disconnected

What a day lads. What a very strange and incredibly emotional day. What an odd feeling to be leaving the place that I have worked in for 1 year and 10 months. Not a dreadfully long time by some standards, I know. But it was my first full time job and whether I liked it or not I’ve spent forty-odd hours of every week looking at that computer screen, those blue divider boards, and that flaming phone.

We were blessed to have met some of the people we’ve met through that place, each other for a start, and some truly wonderful people I hope to call my friends for years to come. It was them that made it sad for me, obviously. And all of the memories I associate with my time there. Me and Darren got the kittens during my first few months there, I have walked up those pathways to the entrance in every season twice. I met Benny there. I, oh god I’m so tired. I wish I could say more but I actually have to sleep and let it all sink in. Then will come the words I need to express how today made me feel.

I had intended to write more but there you go. The processor for the computer came with a few bent pins which I shall attempt to rectify in the morning. I spent the last 45 minutes which I had set aside to write this trying (and failing) to get a good picture of it to send to the website where we bought it. The letters are literally swimming before my eyes at this point so I shall bid you adieu. We have an early enough start to go to the motor tax office, I will fill you in on all tomorrow.

Thud, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I had just enough energy left to include this, it’s a photo of the schedule editor on my pc at work, it shows something I have never seen before - no entry after today. There’s usually something even if it’s just ‘holiday’. I cease to be after today apparently. I’m not sure if that’s cheery or chilling.

inspiration

Just a quick update as an early night is very much overdue. There is good news, I had a feeling yesterday that something would turn up to get us out of the motor tax bind and it did. I had a brainwave at some point yesterday about ringing the car dealer to see if by any chance he hadn’t sent the papers off that register me as the car owner. My inspiration, from whatever quarter, paid off, he hadn’t sent the form on Friday. This means that we can go to the motor tax office on Thursday morning and get me registered and the tax disc paid for and in hand all in one go. We went over to collect the form off him this evening. Fair play to the chap he stayed back late to facilitate us and we were both truly grateful for that act of decency. Similarly he did not have to give me the form as all manner of complications could arise for him from taking the registration process out of his hands. Thank god I smiled him into yesterday every time I met him, thank god he was a decent bloke.

Well I say thank god, but that’s just an Irish turn of phrase for me - thank whoever had a hand in that extreme stroke of good fortune.

We also got the insurance finalised and taken care of this evening, so, all things going well on Thursday morning at the motor tax office, things are back on course. Now I can turn my worrying muscles back to the unpleasant topic of finding more boxes and bubble wrap.

I have to admit I’m getting pretty excited. Last day in work tomorrow, things are almost set. We have some intense days of packing ahead but we’re geared up and ready to go.

Wishing you all a peaceful and pleasant day/night xxx

The image is from Rosses Point in Sligo again, from that fateful mid-week holiday last summer. Peering out from Plato’s cave, reality is beckoning, no longer just the flicker of dreams and hopes…

sad news

A difficult weekend for both of us I’m sorry to report. We awoke on Saturday morning to hear the sad news that Benny’s Granny Rose has passed away in the small hours of the morning. She will be hugely missed by her family for whom she was very much at the centre of things right up until her recent illness. Herself and Benny were friends as much as anything and I know he will miss her dearly. I unfortunately hadn’t gotten to know her personally but the stories of her I have been told by Benny since I have met him and by his family have helped me to understand and appreciate her wonderful presence in their lives.

We both went down for her wake on Saturday but I had to come back up to Dublin on Sunday afternoon fearing that I wouldn’t be able to get a lift back to Navan in time for the last bus that night. It pains me that I couldn’t be there with him for the funeral but I had to come back to work unfortunately. Neither of us were very well this weekend having come down with dreadful colds, which obviously was another burden.

I didn’t have a very pleasant Sunday evening I have to say. I had a temperature but I still got a little of the packing done, the panic had set in so I found the strength to do it even though I just wanted to either a) get on the next bus back down to Benny or b) slouch into a puddle of bonelessness on the floor. Actually the phrase that comes to mind is one of Christy Marx’s, I wanted to ‘falldowngothud’. Instead I stayedstandingpackedbox’s. Ick.

