Wishlist

Thanks to the generosity and kindness of friends, family and colleagues, I find myself thoroughly spoilt and in receipt of a total of £135 of Amazon vouchers, given as leaving and Christmas gifts. My plan was to treat myself to some online shopping during the few, relaxed days after Christmas but they weren’t as relaxed as I’d hoped and so I have still only spent a few pounds on a couple of e-books, ordered directly from my Kindle.

I must admit that, because I hadn’t expected so much, I’ve been a bit stuck as to what to buy. I have no need or desire for any ‘larger’ purchases, e.g. electronic goods or technology – I have all the technology I want; there are things I know I don’t want, e.g. sat nav; household appliances don’t count because they’re boring (though I would quite like a slow cooker and a new iron); and I wouldn’t buy a smartphone from Amazon. (Granted, my beloved six-year-old 30GB white iPod video could and probably will die at any moment and is likely to need replacing but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.)

So I get the rather exciting opportunity but to buy lots and lots of smaller things… Today, I set about the task of bolstering my wish list and thought I’d share some of the items:

Scott Pilgrim on BluRay and volumes 3-6 of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel – I can’t wait to watch the film again and, having been given volumes 1 and 2 of the graphic novel for Christmas, I’m eager to keep reading. I may also get Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost At Sea, which looks lovely.

Le Creuset Mug – I adore the traditional Volcano colour of Le Creuset products and have wanted one of these mugs since I saw them in my favourite kitchen shop in Worcester (which, as an aside, is almost identical to a kitchen shop my mum would take me to as a child, each year, to buy a new cake tin in the shape of my age). I am still debating whether or not to take this in as my office mug.

Baking Made Easy – added to my list on the strength of one episode of the new BBC cookery programme. Because a girl can never have too many baking books and because it really does look easy.

Poach Pods – I got a pair of these for Christmas and they are a revelation. Getting two more so that I can poach more eggs at once.

Once Soundtrack – I finally watched Once last night and it was lovely (all the best love stories are unconsummated. See also: Lost in Translation, Brief Encounter). I only recently discovered The Frames thanks to a twitter recommendation but didn’t make the connection. I’m glad I finally did. I really love Glen Hansard’s voice, particularly in this scene:

Elbow’s new album – I guess it’s not cool to like Elbow since they won the Mercury Prize. Well, I still like them. They’re responsible for my all-time favourite song (Powder Blue, but you knew that already) and I walked down the aisle to an Elbow track (the opening bars of Mirrorball).

Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism – I read this as a student specialising in feminism and queer theory, when I was full of optimism about women’s place in the world, and recently enjoyed her follow-up, Living Dolls: The New Sexism. I’m looking forward to re-reading The New Feminism with the benefit of hindsight.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts – I own too many coffee table books but this one looks interesting…

A range of ebooks, including those I’ve already bought – Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli, Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet (started but not finished before I had to give the book back), Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, David Nicholls’s One Day, Chris Mullin’s A View From The Foothills (which has been on my wish list for a long time but has suffered from my disinterest in big books – thank goodness for the Kindle), Clare Morrall’s Natural Flights of the Human Mind, and many more…

I haven’t added all of that up but I think I’m up to roughly £100. And hours and hours and hours of pleasure. Can’t quite believe my luck.

 

All change!

So, the cat’s out of the bag and those who needed to know first now know (I think, I hope, I’m sorry if you didn’t). In January, I’ll be starting a new job and Chris and I will be moving to Gloucester (possibly Cheltenham but, seriously, HOW MUCH?!) before Christmas.

Having known about the move for a few weeks now, whilst I’ve waited for the contract to come through, a few blog posts have been floating around my head. (Yes, I’m staggered I haven’t let it slip on Twitter too.)

The first was to be an overview of the many things Chris and I need to sort out in relation to the new job, our house move and much more besides – purchasing a new car man enough to get up Birdlip Hill everyday, finding a new yoga class and running club, getting to grips with my new job role, streamlining our many belongings, figuring out our current rental contract, weighing up a removals company vs. hiring a van, endless house viewings, etc…

Cathartic for me, less interesting for you.

