I swear to God I must have done something really, really bad in a past life to justify the sheer, mindless torment I’m forced to endure in this one. No, really.
For the past three hours – that’s THREE HOURS, people – a child has been marching up and down our street, playing one shrill, headache inducing note on a…a tin whistle… (What the hell is a tin whistle? Am I making that up? It sounds like something old people would talk about…) EVERY THIRTY SECONDS. For three hours. Every thirty seconds for three hours we’ve been forced to listen to the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture. I want to die now.
I hate whistling. Hate it. I mean, this isn’t a tune that little Johnny is playing. Oh no. It’s just one, high pitched noise: the kind of sounds that makes your hair stand on end. A "nails down a blackboard" kind of noise. For three hours. Every thirty seconds. WHY? Why is he not bored with this already? WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS? I mean, even Terry, who didn’t notice the noise until I started ranting about it uncontrollably, has just said that if it doesn’t stop soon he will go out there and stick the tin whistle up the kid’s … well, anyway.
It is a well known fact that I don’t tolerate noise well. Tonight I’m wearing this outfit again:
At least it matches my blawg, though!Coordinating your accessories is SO important…
So, Terry isn’t having a great week. In fact, I think he may be cursed.
Before I say anything else here I should point out that I? Am a neat-freak. Really. I cannot stand mess. If I’m in a messy room I start feeling like I can’t breathe. If I go to visit someone and their house is a mess, I will want to leave. Hey, I wonder why people don’t invite me round to visit no more?
This week, unfortunately, has been the Cursed Week of Mess. Witness:
The Sad Tale of the Tomato Soup
It is Thursday evening. Terry and I interrupt our scheduled slobbing out in front of the TV in order to make some more of those vodka cocktails we’ve been having this week. While rummaging in the fridge in search of random liquids to throw in a glass with vodka, though, Terry somehow manages to knock over an open can of tomato soup that’s sitting on the top shelf. (WHY?)
SPLAT!
God, it’s amazing how much soup they get in those cans, isn’t it? One minute we’re happily chatting away in the kitchen, the next we’re in the middle of a murder scene. The soup was all over the floor. It was all over the fridge. It was all over the walls, the kitchen units, the worktops and – yes – the ceiling. It was all over Terry, who had to immediately strip to his underwear and throw his clothes and shoes into the washing machine. The washing machine that was all covered in tomato soup. Gah.
It took over thirty minutes to restore the kitchen to anything like normality. During that thirty minutes, Terry picked up a bottle of blackcurrant juice to move it from one counter to another. The bottle was leaking. It leaked all over the floor, joining its friend, tomato soup. Terry swore and moved the bottle again. It leaked again. More blackcurrant juice joined the party on the floor. Rubin moved industriously around the kitchen, making little whimpering noises of joy, hardly able to believe his luck. Never in his wildest dreams had he dared to imagine that one day we would spread food over every available surface! Now the tomato soup was his! His! And on his paws he would carry it throughout the house!
Suffice to say, we are still finding tomato soup on things to this day. Regrettably, however, this was not the worst thing that happened this week.
The Worst Thing That Happened This Week
Some back story: It is December, 2003. The house is still shiny and new and we are getting ready to go on holiday to Las Vegas. Yay! Nice to go on holiday to Las Vegas! But! But! Terry has lost his passport. (Also: his car insurance, road tax and driving license, but let’s concentrate on the passport for now.) His search for it takes him to the wardrobe in the bedroom: the wardrobe with the cheap and nasty mirrored doors which I hate with the passion of a thousand hot suns, but which we cannot afford to replace as we have spent all of our money on this trip to Las Vegas which will have to be canceled if Terry doesn’t find his FREAKING PASSPORT ALREADY. (Nope, still not over it, apparently.)
Anyway, long story short: Terry rummages through the wardrobe, door gets stuck, Terry yanks at it to dislodge it:
CRACK!
Seven years bad luck, right there.
The other notable part of this story is that Terry used MASKING TAPE to stick the cracks in the mirror together and thought I would find this acceptable. I did not find it acceptable. We, however, had no money, were leaving for Las Vegas in two days time, and when we come home, would find that Terry had kidney failure and our lives were over.
