Well, Grandma went into care last Wednesday. Mum said it was very gruelling, as they decided to tell her the previous night. As predicted, Grandma was very panicked and upset, not really understanding what was going on, and kept accusing Mum and Sally of "stealing" her home (where she got the idea that she owns it I've no idea, because it's rented and always has been...)

Spoke to Mum at the weekend and she said that she'd been in to see Grandma on the Friday and Grandma was in a right state, still crying and distressed. She also told Mum that she had been too upset to eat anything since the previous day, but when Mum took her down to the dining hall she repeated this and one of the nurses said No, she had breakfast this morning and ate the lot!

The trouble is, she is so confused in her mind that you end up not believing anything she says, which is what makes the elderly so vulnerable to abuse. I mean, if she tripped over and bruised her knee, for example, and then she told Mum or Sally that one of the care staff pushed her or hit her, we just wouldn't know what to believe. But thankfully this facility has an excellent reputation and Mum and Sally both feel very confident in the level of care she will get. 

Anyways, Mum has decided that me and her deserve a holiday, so we will be going away next year in the Spring, after Mum's sale completes. We could both really use one earlier, but so much stuff is not open until April, and Easter falls early next year, so we'd have to contend with school holidays. Also our Lucy is away through the middle of April on her charity trek, and if we're away during that then Mum will be fretting that we're incommunicado. So we're looking at the last week of April/first week of May.

So I've been looking around for nice holiday destinations and have been producing one of my famous shortlists (usually famous for being LONG, not short!) Our ideal destination will be somewhere that has nice sunny beaches, a pool, and sufficient shops, bars and restaurants without being overrun with sweaty English chavs. And we need to be within easy walking distance of both the beach and the restaurants/shops/etc. And we'd like there to be some local things of interest we can go see, like historical sites. Also, we want at least an apartment rather than just a hotel room, or for preference, a private villa. 

I suppose that sounds like we want the moon on a stick! But even with my exhausting requirements, I've so far got 32 strong contenders spread across Cyprus, the Algarve, Menorca and Mallorca. I'm also considering Crete, but I'm having difficulty finding affordable flights. And I still haven't looked into Turkey, Malta, Italy or mainland Spain. 

Feeling very bouncy and happy at the thought of sunshine, sea, sand and sangria! Realistically, I haven't had a good holiday since my honeymoon with Pat in 2002. 2006 - Mallorca with Pat and Simon, very stressful as we were at the point of breaking up; 2003 - Corfu with Pat, Simon and Eddie, and we all know how that one turned out. So I think both Mum and I deserve a good break!

In other unrelated news, I managed to completely destroy my beloved Bagpuss alarm clock. This was through total fuckwittery on my part which I am too embarassed to relate fully, but suffice to say Bagpuss ended up falling onto a hard surface, the display broke and the alarm was impossible to actually turn off once it had started going. Alas! So I have replaced him with a cheap and cheerful travel alarm, which I'm sure is far more adult and mature, but is much less friendly than Bagpuss waking me with his "*YAWN* It's time to wake up! And when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up too. It's time to wake up, you saggy old baggy old cat-person, it's time to wake up!"

Perhaps that will teach me not to be such a clumsy fuckwit in future, although I somehow doubt it, LOL.

WTF is wrong with Sarah? She keeps digging in the fresh bag of cat litter, until she pulls the whole thing onto the floor, sending expensive cat litter cascading across the floor. Then she sits in the middle of the mess, looking pleased. It's like she's some sort of cat litter fetishist!

I have now managed to squeeeeeeze the bag into one of the cupboards, which is annoying because it strains my back to have to bend down and drag it out.

Damn you, strange cat behaviour!

Last Friday evening my landlord called round unexpectedly.

I had come home from work and gone straight to bed for a nap as I'd had a rough night the night before, so when he knocked on the door, it woke me, and I was all dopey.

He had called to arrange to deliver a new fridge, as I had reported that the existing one was leaking continually which was making a right mess.

