Saturday 12th May

Dear me, I've logged onto this thing, and I'm thinking whatever am I going to write about... truth is, right now, life is taken up with moving from one place to the other - get up, go to work, come back from work, go to work. I'm so out of the habit of work, and still struggling to get back to full health. I get home so tired that it's about as much as I can do to log on to Ebay and wrap up what's sold that day!!!! I have made one or two pieces - I have to, have to stock the shop somehow!
But I am sort of sticking to my plan for the summer months, I'm re-listing whatever doesn't sell as inventory, and trying to organise it so that at least one item ends its auction per day. That drives traffic in to the shop - people look at whatever's at the top of the list. I wouldn't exactly say that they're flooding through my virtual doors, but it's ticking over.
The most important thing is to build up a stock for autumn and Christmas. I did well last year, better than I'd expected, and as a consequence I want to prepare for this year. I want lots of things to be popping on sale at the right time. And in order to do that, I have to make the time to make these things - which means less to put on sale now. But that's not so bad - I'm getting savy to this. I need to load things at the end and start of the month, when people have money to spend on such things. Just like me, buying my supplies!

Anyhow, I trot off to work in the mornings, back on the old 57 bus. I've been somewhat devastated to find that my usual 10 journey ticket is being withdrawn from use. It's going to disappear at the end of June, I think it was, which means I now have to make alternate arrangements to buy my travel tickets. They - the Abus company, are moving to a flat rate of a pound a journey, which is still the cheapest, but if I can't buy it in advance, well - ridiculous. So I've been investigating the dreaded Farce bus season tickets. They are shockingly expensive. £700 for a twelve month ticket!!!! Seven Hundred Pounds! That's roughly, what, £58.30 a month. But what's my alternative? Farce to, do a ten journey ticket. I normally pay £7.50 for my Abus 10 journeys, with Farce I'd have to pay more than double that. If I buy a weekly season ticket, it's fit for five days and then it stops working apparently. I don't work a five day week, I work a 24 hour, 7 day a week rota - I could buy one of these things, and use it for say four days, and then I've got three days off, before starting the next rotation of however many days on that chunk. If I bought one of these tickets, it would run out on me and I'd only have four days use out of it. Since the cost of this is in the mid-twenties, I absolutely refuse to pay for bus journeys I'm not going to use. On the other hand, apparently they do do a 26 week season ticket, along with the 12 month one, so I shall have to look in to the cost of this. But to make matters worse, I can't go to the travel shop and set up a direct debit to get one of these things, I have to arrange for it to go through my employer. My employer doesn't do anything like this, I've asked our wages staff before. I have to get the information, I have to talk to the wages office, and in all probability my manager too, and they will have to go to all the trouble to arrange for the money to be deducted from my wages. What's wrong with a standing order I hear you ask and my answer to this is I honestly don't know. The only thing I can tell you is that Farce Bus are well known for their rip off policies when it comes to their wretched tickets. This is the result, the absolute result, of the Conservatives and their nasty little policies on selling off everything of any value in this country. It was allegedly going to bring competition into the fields of local transport etc - in actual fact it seems to have resulted in the iron grasp of a local monopoly. And if you put that to a Conservative, they just shrug and say well that's not our responsibility. And have the Labour Party done anything to rectify this? Have they heck. Blair's been too busy off bombing Iraq at the behest of Bush.

Now what was I saying about not having anything to write about? I have to stop here, before I blow a gasket with sheer fury!!!