In short, the door was never replaced. For three years, I have lived with only one door on my wardrobe. Until yesterday. Since yesterday, I’ve had NO DOORS. None. Nada. Zilch. I want to leave home. I need a new house, this one is broken.
First of all, Terry broke the mirror door in the spare room. Not the glass, just the roller thingy, so it was OK, it was fixable. This week, he finally got around to fixing it, and he decided that the best time to rip both doors off their hinges, empty the wardrobe and make more mess than I could have imagined? Was 10.30pm on Friday night, right after I’d spent a looong time cleaning the house in preparation for the weekend. I run a tight ship here.
As he placed the hated mirrored doors on the floor and got out his hammer, a vague sense of foreboding crept over me. Terry is about to break another door, I thought, sage-like. Sure enough:
CRACK!
Fourteen years bad luck. And this is the sight I now wake up to in the mornings:
 Also: the last remaining mirrored doors? The set that aren’t broken? Pepe crapped on them. Extravagantly.
I swear to God I must have some kind of invisible sign on my forehead that only the truly crazy and/or obnoxious can see. I’m not sure what it says exactly, but it’s probably something along the lines of:
BATSHIT CRAZY? STOP ME AND TELL ME ABOUT IT! I’M LISTENING!
Yeah, I have a pretty big forehead.
Anyway, this morning I headed out to the doctor’s surgery to collect a prescription. Just as I reached the doors of the building, a man came out of them, and started mopping his head exaggeratedly. "It’s too hot in there," he said, nodding back towards the surgery. "Had to get out."
"Yes," I said brightly, for I have made a resolution to try to be nice to people who talk to me in the street. My usual death glare just wasn’t endearing me to anyone. "It’s very warm today, isn’t it?"
My new friend nodded, encouraged. "You know what else?" he said, looking shifty. "There’s a f*****g sheik in there too. With a mask on. Shouldn’t even be in the f*****g country."
Now, in my head, where I am a brave person who is not afraid to stand up for her beliefs, even when accosted in the street by someone who might just have been there to pick up his methodone, I would have stopped, turned round and demanded to know just what part of my "Yes, it is very warm today," translated as "If you have any offensive, hate filled views, please tell me about them!" before… well, I dunno what I should have done after that. In the real world, I was already halfway through the door when he said it and I thought, "nah, he can’t just have said that to me. Can’t have."
But he had. As I reached the reception I saw a Muslim woman standing there, dressed in a burkha, with three children. Minding her own business. Harming no one. And while I have my own views on cultures which force women to cover every inch of their flesh in that way, I try not to make a habit of stopping people in the street to spout off about it. I can’t believe there are people who think it’s acceptable to do that. Actually, scratch that – I can believe it. I see examples of it all the time, particularly in our post-9/11 world where it seems that all of the racist, biggoted asshats out there appear to have found validation for their hate filled views. GOD.
The woman spoke perfect English, with a Scottish accent – she’d clearly lived here for a long time, and had probably been born here. Nevertheless, when she reached the head of the queue, I noticed that the woman on reception spoke to her very. slowly. and. clearly. as. if. she. was. a. bit. simple. What is wrong with people?
It took the best part of an hour for my prescription to be ready, so I bought Heat magazine and sat and read it the car, in a bid to stay away from the Crazies. When I finally did go back to collect it, some old biddy pushed straight to the front of the queue and was served first. No one questioned this. God, people annoy me. I mean, this is exactly why I try to live my live vicariously, through the internet. Nice to live vicariously through the internet!
On the way home, though, I did see a dog in a poncho. So it wasn’t all bad.
Tags: racism dogs in ponchos
The POD is finished!* It’s Friday tomorrow! My parents come home on Saturday! With stuff! Stuff from Sephora!** Now there’s a huge pile o’ ironing to do!
Damn.
But! But! I still have that credit card credit to spend on new jeans, except not really, because when I went to the River Island website to order the jeans I wanted, they didn’t have them in my size. This has upset me mightily because River Island jeans are currently my very favourite jeans in the world, being, in fact, the only jeans in the world which fit me properly, both at the waist and at the leg. Or they do when they actually, you know, have them in stock. Gah.
So, what do I do? Do I wait and keep relentlessly refreshing the website, in the hope that new stock comes in and is instantly updated, or do I – *gasp* – go elsewhere to fulfill my jeans needs? It’s a difficult one, made even more difficult by the fact that this purchase must be made online as a) I am lazy and b) I don’t know the PIN for my credit card.
