TOTKat: (hand coded) online journal of a girl geek since April 1999.
WARNING: contains personal opinions. A sense of perspective is required when reading.

[In times gone by this site was a vehicle for my personal rants and complaints. However, currently journal updates are likely to be erratic compared with previously.]

30th March

[10:30] - ...of course it is all well and good resetting the clock on the stereo which is supposed to wake me up, but given that it is armed to go off too early and the secondary alarm is needed to actually get me up and I'd not reset the time on that... Still, I got up with 10 minutes to get out of the house in time for the 08:54. Just.

[top]

29th March

[13:50] - So there I was, clearing away my lunch tray in the canteen and who is at one of the tills, buying his lunch? John Simpson. Cool or what?

[14:40] - Oh and I was bad on Saturday. Bought a suede jacket. Not in the sale! Well, I'd always wanted one. Aaanyway, to upgrade the PC or not to upgrade? That is the question. I do have holidays to think about. Hm.

[23:45] - I'm thinking this 'pretending to be a girl' thing I'm trying to pull off at the moment is rather hard to maintain. Not too sure how long it will last with the wearing presentable clothes in public and not looking too much like a geek/tramp/shapeless lump. Takes effort. And ironing. Bah.

[top]

25th March

[12:40] - Mmph. I is throughly shagged out. This is due to having been bloody minded and manhandling the sofa out into the front garden for the collection tomorrow, by myself. Had to take the lounge door off to do it and the fold-up bed part of the sofa kept popping out and jamming the whole thing in awkward places, then refusing to go back into the mechanism without a furious kicking from me. Various other bits of furniture moved and I haven't even had a cup of tea yet.

I ache and my fingers are tingly and scraped, from grabbing onto lumps of unsanded wood which I'd had to tear the fabric off to get a grip on the damned sofa. Still. It's outside now, in the wet, and the lounge feels bigger now. OK, so the bouncy Ikea chair is in there now, but without the sofa there's lots more space. The kitties really didn't like it for the 20 minutes or so that there was no way through from upstairs to the back door, due to the sofa being wedged in the hall. They seem OK now, though.

Now there's a buttload of dusting and hoovering to be done and I _hate_ that. And bottles to take to the bottle bank. Too tired after all that humping large lumps of furniture about. Bah.

[top]

24th March

[13:50] - Spent the day wandering down the Thames Path a bit yesterday and back to The Wier at Walton-on-Thames. Sadly, the food has taken a dive in quality and the beer wasn't much cop either.

This morning, I have mostly been being productive. Got lots of irritating little things done like hair cut, car wash and a repair. Then I decided to bite the bullet and buy something to wear to this wedding I'm going to in a couple of weeks. I appear to be now the owner of a pink(!) linen suit and it isn't even a trouser suit. What is the world coming to?

[14:25] And now I'm going through the obligatory "where's my hair gone?". Hmph. It needed quite a bit cutting off. Still, it looks and feels a lot healthier even with the hairdresser gunk they insist on putting in it at the end.

[top]

19th March

[13:15] - Ohgod! The weekend looks like a potential nightmare. From 19:15-23:00 tonight, then pretty much all day on Saturday. Not too happy about it really. Still, the show last night was OK, some very good bits, but Hugh Dennis was not on form... seemed rather not in the same world as everyone else at times.

[top]

18th March

[14:15] - Not a huge night last night, drink-wise, thankfully. Work isn't as horrid as it could be, though I go on call tomorrow so that could all go pear-shaped pretty quickly. Hey ho.

[top]

17th March

[12:50] - Mad busy work. Still there's a leaving do tonight and a show to go to tomorrow night...

[top]

16th March

[00:45] - Mmm. More than usual I am not looking forward to the impending week on call. The last one, although not totally silent, was the easiest ever in a lot of ways; possibly because some things that had been weighing on my mind had been alleviated in some ways. However, now that there are only three of us in the team; one on holiday, one on call and one interviewing prospective newbies, it is a bit rocky this week. It looks like there aren't too many new things to install/patch/whatever this week, so the workload won't be totally crushing, but the looming weekend is a tiny bit intimidating. I should get on and book that holiday.

Oh, and iPod is starting to look a bit sickly in the connectors department. So, I may just limp along with that not working 100% right, but then again... and there's a new sofa to get and new mattress and various silly bits of repairs around the house. Bah.

[top]

11th March

[10:35] - Well, the showers at the new office don't suck totally. They're not terribly powerful - my mixer shower at home is significantly better, but then that is better than a lot of power showers - but hot water comes out at a reasonable enough rate to do the job. I should maybe keep a towel in my desk drawer though, because using about 12 paper towels to get the worst of the water out of my hair is just silly.

[top]

10th March

[15:35] - So my domain is finally transferring to a competant registry, after a small hiccup with auth codes. *sigh* How is it hard? Anyway, I'd like to slap Bill Bailey for totally ruining any chance I ever had of listening to tunes like "Eye Of The Tiger" without thinking of his cockney versions. I mean, it isn't like that's a particularly good tune, but he's done it to so many things I might have listened to voluntarily...

[top]

9th March

[14:30] - So why is it that I can't seem to be able to find brushed cotton, men's pyjamas that aren't in stupidly pale colours and stupidly expensive in the UK? Hmm.

[top]

8th March

[17:30] - Finally, my domain is back. In case anyone had even noticed it was gone. *sigh* After much wailing and gnashing of teeth once the problem had been discovered on Friday evening, it has taken until this afternoon to solve the problem. Suffice to say, when I transferred my hosting away from Globalgold in January 2003, it was a Good Idea. Shame the domain transfer wasn't even completed. Anyway, now that I've paid the registry fees for the next two years, I'm shifting to a different registry. One I can trust not to screw things up. Still, at least mail has stopped bouncing now. Bah. It is a sad day when I'm excited to get spam.

[top]

3rd March

[10:50] - So I did some experimental cooking last night. Not hugely adventurous, but still Not A Recipe. It was pretty good and really quite hot; chicken with various veg (mushroom, red pepper, tomato and onion) cut into strips, with tarragon, chili, lime, sesame and poppy seeds in a pitta bread with a touch of mayonnaise. Kinda like Fajitas, but not quite. Nice with the equivalent of 1/2 bottle of Banrock Station (white) from the wine box even with cats demanding that I give them the olives from the side. You see, the olives A. are stuffed with anchovy and B. come from a can and cat logic states that any food in a can is cat food. I did given in and scoop out the stuffing from one olive and give it to Cat A. He wasn't sure, but then decided it was worth the effort. He went looney, racing around the house, for the rest of the night. *sigh*

[top]

1st March

[13:50] - I am not getting a cold. I may be phenomenally tired, but I am not getting a cold. No. However, I do need to do something about that IMAPd I'm running. It doesn't play nicely with the mail client on the Nokia 6600 so at the moment, I can download headers but the message bodies are impossible to retrieve. Which is irritating.

[top]