Kitsch is back in fashion

12:23pm: I really haven't been updating much. But there's nothing to say when every day is as follows-

7/8am- Get up
8/9am-4pm- Fit in quick eight or so hours of revision and university work. Or go volunteering, if it's Thursday.
5pm-8pmish- Go to work and spend three or so hours helping businesses to send their valuable cheese, sulphuric acid, saddles and blood samples all around the world.

I didn't post a Christmas update either, did I? Christmas wasn't too bad. If nothing else, I have a glowing future ahead of me in international peacekeeping. I came away with a reasonable haul including lots of pennies (leaving me very paranoid, travelling back home with over £500 in my pocket. I should have done the man-thing of pretending I'm in the mafia or something, peeling notes off a huge roll of cash "And this is for you, son,"), leopard print stuff and a Hitler puppy in a coma. The Hitler puppy in a coma is meant to be an adorable sleeping toy puppy (since I can't have pets at university), but it has a Hitler moustache and it just lies there and breathes and never wakes up, which I find slightly sinister. I love it though.

I also sort of have plans for after university. I knew I wanted to stay in Nottingham and go for a full-time job, but now I think I'll try for some sort of care-related work in the NHS. I'm hoping that if I go for clinical psychology, this will be somewhat relevant, since it shows I'm not squeamish and can work full time with often quite difficult patients. Maybe mental health patients, although I'm a little alarmed by the disclaimer on all the job applications involving the possiblity of actual/threatened abuse, violence and assault with weapons. Anyway, spend a year working and hopefully not being stabbed too much, take on another volunteering post, gain experience and see what postgraduate courses interest me most.

2:12pm: Yay, end of university! And Christmas shopping is mostly finished, with over a week to go. Unfortunately, I can't go home yet, since I'm working up till this Friday, but at least I've got nothing to do for most of the week but catch up on university reading. Which is good, after last week being quite stressful. In fact, at the place where I volunteer, this ended in the sort of drama for which the correct procedure is to press the Big Red Button to call a security team :o. It was my first incident, but it wasn't as bad as I had expected. Not supposed to give out details due to confidentiality and all, but it wasn't anything very interesting anyway.

I've already swapped a few presents so far, which has been ace. I have a ROBOTIC SCORPION (the same day I was wistfully staring at the Roboraptor posters in Argos too!) and a small vat of Snow Fairy showergel (glittery! pink! smells like bubblegum!). I'm quite happy with my present ideas for my family. My parents are boring and only wanted slippers and Baileys. My brother will get his Grand Theft Auto tshirt. And my sister has a CD she wanted, plus a TINY LITTLE BONSAI CACTUS! It's so small, it fits inside a little keyring capsule. Baby cacti are even cuter than kittens!

And I've just discovered that I'll be rooming with Lucy, my mother's cat. Since she doesn't think she can give them enough time any more, one cat's gone to the flat above and she's trying to introduce the other one to the family home. I'm quite happy to have a room-kitty for a week, but whenever Pusstule realises I'm back home, I usually find her sat outside my door waiting to come in, and now I'll have to shut her out :(. Hopefully, the two of them will get on after a few days, but I'm not very hopeful. Pusstule is a jealous bitch who has only ever allowed two cats onto the property. Poor Lucy is a timid, fat little rescue cat who spends quite a lot of her time hiding in a cupboard. If I had a flat, I'd take her :(

7:57pm: At least I've got about half the presents out the way now.. but I seem to be buying everyone porn for Christmas. Porn for Tori! Porn for Jen! Porn for a Becky! Probably porn for the other Becky too! Now every time I log into Amazon, it gives me all sorts of lewd suggestions for my next purchase and I'm going to end up reopening my nicely wrapped Christmas presents several times just to check nothing went tragically wrong with the gift tags :(

8:22pm: So, today I've been designing tshirts. I've made a design for myself that I love (announcing that this tshirt increases my stats- HP+20%, MP+40%, MAG+4, SPR-6, etc. I was tempted to add that it came with several auto-abilities and ten materia slots) and another for my little brother. After lots of consideration and probably confusing my housemates (*wanders in poking boobs* "How many inches across is this?"), I think I've came up with a design that works.. but I'm not sure which font is best.