I also spent an unmerciful amount of time flailing around the utterly useless website faqs on motor tax trying to find out what information I would need to bring to the tax office and how long it would take to get the disc which we would need to display in the window of the car. I found out after making a second call to the tax office this evening (thank god for my being anal enough to double check these things) that because I am not the registered owner of the vehicle yet, I cannot tax it, and thus cannot drive it. It takes the department who process these things up to four weeks to send the relevant cert back to you. This is a major setback as you can imagine. I am going to hound the department to try to get it expedited but it’s a wait and see situation for the time being.

I am also getting conflicting reports about whether the Gardai will accept evidence that you are trying to get the tax over the actual disc itself, so this will have to be looked into further also. It’s an absolute sham really because if the previous owners tax hadn’t run out before we bought it we could be happily motoring around right now having recieved both of our provisional licences already.

There is also a problem with what address to use for the Insurance as we will obviously be moving around a fair bit in the coming weeks and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of the Insurance company on this issue either.

It will all come together but for now it’s a hell of a lot of extra stress to be dealing with at an already difficult time for both of us.

And so to bed. I shall leave you with a rose, for Rose.

Hair today…

For those of you that know us personally you may have noticed that Benny’s hair has been somewhat long for the past good while. Very long indeed. So long that it has just taken me one hour and forty-five minutes to cut it. My legs are killing me! Hairdressers must have thighs of steel. Don’t worry, I can hear the gasps, I’m not a hair dresser but I can cut hair. I only realised my hidden talent one weekend a few months back when Benny asked me to trim his locks/bits around the back as he hadn’t had time to go to the barbers and we had a something-or-other to attend that weekend. A quick trim of the offending articles turned into a thorough neatening and de-dead-endifying, until I realised that all my years of having a tight crop and scrutinising the hairdressers every move had payed off. Tonight was my most daring attempt - shorter than I’ve ever done before and even employing the clippers/trimmer jobby that came with the most hilariously fancy eighties video I think I have ever seen. It shows you how to cut a ‘classic cut’ (Slater from Saved by the Bell), a ‘contemporary cut’ (Zach from Saved by the Bell), a mushroom cut (every scanger in Dublin in the eighties) and a ‘classic bob’ (me when I was in Brownies when I was nine). We felt the classic cut with a bit of a Toni & Guy-esque touch to the top was the way to go, and dare I say it, I think I pulled it off - it looks fab. He’s in the shower at the moment so I’ll have a last going over when I see it dried naturally (it was by turns greasy-dry, greasy-wet and greasy-wetishy-dry during the cutting process).

The only major problem now is that I have a hair stuck in between two of my lower front teeth, which is fun to fiddle with with my tongue but frankly kinda gross (I put the comb in my mouth while I’m fiddling with it to see if it’s all even, my ‘technique’, I’ll admit, needs some work ;))

Other than that a mixed bag of a day. We’re still on a high from the new arrival but we got some sad news concerning Benny’s Granny which may necessitate a trip down to Meath in the coming days.

Himself has just gotten out of the shower, it still looks fab! It look’s nicer now if anything. He just proudly proclaimed that it’s the nicest haircut he’s ever had! Yay! I love it when a plan comes together

I’m off to get those last little stray hairs taken care of - nighty night all, I shall leave you with a before (of sorts, it’s from nearly two months ago!) and an after, doesn’t he look yummy?

introducing the newest member of the family…

Ta daaaa!! My first photo of our new car, and I am utterly, completely and totally in love with it! Benny’s in shock, or so he says, he’s been wanting to buy a car for four years and now he finally has one (and for it to have happened so quickly) he finds himself somewhat dazed at the thought that right now, our first car is sitting outside in next doors garden. For me, I wanted a car so badly when I was a kid I used to sit and watch everything my dad did so that I would know how to drive if I ever had to and I’ve been dreaming about driving ever since. We just couldn’t justify the expence before now. I can’t believe it either in a way. I love it I love it I love it!

The last lady that owned it was a Mrs Dorothy…(I wont put her full name here). Dorothy! No wonder it doesn’t have a mark on it, and she left in it, along with the wonderfully reassuring scent of her older-lady perfume, a little tin of the base coat should we ever need to cover up any scratches. Isn’t that sweet?

