Tuesday, 20th September, 2005

My Day, In Full

random diary

(Siobhan, curious to see what would happen if she adopted the "My Mundane Life" style of weblog-posting, decides to detail her day in minute detail...)

Woke up at 7am, with that slightly dull feeling at the back of your head that grows and grows until it smacks you in the middle of your forehead with a big home-made sign, 10 feet wide, with letters scrawled in black marker-pen saying "Don't mix cider and wine ever again. 'K?"

Stumbled round the house a bit, in a little pink-and-black-lace night that has become My New Favourite Thing™, until the sound of the postman put me in a panic because I was expecting a package to be delivered.

Said package was big enough to fit through the letterbox. So, panic averted.

This is said package — the stand that is. I'm usually fumbling around like a loon at night before I go to bed, trying to find the charger for my phone, and totally failing to plug it in right. What with me being usually pissed.

Anyway. Spent about fifteen minutes in utter squealing excitement about new charger/stand thingy, then read through emails, comments, other blogs, and wasted half the morning in Second Life.

Decided, when I realised what the time was, that I really should get some work done, so quit Second Life, and threw myself headfirst into the white-text-on-dark-blue-background that is Code World™. Had a joyous moment when I realised that quite by accident, I'd written an entire group-blogging system from scratch — one that automagically worked first time

Taking advantage of having the car back, went for a bit of a spin in an attempt to find some bedroom furniture — specifically a chest of drawers so as to try out a new form of clothes storage — as opposed to Using The Floor™. Headed up past the Ashton to the antiques centre just out of town, and had a nosey round.

...

I must just interrupt this hideously dull flow of rambling, to remark on the antique centre. A few years back (I must confess, I've blogged about this before come to think of it), a bull in the next-door abbatoire (market?) got loose, and made a bid for freedom. It ended up inside the antique centre, which sells lots of china, and, well, you can see where this is going yes?

The local newspapers had their headlines write themselves for them.

There is now a large plastic bull on top of the entrance to the antiques centre — which personally, I find a bit grim. They bill themselves as "Home of the 'Bull in a China Shop'" — playing on the almost cutesy image that that entails. But they don't mention what happened to the bull...

It got shot.

Fuckers. Granted, a rampaging bull flailing it's horns round a bunch of antiques isn't what you really want to see every day, and fair enough, shoot the thing before it hurts someone. But don't then use it as a marketing campaign.

I never found The Perfect Chest Of Drawers™, but here, for the curious, is what I did find:

A Le Corbusier "style" chair, and a couple of Sinclair C5s. Even though it wasn't an original Le Corbusier chair, they were still asking over £700 for it

Gotta confess, I was a huge fan of the C5s. I remember, as a child, thinking "Wow — we're living in The Future™!". I kinda bracket them in the same group as DeLoreans. And having grown up a couple of miles away from the factory where DeLoreans were made, I can't help but get nostalgic about things like that.

There was a stall with loads of comic books. This one grabbed me and begged me to take a picture of it. It's the over-enthusiastic language and typography of the cover that makes me smile. It reminds me, well, of me really

I also thought, maybe Tom would like it

Dear God — that is the single most hideous thing I've ever seen. And the stall was full of them.

Don't ask me why, I just love stuff like this.

I couldn't let this one slip without commenting. Basically, all the stall owners have codes that let the people at the front desk know who to give the money to. I think they base these codes on their names or something.

Anyway, however the system works, this vendor's code is "TAT". Every single thing in his stall has "TAT" written on it. And there was never a more accurate description in the history of antique trading.

Seriously. His stuff was shit.

Dolls. They're scary. I bet they come alive in the dead of night and go round writing "Tat" on other people's stuff. Either that or they hold wild rampant orgies with the Action Men from the 1970s memorabilia stall...

Believe it or not, I did actually find something I liked. I've always been a fan of these 60s/70s coffee sets. My parents have one that I'm hoping they're going to donate to me seeing as how they don't have as much space as they used to.

I didn't buy them, natch. In fact, all I walked away from the place with was a rather fab, chunky, green-glass jar. Which cost me 25p. Which was a sixth of what it cost me to get into the place...

A month ago, I would have bought this.

...