He said that he'd come round on Tuesday night with the new fridge, but that I wouldn't be able to plug the new one in for several hours, as the gases have to settle (I knew this - Paul and I had managed to break our fridge when we moved house in 1999 by switching it on immediately.) So he would call round on Weds morning to move it into its final position and switch it on for me.

Obviously I was still half asleep because I thought he'd said that he'd take the old one away on Tuesday evening when he brought the new one. So when I got home last night I took everything out of the old fridge and bagged it up and put it in the cupboards hoping it would keep relatively cool, and chucking everything I thought would spoil.

Of course he then turned up with the new one and said he would leave me the old one until this morning as otherwise I'd be without a fridge overnight. And then he looked at me as if to say, "Ahh, poor thing, her mind is going!"

So then I had to put everything back in the old fridge. Doh!

On the plus side, the new one is full size, so I will be able to shop at Iceland and fit lots of good value frozen stuff in it. A good freezer really is a godsend when you're single because almost every fresh foodstuff I buy comes in too great a quantity for me to use it all before it goes off. 

While I was putting stuff in the cupboards, I made an unwelcome discovery in what used to be my old "crisps, bisciuts and other snacks" cupboard, which I haven't been in since I started the diet. One whole and very rotten swede, which has probably been there about 6 weeks. I remember buying it, and I remember trying to make something one night for which I'd bought it, and then going "Bugger! I thought I'd bought a swede, but I must not have, as it's not in the vegetable cupboard!" How it migrated to the crisps cupboard I'm not sure, but it left a lovely squishy mess for me to clean up :-p

In other news, the kittens were speyed (spayed?) last week and are recovering fine and being just as naughty and cheeky as ever. I got home last night and then didn't come running up to meet me like they normally do, and even after I called them, they didn't come. So I went upstairs with horrible visions that either I'd left a window open and they'd escaped, or that I'd left the toilet lid open and that they'd fallen in and drowned... but it turned out they'd managed to pull my dressing gown off the hook on the bedroom door and it had fallen down and blocked the door, trapping them in the room. I don't know how long they'd been stuck there but I didn't find any smelly surprises under my bed, so probably not very long!

Scamps has managed to break off a bit of the window blinds in the lounge by climbing up and attacking them, and Sarah has taken to trying to steal food off my plate while I'm eating - it's rather disconcerting as I will be sitting eating my tea in front of the telly, and all of a sudden a paw will flash up from underneath the tray and hook whatever it can get, yank it off the plate, and then Sarah will dash out with the food in her jaws and leg it into the kitchen! It doesn't seem to matter what I'm eating as the other night she stole the discarded stem of my stuffed pepper! 

They are having their stitches out tomorrow, and then off to the cat-sitter for the weekend, as it's lucy_pointycatand rhandolph's wedding on Saturday! And then when I get back, I will be letting the kittens go outside into the garden, which will be a big saving on cat litter, I hope, since they appear to practically poo out their bodyweight every day...

Went down to London on Friday for a weekend of wedding shopping with lucy_pointycat. 

It all started rather inauspiciously...

I had decided on Thursday night that I would catch the bus to the station rather than a cab, as a) it would be a lot cheaper and b) my experience with cabs in this city has been somewhat patchy... i.e. half the time they don't turn up at all, let alone on time.

So I set off to catch the 120 at 7.24, which should have got me to the station at about 8.05 - my train was due at 8.27, so this would give me plenty of time to collect my tickets, get a bottle of water, etc.

I was at the bus stop for 7.20, but no 120 turned up by 7.30. The 41 came along, and I thought, shall I get that, but then decided not to, as it doesn't stop at the station and I'd have a much longer walk down the hill. Anyway, I thought, the 7.34 120 should be here any minute.

Of course, 7.34 came and went with no sign of the 120. At this point I was starting to freak out and thinking, should I just phone a cab now? but hampered by that dilemma of "If I do, the bus will turn up immediately, plus the cab will get stuck in traffic and we'll probably end up following the bus into town..."