( Help! )

In other news, working is okay. It's not very exciting, but it's bringing in pennies for something a trained monkey could do, and I usually finish at least an hour earlier than I'm paid for.

4:37pm: Just had the worst job-related thing ever.

So, today was busy. I was up at seven and off to uni for two lectures, both two hours long. Then I had a projects meeting which involved hours of furiously guillotining our experiment stimuli down to size. After that, I had to go all the way into town in heavy rain, without an umbrella, since I had absolutely no liquid or pencil eyeliner at all. Just as I trudged all the way back out of town and arrived home gleefully anticipating getting into my jammies, I got a phone call asking if I would like a job. Right now.

First, I turned my room upside down trying to find my national insurance number and passport, which were cunningly hidden in my wallet and my documents file, respectively. Then I got lost a lot. Then I showed up without proper makeup or eyebrows, with rained-on frizzy hair, in an attractive flush, frantically cramming my boobs back into my top as I ran up the stairs (my only black shirt had inexplicably developed toothpaste marks the one time I actually had to wear it). Not only did I look like an angry, frazzled troll, I looked like an angry, frazzled, glittery troll, since once I had got into town and was pawing through my Only Black Bag to retrieve things, I remembered the reason why I had spent 20 minutes trying to find my Only Black Bag only to discover it scrunched up at the back of a drawer.. was because I had spilled an entire pot of Barry M glitter in it some months ago. Pink glitter too.

Anyway, I was a brave little trooper, so I marched into the agency anyway, frizzy hair and glittery flushed face and all. No one chased me back outside with pitchforks and flaming torches, so I then went on to completely fuck up my typing test, backspace repeatedly and work at about a tenth of my usual speed since I had inexplicably developed a temporary case of arthritis (resulting in a temporary case of Tourettes every time I accidentally smashed ALL THE KEYS AT ONCE with my squashy great fingers)

And yet, they thought my typing results were fantastic :o.

So tomorrow I have to get up at seven, rush into town, get the address and finish filling out forms, come back for a couple of hours, nip back off to volunteer for a few hours and then make my way directly from there to wherever wants to hire me. I'm pleased, but also a little worried about what sort of place is so desperate that they'll happily hire any angry, frazzled glittery troll who can smash a keyboard around a bit :o

6:04pm: The weekend, and I've been awake since half seven two days in a row! It's sort of useful since I have lots of work to do. Embarassingly, no one in my group can work out how to program a very simple E-prime experiment that consists of the following- press one button to start timing, and one button to stop. 10 participants per condition, time and record each of their pretraining and posttraining trials. We were designing gambling simulations last year!

I also finally got myself into a presentation group for clinical neuroscience on the last university day before it's due in. I've already prepared an animal modelling presentation which we can use, so I probably should have demanded they do the extra reading instead of wading through all these papers myself to learn about rats genetically programmed to be crack addicts. That's my excuse if I ever end up in court anyway. Sorry, guv'ner, I'm from the human 5HT1B knockout strain. Followed, if neccessary, by "Grand Theft Auto made me do it", "It made me feel big and clever" and "I was under the Imperius curse"

There hasn't been much going on. Went out on Halloween for a few drinks and abandoned Becky in the pub with two goths attempting to chat her up. Hee :D. And apart from that, all I've gone out to is heavy metal karaoke the other night, after spending a few hours bothering people online while drinking cheap gin blend. You can always tell when I'm drunk- instead of running around with a traffic cone on my head, I make a typo and declare that it's the correct ending for the feminine form of Russian adjectives found in the dictionary with a H-backward-N-backward-N ending, when not in the propositional or accusative cases.

..And I'm right.

I should turn up to every exam after drinking a pint of tequila. My answers would be brilliant and insightful and written in a mixture of four languages and occasionally go off on a tangent about things such as that dilemma in crowded pubs (or on planes)- when squeezing past someone, is it more polite to present them with your arse or crotch? The arse seems a bit more impersonal, but you can't do the "sorry, sorry!" arm-wavey gesture and you can't see if you're accidentally sweeping their drink out of their hand with your right buttock.