Another theme is related to my sense of belonging. I may well expand on this at some future date. We’ve lived in Worcester for six years now and, though it took us a long time to feel this way, I think it’s fair to say that we now feel at home. Gloucester is not so new or unfamiliar – Chris grew up there and we still have family and friends in the area, we know our way around – but I’m still nervous about moving and settling again. To this end, I have been keeping a list of things to look forward to in Gloucester, which currently runs to:

• Gloucester Guildhall – good gigs, nice cinema
• Blue Thai Kitchen, Ruddy’s Fish & Chips, Over Farm
• Being closer to the Taylors
• Better cinemas in the vicinity (see above + Vue in Cheltenham)
• Cheltenham in general – shopping, restaurants, bars, cultural stuff
• Gloucester’s suburban libraries (so many more than Worcester!)
• Being half an hour closer to my hometown, family and friends
• Being half an hour away from Bristol

(Please feel free to contribute!)

Finally, and most recently, some thoughts on people’s responses to my move. Ever the diplomat, I’m still mulling it over but the current climate in the public sector certainly puts an interesting spin on that one…

(Much as I’ve never told you what my current job is on this blog, I will not be telling you what my new job is. But it’s no state secret so feel free to DM, text, email or even speak to me if you’d like to know.)

What I did do on Friday

• Quite a lot of laundry
• A couple of hours on the phone to my dad in NZ
• Grocery shopping (well, grocery and Heavy Rain)
• Hot smoked salmon salad and Blue Roses on Spotify
• Brief Encounter and some crying (at the film, not just generally)
• Ironing and more ironing
• About half an hour of Heavy Rain and some origami
• Thai with the original Gin Lovelies and the Husbands & Boyfriends
• More grocery shopping, this time tipsy

What to do?

I have Friday off (getting rid of some overtime). A whole day to myself with very little planned. I do need to call my dad in the morning and I do need to go to Tesco and I do need to do some tidying and probably make the bed in the spare room for my parents’ visit this weekend.

Other options:

• Buy Heavy Rain. Play Heavy Rain
• Watch the rest of Brief Encounter that I recorded last weekend
• Take myself out for lunch – or arrange to meet someone for lunch…
• Read a whole book
• Go to the cinema, see a film and get popcorn (salty mixed with sweet, please)
• Bake something nice
• Get a massage / facial

What to do?

Grumpy

I’ll be honest, I’m pretty grumpy tonight. For the following reasons:

1. Mainly, because I have to go back to work tomorrow after five days off and I’ve been having a lovely time and I don’t want to go back. I really need to do something about that.
2. Renting sucks.
3. Letting agents suck.
4. Our landlord sucks.
5. I’ve been putting off ironing all day but now I really have to do it or I won’t have anything to wear to work tomorrow.
6. I’ve been ranting about my general feeling of injustice in relation to the widespread concern about bankers leaving the country if they don’t get their bonuses that doesn’t appear to extend to our incredibly valuable public sector workers.
7. Today, we spent over £200 on brake discs and pads and over £100 on a dehumidifier.

Reasons to be cheerful:
1. Only a two day week!
2. Omar’s visiting at the weekend. And we’re going to see Where The Wild Things Are. Really looking forward to it
3. We’ve got banoffee pie.
4. I have dinner and Seth Lakeman with Leigh and Katy to look forward to tomorrow night.
5. And my team Christmas dinner at Chesters on Friday. Mmmm…burritos…
6. And Leigh’s festive open house on Saturday. Mmmm…mulled wine and mince pies…
7. After some serious trawling of the shops, I found the perfect Christmas gift for my mum this morning.

Will write about my long weekend soon (maybe).

Oh, my teenage years…

Ally texted me last night with a list that I wrote 10 years ago, at the age of 17, of my top ten favourite songs. There are some “what the bloody hell was I thinking?” numbers in there (you know I’m just saying that, don’t you?), as well as some rediscoveries and some enduring favourites.

