OK, February, you win. It’s become clear to me now that absolutely EVERYTHING I try to do this month is doomed to epic failure, so I’m just going to go back to bed until March, OK? Actually, wait: make that May. I’ll get up when it’s Spring and not before…

So, I haven’t been to the gym this month, other than one Body Pump class that was so long ago I’ve almost forgotten doing it. This has been particularly annoying to me, because on the last day of January, I went out and bought a bunch of brand new gym clothes.  I figured it was the only way I’d be able to motivate myself to actually go to the gym because, OK, they were exercise clothes, and therefore ugly by nature, but beggars can’t be choosers, and if new gym clothes were all that was on offer for the month, then by God, I would be taking full advantage of them!

Except I wouldn’t, because the day after I bought them, the snow came. And stayed for a week. During that time, not only was it dangerous to drive (Well, dangerous for ME to drive, I mean), the horrendous weather forced me to curl up into a tight little ball and not move. Just in case I haven’t made myself clear enough the million or so other times I’ve mentioned this: I DON’T “DO” COLD.

The week after that (last week), I caught the cold. Oh, and it snowed. Again. So all gym-going was put on hold that week too, making this week the first time this month that I haven’t had an excuse not to go to the gym. Yesterday, though… well, yesterday was Monday, and we visit Terry’s mum on a Monday, which leaves me with less time to do my actual work for the day, so I decided to let myself off the hook when I woke up at the appointed time and then totally failed to get up and go to the gym.

Which brings us to today.

Today was Body Combat. It’s my favourite class, so last night I prepared for it by laying out my gym clothes in preparation for the morning, and then lying awake all night. I didn’t do the last bit deliberately, you understand: it’s just that my brain likes to do this thing whereby if it knows I have to get up early the next day it will keep me awake, purely so it can go, “Ooh! Not long now! Just a few, short hours until you have to get up, in fact! Man, you’re going to feel like CRAP. You hate getting up early, don’t you? Don’t blame you: you should really have been asleep HOURS ago if you wanted to feel anything like “awake” when that alarm goes off. Seriously, you’re going to feel SO BAD you’re going to pray for the sweet release of death. Even if you go to sleep RIGHT NOW, you’ll still not get enough sleep, and you’ll feel TERRIBLE, like absolutely HORRENDOUS. Man, this going to SUCK!” And so on and so forth.

All of this internal chatter, however, meant that I was awake a good hour and a half before my alarm went off, and even although I sank into the deepest and most blissful sleep imaginable minutes before it did, by that point I had spent so much time thinking about how I was going to get up and go to the gym that there was no way in hell I wasn’t going to actually do it. Seriously, I had even dreamt about that Body Combat class during the short periods of sleep I managed to snatch. I wish I was joking.

Anyway. I dragged myself out of bed, pulled on my (Shiny! New!) gym clothes and headed out to the car.

Which was, of course, totally frozen solid, with both locks impenetrable. %$£^&&”^*&!!!!!!

This was mostly my fault. You see, this is now the THIRD time this has happened to me this month. It happened for the second time on Saturday morning, when I tried to go to my optician’s appointment, and found the car locks frozen solid. That night we went to visit my parents, and I whined so much about my passenger-side entry, and trips up and down the driveway with a mug of hot water, that my dad went out to his garage and returned with a can of  “LOCKS NOT FREEZE!” or something, which he gave me with instructions to spray it on the locks.

(Aside: where does my dad GET all this stuff? Seriously, you could go round there and say, “Damn, I really wish I had a flux capacitor,” and my dad will get this thoughtful look on his face and say, “You know, I think I may have one of those in the garage…” And he WILL. It’s amazing. Sadly, this doesn’t work for Christian Louboutin shoes and ponies, though: I’ve checked.)

Obviously, I brought the LOCKS NOT FREEZE! home with me, put it carefully away in the spare room wardrobe, and forgot all about it. Until this morning, when I once again was forced to enter the car via the passenger side, having first of all travelled up and down the driveway three times with a mug of hot water. GOD.

(Yes, dad, I have sprayed the locks now. Thanks!)

Luckily for me, I now have the whole “Mug/hot water/passenger side entry” down to such a fine art that I’ll probably still be getting into the car via the passenger side by June, out of sheer force of habit, so by the time I finally pulled out of the driveway, I was still in plenty of time for my Body Combat class, and feeling not a little bit smug about it, let me tell you. At last, I was following through on a promise I had made to myself! I was going to the gym, and even although it would hurt, I knew that by the time I got home I would be feeling even MORE smug, and so it would all have been worthwhile.