And finally, moving away from buttocks and mice on crack, a conversation with my brother-

10:01pm: Just been to see Saw III

( Spoilers! )

6:34pm: Things that have kept me entertained today
1. My lecturer suddenly getting rather upset upon looking at one of his slides and realising the graph was all upside down and back to front, and it had been published like that.
2. Spotting a car registration ending in UKE being driven by an enormous burly man, which struck me as comical in wake of recent clairvoyant_wank posts.
3. Discovering a Latin phrase site with useful translations like "Does the Bikini-Suicide-Frisbee match start soon?", "I don't want a toaster", "Anything said in Latin sounds profound", "Do you by chance happen to own a large, yellowish, very flat cat?" and "I have a catapult. Give me all your money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head"
4. Deciding how I want the 7th Harry Potter to go-

"“Ah, Mr Potter,” Voldemort smirked, petting his white Persian cat. “I... haven't been expecting you.”

Lord Voldemort was sat on a comfy-looking couch in his dressing gown, wearing a face mask and eating a box of chocolates while watching Pretty Woman on a large screen TV."

See, I managed to update in under a week, even though absolutely nothing has happened to me in that time :D

10:32am: I'm getting so awful about updating! From now on, I'll try to make a post every few days even if it's only to talk about What Happened On The Bus Today or more thrilling sagas of wheelie bin theft (except that's over now, we finally painted our number on one of our stolen bins, so it's ours for good. I want to paint something along the lines of "This bin is GAY" all over it to make sure that it's even more safe)

I started volunteering last week, and I'm off there again in a few hours. It's great- the people were really patient when I overcharged them by 4p or got confused over complicated coffee orders. And the security is great- personal alarms, emergency cords, can escape into a room behind the bar, etc, even though it doesn't sound like they've ever had any trouble with volunteers being threatened. It's nice easy work too, I think I'll take my Russian work today to get on with in between making coffees.

Apart from that, I don't know. More work on our third year project- the other people in my group all seem to want to get on with it too, so we've already had our equipment made up. Although I still feel slightly cheated compared to the Engineering students- between us, we've paid nine years of tuition fees and this is all the apparatus we're going to ask for? We should demand far more! Although I don't think I really care enough about having impressive looking apparatus to think of a whole new project :P

And now I should probably get some makeup on and do some reading before going out this afternoon.

3:55pm: Hurrah! Today I received my CRB disclosure in the post to confirm that I'm officially not a wanted criminal. This Thursday, I'll be trying out volunteering in the coffee bar of a psychiatric unit. The inpatients have to be nice to me- I'm the one doling out Mars bars, I HAVE POWER.

University is OK. I'm slightly disappointed in clinical neuroscience so far, but the later lectures look good. Forensic psychology is great- the staff seem to be doing lots of research in the area at the moment, since apparantly we're the worst city for young offenders. Neuropsychology.. I fell asleep in, but I think they were getting the most boring lecture out of the way first. Mind and Brain looks like a good lecture to argue in, and also contains less neurostuff and more philosophy. Clinical psychology looks like it'll be great too, especially the planned seminars. And my third year project seems interesting, although I've already found several problems with the procedure and the rest of my group haven't responded to my email yet. But I like our supervisor, and most importantly, I now have keys to one of the experiment rooms. Sadly, the room isn't full of rTMS and fMRI machines :(

I also have a receipt here which I find entertaining. Everything really is cheap at Wilkos!

DISHCLOTHS 0.39
BAKE DISH 1.39
LARGE HORSE 20.00
SUBTOTAL 21.78

The LARGE HORSE is actually a giant stuffed pony. It's really nice and has a removable bridle, and I fell in love with it and somehow Jen made me buy it. Since I had just received a £40 cheque from the university for scrambling my brains in their fMRI machines, I actually went and impulse bought for once (the brain scrambling may somehow be connected with buying giant stuffed toys). I regret nothing, it's the most comfy pillow I've ever had. And now I have a giant pony, a giant squashy unicorn, another unicorn, another pony, a facehugger and a stuffed cactus to share my bed with.

I have a feeling that there's lots of stuff to update about since I haven't posted in weeks, but nothing's coming to mind now.

11:08am: I'm probably hundreds of entries behind on LJ by now, but I should hopefully be back in Nottingham today, and have a computer that will load my friends page in under ten minutes.

