Late Sunday night... not the greatest time in the world to be feeling down. Got some bad news this morning about a job that I'd applied for, and for no reason had felt would just be right for me - and although I've no reason to be feeling like this, it feels like it's been snatched away from me like that plum cherry you've just been fancying and reaching out for, and suddenly it's just not there anymore. Yet I've got no more reason to feel like this about this particular job than any other of the multitude I've applied for and haven't got.
Thing is, I suppose, the longer this goes on for, the more unemployable I feel I'm becoming, which is not a good thing. I've organised myself to go to the job agencies tomorrow, see if I can pick up something temporary, but I'm not particularly hopeful. I tell myself sternly that this is simply how I feel, I don't actually have a sign around my neck saying 'unemployable', but when you get into a cycle like this, it's hard not to feel it's there, and dragging you down. And I know myself too, it's at times like this that I get to feel so desperate that I'll take anything, something that I really can't do, and it all goes pear shaped, I'll end up exhausted, earning a pittance, and in some crappy place where I don't want to be.

And then when you add all this to the trail of unpleasant events that have been happening recently, well it's just one long tale of disaster! In fact, it's almost funny what's been going on for the past few weeks - and I suppose that's my saving grace, that at the moment, I can still laugh about all this. Ah well, enough moaning and groaning. Life goes on eh?

Ah, the end of the World Cup. I shall miss it - until the premiership starts at any rate. Personally I'm going for Holland, much as I like Spain, I just think Holland's time has come. It's supposed to be summer here, but frankly over the past few days you'd have been hard put to tell it from mid-October - wind, rain.. not quite cold enough to demand heating, but you know that's merely weeks away.
I'm trying to think of something interesting to write about. I've been making up new bookmarks - the shop has been shut for quite a while now, but I was thinking I would open in up in later August, and do a sort of Autumn - Christmas stretch, and then see how it goes. Times have not been so good for your average on-line seller, and I'm hoping for a better Xmas than last year. Anyhow, I have had enough time recently to put a good few stints in with the pliers and cutters, so I shall have some new stock.
Went out to meet up with friends for coffee on Thursday afternoon - I've been to the library a few times over the past few days and I should drag myself over there again soon - plugging away at the old dissertation research.
All told, life plods on. I still have high hopes of a job that I applied for recently, although the waiting is interminable. Isn't that always the worst part of job apps?

Monday 28th June

Well I guess we all have to come down from this football style hangover that we seem to have been collectively indulging in. I think I'm so past it that I won't even go on about it - just roll on August and the start of the new season. Yay.. (whispers) Go Villa!!

This isn't going to be a long post because as this evening has been going by I've been feeling just that little tingle at the top of the head that whispers sweetly, migraine.. migraine.. take pills now.. and I haven't, and really must go and do so. With my last cup of tea (ginger) of the evening.
Anyhow tomorrow is library day, I'm hauling my sorry self up to the tenth floor - yes, the delights of the theology department, where I can drag out the actual physical copies of Acta Sanctorum - no I still can't download the damn thing - so looks like I'm in for the hard copy version. I shall copy and take it home to work on it with dictionaries and grammar books to hand (it's in Latin..) I can also start mining the no doubt inexhaustible depths of Analecta Bollandiana. We're also having a sort of meet up of History pgs, in the pub natch.
Went to the fliks last night with Aimee, we ended up seeing this Wild Targets thing. It wasn't bad... but mm.. I don't think I'd describe it as being good either. You know the sort of thing I mean, in my opinion it needed a lot more work on the script, the plot.. the cast was good though. Anything that has Rupert Everett & Bill Nighy in it can't be all bad - that was my operating theory going in to it. However Nighy is a bit too creepy in it, & Rupert Everett just isn't in it enough. And the girl -- the one everyone's running around after - is frankly just too whiny and self satisfied, irritating to hell.
Ah well, yes, I must go get my migraine pills.

