Sunday 31 August 2008

Yardies

I've blogged before about work that I've done inside my house, last time it was the kitchen and the bathroom. It's fair to say the Dizz house is in a state of unfinished-ness as the kitchen still needs a floor and a blind, and the bathroom still needs a blind, a unit for all the 'stuff' that I have and another bath mat as the duckboard that I did buy has proved very hazardous; I bump my ankle on it everyday and I usually slip and slide around all over the place when I get out of the bath on it.

But the outside of the house also needs lots of work. The house is old (built 1901) and I think it would be safe to say that some of the pointing hasn't been touched since that date! My dad would do lots of worrying frowns whenever he was around and decided last week that it was time to "dedicate some serious time" to the Dizz house. As there is no Mr Dizz, my dad is by far the next best thing and so he's my handy guy.

At 10.30 in the a.m work began in the yard. By 11.30 I was in Wickes wandering around helplessly looking for mortar, wearing my wisely chosen shorts, vest top and cheeky bunchers. As you can imagine, within minutes I had a very kindly man helping me choose the correct mortar for pointing and also placing the 3 x 12.5kg bags of the stuff on my trolley. I'm sure he'd have even brought it out to the car if I'd have asked him but I ceased being helpless once I had the goods (a girl's gotta draw the line somewhere dontcha know)

I thought now would be a good time to show you some visuals. It's a work in progress shall we say. And once it reaches some kind of finished state I'll post some pics of it looking lovely. For the moment, it's downright ugly:

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This was chipped out to create the new groove for more effective draining

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Dizz Dad hard at work laying the new groove

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We cleverly used this to make a smooth circular groove...get us!

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What a beautiful view...the yard, not Dizz Dad's bum!

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This is the falling down shed

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And this is the falling down wall

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The other falling down wall

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And finally the original toilet roll holder for the old outhouse

Gorgeous or what? The plans are that the walls will all be painted a sandstone colour, thus brightening up the place massively. The horrible brown doors will be replaced with a much nicer shade, possibly blue. And the concrete ground will also be painted but the area where I sit out and enjoy the sunshine will be some kind of paved niceness and a much more pleasant place to enjoy the many many days of sunshine we enjoy so much...

We eventually got rained off at about half 3 so whilst I've been waiting for my water to heat up I thought I'd blog my Sunday. I'm covered in brick dust. And I think I might actually smell cos it's bloody hard work doing all that scraping and wire brushing! Charming or what?

See you all soon!
xx

Wednesday 27 August 2008

New....

There are so many deeeelicious new things happening that I just had to share. So here goes.

New Season
I have lust. For all the lovely new season clothes that are in the shops. On a weekend shopping trip with Cat I managed to purchase one spotty dress with pockets (pockets!) from the scary goth shop (dress not scary I hasten to add, short yes, but scary? no), a pair of very dark jeans that are lovely and fitted at the top and then have big flares and one blue tweedy bomber style jacket from Peacocks, and 3 tops from the beloved H&M. How I managed to restrain myself is unbelievable. Cos I wanted to buy EVERYTHING. Ooooh much as I love wearing summer clothes, I do love going into that new season excitement.

New Gig Schedule
Seriously, there are so many that it has become a schedule. Last night we saw We are Scientists. 3rd time out for me and by far the best time yet. They rocked the place. And oh. so. cute. The lead singer has the best indie hair and it's even going a bit grey so it's all like salt n pepper...perhaps it would be fair to say that I have lust for him also. He came out into the crowd and people were touching his hair. Now much as I like his hair, if I was going to touch anything, it would have been his cutie bum. There was much amusement with the people watching also as the crowd were mainly 14. And us. No that's not fair, it was a mixed bag but there were a lot of 14 year olds. One of them actually threw up on the bus that I was on in order to get to the gig. Classy. There was an actual Wino-wannabee there too. She was probably about 15. And she was really going for it. Same beehive but bleached blonde and dirty raggy hair, a teeny tiny body, a teeny tiny dress and probably a teeny tiny bra in order to hoist her not so teeny tiny boobs up and out. You gotta love the people watching. Anyhoo, that was the beginning of the late summer/autumn/winter gigs. Cos in 4 weeks we have The Ting Tings. Then 4 weeks after that we have One Night Only and Vampire Weekend in a couple of days of each other, and have just found out that Martha Wainwright is playing 2 days before them and I simply must see her cos she is oh so fabby, and then it's Kings of Leon! Oh how much I love the gigs.

