Listy Things

Songs I Have Recently Rediscovered And Am Now Playing on Repeat

Patience of Angels by Eddi Reader

At The Bottom of Everything by Bright Eyes

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant by Billy Joel

The entire Nutcracker Suite

 

Things That I Have Decided It Is Better To Buy Than Make, in the time vs. money debate

Dry shampoo

Eye make up remover (vs. olive oil, I understand you internet but I can’t do it)

Diced tomatoes

Tinned lentils, chickpeas, etc

 

Things I Can Only Do In Binaries

Wear blush (No blush, or Slapped Violently In The Face)

Eat Vege Chips (No Vege Chips, or the entire packet. You were kidding with the 4 serves per packet, right nutrition label?)

^ this actually goes for all chips, both hot chips and crisps

Make fun of Levi’s pronunciation (Let everything slide, or consecutively say every single word he says funny. Cashew. Mario. Gymnast. Vitamin. Yoghurt. Pasta. Oreo.)

 

What I’m Enjoying Right Now

Panto

Red lipstick

My glorious laptop background

People being excellent

Work (whaaat who would have guessed that? NOT ME)

 

Aforementioned glorious background

What I am Not Enjoying Right Now

Hayfever

Lack of Lois in my laptop background

Saying dumb stuff

People being mean

Uni work

 

Times I Have Recently Asserted How Much Of A Nanna I Am

Now, when I am seemingly not understanding how to use capitalisation properly. How does one internet.

Yesterday when I fell asleep during a fun friend gathering while we drank Baileys

Last weekend when I fell asleep during a 21st party

Every day when I drink about 400 cups of tea

 

Things I Find Funny

This picture. Also some other stuff. Glad we had this chat.

Hola

HELLO I AM HERE LETS NOT LET THE BLOG DIE.

I have started going for runs and now I feel like I can do anything, except run more than 200m at a time.

Frittatas are an excellent breakfast food, as long as they are not too eggy. They also take about an hour to make so luckily I made one for a leisurely brunch yesterday and saved half for my breakfast today, because Monday and Friday mornings I have to be out the door at 7:15 and that does not make for a nice amount of time to cook breakfast. I am hungry now so I cooked up some potato and onion to make a frittata with tomorrow morning, because I suspect I will have to get up early to go for a run and then I will be starved when I get home. But I also ate some of the fried potato because um, delicious.

Podcasts are possibly going to drastically cut down my internet usage time, because today I wanted to listen to some but I couldn’t read blogs/browse the internet AND listen, so I got up and did some cleaning. Guys. I dusted.

I have super nice friends, some highlights this week have included a ridiculous Les Mis facebook thread and a nice pep talk and being the old guys from the muppets and everyone just generally being pretty lovely so GOOD JOB TEAM, I guess my ego can recover now.

I have a ton of gifs in my bookmarks list with no classification system so here is the first bookmark gif I clicked, for your enjoyment, right now. Possibly unrelated.

 

Adorably unrelated.

GTT: I told work ‘No.’

Hello laydees and laydee-like gentlemen.

Today I feel close to hysterical. As you know this has been a tough week for me, including Thursday when all I could do was sit on the couch and cry rather than go out and see Nicola perform and generally have a good time rather than a shit one.

Gif is apropro even though Artie, ugh.

Still, I’ve been thinking of myself as coping. I’ve got my schedule nicely written out and I keep referring back to it to remind myself of the time I have to complete work and socialise and reach my dreams. (The reaching of dreams is a more abstract one, it’s not actually written in my diary like ‘April 10th: Reach for the stars and every mountain higher’).

Yesterday my 2IC called me and asked me if I wanted to work today. I said no, for two reasons. Firstly, I had earmarked today for uni work and it’s important that I stay on top of things this year because they take me longer when I’m feeling like shit (ie, all of the times). Secondly, he has been messing me around for weeks with my roster, including yelling at me when I queried my lack of shifts and telling me I had no right to question it because I’m a casual. Up until that point I had been working five or six days in a row, despite my health issues, which my managers are well aware of, and always turning up on time and ready to work.