The only major problem with it at present is the fact that we need a security code to make the radio work. But it’s a Blaupunkt radio so it should sound good whenever we get to hear it! I shall make enquiries tomorrow on the subject.

We also noticed the previous owner’s address is at the mouth of the Boyne river, a river of significance for his Lordship having grown up on its banks. And the colour, the odd redishy wine, is auspicious in my eyes as just before Christmas (right before and during the time that the plans were made for this Sligo move) I kept seeing the colour in my mind’s eye - an odd kind of ruby shade. It always accompanied my thoughts of our relationship at the time and it kept popping into my head so much I finally said it to Benny. I surmised that it might be my subconscious suggesting a ruby stone in the piece of jewelery he was thinking of buying me for Christmas. When I opened my Godmothers Christmas present (she’s from Sligo btw) I found it to be a beautiful ruby red watch, that oddly enough is exactly the same colour as the car on the face. I thought this might have been the reason for the odd little psychic twinges - but there you are, ‘my dream is out’ as my mother would say, for tis the exact same colour as the car turned out to be. All I need now is for the door of the house we move into to be red and we’re all set!

I am absolutely shattered at this point in the night and dying to get to bed, early for once. That was some nerve racking experience signing for it and handing the money over, that final decision, knowing there was no turning back. But tis done now and as the mother said on the phone after I’d gotten home “Has the baby arrived!” “Yes Ma, the new arrival is here”, “and what colour is its hair” she quipped, “red” says I, “likes it’s daddy and it’s Granddad!”.

The new arrival is here at last

Hooooooorah!

Oh where do I start with how excited I am about this new car. There I suppose! True to form John did the business and got the price of the red one I was salivating over down from 3450 to, wait for it, 2900!!! The man is a haggling genius. How he did it I do not know because this car is so much better than the blue one it’s not even funny. Now, I know it sounds like I’m being a big girl using the colour to talk about the car but the thing is they’re the same manufacturer, almost the same model (Punto) and the same engine size. The red one, which is actually a reddy-wine metallic, is a five door. Which makes it more roomy and classy looking than its three door counterpart. And, as I said yesterday, it hasn’t a mark on it, not one scratch, the interior even looked like new. I think yesterday I might have said it was a 2001, it’s 2000 as it happens but I really don’t give much of a hoot on that score. It’s not going to be worth a whole lot by the time we’re done driving up and down to Dublin etc. so the difference of a year isn’t dreadfully important. But having the car I experienced love at first sight with is. Honestly, when I saw it I just fell for it. How sappy is that? And the other good thing about all of this? It’s only 50 quid dearer than the yellow sports one we were getting off Benny’s brother, the one that fell through. And we’re alot more comfortable with the thought of driving around in an inconspicuous little wine number than in the ’stop me Garda I’m a boy racer’ car.

It’ll all be finalised tomorrow evening anyway. I went down and put the deposit on it this evening and myself and Darren are going down to collect it and finish paying for it tomorrow. There are one or two tiny details to go over but I trust John’s judgement and he said it was far superior to the blue one, that it was perfect infact. For one, the blue one had a problem with a ‘bearing’ (?) that he discovered pulling a ‘hard right’ in it. No such issues with the little red palace on wheels. Oooh, I just realised, it needs a name now! In the interests of superstition I’ll not be so hasty to name this one til it’s actually sitting in the front garden.

Now I just have to figure out getting it taxed (that was one of its drawbacks compared with bluey, which was taxed til November). And find out how long it takes for the vehicle registration papers to get sorted. Just asked Dar about that there and he said it’s yours pretty much when you’ve sent that. Cool. Does anyone know different? Let me know if you do!

Wow, I don’t think any previous entry has had this many exclamation marks. I’m not hugely fond of them in writing generally but if ever there was a time for registering surprise, delight and general exclamation, it’s tonight!

Please please don’t let some shitey little detail scupper this. Oh well, I’ll go over everything again with the dealer tomorrow before I part with the cash and you can be assured that if I do indeed get it home there’ll be a piccy of it here tomorrow :D.

