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So, I have become very lame at being on LJ. Everyone seems to love facebook more than LJ, poor LJ. I'm currently sitting around waiting, hoping that Justin comes over today to take a look at my car. Car be dead. I really just want to be rid of car but I don't think I can sell it if it doesn't work so I'm hoping that Justin will know what's wrong & be able to fix it. Otherwise I might just put it on ebay for parts. Shouldn't really have bought it in the first place but you know, I got excited after I passed my driving test. Stupid brain.

I got Ni tickets for the misanthrope for Christmas which we saw last week, it was quite good, everyone in it was good, there was an amusing moment when someone tried to sit on a chair & the chair tipped over. Though we were sat surrounded by some snobbish critical Americans & some old men who kept eating pringles rather loudly & before the play started I ate an entire packet of Haribo & spent the rest of the evening really thirsty. It was truely tragic.

Work has been freezing lately, snow + lack of heating + a door that must be kept open all day = multiple layers of thermals & hands turning blue :(
A couple of Sundays ago we were having a conversation about how Lyle had hidden in the rucksacks with all the lights turned off & jumped out at Hollie. That evening as we were leaving I went to walk up the stairs & noticed that all the lights were off & Lyle was nowhere to be seen. I turned around & went back down the stairs where Hollie was wrestling with the safe. No way am I going up there on my own. Hollie agrees & we creep up the stairs. The stairs are still lit, I have no idea why we spent 10 minutes getting up the stairs when he was never going to jump out at us there.
At the top we peer around the corner. Very very dark. Luckily there is a display of camping supplies to our right, including some lanterns. yay! I pick one up & pass it to Hollie, pick the next one up & it has no batteries. I put my lame lantern back & turn to Hollie, she's winding hers up, it's currently giving off the light of a dead firefly. As we being to tiptoe around the corner, I'm convinced that he's going to be off to the left ready to run up behind us. As I'm contemplating this Hollie decides to make a run for it leaving me stood at the top of the stairs by myself. I'm about to voice my displeasure for her abandoning me with no warning & tell her to turn on the lights where she gets to the other side when she screams. Proper dogs can hear her completely terrified screams. Lyle has just grabbed her arm. She hits him many times & we retreat to the staff room with Hollie cursing him all the way home.

We used the same lame wind up lantern when all the lights went out on one side on delivery day & the shoe room was pitch black. We had about 20 boxes of shoes piled on top of each other, no light other than what we could get from our phones & 4 pairs of boots to find. It was the closest to being on the crystal maze that I've ever been.

The last time I wrote anything on here I said that I like Greenbelt week more than Christmas week, which I do, but there's something about Christmas in the snow that makes it almost as good as sleeping in a field while working yourself stupid until the last night in the beer tent. That is unless you break down in said snow, that's just a pain in the arse.

Just as I pulled into Simon's road on thursday the snow started & by the time we left a few hours later the trucks on the dual carriageway were crawling by. They wished us luck in driving home & off we went, travelling at about 5 miles an hour down the dual carriageway with the windscreen wipers going & Ni trying to find a radio station that was playing Christmas songs. About ten minutes later we stopped at some traffic lights & never started again. Epic, epic fail.

Leaving the car on the road, luckily there were many lanes, I called Simon for help & we stood around stamping our feet until him & Stu arrived. I didn't have a coat & the snow was slowly soaking through my shoes, it was lame. When the guys got there we pushed the car into the hotel car park, luckily only a few meters away. That's not a fun activity, I have a big car & it's heavy & there was ice on the road. Abandoning the car there we headed off to Asda to buy a duvet & then trudged back to their house, by the time we got there we were all practically hypothermic. They only have 1 spare bed, so I spent the night on the sofa, which is too small to lie flat on & after a few minutes I ended up dragging an arm chair over & strategically piling cushions so that I could lie at some funky angle. I wrapped myself up in the new duvet dressed in £3 dodgy tracksuit bottoms from Asda which originally claimed to be size 10 but were actually size 8 & lacked pockets, a most disappointing feature in any pair of trousers & pulled the covers over my head hoping that I didn't freeze during the night.

Amazingly, I slept fine & everyone began rolling out of bed around half 8, quite a while after Ni should have been at work. Stu drove us over to my car, by way of McDonalds breakfast, in the hope that Simon's dad was right & it had just been the electrics being unhappy & would start up after being left for a while. It didn't. Even with the 4 ice scrapers that we had managed to accumulate between us. At this point Stu offered to take Ni to work as she was running really quite late & I called my parents asking them to come over with jump leads, & my work, telling them that I was stranded in Hatfield & was also going to be late.

