't refund my money for that DC AfterDark Tour back in October.
As for today's post:
Yesterday, we went to Hard Rock Hollywood for lunch with Rian and that went back to her place. She made us chicken noodle with mashed potato and we watched t.v. and played Scattegories and Uno. Good times, good times. Unfortunately, we had to leave her this morning. We headed out around 10:30am for the Wild Animal Park. We enjoyed ourselves and got to see the things we wanted to see and do the things we wanted to do. We both wanted to take the Safari Tour - done, I wanted to feed the Lorikeets - done and Patrick wanted to see the Cheetahs - done. We left there and headed to Target so I could get some hair spray since mine had spilled in my luggage. Luckily, it was in a plastic bag so the damage was minimal. I also ended up getting How I Met Your Mother S2, Religulous and Zack & Miri. (I also bought The Curious Case of Benjamin Button later on at a convenience store). From Target, we headed to Dave & Busters (a restaurant/arcade). My cousin, Debbie, met us there and we had supper and then played in the arcade.
Edit: I just noticed that this posting was listed for Thursday, at 2:28am, instead of Wednesday, 11:38pm. Strangely enough, my Blurty seems to still be on EST instead of PST. I corrected the date and time. I'm not bothering to correct the time on the actual Thursday entry since it's still on the correct day. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.
Arrived safely (and a little early) in LA this morning. Got to Rian's around 12:30pm. Went to In&Out Burger for lunch, took a nap and am now stuffed from a delicious dinner after taking a much needed nap. Jenn's chicken fried steak is well worth the trip and I'm totally going to be spoiled because Rian's making chicken noodles w/ mashed potatoes tomorrow. I'm going to burst by the end of this trip, let me tell you. Now, just hanging out with friends and having SUCH a nice time.
Apologies for the title, but I've already used Life On Mars, and, well... yeah.
( Doctor Who episode 4.16/30.16 The Waters Of Mars review )
excitedI have a cold. Wank. Waking up through the night and then being wide awake from 4.30am with no hope of going back to sleep is also Bad. My nose wasn't too awful first thing so it was mainly the bunged-up-ness and knackeredness, but during the morning the dam suddenly broke and it was Not Pretty.
Tonight I shall go to bed with a nice Lemsip and honey. And maybe put a sneaky shot of Drambuie in it.
Uggghhh.
I mean, a lot has happened since I last had a proper update. I went to London and saw WDers and got John Barrowman's autograph via Christine, and then a load of good stuff happened at work, and I could even talk about this house-hunting malarkey.
BUT INSTEAD I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT PONIES.
You see, Hasbroken (as they are maturely referred to on The Pony Boards) have decided to set up their own TV channel to brainwash kids with. And one of their Maybe Certainly Most Definite brands to get its own show? OMG PONIES!!1!
You'd think that I'd be punching the air about this, except... well, the ponies have changed
In the 80s, the ponies on TV looked like this, this and this. Then in the 90s came My Little Pony Tales, which we don't talkabout.
Then, when the Pony line was relaunched, we got a pretty middle-of-the-road cartoon with inoffensive design, such as this (y hallo thar, Pinkie Pie.)
Then. Hasbro rejigged the line, trying to make it cooler for older little girls. The result is a style which has caused uproar in really pissed off the Pony Community. The ponies in the cartoon, accordingly, now look like cartoon versions of THIS.
RUN AWAAAAAY.
Seriously, What is wrong with their heads?! And why are their hooves so freakishly huge?! Kiss mine, Hasbro.
TL:DR version: They Changed Ponies And Now They REALLY Suck.
annoyedI'll be in California in less than 24 hours! WOOT! I'm almost completely packed, just have those few odds and ends you can't pack until just before leaving. Also, I still think I've over-packed so I may go through things one more time. It's so much easier for guys. [sigh] According to my son, he's packing one pair of jeans (in case the ones he's wearing get too dirty, he said with a smile) and enough shirts, socks and underwear for the week. Knowing him, everything will just be crammed in the suitcase too.
He's been working for hours, but H has almost finished repairing the fence. He refused to go the concrete panel/professional route (an argument for another time as I just wanted the panels back up), but went for new wooden posts and metposts to delay rotting, and I fear the joins still aren't tight enough to make the fence solid against gales, but it's better than nothing - and how - at least people can't see into our garden now! He's just (hah) got to put the surround for the back gate back and drill a new hole for the lock, but otherwise things are looking so much better. I'm very grateful he's so good at DIY.
Actually, this has turned out to be a small blessing, seeing as the posts needed replacing anyway, and while he's been doing that, I've been tidying up in the garden (weeding, pruning) and cleaning the windows and doors at the back to keep him company. More productive than sitting on the sofa feeling sorry for myself and watching TV, at any rate. I'm now fixing dinner and logging some more CDs so they can go up into the loft and create more space (a project on the To Do List). 1,510 songs logged so far...
I've got about 1000 words left to produce on this wretched essay, then go through and standardise/check all my footnotes, work out some kind of bibliography and attach appendices. Then I have to print the bastard, post 2 copies to uni, and send it electronically for marking. (Obviously I can't do any of the posting until tomorrow.)
DOCTOR WHO IS TONIGHT. :-D
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