Highly Strung

Having made the dramatic change from blonde to dark hair I was shocked when on Monday no one in the office commented at all. Staring intently into the mirror last night I pondered on whether it was because no one liked it, or perhaps simply because it was in a pony tail.

This morning I dressed with care, black pencil skirt, black scoop neck top with three quarter sleeves and long lace up docs. After carefully straightening my now dark brown hair, applying contrasting eye makeup and adding a bright red wool scarf I left the house determined to make an impact on the collective conciousness of my colleagues.

Twenty minutes in and my two bosses had still not commented, despite me having a direct conversaiton with both. Feeling slightly invisible I slunk back to my desk. Five minutes later, unable to keep quiet any longer I abruptly stood up and said to them both; “is it that you haven’t noticed my hair colour has dramatically changed or do you just think it looks a bit shit?”. One of them, looking taken aback, said he was sorry but he didn’t tend to notice these things (which I asured him was fine), and the other said he had noticed but hadn’t had a chance to say anything.

Thereafter as I walked the length of the office being terribly busy and dynamic a number of other people were moved to comment wihtout my prompting. This included the young lady (how old am I?) from reception who commented that my hair was, and I quote – amazing! She actually spoke at length about how much better it was than the blonde colour and how it brought out the colour of my eyes and enhanced my skin tone.

Ha! Not so invisible after all!

So here I am, 3 days from moving, am I at all stressed? Well, not so much that I would notice, but there are a couple of small signs. For example the fact that as soon as I had entered the bar a friend and I had chosen to drink in tonight, the people at the neighbouring table irritated me so much that a verbalisation of that irritation just came out before I could stop it. But it is true that they were talking very very loudly for a Monday night.

I’m ‘home’ now though, just me and my multitude of boxes. There’s a ready meal in the fridge, the electric blanket is on, the TV is fired up, am good for the night now. None of this means I’m any more comfortable in this area of town that I’m clearly not meant for…still, I’ll try anything once.

Today I received a letter from an online store I have never heard of it telling me I had been refused an account with them. Funnily enough I had not applied for an account with them.

When I called them they gave some details – for example the email address registered with the account, clearly some bodged together amalgamation of my name with a yahoo appendage. They also confirmed that the mobile number was not mine, sadly they were not able to give me the mobie number listed. The date of birth was 1966, quite a few years before my actual date of birth.

This worries me somewhat – identity fraud has always worried me. It’s the reason why I have a large plastic box full of paper bank, credit card and store card statements. I desparately need a shredder to cut down on the storage required for my overflowing paper mountain. Ideally i’d like to have a use for the resulting shredded paper – perhaps a hamster.

Going Cheap

Tonight I am popping up to my estate agent’s office to meet my new landlady. I have handily produced a list of questions for her and plan to actually remember to take it with me this time:

- is the address no __, ________ street, or __________ street. There appears to be some confusion on the part of the agent and my local council

- I’ve noticed the flat next to mine has a black rubbish sack in place of one of their window panes, will I be living next to a ‘bad element’?

- where are the bins located?

- is the flat wired for cable? (I doubt she’ll know the answer to this one, only geeks like me know the answers to those sort of questions).

I have taken the precaution of dressing like a grown up – skirt etc (although I do have ridiculous knee-high lace up docs on as well), in order to give the impression of being a sensible, responsible, reasonably well off adult.

In 12 days time I’m moving to trendy Crouch End. I’m uncharacteristically (how flipping long is that word?) late in packing, normally i’d have had it done a week ago. I have however managed to do the bulk of it today. It’s a very satisfying feeling, having said that – it’s also a very barren environment now. Lucky I’ve run away back up to the boyfs house.

It’s only 6 months since my last move so I reckon i’ve cracked it this time…I’ve even managed to remember to leave some condoms out, something I stupidly forgot last time. I vividly remember searching a couple of boxes fruitlessly in the middle of the night a couple of weeks before I moved.

Hi testing out Spin-my-Blog to see whether it makes sense of my ramblings & converts it into text for my blog.

Voice-to-Screen messaging – powered by SpinVox

Using a website to tool to input today’s food intake, including a projection of tonight’s intake (2 glasses of white wine were added)I produced the following pie charts.

This is today’s actual nutritional profile:

And this is my target nutritional profile:

The bloody bastards have removed the entire alcohol intake – what’s up with that? Is it a general view that self medicating is a bad thing?