I say hopefully, since my attempts to return to Nottingham have been thwarted twice. Yesterday, I got up early, packed up my stuff and made it all the way to the front door, only to discover my family had ran off and left me locked in the house without a key. This morning, I stole Shaun's key, made it out the door and was half way to the train station before realising I'd forgotten my phone. I'll give it another go in half an hour.

I can't remember if I updated about this or not, but obviously I've been back home. I went back for my 21st birthday (thanks for the messages!) to make sure that my family HAD to buy me presents. I haven't really done much else while I was back, except visit my grandad and go into Manchester once, which was made more interesting by a "gang of 16-20 youths" throwing stuff at the train. All the conductor made us do was move away from the windows and lean over. I'm not sure if that would help much- getting a brick in the back of the head won't be much better than getting one in the face.

It'll be nice returning to Nottingham, where I don't have to shuffle around the house in a duvet, fall asleep to the gentle screechings and wailings of foxes, owls and bats, or share my bed with a giant, uncatchable spider. Although after three days unsuccessfully trying to coax it out from behind my bed, I've came to think of it as another pet. It's now nicknamed Psycho Housespider, which means I only have a Liquid Something pet to collect- I've already had Revolver Pusscat, Decoy Goldfishie, Vulcan Budgie and Sniper Mutt.

I don't think there's anything to update about, so I think I'll use these remaining fifteen minutes to check I'm not trying to leave the house without my phone/money/pants, and hopefully I'll be back in about four hours.

3:34pm: I can't believe that I began reading fic over seven years ago, and I've only just realised that "buttsex" is an anagram of "subtext". Internet, you have FAILED me >:|

Luckily I realised it just before my 21st birthday, since I had a feeling that it might be one of those Freudian stages you have to go through by a certain age, otherwise you're doomed to become Norman Bates (or in this case, be forever unable to spot the smouldering sexual tension between any two given male TV characters who ever look vaguely in each others' general directions). Although I was reassured that certain housemates also hadn't noticed it, and still managed to become healthy, pervy, porn-writing adults. Whew.

Besides that revelation, I have nothing else to update about, unless people really want to hear about the fabulous sandwich I just had or my adventures at Asda.

5:39pm: I love going to the international supermarket!

Today, we found some apples with leprosy, some very squashy apples (you could push your finger RIGHT IN and it went back to its normal shape afterwards), some hairy square-ish vegetation the size of a small dog, rose jam, CARROT JAM, 'Negro' biscuits, Ash-shole-something-else in a tin, Kockkreme and numerous other funny things. I wish I still ate dairy just so I could buy unpolitically correct biscuits, Kockkreme and tinned asch-sholes.

9:31pm: I hate having colds. I rarely get ill, but when I do, my immune system seems to overreact and starts raising temperatures and unleashing mucus to try and burn/sneeze out all invaders. So last night I spent over 12 hours in bed, most of which was spent being awake, feverish and unsure where I was. Amongst other humorous ideas, I thought there were people all over my room, I was in an episode of Buffy and I was somehow involved with the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo. I also ended up wandering all over the house a few times, but thankfully no one was up to witness me stumbling around in my jammies babbling on about secret illumanti organisations hanging out in my bedroom. I also woke up and found I'd ripped more skin from my latest kitchen burn, although at least this time I didn't wake up to find it was stuck to my sheets with.. whatever goo leaks from burns.

I have nothing to really update about and the computer screen is giving me a headache, so I think I'm going to go sulk and take out my lack of sleep by blowing lots of virtual shit up on my playstation.

4:16pm: Happy birthday Tori!

Me and Jen went running into town for present-finding.. a bit late, but we knew what we were going to get, so we thought it would be okay. Except it turns out that everywhere has stopped selling this particular item.. after a bit of a search, we finally found one hiding in John Lewis. The only one they had too :o

I have nothing to really update about yet. Although I finally got round to tarting my LJ up, so expect a variety of half-arsed icons and humorously messed-up layouts (in clashing, neon colours, scrolling upside down) until I finally get everything sorted.

3:40pm: Yesterday I finally got to go inside the strongest magnet in the UK. I've wanted to find a way to sneak inside it ever since I heard it existed, and if people want to pay me to do so, then that's quite alright by me.

