Aaaand we’re back! Did you miss me? And have we got everyone? Show of hands, please, so I can work out whether all of my prechus readers have made the move to WordPress with me, or whether you’ve decided to use this whole thing as an excuse to stop reading and pretend you just “got lost”…
Mad props to Terry, by the way, for doing all of the hard work here while I did the …. no work. I did do a lot of refreshing the page, though, and that totally helps with a move like this. For sure.
Anyway, here I am at my new WordPress home. You will notice the spanky new header and footer images, but the rest of the design is going to remain pretty much unchanged, until Terry has either finished transferring all of our other blogs to WordPress, or got sick of me nagging him, whichever comes first. My money is on the nagging.
And! And! There is a change to the comments fields, in that we now have threaded comments, which means that when you leave me a comment, I can reply to you and my reply will show up underneath your comment. And then other people can come along and reply to my replies, and it will be a total reply-fest, and we’ll all feel like one big, happy, integrated Internet family. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
Anyway there is still a lot of tweaking to be done, so I’m going to go and do that, instead of telling you all about the mice that have once again set up home in our kitchen, and the half-naked man I saw while out walking the dog on Monday. Those will have to be other posts for other days…
OK, listen up folks, because I am totally not joking with that title, this is IMPORTANT! You will be questioned as you leave the blog to make sure you were paying attention, so you may want to take notes. I will wait while you go get a pen…
* waits patiently *
Ready? OK, well, at an unspecifed but imminent time over the next few days, this here blawg will be moving from its current blogging platform at Typepad to a new home at WordPress. Basically we’re doing this just because we can. No, actually, we’re doing it because things have been going really well with our Blawg Network lately (did you hear me just tempt fate REALLY LOUDLY there?) and so obviously Terry and I decided that we better hurry up and do something to screw things up. This is that thing.
So! Rubinman was the first blog to move, because Rubinman only has about three readers, and they’re all related to me. That went suspiciously smoothly, so because Forever Amber only has about five readers, it will be next to jump off the cliff edge, so to speak. This means that at some point – and perhaps at many points – over the next few days, you may notice that the site, like, totally disappears, or looks really weird and stuff.
Because the domain will be transfered at the same time as the posts, most of you five probably won’t notice much of a difference while the transfer is going on. We hope. All you’ll have to do is to bookmark www.foreveramber.co.uk and then sit there, frantically hitting the “refresh” button until I come back to you. (I WILL COME BACK TO YOU, MY PEOPLE! I WILL NOT ABANDON YOU! PLEASE DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME!)
There are, however, some of you who I know read the site through its Typepad URL, which is www.foreveramber.typepad.com. Those people will need to STOP DOING THAT. That URL will not be updated and will soon cease to exist. So you two need to get with the programme, change your bookmark to www.foreveramber.co.uk and then begin the frantically-hitting-refresh programme outlined above.
Then there are some of you who read the site via RSS. We don’t think you will be affected, because we will be trying to realign the universe feeds with the new platform, but actually, we have no idea how that will all work, so if you notice the feed hasn’t been updated for a while, either I’ve died or the feed isn’t working. If it’s the former, damn, that sucks. If it’s the latter, you will find a “subscribe by RSS” button somewhere on the new site to resubscribe. Or, you know, just keep hitting “refresh”.
As for those of you who subscribe to the email updates, finally… yeah, good luck with that. Also: see “subscribing via RSS”, above.
So, yes, I think that’s everything. I will post again once the transfer has been completed and my sanity has been restored. If, of course, you never hear from me again, well, clearly something catastrophic has happened and Terry deleted the site by accident. Blame him.
See you on the other side, folks! (I hope.)