Finally a 120 turned up at 7.42. I don't know if it was the 7.24 really late, the 7.34 eight minutes late, or the 7.44 two minutes early, but I didn't stop to ask. I am guessing it was the really late 7.24, because we then picked up multitudes of passengers at every stop, to the point where we stopped taking any more passengers at Manor Top because the bus was full! So of course that slowed us down again.

Eventually we got to Pond St at about 8.20, so I forced my way to the front, jumped off, and legged it to the station. Of course, there was an old geezer in front of me at the FastTicket collection machine dithering over the buttons, but the good news was, the screens were showing that the 8.27 to St Pancras was standing at platform 8. The bad news was the platform 8 is the furthest one away. 

Finally the old geezer finished dithering and I swept him aside, banged my credit card in the machine and punched in my reservation code. The machine spat out three tickets - my outbound, return, and receipt, I assumed, so I thrust them into a pocket and legged it over to platform 8.

Of course, by the time I'd finished barging people out of the way, the platform was empty. I went to the Information kiosk, where I was informed that yes, I had missed the 8.27, but not to worry, there was another St Pancras service leaving at 8.36. Just one small problem - my ticket, being an advance booking, wasn't transferrable. I would have to buy another ticket. Argh! With the prospect of having to spend about another £100 or so, I asked if there was anything they could do. The nice information lady advised me to speak to the "train manager" when the St Pancras train arrived and see if he would let me travel.

So a couple of minutes later the Train Manager was examining my tickets and looking at my earnest, pleading face. "First class, eh? Alright love, on you go," he said, which was frankly amazingly lucky! I scrambled on and plonked myself in the plush first class carriage (first time I've ever been in one) and tried to catch my breath.

The train set off, and about 10 minutes later the train manager came round to collect the tickets. He asked for mine (even though he'd already seen them) but then said, no, this is your return ticket, where's your outbound? Puzzled, I searched my pockets, but lmew I'd already given him everything the machine had given me. I said, "But there's two tickets there, aren't there?" It turned out one of them was my seat reservation and the other one was my actual ticket. 

I worked out afterwards what it was - the reservation service had given me two collection codes, but when I'd put the first one in, because it spat out three tickets, I of course thought that it was being intelligent and had given me both. And being in a mad panic to get to the platform, of course I didn't check them all over.

Anyway - the very nice Train Manager obviously decided that since he'd let me on in the first place, and hearing my pathetic "But that's all I was given!" cry, that he wasn't going to worry about it, and with an "Oh well, never mind love" he went off to check on other customers' tickets!

As the attendant who served me my (free) tea a few minutes later put it, "I should count yourself lucky, love, because the train manager I travelled with yesterday would have definitely not let you travel!"

Anyway I will have to finish this later as the data I've been waiting for has just become available and I need to do some work!

Am I the only person screaming "Who the hell cares??" at the TV, radio and newspapers?

Who in their right mind gives a flying fuck whether two teenagers, who they will never have any contact with in any way, are seeing each other or not, or care for all the gory details?

I can understand being interested in friends' and acquaintances' relationships. Even celebrities, to a certain extent, because if you buy someone's music or books or watch their films then you can sometimes feel like you have a sort of vested interest in them, or you wish them happiness, or you just like to see them in magazines so you can check out what they're wearing.^*

But the royal bloody family? Honestly, who gives a shit? These people add nothing of any value whatsoever to society, and that includes cheap entertainment, because they're too tame and insipid to even give us a good old drugs and booze scandal, the chinless wankers.

Catching sight of the headlines today or hearing the radio news has felt like being in the bloody girls' toilets at the sixth-form disco. It was so irritating on my way home that I had to plug my MP3 player into my radio via the fag lighter. Thank god for my Rio; without it I would surely have committed some mighty sins of road rage by now.

---

Ah, I see my PMS has arrived...