Sadly, they didn't scan my brain in the end, although there's no reason why I can't take part in another study soon. It would have been ace apart from one thing- they wanted to scan my hand, which required lying inside the scanner with my hand stretched up in a comedy superman-esque pose.. and they had to pick the one volunteer with a subluxating shoulder. It doesn't like being moved above my head, so there was lots of aching and soreness from that.

Apart from that, it was great. I ended up slightly sick because I kept forgetting the advice to keep my head down when coming in and out of the scanner, and moving your head around to get a good look while suddenly entering or leaving a magnetic field 140000 times stronger than the earth's leaves you feeling just a tiny bit dizzy. But it was fun, probably more fun than being fitted with a tap in your arm, hooked up to tubes, made to lie in uncomfy positions and shoved inside a claustrophobic, noisy tunnel inside an enormous magnet really should be.

Oh, and I forgot to make a SoaP post! If there's anyone left on the internet who hasn't gone to see Snakes on a Plane, you really should. Best £4.30 I ever spent! I thought the title says it all, but really there's a lot they missed out. It should be..

( Samuel L Jackson With Sporks Fighting Head-Eating Snakes On Crack On A Plane )

2:19pm: I had all these plans for today, but then I had to spend half of it sleeping off a headache and now it's all wasted. I suspect the headache is because I've had no sleep for two nights in a row. Yesterday I kept waking up in the night, then woke up early because I had a bad dream and couldn't go back to sleep because I had to go see if it had really happened. Except it was a really embarassing bad dream to do with the internet, so I won't mention what it was about :P

Anyway, I had to stay up then because I needed to go to my university and consent to them injecting me with some sort of magnetic goo and stashing me inside an enormous scanner for a few hours. I want to have my brain scanned and get a picture of my insides, they want to pay me up to £120 to do it. They also throw in free pregnancy tests, which I find hilarious and secretly want to use just because they're free. Guaranteed, due to the current lack of man anywhere near me, the only way I'm pregnant is if God couldn't find a more holy host to spawn the next Messiah.. but it would be really awkward explaining to God that I accidentally fried Jesus inside a 40 ton magnet.

After that I promised myself I would have an early night, but after snuggling up in bed and dozing off, my mother called around midnight. Her father had came back out of hospital, she bought him some presents and went round to visit, and it turned out he'd been readmitted via emergency ambulance. He was really bad for a while, but now they've stabilised him. First thing this morning, he should have a scan and they're almost certain it's an existing gall bladder problem making his pancreas flare up again. And if so, it's straight into surgery to take the entire thing out. So she wasn't too worried.

After getting the full story, I still couldn't go to sleep since the hospital has stole all my grandad's jammies, so I had to go and order a pair of XXXXL navy pyjamas with a drawstring waist. I went to the address she'd given me and wondered how I was going to get some jammies from a website that sells organic breakfast cereal. I eventually got the right site, spent ages finding the right pyjamas, got my card rejected three times because it's a crap Highline card and lots of websites insist you're committing fraud because it doesn't actually have an issue number. I eventually made my order, only to get a phone call this morning from the warehouse, who could only supply XXXXXXXL pyjamas in that style. Got my refund, and went off on another internet hunt to find the same pyjamas, but they may not arrive for a while now :/

I didn't wake up till late since I only got to sleep over four hours after I had planned, so if none of the other three people in the house managed to wake up before midday then our bin won't have been collected. And when I woke up, I had a yucky headache and it took till 2pm to sleep it off again. Still, I just found out my sister did well in her GCSEs (6 A, 1A* and 2Bs), even though she's complaining she didn't get more A*s.

6:29pm: I found out who my project supervisor is! He does stuff in clinical and applied neuropsychology, especially rehabilitation after brain injury.. which is an area I'm very interested in. It wasn't my top choice, but it was very high in my list, so I'm extremely happy with that. I was worried I'd get an experiment counting how many times per minute a rat pokes a lever with its nose (although I could probably get out of that on grounds of being vegan and therefore highly prone to digging up dead relatives and blowing up the labs in protest, at least according to the Daily Mail). Anyway, now that I know I'm not, I'll have to go over to the library and see what sort of ideas I can come up with. I don't think it's very likely that he'll lend me the fMRI machine or a few brain damage patients, unfortunately.

