And the “Spam Title of The Century” Award goes to…The penis enlargement patch people (PEPP) with, "What Color Does a Smurf Turn When You Strangle It?"* *Note: I have no idea what the answer is because the spam itself was for, well, penis enlargement patches. But credit where it’s due for the title.  A Day in the Life of My InboxThese are the subject headers of all the pieces of spam I received over the course of today. I think it reads like some freaky piece of beat poetry or somethin’: Outbid handpicked Principal sword Shout confederation Cindy: Rates are Low Again! Still waiting Vegas.bucks. Healthcoverage as low as 38 per month Last night’s encounter… Important health information Be rewarded for your opinion Your wealth: sea magpie Directive distant Your family: pin setter Hey bro, found this site Members of the jury for the IX Union Fenosa International Exhibition Health coverage comparison The other blue pill The best kept secret about debt Get Name brand fashion jeans for men and women! Nexus appraisals low fee schedule Complimentary Trip to
Disneyland WEBER Grill survey – Complimentary WEBER Grill Kenneth Cole Gift Card Has been reserved for you! Do you know who lives in your neighborhood? Hoodia will KILL Your appetite Is your dog’s food good enough? It’s better to be pissed off than pissed on! Credit card chargeback A new you in 2006 Top notch refinancing for the USA Lots of no charge ringtones Stepping into the Light Technology, communication, oracle, sap, peoplesoft, ibm, hp customer lists The best kept secret about debt Bounty paper towels on us! Registramos SU marca IRBL announces government contracts Inhabit Professional opportunity made simple Top insurance carriers at the best prices Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning Start generating sales and earn a bonus from Skinsales Euromillions Lottery You happy Please someone, just shoot me now… My So-called SalaryFree at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last! You know that scene in 24 where Jack is interrogating Audrey, and he totally knocks over the table, then grabs her and he’s shouting right into her face and she’s all “No, Jack! Have mercy! Aaaargh!”, but it’s all in vain because you just know that sometime before the top of the hour, the Bad Man With the Syringe is going to come in and torture her? Yeah, that’s kinda what this whole “filing the annual accounts” thing has been like. I mean, I should make it clear upfront that Terry didn’t actually torture me. But also? He kind of did, in a way, because I? Hate this. HATE. THIS. I hate every penny-counting second of it and there have been so many times this month when I’ve wanted to cower helplessly on the floor, rocking back and forth and shouting, “please, no more! No more, I tell you!” Sometimes, in fact, I just went right ahead and did it. But it’s over. We survived. And next year, I really will be better. No, I really will, I swear. From this point on, however, there are to be changes, both good and bad. Good change: I am now being paid a salary! An actual, honest-to-God salary, that will be paid into my bank account every month, for as long as the business account can support it. (Possibly not very long, then). Bad change: In order to avoid being taxed to the eyeballs, this salary will be the smallest amount it is possible to pay someone without being charged for it. If you were to take the number of hours I work (bearing in mind that being self-employed freaks me out to the point that I feel guilty if I stop for a toilet break) and divide it by the amount of my so-called salary (I’m sensing a theme here), it actually goes into negative figures. Yeah. Obviously, this is not as bad as it sounds as I can also be paid dividends from the business. (Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about here? Or is it totally obvious that I thought dividends were something you got in Monopoly?) This, however, is frowned upon. By Terry, specifically, who seems to feel that I should have the ability to survive on fresh air month after month. It’s not good, people. It’s terrible being poor, especially when you desperately need new clothes. In other news, it took me almost 90 minutes to get dressed this morning. I SO need to shop… My So-Called SummerSo, my house is filthy, my dog hasn’t been walked for a week, and I’m sitting here in my oldest jeans and rattiest sweater, with cracks like the Grand Canyon under my eyes, but it’s done. The Huge Project of Doom is done, so I feel like a schoolkid on the last day of term. I can’t believe it’s not Friday yet. It’s been a rough few days. Why is it, I wonder, that some PRs seem to feel that being obnoxious and vaguely threatening is a surefire way to get a journalist to give them the coverage they so richly don’t deserve? Hmmmm? I mean, how does that one work? One of the PRs I have to deal with on the HPOD hates me, and while it’s OK because I hate her too, it’s also totally not OK because, hello! Why so snarky? If I wanted snarky I’d have stayed in a real job, thanks very much. Gah. Anyway. That aside, the past few days have pretty much blurred into one another. Tomorrow I have two more projects (of doom, natch.) to complete and then Friday? Friday is clear. Pretty much, anyway. I mean, it’s clear of the type of work that involves clients. It’s not free of the type of work that involves me sitting at my computer and desperately trying to catch