Other than that I don’t think I’ve much left to say. Though that’s pretty good news from where I’m standing so it shall have to do ;). I shall leave you with a picture of happy us, though I reckon the smiles on our faces all evening have been even wider than these pair of cheshire cats! It was taken by someone from the team on a work night out, so thank you mystery photographer…

decisions decisions

I think we can take it as a given that weekends are difficult for me to write on, or in, or over, whichever. I am always full of good intentions and inevitably get side tracked. For instance last night myself and Benny got stuck into a heavy duty car conversation that pushed me way over the time limit for getting anything written. Which was as well because it needed some discussion because this evening we went to see one of the cars which had taken our fancy.

It turned out to be a nice drive - Darren test drove for us, very kindly, as neither of us have received our provisionals yet. It just looked a little ‘distressed’. Now, of course, I’m a picky shite so this was always going to be something I would pick up on when going to see any used car. It has quite a few dinges and scrapes. It doesn’t look like a rust bucket, don’t get me wrong, it just looks a bit more used than I’d expected. There’s stains on the seats too. Ick. My mother told me tonight that her father always said to go for the car that was cleanest on the inside, a sign that the previous owner had loved the car and taken good care of it. Sigh.

Obviously, because it is the law of the universe, a much nicer, and inevitably more expensive option reared its head while we were at the garage. A metallic wine 2001 Punto, 450 euro’s dearer. Pushing the budget to the furthest limit with the fact that the tax has to be sorted on it. But it was s.p.o.t.l.e.s.s. - why oh why did it have to be spotless? Not a scratch, inside or out, brand new looking and a five door model. Gah.

Anyway, Darren’s Dad John has kindly offered to go and look at them both for us tomorrow, to test drive and haggle. And boy can this man haggle. I’ve seen him in action in Turkey and in South Africa and this man could buy 10 euro for 2 euro, if you catch my drift.

So we shall see what he says. Hopefully it’ll be clear-cut based on his feedback. It’s a bloody tough one though. On one hand the blue 2000 model (3 door) is perfectly priced and we’re probably going to run it into scrap anyway. On the other hand for the extra 450 we get a little palace on wheels. Would we regret not stretching? Would we regret stretching? We await John’s input with bated breath.

In other news, I had a pleasant if somewhat staid weekend. The highlight was our trip to the 12th Lock, our old favourite from the start of our relationship. We had a nice meal and got pleasantly nostalgic, and squiffy. On Sunday I put on more washes than there was room to hang them up and I packed two bags and a box for the big move. Not bad going. Not great, but not bad. The gathering of the box’s from Xerox looks likely to be postponed til Wednesday as I’m going to be heading to the garage tomorrow night to put down a deposit on whichever one is decided on.

My head has been rather scattered this past few days. Words and names have gone missing, I’ve repeated myself far more than usual and I’ve been generally a little dazed. It’s because I’m stressed, because of the influx of data, because I’m remembering so many things to do and doing them - much more activity than has been the norm in the past few months. We can’t wait to get down to Cavan though. To relax a little before the last big push. It’ll be worth it though.

So, not much in the way of revelation or intrigue tonight I’m afraid, just a status report, which is, unfortunatly all my brain is good for at the moment,

Nighty night all xxx

a quick update

Oh dear. WordPress is down! Heads will be rolling in the server room. I’m not dreadfully surprised though. Since I joined a month ago or so they’ve had 87,000 new users. I’m not well up on the usual sort of traffic for these sites but that does seem like an awful lot of people in a very short space of time.

Hey ho. I’ll just write this in word and pop it up later or tomorrow – whenever they get themselves sorted. I’m not complaining, I’ve been really happy with the site so far.

So, I’m off to Katie’s for drinkie-poo’s and chats. Yay, I love our nights. I’m picking up some goodies in M&S too so it shall be a grand night all in all. Himself is off to Meath to sort out some space in the shed for our stuff (we’re moving it there first while we work out of Cavan to get the jobs/house sorted in Sligo). I miss him when he goes away for the night though, the bed does be awfully big and cold without him .

