I have decided that one of these days I will invent a time machine and come back to this year, and my 2nd self can go and study in all those time where my 1st self was at meetings and procrastinating and then pass the exams, so that I get a good degree. Which means I as 1st self should miss my exams this year so that 2nd self can go instead. Surely that would work?!
Next thought is “Where have all the good men gone and where are all the Gods?” which is of course the first line of Bonnie Tyler’s big hit ‘Holding out for a hero’. Just cause I get bored of being single, and then I wake up and think when the hell would you find time for them?? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
Have realised that the second part about Gods is relevant in another way, but I shan’t elaborate too much, due to the fact that most of my friends are atheists and just wouldn’t get it. Don’t worry, I’m not going all evangelical Christian on you or anything.
My Granny passed away on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, depending how you look at it. The funeral is this Wednesday, which means a big relatives gatherin’ due to my mum being one of five, and my granny being one of four, and that is just for starters. Thankfully this time I have an outfit that will make me look like the 21 year old woman that I am, and not an overgrown schoolgirl like I did at my uncle Charlie’s funeral. I know this is a bit petty, but I am determined to mourn in style.
Right, I’m off to build that time machine.
Cross-posted on facebook
I went to Edinburgh last weekend and it was just going to be a rather dull weekend, with a dental appointment being the highlight. Well, what happened at the end of the weekend wasn’t a highlight at all, but was certainly the event of the weekend. My mum had already said that she was thinking of visiting my granny on Sunday as she had been really unwell. My uncle was up there that weekend, and then on Sunday morning, I was at my dad’s and my mum phoned saying she was going up, did I want to go too? I decided I did, and suddenly what was going to be a lazy morning watching iPlayer and eating bread turned into rushing around packing and getting dressed. An hour later we were going up the road to Laurencekirk, where my granny stays in the care home. When we got there, we almost literally ran into the doctor, and so my mum was able to speak to him about what was happening. Basically, it was time. She was on palliative care and not expected to last the week. I had had a sense of foreboding that morning when my mum phoned, hence why I decided to go up, and I was proved right unfortunately.
She had been in the home for the last year and a bit, having moved in when she was 90. It was known but unspoken that she was there to die, hence in a way it was the long goodbye. The staff in the home were so great in those last days, letting my mum and her brothers stay as much as they wanted and bringing in lots of tea and biscuits. We could tell things were serious so they had called my aunt in Texas so she could come over, maybe in time, but in the end it wasn’t.
She died in the early hours of Thursday, literally less than 12 hours after I had last seen her. I have never seen death so close.
Moving in weekend: I was helping out at Johnson all weekend, and I met the girl who is now living in my old room, and my old fire alarm is still there, and she’s not deaf so she’ll have fun when that red light goes off with the vibrating pad.
Hustle: This was on the Sunday night, and I was given some bucks to give out, but I’m terrible at thinking of challenges, so I got them to kiss my shoe. I was in heels for once so it was all very dominatrix-y. Quite strange really, I’m not very dominant…moving on!
Anytime I did go out to help at the events at night, I always found myself out later than I intended. Even though I was only down for 2 shifts after move in weekend, and one of those got cancelled I clocked up 42 hours of volunteering, and I was working in info and advice and did about 12 hours there. I managed to get a cold right before fresher’s week, and funnily enough I didn’t get over it until well after fresher’s week, when I finally had time to recover. So sorry freshers that got the flu, that was probably me what gave it to you.
Saturday: spent 9 hours (!) in The Priory. The first 3 or 4 were fine, then it all got a bit hairy really. It was really difficult to work out what was going on, as there was a mixture of our fresher’s and the the general plebs that are not students but still want to nick all our condoms. Grrr!
Sunday: Last night of fresher’s week, and I helped out in the volunteer’s quiz team and we came 2nd. This meant pizza parties the next 2 weeks as our prize was domino’s vouchers. They had King Creosote play and it was all a pretty good end to the week.