Of course, I had forgotten an important fact here: I had forgotten that, last I checked, I was still Amber, and things just don’t tend to work out like that for me.

That’s probably why, after having driven for approximately three minutes, I encountered a traffic jam. And I sat in that traffic jam, almost without moving, for the next 25 minutes. When the time came for my class to start, and I was still sitting in the same place, still a good 15 – 20 minutes away from the gym, I accepted the inevitable, got out of the car and started walking amongst the stationery traffic, singing “Everybody Hurts” to the sky. Whoops, no, that was just in my own head. What I actually did, was turn the car around and return home*, taking a curiously circuitous route that was only vaguely familiar to me, on account of all of the stationery traffic that was just littered around the roads, going nowhere. It was like a scene out of one of those “End of the world, OMG, only Will Smith can save us now!” movies, honestly.

And this is why I try not to ever leave the house, if I can possibly help it. Every time I do, it’s just all stressstressstress, failfailfail, and I normally end up buying something I don’t actually need, into the bargain. (Not today, though. Because I would’ve needed to actually GO somewhere to have been able to buy something, and instead I just drove around, wasting my precious, precious, heart-breakingly expensive fuel instead. AAAARGH!)

I’m going back to bed now. Wake me up when it’s Spring, would you?

* Yes, I know, I could’ve just gone to the gym anyway. But it would probably have taken me another 30 minutes to get there, God knows how long to get back, and anyway: by that point? I just didn’t want to.

So, I went to the gym. In fact, I went to a Boxercise class, and here’s the thing about that: if you ever catch me mentioning doing another one, I want you to do that “reaching through the screen and slapping me” thing we discussed earier this week, m’kay?

Now, it’s not that Boxercise is unbelievably hard or anything. I mean, it might be, for all I know, but the thing is, I don’t know, because when I went, I hadn’t been to the gym for …. let’s just say “a while”… so really, anything I tried would probably have seemed hard to me.

Or then again, maybe not: before going to the class I did, of course, Twitter and Facebook obsessively about it, and the feedback I got from people who had actually done a Boxercise class (as opposed to, say, just reading about it online and thinking, “Ooh! Hitting stuff! And not getting in trouble for it! Book me in!” ) was mostly derisive laughter and advice about taking out private health insurance first. So, naturally, I ignored all of this, and went to the class anyway.

I did, however, take Terry with me. See, I’d read a bit about this. I’d read, for instance, that there might be something called “pad work”, which is where one person holds up a couple of big pads and the other person beats the crap out of them, while wearing boxing gloves. As much fun as this sounded, as soon as I read about it I realised that the fact two people were involved in this “pad work” would mean that we would probably be told to “partner up”. And I? Do not “partner up”. Mostly because… well, because I am That Girl who is always left standing on her own, smiling sheepishly, when everyone else has picked their partners for games and stuff. You know, the one the gym teacher is forced to allocate a team/partner, and then give that team/partner some extra points to make up for their “handicap”.  And even then, everyone’ll be going, “Aww, miss, do we HAVE to have Amber in our team?” or “We had Amber LAST time, it’s not fair!” And then you end up partnered with that smelly kid no one else will speak to, and after that, the smelly kid thinks s/he is your BFF, and never lets you out of his/her sight from that moment on.

(The one exception to this: during stupid ass “team building” exercises when I used to work in an office, and we’d be required to discuss things in pairs and then write our conclusions down on a flip chart with a magic marker. Oh, everyone wanted to be my partner THEN, let me tell you. Because they’d be all, “You’re the writer! You can do the ‘writing down’ bit!” And I’d be all, “Not that kind of writer, dumbass.” Then I’d smack them.)

Anyway, as I was saying, I am That Girl, and in a bid not to be That Girl during the Boxercise class, I took Terry with me.

What I neglected to consider when I did this: Terry is much bigger than me. Also: much stronger. Oh, and male.

What the gym instructor said when I indicated that I wanted Terry to be my partner for the “pad work”:  “NO.”

Once again, I was That Girl.

The last woman standing was forced to be my partner. She, too, was much stronger than me, on account of me being a weakling. I think she would’ve been prepared to accept this as not being my fault, exactly, but I reckon she found it harder to accept the fact that I totally can’t count. Or remember things. So when the instructor said, “OK, give me 20 crosses, 40 uppercuts, eleventy one really fast poky ones, same on the other side, then 20 hooks, then 35 reverse-cross-hookercuts,” I was all, “Errr….?”