After freezing to death for a little while my parents arrived, at around the same time that Stu made it back, go figure. & we pushed my car back across the car park so we could connect the jump leads. I was by the drivers door, one hand on the steering wheel, Stu was on the other side & my mum & Simon were at the front. After hauling the thing most of the way across I hear a scream, look up & find that my mother has just plain disappeared. Luckily she'd just slipped rather than falling through thin ice & managed to get up & continue with the pushing while I rolled my eyes & Simon & Stu seemed a little confused as to whether or not they were allowed to laugh.

The jump leads did the trick, though the the third time during this snowy saga the windscreen wipers were still on when the car started & sent a flurry of snow over the door & into the car. The first time was me in the car park & was bloody hilarious as it mainly landed on my head, the second time was Stu, also in the car park & it landed most of a snow drift into his door. I managed to predict the third time, but didn't quite get all the snow out of the way & a few flakes caught me in the face while I spluttered in surprise.

We decided that mother should come in my car, just in case something bad happened. though exactly what they expected her to do other than flap in a panic I really don't know. The lights out of the car park are activated by a security camera that cycles them in to the other roundabout lights (did I mention that I broke down on the edge of a roundabout?) unfortunately said camera was covered in snow and so not actually working, leaving me to jump the lights in the ice. Amazingly we survived the experience & crawled back home at about 20 mph.

I was an hour late for work & the place was so busy with people needing snow boots & wellies that I didn't manage to apologise for my tardiness until I'd been there for over an hour & even then it was just a passing comment on the stairs in between my boss's bitching about hating the stupid staircase. I started with walking boots, regular socks, thick socks, thermal top, long sleeve t-shirt, fleece & fingerless gloves. After running up 2 flights of stairs to the shoe room repeatedly I had to shed the thick socks, the gloves, the fleece & roll up the sleeves of my t-shirt. After pushing my car around & tramping about in the snow I really wasn't in the mood for so much exercise.

So, haven't updated in an absolute age, but my friends page is also looking decidedly bare so I think there's been a general lull in LJ activities recently. Leaving for Greenbelt tomorrow, which is my most favouritist week of the year, even above Christmas! I'm going to be team leader this year though, which could go either way, hopefully I won't be a complete disaster.

Last weekend all Naomi's bridesmaids plus Naomi headed down to the frontier centre, where Ni works, for a couple of days of outdoor activities & general frivolity. We went by way of an interestingly navigated detour to Northampton station to pick up Nom & arrived around dinner time, where there was no vegetarian food, but they managed to survive on chips & beans while I munched on a heap of Shepard's pie. After foodness we had a go at archery, which was amusing. We lost an arrow, but gained another shortly after so no one will ever know. Except you obviously. Liz & Sarah were both aiming for the same target & managed to get the same score pretty much every time, which was rather impressive. Over on the end target Naomi was struggling to hit anything, which was rather amusing seeing as I wasn't actually watching her, I could just hear her despair as her arrows sailed over the top. Me & Nom had a rather ego boosting time up at the top target, helped a little by the fact that we ended up with more arrows in our quiver than everyone else.

Day 2 involved initiative games & High ropes, followed by a picnic lunch on Ni's living room floor & an afternoon bike ride around the lakes, then climbing, abseiling & pubage in the evening. Initiative games bordered on the ridiculous & weren't helped by Liz's complete lack of balance & tendency to laugh at inappropriate moments. We also cheated outrageously on one of them. Following initiative games, we played a game that Nom called evolution, before heading over to the highropes (where we attempted the crate stack, which is when you stand on a tower of milk crates & add more underneath your feet until the tower collapses underneath you or you simply fall off, & Nom & Naomi reached a rather impressive height. Mainly helped I think by Nom's complete lack of sympathy whenever Naomi got scared & refusal to stop even when her partner was screaming. After them, Liz managed to fall off while leaving Sarah still stood on one pile of crates looking rather scared & me & Ni got a little too casual & swung a crate without paying enough attention. All fall down.), evolution involved everyone crouching on the ground & repeating the word egg, while pretending to be an egg & then playing rock paper scissors with the nearest person. The winner became a chicken & had to play a chicken, while the loser stayed an egg & had to play another egg in an attempt to evolve into a chicken. The chicken became a dinosaur, presumably it would take too long to work through every single stage in the evolution process, & the dinosaur became a fairy who floated out of the game victorious. Distressingly I grew into a dinosaur before everyone else & was stuck until Liz evolved into a chicken & I amused myself by chasing her flapping self around the group whilst doing an incredibly accurate impression of a T Rex. I then lost & spent the rest of the game sitting on the floor as an egg while fairies floated around my head.
The trip to the pub involved a terrible waitress, presents (woo!) of necklaces for all the bridesmaids to match our prettiful wedding dresses & some strange conversations including the origin of swear words & lol catz, obviously there was alcohol involved somewhere. At one point Liz admitted to using the word "coz" when texting & Nom said why would you do that? in the kind of voice used by cartoon characters who have just found another cartoon character drowning a new born litter in some kind of acid. Distressingly, I still hadn't finished laughing when Naomi made the next joke & very nearly ended up on the floor, amazingly I did manage to stay on my chair. Even more amazing than that was our success at walking back to the centre in the dark along a road with no footpaths & fast moving cars speeding past. No one even fell down the ditch, which would've been rather tragic.