New television
Not an actual television set, but just as good, I bought my weekly copy of heat magazine and found out that Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives both return to the screen next week. Yippeee!

New books=education
After a recent discussion with Cat concerning the art of burlesque and whether it is feminist or not (more about this in future posts, watch this space!) I decided that I need to expand my knowledge on feminism. I know I'm not alone in following the stereotype that true hardcore feminists are man hating, hairy legged, dungaree wearing scary peeps
...possibly explaining why one needs such an education. I'm slightly scared I have to say. The texts I have taken out of my library are very large. And they have little writing. And no pictures. Considering my current reading matter is Forever by Judy Blume I'm thinking it's going to be very different. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

New fitness
After the night out with D when we talked about being 5 years older, we also declared a need to get us to the gym. Cos much as we like to think that it's okay not to exercise, we all know that ain't the case so gym it is. My induction is tomorrow at 8pm. I'm really not a big fan of the gym. But I'm also not such a big fan of the wobbly-ness. I'm almost certain this will go the way of all other fitness declarations and I'll soon be the cake eating, non-exercise wobbly that you all know and love.

New is over and out. Later alligator x

Monday 25 August 2008

Bank Holiday bedlam

The tradition here in jolly old Blighty is that when it's a Bank Holiday weekend we simply must go out on the Sunday evening and drink ourselves into oblivion so that we can spend most of the precious extra free holiday day in bed with a terrible hangover. This isn't the case for today, I am hangover free. But I did venture out into the town and it was the usual madness so here I am blogging about it.

The evening began a bit clashy. The first day of sunshine we'd had in what seems like forever was yesterday. And it was deeeeeelicious. So of course I had to stay out in it for as long as I could. Thus I found myself at Wavey's asking ever so innocently what the time was. The reply of 7pm prompted me to do lots of squeaking and fuuuuuuuuu...I'm never going to make it into town for 8 cos I have to wash my hair type exclamations. I scarpered back to mine and got ready pronto.

Thus I found myself in the meeting pub. I always thank my lucky stars that I am: a) tall and b) have very distinctive hair as I can easily find the people that I'm going to meet or they can find me. Despite the throngs of people I managed to find D and we squeezed our way to the front of the bar, bearing in mind at this time of 8.30 the queue was 6-deep. Thoughts of being laydee-like and just ordering a half went out of the window due to the excessive queue, so a pint it was. We hadn't even gone 2 steps with our drinks before someone knocked D and I had half a pint dripping down my arm. Welcome to Bank Holiday Bedlam.

The pub was jumping. Literally. The inside was packed. The outside was even more packed. It was standing room only. In the small group of girls that we were there was some kerfuffle with a group of boys and in what seemed like a matter of minutes one of the girls was crying. This did not bode well for the rest of the evening. I'm not entirely sure of the sorry tale as I only heard it chinese whisper style 4th hand but apparently one of the boys had called this girl fat. Now most girlies in my town would have simply either told this sorry loser to eff-off or would have punched him. Clearly this was an emotional day as she sobbed. It was awful. I had never met her before, really had no clue what was going on, the table of boys were mortified, what a mess. We didn't stay too long...

The next plan was to go to the awful pub that used to be a cracking old man's pub but is now a nasty townie wine bar. And there were people queueing up. Outside. In order to get in. I have one rule about pubs: I will never queue to get into one! A club yes, but a pub, no way! D and I did the most sensible thing and opted for a different pub. Much more our taste. Music was good. There were seats. And there was much hilarity. Which evolved from the following incidents:
*D telling me all about this guy who we shall call Wrecker (name changed for safety reasons) That's the name he's known by. Back in our art college days D and S had gone back to Wrecker's house after a night out at the local sweaty ceiling club. They were expecting to be raped and pillaged. He had severed dolls heads in his living room. They were thinking oh-oh what's he doing in the kitchen, mixing up some deadly cocktail with which to poison them so that he could have his wicked way...turns out he was cooking up some baked potatoes cos he was a bit peckish.
*We were sat very near the pool table last night. One guy had those low slung jeans where basically they sit down and you see their undercrackers. This was all the usual thing but this one guy started doing all those weird leg actions as he was taking each shot. The only way to describe this is that he looked like a dog cocking his leg ready to pee. Men are very strange beings.
*D has decided that the next 5 years are crucial in our development. We had one of those discussions that can only take place when you have alcohol in your hand about where we might be. We didn't actually come up with a firm answer which says a lot for both of us I think. All I could think was that in 5 years I will be 38. EEEEEEKKKKK!