up with everything I haven’t been able to do during the past few days, but still… plans are to a) clean my house b) walk my dog, and c) maybe head to the shops to buy some cheap sweaters, because hello May! Remember when you were warm? What happened to that? Ever since my computer died and I was forced to switch to the laptop, I’ve been working in the living room. The problem with this is? Well, the ground floor of our house is open-plan, which roughly translates as "totally freaking freezing". Also: it’s been raining steadily for around about forty days and forty nights now, and the dampness, I feel it in my bones. I hate the Scottish so-called summer. Hate it. I tend to feel the cold much more easily than other people, so while everyone else walks around in summer clothes regardless of the fact that it’s been raining forever, I’m forced to bundle up in every item of clothing I own, just to stay reasonably warm. It’s not a stylish look. Trust me. So I need to shop. And clean. And maybe then I’ll be able to find out what "normal" life is like! Note to the spammers:The penis enlargement patch? The one that will allow me to "ejaculate like a pornstar in enormous quantities"? That you keep spamming me about repeatedly? We have no need of that here. Also: I hope you burn in a fiery hell. That is all. Smackdown SundayIt is Sunday night. I have wine. I am afraid to go to bed because when I wake up it will be Monday, and next week is going to be a bad ‘un. Four times per year, The Scotsman produce a supplement thingy called the New Homes Review. It’s like a proper magazine, with pictures and stuff, and every single word it contains (except the adverts, of course. Which is actually quite a large percentage of the wordcount, come to think of it) is written by Yours Truly. That’s a lot of words. So, I have six articles to write for that, plus another three for Scotland on Sunday. I also have a whole bunch of other articles to write for my clients – so many that it’s actually making my head spin to think about it. Or maybe that’s the wine? I have all of this to do by Friday, plus all of the other crap I do every day, like, y’know, showering and combing my hair and eating dinner and stuff. I may be gone for some time… Very bad things…A Bad Thing happened to my computer. We don’t know what the Bad Thing was, but the end effect is that I can no longer use the Internet with anything like ease. Every page I try to load just freezes and crashes, my cookies are not stored (which is really freaking annoying considering I now have to sit with a huge list of user names and passwords for all of the sites I frequent), and there are various other small but irritating things going on now. It made me cry. Not being able to use the Internet from it basically renders the computer useless to me. Although my writing is obviously done on Word, all of the research is done online, and I also write for a couple of sites where I upload the copy directly. Also: if I can’t access my blogs and discussion boards at least five times per hour, I will die. But! But! All is not lost! Late last year Terry purchased himself a shiny new Sony Vaio for a consultancy job which turned out to be short lived. Guess who has the Vaio now? Did you guess “me”? You are right! It has a wide screen and wireless Internet! It is pretty! Outlook isn’t working on it yet but hey… it is pretty! I still miss my desktop, though. I feel like I am cheating with it by gettin’ with the Vaio here in the living room while it’s sitting there all broken upstairs. A sad day, indeed. (Pretty!) One Nation Controlled by the AssclownsRemember last week, when the nice man from the council came round to discuss my Neighbours from Hell problem? Well, the nice man was very helpful. He gave me a nice card, with a nice phone number on it, which he said I should feel free to contact any time, day or night, that the music started up. A nice card which I immediately lost. For real. As his car disappeared around the corner of the street, the music started up. Loud. Now, I could have called him back right then and there but I didn’t, because I? Was embarrassed. I had tried so hard to be good and rational, and to not seem like some totally crazy noise lady who walks around in orange headphones all the time because any kind of noise drives her completely and utterly batshit crazy. Even although I totally am that crazy lady. Anyway, the noise started up again on Saturday afternoon, as I was out mowing the lawn. Again, I did not call, partly because I had lost the nice card with the phone number on it, but mostly because it was Saturday afternoon and I figured the powers that be would consider Saturday afternoon to be fair game as far as ear-bleedingly loud music goes. (I personally don’t understand this. Far as I know, if the music is too loud, it’s too loud whenever it’s played. It doesn’t become OK at 2pm on Tuesday, or on the fourth Thursday of every month.) Yesterday afternoon, the music started up again, louder than ever before. This time, however, a new player had entered the game: the man in the house opposite us, who was listening to heavy metal and wanted the whole street to know it. It made me want to kill myself. I know it made Terry want to kill me, for sure. Instead, I came into the bedroom, which is on the other side of the house, thinking I could set up the laptop. But no! the kids across the street had set up a