Bog roll thief

Hello again... oop, back in a minute.

I'm back. Just had to pop to the toilet, but I'm sure you wanted to know that. Why did I bother writing it in at all I may hear you ask? It's not as if there is some sort of indication on here of whether I'm in the room or not (besides any I decide to put in myself), or if I suddenly stop typing in order to leave the computer for five minutes. Um, can you wait just a sec?...

Back again... Not really, I never went anywhere that time, I was having a joke with you and I bet you fell for it didn't you? Oh, you don't care? Fine, be that way.

Right that's a couple of paragraphs wasted, what's next?

Ah! Yes! We have a bog roll thief in our house! It's come to light over these past few weeks that at least one of us in the house is consuming an obscene amount of toilet paper. It's going so fast they might actually literally be eating the stuff. Only yesterday there were two full rolls in the one working toilet with have left in the house, and come this afternoon Yoli has bought a new pack for the loo.


I suppose if someone is eating the toilet paper I could perhaps understand why they are doing it as everyone is a bit tight for cash at the moment. It's still only have a week or so left before the next loan installment comes through (that may not be including me though, remember?), and I'm sure there is a lot of fibre in toilet paper if you're without food and need something to get you by but this person needs to learn to save some for the rest of us. Perhaps if they supplement their diet intake of loo roll by eating the paper in the recycling bin? That way they could keep themselves fed while simultanesouly providing a service to the environment as well. I know at least one of our more enviromentally concious housemates would be happy with such an arrangement.


That is all for now. You may stop reading at the conclusion of this sentenc

Cleaning house

We had a nice big house clean today. It's been a while since the last one, so not suprisingly it's been looking and smelling minging in places - particularly the downstairs toilet...

I would like to say we did it because we felt it needed in but for me that isn't nessecarily true. I KNOW the house has been needing it for a while and we have even talked about doing it a few times. I think that almost at least once every other day one of us has said "we should clean the house on (X) day", and everyone else will half mutter in agreement. No, the real reason that we got off our arses and cleaned the house today is because our housemate Yoli is coming back tomorrow afternoon. Being the housemate who is the most concerned about ensuring the house is clean and tidy we decided to have the big tidy up for when she got back. None of us has actually admitted to each other that was the reason why we cleaned the place today, stuff like that generally goes without saying here.


We've got Jonathan Ross playing on Dave, i think it's probably about a 3 year old episode. He just introduced a female guest, but I wasn't really paying attention and looked up to see the back of her and got a little excited by what I saw until I realised it was Amy Winehouse and now I feel kind of wrong. The same way I think a friend of mine (yes a friend, not me), thought the keyboard player in Hanson was fit only to find out it was actually a boy and not a girl (you know who you are - Steve).

I'm gonna cut this one a little short because I'm writing it on Sophie's laptop and I said I would only be 15 minutes. I thought I would've been able to write a little more than I have but my brain has gone a little blank so I'll stop forcing it.

Until next time...

darkhorsedan vs sophieblog

Sophie is telling me to write what I want. We're trying out a little blogging activity that she played out with another friend of mine, Swpnil, last year. I'm not sure if it's gonna work or not because it was probably something that happened naturally last time and now we're kind of forcing it.

It is pretty funny though. She is sat on my bed with her laptop typing away while I'm typing this, all that can be heard is the clicking of the keyboards. Now she is telling me to ask a question, or throw a question out there to answer.

I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. Apparently I'm probably doing it correctly as it's not supposed to make sense to anyone reading it. Sophie has just gone to check the cakes she's making.

What cake is it? - Lemon Drizzle cake, she answers. It's got another 12 minutes before it's done Yum!

I just got her to answer a question that often bugs me "does my room smell?" However all she can smell is the cake from the next room, it probably means my room always smells.

The religeon of one age, is the literary entertainment of the next - DISCUSS! (a crap attempt at generating discussion between us)

I attempt to express how stressed out I am to Sophie about my dealings with the scripting of a game i'm playing. She mishears me and thinks I'm stressed out about a game of Mario Kart we had half an hour ago, where Yoshi kept overtaking me and causing me grief. I tell her the games of Mario Kart are feeble distractions from my current obscession with learning the scripting language of a computer game so I can attempt to make my own games.

Trivial pursuits (haven't I already given a blog this title before?)