I'm also back in Nottingham. The funeral didn't go too badly, although I could have done without the excessive amounts of alcohol. Whisky before the service, champagne afterwards and then off to the pub for a quick ten-hour drinking session, where I couldn't order a coke without some sneaky relative dumping a few shots of vodka in it "You're not drinking coke at your grandfather's funeral!". I had to do all the immediate family stuff too, like walking behind the coffin and standing around it for prayers, which I hadn't expected. Still, it was a nice funeral and the pub was packed afterwards. He was quite popular- ran a hotel, slot machine businesses, member of the Magic Circle, chairman of the local football team, etc, so a lot of people turned out for it.

The other grandfather isn't doing badly either. I might be responsible for unleashing him onto Livejournal if he gets out of hospital- he obviously can't go back to running busy restaurants right now, but he seemed intrigued by the idea of having his own cooking blog.

I also feel like I'm neglecting my LJ, so I will get back into updating regularly, and I've already started working on a new layout and some icons. I couldn't really bring myself to care about it when I was fighting off two siblings and a cat for the privilege of using the slowest computer ever back home (the cat wasn't interested in using the computer, just in sitting all over it).

4:11pm: Thanks to everyone who left messages. They were very much appreciated. I began replying to them, but it was just repeating the same thing over and over.

My grandfather seems to be getting better, considering last Tuesday they couldn't say if he'd still be alive when we got to hospital. Not long after his heart had stopped, he was trying to take his oxygen mask off and inviting a nurse to shove it somewhere painful when she kept replacing it- they ended up sedating him in the end because he kept making a nuisance out of himself. Things could still go either way, but he's now off the oxygen, out of high dependency and seems a lot better.

Although strangely, just as he's in hospital for pancreatitis, my other grandfather suddenly died. He wasn't ill at all either, although he was very old. I really don't need e-hugs or anything- I barely knew him and only generally saw him in the form of a card and envelope of money at Christmas and on birthdays. I'm staying around Lancashire for a bit to go to the funeral though.

I'm currently behind on LJ and probably everywhere else. The main computer up here died suddenly and won't turn on at all now, which means I had to get out the hilariously old computer that my mother used to use for typing up Word documents. It takes a very long time to load anything and MSN doesn't seem to work too well, so I probably won't be online much.

3:52pm: So, the last few days-

Friday.. went over to celebrate tinker_goth graduating from university and get into far too serious discussions about international corporations, perhaps not the best idea when armed with a £5 bottle of 'gin blend' (not even good enough to qualify as real gin!). The morning after I woke up and noticed something black and white next to my bed. After a brief moment panicking that I was drunk enough to steal an entire zebra crossing, I found my glasses and realised that at some point in the night I had inexplicably got clothes out from the back of my wardrobe and dumped them on the floor. I can only conclude I was sleepwalking, but after checking it appears that if I did leave my room, at least no one saw me wandering around the house semi-nekkid and probably whimpering about dinosaurs chasing me (Jurassic Park gave me nightmares for years :().

Sunday.. travelled back northward at some ungodly hour in the morning. Me and jennikins spent the entire time educating ourselves by managing to speak almost entirely in French, German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Swiss, Prague-ese, Latin, etc. For some reason we were planning the essential phrases for any student planning a pub crawl of the entire world-

( Some fine examples )
Once we got back (after four hours of travelling and talking to old Irish men who predicted I will die of a chill), we went visiting Scottish Jen and impressing her with our adult sense of humour (being able to call someone 'bumface' in numerous languages is both big and clever). Then the main benefit of coming home- proper alcohol, not 'gin blend'. After that I spent about four hours talking to Clifford and Shaun, which was odd. I never thought I'd have a conversation with my fourteen year old brother about propaganda, the Cold War, 1984 and so on, but thanks to videogames he actually did want to hear about it so he could understand the events of MGS2 and 3. It was very queer.

8:49pm: Birthday Massacre last night! They were wonderful, Chibi is the cutest thing ever. I wanted to steal her to keep on my mantelpiece. Then I remembered I don't have a mantelpiece, so now I'm going to get my crayons and draw us one to blu-tac above the fire, complete with candles, flowers, a carriage clock, kitsch ornaments and Chibi sat in a corner. I also wanted crayoned deer's heads on the wall, crayoned chandeliers and crayoned portraits of us all, but I might be getting a bit silly. I think I'd make a super interior decorator anyway.