Not a lot to say about Friday, it was fine really. Got some help from Sarah re the box situation so that feels better. Just asked Dar if he’s free to go brumbrum (car) hunting in the morning – that would be another huge weight off my mind.

Speaking of things on my mind, I’m very worried for a friend that’s not feeling the best, I’ve been thinking of him all day. Depression is such a pain in the arse illness. I used to think I was odd (and to be fair, this was not entirely untrue) all my years growing up when I was just genuinely suffering from depression. Finally realising it and talking to people about it made me realise just how many people suffer with it. I’ve reached the point now that I wonder why I ever thought it unusual, it seems to be more common than not. Well, I’m sending good vibes his direction so that’s the best I can do for now.

A little sunshine to sign off today, take care all xxx

 

jobs, Jesus, and the meaning of life

Oh dear god looking at jobs on recruitment web sites has to be one of the most soul destroyingly boring things I have ever had to do. Stocktaking on the fish counter in Dunnes was more fulfilling and interesting. I hate it passionately. It’s just a big disappointment waiting to happen, every time you sit down to do it. I do not want to work in sales, for a call centre, I am not a qualified extrusion engineer, I do not know what a process analyst jump-through-a-hoop specialist is. I don’t want to know. I never wanted to know, never will. I want to be a writer. Whinge. Whimper. Pout.

When I look for jobs, regardless of whether it’s Dublin or Sligo, I shudder. I fantasise about working with animals, writing my novel, running a B&B, starting my own business. I feel inexperienced to do the latter at present, I know it would take a massive amount of research. Mostly I just feel despair. That’s awfully childish isn’t it? There’s a fine line between being walked on and knowing when to say no though. I have looked at jobs this evening which are so violently under-payed it makes me sick to think anyone is getting away with it. I have looked at jobs today that make me feel truly sorry for the people that do them. The one truth I try to push to the front of my mind is that I couldn’t have stayed where I am. I have to strike out and do something different, even if it turns out to be worse. I have to try. Benny feels exactly the same.

Screw it, I’m havin a beer. *clickity-fizz* *sluuuurp* that’s better. (There was another sound effect a few seconds later, but anyway )

Sorry about the whinging. It’s been a whingy day though. I do try to be upbeat as much of the time as I can, some days you can’t win though. Whatever mixture of hormones, tiredness, environment - sometimes there’s no fighting the grumpies. I wasn’t alone today though. Most of the team were in the same boat, even my msn buddy was feeling it. T’was a stormy day, dark rolling tumultuous clouds, rain, lots of, and wind, even more of. The nicest part of it, which Benny quipped about as we walked slack-jawed out of the industrial estate gawping at it ‘guess what you’ll be writing about in the blog tonight!’… one of the most exceptionally dramatic and spectacularly beautiful sunsets I have ever seen. That Benny’s ever seen. Everyone walking out of work had to have a good gawp out of the windows on the strip between our building and the main building. The whole sky around the setting sun was on fire, every different shade of pink, orange, red, purple, combined with neon edged, bizarrley nucular-explosion shaped mushroom clouds. Of course I didn’t have the camera. I am SO getting myself a little portable digital camera.

Himself has gone off to bed early tonight. By his reckoning, and I’d tend to agree, eight hours is not sufficient to deal with the dual burden of worrying and being extremely unhappy at work. I could only go to bed at 9:30 if I had been drinking all night or was incredibly ill with something. Early nights are just not my thing. Had enough of them as a kid.

I was actually just saying that on the way home on the bus - if I could only have one wish, it would be that I didn’t have to sleep. I could sleep if I wanted to, I would still experience tiredness, but if I chose to sit up reading all of the books and writing all of the books I’d like to, I could. My usual three wishes would include being able to eat anything I liked without putting on weight, having a watch that could manipulate time and giving one wish to the wish giver. Well, you can’t be greedy with these things.

I put on Massive Attack, Teardrop, oh what a deliciously spiritual song. Gives me goosebumps. Makes me calm. I love when things sound like rage and peace simultaneously. I like dichotomies.

I wish I had more to say tonight. I can feel something, like hands behind a translucent cloth, feeling around, wanting to breath. What is it?