Sunday was reserved for a canoeing trip involving a barbecue, where tragically we almost set Ni's canoe on fire. We were using Bug (that's the canoe, not an overlarge actual insect) as a windbreak in our attempt to light the BBQs & once we were all happily eating, Liz looked over & asked if Bug's paint was supposed to be bubbling. Surprisingly it wasn't, but we think she's going to be okay. I hope so seeing as that's the first time Ni's ever taken her out & it would be a little distressing if we killed her on her maiden voyage. We left after hauling the canoes back onto the racks & dropped Nom back at Northampton station, where we got lost again & managed to approach one roundabout from every side over the course of the weekend, a rather remarkable feat I'm sure you'll agree.

( Photos of Frontier )

My alarm clock reset itself the other day. I think there must have been a power cut in the middle of the night or something, but it's making me paranoid. I'm seriously considering buying a spare alarm clock that runs off batteries just in case it happens again & I accidentally sleep through work. The only thing stopping me is that a spare alarm clock is the first steps towards an infinite number of alarm clocks covering every surface in my bedroom, each one waiting for the one before it to fail, which seems a little excessive.

First trains, since taking over Thameslink, have been repeatedly lame. Firstly by stopping scheduled trains all through the night & also by needing to borrow trains from other companies as they somehow don't have enough. This borrowing train thing is all well & good, but other trains from other companies have doors in other places, which you wouldn't think would be that much of a problem, but it means that when I head over to kings cross & stand in my usual space, at the exact spot where the first set of doors stops, so that I jump on next to first class or, if I'm lucky, there's a whole carriage up the end with people only coming in from one door, making it much more likely of getting a seat, it's a system I perfected while commuting to uni. Anyway, I'm standing there, in my magical place & of course people start to gather around me as the time for the train approaches & they're all edging forwards, but I can't edge forward for fear of electrocution, but that doesn't matter because I'm right in front of the doors, right in the middle, at the place where they open so people can't even sneak in around me. Except that the train that rolls in isn't a first train, it's some other train, some train with different doors, which roll right on past me & I end up in that stupid scrum of people, desperately hoping to get onto the train at all, forget a seat, they've all been taken half an hour before you've got a foot in the door. Grr

I was drinking a can of appletiser the other day, appletiser you say, in can? Yes indeed, get yourselves down to simmons good people, for appletiser in a can is a magical thing to behold. So I'm drinking this appletiser & on the side of the can it has the '5 a day logo' because a little logo is what's going to get the nation eating more healthily. Then underneath the logo it says 'eat more' then underneath the eat more, in tiny letters that are enclosed in tiny brackets, it says, (fruit & veg). Which cracked me up. If they hadn't clarified do you think we could sue? Appletiser told me to eat more & now I'm 1000 stone & I'll need 17 heart bypasses in the next 2 years, damn you 5 a day & your advertising, damn you!

My final point for today is about work, the joys of retail, woo. There was a boat load of interviews the other day, lots of children coming in wanting weekend jobs that they will hopefully get or I'll have to work every Sunday this month, which I really don't want to do. Not only are Sunday's incredibly boring, but Paul has decided that he now works Sundays & he doesn't like me, not one bit, so while I'm bored with nothing to do, I have to look very busy or I'll get yelled at & I don't like getting yelled at :(
We're supposed to be getting new uniforms, well we've been waiting for them ever since I started, but they've actually been ordered now, which is a feat of small miracle all by itself. The only thing about these uniforms, is that they consist of fitted t-shirts, which you probably wouldn't think of as being a problem, but I've been thinking about it & it seems to have disastrous consequences for all involved. You see, when the delivery gets in, we have to carry many heavy boxes up many stairs & as we do this, inevitably, our trousers, shorts, whatever we are wearing, inevitably start to slip down with the box that is falling out of our hands. Now this isn't generally a problem as our large, generic polo shirts are long enough that no one notices & you can simply sort the problem out once the box is on the floor. Fitted t-shirts though, firstly, not so long, will not cover any amount of arse, secondly, will ride up as we carry these boxes. Do you see where I'm going with this? On delivery day, we're all going to end up naked. Yes people, naked staff at Milletts on a Tuesday, we're all going to prison. Prison, prison, prison.