Today I went out to look at pets, which was a bad idea as I kept idly wondering how difficult it would really be to shoplift a couple of live bunnies while Tori was off looking at snakes. And a few hamsters and a couple of rats, and.. everything except the birds, they kept looking at me funny. After the pets, went around some charity shops. I managed to find the other russian textbook I was torn between getting for £1.50 and a huge dictionary for £6 less than the published price. I also wandered over to the library, which I finally got round to joining. I think I'll go look around properly tomorrow, since today I got lost and ran out :(

I spent the rest of the day mostly removing my dreads. I hate how whenever you think you're done and get relieved, there's always just one more lurking in there somewhere. They're always the most tangled and difficult to remove too. And unfortunately, I can't throw my own head across the room in frustration >:|

8:49pm: Still not much to update about.

My Becky came down last week! Only for one night unfortunately, but it was lovely seeing her again, even if it reminded us how much we miss her. We started off by drinking at our house on such disgusting beverages as cherry lambrini, shmirbangers, wine that had been sat in the kitchen for months and turned to vinegar and some sinister conoction that tasted like Tixylix. I then had to literally drag the other two all the way to J7, which fortunately is just around the corner. Only one of them fell over while I was towing them there, and there weren't too many collisions with pedestrians or lamp posts. The bands were quite good, although my hearing didn't come back until towards the end of the next day. Then went off and had more drunken talks with Becky, mostly along the lines of making her move here. I think she's very tempted and me, jennikins and luxleviathana have a spare room available now too.

Finally got round to visiting the Wake, which wasn't that great. It was made more interesting by me and luxleviathana taking a banana for a walk first. I've always wanted to post a banana to myself, just to see if it would arrive (and to see the postman's expression when he knocked on the door to deliver our banana. He already thinks I'm a bit odd, probably because when I answer the door I'm usually missing my eyebrows, in my jammers, can't remember how to write my own name and make excited noises about "YAY PRESENTS!"). Anyway, we finally got round to it. I checked the Royal Mail guidelines and found that they can't complain as long as it's sent first class and is marked as perishable, so we stuck a stamp on it and wrote on our address (and "Perishable!" on the back) and went to post it. Unfortunately I somehow broke it on the way to the postbox (yes, you CAN break a banana!), so it got eaten instead.

I finally finished MGS3 yesterday. I put off playing it for ages because I'm cheap and wanted to steal my brother's copy, but after a while it became clear he was never going to get bored with it, so I bought my own and managed to spread it out over a week. I think most of that week was probably spent slogging up The Sorrow's river facing the ghosts of every person (and pet parrot :D) that I had killed in the game. It's probably supposed to make you reflect on what a bad person you are, but it just made me decide I should cut more throats next time I played the game because those ghosts looked funny. I don't like games being so realistic that they try to actually recreate the post-traumatic stress disorder too. The ending already left me sad enough :(

I finally got round to ordering a proper Russian textbook so I can get my head around conjugating verbs! I am the most interesting person in the world ever! Besides conjugating verbs, I think the only things happening soon are changing my hair to all black (for jobs, boo... although maybe a few cheeky blonde transitionals might sneak in) and the Birthday Massacre this Wednesday. I'll understand if anyone defriends me before that fascinating update :P

11:06am: Not much has happened since coming back to Nottingham.

I finally got on with looking for jobs and voluntary work. I'm trying to get at least one placement in a mental health area to get some experience before going onto further courses after my degree. I should have an application pack showing up either today or tomorrow, and half way through August I should be able to apply for a placement at another organisation. As for jobs, I sent off my CV and covering letter to a couple of places, and I'm waiting for a call back from a self-described "eccentric gentleman" looking for someone to help sort out his business. Not sure whether anything will come from that (I don't actually have any office experience) but it seems like an okay place to work, and I met the requirements of knowing how to use Word, being tall and not scared of spiders.