A few days after Terry and I moved in together, we hit on a scam that would ensure that we saved money and continued to enjoy regular meals, even although we were no longer living with parents. The plan was stunning in its simplicity: we would have dinner at our respective parental homes on at least one day each week. We have worked this scam pretty successfully ever since, and so it is that on Saturday evenings we can always be found at my parents’ house, where we eat all their food, drink all their wine (OK, I drink all their wine…), have furious arguments about Clinton/Obama and try to leave Rubin behind by "accident" when we leave. (That part of the plan has never come off. We’re working on it.)
This Saturday night, however, my parents were in London, at a wedding, and so Terry and I were forced to feed ourselves. Naturally, we decided to eat out.
We headed to our local Chinese restaurant, where I instantly managed to pull off my usual trick of being by far the most ridiculously overdressed person in the room, simply by wearing a skirt. (WHY? Why do people nowadays think jeans-and-a-t-shirt is the appropriate outfit NO MATTER WHAT? Why does no one ever dress up any more? Why do I persist in the belief that I am actually living in a black and white movie, meaning that I always end up looking like an extra from Breakfast at Tiffany’s when everyone else is in – yes! – jeans-and-a-t-shirt? Except for that one time when I thought I’d try to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb for a change and went out in jeans and a t-shirt, only to find that everyone else was dressed like extras from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Gah.)
Anyway, at the end of the meal the waitress brought us fortune cookies, and we went through exactly the same thing that always happens when Terry and I are given fortune cookies. Here is Terry’s fortune:
OMG! He will soon meet someone special! Who will obviously not be me, on account of his having already met me, and my being "spechul", not "special". Eeek! When will this meeting-of-the-special-person occur, I wonder? Should I stop him going to the gym? Should I perhaps try and stop him from going out at all, or is this meeting inevitable, and I am actually just The First Wife? OMG!
Here is my fortune:
So, basically my husband is about to meet Someone Special, and I, meanwhile, need advice from a cookie on how to "look and feel younger". Great.
Seriously, this is the same kind of crap we always get from fortune cookies. One time I swear to God Terry’s said something like, "You should totally rule the world, dude, because you are amazing!" and mine said "You suck, by the way". Another time – and I am honestly not joking here – my fortune cookie said that I would face terrible hardship in life, but would survive it if I was lucky. Because that’s totally the note you want to end your fun meal out on, isn’t it? GOD. Who thinks this stuff up? (And that night, Terry’s cookie said something about puppies and kittens and him one day ruling the world.)
Anyway, thankfully my parents will be boarding their flight home any minute now, so our Saturday nights will be back to normal next weekend. And I, meanwhile, will be ever-vigilant and always on the lookout for Someone Special. That bitch.
The title says it all, really. I’ll still ill. Oh, so very ill. Send flowers! And also: Haribo Mix. Just because.
On Tuesday, when I last posted here, I was actually feeling like the cold was maybe on the way out, but I was clearly just delirious at the time, because by about 6pm yesterday I was feeling like I’d been run over by a truck, several times, and I was forced to go and lie on the bed, moaning piteously, and waiting for death to come and claim me as his own.
I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe through my nose. I can’t stop sneezing. My eyeballs hurt. Last night, I was forced to spend the best part of an hour lying on the bed with two twists of loo roll stuck up my nostrils, like tusks, because my nose would just not STOP RUNNING. I am in hell, people. In hell. (You see what I meant about me getting the cold worse than other people? Or being a helluva lot more dramatic about it, in any case.)