In the end, my partner had to actually count my punches out loud for me. And I STILL got it wrong. Like, I’d think I’d done 52, but I’d actually only have done eight. (HOW?) On the way out of the class, I’m sure I heard my poor partner say to everyone else, “Hey, word to the wise: never partner That Girl….” but I may have just imagined that.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a boxer, somehow. Especially given that I had trouble getting out of bed this morning because I was so sore from yesterday’s exertions…

This weekend marks the one year anniversary of Terry and I joining the gym. We decided to celebrate the occasion by forgetting to renew our membership, so that when we turned up for Body Pump on Monday morning and tried to swipe our membership cards, the turnstiles wouldn’t open for us and a recorded message started blasting through the entire gym saying, “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! GUESS WHO HASN’T PAID THEIR MEMBERSHIP FEES?!”

Ok, maybe not that last bit, but a small queue did form behind us as we resolutely tried to force our way through the barriers, completely oblivious to the fact that the gym had PUT A BLOCK ON OUR CARDS. Even although the membership technically doesn’t run out until Friday. GOD. Luckily, Terry had brought our bank details with him, so we were able to sort things out and gain access to Body Pump, but the experience had clearly put me off my stride, because when we finally made it into the studio I managed to select The Step That Always Falls Apart As Soon As You Touch it, and it clattered to the floor in three pieces, making so much noise that everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me.

Then I picked it up and immediately dropped it again.

Then I picked it up a third time, swung round and… barrelled straight into the punch bag that hangs from the ceiling.

The next morning, when we arrived for Body Combat, we discovered that our cards were STILL BLOCKED, and riot police were preventing us from entering the gym. I wonder why?

Anyway, despite the fact that I drop the equipment on a regular basis and haven’t been able to use the pool since January, I’m actually feeling pretty pleased with myself that I lasted out the entire year, because let’s face it, I really didn’t expect to. At all. I mean, I was really just humouring Terry when I agreed to join up, and my intention was to only use the sauna and spa, and to make sure I didn’t break a sweat, ever. But somehow I managed to keep going, and am now actually going even more regularly than I did to start with, when I was still in hot pursuit of that free towel. Yay me!

And now I’m going to go eat cake…

Today at the gym (four times in a row! GO ME!), before the class even started, I managed to:

1. Drop a barbell on my thumb, creating the kind of pain that makes your heart rise into your mouth, and makes you feel like you’re going to throw up any second.

2. During a gap in the ear-splittingly loud music that was playing at the time, shout out the phrase, “HE LIKES TO STOP AND PEE ALL THE TIME!”

I think I may be starting to understand why I’m Amber-No-Mates at the gym…

(On that second one, I was having a shouted conversation with Terry at the time, about a man I’d spotted through the window, who was out running with his two dogs.

Me: I wish I could go running with Rubin!
Terry: You could go running with Rubin.
Me: No I couldn’t: I’d never get to do any running because he…
[MUSIC STOPS]

Well, you know the rest. And so does everyone who was in Body Pump this morning. Gah.)

On the plus side, this product, on sale in the gym’s reception, always makes me smile, so it’s a good job I always have my phone camera with me at the gym, for those “pretending to be busy” moments:

OMG, size zero! Isn’t it terrible the pressure kids are under to be skinny these days? Particularly given that, as we all know for a fact, size zero is ugly and unattractive, and ALL MEN hate women who are that size. Because those women are not “real” women. Nosiree.

Note: I’m being sarcastic, by the way, just in case anyone didn’t realise. (And trust me, I have to say that because there’s pretty much always someone who doesn’t. Case in point: the angry comments I sometimes get on this entry from people who want to tell me off for being so “nasty” about redheads and “hating on them”. Because yes, folks, I am secretly one of the redhead hatrz. That’s why I have this headfull of red hair, you know? Because I hate it. Not as much as I hate the use of the phrase “hating on”, though.)

Where was I? Oh yes, size zero. Yes, I was being sarcastic above, because God knows, this is my pet hate right now, the way people would never in a million years make a derogatory comment about larger women (and quite rightly so), but think it’s absolutely fine to call thin ones “ugly” and tell them endlessly than no men find them attractive. Names like “stick insects” and “lollipop heads” and “skeletons” are bandied about with gay abandon in the UK media right now (and particularly in the fashion blogosphere, where slagging off the skinny girls is de rigeur these days), but overweight people are regularly described as “curvy” and “voluptuous” and “real women”. (What are the thin ones, then? Imaginary?)