This is the kind of problem I like, though, people. I WILL prevail…
*Sort of. Well, not really, I mean I’ll have to go over it all again in the morning and this was only the first re-write anyway, so the client will have to come back to me with a gazillion changes, and I’m probably going to have to leave the country or something, but hey, who’s counting?
** Oh please, oh please, oh please…
So, the latest installment of the Huge Project O’Doom was nineteen pages long when I started editing it. It is now twenty-three pages long. HOW? Every time I finish a page I look down at the length-thiny and an extra page has been added on. I swear to God, I will be doing this forever, unless, of course I LOSE MY TINY MIND in the process. Yeah.
I would really, really like this HPOD to be over with. I’m so bored with endlessly refreshing my forums and blogs in my quest for distraction. And why are you people not updating your blogs more often, anyway? Am I supposed to entertain myself here? GOD.
As well as being bored rigid, I’m also slightly freaked out this week, reason being that I found out a couple of days ago that my little cousin (who lives in Canada) just got married. Now, my cousin is 26 now, but she’s still my little cousin, and last time I saw her in person she was thirteen, so this latest development is making me feel old. I’ve been noticing lately, though, that I totally AM old. The evidence:
- Going out to collect the mail in the morning wearing only my dressing gown
- My grubby, makeup-and-coffee-smeared dressing gown
- Throwing on a white top to walk the dog in (because my little sundress, it would’ve got me lynched had I worn it to walk through The Ghetto), noticing that my green bra is totally visible through the white and not bothering to get changed.*
- Buying Asda’s own brand hair conditioner rather than my usual, more expensive one, because who will be able to tell the difference?
- Worrying about what the neighbours think of the garden
- Going to Ikea. And the garden centre.
- Walking past large groups of teenagers and attracting NO COMMENT from them at all.
Hell, soon I will be buying jeans with elasticated waists and saying, "I remember when this was all fields" on a regular basis. I’m scared. Hold me.
There is also a small amount of evidence of my still being young, though, such as:
- Showing flagrant disregard for the accounting system Terry has set up. Terry is not speaking to me about this. Oops.
- Putting all the fruit juice in the house into a glass with vodka and calling it a "cocktail". (Actually, Terry did this, but I drank it. Drank them, rather. Hic.)
- Erm…
Yeah, I really need to pick my game up here. Also: finish the HPOD. Everything will be OK once I finish the HPOD…
*In my defense, I did cut my walk slightly short to come home and rectify this, because GOD, what was I thinking?
GOD. It should be illegal to have to work when the weather’s as hot as this. In fact, when I rule the world it will totally be illegal, along with chewing gum, wearing white socks, walking really slowly round the shops and letting your children play in my garden. (WHY? For the love of God, WHY?)
It is hot, people. It is hothothot and also sunny, but do I get to enjoy any of this hot sunnyness? No. I do not. For the Huge Project O’Doom continues, and, in fact, seems likely to NEVER END, and so I sit here, trapped in a hot, stuffy office listening to the children playing in the street outside and being horribly reminded of this one time when I was ten and I got the mumps for FOUR WEEKS of the summer holidays. Gah.
Anyway, continuing with the theme of "we are old now, so we do boring things", and buoyed by the successful installation of the brown picket fence, Terry and I went to Ikea last night, on a fact finding mission. Facts we found:
- We always think Ikea wardrobes are really cheap, but actually? Not so much.
- We really want a red leather sofa.
- We need a new kitchen and we need it now.
- We can’t afford a new kitchen
- Buy maybe we could redecorate the office?
- Mmmmm, onion rings!
All of this was brought on by Terry, who has entered one of the overly-zealous-let’s-fix-up-the-house phases he enters into every so often. This week he’s all, "Hell, if I can put up a small fence, what’s to stop me building a conservatory? And an extension! I could knock down this wall in the kitchen and make an attractive loft-style apartment out of the ground floor of our semi-detached house. Look, there’s nothing to it! I bet I could kick it down with my feet right now!"
