I’ve got Thursday and Friday off. I’m totally knackered from having a busy week last week. The beginning of this week has been quite tiring too. So, I booked some time off. I thought it would be easy, but my boss made a bit of a deal about it for a minute or two. Finally he said he’d think about it.

Thursday I’ll be going out in town dressed as a pirate… Yeah. I mean _yarr_! Vicki’s leaving party thing is fancy dress. Or at least that’s what she told me. I better not be the only one who turns up like that.

Friday will be a day of recovery, as will Saturday, and Sunday. Vicki’s leaving for her Ryanair training at the weekend, so I probably won’t see her very much, if at all, for quite a while. 🙁 I’m going to be 100% *_bored_*!

I’m sitting at the computer I use in the office because I’m so fricking bored, I needed to do something that involved a bit of thinking for a while. So I’m writing this.

I was out last night with Vicki and Dave. We were going to do The Cockle quiz, but it was really busy, so we decided to go to The King and Miller instead. We all got food there, which was very nice. Then we did the quiz, which was appalling. We got 18 out of about a million.

After that Vicki dropped Dave off at Eli’s house, then I collected a few things from my house and went to stop at hers for the night.

I have no clue what time I got to sleep, but I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say we’re both completely fricking knackered today. Vicki decided she should take the day off, but I have my final 11 hour shift to do today because Adam’s back in town. It’s a good job because I’m so bored of being here for that many hours a day! 🙁

Right, that woke me up a little bit. Just another 3 and a half hours to go!

It’s now British Summer Time! 😀 The clocks have been put forwards an hour, so catch up.

It should actually be light when I leave work at 19:30 on Monday… Even if it is still a bit dull when I wake up at 07:30 that morning. :'(

I’m in the middle of watching the second episode of the second season of “Life On Mars”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478942/ and I’ve had something in the back of my mind since a few minutes in.

The chief-type-guy is named Supt. Harry Woolf. One of the main crooks in this story is named Arnold Malone, but they usually refer to him as Malone. I couldn’t quite get why they were linked in my mind for a few minutes, but then it occurred to me. I was thinking of the name Piggy Malone for some reason. After “a quick Google search”:http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=piggy%20malone it turns out that’s a Two Ronnies character name. And the rest of the link? Woolf… Piggy…

I wonder if that’s some sort of reference thrown in for the attentive, or just a big coincidence.

The “tv.com cast list for the episode”:http://www.tv.com/life-on-mars/episode-2/episode/977566/cast.html lists Arnold Malone as the actor rather than the character. I have to use the site more to reach level 2 before I’m allowed to “contribute” and fix their brokenness. Oh well.

Last week was a pretty long week compared to most. I’m glad it’s over.

I managed to get myself out of the last two hours on Friday too. It was supposed to be some training thing that got cancelled a few weeks ago thanks to a power cut. I said I had to be at home waiting for a plumber because my mum had cut open a radiator pipe. Only the part about the plumber was a lie though, so it’s half-alright! 😉

Instead of coming home I went to Vicki’s house for a couple of hours before her shift started. We got a stuffed crust pizza on the way there, too. It was very very nice. I was pretty knackered because of the late night/early morning before, so when I got back here I wanted to just mong out for a couple of hours while poor Vicki had to work. Instead I discovered that the thing my mum had cut into the radiator pipe with had a leak in it, so there was a lovely coating of green paint dust over everything. My bedroom door had been left open, so everything was coated. 🙁 I spent a couple of hours cleaning it all, then changed the sheets, then had a shower. _Then_ I got my chance to mong out a bit! 🙂

I was actually nodding off when Vicki called me after her shift, but I got back up again ready for her to come over to stay the night. She was absolutely knackered, and so was I, so we listened to a bit of music and then went to sleep.