We trotted off to the next pub and it was horrible. Why is the last pub always the most awful? I know it's when they switch the lights on and everyone who looked okay becomes suddenly real and usually quite minging, but this was bad. D and I were looking around in horror. And there's people do this every single Friday and Saturday night. Ugh. Nasty. And that was it. Or so we thought. Because the town was so busy trying to get a taxi was a nightmare. I walked further down and left D as we go in different directions. It's fair to say that I never have any problems getting a taxi usually. But it took me 15 minutes to flag one down. And he was a whinger. All the way home moaning about this, moaning about that. I felt like saying to him, shut up already! You're getting a tenner out of me to drive 5 minutes down the road, how hard can your life be!! Tchah!

And that was it. I survived. I was out for a total of 3 hours. But that was more than enough for me. There will be people laying in bed today with some bad sunburn and a very bad hangover. Bless them all.

Later alligator x

Monday 18 August 2008

They don't deserve her

I know our wonderful Dizz doesn't need a t-shirt to express herself, but if I was to recommend one it would be this...

It applies not only to libraries but to most organisations, I suspect. One size fits all.

Trully Dizz, they don't deserve you. Can't they see how wonderful you are? Are they devoid of all sensory preception?

Thursday 14 August 2008

Job, didn't get

I decided it would be easier to blog about not getting the job than it would be to try to text everyone that I know. I haven't heard officially from the HR bods but I have heard via a text message leading to an email that another colleague got it over me. Nyeh.

There was once a time when I applied for a job in there that I was actually doing and they gave that to someone else as well. I was younger then and kind of incensed. I went shopping and bought this brilliant teeshirt that had a logo on saying "KISS MY..." and then it had a picture of a monkey baring his arse, thus 'kiss my arse' and I wore it to work the following day. It was brilliant. I didn't need to say anything or be outraged as the teeshirt did it all for me. The big boss took one look at it and scarpered, clearly fearing I was going to cry or cause some kind of fuss.

This time around I'm much more philosophical. I've had the attitude all along that if it was meant to be, then I would get picked. Clearly this is not my job. Who knows where my perfect libraryland job does lie? But it's clearly not in the area of digitisation.

I briefly considered what kind of teeshirt I should buy. Before I decided that I don't need to do that anymore. On Monday I will go in, congratulate my colleague, sit back at my desk in my usual rockin-it outfit and rise above it all.

xx

Saturday 9 August 2008

Dizz returns!

Well hello! Long time no blog. It's been fabby to sit back and let Tizz and Fizz take over for a few weeks. But there's so much I have to tell you I'm going to have to break it up into categories. Seriously. Dizz has been a busy bee. So no point messing around. Let's get to it.

Work
One of the reasons I haven't blogged in so long was that work was dragging me down. I won't go into it too much cos you really don't need to hear it all but the basic story is I was covering a post in the finance department. I probably might have mentioned to, oh pretty much everyone, how much I hated it. Truly I did. For the 4 weeks I was cover I was close to tears every evening that I returned home. I almost, to my shame, cried in a car park when I bumped into Wavey I was so upset. So it made me grumpy. And I didn't want to blog grumpy. So I just didn't blog. There is light at the end of this dreary tale. The cover is over. I may have done a celebratory jig around a few desks I was that chuffed to be rid of it. And now I'm back in my beloved electronic journal homeland. I am smiley once again at work. Yay!