The house has become a little busier and louder these past couple of days with the return of Sophie, who was joined by her boyfriend Scott, and the arrival of Paddy about 30 mins ago. The house had been quiet this past week with only 2 of us here. Sophie had brought the game Trivial Pursuit back with her from home, so today, myself, Sophie, and Geoff all had a game.

It's been a while since I'd last played, but this version is different to the one I'm used to. It comes with a DVD that provides you with special questions every time you land on a square to play for a piece of cheese (or pie, or wedge - whatever your preferred terminology is for those little bits of coloured plastic). The categories are different as well, gone are the history, arts and literature, and general knowledge questions, this particular version of Trivial Pursuit is based around popular culture, covering categories such as film, TV, music, sports & games, gossip, and trends. Consequently this makes the game far easier to play so you can feel a lot smarter when you're getting loads of questions right, but at the same time it also makes you aware of how much of your precious gray matter is taken up by useless and trivial bit's of information such as "who gave the best man speech at David Guest's and Liza Minnelli's wedding", or "which actor was in an off again, on again engagement with singer and actress Jenifer Lopez?"

What does knowing that do for anyone? You might try and argue that knowing the ins and outs of an historical event such as the Battle of Thermopylae does nothing for you other than making you look like a smart arse, or geek, but history can teach you many things, such as how we got where we are today, and how we can use events in our past to understand how to deal with events in the present and our future . But what things of importance has the lives of people like Jenifer Lopez and Ben Afflek taught us (except for the importance of signing a prenuptial agreement)?

Anyway, those were two of the questions I had while playing today, and I answered them pretty easily. In fact pretty early on in the game I managed to collect all the pieces of cheese (or pie etc) and was heading towards the centre for my final question while Sophie and Geoff had only collected two pieces. Foolishly I believed victory was now assured and gloated quite openly about this to Sophie and Geoff, to which Sophie declared that I "hadn't won yet, it was a 'tortoise and the hare' situation". How right she turned out to be.

It seemed no matter how many rolls of the dice I got I could not land on the centre square and kept missing it to answer other questions, most of which I got right. For almost an hour I was trying to land on this square, and achieved it only 3 times, and all 3 times I couldn't answer the question. Then as Sods law would have it (or perhaps Karma, though I think a game of trivial pursuit is too 'trivial' an affair to have karma get involved) Sophie completed her collection of cheese (plastic pies etc), landed on the centre square and got her question right first time and won the game.

I'll be sure to swot up on heat magazine and the gossip columns from tabloids in time for the next game, then victory will be mine!

Taking more hours

In my last post I talked about my need for a new job and my strong desire to leave Blockbusters. It so happened that I had my shift that same day and I told my manager that I wanted to hand my notice in to look for a job that had more hours. She knew it was coming, but she also mentioned that there would be 40 hours left open now that Emma is leaving. I thought someone else had already laid claim to those 40 hours, plus I didn't think I would want them, but when she made the offer I must admit I was tempted.

I know I already expressed strong feelings against staying there any longer, let alone doing more hours, but when offered the hours my mind started weighing up the pros and cons of whether I should take her up on the offer. The main bonus to staying would be that I wouldn't have to look for another job and it's been a while since I've had to do any job hunting and I remember I never liked it (but who does?).

I started trying to decieve myself, thinking that doing more hours there wouldn't be that bad, it would actually allow me to get used to the job if I was there more often. Plus I would be up to date about what was going on in store and not have to play catch up to the constant changes that it's always going through. So, only ten minutes into the shift I told my manager that it was likely I would take the hours, I would let her know within the week provided I haven't found anything else (though already in the back of my mind a little voice was telling me that I'm never gonna find anything else because I'm too lazy and would rather suffer long term pain and annoyance rather than disrupt things in the short term).

After agreeing to the possibility of staying on my manager finished her shift and it was me and Hayley to run the shop until close.... and it was one of the worse shifts I've ever had. It was a Tuesday, the shop should have been quiet. We were left a few jobs to do and should have easily got most of them done but we could barely finish one of them. It seemed like almost every customer we served would somehow lead to a complication. Films were misfiled or missing, films weren't checked in properly, or they weren't checked out properly, it was like we were suffering the consequences of all the mistakes people had made on previous shifts and having to sort them out... There were a few moments in the shift where I came very close to just walking out of the shop and never come back. Basically the shift was bad enough to make me seriously rethink wanting to stay on, and get to work finding another job.

