Finally, something new...

Well, blogger ate my post (a few days ago...)

Sigh. And you wonder why I've been so quiet. This isn't the first time.

So giving up on doing the update again, I still have way too much work to do this twice, I have a new phone number due to the last phone being pick-pocketed from me on Saturday. If you want it and haven't had a mail from me already email me on my first name dot my surname at gmail dot com.

I can't access excite really anymore, so I can't really access any email addresses I have there either. Sadly. Bloody spammers.

Merry Christmas

Well, I thought in the spirit of it all I'd wish all my friends, family and anyone else who happens to read this a very merry Christmas, whatever your faith or denomination may be. I wish all of you a time of joy, love and fellowship.

That aside, I'm suffering the Cape Town heat and trying to decided whether the torrential rain in Johannesburg would make a nice alternative? As an ex-Capetonian I do have a high tolerance for pissing rain, and in fact, I actually rather enjoy it much of the time, provided it doesn't last toooo long (a week) and isn't tooo cold (below 19 degrees C) and preferably when it's over a holiday so I can appreciate it from my bed.

None-the-less the days have been lovely here and I can't wait till the three day family rigmarole is over so I can actually show my boyfriend something of the place!

Despite this, he has been well amused by the vehicle's driven by the younger more testosterone filled members of the Cape Flats population. Whooo wee. It's bad.

Out, out damn spot!

Whoa! Not cool!

I just go stuck three times with a needle in a hunt for veins.

This is partially my own fault. I'm due to donate blood and I didn't want the nice lady Doctor to use the convenient vein I donate from since this will prevent me from donating for an indeterminate period. So after the one I used to use gave no joy she tried the back of my right hand - the veins there being fairly thick and promenant. No joy there either.

(And blimey but does a needle in the hand hurt, both during insertion and afterward.)

Finally we gave up and used the easy one. And boy, did it gush!

I was a little tense after this, but mostly fine. I had enough cute snowmen and candy-cane plasters to make make me look like a chistmas tree and a cool story to make my office mates squirm.

However I was halfway out of Sandton (Daarling) when I noticed that the plaster was feeling a little cool and soggy. I put my hand to it and looked down at my studdenly damp hand to find my fingers squelched with blood.

A brief second of panic and I rummaged in my bag-of-many-things for a tissue. That seen-too I hit upon using my stretchy, beaded bracelets as a make-shift touniquette and I walked to the parking pay-machine feeling now somewhat shaken and a little embarrased.

It's become such a total taboo these days to bleed. Blood has always had a power over the imagination, but ever since HIV and AIDs has become the modern-day bogey man blood has become something to shy from like a poison serpent or a spray of acid.

While I know I'm clean - the re-proving of that being the mission of the day on command from my insurance brokers - the man in the, er, mall doesn't and I'm behoven to try my best not to get blood well, anywhere really.

That said the royal-we are all fine now... except the hand which pulls occasionally as I type. Gym's going to be so much fun!

Call of the dark-side!

I am gradually working toward completing my transformation from chronically uncertain and responsibility-lacking post-teen to moderately-slack pseudo-yuppie.

The step completed yesterday was to sign up for a gym contract with the joys of Discovery Vitality. Cheap contracts! Yay!

Seeing that within limits, I actually like exercise, I don't think going twice a month to keep the contract active will be too difficult. Plus Tony and his friend Brett started going to the gym twice a week and I'm going to join them on Mondays from now on. I'll probably aim to go on my own at other times, especially since I get equal access to 2 other Virgin Actives in the area. I like gymming in the morning, but I don't know that I can face the 5am wake up to do it... not yet at least, maybe if I get addicted...

Meanwhile I've been making friends with Liz, my new physio - since Lala is a little far away. She's been trying to sort out my groin muscles and ankle. Strangely it's the ankle that providing the greatest trouble. It's been 6 weeks since the grading and it's still very unhappy. Admittedly, I did manage to twist it twice after the grading, once very badly 4 days after, and then a mild twist more recently. They booby-trapped me as I was exiting the physio by washing the tiled ramp that comes up to the front door - and there's no second option of stairs...

Next things on the list are, of course, to move out to which purpose Tony and I are currently collecting usefulls. We bought some really nice, matching wine glasses and tumblers this weekend and a Morphy Richards microwave in brushed steel last weekend. This weekend we might invest in the matching apple-red kettle and toaster we saw while shopping for said microwave.

Then once all that is over, I need to start saving for a new car!

Over-worked and over-worked

Work has been hard of late. I'm not used to chasing deadlines on projects of this sort of magnitude, I'm used to a fair mix of projects ranging from the epic (like all the ones I do these days it seems) to the mini. This meant it felt like you accomplished something during a day by clearing your place of all the little things. Now there are no 'little things' and only a constant slog toward a short-term goal that by the time you're don all you can muster is vague relief before plunging headlong into the next thing. Of course, this being design, often the project you've completed rises up to demand attention once more and then you have to juggle that with all the new projects.

This way of working has been slowly wearing me down over the past few months since I can't keep up this pace unabated for so little reward. Most of what we do is free pitches, which 80% of the time means your work is discarded. Then if the client chooses it, they often proceed to pull it apart until it bears only passing resemblance of your original creation. There's no work-satisfaction payoff, plus I'm working harder and for longer hours than I ever have in my life as yet.

My sole consolation is that I as least have coworkers now, even if they are a bit of a mixed bag and my creative director can be moodier than a 15-year old girl, and the senior designer is a hypercondriac with deep-seated issues and ADD. Half the time the staff seem to add to the stress and tension rather than providing a vent for it. No-one here will take the blame for anything and it results in so much bitchiness with everyone trying to play the naming game. Us three in the design department mostly try to keep our heads down, but every-so-often we still need to defend our honor, especially against DTP who're ready to blame everything on us 'useless designers'.

The net result has meant not much time to blog really. So quicky: I've graded to orange in Jitsu, I'm going to physio a lot to recover from the injuries I got before and during the grading, I've passed all my PR assignments and I'm failing to study for the exam in January, I've started writing a LARP with Annick which promises to be lots of fun, Tony and I invested in a rather nice microwave on the weekend - our first homeware purchase, I'm aiming to start gym on Monday and as implied by the homeware purchase, Tony and I are still going strong, even if he manages to be a total bitch to half my friends. Sigh.

Sorry for you.

I had an update. I promise. It was a little whiny, so maybe you're better off without it, but seeing as I'm ill and under stress it's hard to be positive.

Unfortunately my decrepid, decaying, piece of shit mac died on me just as I was about to push "publish".

So maybe next week.

Right.

So I have this new job, and I'm working so hard that I have waaay less 'me' time during office hours than ever before, I get to work almost an hour earlier than I did at VI and rarely leave at our official finish time of 16h30, in fact I'm at the office now, gone 7pm, working on a hectic deadline, my computer is in the process of having some sort of hardware failure on me and despite all this I am so much happier than I was a the last place.

I'm sorry I haven't updated - I started last week, but my degenerative Mac crashed on me and ate it.

I'm off to dinner with Sed in a few minutes and thought I'd type this up quick while I avoid doing the next step in the group structure I'm building.

Hopefully I'll be more eloquent and informative soon, but don't hold your breath - I'm having to much fun having actualy people to talk to again.