I was going to make a spotify playlist to share with you but because I was a somewhat pretentious teenager, partial to a bit of musical snobbery, there are a few obscure B-sides in there so I can’t find them all. So you’ve got some youtube links:

‘Queen of the Troubled Teens’ by Idlewild (I genuinely believed this should be my anthem. I was such a loser.)

‘Tame’ by Pixies (the first Pixies song I ever heard. And so began a lifelong obsession…)

‘Silence’ by Delirium (no link because it was the radio edit that I loved but a VERY SPECIFIC mix, which I can’t remember and subsequently can’t find)

‘Nights in White Satin’ by The Moody Blues (this isn’t even the one I’m ashamed of)

‘Blackpool’ by Delgados (still awesome  – but no proper video sadly. Would encourage you to seek it out)

‘You Just Have To Be Who You Are’ by Idlewild (I liked Idlewild, ok? Still do, in fact)

‘Blue Flashing Light’ by Travis (I’d just like to point out that the first two Travis albums were actually very good and perfectly acceptable listening material)

‘Genie in a Bottle’ by Christina Aguilera (what the bloody hell was I thinking?!) (I still have a soft spot for really well written pop music and yes I do happen to love ‘Beat Again’ by JLS)

‘Everlong’ by Foo Fighters (this won’t ever stop being one of my favourite songs)

‘S.O.F.T.’ by Elastica (see above)

Some observations: I was not only a pretentious teenager, but also a noisy one. I’m not sure that I’ve changed a great deal. I’m still noisy but I suppose I’m more inclined towards some quieter moments this days. And my husband has had some influence over my musical taste too, which is only natural.

I am so spending the weekend coming up with my top 10 favourite songs…

American Office

(This is the first blog from my new MacBook. The plan is, now I have my own laptop and am not sharing my husband’s PC, that this happens more…)

Anyway, Chris and I watched The American Office tonight. It’s on ITV4 now. We’ve seen bits before but not whole episodes.

Some observations:
1. There is not enough background noise. It’s noticeable.
2. Chris kept trying to figure out which American character was which British character.
3. I can’t watch Steve Carrell now without remembering how great he is in Little Miss Sunshine.
4. I need to watch more of it, I think. Didn’t strike me straight away (mainly for the above reasons).

Vocation Theory

It’s nice to think of all the exciting stuff my school friends do for a living these days. In our circle of friends, we have a counsellor, a couple of journalists, a landscape architect, a banker, an accountant, a school secretary, and a couple of musicians. I like the variety of it. And the fact that I can remember little characteristics about them all as teenagers that mean that their current career is no real surprise.

And, of course, there’s me. You understand what all the others do, right? But not what I do. Ho hum.

Here’s a list of other things I’d quite like to do, if I ever got the chance:
1. Be a wedding florist (and make people happy)
2. Teach adult literacy (and make the world a better place)
3. Work in a bookshop (and make myself happy)
4. Do a PhD and be a lecturer (see above).

Also, I did a careers search last night (mainly because I haven’t done one since school and wanted to test my ‘Vocation Theory’ outlined above). When I put in that I’m not motivated by money, it just gave me crap jobs that would be nice and everything but that I couldn’t afford to do without some serious lifestyle changes. So I put in that I am motivated by money and it gave me unbearably ruthless jobs that wouldn’t fit my moral code AT ALL.

Rock and Hard Place.

Some things

1. I just had a horrible hospital appointment that took two whole hours of just sitting in various waiting rooms and then I made the stupid mistake of looking up my new medication on the internet and discovering that the side effects are *hideous*. So I bought myself the following albums to cheer myself up:
Dark Was The Night
Glory Hope Mountain

2. I also considered buying the last Alela Diane album but then didn’t because it has gone up £5 since I looked yesterday.

3. I really quite like Office 2007.

4. I’m thinking about twitter. 

Things I need to blog about

1. The wedding dress shopping experience (and other marriage-related items)

2. My job (which is genuinely thrilling at the moment)

3. An update on my new years resolution post below

4. Elbow and Blood Red Shoes (next week)

5. I can’t think of anything else