I'm gonna get you little fishy...

Up until yesterday, it didn't really feel like I had a holiday coming up, it didn't feel real but it definitely is now. I hope to have some last-minute dive kit arriving, I've got my travel insurance, have had the pre-holiday de-hairing, have looked up bus and train times to get me to the airport and have just been given the office dive computer to christen. It's so new and shiny and hasn't been in the water yet and that more than anything else has made me think YAY! I'M GOING ON HOLIDAY TOMORROW!!!

braver than me

What's your first reaction when you see this image? I had several competing for first place:
1- Halloween candy in March? (it's the font and colour of it)
2- scary!
3- yick!
But some people are made of stauncher stuff than I am. Marie reviewed this candy with such dedication that I had to laugh. I wouldn't have gone near it with a 10ft barge pole.

biting the bullet

So after a week or more of sporadic 'aches'* in my ears and with my dive trip looming (I LEAVE ON THURSDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) I finally decided to cowboy up and go to the doctor. I decided that I would ask for ear drops, as a preventative if nothing else and that at least would calm my paranoid internal mutterings. So I get there and the lady at the desk is friendly and the doctor when he calls me in sounds friendly and doesn't look at old and doddery as I'd built him up to be in my memory (I saw him for the one and only time before this just over a year ago) so, thinking I'd blown this whoel thing out of proportion, I sat down and explained the situation. He looked in my ear, said it looked clean, any aches were probably from internal pressure and I should take sudofed to get rid of that and drops were a last resort (the unspoken part was that he wouldn't prescribe them until it got worse). I double checked that any achey stuff would only be from congestion, he said yes, apparently my ear looks good and sent me on my way. No weighing or general questions about my health, no blood pressure, nada. I guess I'm just used to the personal touch of my doctor who has treated me for the past 10 years or more and doesn't have a gazillion patients. So I bought sudofed on the way to work, have popped a pill and it better bloody well work. (I have a moderate degree of faith.)

olé¡

A couple of weekends ago I accompanied a friend to an 'm' party. I went as a Mexican (having all the paraphernalia left over from Kerry's and my Mexican party all that time ago). I've put this picture up because, artistically, I'm fascinated by how much more flattering B&W can be (especially when you boost up the contrast) than colour... I mean seriously, dude, I look so much better in B&W.

alternative humour

I can't remember where exactly I found this image (it was somewhere on my stumbles) but I had to put it in because it makes me laugh. Cute and funny but somehow a little bit sad as well.

*I say 'aches' because I'm in a near hypochondriacal (it may not be a real word but it should be) state so any twitch of anything in my ear becomes an 'ache'.

grumble grumble

Stupid blogger is playing up and won't let me upload pics, without which there is no point in me blogging. Boo hiss I say, booooooooo.

font nazi time

One of the guys at work forwarded me this email the other morning and as soon as I opened the email I started laughing and this is why:



Well you won't be working for any magazine of mine buddy, I can tell you that. What kind of a designer sends an email around asking for work that is formatted in comic sans?! It means one of two things:
1) comic sans is the default font he has set his email to
2) he made an effort and chose to format his text with that font
And in fact option 1 means he made the conscious choice to set satan's font as the default which is an UNFORGIVABLE offense.

no imagination*

My flatmate was very excited the other day because he got Vista for his computer. When I asked him, not very delicately, why the f*ck he had gone and done a thing like that, he said because it was better than XP. I said, "Really?" We all agree his computer is shit. It's slow, it's temperamental, it's a PC. But I am the first person to point out that it's probably not the poor little computer's fault but rather the stupid operating system it has to run. What computer stands a chance?

So Sean had disappeared off to his room to geek it up with his new satanic operating system and I was telling Sarah that it was meant to be 4˚C the next day so we'd need to bundle up and she said, "Oh we know already. Sean has a new toy on his computer which tells him the weather." At this point I lost it, "It's called a widget and they nicked it from Apple because they have no f*cking original ideas of their own!" That sentence reads fairly calmly** but my voice was raised and my arms were waving in the air. One might almost have described me as irate...

*this should be making people think of The Italian Job, the American remake.
**and may in fact have contained quite a few more liberal smatterings of the 'f' word, I get a bit worked up when it comes to the lack of imagination of the staff of Microsoft

sorting it out...

Yesterday I realised that in just over 2 weeks I will be in Dahab on my yoga diving course. This means I will be diving which means I will be underwater which means that I will need my sinuses to be fully functioning and not in their current snot-clogged state. This meant sitting down with myself and giving my body a little talking-to. I explained that it may have been sulking over the past couple of weeks (although God only knows why, I've been very nice to it- I feed it regularly and take it for walks and everything...) and whereas the whole feeling of stuff shifting around in my head when I wake up in the mornings and filling up my sinuses to the stage where I can't breathe and eat at the same time may have been all very haha funny in the beginning, the joke is now over. I'm giving my body one week (and that's pretty indulgent as it is) to shape up and I want to feel those sinuses whistle clean and ready to smoothly equalise by the time I hit the water. I have fish to see and places to swim.

Not to appear totally insensitive, I have promised loads of vitamin C enriched yummy fruity drinks and even some non-perscription medication but if it doesn't shape up, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take it to the doctor and as I explained to myself, neither of us want to do that. He'll probably prescribe 4 different drugs that we don't really need and tempt us with the hope of taking our blood pressure only to let us down. Oh yeah, and that sore throat that's been sleeping on the couch for the past fortnight? He has to go too.