What's happening to people on livejournal lately? The other day I had no posts on my friends page at all, it looked a little bleak. Having said that, I haven't posted for well over 2 months now, fuck knows what I've been doing, working probably. After the initial, you'll be working 2 days a week, Mondays & Fridays, I've been working 5 days out of 7 recently & seeing as that's what I was trying to escape when I left the newsagents, it's beginning to grate a bit. Though the new rota's gone up & it looks a lot friendlier, so that's nice.

In reference to the title, last weekend was Naomi's hen party, which was much fun. Not so much the morning after, when I had to get up at 6:30 to get a train & then a bus & then a train & then get picked up from Hatfield so I could go to work for 6 hours. When I say I was there, I was barely concious, more of a drowsy blob trudging up stairs & getting in peoples way. The actual party though started at around midday-ish (I think) When we, we being myself, Anita, Sarah & Liz, four of the bridesmaids for the wedding, the other one is still off on her travels I think she's in NY right now, headed to a park where Rev were busking to advertise their latest concert. After the busking we had a picnic in the park, where everyone was decked out with Naomi's hen party badges. We bought a cardboard treasure chest to put stuff in & then realised when we were putting it together that it didn't have a bottom, very helpful. Ni managed to attach the cardboard packaging to the bottom with a couple of spare badges though & we poured them all inside, it was rather nifty. It was pirate themed by the way, we didn't just randomly have a treasure chest, that would have been a little strange.

Anyways, after lunch it was off the the river for some pirate punting with jugs of pimms & attempts at bridge hopping. Only me & Ni tried the bridge hopping, on the first attempt I grabbed the bridge & couldn't pull myself up, so was just hanging there thinking "oh fuck" when the punter appeared next to me & I realised that they hadn't quite passed so I could drop back down without drowning in the Cam. I also managed to kick someone in the head while I was flailing. Ni of course, leaped nimbly up the side of the bridge & jumped back down the other side into the punt with no problem. I have an immense bruise on my arm from that attempt. On the way back, I stood up to try it again & realised that there's an extra beam on that side so I could barely reach the railings, so Ni just turned the punt around & went back at it. This time there were people on the bridge watching & a load of people on the banks & all the people in the punt were yelling at me, so if I didn't get up there would be a lot of people laughing at me. I just about made it & then when I landed back in the punt & Ni had turned it back around the lady on the bridge looks at me & goes, "So are you doing it again then?" No, I think not.

After the punting we stopped off for a cocktail before dinner, which was in a very hot, very loud restaurant that served some amazing sticky toffee pudding :) From the dinner we went on to Henry's, where they had a table for us & had also put together a cocktail called Naomi punch which was very nice. It was school disco night, which meant that we had songs by Five & the Spice girls & of course there was Saturday night, which we all had to get up & dance to. We also got the DJ to sign Naomi's t-shirt, which we'd all been signing, we got her a t-shirt, we weren't just drawing on her clothes. The t-shirt was a prize in the Who wants to be Mrs Message quiz that Liz wrote & we did during lunch, she got every single question right, which I was quite impressed by.

( some hen night photos )

The weekend before the hen party, I went to the UK games expo, which was like a convention for euro games in Birmingham. On the Friday we made a friend called Steve who taught us a load of new games & on the Saturday we spent lots of money buying them, well, mainly Simon did, I only bought one. Birmingham is one of the most depressing cities to drive into, it's like a desolate industrial estate with power plant on one side of the road & immense warehouses on the other. Apparently it gets nicer nearer the centre but we didn't go in that far. We also took a crazy trip to a board game shop about 40 minutes away cause the stand at the expo didn't have a particular game. We got a little lost on the way & barely made it over there, then on the way to the cinema afterwards we had to drive around practically all of spaghetti junction, it took an absolute age.

On the Sunday, instead of staying for more Expo, I met some friends in London to go to the Harold Pinter tribute at the national theatre. There was a woman who stood by the stage door from 11am till past 7pm, she didn't even have a ticket to get in, she just got a shite load of people's autographs. Afterwards my friends headed back round to the stage door, but the only person who left was Maggie Smith, who was helping a very old woman to a cab, everyone else stayed inside for a big piss up, so we were just stood by the door waiting for nothing really. It was a joyous experience. There was an amusing moment before the show started when a few of us were sat in the foyer & Nancy was wondering how many celebrities we were going to see, when David Walliams walked in, so I nodded towards him & said There's someone famous. The three of them turned around to look & then just stared at him with their mouths hanging open in shock, of course he looked over at that exact moment & laughed about as much as I was before disappearing, I was much amused.