Basically, I am a great employee and they are really, really taking the piss by cutting my hours so heavily and not working with me because I have uni now.

So, even though the money would be nice, because (see above) I am getting pretty much no work, I just said no. And it felt great! I’m so used to just bending over backwards to help people and do as they ask and normally what happens is that I care too much and then they chew me up and spit me out with not so much as a thank you (again, see above).

I feel even better about the decision today because I feel like death warmed up and oh my god if this exhaustion doesn’t stop soon I may need to go back on anti-depressants because already things are starting to seem like they’re just not worth it.

I guess the happy point of this post is that I have decided my mental health is more important than my managers at work, which is important and good.

~ Lois

PS.

Moneh!

SO as we are all aware, I have little to no money, and so I am gonna do a spending fast. Which seems ludicrous when I have no money to spend anyway but bear with me.

Also, just to clarify, I’m not trying to be all “OH WOE IS ME I AM SO POOOOOR TAKE PITY ON ME”. Particularly with this post I feel like if I post it here I am more accountable, and generally its just something in my lyf that I can blog about. So if I seem whiny I apologise, thats not my intention.

Anyway, I came across this blog a few months ago and I always thought it seemed like a good idea but that was before the 6 week holidays and when I was like “Oh but I have money and no debt so this isn’t a problem!”. And now I still don’t have debt (small mercies!) but I don’t have excess money to just be like “What? Joseph Joseph utensils on sale? I SHALL HAVE IT”. Side note: good purchase, so I am glad I had the money for it at the time. But that weekend was really my last weekend of having money and that is SCARY and boring.

So basically this spending fast is only buying essential things for a period of time (the girl from the blog did it for a year, I am thinking more along the lines of Lent – celebrate finishing with chocolate, etc). I feel like that will be enough time because its not *really* a problem with overspending (except on eating out/jam and cream donuts from Brumby’s) so its not like I have to overhaul my brain and teach myself to cut back, but just if I impose these limits on myself I can’t make exceptions and then I should be able to save a bit of money and start looking at flights to the UK and NY and such. Cool? Cool.

(as a side note, when I put money in my savings it gets labelled “Sweet Potato Felafel at Leon’s” or “Herbie’s Garlic Bread” or something else England-specific that I will want to use it for.)

SOOOOOO this is what I am allowed to spend money on:

Rent
Groceries
Petrol (but not much)
Phone credit
Medicine and doctors and physio
Haircuts
Edit: I forgot volleyball

I think thats it.  I’ll probably add shit if I need to, but basically no clothes or kitchen things or jam and cream donuts. So hopefully I can still see people during this period because I don’t want to be that guy who is like “Oh I can’t go”, but I can’t because RULES. Rules are how I will be reunited with my favourite garlic bread.

(a long post about) Dreamz

Hello.

It’s been almost a month since I’ve updated. My excuse is that I’ve been perfectly happy so I haven’t needed to find reasons to be so. That’s not entirely true, but we’ll go with it.

Aly’s updated on most of the exciting things we’ve been up to (it’s convenient sharing 98% of your experiences with another person, especially one who is more diligent with recaps), so I’m just going to talk about things I’ve been doing which have been directly related to taking steps to ACHIEVE MY DREAMZ.

Dreamz are a funny thing, and I’ve been struggling with coming to terms with mine for ages. A while ago when Lois posted that excellent and emotionally honest post about her relationship with her parents, and we all said that we would do similar posts about the obstacles in our own lives. I had planned to write one about The Restrictions of Potential, or something. It’s basically a HUGE white person problem, but I do believe that it’s been holding me back, so I’m gonna talk about it, and if we could all forget about starvation and AIDS and slavery for a little while so we can pretend that my issues matter, that would be great.