Play
In true Dizz style, I didn't let the grumpy work affect my playtime. In fact I probably made sure I did even more than usual in order to counteract the grumpy that was work, play Dizz was fun fun fun. I was out and about doing everything. I said no to very few things and yes to oooh everything! I was knackered. But good knackered. To sum up quickly I've seen loads of films, the highlight being Mamma Mia. Yup, Dizz who hates musicals absolutely LOVED it! I came out of that cinema with a huge grin on my face, came home and pranced and danced to Abba. What a great film. I even want to see it again. And think I will buy it on dvd. This is like a miracle. Maybe the musical love happens as you get older? Who knows. Who cares. Embrace. Enjoy. Lurve the musical. I also had a soooper weekend with my girlies in Stratford where we watched the oh so lovely David Ten-Inch in Hamlet. This was an awesome experience in more ways than one. Not only was it an utterly fantastic performance, with a gorgeous set, beautiful lighting that intrigued me so much I almost bumped heads with the person in front as I bent down and forward in order to see them come out of the ceiling, the deeelightful glimpse of David's pants (oooh!), and general all round greatness that ended in 3 curtain calls and me coming out in goosebumps and pittery-pattery heart beats at the end. Oh! Wow! That was all I could say. Seriously. Wavey texted me whilst we were in the pub and I think the majority of the text was made up of 'wow'. The loveliness of the weekend continued with drinking in a lovely beer garden, a fabulous day of shopping and lots of yummy food, Fizz buying her house and us all high fiving her round the breakfast table, a wonderfully funny road trip home where we sang loud and bad and laughed and laughed. I didn't want it to end it was so utterly fabulous. But such good memories. Since then there's been lots of spending time with my favourite peeps, eating, drinking, gossiping, laughing, what more do you need my lovelies?

Unwanted emails
Just before Christmas, for about 15 minutes I was seeing this guy. We were all very happy, it was all very lovely, but then it all went a bit wrong when his ex decided that she wanted him back, he picked her, Dizz was sad, Dizz got over it. A couple of weeks ago who should I get an email from but said guy. Wanting to know if we could start up again. My first reaction was a pounding heart. Followed by a teeny bit of outrage. The very cheek! I discussed it with the usual nearest and dearest and reached the conclusion that there was no way this was going to happen again. So I had to send an email back. It was horrible. How do you say to someone, basically, tough luck. But I did it. And I told him never to contact me again. He said he would post back the book that he basically stole from me first time round. So far no book. I'm thinking that I have to give up on the book. Again. And! Today I went into the coffee shop where we spent a lot of our dates getting to know each other. It's now considered a safe zone once again. As R very kindly pointed out, that kind of grief is what you expect after 8 years of marriage and 2 kids, not a handful of dates and a few weeks of fun. Pah!

Pedicure
Today I treated myself to a pedicure. I've been working lots of overtime at work and I love having painted toenails and a foot rub! So off I went to my lady in my beauty salon. Oh it was heaven. I was in there for a whole hour. And I didn't once jump even though I have the most tickliest feet! I chose a really dark purple:

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Nice or what! Suits you sir!

Butt ugly
Whilst enjoying the lovely weekend with my girlies in Stratford we came upon a little craft fair. Fizz seriously can't walk past anything that says craft without us going in. And it was so cute. It was one of those odd little craft fairs that has pretty odd stuff in. I saw the following and just thought, I have to have me one of those:

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How funny is that! It's horrible. It's ugly. But it grows grass out of its head! So wrong in the halls of interior design but yet so funny. Makes me laugh every morning when I see it.

Interview
On Thursday at 9.30am I have an interview for the post of Information Officer: Digitisation. How utterly posh does that sound. I really want me this job as I very firmly believe that this is the future of libraries so I want to get a head start. I have bought a very lovely black skirt to wear today that is high waisted and ties with a bow. Smart. Funkay. Just got to decide what to wear on the top then I'm ready. I'll keep you posted!

And I think that's it. You've had a very brief catch up. I'll be back more frequently now, honest injun. Hope you're all having a very lovely weekend xx

Tuesday 5 August 2008

Imaginary Dog Names

When I eventually move into my new pad I'm hoping to get two little dogs (I want two so they can keep each other company). They will probably be miniature Yorkshire terriers because my brother is hoping to breed from his. I've already decided that one of them would be called Basil. This is so that, if it runs away, I can shout "Basiiiiil" a la Fawlty Towers. The question is what to call the other dog.

Now this is all hypothetical. The dogs do not exist and I've no idea what sex they will be if they ever do come into existence. But just for fun, what should the other dog be called? I've already discarded Sybil and Manuel as too obvious. Any suggestions?