Time is such a weird thing. It feels like only yesterday I blogged. There must be some kind of bizarre difference between real time and Internet time In fact, I know there is..

I’m moving house again on Sunday – one of my friends from work is helping me. Although it’s been an interesting experience – being asked to look after a tarantula called Lilly, having Sky movies, never really knowing what’s going to happen or who is going to be around – it’ll be nice to have at least a little space I can lock and call my own.

It’s been freezing recently, and on Tuesday I managed to snap my front door key in half whilst trying to open the door; how I managed to break a small piece of metal in half I’m not too sure, but the landlord gave me another key today. I had the idea that I’d start packing my stuff up tonight but I got distracted by the Internet (whilst waiting for the water to heat up to have a shower). I’m definitely going to have to tidy up at the very least though, becaue the landlord’s showing someone round my room tomorrow. Last time he showed someone it wasn’t particularly tidy – but then he didn’t give me any notice. And I’m about 90% sure the fact that the woman rejected it because there are no locks on the bedroom doors!! Sigh. Oh well, not my problem for much longer.

So at work, apparently they can track what websites people visit, what they are doing on the computers etc., which I’m completely new to, having had previous jobs with a tiny company and a company where only a few computers even had the Internet (on purpose). Yeah, I got my wrist slapped for using the Internet not on my lunch break. Doesn’t matter that not only am I completing all my work early, doing a big percentage of the rest of the team’s work AND have done urgent tasks for a completely different department of course. Or that I’ve been thanked maybe twice for any of it. There are good days and bad days like any job I guess. And people are a bit short tempered at different times. I do like all the food that we have bought for us though, but I’m eating too much! Slimmed down enough to fit into my favourite black jeans, but only because I’m walking so much. I get paid tomorrow though and can have a big shop of healthy food at the weekend.

Tomorrow is Ellie’s Halloween party (I’m planning to go as a devil), Saturday I’m intending to spend in town and food shopping, then Sunday I’m moving. Yay! Busy busy. Not going to be as good as last weekend though…London was amazing. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good time – almost every second was perfect.

4* London hotel, tickets to see The Lion King at the West End, shopping, Italian-style ice cream, meal in a posh restaurant – what more does a girl need?

The project I’m working on for my mum is ever closer to completion, which is fantastic. It’s difficult being motivated enough to work on it every night - I have to sit downstairs on an uncomfortable chair because I much prefer using a mouse rather than a touchpad for graphics work, and I have no desk in my room to rest my laptop on. It’ll be worth it in the end though.

The next big thing I’m looking forward to after going home is my birthday weekend, because Joe finishes uni for Christmas, and maybe my family will come to see me on my actual birthday. I hope so. Perhaps I can arrange something at lunch time at work otherwise. Then Christmas – I still haven’t heard about whether I’ve got the days off I wanted, but if I have I’ll be off from the 19th December. Can’t wait!

Actual proper updates are on hold for the moment as I’m working on a new project (which will be revealed to the person it’s for on the 8th), and after that I’ll be updating here. I’m quite excited about this project because it’s given me a chance to develop my work stuff alongside my web design stuff…also involves business type things which I’ve always been interested in but never really developed. Guess I get that interest from my dad. We’ll see what happens, I just hope it’s successful *fingers crossed*

The longer I’m living here the more I enjoy it. The people are so nice and there’s a warm community atmosphere. Even random people in the street will wave and say hi. People at work have bought me drinks, paid for a taxi, driven me to Cheltenham, given me a lift back to my house, and bought a hell of a lot of chocolate and biscuits to eat in the office. I try to give back what I can, and two of my bosses loved the shortbread I made the other day, so yay

I’m being trained/introduced to search engine optimisation at the moment, and picking up all the little tricks of the trade. The company is introducing news articles on their web sites, and I’m going to be responsible for implementing them manually (and perhaps even writing a few – you never know) at first. Recently I’ve been writing for the catalogue – didn’t really expect my first published work to be in a clearance catalogue…but hey, you gotta start somewhere! Today we had a two and a half hour meeting which was actually pretty interesting, and I learned a lot more about what’s doing well, who we sell to etc. business-wise.

I picked up Angela Carter’s Wise Children again yesterday, having not read it since college (and reading it so much then for my exam that I really didn’t want to pick it up again for a good few years – as it is I can still read half a sentence and remember the rest of it from in my head). One sentence particularly struck me though, about people leaving and making gaps and others filling them just as quickly. It’s so true – I think back to some of the people no longer in my life and just think ‘But where would they even fit now?’. Which sounds terrible, and if there’s someone I’ve not spoken to or seen for ages, it’s always lovely to hear from them again. But underneath, it means no regrets. That people who’ve chosen to fully leave my life and I’ve chosen to let go I have no regrets about. I’m so happy right now, I love my job, I love the people, I love my friends from school and college now uni that I’m not going to see tons of. But the people who were bad for me, that consistently tried to bring me down to make themselves feel better, who were too busy pointing out all my mistakes to notice that they were doing the same things or worse things, are gone. And that’s great. It’s almost almost perfect.

This weekend I’m going to London and I’m so excited!! I can’t wait to see The Lion King in a West End theatre So happy to have a weekend off – after my working day is done and I’ve walked 4 miles, I get home and work on my laptop on online stuff, so it’ll be nice to kick back and relax.