I breath in, let my heart settle to the beat of the song. Close my eyes, open them to focus on the candle flame. Out you come. There you are. I want to be a writer. Wriggling around in the background the whole time I was writing this tonight. The job problem is that I am not interested in doing any of those kind of jobs, this is why they bore me. I feel so frustrated in my current job. I can see everything that’s wrong and can do little to change it, the weight of the massiveness of the task and the unlikeliness of my ever succeeding strangled the urge in me a long time ago. The frustration never died though and I have learnt big lessons in patience. And so, as ever, I see the bright side.

I have come away with a deeper understanding of human nature, of my own strenghts and weaknesses, of the strenghts and weaknesses of those around me, of why things are so difficult. I have had time to formulate opinions on the things that have troubled me, on how emotionality and big business are gripped in a battle the outcome of which is suffering for the people that can do the least to change it. So many illusions, so much resignation, so much understandable unhappiness making so many other people unhappy. You cannot change any of it on a grand scale, you can only change yourself. If we had the tools to do that we would solve it all. This may be why religion is still so powerful, there is such a strength in the truth of self love, of acceptance of others. It just isn’t something I need, to defer to an all powerful parent figure to find that love and acceptance. I wouldn’t deny it of anyone else though. I just have a strong need to make those assessments of myself, to criticise and praise based on my own lengthy analysis of self and others. It’s what makes me love life and hurt so deeply for anyone that feels they cannot have that love, for those that leave us because of it.

And that garbled inadequately expressed mess is only the tip of the iceberg of what I have to settle, or at least quantify, before I can start to write. I vowed that when I finished college I’d go through the notes listing all of the things I wanted to talk about in my writing. This has obviously not happened. It strikes me having seen what just happened there that I may be better just starting somewhere, anywhere, seeing what comes out, what the strongest images and ideas are. If they need more research the research will do what it inevitably does and lead me on to looking into other things, remembering what took my fancy on the first pass. It should really be a more qualitative, intuitive process, not something I can put down in a list. And so the fight between my logical and emotional selves struggles on. Though I don’t want to struggle and fight with it anymore, I want to just recognise the need for the two to meet half way and keep recognising it and analysing it until I understand it well enough for it not to still be the issue it is today.

Don’t you just love it when a song turn’s on the tap, unstops the bottomless bottle of thought, even just for a few minutes. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said Jesus turned the water to wine, he turned the life giving sustenance into the life loving truth serum. He showed us how the basic need can be transmuted into the life enhancing and positive, that one alone was not enough. Christian parables as a justification for drinking, I think I should quit while I’m ahead tonight

The picture, well, the light in my eyes, captured the mood of the song I was listening to tonight whist writing. Not quite as scary as the last black and white eyes close up I included here, I hope…

“water is my eye, most faithful mirror” Massive Attack, Teardrop

“see our chaos in motion”

Well hello again. I’m back. Hopefully uninterrupted for a while at least. Right, I do like to get the nitty gritty details out of the way at the start so let me think, what news on the Rialto? The list of things to do is starting to bulge a little at the seams again unfortunately - this is making me a tad nervous tonight. It seems that no matter what we get accomplished there’s always another big juicy one looming, harder than the ones that preceded it. But as I keep telling myself, and said to Benny the other night, most of the difficulty and fear involved in this process is in the anticipation of the doing, not the doing itself. It’s a fear of the unknown kind of thing. And the reward for struggling through it? Our first home together, something we have looked forward to from the very first weekend our relationship started. And also the fact that none of this will be scary once it’s done - I will know how to do something else, I can improve upon it for the next time and offer advice to anyone else in the same position. All part of the growing up/learning process.

Okay, I’ve given myself the pep talk. Now I know the best thing to do next is list the unpleasantnesses and make plans for how to dispatch with them. Numero uno irritant de jour is the thought of packing. I don’t know where to get boxes. Well, I do, sort of. I can go down to the local shop and ask when they get their deliveries and if they would keep a few aside for me when that happens. I also know that our manager has a few put aside for us but collecting them off her without the car almost rules that out, unless I can think of something else. Bubble wrap we can acquire from Benny’s dad’s factory. But how to get it down here - who to ask to help with that etc. It all adds up.

