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Woolies Wondering…

Went shopping today. As we badly need some cereal bowls, I decided to look in Woolworths.
Found some bowls, but buying four or five of them looked a bit expensive. There were “50% reductions!” signs all over, but even at half-price, the cost was a bit steep (for me).
Then I came across a set of bowls and plate, 16 pieces in all. Now, we need some dinner plates as well – the ones we have are chipped, non-matching or both. And this set was marked as £13, down from £17.99.
That’s not a 50% reduction, I thought to myself, but it’s still a good price for a set. So I heaved it up to the checkout. The tinsel-bedecked lady behind the till smiled at me, waved her scanner at the box and said sunnily “That will be be £3.97!”
“Er, pardon…??”
Another big sunny smile. “£3.97 – that’s with a pound taken off, you know!” As though that explained the low price.
I did an extremely rapid calculation. 50% of £13, minus £1? (And why the pound off?) It still adds up to more than £3.97, even with the VAT cut. But – why argue? Pay the woman and vamoose with your prize! Before somebody notices! So that’s what I did.

On the way home, we discussed this; B remarked “How can these checkout people keep smiling when they’re losing their jobs in a couple of weeks?”
“By playing Santa Claus and giving customers enormous discounts?”

We drove home smiling…..

in:

General

I Am Writing This Drunk….

…Coming off verapamil has meant that I can now drink alcohol (fairly moderately). Before, more than one small glass of wine was liable to leave me feeling very ill indeed (something to do with the way the the drug affects the liver’s alcohol processing).
We have had Daughter no.3 + husband up for the weekend; I drank two glasses of my home-made banana wine at supper and felt fine. This afternoon, we all had lunch together and I drank three (large) glasses of wine – I now feel extremely cheerful and not at all unwelll.
It’s been a nice weekend – we all had a great gossip and I got news of all the family back down south. Then this morning, me & B took them to our (hopeful) future house, deep in the forest. It was only just above freezing; there had been some snow up there and it was icy and frozen underfoot. I only fell over the once, but I have learned to fall properly, going with the fall and folding myself into the ground instead of jerking and trying to stay upright. I’ll probably have a nasty bruise on my hip tomorrow, but nothing worse. It was a very good walk, even though it left both me & B pretty tired.
I am now looking at my Xmas prezzie from the family – a large flat-screen monitor. It’s incredibly bright; I’ve turned down the brightness to 80% but the colours still look weirdly psychedelic. My old monitor clearly had something wrong with the brightness control – when I watched Youtube videos before, I always thought the dark colours were the fault of bad filming. I’ve been watching some of the same videos today and am amazed at the difference.

Anyway, I am feeling happy……
For a change.

in:

General

Out(date)d…

Went around the Co-op this afternoon for a few things. Absorbed in the cleaning section, it took me a few moments to recognise the song that was being played on the store radio – The Rolling Stones with Let’s Spend The Night Together. Instantly I flashed back forty years, to hot, crowded rooms rank with the smell of dope and patchuli, “I’m off my head and my mouth’s getting dry”, swaying bodies, stale beer, “I’m high, But I try, try, try “, the promise of thrilling illicit fumblings in dirty sheets, “Oh my, my, my, my, my Let’s spend the night together “….
Then I came back. To a small Scottish supermarket. Four decades later. Standing in the cleaning products aisle and wondering if I should get some more cream cleaner for the bathroom.
And wondering why the hell that song was being used as background music in a bloody supermarket; I suddenly felt like somebody had got hold of my teenage diary and started reading it out over the intercom.

I headed for the checkout, furiously.

in:

General

The Holiday of a Lifetime….

“Live like Ann Frank in a lovely Amsterdam attic”.

Entire top floor apartment located just opposite the Anne Frank house.
A very nice location, Dam square 5 minutes walk and all the major attractions, restaurants, and night life within walking distance. The Jordaan area is home to many students, artists, and young professionals. This lively and picturesque area is known for its restaurants, night life, specialty shops, and cultural attractions such as the Anne Frank House and The 9 streets, 9 small streets selling lots of items you will not see elsewhere.
Anne Frank apartment has a small roof patio at the back.The apartment comprises 2 rooms, 1 large and 1 small….

Being woken up at dawn by armed SS officers kicking down the door is optional, apparently.

in:

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Strange Phone Call….