Of course Wednesday and Thursday went by and I have done nothing about finding another job. I had work this evening and had decided that Tuesday was just one of those days - they can happen in any job right? But then I when I worked tonight, it was almost like an exact repeat of what happened on Tuesday - except I was afforded a slightly different perspective. On Tuesday's shift I was pretty much in charge so it feels like a lot of the responsibilty falls on me. Not only that but it means you get asked all kinds of questions by whom ever you're working with if they haven't been there as long as you or are not a senior staff member, whenever there is some ambiguity on how to deal with a certain problem. The truth is, at Blockbusters when you run into a complication of problem there isn't always a definate right answer or way to go about things, you just have to go with what you think is right and hope you don't get in trouble for it later. So when you encounter a gray area or an ambiguity you instantly look to someone in a higher authority for the answer, although the answer they'll give you is the same answer you have come up with yourself. Quite often, in the shifts that I work, that person someone would go to is me and it really stresses me out because I know they can come up with an answer themselves. Sometimes I encourage people to sort it out themselves (if you can call it 'encouragement', to be honest it's either apathy, so I'll say something like "yeah do whatever", or it's more like an ostrich burying it's head in the sand and I'll say "I dunno, do whatever you want I'm not involved".)

Until today, I never really understood why some of them come to me when they have a problem. Like if it's something I think they genuinely don't have an answer to I'll help out, but when they know it already I'm just thinking "why are you laying this burden on me?" However, today I was working with Spencer, the assistant manager, and it occured to me during that shift that I was doing that exact same thing to him. I had to deal with numerous problems that I know I would have just dealt with if he wasn't there but today I kept double checking with him, or asking him what I should do. So I realised why people do it, because they're not in a position where they don't have an alternative but to deal with it themselves. It's like when I work with staff members as experienced as myself. We've got more or less the same knowledge and the same know how but we just don't like taking the responsibilty for something directly onto our own shoulders - if you can shift it on someone else, or at least gain a second opinion so that the responsibility is shared it makes the job that bit easier to deal with, coz all any of us wants is an easy time.

You're probably thinking "but it's just Blockbusters, how hard can it be being a till jockey", and I used to think the same thing. But something has gone wrong there, I find myself becoming far too stressed out. And today with Spencer in charge having to go through a shift that mirrored my shift on Tuesday I got to see from an outside perspective what I could've looked like and it didn't look very nice at all. Do I really wanna have a job that could do that to me for 40 hours a week for the next few months only getting paid 5.50 an hour?

Admitedly these were two very bad shifts, but almost every shift now seems to have its moments. I think if I'm clever I should take those two shifts as a sign. They're a sign that I should get the fuck out of there a.s.a.p, and I'm gonna have to get serious if I really wanna do that... Like maybe I should actually give in my notice, rather than perhaps look for a job and using this one to fall back on. Maybe if I leave myself nothing to fall back on I'll get out there and find something.

Apologies for typos and spellings - I haven't even bothered to skim through this to see if it reads okay, as long as you get the general jist who cares?

'Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But The Rent'

I should be worried. I tend to worry easy but my tried and tested tactic over the years is to shift anything worrying, problematic, or soon to be an urgent matter, out of my mind and fill it with meaningless distractions instead. It's only when things become really bad that I suddenly scream and panic and try to sort it all out, all the while cursing myself for not doing anything about it sooner. My problem at the moment is that I need money. I used up everything I had on last months rent and now have to wait two weeks before my next pay day.

Despite my current lack of funds I wasn't that worried about my situation until yesterday. My Dad is putting 30 quid in my bank account for my birthday (yeah I know that was a while ago, but he sent me a cheque through the post, only it was from an old cheque book and bounced) and I know I can easily buy enough food with that to last me until pay day. I've recently found a nice and cheap alternative to endless weeks of pasta as well so I'll have slightly more variation than I usually do when I'm on a budget. What I do now is make up loads of rice and then mix it with soup because you can buy loads of rice and soup on the cheap. I've found the best combination so far has been chicken soup and rice and I'll usually make a huge pot of it up and get up to four big servings out it.

It's not uncommon for me to find myself in this situation at the end of term. Those few weeks before the next loan payment comes forces me to turn into a student cliche', spending my last few pennies on huge bags of pasta, eating nothing but carbohydrates for a month. At least with this new recipe I get a bit of variety so I can now make a choice between either pasta or rice each day. Then by the time the loan comes I'll vow never to eat pasta or rice again (at least until the next time I have no money).

