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It's been a funny week. ( Two stand-up comedians in four days?! - Rated 15 for language and mild pooing of self ) |
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Friends Blurty for Gayle.
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| Saturday, November 28th, 2009 |
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It's been a funny week. ( Two stand-up comedians in four days?! - Rated 15 for language and mild pooing of self ) |
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| Friday, November 27th, 2009 |
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| I had a very pleasant visit with my stepmother and her sister this evening along with my two sisters, Dawn and Darlene. Norma (my stepmom) and Aunt Mary were down to spend the holiday with their mom in Massachusetts yesterday and came down to Connecticut to visit us today at my sister Dawn's. My stepmom is awesome and I hate that she lives a little over 5 hours away as I would love to spend more time with her. My birth dad died over 6 years ago but she is and always will be family. Pat came with me even though we took separate cars so that he could bring Karlie home when it was getting closer to her bedtime since Megan's working tonight. My son Zach was able to make it up for a little bit as well. Finally, everyone had left except me so I could spend a little one on one time with Dawn, which we haven't had a chance to do in AGES. I still didn't stay to late since she had been up since 3am. She's one of those Black Friday shoppers. I was home by 9:45 and can now sit back and catch up on my shows that recorded while I was in California. Once those are caught up on in the next few days, I can start watching Christmas DVDs. | ||||
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OK, I have reconciled myself to the fact that we're not going to achieve all that I had planned for this week, but we have done some more stuff. For example: we've chosen a replacement floor for our kitchen as ours is so horrible and manky I can't stand it any more. Which also motivates me to get the skirting-boards and doors done in the kitchen done in advance of installation and H to tidy up the pipes. Also, we replaced the living-room lightshades as I've shredded the existing ones with my lightsabres so badly over the years. The new ones aren't all that different, funnily enough, except for being cylindrical instead of spherical. I'm very happy with them. Tomorrow I am going to Collectormania London. I have to get up at 7:30am (both days, thanks to stupid train schedules, even though Sunday's photoshoot isn't until 11:45am), but as H is giving me a lift to the station, this is an improvement on how much earlier I'd have had to get up if I were to include finding and paying for a parking space. Callie Helen's going to Saturday's event too, and we're hoping to meet Jazz afterwards! Which will be awesome. Have a great weekend, peeplets. |
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| Thursday, November 26th, 2009 |
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I hope all my American friends had a lovely Thanksgiving. I had a nice time at my sister Tracey's. Turkey, mashed potatoes and meat stuffing for dinner. Yeah, I'm not a fan of veggies. Great desserts too. I had chocolate pudding pie with whipped cream and some tapioca pudding. Then we came home and I stopped in next door at my in-laws to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving too. Two of my brothers-in-law were still there with their wives. The guys were in the living room and we womenfolk were in the kitchen when my m-i-l proceeds to tell my sisters-in-law that I'll be having surgery done and why. Yes, I felt my entire face turn bright red and I was so stunned I didn't even know how to react. I tried to play it cool but the more time that's passed, the more embarrassed and angry I've gotten about it. My husband was very apologetic for saying anything to his parents but he's lucky he has ambulance duty tonight and isn't home. Of course, I've been pretty informative here on blurty but for some reason, that's okay. I've kept the discussion to friends only and let's face it, we've talked about almost everything between here, the WD and LJ so not such a big deal (for me at least). |
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| Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 |
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A bit of a scrappy week so far. ( Read more... ) |
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| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 |
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| 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] | ||||
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| Monday, November 23rd, 2009 |
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1. 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. |
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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. |
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| Almost 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. | ||||
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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. |
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 |
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| Another 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. | ||||
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| Saturday, November 21st, 2009 |
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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. |
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 |
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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? |
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| Saturday, November 21st, 2009 |
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Was 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. |
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| Friday, November 20th, 2009 |
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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. |
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| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 |
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| 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. | ||||
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 |
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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. |
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| Monday, November 16th, 2009 |
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| 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. | ||||
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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 ) |
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I 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. |
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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 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. |
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| Sunday, November 15th, 2009 |
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| I'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. | ||||
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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... |
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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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Friends Blurty for Gayle.
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grateful.
cheerful.
annoyed.