While I was out, I noticed that Ffr was doing strange revving things when she was idling. It's not ideal, but let me try and convey those strange things through the medium of HTML...

vvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooom ... vvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooom ... vvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooom ... vvvvvvvvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomm

To quote the Haynes Manual (I always think that you know when your car is past its best the minute they release a Haynes Manual for it...), she was "Idling erratically". So I crossed my fingers, hoped it was just the air filter, and popped off to Halfords.

Now, Halfords, I have to say, is OK when you know exactly what you want, and you can't be arsed to source the parts any other way. But when you're not entirely sure about something, they're shitting useless.

The air filter was no problem, but I thought that while I was there, I'd get some new spark plugs. Now, having only changed them once in the five years that I've had her, I was pretty sure (rightly as it turned out) that (a) I didn't have a socket thingy to remove the old ones, and (b) the size of the nuts was a bit non-standard.

So I did what any self-respecting consumer would do in this situation. I asked someone.

"Oh yeah mate, you need this one", said a rather spotty teenager who probably only knows how to put stickers on the back windscreen of his car.

I looked at the things, compared it to the plugs in my hand, and thought "Nah, not a chance".

I was right. Despite saying "14mm" on the pack, the socket thing was way too big.

Bloody useless piece of shit. Admittedly, what every self-respecting consumer would do now is go back to Halfords, moan a bit, and demand one that did fit. But I'm crap. And I don't like to think that a spotty teenager might think I knew less about cars than he did. So I'll wait a few days, and just buy another one

Anyway, turns out it was just the air filter. Ever since I got Ffr back from the garage, I've been thinking to myself that she seemed a little feeble — I was sure she used to shift a lot more than she did. And d'ya know what? Just putting a clean air filter in made a ton of difference.

I should (obviously) have known this would be the case when I took the old one out and make the observation that "I'm sure this things should be yellow — not black".

Came home. Did more coding. Decided that I really should wash my hair before I went out to meet a client, seeing as it was so long since I last washed it that the rat's tails were starting to stick to the back of my neck.

Spent ten minutes washing it, and a further fifteen minutes stood bent over the bath with the showerhead in my hand, sobbing my eyes out, because despite being all strong and adult and coping with things, I still have moments when my entire world crashes around my head, and there seems to be no point to anything whatsoever now that she's gone.

*pause*

*regain composure*

Went to see client, and had a interesting double-coding experience where we actually thrashed through some authentication scripts together. A strange experience — one that must be familiar with people who use collaberative text editors like SubEthaEdit, but one that's completely alien to someone like me who prefers to bury their head in a monitor and ignore the outside world.

I much rather thrashing through code concepts — you know, like "it could do this, possibly this way", as opposed to the bizarre situation that you get when two people's techniques collide.

And after that? Well, I decided that I was all coded out, and plodded around Second Life for a bit. Nothing really constructive — not like yesterday when I build a tree ...

...but I did do the extraordinarily trannie thing of building a huge petticoat out of fifty prims, and giving myself a little bow

Yeah, I know — I'll be building maids' dresses à la Mrs Silk in there next

When I figured I'd given myself enough time for the rush-hour traffic to die down, I decided that it would be a good time to go do some shopping.

Now, anyone that knows me pretty well, can testify that around seven o'clock, you can be pretty sure you'll find me in Sainsburys, buying a bottle of wine, some cheese, some bread, and some fags. But now, I have the car back, so I did the most out of character thing I've done for a long time — got myself a trolley and did a Proper Shop™

Look! I bought food. My fridge, dear God is full of things to eat.

All I gotta do now is find someone to cook for

...

Apologies for all that. I wasn't actually going to write anything today, but once I started, I couldn't stop.

I promise I'll try and think of something juicy to rant about soon

...

Just realised, I left something out. For a completely accurate description of today, you need to insert the following lines in there somewhere:

Got dressed as a girl. Had a wank.

April, yes and yes

Yes, but if you look carefully, you'll notice that that's a bottlel of white wine, which (as we all know) shoudl never be drunk — just used to cook with

Oh yeah, and another thing...

Mechanical things I get — I'm the one who changed the cylinder head gasket on her mini by the side of the road one time. And the one who bodged a new exhaust out of a couple of drinks cans

But it all comes down to having the right tools. And for that Halfords sucks

Ack, piece of piss — I just downloaded one of the images from the phone (so I could see what size it was), resized my litte "ambiguous" image, and shoved it back on the phone. All through the Power Of Bluetooth™

I thoroughly recommend it