On A Mission - Maybe

We're shut off from the rest of the World (aka London) this weekend, they've suspended both tube lines going into town. Awesome, well done TFL. Despite of that, I've made my way to Ealing to have a little chat to the Estate Agencies again. Only to find out that I won't be able to secure the lease on a 2 bed flat on my salary. This basically means that my original plan to find a lovely, cosy, warm & as close to German standards as possible flat & then look for a suitable flatmate won't work. As it stands I'd have to find the flatmate FIRST & then get the flat, which is exactly what I don't want.

Not that there are currently any flats on the market in the first place. One of the agents tried showing me a place that she said was just what I'm looking for - thankfully the current tenants were still asleep due to going a bit overboard while celebrating Diwali & I didn't have to break to her that actually, that place was pretty shite. This was before someone told me I wouldn't be able to rent it, anyway.

So my options are:
1. Find someone to share with & go flathunting together
2. Move further out of London & get a studio/one bed flat on my own
3. Leave this fucking country & move somewhere where I can afford a nice place
4. Get a better paying job/raise/promotion
5. Hit gumtree & find a flatshare that fulfills most of my requirements

I can't see 1 happening as none of my friends wants to live in West London. I would consider 2 if all else fails. 3 is very tempting, but I like my job & my friends & London if it wasn't for the abysmally bad housing situation. 4 is a nice thought, but not very likely to happen. Which leaves me with 5 (& 2 as my plan B). It's not going to be easy.

Or I could just stay where I currently am, freeze & feel guilty every time I turn on the heating. Yeah, not ideal, either.

On another note, I'm still trying to distract me from the misery that is English housing by making an effort to be more sociable. Frani came over on Friday for a massive catch up & a home-cooked vegan dinner, both of which was great & made me happy. And I went to a Halloween party on Saturday, dressed up as a gothy witch, which was quite cool, too. The weather hasn't been as cold as the previous weeks, which means I've actually had a few quite decent days in our current flat.

It's set to get colder again next week, though, and I'm starting to panic again. And my flatmates kinda have someone lined up to take my room already, so I should make up my mind if I want to do the flatshare-hunting or just hole up in my room with my heater & wait for winter to pass.

Honestly, if anything's ever going to be the final straw that makes me leave London it's going to be the living situation (oh, and the medical care, which to be quite frank, is just as bad as the houses).

Despicable Me

To distract myself from flat woes & spent the evening in a warm environment, I went to see Despicable Me on Tuesday.

It's awesome.

It's well made & actually has humor for grown-ups as well.

It's incredibly, insanely cute.

It made me giggle quite a lot.

I want a minion.

Go see it!!!!!

(4 out of 5 little yellow stars)

Our House

There's a problem with my new place. It's cold. Really cold. It wasn't so bad when we moved in (August), but even then you noticed the lounge being distinctly colder than the rest of the house. Now that it's autumn & frosty, the temperature difference between back & front of the house has become even more noticeable. While the kitchen is quite bearable even without heating & seems to keep warm quite long, the lounge (& upstairs bedrooms) resembles a freezer. It takes ages to get warm, while the radiator in the hallway happily toasts the staircase & loft, & gets cold again as soon as the radiators cool down.

This massively pisses me off. It's actually making me quite miserable. I like my house warm, without having to throw money out of the window to keep it that way. It doesn't help that one of my flatmates claims to never feel cold & the other one hides in her room with a little fan heater.

I'm entirely not happy & this situation is not made better by my flatmates not really being very sociable types. I spend most of the evenings I'm at home alone in the lounge, while they hide in their rooms to watch their own TV. I like my personal space as much as everybody else, but I'm not living in a flatshare because I don't want to hang out with people.

I've spent most of this week trying to figure out what to do. Not that there is much I can do, except move. And this is made difficult by the fact that I've signed a 12 month joint lease.

The landlord's coming over tomorrow & will hopefully make the radiator in the bathroom go warm, tell us how to turn off the one in the kitchen & be able to tell me when the boiler has last been serviced (I'm assuming never). I don't think he's going to be very open to my suggestion to insulate the wall & the loft, which is what this place really needs.