17th June 2004

It's gone midnight, and I've been veging out for a couple of hours, but I'm.. hungry. I have never managed to get a lock on whatever it is in my brain that correlates diet with hunger. I'm not actually hungry, I tell myself, I just want to eat something. I find myself fantasising about things like jam sandwiches, which I wouldn't touch in a month of Sundays, and this afternoon I almost binged out on rice cakes - if one hadn't been revoltingly overly-salty, I would have ended up eating half the packet. Perhaps the over- salted one was added by the manufacturer in the knowledge they were saving someone from a binge.
Actually I have to admit I really like rice cakes. There's something about the texture of them that seems, well, ok, sponge like, and I'm not talking about the variety that comes with buttercream and sugar. Did you not suck the water out of sponges when you were very small? I'm afraid to say that I did, and what's more I quite liked it!

Back to the diet. I have actually lost some weight, just not this week. However, last week I lost 5 lbs, which I think is probably enough to be satisfied with in a fortnight. I would like to loose this weight both hopefully for some time to come (let's not be over-optimistic here! No stupid promises like forever!) and well, loose it too fast and its a sure thing that I'm trying to do this too fast, and eating too little and will end up going off the deep end in a fast food joint or something. So 5lb over a fortnight is ok, it's a substantial loss. Thing is, well, I'm not too sure that I'm actually sticking to this that well. Take today for example. I had the smoothie for breakfast, still love those things, then tuna salad (with no dressing!) for lunch, and tonights dinner was chicken breast - all 4 oz of it, roasted - ha! roasted. Wrapped in foil and baked in the oven - I had to tart it up with something, so I rubbed lemon zest and black pepper all over it, so yes it did have a bit of flavour. I steamed the veg - carrots, potato and green cabbage, and I finished off with a cherry low fat yoghurt. I had an apple a bit later - it's the snacks that get me, because as I think I mentioned last time, come four, five o'clock I want tea and something. Something today was supposed to be two rice cakes and a teaspoonful of peanut butter. I ended up having four slices of wholemeal toast. Am I freaking out where there's no need to freak at all? God only knows. We'll see if I loose anything this week, and if not, well I shall need to do something. It's not like I'm stuffing myself full of chocolate or stuff like that. And that has to be an improvement.

Apart from this life this week has consisted of football and miracles. I take down my miracle records - for the database that my dissertation will be based on, and I listen half heartedly to the football. I have to admit, I did actually stop with the miracles to actually sit and watch Spain get decimated this afternoon - firstly because frankly it was so unusual, and secondly because Fernando Torres has a new hairdo that makes him look pale and interesting. I couldn't quite make out if this was actually his real hair colour, or he's a strange natural mouse blonde. Whatever, he's got a very good hairdresser. I hear the voices of my brothers rumbling in the background, enough with the fashion critique, what about the football? Yes.. mm. I think a lot of people are saying that at the moment. I have yet to see a match that has really caught fire. I did see the North Korean man weep, allegedly with pride at representing his country, but couldn't help wonder if partly it was down to fear at what would happen to them if they lost. I thought Gerrard was just brilliant. I don't care what Franz however you spell it thinks about it, but I did think they weren't anywhere near as bad as the media are currently making them out to be. I'm afraid I was a big Gerrard supporter when the whole captainship thing was an issue in the first place, and I hope he goes on to show why he should have been appointed in the first place. Ok, the whole court thing was a bit dodgy, but hell, over and done with now. I like to see Liverpool men do well. Nothing to do with the fact that I'd take MU over Chelsea anyday, but well, family and all that. We have connections to Liverpool and I always like to see them do well. Well shod of Raffa too I think.
Ok, now to steer myself away from the controversial opinionated bit.. miracles. I've got a whole pile waiting to be input into the database, but it's come time to do the test querying bit. In fact I really should be taking the instruction manual to bed with me to try and figure out how I do it, but I think that's pushing it a bit and I'll leave it till tomorrow morning. It's going to take me forever anyway. And if that wasn't enough, the blasted vpn client went corrupt on me again last night, what is it that makes a perfectly straightforward program that worked last week suddenly stop working when you've done nothing to it? God only knows.