Wow so…where to start?! First of all, yes, this is a new theme! Although…I can only take credit for the top banner, at least it’s a step in the right direction, no? The quote is from Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Spelling’, and the image consists of two photos I took today and then played with in good old Paint Shop Pro.

Recently I’ve really been missing web design, especially with my new job where I have shiny Photoshop and FTP installed on my computer, dying to be used. Also, I’m working next to people who spend all day designing homepages and taking and editing photos – with all that creativity flowing, it’s easy to feel inspired and wanting to get back to my own stuff. But the most important element is time. Since moving here, I’ve made friends at work and at Games Workshop in town (like the geek I am), but of an evening there’s not a whole lot to do. Rather than going out any night of the week student style, every one works full time and will usually go out on a Friday night. Most of my new friends are – despite being late twenties/early thirties – married, living with their partner, and a couple have kids or kids on the way. Suddenly I’ve jumped into this whole world that theoretically could be what my life is like for the next 40 years, and that’s kind of scary.

Back to my original point…I have a lot of free evenings. Keeping in touch with people through MSN and phone (and Facebook) is great, and what I’ve been doing. The rest of my free time involves watching TV, DVDs, reading, playing Catan, browsing websites, and painting. But now I have free time like I did in college, it’s definitely time to get back on track, especially as how my web design got me a lot of interviews in the first place.

The best thing about having a full time job is definitely coming home at the end of the day and not thinking about work until the next working day. Leaving work at work, and not feeling guilty about not having finished an essay, or going on a journey without taking some work, or keeping up with reading, is a big psychological thing for me. I don’t feel anxious. I feel free.

Oh, I also upgraded Wordpress – I was running 2.1, and the latest version is 2.6 so yeah – I got a bit behind! I had a suspicious feeling something was going to go wrong even though it’s the easiest thing ever, and it did. It looked fine in IE, but was just a blank page in Firefox. I realised that FTP hadn’t properly uploaded the files and so reuploaded everything. Still nothing. I was slightly panicked (and feeling stupid) by then, so I had a quick google around and found someone had tried just switching to the default theme in the admin panel and then switching back again. Which weirdly enough, worked like a charm. But by this time I was completely shattered, because it was about 2 am and something I’d anticipated taking 10 minutes or so had taken about 3 hours. Crazy! (I was playing Catan at the same time though). The theme still needs a bit of tweaking, and my original plan to start proper updates this weekend kind of went out of the window, but at least this is all sorted and working now (hopefully).

I’m moving house again, even though I’ve only lived here three weeks, because someone’s been going in my room. They backed up all my files onto CD and also broke my laptop screen (there’s no lock on my door but I’m faithfully logging  out now)…which has cost my £150 to get fixed. It’s with my parents now because my dad’s friend fixed in, and I’m collecting it at some point next month when I go back. For now I’m using my trusty old laptop that I got in my first year of uni. I cleared it out a while back but it’s still fairly slow. From the third floor the wireless connection isn’t great either, but sitting in the lounge right next to it seems to be fine.

I’m also moving because the house is too far away from work. I’m walking about four miles a day just to work and back, although I got used to it surprisingly quickly. It’s like there’s a little puppy inside me on weekends when I’m not walking that far saying ‘Walkies please!’ (yeah…I’m so weird), hence why I decided to go into town yesterday and go for a couple of hours’ walk today. It’s getting darker earlier though, and leaving the house around 8:15 and getting back around half 6 five days a week is getting pretty tiring. Also travelling to Nottingha and Manchester for occasional weekends is getting pretty tiring too. Next weekend Joe is coming to visit, and we’re going to London which is less than an hour on the train – definitely beating the 4-5 hours on trains to get to Notts or Manc. I’m pretty excited about that, even though I can’t really afford it at the moment, since because of the way the months fall, I’ve been paid for exactly 1 week at work, and I’ve had to pay 2 months’ rent and deposit for 2 different places lol. I should be moving at the beginning of Noveber, which is great. The new house, whilst it isn’t as beautiful as this one on the inside, is still pretty damn nice. The street has amazing views across town, the area is pretty countrified, there’s buses nearby to town, and it’s only a 20 min walk from work. Best of all, just around the corner there’s a pub, supermarket, hairdressers and takeaways, which is fantastic. Where I live now there’s a chippy, hairdressers, and a Tesco which is great, I’m getting so reliant on having a shop open late nearby lol. So really the only disadvantage is that the massive 24-hour-except-Sunday Asda (and its friends Borders, Next, Boots, a library, gym) is now quite a bit further away. And definitely not on my way home. But it’s definitely worth it, especially as the rent is super cheap – £5/month more than I’m paying here, and it’s an ensuite room. Also I’m hoping for discounts as one of my new housemates apparently works at Borders

According to Wordpress this entry is now over 1,000 words, and I’ve said all I’ve got to say for now, so I’ll leave it here. I’ve written out lots of brand new stuff for the site and I have lots of plans and projects to put in place after I’ve sorted, moved, deleted, added and upgraded stuff, so I’m pretty excited about it all! And for the first time in ages, I’m returning comments. So go ahead and spam me!