Well, it's been a month of changes and no mistake.

Mum and I have been talking about her selling her flat and moving up here with me since last year, when she realised she was going to have to sell up due to her lack of earnings while she was looking after Grandma.

She received an offer on her flat just before Christmas, but there have been really ridiculous delays on the completion, mainly because the solictor for the buyer at the bottom of the chain was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

The week after Grandma's funeral, we finally got notice that the sale was going through, but without much notice: completion date was just 5 days' time!

So whilst Mum was in a frenzy of packing, I went into work the next day and gave my notice in, the plan being for Mum to support me for a couple of months with the leftover money from her sale, until I get something a lot more to my taste.

My boss, being eager to get rid of me, agreed to release me that Friday, which was very handy with Mum arriving the following Monday!

There were, of course, last minute unpleasantnesses with my unpleasant boss, including her spitefully removing my systems access completely on the Thursday - which meant that I arrived on the Friday, having caught two buses to work (since my car was being fixed) to find I had nothing I could do, and that of course I couldn't salvage any of my spreadsheets which I'd produced and send them to myself at home for future use. (All resource planners do this when quitting a job. When you've spent nigh on 15 hours crafting a macro or pivot table from scratch, believe you me, you want to get all of the use out of it that you can!)

Anyway, nuts to all that, I'm free, free, free! Goodbye Otto with your stupid, stuck-in-the-seventies ideas about call centre management! Goodbye Evil BitchBoss, with your witless shoe-and-handbag fetish! Hahahaha!

Anyway, as I was saying, Mum arrived on the following Monday, and for the last two weeks, we've been settling in nicely, getting all Mum's stuff unpacked (well, most of it - we haven't got room to unpack it all.) We've had to go pretty slowly, because Mum had a really dreadful cough and cold when she arrived, which of course she then passed on to me, so we've both been hacking and sneezing and using masses of tissues, cough sweets and Night Nurse.

Mum tried to persuade me to sell all my comics as a job lot, but I refused, so we managed to find some better storage options for them, and at present I'm re-cataloging and indexing them, and will be listing a goodly bulk on eBay again, but definitely retaining a good number that I just refuse to ever sell. I suppose in some ways I'm a bit silly, because (for example) all of the Sandman comics, I've got in trade paperback collections. But at the same time, I can't bear the thought of letting them go, and not just because the value's going up, either. They're part of me, part of the person I was then, on my way to who I am now.

I've had a few nice surprises as I've gone through, too. A few older first editions, nothing spectacular, but certainly worth a few quid. And some things I'd completely forgotten about: an old copy of Sandman 23 which Simon Smith and I, in a fit of boredom one evening, decided to edit with our own wording for every other character but Morpheus. (The cover had got ripped, and we both already had another pristine copy.) I might have to upload some scans of some of the more inspired pages; I reckon the Fair Use clause on satire should allow me to print a few panels without enraging the copyright gods.

It's been nice having Mum here - it's horrible being on your own when you're ill. Although of course she gave me the bloody thing in the first place, so perhaps that evens out, LOL. But it IS nice having her here; I know she will push me to get out and get some exercise more, which should help with the weightloss thing (which is still going well; 15lbs lost now.)

The cats have definitely got used to Mum and are enjoying having someone around who sits on the sofa more often, although neither of them are really lap cats.

Mum has given both me and our Lucy a bit of money as a present, so I have blown mine (and some of me own money) on a new PC, which should arrive next week. It's a custom job, with 4gb RAM, a dual-core 2.3ghz processor, two HDDs, a lightscribe DVD writer, a TV card, internal card reader, AND a new TFT widescreen monitor. GEEKGASM!

Quick catch up of the last few days...

Went out to town last Friday with lots of the old resource planning gang from Crapita, including those of us who have moved on, and new boy Kieran, who disappeared halfway through the evening but seems a nice fella.

We started off in East 1 noodle bar off West Street, where we were served such enormous portions that none of us could finish (except Owen, who scoffed the lot!) and the quality was good, but the seating was that kind of wooden bench refectory-style which seems to be in fashion right now and plays merry hell with my back.