What else? I have the date for my jury service come through. July - so at least it will all be over and done with before next term starts. Alas, the law will prevent me from including any juicy details, so you can expect to hear a lot about sitting around and waiting for things to happen I expect. I've applied for a couple of new jobs, but heard nothing as yet - one I definitely don't expect to hear anything from as it's with the Scottish Ballet, and I expect they will be flooded out with hot young marketing grads. Still as I keep telling myself, experience might just count for something. Its Friends marketing, that sort of thing, and it's been a long time since I last passed through a stage door. Still we can cross our fingers and hope.

Ah well, the witching hour has come and gone and at least I no longer feel hungry. I'm off to bed!

Friday 7th June

Ok, time to come clean... I've been dieting. I'm not going to go into any sordid details of exactly how much weight I'm trying to loose, or have lost. Some things shall remain forever secret twixt me and the scales. But none the less, I've been at this about a, well I was going to say a week, but I think it's more like two now.
It was the knee that was the final straw. I've been having problems with my knee for a while now, ever since I had a bad fall a couple of years back, and I'd been limping around over the past few weeks - I felt like it wasn't healing, then it was, and anyhow I was thinking about it and eventually decided that really you couldn't expect a relatively small joint like a knee to take the constant pounding mine must get. Loose some weight I thought, it'll do them both good. Hence..
So then I have the big decision of ok, what sort of diet am I going to follow? I can't tell you how much I hate the whole Weightwatchers thing. I've done the whole turn up at the church hall thing to death - the last time, Jo and I decided to do this together, and both of us went (on a single occasion) to join the group in Bradford on Avon. It was held in the simply stunning thirteenth century hall - I couldn't tell at the time whether it was a church hall or a village hall, or what sort of hall it was, but the half-timbering and plaster work was stunning, and worth the visit - sort of. Now this has to be a good, four, perhaps even six years ago. We felt nervous to start with because there didn't seem to be many people around, and frankly none of them that we could see appeared to be in the slightest bit FAT. One or two of them could have stood to loose a couple of pounds, but - jesus, Jo and I could have outweighed two of them singly by ourselves. Add to this that most of them were wearing designer gear, and that they all of them didn't appear to be inclined to talk to us - well you'd think that on it's own would be enough to finish us off. However, there was a further horror in store. As the class started, it became apparent that one woman was attending accompanied by her daughter, who couldn't have been more than about 12. She was a lovely little girl, bright and friendly - if I remember rightly, she was the only one to have looked in our direction even if she didn't speak. She was plump. She was plump in the way that my mother would have described as puppy fat. That I would describe as puppy fat. The sort of fat that in a couple more years, even in possibly twelve months, would completely have disappeared, yet this poor child was being dragged into a 'class' of adults, presumably comprising of most of her mother's friends, and was completely targeted by the class leader. Both Jo & I were totally horrified. We couldn't understand why the mother was behaving so inappropriately as to not seek out a more suitable group, if she felt her child needed to be subjected to the rigours of a diet class in the first place. Personally, I would have had her down to the swimming pool or some sort of high level physical activity before I'd subjected any child of mine to that. As it was, the next week we found a far more suitable group for ourselves - we did loose a few pounds, but like most of certainly my dieting experiences, it went back on within a few months of stopping the class.
So. No class for me. But as a (relatively) experienced dieter, I know that these things work, the whole weigh me in front of others somehow produces it's insidious effects - you do loose weight. But I'm not into this sort of thing on my own at the moment, I just really don't fancy it. I'm online now, and there's loads of online dieting services, I thought I would give them a go and check them out. So in short, I've signed up for the Grauniad's diet club, Eatright it's called.
It's a strange sort of experience. You go through all the joining process, pay up (and none of these things are cheap - but I'll get on to the real devil in the piece later) and put your details into the system. I.E. - how much you weigh. At the time - no scales. No I don't keep a set of scales about the place capable of weighing me, only the average kitchen variety. So that involved more expense, go buy a set of scales. I used the weight I'd been given at the doctors when I joined the new surgery, which had to be over a year ago, and frankly I think I'd done my best to forget that as soon as she'd weighed me! As it turned out, it wasn't that far out, although I'd overdone it by a stone. So I can't tell you how much weight I've actually lost yet, come next week, yep, then I shall be able to say yes, I've lost X pounds.