Meanwhile at home: We managed to obtain a big ass TV. Literally big ass, it’s a really old widescreen one. Kathryn and I have agreed to halve the TV license. I had to change the plug, after initially just shoving the old plug in with the help of a paperclip. Paperclip had to stay in socket, in the earth pin bit, but this got Kathryn riled and she pulled it out. So I changed the plug, it took a while but I had a good sense of satisfaction afterwards, especially was we saved a ton. Vicky was all for calling out an electrician, which annoyed my Scottish thrifty sense. I’m not giving an electrician my hard earned money for something I can do myself.
And then on Monday I felt invisible. And now I can’t remember why. Because I have posted this a full 4 weeks after fresher’s week as I am a lazy bum when it comes to this blog.
I’ll try to post about the first four weeks of proper term time soon enough.
This is an open letter to all those who make DVDs, be they the actors, comedians, producers, publicity, whoever this concerns basically. Which is probably jut about everyone in the visual medium industry, plus the deaf people who watch their programs and films, or try to.
Dear Everyone,
I am writing to you about the lack of subtitles on your DVDs. It has frustrated me for some time that there continues to be a considerable minority of titles that come out on DVD without subtitles which means I can’t enjoy them like my friends and family do. One category which is particuarly bad for lacking subtitles is stand-up comedy. In the hall of shame here are excellent comedians such as Bill Bailey, Billy Connolly, Dara O’Brain, Dylan Moran, Jimmy Carr. The list goes on quite substantially. Another notable set of DVDs without subtitles that has infuriated me is ‘House’, the TV series starring Hugh Laurie. I know I would like to see the series in full, because whenever I have seen them on TV they have been subtitled and I’ve enjoyed them then, to the extent that one can enjoy it when not understanding the context around it as I haven’t seen the rest of it. Behind the scenes music dvds (like bands that do tour dvds) are also another one for lacking subtitles. What if you want to sing along, karaoke style? Sticking with behind the scenes, too often dvds have the main feature subtitled and the features are not. We buy the dvd for the whole package remember, just like everyone else, so put subtitles on the whole thing.
Admittedly it seems to be quite often quirkyr things from America that hit British shores that most often lack subtitles, like I wanted to buy ‘Moving McAllister’ but it has no subtitles. Neither did ‘Dangerous Lives of the Altar Boys’. This is doubly frustrating as they are in foreign accents which means subtitles are even more needed.
There is a website, dvd-subtitles.com, which is mostly contributed to by the general public which lets you know about subtitle availability on DVDs, but it’s not exhaustive. It does however have a ‘Hall of Shame’ listing hundreds of DVDs currently inaccessible to anyone with hearing problems (or thin walls who put on subtitles so they don’t disturb the neighbour).
So this is my plea to all those involved in the dvd industry: please put subtitles on all dvds!
Yours faithfully
Kate
Oh Man, just about had a complete orgasm when I came across this on ebay >>>
I think I’m in organisation paradise…it’s colour coded and everything. *Hyperventilates* WANT! I will probably buy it soon…even though I don’t need 510 disc slots. Yet.
I hereby pledge not to go down the route of talking about my agonising of relationships and love, whether before or after I am with anyone, on this blog. It’s just a very bad idea. Suddenly felt the need to say this after two people I know have started discussing each other on their respective blogs after a painful and quite often bad relationship. I’ll stick to going emo over love in my private journal. I think it would be appreciated.
This is an awful easy pledge for me to make right now, considering the dearth of any ‘action’ right now, and that none of my relationships have ended badly other than the initial upset of ’shit, that’s over’. It’s getting depressing really. No, no… can’t talk about what I don’t have. It’ll come. Not the bad relationhip thing, just a relationship, hehehe.
It’s the last of these US trip posts! Woop!