It winds me up. So much, in fact, that I don’t think I can even trust myself to write any more about it without it degenarating into an incoherent rant. Even more so than it has already, I mean. Here, have a picture of my dog:

People, my winter holiday is BACK ON. Even if I have to, I dunno, sell Rubin or something to pay for it. Because seriously, folks. SERIOUSLY. Enough with the rain already. I mean, people had to be rescued by boat from the town next door to ours last night because of all the rain/flooding, and other people had to be airlifted to the local hospital because of it. Which would really, really suck, you know?

Now, we live in Scotland, where it’s pretty much all hills, all the time, so trust me: we just don’t get that much flooding. I’m starting to feel like we’re in The Bible or something. I’m also starting to think that if we don’t get the hell out of Dodge, and soon, we’ll grow webbed feet and have to learn how to breathe under water. And I know that sounds cool, but I just don’t think it would be somehow.

The result of all of this apocalyptic weather? As I said, the winter holiday is a goer. It looks like we will just be going to the Canaries, which is exactly what I thought would happen, because there is seriously nowhere cheaper (that’s within five hours of the UK and hot at that time of year), but at this point I really don’t care because GIVE ME SUN. Please. I’m desperate here.

In slightly better news, my stint at the gym last Thursday turned out not to be an isolated event after all, and so far I have been every day this week (I know!), doing Body Pump, Body Combat and, today, Body Attack. So, yeah, I feel like my body really has been attacked now, for sure.

I also feel kind of like the new girl at high school, because the thing about all of these classes is that everyone else already seems to know each other. Now, I know people are always recommending the gym as a place to make new friends, but I just don’t see how that can be done easily – and not just because people tend to take an instant dislike to me. (No, seriously, I think it’s because my "resting face" is a frown. And maybe because if I don’t have my contact lenses on, I will walk right past people without recognising them, and that tends to cause offence.) I mean, how do you make friends at the gym? Do you just walk up to people while they’re on the treadmill and stand next to them shouting, "HI! WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND?" Because that would be weird.

Note: I don’t actually go to the gym to make friends, by the way. I go to the gym because I like making myself look like someone who has only recently learned how to walk unaided, obviously. It’s just that, when I walk into these classes, I always have a bit of a sinking feeling as I realise that everyone else is standing around in little cliques, and then I have to sit down on the floor by myself and pretend there is something super-interesting on my phone that I absolutely have to look at RIGHT NOW.

In conclusion: I suck at making friends with people. But I have been to the gym three times already this week so, you know, yay me!

Last night when I looked at my diary to see what I had planned for today (because obviously my life is SO busy that I need to do that. I mean, it’s not like I could just write "Blog, eat, sleep" every day and be done with it, is it?) I found that I had written:

"9.15am – Amber"

Eh? The hell? Was I planning on being more "Amber" than usual at 9.15am? Or did I feel I’d need a reminder that I was Amber at 9.15am? Or am I just going crazy? I’m guessing Terry would probably go with "crazy", because despite the fact that everyone totally agreed with me that the whole "reading at the gym" thing = a bit weird, really, he is still maintaining that it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. His argument seems to involve proximity to the sauna and jacuzzi, which I guess could very well dupe people into thinking they were, in fact, at an expensive day spa and not AT THE GYM. Personally I think all the screaming children would convince me otherwise, but hey, that’s just me. (Also, Terry? You’re wrong.)

Oh, and 9:15am this morning was body pump, by the way. Not "Amber". 9:15am tomorrow is my first attempt at Body Combat, and I’m actually quite worried about this because apparently the fact that the schools are now on holiday means that hardly anyone goes to the classes all summer (there were only a handful of us in Body Pump today), and I’m having horrible visions of it just being me, on my lonesome, prancing around in front of the instructor rather than just hiding at the back of the room, like I usually do in classes. That would clearly be embarrassing enough in itself, but when you consider how clumsy I am (this morning I’d only been in the studio for two minutes and I’d already dropped my step and almost knocked over a whole pile of barbells), and I’m sure you can understand my fear…

Anyway, you will have gathered from all of this talk about gyms that my trip to the opticians on Friday was a relative success and I was not diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. Or, indeed, any kind of "seen through the eye" tumor. Result! In fact, it seems my eyesight has actually improved since my last visit. Given that on my last visit it had improved from the visit before that, I’m guessing that within a few years I’ll be back to 20-20 vision again, and since I haven’t had 20-20 vision since I was about 9 years old, I’m quite excited.