Anyhow when you've done all this, you then choose your meal plan, and get down to selecting your meals. This comes in a 7 day format, which would have been convenient had I decided to start this diet on say a Monday, but no I had to get the big commitment bit on a Thursday, which now comprises my day 1. I'm going to fiddle around with it a bit, and try and get it to run properly, I'll do myself a new week plan from Monday if I can and perhaps that'll make it run properly. Anyway, my meals seem to be nice enough, I've even had a few that I really like - Red lentil and Walnut salad for example, and an Apple and Walnut Salad - ok, maybe too heavy an emphasis on the walnut motif here, but hell, I like nuts! I had an extraordinary experience the other day when I opted for the Chicken Fried Rice meal one evening. Have you ever measured two ounces of dry rice out for yourself, and then cooked it? I was looking forward to this, rice - again like nuts, a favourite food. What I ended up with was a bare desertspoon full of cooked rice, that got me scraping those odd grains that always stick to the pan out! Horrified does not describe how I felt in relation to this!
The other thing that I have to say has really got to me over these past couple of weeks is the extent to which food immediately takes over the brain the moment that the concept of 'diet' is decided upon. My day's are becoming dominated by, ok, wake up, where's breakfast? It's not a meal I normally eat, and I've been able to have a smoothie for this, which I'd recommend to anyone who's normally a non-breakfaster being forced to contemplate food at whatever hour of the day you normally rise at. My smoothie comprises of a glass of fruit juice (I've been going for cranberry, it's a good mixer), in the blender, with a banana, and an ounce or so of berries. I've been on the strawberries for the past week, tomorrow I branch out to blueberries. Fancy having to measure an ounce of blueberries. Six or so I should think. The punnet will last for a month at that rate. So anyhow blend and drink. The resulting substance will see you through to eleven at least, and is actually drinkable, and enjoyable. I now find that I can tolerate the slice of wholemeal toast and teaspoonful of peanut butter about then. Yep, literally, a teaspoonful of peanut butter. So depressing..!
Then it's lunch. Lunch is normally a good meal for me, I'm not used to eating vast quantities, usually it's a sandwich and cup of coffee, so the red lentil salad, or a tuna salad - these are good substantial meals to me. But then we get to my downfall.

Tea, I love my tea and slice of cake - I like to come home and have tea, and then I'll eat a dinner, and yes, I feel it is dinner that has done the damage over the years. Particularly combined with the tea say an hour and a half beforehand. No cake now for Tess.. sniff. Now I have my snack, which is normally some form of cracker, with teaspoonful of peanut butter, or a spoonful of hummous, something wholefoodie. I'm getting used to this. I've even had fruit on a couple of occasions. Dinner - well dinner's a whole different story. I've taken to racking up the vegetable content so that I don't go mad about nine thirty and find myself devouring half a loaf or something. And that's where the demon money comes into all this. I went to Asda on Monday, and I'm telling you I spent £80. Horrifying. And what was this on? Vegetables that's what. Extraordinary quantities of vegetables, and it's the middle of summer and this stuff is supposed to be cheap now!!! No chance. God knows if I can actually afford to loose weight, that's what I say. Good quality, varied types of vegetables are expensive. It's awful. And it just goes to show you why so many people are overweight right now, they can't afford to be thin!

I shall stop here now. I need to go and find something wholefoodie to eat.