To our ever-lasting shame, nobody could work out how to split the bill equally nine ways, without using the calculator function of their mobiles. EXCEPT ME! Hahaha :-)

We then went on for drinks at a couple of pubs and then ended up back at Rhys' for a nightcap and an intellectual discussion about the merits of Shakira's videos. No, really. OK, it wasn't that intellectual, LOL. And once more I had terrible trouble getting a cab until I phoned Mercury, who have now moved to number one slot on my list. 

Had to go into work on Sunday and Monday morning to run the [insert appropriate epithet here] reports in preparation for my holiday due to Mum coming to visit. The damn MI didn't turn up on Sunday, so that was a complete waste of a journey to work, although I did spend the four hours before I gave up productively updating Facebook, which I am now favouring over MySpace since it has far less spammers and security holes.

So Mum arrived on Monday afternoon, and then spent the next 24 hours cleaning my house. No lie. To be fair, I hadn't been able to clean properly for some time due to my back pain, but also (as all the world knows) I fucking hate cleaning anyway. So I was quite happy to get a free cleaning service! She even bought her own equipment! 

So that took care of most of Tuesday, and on Wednesday we went out to Castleton with the intention of having a good walk, but unfortunately it started pissing down with rain, so after poking through the village for a bit (where i nearly had a wallet accident in a secondhand bookshop) and visiting the church, we decamped to the Plough at Hathersage for some lunch. 

Waved Mum goodbye on Thursday morning and then into the bank for a review with my "personal account manager", a very nice lady called Helen who has managed to save me nearly £80 a month on my loan repayments by renegotiating it in the face of complete indifference from head office. Hooray! On a similar note, I got my Xmas bonus from Renderosity, and very nice it was too.

Caz came up this weekend for a girly night (well, as girly as you can get with us two, i.e. not very) which was great, as we haven't seen each other for at least two years. Went out and ate at Sheikhs, and made a fair dent in a bottle of Kahlua,  and stayed up til after 4am yattering away about everything under the sun, and then carried on in the morning. Which explains why I had a sore throat the next day, LOL. We both said that we mustn't leave it so long next time!

And now I am at work, and it's just indescribably meh. The night out last Friday made me realise how much I miss having colleagues that I actually get on with. I even miss Owen's sarcasm and scathing remarks! I've just got nothing in common with the people I work with here. Well, the bloke I sit next to is a good laugh, but everyone else is just on another planet. 

Nick said he missed my evil cackle, hahaha. And Liz said it's no fun in the morning there any more because they can't listen to my team fielding ridiculous excuses on the absence line!

Oh well better go, as Totalview has FINALLY generated the skill plan...

My chair has finally arrived at work and I'm going back Thursday! Woohoo!

So long Jeremy Kyle and the parade of hopeless chavs that grace our screens every afternoon! No more drooling in front of the telly for me!

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...

I have still not got my email account set up at Otto since starting more than 2 weeks ago. This is somewhat annoying since I have things I need to email people, and receive back.

My boss sent me some spreadsheets she wanted me to look over on Friday, to my home email. I have just tried to open them via my webmail client here... but can't! They're too bloody big for my web server!

So I've had to email her from my other webmail account and ask her to put them on the shared drive. And thinking about it, why the hell didn't we do that in the first place?!?

Wow, can't believe I have so much to write. Busy, busy, busy!

( Life at Otto )

( Some recent socialising )

( It's the thought that counts )

( Simon's reverse-midas touch, and unfriendly pussies )

( Toys and Trips )

( My ickle kittens )
( Healthy eating, weight loss, and other piss-boring topics )

Oh my god!

I've spent 4 hours on the road today between here and Bradford, for a total of a 12 hour day.

This, to spend time in what must be Yorkshire's shittest city ever, in a building that seems to have been designed after the Northern General. I swear to god the floorplan is identical, as well as the decor. Although the Northern is probably cleaner. Otto House MINGS!