The bad news is, for reasons to boring to go into here, I had to move to a different type of contact lens, which is more expensive than the ones I’ve been using. The cost of this isn’t huge, but it has made me wonder again about maybe getting my eyes lasered at some point. Terry is currently thinking about doing this too, but of course, Terry is brave and I am not, so I’m wondering: is the thought of not having to wear contacts any more enough to persuade me to allow a laser to be beamed into my eyes? (MY EYES! MY EYES!) Hmmmm. The jury is still out at the moment, but if any of you have had this done, please feel free to share your experiences…

I have to go to the opticians tomorrow, for my usual annual checkup. This worries me, for two reasons:

1. What if the optician looks into my eyes with his little light-stick thing, and spots a huge tumour growing in my brain? That can totally happen, you know, and the reason I know this is because I constantly get hits to this website from visitors who have Googled some variation of the phrase "OMG, opticians can totally spot brain tumours and that could happen to YOU, dude!"

Also, my optician has a tendency to make lots of sombre "Hmmmm" noises as he looks at my eyes, and my fevered brain tends to translate these sounds as "Hmmm, I wonder how I’m going to tell her about the massive brain tumour I’ve just spotted behind her left eye?" so by the time he tells me to "take a seat in the big chair" I always think the unspoken end of that sentence is "because you’re going to want to be sitting down for what I’m about to tell you." So, lots of fun there, then.

2. When he switches off the lights in the room and gets out the little light stick thing, which he then waves about in front of me, I always think he looks like he’s rave dancing. You know, like in the 90s? When people used to carry those day-glo sticks to raves and make "whooo! whoo!" sounds while waving them around? (* Has clearly never been to a rave in her life*) So that makes me want to laugh. Like, really, really badly.  Luckily, I’m usually able to prevent myself from laughing by thinking about the brain tumour, though, so we’re all good.

Also, just while we’re talking about the gym, (see that effortless transition there? That’s why I am a writer.) today when Terry and I went to Body Pump, I happened to glance down at the pool, which you can see through one of the windows in the Body Pump studio, and noticed that it was surrounded by women in snazzy swimsuits who were all just lounging around reading novels. In the GYM. For an hour. So, they were basically pretending to be sunbathing, only without any sun (because they were indoors), or a pool bar, or a martini or anything.

Anyway, I mentioned to Terry that this seemed a bit strange to me (because it’s a gym) and then he gave me that, "Oh my God, I have married a moron" look he does so well, and explained that no, it’s me who is a bit strange, and that there is nothing more normal in the world than to head down to the gym with your beach towel and a paperback. Apparently this is what all the cool kids are doing now. And then I felt stupid, because I normally just read in bed, where there are no screaming children or judgmental redheads walking by, and now I realise that I’ve been missing out on a whole world of sunless sunbathing at the gym.  RELAXING: UR DOIN IT RONG!

Maybe I should give it a try?

A long time ago, in a land not-so-very-far from here, there lived a beautiful princess young woman who decided to take a step class at her local gym. “I shall take a step class,” said the young woman. “Because I bet that won’t hurt AT ALL.”

So she did take the step class. And it did hurt. But not half so much as it hurt the next morning when the young woman tried to get out of bed and instantly fell flat on her face. Somehow, in the still watches of the night, her poor, tired leg muscles had seized up completely, leaving her legs “frozen” in a sort of “sitting down position”. The young woman could straighten her legs, but not without a great deal of pain, so she was forced to walk around all day long with her legs in that same, “sitting down” position. This sucked, especially given that she now had a flat face too, after falling out of the bed.

At this time, the young woman worked in an office which could only be accessed via a steep flight of stairs. Of course, when our heroine arrived at that office, still in her leg-locked, hunchback position, she found she couldn’t negotiate this staircase while standing up. Because she was a determined young woman – and also: a stupid one – however, she decided to persevere, and made her way up the stairs by sitting down on her poor, aching butt (also injured during the step class) and hauling herself up with her arms (thankfully functioning normally). She made her way back down in the same, ungainly fashion.

After that, the young woman didn’t go to step class no more. But years passed, and as she grew older but no wiser, the young woman started to realise that she could not possibly continue to eat the Easter chocolate at such a rate without doing something to work it off, so the young woman had a long, hard think to herself, and she thought, “I know! I will take a Body Pump class! Because I bet lifting heavy weights for 45 minutes won’t hurt AT ALL, and that whole “step class” fiasco was probably just a fluke.”