Thursday 27th May

Well folks, I reckon that was summer! I don't know how it is with you, but right now we're back to cold, well chilly at least in comparison, and this afternoon we had a hail storm. Only lasted what, 5 minutes, but it was bouncing off every surface it could possibly hit. Unbelievable.
Still, I'm more and more convinced that this is all down to that damn volcano - I know it's died down, but we've been having some really very attractive sunsets (I'm not around to see the sunrise!) very pink and streaky, which has inspired me to start up a little project. Life can't be all Latin and miracles, trust me. Anyhow, I'm making a mixed media picture, I've been wanting to do something truly mixed media for a while, and this seems an ideal opportunity. When I've finished it, and if I think it's actually worth putting on general view, I'll put a picture up, and maybe even a whole how I did this blog, since its been a while since I did this. I've bought a little fabric, renewed some of my paint tubes - it's been so long since I painted anything that many of them have dried up, yikes! I need to do things like this, I'm one of those people who needs to express the creative urge regardless of whether that urge produces anything wholly decent as such. I suppose I should be busy turning out bookmarks, but frankly the shops' been shut since my last huge essay deadline date, and over the past few months I'd say that it's not exactly been selling stuff like hot cakes. Since it's expensive to run - the Ebay fees are just horrendous, I thought I'll leave it until later in the year, when sales usually pick up.
What else have I been up to? Suffering in the knees is what. I'm grasping this bull by the horns by trying to loose a bit of weight, exercising, and no it's not going wonderfully well. I've been doing the exercises that the physio gave me for about two and a half weeks, and not one jot of benefit have I yet to see, which is a touch worrying. Normally these work like hotcakes, with things picking up within a matter of days, but not this time. We must just keep our fingers crossed that a) it doesn't get worse and b) it's not something other than muscular or ligament damage. I have a nasty sneeking suspicion that it's going to prove that way, and technically yes, I should go to the doctor, but I don't like doctors, never will, and I'd rather suffer for a while longer until I really can't put it off anymore. At least until I can prove by some weight loss that I am trying to do something about it myself.

As for the weight, well, as I said I've commenced dieting. I don't know what it is about diets, but the moment you start one, you get instant wild hunger pangs. I had a fabulous lunch, measured out on the scales, two ounces of red lentils, 1 oz of walnuts, handful of rocket, tomato, all done according to the recipe, and it was delicious. I can't tell you often enough that it really was tasty, and will be a pleasure to eat again, even if I wasn't dieting. It was filling. I mean, lentils for the lords sake, take a wee bit of eating. Walnuts need to be masticated. I thought well this will keep me going until supper. But come tea time, what did I want?? Food. I was hungry. I did stick to the diet, which provides snacks, I had plain wholewheat toast, with a teaspoon of peanut butter. As laid out in the plan. However, whilst they say one slice of toast with peanut butter, I had four. Yep. Disgraceful isn't it? I'm not too freaked by this, if I'd have raided the deep freeze for the icecream I know is there, then I would have been cross with myself, but no butter was consumed, and I did stick to the teaspoon full of peanut butter on each slice. Small falls like this are only to be expected, and you can but struggle on, safe in the knowledge that if you stick to whats on the diet sheet, the odds are you are still probably eating less than what you were eating prior to commencing.
The dinner was pasta with bacon and spinach, and I'm sorry to say whilst I like bacon, and I love spinach, I didn't take to this as well as I did the lentil recipe. Tomorrow is Spaghetti Primavera, that should be good. Lunch is a baked potato with beans. Got the beans, not sure I've got any baking potato's - that's another diet based issue, the cost of the bloody thing. You are constantly food shopping too. You have to have so much food to produce meals that are high fibre, low fat types, because you have to have the variety so you don't get bored and devour whatever fatty food is to hand or run screaming to the shop for half a dozen packets of cheesy whatnots. Gross isn't it?

Weds 19th, sort of, because it's after 12 so really its thurs 20th!