So, finally hit Texas, although there was one point where I was worried I’d get stranded in Hope, Arkansas. The bus had apparently broken down, and the bus shelter was quite funny in that it was literally a tin roof on the side of a building which we couldn’t go into because it was actually a lawn mower repair workshop. There were sodas and crisps for sale out of a coolbox under a bench, and the times that buses were scheduled to arrive were on a whiteboard. Hope, Arkansas is the hometown of Bill Clinton, for those of you who like your trivia. Yes anyway, bus seemed to have broken down, possibly a tyre problem, and then bus wasn’t broken down after 40 minutes of faffing around and so we all piled back on, and I got to Dallas no bother, and in time much to my suprise.
I really didn’t do much in Grapevine, but that was the beauty of the place. I had deliberately scheduled this to be the end of my trip so that I had time to relax away from everything. I did some shopping, getting the essential petite jeans and we went to the cinema and saw my sister’s keeper, which made me and my aunt cry, but not my cousin. I spent four hours on the computer and m aunt thought this was a long time. I decided it would be best not to enlighten her on the reality of my interneting life, where 4 hours would be going pretty well for me. They have a swiming pool, which is a novelty for me, so that was fun to go in. Me and my cousin watched loads of films on the movie channels they have, and I introduced my aunt to West Wing, but it was the last 7 episodes or so, not a great place to start really.
So the big highlights were the Microsoft company store, which I could go to because my uncle works for Microsoft. We went to see his office first and me and cousin laughed because he had these etiqutte guides for various countries that he deals with, including Britain, which we thought was daft seeings as he is British and goes back to Britain at least once a year. It had things like, “Brittish people have a very dry, ironic humour” – read sarcasm, and “British people don’t like talking about personal things”, which is perfectly true, at least not random strangers over the phone. There were ones for australia and india as well. Then we went to eat at the staff cafe which is very nice actually, and they have cutlery made out of potato, which is like my idea of bloody fantastic. I’ve still got a spoon from there kicking around somewhere. It’s so that it it’s compostable, they’re on a big environmental bent in the cafe. And the store was pretty good although I couldn’t quite work out what to get and eventually got a student version of Microsoft office, to replace the not-so-legal version I had.
I also went to church. The family goes to the Presbyterian church, which is similar philosophy to Church of Scotland, so there wasn’t any burning in hell, so that was pretty good. It was an alright service, can’t remember what the sermon was about. We had to go to Sunday school before hand, and this was sunday school for all confirmed adults. They used James Bond, of all things, to start the discussion about not wearing a mask and how God can see behind it or something. Yeah, not hugely impressed with all that. Afterwards I was introduced to a woman that my mum had hosted when she visited Scotland, and I think I may have scared her slightly after I said to her that not going to Church isn’t unusual in Scotland (and it really isn’t), and she told me this was sad. I kind of wanted to tell her that we find all this church going in the bible belt scary, but I bit my tongue. I was a good girl.
Yeah, that was Grapevine. Fun and Games. I was pleased to come home somewhat as I had gotten all the restlessness out my system I felt and had been away long enough to miss Aberdeen.
Home Sweet Home.
And back to this. Really not sure there’s much point, but I guess it’s quite good to look back at it all.
Finally got into Nashville, and I saw my first Amish people ever in the station. Y’know, with full gear on. I find that whole sect fascinating, so I kind of stared at them while I waited for Vicky and Julie to pick me up.
Day one of Nashville was also Day one of the CMA festival. Vicky wanted to go see James Otto at the convention centre, so we had to get up early, which I managed fairly easily, but had to remind Vicky to get up. We got down the centre, had a wander round and then joined a queue to see this Otto guy. Now, I don’t really have much clue about country music. I know of those who have broken through in the UK, and perhaps a few more thanks to Vicky, and James Otto was one of the Vicky people. I hadn’t heard his music, I had no idea whether I’d like it at all. Vicky was asking me whether I was going to try and get a photo or anything and I was like, “what’s the point?”. When we got to the front of the queue, she got a photo taken and then they turned on me. “Do you want a photo taken?” Me: “No, you’re alright. James Otto: “Aww, what’s the matter, are you shy?” This made Vicky laugh for the next four days. I was so tempted to answer, “No, I’m not shy, I just don’t have a fucking clue who you are!” But I didn’t say anything and I got a picture taken with this absolute giant of a man and his autograph. We went to see him playing later and I still don’t have a clue who he is. I wasn’t mighty impressed.