The next big problem is the acquisition of a car. This terrifies me. What if we pick the wrong one, can’t get a good bargain etc. Well, so what. We don’t have time to fiddle around too much over that particular problem so we’ll just have to put it down to experience if we don’t strike it lucky. We’ve seen a few decent enough models on carzone.ie so we shall have to just cross that bridge next week, provided we can do that after work. Which reminds me to check what shift we’re on. Please please don’t let it be the 9:30 to 6:00 - that would push it too late for going to garages. Would it? Hmm. It all adds up.

And then of course there is the terror of the job problem. I haven’t heard anything back from my one direct email on the subject. We have gotten nothing back from either recruitment agency. This I think will have to come down to applying directly via ads on the net and in the Sligo newspapers nearer to the date. There is simply bugger all point in applying for positions right now when we wouldn’t be available to interview for them for another three weeks. Sigh.

I know this is the point where I should take stock of all the things we’ve scratched off the list so far so I can reassure myself we are making some progress. But the thought just bores me right now. I’m impatient to get the next bits sorted really. I’m looking forward. A rare and precious shift in focus for McGrath. I’m hanging on tight to that thought right now. In fact, now that I’ve said it to myself I feel a tiny bit better. That impatience shall be my tool for wading through this last few scary bits. I shall sharpen it on the stone of eeeek until it renders all worries broken glass at my feet.

Okay, I’m listening to Dead Can Dance and the song currently playing is so wonderfully medieval it just brought Knights and battlefields to the front of my mind. The song that just came on after it has the wonderful line ’see our chaos in motion’ in the chorus. That’s a nice image. It might have been a good title for this journal in it’s current Sligo-bound incarnation. Though the seeing would have to be done in your minds eye, but I’ve been getting some nice encouragements recently from friends regarding my novelistic turn of phrase, so perhaps you can ’see’ it via the writing.

So what’s been going on in my mind otherwise. Extreme thankfulness for the increase in light. It has now reached the stage that even on the later shifts we’re going in and out of work in the light. There was even sunshine this morning despite the frost and I could actually feel the back of my eyes relaxing and soaking it in. Well, I imagined I could and I quite like the sensation, so I’m not going to question it too much.

Also, extreme thankfulness for modern technology. I’ve been waffling on for a long time, in tune with quite a few others I believe, about how wonderful the internet is. You don’t need to hear anymore on that subject, if you don’t agree, well, pity about ‘ye. Msn instant messaging is the modern technology in question for this bout of thankfulness. It’s just super. We have it in work, thankfully, as I am informed there’s quite a few call centre’s in Britain that don’t allow it, and also don’t let their staff have access to the internet while they take calls. Dear gods I would not have made it through this past two years in there without the internet.

Anyway, instant messaging has given me a really great opportunity to get to know someone who I never would have known otherwise, well, depending on where you stand on fate I suppose. Here’s how it happened; a few weeks ago I sent a screen shot of a problem I was having to one of the people what fixes these problems. She spotted the name of my blog at the bottom of the screen shot on one of the tabs in the toolbar. She investigated and a couple of weeks later, whilst solving another problem for me, asks, right at the end of the conversation ‘So how’s big bird?’. Big bird, for anyone not up to speed, was the name of our ill fated little yellow motor that sadly, shall not be ours. I was stupefied for a moment or two. How in gods name could this person I had only ever exchanged a handful of emails with know about our car? It dawned on me it had to be the blog…. and… ah yes, the screen shot. And so the emails started to fly. She has a blog (which is anonymous, so I cannot share m’fraid) and I’ve been enjoying that alot, and now we’ve just started bantering back and forth all day via the internal instant messaging. I never would have met her because she works in merry old Engerland. We find ourselves so thoroughly well acquainted at this point that it’s astonishing to think that only a fortnight ago we only knew each others names. Tiny tiny planet. And so many of us with so much in common. A truly warming thought.

Anyway, to the shower with me and thence to the leaba. A good day, full of laughs and cheer. The things to remember in the darker days.

Wishing you all a rosemantic evening, regardless of whether you’re celebrating the day itself specifically,

Take care of each other xxx