ghetto blaster on their front lawn. A ghetto blaster, people. Snipers, where are you when we need you? So, this afternoon, Terry and I adjourn to the living room for our lunchtime viewing of Neighbours. As the theme tune struck up, however, so did a theme tune of a different kind: a pounding baseline so loud that even Terry was forced to break his usual zen silence and express his irritation. It was coming from a blue van/mobile disco belonging to two workmen who were busy digging something up in one of our neighbour’s gardens. (Note: not even our next-door-neighbour. This is a house two doors along). The workmen are apparently Green Day fans. They don’t wanna be American Idiots. But they sure are a couple of British Assclowns. People, I put up with it until the end of Neighbours – not that we could hear Neighbours, of course. Then all hell broke loose. See, I always knew it would end this way. That I would control myself and put up with the noise for so long, and then, one day, something in my head would break and I’d issue from the house like an avenging angel, ready to set the world to rights by forcing two workmen to turn their music down. Which is pretty much what happened. I mean, I had intended to be all reasonable and stuff, but when it came to it, my voice went all shrill, and I had to yell to be heard over the music anyway, so I guess I thought that seeing as I’d started off all shrill and shouty, I may as well continue that way. They laughed at me. I knew they would. I don’t exactly inspire fear, you see. So I walked back to the house on shaky legs, rejoicing in the fact that although I’d made myself look like a freak, they had, at least, turned the music down. I poured myself a coffee (because yeah, I totally need more caffeine) and came up to the bedroom, which is my office at the moment on account of my computer being FUBAR. Let’s not even go there, though. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you? As soon as I closed the door and switched on the laptop, the music started up again. Someone shoot me. Please. Blogging AlongDon’t worry, I didn’t fall off my bike a third time and break my pretty little head for good, I’ve just been busy. Busy blogging, mostly – just not here. Sorry. The last few days have been spent setting up a couple of new blogs at The Fashion Police, both of which are still embarrassingly empty, but hey, doing my best here, mmmkay? First up we have Crimes of Fashion, which exists purely to poke fun at people with bad clothes. Expect to see me on there quite a lot then. Next up, we have the Celebrity Gossip Blog, which at the moment exists purely to indulge my fascination with Downward Spiral Britney and her trainwreck lifestyle. Brilliant fun. I’ve also been plugging away, doing my bit over at TV Scoop, a task made ever-harder by the fact that I don’t watch any British TV at all, ever. Don’t tell them that, though. Finally, The Scotsman called on Sunday morning, looking for an emergency 600 words, deadline Monday morning. I, of course, did what any self-respecting journo would do, jumped on my bike and went for another long ride. I didn’t fall off this time. At least some things are going well… The One Where I Fall Off My Bike Twice in 30 SecondsWhen you read the inevitable future entry in which I tell you how stupid I am, and you shake your head and think I’m obviously just fishing for compliments because seriously, no one is that stupid, I want you to come back and re-read this entry first. And weep.
So, this morning Terry and I go out cycling. We’re cycling merrily along, up hill and down dale (but mostly up hill, it has to be said), and also, along the side off the motorway, because that’s what it’s like where we live. Yeah. Anyway, there we are traversing the side of a particularly bumpy hill when Terry, who is lead file in this expedition, suddenly stops (Reason: unknown). I, travelling immediately behind him, am forced to stop too. As I do so, I place my right foot down on the ground to steady myself.
Except we’re on a hill.
So there is no ground.
And I am stupid.
With an embarrassingly feminine squeal, followed by an equally embarrassingly masculine grunt, I promptly fall sideways off my bike, and roll a little way down the hill. Terry watches and laughs. (Remind me, why am I marrying Terry, again?)
The only harm done is to my ego, so I get up, dust myself down, and get back in the saddle. Off we go. We’ve been cycling on for not more than 30 seconds when Terry stops again. (Reason: still unknown.) I stop behind him, put my foot to the ground – and promptly fall off my bike again. AGAIN.
And this is why stupidity should be painful. (Actually? It kind of was…)
So, we’re back home now, and Terry has laughed at me, ooooh, maybe 30 times? I am stupid. And also: bruised. But! But! It’s all OK, because I bet I totally burned a kazillion calories and now I’m all toned, like an athlete, no?
Um, no. I consulted my nifty little “bike pedometer” thing when we got home. We’ve done 5 kilometres in one hour. Calories burned: 60. Sixty. If that right there doesn’t convince you that exercise is a complete and utter waste of time, I don’t what will. I mean, 60 calories. That’s nothing. I bet the two slices of toast and, OK, jam, that I had when I got back contained more calories than that.
Exercise: gah. Cycling: gah. Stupidity: gahgahgahgahgah. Gah.  |
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