*(Or conversely rejoice in your darkest heart when they break up with someone, so that your feverish sexual daydreams may have an extra slice of reality as you imagine them bumping into you in a club and finally realising that you are The One and whisking you back to their room for an evening of champagne and rumpy-pumpy. Ahem.)

A quick catch up, because I'm running some stuff in Excel that takes ages... dipping in and out of this entry while I wait for the system to catch up with me. (I have no patience to sit staring at the screen watching the damn windows hourglass turn over and over and over...)

Work stuff

Things are really busy at work, as we have a new catalogue about to launch. It's taking me longer than I expected to do practically everything, due to a) the server being very slow and b) the appalling lack of historical data available. Let me give an example on this latter point:

My boss asked me to pull together a report to show the numbers of calls arriving by half-hour interval on certain key dates last year. This was to give an idea of whether we could reduce the centre opening hours around the bank holidays this year. I confidently asserted that it would take me no more than 4 days to collate the data and put it in an appropriate format.

Hahaha... Firstly I found that there was no data in electronic format on the network drives. WTF?! When I asked the MI (Management Information) team about this, they pointed me to a cupboard with a load of paper printouts of interval reports. But, they said, this wasn't going to help me much as it only had the Sheffield data on there and not Bradford. Argh!

Then I discovered that the meagre data which had been scraped up by the bloke who was in my position before was iffy, as he'd taken it from a data dump that we had subsequently discovered was using the wrong applications. So it was back to the drawing board.

I approached the lady who does the telephony stuff for both sites, Chris. She said she could create a report - or three reports actually, to get all the sites' data - which would show me what I needed. Great! There's just one problem... the PC on which the reports are run isn't connected to the network - so how to get the data onto my PC?

Finally, I came up with a solution - using floppy disks. Of course, there were no floppies available in the building, so I ended up having to go to PCWorld and buying two boxes of floppies. (The guy at the till looked at me as if I had just stepped off the Ark, and told me, "Ooh, do you know, I don't think I've ever sold any of these before!" I was tempted to pin his ears back with a treatise on how we used audio casettes "in the old days", but refrained.)

So I've spent the last 4 working days copying disks, taking them back upstairs to my PC, stripping the data off them, reformating the disks, bringing them back downstairs, running another report, copying to disk... etc. The reports are so big that many will only fit one to a disk, even though I only need three columns of data. I can't strip the data out before writing to disk because the Reports PC doesn't have Excel installed.

Jesus! It's as if someone has gone around making everything as difficult as possible on purpose!

My boss is hardly ever here, and my email still isn't set up, so several times I have embarked on a piece of work only to be told I need more information, or the layout isn't right for what she wants, so I have to redo the whole thing again.

Well, I've not even been here a month yet, so hopefully this is just teething troubles!...

Simon stuff

Pat called me last week and said that he was bringing forward his plans for moving to Cardiff. Simon will be going back down with Cara immediately after the Easter hols, while Pat finishes off the arrangements for moving, transfer of benefits office, packing, etc., then he will join them a couple of weeks after.

The reason it's kicking off so soon is that Simon's having problems at school (again) with a boy who's continually picking on him, getting in fights and damaging Simon's bag.

Personally I would have preferred to go to see the school and tell them to sort it out, because this is just now teaching Simon to run away from his problems. But it's not my decision :-(

So, I have booked us a photography portrait session this Friday (which I got a big discount on through work) so we can have some shots done and pick the ones we like best, then get a big print. So I will have one or two that I can frame and hang up, and Simon can choose one to take with him to Cardiff.

I've also got all of Easter off work (shock! I have to get used to taking bank holidays off now that I'm not operational staff!) so I've arranged cover at Renderosity so we can have 4 days together with no interruptions, just doing whatever stuff we feel like. Hopefully the weather will be fair, so we can go to Clifton park and go out for some walks.