Have attended FIVE meetings today, only one of which needed to happen (in my view), and that probably could have been handled by email. The other four consisted of everyone arriving, getting out their copies of the spreadsheet which had been emailed round by the chairperson, and sitting looking at it while the chairperson read it off and said "So is everyone okay with that?" for every item... and everyone saying "Yes." It took longer to get to the meetings (through a good half-mile of rambling, sickly-painted corridors with lino-tiled floors and up and down four flights of stairs) than it did to actually hold them.

I found out today that I am going to be forecasting the third party (i.e. outsourced) traffic, which has no existing forecast and no historical data beyond December 06. It has never been forecast before and there is no process in place at all.

After this bombshell was dropped, I of course (being the blagger that I am) said, "Great! I love a challenge and this is a chance for me to really get my teeth into something and work up my own processes!" Then I excused myself, went to the Ladies (which I found after a mere 10 minute search of the area), locked myself in a cubicle and banged my head against the wall while repeating "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" under my breath.

Strangely, when I double-checked my CV tonight I didn't find "Psychic abilities; has own crystal ball" in my skillset.

I knew this wasn't going to be easy but I had no fucking idea it was going to be this grim!

I'll be working out of the Sheffield office for the rest of this week thank goodness. I know it's a purpose-built centre so at least the ambience won't be so bad, and obviously the travel won't be. I've been up at 5.30 the last two days to get there for 8.15am, and not home until 5.30pm last night and after 6pm tonight. My kittens are starting to think I've abandoned them!

I am now going to bed at the ridiculous time of 9.30!

Well, I've said my last goodbyes at Capita/Dixons (although there are some annoyances that need sorting out, e.g. I still haven't received my redundancy pay despite my boss telling me it would be in with this month's pay, and my bonus is 5% instead of 7.5% so I may need to seek legal advice with that one.)

Went down to Brighton last Friday for an interview with Amex, but although they offered me the job (more or less immediately - the recruiter rang my phone as I was getting out of my car back at Mum's!) they weren't prepared to meet my salary needs, since they would have people on the team with more experience than me earning less. Which is fair enough really. But there's no way I can afford to move back down South on anything less than a £4k increase on my current salary (plus relocation allowance), so that's that for now.

So it's off to Freemans (Otto) on Monday, which I'm quite happy about. They have a gym and swimming pool onsite, and 30% discount off the catalogues after your 6 months probation. Only fly in the ointment is that I have to go to Bradford for the first day :-p Still, I'm to be there for 8am, so the traffic shouldn't be too horrendous at that time of day. Hopefully.

Dropped in on Grandma while I was down, as it was her birthday on Saturday. It's about 4 weeks now since she broke her wrist and she's not looking good at all. Obviously because I don't see her very often, any deterioration in her state is quite immediately apparent. That said, she doesn't seem too much worse than she was at Xmas. But Sally and Mum look absolutely KNACKERED and clearly can't carry on like this. Grandma now needs 24 hour care, and there's no way once the plaster comes off that she'll be able to go back to looking after herself again. She might be able to pull her own knickers up again but mentally she just isn't capable anymore of coping on her own.

Added to that, the fracture was displaced and probably won't heal right - they would have taken her for surgical pinning but apparently they decided she was too big a risk for anaesthesia.

Mum said that Grandma just wants to sit in her chair all day and do nothing. Mum keeps trying to persuade her out on walks and even managed to get her out on to the forest (with Sally's help) last week but Grandma clearly just didn't want to be there. Mum said, "Mmm, just get a breath of that fresh air, doesn't it smell great, Mum?" To which Grandma replied, "All I can smell is wet grass and dog turds!"

Joking aside, it's such an episode that really brings home how much she's just not there any more - she always loved the countryside, you couldn't have transplanted her from the village to the city. She loved being out in the garden, growing things, but this year, of course, her garden has just gone to seed. When I used to stay at Grandma's when I was tiny, we used to walk at least once a day across the fields into the village and get the day's shopping, stopping at the dairy on the way back so I could say hello to the cows. I suppose it was only about a mile each way, but because I was so little it used to take ages.

It seems clear to me that Grandma will have to go into residential care, but it's a question of getting everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, not to mention finding her a place somewhere that doesn't look like a prison camp