Life lessons reiterated by Photoshop

I didn’t make new years resolutions, that is just not my jam, but there are things that I like to try to do so my life is simpler and easier and nicer. Then I forget about them because I have a deadline, and Photoshop kindly forces them back into my life. For example:

– Only do one thing at a time. I was told over a year ago that I am ruining my body (cortisol sounds right?) by always doing two or more things at once and therefore making my whole body stressed to the point where that level of stress becomes normal, so I have to do even more stuff at a time to feel like I’m getting anything done (or something to that effect, but more medically accurate). If you have spent more than 2 hours with me you are probably aware that I can’t NOT multitask. Photoshop is all “Nuh-uh, lady!”, and if I try to do anything other than what I’m meant to be doing (Facebook and Twitter, I am looking at you) it crashes and I didn’t save it recently enough so I have to go back and do things again.

 

– Take breaks. Normally a forced result of Photoshop crashing and the pinwheel making me wait forever for it to reload, it means I am actually getting up and walking around instead of sitting down for stupidly long periods of time. Also if I have been working on something and it is frustrating me to the point where I have a headache, that is probably time to leave it alone for a while.

 

– Think about what you are doing or you are going to delete a layer you just spent fifteen minutes working on. You fool.

Sydney and Stuff.

So I went to a workshop on the weekend. I didn’t highly publicise it before I went, for no particular reason. I think I was more concerned with the cafe job dilemma to worry about the fact that I was going to Sydney for three days. We stayed somewhere with little to no phone reception, which sucked balls. The flight on Thursday night – which was meant to be at 11:50pm – got delayed so we boarded at 1am, arrived in Sydney at 8am (5am our time) and had to work until 8pm on roughly two hours of sleep. Friday was the biggest waste of time imaginable. Our group caught up for the first time in over a year and it was awesome. Some other people who knew me got really irritated that I was spending more time with the reporters than them, and bitched that I made them do too much work by writing out their personal story on my graphics tablet so I could animate it (we had to tell her story somehow because she volunteered to, but wouldn’t have her face or voice on camera, and apparently she thought it wouldn’t get back to me if she bitched about me to all of our mutual acquaintances). I don’t care, really. It would really upset me in some circumstances, but I was too exhausted to even bother. I got some sleep both nights we were away, but people in other dorms were loud all night and we had to be up early and didn’t finish working until late. I got home yesterday and was in one of those ridiculous, sleep deprived moods where I cry at everything that doesn’t work properly. Get home and only have keys to the door that is chained from the inside? Cry. (Levi had keys to the other door, so I only had to wait a couple of minutes for him to go home and get them, but logic isn’t my strong point)  Can’t find my washing basket? Grumpy. Find it and can’t find my pegs? Cry. I slept for 12 hours on Sunday night when I got home so I don’t understand why I was still so tired, but considering I normally need 8-10 hours sleep a night and I didn’t get that for three nights I can see how one bulk 12 hour sleep wouldn’t necessarily fix it automatically. I’m so grateful that Adam forced me to go home last night early, that was a pretty cool thing because I felt too guilty for missing most rehearsals to ask to go home. I feel really bad saying I’m too tired to do anything when I know other people have legitimate reasons for being tired and don’t complain as much as I do. Maybe I should actually get my thyroid tested so I can also have a legitimate reason. Levi keeps being all “Oh, I have no idea what its like to be tired“, because obviously he works WACKED OUT HOURS, but I think we’ve established over the last three years that I just need more sleep than he does so he can stop being such a little bitch. I have two videos to edit (well, one to edit, one to animate) by Monday. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am that I quit that cafe job. Can you imagine if I’d been working from 8am today and yesterday? I would be hating everyone.

 

Moral: I need to take care of myself more than I need to rehearse my two lines for panto, and that is the harsh truth of the matter. Also Sydney was great for most of the time.