Depending on how all of this turns out, it might start hitting the estate agents again.

Bugger.

Back!

Oh, hello! Been gone for a while, what with moving house & Sky taking absolute ages to sort out my interwebs (they were even worse getting my TV set up, but hey, I'm not paying for anything so can't really complain).

Things wot happened since I left Kilburn & set up shop in Acton were many.

I had a wonderful Planet Angel party weekend, mainly due to the afterparty being quite rad & featuring Arnon who was visiting from Canada & stopping by before he was flying back. Earlier that month I had both him & his girlfriend Cara staying over at mine for a few days, but hardly got to see them due to work & their sightseeing schedule. Can't wait to see them again next year at Burning Man :)

I finally gave up & got my hair cut, it's now a layered bob & much less of that mess that was gracing my head previously. Mysteriously, I seem to have developed somewhat wavy hair. I don't understand why & am not sure if I should be worried or pleased, my hair's always been straight as hell, but I can now definitely spot some wavyness to it.

The new flat is nice, it feels a lot more like home than the previous place ever did. My room's got all it's furniture now & I even bought a new bed (& a double duvet, today), all I need now is some decorative elements. My furniture is white, the bed is silver metal, the walls are white & the floor is some weird shade of charcoal/blue. I'm thinking some bamboo boxes to replace my shoebox storage & pink/purple colour touches. I had seen a great poster at Ikea (online), but unfortunately they didn't have it in the store. So now I'm on a quest to find grey/pink/white bed linen (need new covers as I didn't have a double duvet before) & something to put on the walls, although I'm not entirely sure how/if I can attach things to the walls as they seem to be rock hard.

What else? I've been working a lot, but seem to get recognition for it as well, which at least is something. Unfortunately being stressed & having manic workdays means I need the weekend to chill out & mainly slump on the sofa, which is not really what I call a banging social life. There are some parties coming up, so there's hope.

Hooray!

I'VE PASSED MY PROBATION!!!!

Words cannot explain how relieved I am. My boss came back from holiday, we had a catch up & he passed me without further ado. It's so great to get rid of this uncertainty. It does not, however, make my main client any easier to work with. But now that I don't have to constantly fear that one bad step will cost me my job, I can be a bit more relaxed. Also, my boss won't be going away again that soon, which makes things easier as well.

Not much else to report, really. I'm still packing my stuff for the move on Saturday, man&van (+John) are sorted for early afternoon. After lots of calls to our competent *cough* *cough* call center & FINALLY getting someone who knows their stuff with the third call, I've now got phone & broadband for the new place sorted. As in I'm paying for it for now, as it turned out we need an active (i.e. with number) phone line before any of the free staff offers can apply. I'm hoping that getting the rest set up won't take forever, but at least I'll have interwebs within the next 10 to 15 days. With all of that I'm surprised we're still wondering why sales are down.

I'm going to the dentist tomorrow to get the ugly temporary crown replaced with a shiny, permanent gold one. Happy days.

Oh, and two people I met on the playa in the Lost Penguins camp are coming over to London & staying at my new place. I'm excited & their visit happened just at the right time as now I've actually got sofa space to offer & understanding cooperative flatmates.

There actually seems to be a chance that I'll be back to my usual, happy, relaxed self end of this month.

Plans for when that finally happens are:

- loose weight (no excuse for chocolate binges anymore)

- go clubbing (should tie in nicely with the weight loss plans)

- catch up with everyone I've neglected due to being stressed/miserable/too busy

Yes, indeed.

The Edges Of The World

This week has been a totally mixed bag. I think I might've messed up my probation *again*, due to sending out a report with data that I thought was ok, but actually it wasn't. Apparently one department had known all day, but had neglected to tell anyone else. I thought the data looked a bit dodgy, but it had been looking like that since a week ago, so decided to send out the report. Big mistake. I don't know if they can really hold me responsible for this, as I honestly didn't know about the missing data logs that were causing problems, but they're probably going to say I should've spotted discrepancies etc. etc.