So we went along to the big concert that night, I was getting tired having been up so late the night before. One of the first acts on I insisted on calling ‘the insurance company’, as that what they sounded like. Brooke and Dunn, something like that. They played for ages and then we were told we had to move under cover as there was a thunderstorm brewing. These people are pathetic and very obviously not British when it comes to festivals. Move under cover for rain? So we shifted, and waited an hour for the rain, and then another hour when the rain poured, and it really did pour, and I figured ‘what the hell’ and got wet dancing in the rain. I dried off when they put the concert back on, much to many people’s surprise, it was that hot. I was so tired, I virtually slept through Brad Paisley. Vicky was ecstatic to see this guy. I really wasn’t bothered. This was a running theme throughout the festival.
The next few days were pretty much the same. We did a lot of bar hopping and shopping. We discovered a restaurant where you ate and then never wanted to eat again for the rest of the day. It gave me such bad indigestion that I had to take alka-seltzer. We were in a very quiet cafe at this point, and just when I was putting the A-S in the lemonade I had bought, she called over “Is everything alright there?” I replied, under my breath, “Yes, fine, just putting drugs in your lemonade”, which made me and Vicky laugh. It tasted like sherbet, it was very nice and did the trick.
For all the laughs though, some things did get to me here in Nashville.
- Tipping: oh I could do a whole post on this, and I probably will.
- Vicky’s friend Julie: I don’t want to speak ill of her, as she was helpful and gave us a lift back to the hostel every night, but this meant we had to go somewhere and eat and pay for her dinner every night. It wasn’t expensive, but it was annoying. I now realise in light of my IBS it may not even have been the best idea for my health, but I’m not convinced eating at 1-2am is good for anyone. She also called Obama a ‘douche’, which put put a black mark next to her in my book.
- The heat: far more noticeable when you are out and about. It was actually hotter in Texas, once I got there, but then I was staying in an air conditioned house.
- Getting patronised far too often for my liking by Vicky and Julie. It was just little things, but it was annoying. It was also other things Vicky does which I was aware of but it was intensified by constantly being with her for a week. In Aberdeen, I can get away if I want. I hadn’t realised how necessary that was.
- Spending more money than I wanted to due to the bar hopping.
CMA festival highlight for me was Taylor Swift, out of God know how many people played, she was the only one I really knew of.
I also got put in the crowd scene for a music video by a band called Trailer Choir. The song is called ‘rocking the beergut’ and I don’t rate it. It basically advocates obesity as okay, especially with their very overweight singer prancing around the stage. Left early, and it turned out to be the only few hours I was with out Vicky the whole week, until I got left at the greyhound station the day I left.
The last night I was there we went to Coyote Ugly, because Vicky had been going on and on about it all week. I was interested to see this place, and to dance on the bar, which sounded fun. Well, dancing on the bar was fun, but the rest wasn’t. The drinks are really expensive, and I noticed on the till it had a kind of motivation thing that said it all. “Are you being sexy? Are they having fun? Have you taken all their money yet?” The place began to get my feminist riles up. For all that Vicky protests that the girls are in control and they can do what they want, the place is not far off prostitution. It was mostly guys there, and the bar girls were wearing deliberately tight and suggestive clothes. They had a whole routine that involved calling a guy over sometimes marking his chest with a marker pen, and then one girl lying on the bar in front of him with another straddling her. They then put a shot (in a glass) on the lying down girl’s navel and the one on top got suggestive with a peice of lime, teasing the guy to get it out her mouth. Then the on top one made the guy take the shot from her navel and put the lime in her mouth. Routine over. They only did this with guys. Now what is the point of that routine other than to sell themselves? The dancing on the bar, fine and generally flirtyness fine, I guess. But that routine and the whole place just got to me. I preferred the Karaoke bar we had been to, althiugh there was a creepy guy there. I sang 2 songs and even got complemented on my singing. That made my week really.