Yep, and again here I am late at night, blogging. Well it seems to be a habit of mine. Anyhow weirdness of weirdness, today I got a notice that I've been selected for potential jury service. For the next two years, I can be summoned at three weeks notice, I have to let them know when I'm planning on being away, and serve on a jury. I've actually done this before, and frankly I have to say that I feel it's somewhat unfair that I can have my life thrown into this degree of uncertainty - they didn't hold me in abeyance for two years the last time! I just got a letter, went and served - none of this you will tell us where you are if you're planning on going away from home, in advance - not that I've got anything against jury service, but I think it would be a bit better if they shared it out a bit more fairly. What's wrong with the idea that if you've done it once, that's it, you've done your bit and thanks for that. Let's share out the duty and those people who, when I say I've done this, go Oh God, I've not, I'd love to - well why not let them? When I did it last time a woman told me once you're summoned, you get summoned again and again. What a pain. Why couldn't it have been your premium bond's come up?!
It is like winning the lottery, only not, if you see what I mean. If my number has to come up, on this not exactly common lottery-type event, why couldn't it have been the actual lottery? What's to bet I get summoned say in the first week of next term, or three weeks before an essay is due or something. Yep, that'll be it. My number will well and truly come up three weeks before I'm due to hand my dissertation in. Still mind you I can at least ensure that that isn't in a state of disarray three weeks before the hand in date!
So what else has been happening - Abby came to visit this weekend, and along with the trips around museums, I seem to have destroyed my knees. Every day they started getting a bit weird, but ever since she's gone home & I've been left to get on with normal life, it's like they've crumbled to some strange powdery state. I feel like a little old woman staggering around with my stick and on full dose painkillers. I shall have to take them to the doctor for physio I think. Mind you, having said that, I've been doing the exercises I got when I fell a couple of years back regularly for about the last three weeks, I've even constructed a support pillow for the back of the knee out of popping plastic and packaging tape. It doesn't seem to be doing a bit of good. However it was great to see Abby, and I don't think we stopped talking the whole weekend. We went to see some great places as well, the Tennement House, the Burrel Collection, and St Mungo's. St Mungo's is the Catholic Cathedral of Glasgow, and we saw a rather fascinating end of a service given for some sort of priory organisation that reminded me somewhat of the unsavory groups out of Dan Brown's little fantasies - a number of older men in smart suits wearing tunics over the top of these apparently constructed from white sheets. And a number of them could have done with the larger version too, they pulled across the jackets and seats of their suits in a most unfortunate fashion! I suppose I should add that I have no idea who these people were, but they were accompanied by six masons of what was clearly a very high degree to judge by the badges, iconography and medals they were wearing, not to mention the fact that these guys were in tail suits. Full morning dress, bar the top hats. Extraordinary. The cathedral itself was rather interesting, with a number of wall placques that are well worth a look. And the necropolis is fascinating, and at some point I'll get the photo's off my phone and put them on Facebook.

I'm off to a mapping workshop soon. They organise this sort of thing for post grads at the university, and this is in pursuit of my quest to be able to put spots on a map of antique Europe, where the miracles actually take place. I'd like a nice colour coded set of spots saying here were ten, here were twenty - here was a single miracle in say 595. You know the sort of thing. I think it will look very fancy in my dissertation, but it's not as simple as saying you get a map and put spots on it. This is going to be a seriously intensive course, I've had to download stuff, log on to digimap, which appears to be a system whereby you can access lots of ordinance survey maps - it's all very interesting. I like maps, there's something about them that whenever I see a map I end up gazing at it as if it was vibrating and turning purple. I particularly enjoy maps of old places that I used to live, it sort of takes me back I guess. But any old map will do, if I can't find one of where I used to live I'll settle for mysterious places. I have a road atlas of America, which I find absolutely - well, rivetting. I look at all those place names and marvel. It's not as if I particularly want to go there and actually see these places for myself - although I wouldn't turn it down, but I like actually looking at the map itself. What I'd really like to get hold of is a sort of A6 sized map of the UK, a hardbacked book type version, of the type of map that you used to have to have when you, ahem, ok, I was at school. I'd like to be able to get on a train or a coach and follow it, so I could see what that mysterious building twenty miles in the distance is, or what those hills are called. I think the only solution to this is to get one of these new Iphones, with a satnav on it. However, I'm keeping a very firm hold on this idea, no way am I doing this until I have work.
Which brings me to the fact that I still don't have any work. Pain in the neck or what? Oh well, I keep on trying.