Apart from that, nothing. I haven't really been out much, so I'm not exactly sure what I have been doing these last two weeks. I'm probably going to start updating several times a day out of boredom. I've already began learning Russian to give me something to do (and because it's a great language and will serve me well when I have a horrible laboratory accident and emerge as a supervillain. No one will take me seriously with a Lancashire accent, no matter how many places I take over). I picked up the alphabet in a couple of hours and I can now read out stuff written in Russian quite quickly, but I think I may need to get a book to help me with grammar. I spent a while in Waterstones looking for one which doesn't just cover vocabulary and isn't completely transliterated.

Now I'm off to resume wig-making. I've had one sat around waiting for me to add dreads to it for ages, and if it works out then it could be a potential source of ebay pennies. This one is going to be black, purple and white with some swirled dreads in. Unfortunately people on ebay seem to think they're being ripped off if they pay more than £20 for fake hair, even though it takes hours of work, includes the cost of materials and I know my dreads can last a year (so far) of being worn constantly as extensions without any unravelling or losing their shape.

2:29pm: Again, I've managed to put off going to the job centre. But I'm due to donate a pint of my finest O+ soon and the blood donation centre is near it, so I may as well save myself an exhausting ten minute walk and do both at once. At least I finally got round to making a list of things I can put in my CV. It looks a bit desperate since although my qualifications are good, the only job-like things I can list are voluntarily working for Clifford's company, voluntarily working in my father's hotel, this probably illegal typing job I did from home when I was fifteen and work experience :S. Hopefully I can do some voluntary work this summer to make up for things.

I've been home for a week, if anyone was wondering why I was so quiet. It was fun- I forget how great it is having my mother to cook for me, Clifford to bring me alcohol in a glass the size of a bucket on a stick (I love wandering around absolutely smashed and truthfully claiming I've only had one drink), and a Shaunickers to steal games from. I ended up nearly in tears laughing when we were planning our own spoof Metal Gear film after hearing they're going to make one. I think ours will be far better and more faithful to the game- we actually want our film to include the exclamation marks appearing above peoples' heads, Snake dropping dead from lung cancer after smoking for five minutes, the cardboard box saving the day and Psycho Mantis demonstrating his fearsome telekinetic powers by making a small plastic Playstation controller go wibble-wibble-wibble about three inches across the floor.

I stayed back home until Shaun's birthday. I had various present ideas but nowhere in Manchester stocked them, so he ended up getting a generic PS2 controller (he did actually ask for one since his was falling apart) which had bits falling off about three seconds after he unwrapped it, and some form of toffee/fudge stuff with an edible insect inside. I got that as a joke, but it actually seemed to be his favourite present. It made me a bad, bad vegan (although I suppose it's no worse than buying him some Haribo.. maybe :S), but a great older sister since he managed to impress all his friends by eating a small scorpion in front of them. Apparantly it tasted absolutely disgusting and he was spitting out black sludge for ages.

I can't think of anything else that's happened, since I've done nothing except go to the pub and such since arriving back in Nottingham. Oh, if people could check again for my 'evil kettle' (dread steamer) that would be very much appreciated, since I've been going around with less than a quarter head of extensions in for ages and want to try something new.

1:33pm: Outside my house, there's a giant noisy truck on fire and a man using a glowing burny stick to melt the road. It's keeping me entertained, once I realised the truck was meant to be on fire. I think they're actually taking the yellow lines off the road before someone suggests it's another of those things I see that no one else does, like the giant blue bunny that I KNOW I saw on TV.

If anyone who knows me in real life has some pliers or a hammer that I can borrow, that would be appreciated. I'm currently installing eyelets in material using a large chunk of door and a pointy bit of metal I found in the cellar. Surprisingly, it does work if I get violent enough. I've only squashed my hand a few times and not impaled it once (well, not with the pointy bit of metal, just the needle. I've accidentally sewn myself to the fabric a few times)

I was going to go look for a job today, but instead I think I might run away home soon for a few days since it's the Shaunickers' birthday and Father's Day soon (I think..), my mother hasn't heard from me in a month and I might have to ask for some money soon (I haven't asked for any all year, so I suppose they can manage to pay a month's rent for me). I'll also be able to take advantage of having a working phone to call NTL and get ours sorted out. And if I take my sewing stuff, I can finish it off on the sewing machine and use the assorted hammers/pliers we always have lying around to install the eyelets. Plus it's nice and cool at the moment and I'd rather not spend four hours travelling in hot weather.