I was pleased to leave Nashville somewhat, which isn’t a good sign. If I go again, it’ll only be for a few days, and do silly touristy things like the country music hall of fame and stuff, cause we didn’t do any of that.
Stupid holiday blogging will recommence at some point, but the moment other events have taken over. This post is going to be a bit depressing and has slightly explicit details of my health problems, and then on my TV watching habits. If you don’t wanna know, don’t read it. I don’t care.
I went to the GP today and got put on 3 different medications. Which is kind of what I was hoping for, a little recognition of the shit (literally) I go through. Yes my friends, I cannot be bothered hiding this because it just makes misconceptions worse, I probably have IBS. Can’t absolutely confirm it, but it’s the best diagnosis we’ve got for what has blighted me for as long as I can remember. So the doc put me on something called Mebeverine, which I have to take 20 minutes before all meals. I should also start getting more exercise, which is difficult for me cause I’m very unmotivated in that respect, and also should probably stop snacking but… I like snacking dammit! I should start paying more attention to what I eat and if anything makes it worse, but in that respect I’m a bit skeptical. I have had this so long, my diet has not remained the same all those years and then nowadays when I do have a somewhat regular cycle of meals on a weekly or fortnightly basis, the back passage does not correspondingly explode at certain meals. Not that I have noticed. Perhaps I’m also scared to go down the exclusion route in case I discover I am actually lactose or gluten intolerant. If I was either of those things I think I would actually break down and cry. I like my pasta, bread, cheese, milk in my cereal. Thing is, I don’t get too crampy with the IBS, it’s just a very unpredictable bowel movement mostly, so the motivation to cut anything out is low. I’ve lived with this so long that in my mind it’s a depressing fact of my life. My shit doesn’t bother me any more. Let’s be proud of our shit. Okay, I may be going too far for some people, this may all seem way too distasteful for some folks. I feel sorry for you. It’s something we all do, we shouldn’t be scared of it.
Otherwise I went on the pill to try and level out my cycle and all the other benefits that come out of it hopefully. Not because I’m having sex, chance would be a fine thing! In a way it’s better I’m doing this now when I’m not seeing any one, because then I know I am doing it for me and not for any other reason.
Third thing is just ibuprofen, extra strength version, because I have back pain. My posture is shit, and I’m pretty sure my breasts are to blame for this. Boys and girls, do not wish big boobs on anyone, especially not petite women. It makes for a hard life. I’m in a way lucky because the big boobs are not too obvious, and I actually don’t have a cleavage so I haven’t really had any unwanted attention from boys who stare way below your chin. Just unwanted back pain. Meh.
The other thing that has come crashing into my life is Torchwood. My friends, I am sorry to say that my favourite character, Ianto, died in tonight’s episode, and a lot of tears were shod. Kaye, my flatmate, cried and then went over to anger. I was occasionally angry, but not nearly as much as she was. Can’t believe Gwen got left. No actually, I can. Russell T Davies seems to have a thing for her, so she was never going to go. She is a rather annoying character in my opinion. So in the space of 5 episodes, if you count the series 2 finale, they have killed off 60% of the team. And not replaced any of them yet. I really hope they get a fourth series, to see what happens next. There is a promising new character in this series, Lois, and if she was in the next series then that would be interesting. But it will never be quite the same again.
I often cry when characters die in TV series. Not so much in films. I think this is because there’s more time invested in a TV character. Off the top of my head, only Forrest Gump has the ability to make me cry most times, when Jenny dies and Forrest makes that speech to her grave, that gets to me. In TV though there is more. Dr. Greene in E.R. season 8, Leo McGarry in West Wing season 7, When Rose was sent to a parallel world in Dr Who series 2 (that doesn’t do it quite as much since I met Kaye though), Tosh in Torchwood season 2, and now I’m not sure if I can bring myself to watch this last episode again. Thing is I kind of need to, so that I have watched it with subtitles and got everything that happened. I better have the hankies ready this time. I blubbered all over my duvet cover the first time.