Due to all of that, I've spent the last 4 days nervous & quite anxious & really not very relaxed. I do like the job, although working with a certain person is hard, stressful & not very fulfilling at the moment. But the rest of his team are nice, I feel like I can move something. I'm very worried that my boss is going to tell me tomorrow that they're not going to make me permanent.

I have decided that, no matter what happens next week or on the 23rd (the official end of my probation), I'm going to try & get certified as a translator. It'll mean studying & exams again, something I thought I had left for good when I started working, but it would also give me a second leg to stand on, career wise. I'm not sure if I'm actually cut out for corporate life.

So, at the moment the light at the end of the tunnel quite possibly could turn out to be a train.

In addition to that, I'm preparing for moving to Acton next weekend. I've packed half of my room, have to sort out actually details for the man&van early next week, the furniture is built & as soon as Lynn has the hoover fixed I'll clean my room to get it ready to move in.

Oh, and I'll get the permanent crown fixed next week as well.

Not sure if that's what they mean when they say when it rains it pours. I'm glad when August is over, no matter which way things go, at least they're settled. This uncertainty is killing me, I just want to sit down & relax & just not have to worry anymore.

To get my mind off things for a little while, I met up with John today to do some culture. We hit the Hayward for Ernesto Neto's "The Edges Of The World", which also featured some Design exhibition which threw up the age-old question what actually should be considered art. We weren't exactly sure, but we were certain that none of the exhibits excited us much. Ernesto Neto, though, was stunning. You could touch it, smell it (cinammon, lavender...), walk through it & over it. It was so much fun!

To round the day off, we ate some al-fresco sushi at SoBa. While all of this didn't totally relax me, it was nice.

My boss is back tomorrow, I'm very apprehensive going to work & having a meeting with him. I so hope that everything turns out alright.

Wish me luck!

Adventures In Flatpack Land

I went to IKEA & bought things last Tuesday. I then spent Friday evening & Saturday afternoon assembling my purchases, helped by John who turned out to be astonishingly skilled with the (electric) screwdriver. It actually was kinda fun & strangely rewarding to build something that I can now use to put stuff into. Also, John & I were a good flatpack assembly team.

This means that my new room is now more or less ready for me to move in. Well, it still needs a proper hoovering which I'll hopefully be able to do on the coming weekend, provided Lynn has managed to fix our hoover.

After spending quite some time in the new flat it has somewhat grown on me, I feel quite positive & happy about the move & I think my room might be about the same size as my current one, which means I should be able to fit all my stuff in it unless I randomly buy more things in the next few days (not planning to do that).

Other than dealing with move/flat related issues, not that much has happened. I've been to the movies twice in the past 7 days. I've traveled all the way to Wood Green to watch Inception with Stu, Benjy & some others last week Wednesday. Unlike the others, I wasn't too impressed. Not sure about everybody else's dreams, but mine are a lot more surreal, exciting & weird than the ones they were dealing with in the film. I was expecting more mind-bending landscape action & some weirdness. It was rather bland & boring instead.

And I went to see Toystory 3 (in 3D) with John last night. It was good, I'm not (& have never been) a huge fan of the Toystory franchise, but the story was gripping & it was well executed.

This week so far is looking rather uneventful. I'll have to start sorting out stuff for the move soon, I'm planning a trip to the Hayward on Sunday for the Ernesto Neto exhibition. Might hit the park or the shops (depending on weather) on Saturday. I'm really quite happy not going out for a month or so, September will be busy on the party front again & after all what my body went through in the past month I think I deserve a bit of rest.

Oh, on that matter, my arm's healed now & is 99% functional again. My tooth now has a temporary crown, which will be replaced with a full gold one next week. I had some sleep issues lately which seem to have been sorted out by taking some 5 HTP before going to bed. Now all I need is to get my weight back to a pre-London figure.