So, how is everyone? I've started to get really bad at checking LJ, so I would like to say that I am very happy about all of your news & very sad & sympathetic about any & all of your problems over the past couple of months or so.

I'm currently at 73,530 words & I'm taking procrastination to a form of art. Who knew that so many hours could be wasted simply by looking at photos on facebook? I've also joined twitter, but that seems a little pointless as I only know 2 people on twitter, so no-ones really reading my updates, I'm just making pointless little remarks in 140 characters or less. Like: I have a random marzipan craving. Though I'm not sure that anyone reads my LJ either, so I could just be sitting here complaining to no-one about the fact that there's no-one reading my other complaints on a different website. What a thrilling life I lead.

I've decided that my boss is simply a prick & I would like another job. I'm thinking about trying to get a night shift at a 24hour supermarket, that way I don't have to deal with any customers & I'll be able to complete my long term goal of becoming completely nocturnal. It's difficult to achieve right now when every few days I have to get up early & go stand in a shop for 9 hours.

My Nan is in hospital, it's not looking great. Every so often my mum sticks her head into my bedroom & tells me that she's got worse. She went in with a chest infection, she now has pneumonia. She's 97, so I don't think that a chest infection ganging up with pneumonia is very fair of them but diseases these days just don't do as they're told.

On a slightly happier note, I went to see the boat that rocked yesterday, it was quite fun. I now want to get a load of people, a big boat, a crate of alcohol & some old rock & roll records & spend some time at sea listening to music & dancing badly. Who's with me?

Just took my driving theory test, the hazard perception part is so boring! There's a ten second silent countdown to every clip & there are 14 of them, it lasts forever! But anyway, managed to get every question right somehow, luck I think. Got back to the station & it was an hour till the next train, which was even more boring than the bloody test!

I saw some friends yesterday & one of them said that I should ask my boss to get my 2 supervisors together & have a meeting with them to ask why they said all that stuff about me & explain what they think I'm doing wrong as neither of them have ever said anything to me which makes it kind of difficult to understand what they meant. It could be a good idea, but I think my boss is just a wanker, so it might just go a bit shit. Any ideas?

So my boss has been away for 3 weeks & there's been a couple of supervisors running the shop. One of which is never around, he disappears upstairs, doesn't carry a phone with him & fucks off to do some shopping, get doughnuts & buy a paper to read in the staff room while I'm left on my own in the shop. The other one I thought I was getting on with pretty well, she's been there on Fridays when it's delivery & I generally spend the day carrying boxes around & sorting stuff & when that's done we have pretty friendly conversations & wonder at the lack of customers. Today my boss comes in, calls me into the staff room & just says So what's going on? I have no answer to this, not having a flying fuck of an idea what he's talking about. He then says that the two supervisors have complained that I'm lazy, don't finish jobs, stand around talking & ignore customers, which, aside from being complete crap, if I'm standing around talking, so are the bloody supervisors cause it'll be them that I'm talking to. I really wish that I'd pointed how how they take fag breaks when they shouldn't, leave me on my own to go & buy doughnuts when they shouldn't & give unauthorised discounts when they shouldn't. I have never not finished a job & I've frequently asked if there's anything that needs doing & been told no & I talk to customers even when they really don't want me to. Needless to say it wasn't the happiest day.
The manager also told me that it was my fault that the staffroom was dirty, upstairs hadn't been hoovered & that the stairs hadn't been washed. I spent that last half hour of the day on my knees scrubbing the stairs with a shoe brush because I couldn't find a mop & shredding my fingers on the metal. If I really was a shit worker & didn't do what I was told & started things without finishing them then ok, maybe mention that to him, but I really don't get why I've been not only accused of all this shit but blamed for literally everything that wasn't done while he was away. I've been there a month, I don't even know everything that needs to be done.
What made the whole thing worse was that my supervisor acted all sympathetic & said that he was out of order for saying all that, when it was her that made the shit up in the first place. She's stood there saying, well if you were a terrible worker it would be all right for him to have a word with you, but you're not. & I'm just thinking, well why the fuck did you say I was then? Of course I didn't say that, I just nodded & agreed with her & now I'm thinking that I'd quite like to change jobs, but after all this he's hardly going to give me a decent reference, which leaves me in a worse place than when I was working 42 hours a week in a shitty newsagents. Fucking joy.

/rant.