And so it was that our heroine found herself in a Body Pump class, lifting weights to music. And almost instantly, she realised that this? Was a mistake. Even although there were other people in the class who’d never done Body Pump before either, the instructor decided to focus her attention on our heroine. “Everyone add more weights to their bar!” she would shout encouragingly. “Ginger girl at the back: go down to the lightest weight possible!”

It was during a set of exercises known only to the girl as “Oh my holy God, why am I doing this?” that our heroine realised she was in trouble. Because, you know that scene in Harry Potter where Harry has all the bones removed from his arm and had to grown them back? That’s exactly how her arms felt. Only without the “growing back” bit. Because the girl was still stupid, though, she persevered. “Am I not the girl who once ran for 49 minutes and two seconds before almost fainting with exhaustion, after all?” she asked herself. She was, indeed, that girl. But perhaps a better question to ask herself would have been, “Am I not the girl who once fell off her bike twice in thirty seconds?” because seriously, WHO PUTS THEMSELVES THROUGH THIS KIND OF CRAP?

Well, I do. For this, people, was no fairytale. I AM THAT GIRL. Today? My legs aren’t quite “frozen”, like they were after step, but I’ve been avoiding the stairs as best I can all day, and let’s just say I’m really worried about how I’m going to get my wine glass to and from my mouth tomorrow.

And next week? I’m going to do it again. And I’m also thinking of signing up for Body Attack. Because seriously, I bet that won’t hurt AT ALL…

It’s my birthday today. I mean, I actually celebrated my birthday on Saturday, which was the only time I was able to fit it into my hectic schedule, but as today is the actual day, I guess it’s only appropriate to mention that I AM THE BIRTHDAY GIRL. Yay, me! No, I STILL did not get a pony. Jesus.

I celebrated by running on the treadmill at the gym for 49 straight minutes last night. Forty. Nine. Minutes. Clearly I was aiming for a perfect 50, but at 49 minutes and two seconds my body suddenly piped up and told me that if I didn’t stop running RIGHT NOW, it had ways to make me. Those ways included blisters on both my feet, my life flashing before my eyes, and me still not being able to walk properly today. Happy birthday to me! So near but yet so far. Story of my life!

Still, 49 minutes. Am old, but not yet finished…

For this week’s Friday Photo, I present the evidence of the one and only time in my life when I was persuaded that dungarees were an acceptable item of clothing. Of course, I didn’t call them “dungarees”. No, to me they were, and forever shall be, “dongledees”. (“Dong’el’deez”). To this day, I have a deep and abiding mistrust of anything that looks even remotely like it could be related to the “dongledee” family. Hey, I wonder why?

In other news, the gym called. They wanted my membership card, my free towel and a written undertaking to never whine about them on the Internet again.  Nah, I’m just kidding – although this would possibly be a much more interesting post if they had. No, the gym were doing one of their regular “user surveys”, and let me tell you it COULD NOT HAVE COME AT A BETTER TIME. Terry took the call, and I could see from the panicked glances he was casting in my direction that he was thinking, “Oh God, what have you said in your blog this time?). But it was all good. In fact, the manager who called us said there had been other complaints about the “pool full of kids” things, and that this is something that tends to happen any time there’s any influx of new members, which there has been after new year, as everyone makes resolutions to get fit, lose weight, and leave their offspring in the middle of the fast swimming lane while they lounge in the spa.

Anyway, the woman said the gym are going to “take steps” to resolve the situation, and hey, you know, “steps” are all I ask. So basically Amber – 1, The Gym – 0. Even although I didn’t actually do anything other than whining in my blawg.

In yet other news, our house is still standing after the Watergate affair, but I’m not sure how much longer that’ll last. The huge crack o’doom in the ceiling (or ‘Mount Doom’ as I like to call it) had widened, and also bulged, giving every appearance of being about to fall down or heads at any seconds. The wood floors in the hall and living room, meanwhile, are slowly rising UP to meet the ceiling (Terry says no one else but me would even notice this, but I think not. And also: don’t care, I want it fixed.). Everything else, including me, Terry and the dog, is just permanently coated in a thick layer of dust, which is replenished every time Terry goes to the bathroom and begins knocking more tiles off.

I was trying to clean this dust up as we went along, but I started to feel like I was fighting a losing battle with that one so recently I, er, just haven’t been bothering. I’m not much liking this “2008″ business AT ALL, to tell you the truth…