We will probably not go through with the knocking down of walls, because we’re the kind of people who come up with these ideas, talk about them obsessively for weeks and then abruptly forget all about them, but I think we might try and do something with the "office", which is a real state at the moment. I keep thinking that if we could just turn the "office" into a pleasant, calming working environment, it would perhaps make the Huge Project O’Doom that little bit easier, and I could maybe even stop putting inverted commas around the word "office" every time I write it. It would be exciting, though. Even though we’ve been running this business for over two years now, having a "proper", swanky office would make it all seem a bit more real, if that makes sense.
And if nothing else, it’s always an excuse to eat more Ikea onion rings.
We’re having one of those weekend heatwaves we sometimes get. It’s boiling. I’m wearing my shorts and everything. It’s like being on holiday, except I don’t know about you, but when I’m on holiday I generally don’t lock myself in the dullest room of the house and spend hours ploughing through the Huge Project O’Doom, which is what I’m currently doing. Or not doing, as the case may be. Yay for summer!Just the same as winter, but with sun! Woo hoo!
It’s not all Doom, though. For instance, because we are old, we went to the garden centre yesterday. And bought gardening things. For real. (We also went to the all you can eat Chinese buffet and drank wine, so there is hope for us yet. I think). The main problem with me and gardening is that I hate it. And resent it. It just seems so pointless to spend hours every weekend tending to a garden, only to have to do it all over again the next weekend. The fact that it’s guaranteed to pee down all the intervening week, so you don’t actually get any benefit from the dumb garden just makes it all the worse. I feel like Penelope, weaving her tapestry all day and then unravelling it all night. It is a ceaseless, thankless task, and when we have money? I am SO getting a gardener.
Anyway, the main problem with the garden at the moment is that (Ihateit), being the overgrown wilderness it is, the neighbourhood kids tend to think that it’s not a garden at all, but simply a piece of scrap ground for them to play on, ride their bikes over and use to peer through our windows – THE SWINES. This winds me up something chronic, so during our trip to said garden centre yesterday we bought ourselves some picket fencing which, despite the title of this entry, is not white at all, but is brown. Sorry.
We only got enough to put at the bottom part of the garden (we are poor, so poor), but the idea is that the SWINES will see it, realise that it’s a GARDEN, suckers, and get the hell out. Not sure if this idea will work AT ALL though, as last night, when we were out laying the groundwork for our new fence? The neighbourhood kids all gathered around like we were a campfire and babbled crap at us for so long that I was forced to go back into the house. GOD.
They were drawn to us, it seems, by the presence of Rubin, who was looking mighty cute. As they approached, though, screaming “OMG, lookit the cute poodle!” (*cough*-BICHON-*cough*), the “cute poodle” in question leapt to his feet and started snarling and barking like the scary wolf we all know he is. After we’d gone, the kids told Terry that they have often heard the screams of “BAAAAAD BOOOY! NOOOOO! BAAAAAD!” echoing from our house late at night. Oops.
Anyway. The fence isn’t in situ yet, but when it is, you can be sure I’ll tell you all about it, because that’s how boring I am. In good news, though: I just looked at one of my credit card statements (I normally only do this when I’m drunk, but for some reason I did it this morning, too), and discovered that the account is IN CREDIT to the EXACT AMOUNT OF THE NEW JEANS I WANT!* How cool is that? Free jeans!
* Totally not the exact amount, but what’s £10 amongst friends, really?
Tags:freelance writing summer gardening
So, our article in the Daily Record came out today – a double page spread, under the headline ‘IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH IS A VOW AMBER HAS ALREADY TAKEN’. Hee! They used this picture, but they cropped it, blew it up to massive proportions, flipped it round, greyscaled it, and also: photoshopped it to make me look like some madcrazy snaggletoothed troll – THE SWINES.
But that’s not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is this: EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT ME. Everyone. I mean, I’ve had my picture in the paper before. Hell, when I was a reporter I was in the paper every other week: receiving massive cheques from politicians, launching bonnie baby competitions, getting dressed up in the strip of the local football team so we could express our "support"… And you know what? I never really thought about it, partly because it was a local paper, so only local people would see the pictures, and partly because I have no idea why. Maybe I was crazy.
This paper, though, is a national red-top. It’s got a circulation of millions, and is probably the most widely-read daily newspaper in Scotland. Which is a bit…wow. I just keep thinking of all of those millions of people who have a picture of me and Terry in their houses today, who will have LOOKED AT ME, even if it was just while turning over the page and thinking, "Ewww, a snaggletoothed troll!"