However, the BIG problem is, the loan might not be coming now. I got an email the other day asking to hand my student card in because of my deferral and it has left me wondering if that means they will be keeping back my next loan installment. The thought had never occured to me that this might happen up until now. I thought as I'm defferring it means I'm still a student, and will be for much longer, but as they have asked me for my student card it must mean that from now until October I am exempt from having student status, and consequently lose all the benefits that come with that.

After seeing the email yesterday I sent a message asking if my next loan payment would be withdrawn but I have recieved no reply thus far. The scary part is, if they are not gonna give me the next installment then that means I've got to start looking for a full time job, like NOW, because I know they won't give me more hours at blockbusters, and the way I feel about that job, I work far more hours there than I would like to already. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm contracted to pay rent here until June I would just run home, but that's not really an option so I'm in a right pickle because even if I do find a job in the next week or so I'll have to wait another month before I get paid, in which time the rent will be overdue. On top of that Blockbusters won't let me go so easily, because I've been there 4 years and i'll have a load of notice to work, which means it could put a halt on starting a new job anyway.

Thing is, the part about getting a job doesn't really bother me as I was thinking of doing some temping work and quitting the hell that is Blockbusters anyway, it's just there's potentially greater urgency about it now than there was before.

I better get off my arse and get to work finding work.

The monthly scripwriters meal

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), the scriptwriters meal last Thursday had none of the drama of the previous months meal and was generally a pretty tame affair. The only time it looked like a fight could break out was when Sophie found herself sitting opposite Sheila and was unable not to make a, perhaps deliberately, provocative joke towards Sheila. The set up was, our lecturer John Foster had a little wine left in the bottle and was trying to offer it around. Sophie jokingly said "pour it on Sheila's head" (not particularly funny but it sent out a clear message), causing Sheila to aggresively retort saying "Would you like to find out what it's like to have a wine bottle shoved up your arse?"

Knowing Sophie, I knew she would have to respond to that. I gripped her leg under the table hoping it would send out some kind of message to her to stop and just leave it but I knew it wouldn't work. Instead she said "I don't need to find out, I already know, and I liked it."
Thankfully Sheila's didn't want to take it any further and she said something like "Okay, glad to hear that", and went back to her conversation with John.

After the meal was over and everybody was going home, two other students off our course called Lorraine and Sam came back with us to our house. Lorraine was enthusiastic about staying out and drinking more, and although I felt tired for much of the meal, I felt like I was up for more drinking now. When we got back to ours we decided to go to the summer house and play some texas hold'em poker, although Lorraine and Sam hadn't played before and would need to be told the rules.

However almost as soon as we started trying to play the game, I knew we had made a mistake. It seemed that while we were trying to teach Lorraine and Sam how to play, Paddy who has played poker many many times before, seemed to want to sabotage everything we were trying to teach them. He started questioning the betting procedure, saying we shouldn't play the blinds, or that everyone should put a blind in, or that you never have big blinds and little blinds. I don't know if it was just because he was drunk, or all the other times he's been playing poker people have been putting the blinds and the bets in for him (which is apparently what Sophie said of him after). Even Geoff, usually dependable and reliable in situations like this, seemed to become mischievous and adamant that he would throw a spanner into the works at everymoment possible. We would become confused about how much money there was in the pot because he would just throw random chips in when people weren't looking, or it wasn't his turn to bet.

Despite all this, Sam managed to pick the game up suprisingly quickly, while Lorraine hadn't a clue what was going on because of Paddy's confusion of the betting process, and also because she was very drunk by this point. She was at that stage of drunkeness when your legs decide not to work properly anymore and ended up having three very bad falls over the course of the evening. One of them, where she was spinning around and fell into the patio doors of the summer house and bashed her head on the window looked particularly painfull. Thankfully, it looked as though her intoxicated state was numbing the pain.

So, as poker became more difficult to play with the alchohol steadily regressing the mental age of the players, I remember turning to Sophie during the game and saying that it was like trying to organize a poker game with children at a McDonalds kids birthday party. It shouldn't have been a suprise to us then, that after we had given up on the poker game, a few of them started playing Snap!

By sometime after 4am, after some games of truth or dare and a dance off competition (I know, not exactly grown up - but if you can't beat em, join em) everyone was burnt out and Lorraine and Sam got a taxi home. My evening was finished off with an episode of Takashi's Castle and then I went to bed.