Vicki got up this morning and had to go get ready for work. Pretty much all I’ve done is install Ubuntu 7.04 over Gentoo. My Gentoo installation had been broken for a pretty long time thanks to some dbus stupidity. I’m so glad to have a mostly-working Linux installation! 😀

As usual I completely forgot to backup my completely awesome xorg.conf so I only have one working monitor until I get the time to make a hundred thousand configuration changes and test them all the time. :\

VLC and xine both cause the whole thing to lock up, yet mplayer doesn’t. My keyboard is set to a US layout even though I selected UK for the setup. My media shortcut keys don’t work yet. The second two shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to sort out, but that first one is something I don’t think I can be bothered to tackle right now. I’m hoping it’s something as simple as setting the equivalent of the -vo option in mplayer. Fingers crossed. 😀

I’m pretty sure I heard about the Dark Tower comic over a year ago. I’ve been eagerly awaiting it ever since. When I say eagerly I don’t think you’re likely to be able to understand _how_ excited I mean.

Well, when I got home yesterday I had a box on my bed that had been shipped from America for me. I opened it up to find the first two issues of the series. 😀 I read the first one straight away, and it’s awesome! 😀 There’s so much stuff that I remember from reading the books and stuff… It’s just brilliant. I’m pretty sure I’d love anything at all to do with the Dark Tower though. Perhaps an MMORPG, a series of movies, anything!

I’m going to be reading the second one when I get home tonight, then I’ll sit and wait for about 2 months for the next two issues to arrive. :'(

I went out in town last night with Vicki, Lucy, Sam, Terri, and April. Emma made an appearance too. I was drinking until pretty early in the morning, even though town was totally dead. I felt pretty rough this morning. To my absolute joy I discovered that the water was off in my house when I got back there from Vicki’s at 7:30 this morning. So I couldn’t even have a shower. I’m getting by on deodorant so far. The water should be back on when I get home and I’ll be straight in the shower. I don’t want my grubby hands touching the comics after all!

Had a pretty busy week this week. Two 11 hour shifts to kick it off, and two half days working by myself (including today). Tomorrow should be pretty easy though, and then it’s the weekend again! 😀

Vicki came over last night and I played a DVD on my new DVD player for the first time. It was “Shaun Of The Dead”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365748/. A _very_ good film! I’d seen it before, of course, so I’m not bothered that it didn’t get my full attention. 😉

Tonight it seems like I’ll be going out in town. I’ll probably be pretty damn tired tomorrow morning then, but that’s ok. I’m young, I’ll live. Now’s the time for having fun. I can rest when I’m dead.

This is to stop Vicki from pestering me for a mention on my blog all day.

Hello Vicki!

I sorted out some of my finances today. I’ve decided that I can’t keep just spending to my means and expect good things to happen. So, I’ve set up a savings account online. I won’t have access to it at the branch, or at a cash machine. If I want money from it then I have to transfer it on the computer to my other Natwest account. Starting this month I’ll be putting £200 a month into the account automatically from my current account. It’ll go in a few days after I get paid each month, so that should never be a problem.

Having that money spoken for will make it easier to save. I’ll just count it as gone until I need a lump sum for something. I really want to start sorting out my money situation, then I can do something about moving out, getting a car, etc.

Today is the start of all that. 😀

Oh yeah, and to undo all my efforts I got a credit card. It should arrive in a couple of days.

Adam’s on Holiday (the lucky bastard), Sue’s got the flu (heh, that rhymes), and that leaves Rob and me.

Rob has spent literally half of the day today chasing after students that he argued with over the last couple of days. He’s sent 3 or 4 emails to tutors, spoken to one on the phone, and had a chat with another in the corridor. It’s ok that he wants to keep things quiet and stuff like that, but he takes it very personally. Where a simple “can you just keep it down please lads,” would have a positive result Rob will go up to them and say “excuse me” non-stop in his quiet voice until they turn around. Then he’ll point them to a sign, or the log-in agreement or something like that. He can’t just let it drop with a brief warning.

I wouldn’t mind if he could just send off a quick email to a tutor about it even, but they’re taking up more time than anything else in his day at the moment.

Oh well.

Peace and quiet in a couple of hours, at least.