And then I think about all of the pet litter trays we’ll be lining tomorrow and all of the bags of fish and chips we’ll be wrapping into next week, and I think I may be trying to make some kind of point here – maybe on the transient nature of fame or something? – but I’ve only had one coffee today, so maybe y’all could just pretend you know what I’m talking about…
(Terry and I are currently looking after Terry’s mum’s parrot, Pepe. His cage is lined every day with newspapers. Now I keep imagining my face in a bin somewhere with a huge bird dropping on it. GOD.)
Anyway. The story was fine. We live in Edinburgh, now, apparently, and our visit to the Grand Canyon was "the trip of a lifetime!" (er, hello! I was twenty-freaking-seven! I haven’t had a lifetime yet!), but hey, at least they didn’t mention my age. The one thing that does bother me is that they’ve said that Terry’s mum couldn’t donate a kidney because she was "considered too old at 63". Now, that, my friends, is crap.
Terry’s mum wasn’t allowed to donate because during the final stage of testing, they discovered a problem with her heart which, although not serious enough to worry about, nevertheless made them not want to put her through such major surgery. They discovered this in the final stages of testing – they wouldn’t have bothered testing her at all if they thought she was too old. It’s a small point, I know, but I don’t like to think that people in their 60s might discount themselves as live donors after reading that.
Ah well. I guess if that was our 15 minutes, we’ve had it. Easy come, easy go…
ETA: Just found that the story is on the Record’s website, here, although without the pics.
Tags:kidney transplant kidney failure
 So, you would think I’d have learned by now that drinking wine at lunchtime is not such a good thing, huh? Or, indeed, eating a three course meal, for that matter. Because now it’s 17.31, I’m back at my desk with all of the day’s work still unfinished (and, yes, unstarted) and do I feel like ploughing through it all now? No, I decidedly do not. And you can’t make me.
Today we visited our wedding venue, Orocco Pier, for lunch. The visit was kind of like a consolation prize, for today is a bad day for me, being the day my parents leave for Florida for their annual summer holiday. They’re up there now, in the sky. It’s quite disconcerting having parents in the sky, especially if, like me, you suffer from The Panic. Even if the plane doesn’t crash, they still have to stay safe while driving around central Florida for two weeks, and ohmygod what if something happens to them? And also: what if something happens to us while they’re gone?
This last bit of angst is not quite as far-fetched as it seems considering that this time last year my parents’ plane hadn’t even left the ground and Terry was in hospital having an emergency operation on his fistula. My parents were in international departures, Terry’s mum was in Crete, and, in short, wasn’t a body around to drag me back down from the ceiling and convince me that it was all going to be OK. They said the operation would take an hour: it took three. By the third hour I was seriously considering going and knocking on the door of the woman across the road and asking her to come and sit with me before I done LOST MY MIND, people.
Serious illness has a way of making you feel much more vulnerable than you otherwise would. And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t be sitting here obsessively refreshing Sky News and waiting for news of a plane crash if Terry hadn’t been ill – but I have to admit that I’ve never felt more alone than I did on that day last year, and I pretty much live in fear of a repeat performance. Our health and happiness seems so much more fragile than other people’s. I know it’s not really – hell, the events of this time last year are testament to that. But the fact remains that we’re still more likely to have to rush to hospital suddenly than most people are, and it’s at times like this that I’m most aware of that.
God, that was depressing, wasn’t it? Here, have a photo of the Forth Rail Bridge to make up for it:
 This is where we’ll probably have some of our wedding pictures taken – it’s just a stone’s throw away from the venue (we’ll get married in front of a huge window looking out onto this same view) and will no doubt be swimming in rainwater in March. It was nice and sunny today, though, and ohmigod, the food was good. It gave us both a warm, fuzzy feeling about the wedding, and no, it wasn’t the wine.
And now it’s SIX o’clock and I haven’t done any work. Gah.
…they made me sit on Terry’s back:
 Lookit how excited we are. Whee! We gotta kidney transplant and now we’re getting married! You wish you were us, you really do!
In other news of a photographic nature, we’ve also finally – FINALLY – booked a wedding photographer. Halleleuja. Also: we’re broke now.
Anyway. Must work.
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