All of this clearly sucks, but it sucks even more because here’s the thing: when you’re self-employed you just can’t get ill. You really can’t. When you have a “normal” job and you wake up dying, most of the time you can just call in sick and some other poor sod has to take care of your urgent tasks while you recline on a chaise longue in a silk wrap, eating chocolates (because as we all know, calories consumed while ill totally don’t count) and looking pale, yet beautiful. Wait, I’m getting real life confused with black and white movies again… You get to do all of that, anyway, but without the chaise longue, silk wrap or the “beautiful”. And with a lot of screwed up, snotty tissues, some Lemsip, and very greasy hair. As I said, it sucks, but hey, it’s still better than being at work, (I had some REALLY bad jobs before I decided to start working from home) and this is your consolation as you lie there working your way through a family sized bar of Dairy Milk and wondering if Terry would go out and get you a Big Mac. (See: calories consumed while ill don’t count, above)
When you’re self-employed, though, none of this applies. Because if you don’t haul ass to the computer (and yes, the computer could come to you in your sick bed, but as anyone who has ever tried to work in bed will tell you, after about an hour of that, your butt starts to get REALLY sore and you want to die.) and get the work done, the work will just not get done. No poor, put-upon colleague will step in to do your share of the work while muttering that you’re probably just faking it; no temp will arrive to shoulder the burden for you and change all the passwords on your computer while you’re gone. The work will just NOT GET DONE. And then you will not get paid. And you will lose your house, your car and your sanity and have to go to the workhouse. OMG!
So, basically, instead of lying in bed eating chocolate and being waited on hand and foot, you get to lie there in a cold sweat with two toilet paper tusks sticking out of your nostrils, thinking, “OMG, if I don’t update my website today, all of my readers will disappear and NEVER COME BACK and that will totally be the end of my pro-blogging career and I’ll have to go and work in a call centre and be verbally abused all day, and finally die without ever having made enough money to buy a pony, The End.”
Then you drag yourself out of your sick bed and you stagger to your computer and you force yourself to crank out a bunch of useless posts, in some of which you will mis-type the word “shoes” as “hoes”, which let me tell you, is a Very Bad mistake to make.
First, though, you will take the time to write this “poor me” entry, so that people will know to feel sorry for you and to send you Haribo mix. Now, if you’ll excuse me, folks, I have to go replace my Toilet Paper Tusks (TM).
OK, so after my last post I’m glad to see we’re all in agreement: I get to rule the world. I promise to be a fair and benevolent ruler, and to only occasionally be totally freaking irrational and despotic, but there’s just one thing: can I start next week?
Because this week, I’m too busy dying.
Yes, on Sunday morning I woke up feeling like I had a bunch of really sharp knives in my throat. As knife-swallowing hadn’t been part of Saturday night’s entertainment, I quickly deduced that I was getting the cold, and this was Very Bad News because, as anyone who knows me will testify, I don’t get normal colds. No, I get them worse than everyone else. Worse than you, for sure. My head colds are more like mini bouts of pneumonia, which is why I’ve been feeling very sorry for myself over the last few days. Sadly, the "illness" wasn’t bad enough to stop me working, but it did stop me going to the gym so, you know, every cloud, silver lining and all that.
Anyway, your responses to my post about Word Domination reminded me of a few other things I want to ban, kicking off with a suggestion from Anne-Marie:
Public spitters – BANNED
I mean, WHY? Why do people feel the need to do this? Just last month, for instance, I was standing at the ATM getting some cash to pay for my Ghetto Haircut, on account of the Hammer House of Hairdressing Horrors not actually accepting debit or credit cards, and… DIGRESSION! DIGRESSION! INCOMING!…
Shops that don’t accept plastic – BANNED
Seriously, this shows you just how much of a backwater we live in: THERE ARE STORES THAT DON’T ACCEPT PLASTIC. Which totally boggles my mind, because really, I am like the Queen, and by that I don’t mean I’m in my 80s and mother to some slightly strange looking toffs, but that I don’t carry cash. Ever. Because… actually, I don’t really know why. I think it’s because I hate it when I have to take out £10 just to buy something that costs £2, and I end up with a whole bunch of change that will burn a hole in my pocket, and then I’ll walk around thinking, "OMG, I must find something that costs £8 and buy it! Because I CAN!" Basically, if I have cash, I WILL spend it, so I just use plastic all the time. (Yes, I am one of those people who uses a debit card for small amounts. I expect lots of you will want to ban me for that, so let me just remind you that I RULE THE WORLD, not you, mwahaha!.)