Then I will have him on the Saturday 14th April, and then he'll be going off with Cara on the 15th :-(

It's not like I didn't know this was coming, I just thought we would have another 3 months or so, until the end of the school year. But at least I have been mentally preparing myself for it for the last few months, so it's not a total bolt from the blue. But it will be such a wrench at first. And I'm sure he'll be on the phone every night telling me how miserable he is.

General stuff

So with all this going on, I have been a bit low, but trying to keep a positive outlook. Had Oona over to dinner on Tuesday evening, which was a good laugh, even though we killed two and a half bottles of wine and I didn't get to bed until 1am, so I was both hungover and tired yesterday, but hey, you only live once, and these things have to be done from time to time!

I've been eaiting healthily, but not strictly, as I can't find it in my heart to waste time trying to persuade Simon to eat (for e.g.) an omelette and salad instead of macaroni cheese, when we have so little time left. I'm particularly liking things we can make together, which unfortunately does tend to be the junkier stuff like cakes and biscuits. I did make him seared trout with sweet potatoes last weekend, and he helped me with the sauce for the fish. Unfortunately, he didn't like the sauce, and he said there was too much spicy relish on the potatoes. *Eye_Roll* at children's palates!

I've introduced a "Critique Group" at Renderosity which is generating a lot of interest and approval. My ultimate hope is that it will generate a real cultural shift away from all the ego-stroking and towards a genuine atmosphere of learning and growth. So far, it's working, but it's one of those things that it can be hard to sustain (because giving thoughtful critiques is a lot harder, and more time-consuming, than just saying "OMG i luv it ur so fab hunny xoxo".) Still, we've currently got more than 50 signups, which is impressive and hopeful.

I bought a Vax carpet washer last week, because my living room carpet is getting really stained, mainly due to Simon knocking over drinks (on average, one per visit.) If I don't do something, I'm going to lose my deposit when I finally come to move on (not that I'm planning on it, but...) and every time I look at it, I do a kind of mental "Urgh." Gonna put that round when I get in tonight. Knowing my usual reverse-midas-touch with these things, I will probably end up blasting filthy water all over the walls, or something.

Trying to look at the positive side of not having Simon every weekend, I will have a lot more time for projects, so I'm hoping to expand my Renderosity store some. At present I rarely have time to knock out a render, let alone a product.

I'm waiting on an Amazon order at present: "Call Center Forecasting and Scheduling", "Seasons" expansion for Sims 2, "Flushed Away" on DVD, which both Simon and I loved in the cinema and are really looking forward to, and... the "Happy Feet" DVD with exclusive Amazon limited edition Mumble plush toy! KAWAII! Of course, being a cheap bitch at heart, I went for the super saver delivery, which has the advantage of being free, but the disadvantage of making you wait until all items are in stock before it dispatches your order. Hence "Happy Feet" is already out in the shops, but "Flushed Away" isn't until next week, so I won't get my order until probably next Friday. And of course I'm now rabid to see "Happy Feet" again and wishing I'd picked the more expensive shipping option!

Uggghhhh... getting so bored of this slow server response. It's taken me 3 and a half hours to do as much as I have, and I'm sure if it responded as quickly as I'd expect I could have been finished in 90 minutes. Oh well. The rest of this task should take me up to lunchtime, then this afternoon I can get on with something a bit more interesting. Hopefully.

The kittens are getting cuter and more adventurous by the day. Sarah is starting to get inquisitive about the outside world, and I have to be careful that she doesn't escape when I'm coming in and out of the house. I won't be letting them out until after they've been speyed(sp?) in June. Both of them, for some reason, have taken to licking and chewing my hair, which is a very strange sensation, especially when it's what wakes you up! I really wish I had a video camera right now, because they do so many cute and funny things that I'd like to capture. I've got my camera phone but that's not decent quality.

...SHIT. I've just discovered that one of my carefully-built spreadsheets is pulling the data from the wrong place on another spreadsheet, which means all my reports for one whole brand are to cock. BUGGER! Oh fuck this, I'm going to have some lunch and then come back and redo it...