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TheTome /
LothedInArchivesAugustYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. 19 August 2004 - 15h25 Umm... not entirely certain why I've started this entry. Guess it's since my mum commented yesterday that I haven't updated for a while. That's really because I haven't had a hell of a lot to say. What I will say is that somtime, over this last month, I've gone from thinking to myself, "Well, if it doesn't get better, I'll just go home.", to thinking; "I can't wait for it to get better, since I don't want to go home." I reckon that's a pretty significant mile-stone. There is a 'yet' on the end of my new opinion, I have every intention of going home eventually, but not soon. The oddest thing is there has been not drastic changes in my life to prompt this switch in my perception of living in London. No "big bang" of any kind. It's just been a creeping acceptance, and growing enjoyment of my life here. Oh, I'm nowhere near as happy as I was in Joburg, yet, but that will get better. In a month or so all the students go back to uni, people cease to dream about their holidays in Spain and the job market opens up again. Sooner or later I'm bound to find something, even if it is just reception/secretarial work. I guess I've also been making new friends here. In this city it's important to have lots of friends - or ones that live round the corner, since the travel aspects make it difficult to see the same people regularily. But as it stands what little time I have spare from the Tram is pretty full up with social activities. I've also been working more at the Tram in an effort to earn a bit more money. All in all, I guess I'm finally finding a comfort zone once more.
13 August 2004 - 14h03 This morning I woke up at the ungodly hour of 7am, made even more ungodly by the fact that I'd only got into bed about three hours earlier. I blame work, since Canada is too far away... The reason for this is that I had a 'routine' doctor's appointment and pre-booked NHS appointments start at horrid hours. In a state that can best be described as 'the shiner side of pure agony' I managed to make it up the stairs and into the shower before the rest of my housemates who have actual day-jobs managed to get there. I then had to repeat this stairs-climbing action since the gas-heater wasn't going at full strength yet and the water was coming out a temperature that could charitably be called tepid. Whilst standing there in the shower in the process of blithely rinsing off the soap, I happened to glance to my left, at the shower curtain, which was when the real nightmare of my morning started. Slasher flick style, I saw the object of my horror's shadow moving over the shower curtain. It climbed rapidly upward and emerged over the top, legs and all, two-inches of damn ugly spider. I freaked. I'd like to take this moment to say that I am mostly over my arachnophobia. It is controlled - I can even deal with small innocuous spiders on me. Fake spiders have never given me problems. I kinda like those little hairy jumping spiders, they're fuzzy and cute. However, five centimetres of hairy, grey vileness clambering along a precarious, slippery shower curtain-rail above a bath that Im standing naked in, is just one step further than I can bear. Okay, its quite a few steps further than I can bear. This was the sort of spider that arachnid loving house-hold will name, Nol, or the like, and tolerate with an affection born more out of the amusement value of watching guests and visitors encountering it, than any real love for the critter. Here I though that leaving Africa would mean less encounters of the arachnid kind. Ugh. We seem to have had some spider population explosion over the last month, theyre everywhere, and generally larger than the ones back home. They coat the back yard with their webs, they hang from my bedroom ceiling, they even manage to clamber onto me at work. I was dealing, but Nol has taken it just too far, and all I can do is to sit here, skin crawling, thinking about it. Happy Friday the 13th to me. 11 August 2004 - 11h55 Well, I had a great weekend. Which has once again put me in good spirits and makes being a bar-girl in London, less of a hard thing to cope with. I do have to admit though that I have come to comfortably dispise my job, rather than loath it with the fresh passion that I had before. That and we've rotated a lot of staff, so I'm getting on relatively well with everyone there at the moment. On Friday we, being Simon Cross up from CT, Stephen Croombe (who I haven't really seen for the last 4 years or so, but I know from back when he was one of Nerine's thingies, many, many, many years ago) and a few other assorted ex-claws, plus their others, semi-natives, went to see Camelot at the Regents Park Open-air theater. The weather had somehow conspired to provide us with the absolute perfect London evening, clear skies, beautiful sunset - still takes a while to get dark - fabulous! And the venue is far superior to Maynardville, although the appreciation of the play was marred for some since thay hadn't expected it to be a musical. I actually encountered Simon and Stephen first - walking the wrong way to the Theater, and underwent the first few minutes of waving at them from the distance, only to realise that niether of them would recognise me as a not-quite-blonde with a mop of curls (which is now getting too long, and I entertain fantasies of taking a pair of scissors to, but so far have managed to restrain myself). Ah, well, all good. Saturday saw me making a loong trek out to West London for Zara's birthday party. The theme was Bride & Groom, but seeing as I've left my closet full of costumes at home in Cape Town, I settled for dressing up smartly, wearing my sunglasses as much as possible and declaring I was the 'divorce lawyer'. A bottle of red wine later, some of which landed up on my, fortunately, black skirt, I decided to retire the sunglasses. Finally, Ian's girlfriend Sarah has moved in since the situation at the place she was staying in has apparently become unworkable. However, and much as I like the girl, she does tend to sleep in until 2pm in the afternoon, and then sit in Ian's room mucking around with mp3's and CD's (since she DJ's with Ian on Friday nights). This means I'm not going to get much opportunity to be one with Ian's computer - or certainly not for the lenghts of time I've become accustomed too. Sigh. 3 August 2004 - 16h23 This lovely weather we've had this last week has added yet another level of reluctance on my desire to do anything productive. Everyone here is operating on the knowledge (or at least belief) that this is summer. These, last 6 days, and the few that may be yet to come, are pretty much all the warmth and sunshine we can expect in 2004. In response I have made my usual, moderately futile effort to get a bit of skin colour into myself. You may all laugh now. I have also been trying to broaden my reading out of the realms of pure Sci-fi and Fantasy - I've been reading Iain Bank's The Crow Road. Although that's as much because he's my favourite author and he just doesn't write Sci-fi's anywhere near as fast as I can read them. That and I found the book in one of the local charity shops (the funkier of the two) for a whole whopping ?1. Otherwise my time has been wasted on KoL?. Damn you, Jason. Oh, well, at least those 40 adventures a day are spent quickly. Which is why I've got two characters... Ho hum...
1 August 2004 - 20h36 I have many words to describe how much I hate working shift work. Very few of them are polite, however. I missed Austin's birthday party yesterday since I couldn't get out of a shift. Well, not without having to donate it to someone else, and suffer the consequent lean week that would result. I'm facing the identical dillema over Zara's birthday this coming Saturday. And it gets worse. I have just discovered that Nicktoons is playing Invader Zim every night at 9pm! And I work most nights! And we don't have a video machine! I think I'm going to cry. |