So, anyway, I’m standing there getting my cash out of the ATM, when suddenly a car pulls up next to me and a man in a tracksuit gets out.
(Men in tracksuits – BANNED!)
Now, this gave me some cause for concern anyway because I felt sure he would come and stand in line behind me, and would stand as close behind me as he could possibly get, breathing down my neck and looking on with interest as I typed in my PIN. I felt sure he would do this because EVERYONE DOES THIS IN LINE FOR THE ATM. Seriously, they do, don’t they? And in the line for everything else too, come to think of it. They do it to me, anyway. Time and time again, there I’ll be, standing there minding my own business when I suddenly become aware of warm breath on the back of my neck, I turn round and – yup – there’s a pensioner stuck to my back.
People who stand too close to you at the ATM, and in other places too, but mostly at the ATM – BANNED
I don’t know why it’s normally pensioners that do this. Maybe because pensioners have a reduced awareness of the concept of "personal space" or something? ("Ooh, when I were a lass we didn’t have no newfangled ‘personal space’, young ‘un! In fact, there were 35 of us all living in a shoebox and it didn’t do me no harm! Aaar!") (I have no idea why I made my fictional pensioner say "aaar" there, by the way. Maybe a pirate pensioner?)
Anyway, pensioners tend to be the biggest culprits when it comes to personal space-invading but other people do it too, which is why I experienced a prickle of fear as I saw Tracksuit Man approach the ATM. Remember where I live, here, folks. The Buckfast bottles, the locals howling at the moon – I’m pretty sure "mugging a girl at the ATM" wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for some of these people, especially given that most ATMs round here make that handy "BEEP! BEEP!" sound when your cash is ready, which, really, they’d be as well just replacing with a recording of someone shouting, "ATTENTION ALL MUGGERS! CASH STICKING OUT OF HOLE IN WALL HERE! VULNERABLE WEAKLING STANDING IN FRONT OF IT! NOW’S YOUR CHANCE!"
ATMs that make loud noises when your cash is ready – BANNED
Where was I? Oh yeah, so Tracksuit man gets out of his car, walks towards me, positions himself just a few centimeters away from my back, and then…
…makes a disgusting "hawking" noise (gag!) and spits a mouthful of… frothy phlegm… onto the pavement. Right next to my shoe. AAARRGH! Gag, gah, gag!
I seriously almost threw up. Once I’d brought the gagging impulse under control, though, I’m afraid to say I took my life in both hands, turned around and shot the idiot in the head.
Whoops, sorry, no, that was how the scenario played out in my own head. In real life, I just shot him with one of my Death Ray stares. Which was dangerous because remember where we live, people. If real life was anything like my imagination, though, that glare would have incinerated Tracksuit Man where he stood. All that would’ve been left of him would’ve been a football top, a pair of "trackie" bottoms and some expensive trainers. That I would’ve… spat on. Because, actually? Sometimes two wrongs DO make a right. And sometimes I would like to go round the houses of all the people who spit on the street, and spit on their floors. Or on their widescreen TVs or something. The fact that I can’t actually spit (Seriously. I can’t spit. I did try, out of curiosity, and I have no idea how they manage to get that much phlegm out of their systems. How do they do it? ) would clearly be An Issue here, but I’d find a way around it. Maybe I’d just let Rubin pee on their washing machines, instead.
Yes, it’s a strange kind of justice that will operate in the world with me as Supreme Ruler, but I totally think it will work, no?
So yes, basically the entire point of this entry was for me to give my wholehearted approval to the suggestion that people who spit in the street be BANNED. Clearly that annoys me much more than I had realised, maybe because the scenario above is actually all too common, and I seem to see men doing this ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
Also banned: bloggers who start out with the intention of writing a couple of simple paragraphs, and end up writing long, whiny rants filled with multiple digressions. Because seriously, what is WRONG with those people?
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