And my computer is broken, so I’m back on my old laptop, joy of joys. I’m waiting for a courier to come round and pick the damn thing up to get it fixed. I’m really miffed about this, I’ve only had it two months and I have gotten used to the massive screen and the wireless keyboard, and now I’m back to tiny screen and attached keyboard. And this thing gets hot. The PC got hot too, but at least it wasn’t on my lap when it did.
And I’m in the process of re-applying for my bus, which I didn’t think I would have to but it turns out I do. Yay. This necessitates going to audiology to find out about getting a letter. Thankfully the Aberdeen department is pretty easy to go to and get seen quickly, and after a quick discussion whether a hearing test would be necessary, we established it won’t be and a letter will suffice. The hearing test isn’t necessary because my hearing doesn’t change. I remain as deaf as I was when I was first diagnosed. I’m going to miss getting seen quickly if I have to go back to Edinburgh, where getting seen within 3 weeks seems to be a bloody miracle.
All this just in the last two days. Jeez. I’m farting like a mule now, hahaha.
I’m back in Scotland now, and there is no way I could fill a post for each day any more. So I’ll just see how much I get into here just now, before Torchwood starts in 45 minutes.
Day 7/8: Washington D.C. to Nashville????
It’s funny, day 7 was supposed to be a really boring one to report back on. I packed all day and caught up on The Apprentice on YouTube, and then went to the Greyhound Station. I got my ticket, eventually joined the queue for the bus and then rapidly realised while standing there that we were likely to be late. Late would be a problem. I only had a 45 minute transfer time in Richmond, Virginia, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I got there late, but I was betting it wouldn’t be good seeings as this was a later bus. I went to find a staff person who could explain what was happening, maybe reassure me. Argh, like hell that was going to happen. She questioned whether I was really going to be late for my connection when I went to speak to her after 30 minutes delay. I could tell we were, the bus hadn’t appeared and even if it had, it was going to take more than 15 minutes to get everyone on. She then said “We’re just waiting for the driver to come down from upstairs”. OH MY FUCKING GOD! Yeah, was not best pleased. I went to speak to her again when the bus really was 45 minutes late and she brushed me off basically. Bus was eventually more than an hour late out of Washington D.C., and correspondingly late into Richmond. When I arrived in Richmond, I was immediately told that the next bus was at 5.30 am. It was 9.30pm at that point. 9 hours in this greyhound station in the middle of nowhere did not seem appealing in the slightest. I phoned my aunt in tears, and I had already told Vicky I had missed the connection. In amongst all this, I met a guy called Josh who seemed friendly enough, and no one in the station seemed threatening. I began to resign myself to my fate of being here for the next 9 hours and thought it might not be so bad. Then I get a phone call off Vicky, who is more panicked than me about me staying overnight in this place, going on about how I’m going to get my passport stolen, don’t fall asleep. It was patronising, and I started to get really annoyed. Vicky then told me she had people working on getting me out of there and a place to stay. This sounded a little uncomfortable to me but I went along with it. Eventually a guy called Steve came and picked me up, and his house was really nice and it was my first time in a pick-up truck, so that was cool. But something about it all still creeped me out slightly, and I had been sorry to leave Josh. (Yes, he was cute…he kind of reminded me of my ex-boyfriend actually. That’s not such a good thing perhaps.) My fears about Steve were somewhat confirmed when I went on his computer. I’ll not go on here… it was nothing illegal, just it explained a lot. Got a good nights sleep though, so that was something.
So eventually Steve took me back to the greyhound station, and I was finally on the way to Nashville. Thankfully there were no more transfers to meet, so there was not so much risk of disaster. Finally got to Nashville at 2.30am, a full 17 hours later than planned. Vicky and Julie, the woman she had been staying with came and picked me up and we headed to the hostel. Guess what? It was hot there too. Vicky and I spoke til pretty late, which punished us the next day, as it turned out to be a long one. I’m going to post Nashville in one post, the next one.
