Cookies

A while ago (about a month or so) I finally got round to making the biscuits from Factobrunt's recipe. Here they are, I've only just got round to posting them. They were really nice! Look at that huge piece of chocolate on that second one.

Socks

Why is it that when you're looking for your socks, you can always find individual ones that don't match, but never a pair? You would think at least two of them would match. This morning I had trouble finding two halves of a pair of socks, it was like the Crystal Maze, but with socks.

Like this:


Maybe I should just try organising my socks.

I bought 3 pairs of socks today. Somehow I managed to choose three socks that were all Neopolitan ice cream coloured. I do this a lot, I like things that remind me of food but the problem is I end up with things that look the same because they remind me of certain things I like to eat. In the Autumn I saw a yellowy-white coloured step by someone's house with orange leaves spread on the top. It looked exactly like vanilla ice cream with cornflakes, I wish I had taken a photo of it.

Anyway, I chose some slightly different socks in the end, I wanted a change. So it's really been a sock-themed day.

I've got time off, you've probably noticed.

Crunch

Every time they say 'credit crunch' on the TV, I see this.

Um...

Well it's been a while since I posted and a lot has happened, more weirdness at work but it seems to be evening out now *I hope*.

Good news: I started driving lessons and they are going well! I decided I was fed up with the way everything was going for me at the moment, which was nowhere. But what do you do when you feel like you need to change things but you don't actually know in particular what you want to do? I don't know, but anyway I decided I needed to learn to drive so there's a start.

I'll find something more interesting to post before long, after my brief hiatus (haha I've always wanted to use that word in a sentence, but I don't think I could get away with actually using it out loud). Anyway...

2008

Happy New Year everyone! I really hope what Jonathan Cainer said on Jools Holland's Hootenanny was right and that it will be a 'stonking' year.

Well I can't be the only one who is sat here thinking this, but I really need a new job. I wonder if anyone else is stuck in the same situation that I am. I have no idea where start looking for a new one. I think I even want to change careers, though my job is hardly a 'career' anyway and it has got less and less like the job I was employed to do as time progresses, so maybe it's just put me off. The other problem is, even if I want to stay in the same field, there are so few opportunities around. I don't even know what I am in terms of job title and so on, because I know bits and pieces of different things and nothing in particular.

It's not like being something straight forward like a receptionist of a plumber or something, so that makes it all the more difficult to find a job or even a company to send a speculative letter to. I keep looking up companies on the internet and in the Yellow Pages and then discovering the category they come under really doesn't describe them or what they do at all. I can pick out two separate companies under the same heading and they will be completely different. I suppose everything is going this way now, very ambiguous and not really anything in particular and confusing because noone has a clue what anything is supposed to be. It sums up how I feel about my current job too, and the company I work at as well. I keep getting the feeling that my job is like a metaphor for the state of the country, confusing, badly organised, directionless, ambiguous, uninspired and full of bitter people.

I was thinking on going to another country for a year or six months on some sort of working holiday thing, just to see what it's like in other places. I think I hate this country now. The only thing is, if it turned out that everywhere else is just the same or worse, I don't know what I'll do then.

Well I suppose sometimes when things feel really bad they have to start to get better eventually so maybe something will come up, but I just feel so trapped at the moment.

Talking of Jools Holland, I liked Seasick Steve's country blues music on that programme so I've ordered one of his CDs. The only thing is that I ordered it with another CD which is out of stock so it will take something like three weeks until it's dispatched. That could be a good thing though, it will probably turn up when I've forgotten that I ordered it so it will be a nice surprise.

Craze

I know the Sudoku thing started ages ago but it's only just reached me. Well not me exactly because it does drive me slightly mad, but my family. A couple of weeks ago my dad and mum had the daily Sudoku puzzle on Teletext all the time. I thought this was just a one off thing but then it spread to my sister. All last week I kept coming home from work and there it was, the Teletext Sudoku page. Handily and yet annoyingly at the same time, there's a little screen in the corner showing the TV picture so you can see what's on telly at the same time, except the sound was muted.

It's amazing how difficult it is to understand TV programmes without the sound on. All I got from that programme was that there was a man and I think he owned a sheep, the rest was a mystery. I tried to make up my own words but without some sort of backstory you just don't know whether you're going off track or not.

Last Monday it came to a head while I was on the train reading a newspaper over a man's shoulder as I always do. Just as I was straining to read an interesting article he turned to the puzzle page where he sort of folded the paper in half so he could have a good look at the Sudoku.

To my horror though, it got worse. When I got home I heard loud bleeping coming from the living room and found my dad playing on some sort of hand held electronic game thing... it was electronic Sudoku.

Arrghh!

Maybe I ought to stop fighting it and take it up myself, I don't know.

Merry Christmas!

Guitar

Yesterday I took my guitar to the guitar shop to get it repaired. I've been having trouble with it for ages, it just would not tune properly. I've been looking on the internet for weeks trying to find out as much as I can about guitar intonation in order to try and fix it. In the end, after holding a ruler against it, I discovered the neck is slightly warped. I finally decided it was about time I took it to a shop and get someone who knew what they were doing to take a look at it.

The shop I took it to is great, its like a whole different world. They have lots of guitars and mandolins and banjos in the window, they even had a ukelele in the shape of a Gibson flying-v! Its a very small and old-fashioned looking place and there is not a lot of room to move when you get inside, there were about 3 people in there and it was already completely crowded. I got directed towards the back room, past a man playing some bluegrass on a banjo, to see a man with the hugest biceps I have ever seen, he must have been a body builder because they were almost the size of footballs. I'm not exaggerating, they really were.
Anyway, He took a look and said that the neck was twisted, and he got a ruler and showed me that on each individual string the distance between the nut and the 12th string should be the same as the distance between the 12th string and the bridge, I think he said something about checking it on the 1st and the 4th string and getting those right first, and then you can work on the others.

The other thing he mentioned was that the action was too high. He said that it made a change because normally he gets these big blokes coming in with guitars that have a really low action complaining that they have difficulty fretting the strings, and he usually says if they can't play them that low, they may as well just give up altogether! Here I was with this extremely high action and not even realising it was a problem. I mean I've been playing it like that since I got it, it never even occured to me that it might be awkward! And my fingers are small.

He pointed to a picture on the wall of his grandfather and said he would approve, apparently he was very strict and would have just said play it as it is. It was a really old black and white photo of a smartly dressed man holding a banjo. The repairman told me he made banjos and played in bands.

When I get my guitar back, he said, it will be like a different guitar. Well that's good, it sounds like it will be a lot easier to play.