…last night. The phone rang, the display showing a mobile number. I picked it up and a mechanical voice started reading out gobbleygook. It sounded like random characters, no recognisable words (apart from what sounded like ‘troll’), with a great many “semi-colon”s and “zero”s.
I eventually worked out that somebody was text-messaging our landline. However, the mobile number wasn’t listed in our address book. So it was somebody with our number in their phone either trying to text-message us whilst blind drunk, or lying on top of their phone in the middle of extremely athletic sex.
I’d like to think it was the latter. 😀 If it was you, tell me. (I’ll treat your call in the greatest confidence, of course…)

ETA: Found out what it was about. We have no mobile phone reception at all in and around the house, so we only use our mobe for emergency calls when we’re out. This morning, we went out shopping, and I happened to check the mobile for messages (something that I do only about twice a month, since everybody knows we don’t use a mobile). Anyway, there was a VCard from an acquaintance, with the same timestamp as the phone call.
So that was what the call was all about – there were lots of formatting characters in the message, and the robot had simply read them all out. Nobody was drunk, having sex or in any other way enjoying themselves.
Bum.

in:

General

Health Update 2…

Getting off Verapamil wasn’t so easy as it appeared. It’s thankfully gone now, but for the last three days, I had a continual headache; looking at various medical sites, it fitted all the signs of a Tension Headache – slightly stiff neck, runny nose, getting worse through the day. And I’ve been having lots to get tense about – paying the damm coal bill, forex; additionally, the bright screen of my laptop could have been giving me eyestrain. And it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the headaches I used to get before my thyroid problems were diagnosed – the headaches then got to the point where they produced vomiting and retching.
I was naturally worried for a while. But when one of the sites mentioned that Verapamil was a treatment, I knew what was happening – I was ‘cold turkeying’ from the stuff.
Anyway, I feel fine now.

in:

General

Health Update…

I’ve taken myself off the Verapamil tablets; six months is long enough to try it out, and it really wasn’t doing me a lot of good. The main problem was that it made me fuzzy-headed all the time; I couldn’t think very well and everything felt ‘flat’ and dull. It was the mental equivalent of permanently wearing dark glasses and earmuffs. Reading through the Wikipedia article on it, I wasn’t wholly surprised to discover that it’s occasionally used as a treatment for hypomania – it was impossible for me to experience any strong feelings about anything. Motivation (as I’ve mentioned before on here) was severely lacking; the main reason why I’ve been blogging so little lately. Time and time again, I started a blog post, only to stop after a couple of sentences trying to remember exactly what point I was trying to make. I really envied my writing friends who were able to steadily chug out hundreds of words each and every day for NaNoWriMo. Books and reading were also a problem – I kept losing interest after a couple of chapters; I can’t think of a single book that I started during the last few months that I managed to finish.
Additionally I was getting forgetful and clumsy, with my typing becoming appalling – spellcheckers took care of most of my mistakes, but they couldn’t stop me mangling names and numbers. And I couldn’t remember quite simple things, either (like getting the online version of Transit ready, for instance). And there was the depression, which I’d rather not talk about…..
And it didn’t really stop me having tachycardia attacks either – they were just much fewer and of much shorter duration.
I’ve been ‘clear’ for five days now, and the new mental clarity is amazing – I’m thinking again! And I’m feeling rather cheerful. I’m a bit apprehensive about having more tachycardia attacks, but I’m determined not to get stressed about it.

So – on with the show!

in:

General

News From The Sofa…..

I have finally got Linux installed on the old laptop, and am now able to blog from anywhere in the house – at the moment, I am comfortably ensconced on the sofa.
Having all but given up on the idea, after having so many failures, I discovered Puppy Linux. This runs on just 94 Meg of RAM, making it ideal for my machine with its 128 megs. Of course, there are other small-footprint distros; but for me they proved pretty useless, since in no case had anybody bothered to translate the installation menus from the original Geek. Happily, this is not so with Puppy, which deserves some sort of Plain English award for the clarity of its installation instructions and Help menus. Thus I was able to get everything installed and running in about an hour. And my laptop fairly zips along now; using it with WinXP was a pain – every operation took ages. Using Puppy, however, there’s no great difference in speed between this laptop and the desktop machine. It’s fractionally slower loading webpages, but that’s all I’ve noticed so far.
I’ve not found out how to network the laptop with my Windows desktop and printer; it will pick up and display the Shared Folder on next door’s PC (which shares my wireless network) but won’t recognise my PC. But I’m sure that’s something I’ll work out eventually. For the time being I’m just pleased to be able to surf, email and blog from the comfort and warmth of my sofa!

in:

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