smilax

Today

Me
00:44
Aaaaagh
We are staying in a hotel that apparently has a ghost
We even visited her room

Brandon
00:45
i heard

Me
00:45
Then I accidentally drank the dregs of Daddy's coffee thinking it was tea
Now I cannot sleep

Brandon
00:45
pff

Me
00:45
And the toilet is making strange noises
And Daddy suddenly went aaargh in his sleep
He's still asleep
And mommy is still asleep

Brandon
00:46
well

Me
00:46
But I am scared and awake now

Brandon
00:46
i dont know how to comfort you here

Me
00:46
Help help

Brandon
00:46
i got over my fear of the dark
due to necessity
the hunger for instant noodles overcame the dark
i don't even know when the fear disappeared it just did
twas cool when i realised

Me
00:47
Well done
You're right
This doesn't help me very much

Brandon
00:48
nay

Abigail's Adventures in Blogland over at http://whereabigailwent.com/

Part 0

Day -357: The day I got my blog
Day 1: The day I decide to actually use my blog.

Part 1

Day 1: My mother is reading my blog. Hooray that is a start!
Day 31: My mother is still the only person who reads my blog.

Part 2

Day 1: Thanks to our newly installed fibre broadband, I can now upload tonnes of pictures without Brandon barging in and screaming "STAHP! STAHP!"
Day 17: Oh bugger it all I haven't watermarked a single thing
Day 21: Hang on, no one reads my blog anyway. It's highly unlikely anyone will steal anything

Part 3

Day 1: Let's include all the stuff I did since Day -357!
Day 2: Yeah, we're probably going to have to leave all that stuff out.
Day 25: Ok. If I work at the pace of two blog entries a day, there's the possibility I'll be able to clear this backlog by the beginning of next year!

Part 4

Day 15: Idle thought. Me trying to add sharing widgets is like Glinda's attempts at turning Elphaba's dress into a ball gown. Poof! And nothing appears.

Part 5

Day 32: Huh. Maybe if I go on LJ and put my new blog address there, all those people sending me messages about enlarging my penis might come visit and maybe even read something.  

Yeah. So I started out wearing nice dresses to work, but now that Daddy's in JoBurg for a whole week, comfort while travelling in packed trains is now key. I've pretty much completely embraced the working culture here where you're basically only dressed so as not to be naked, so it's t-shirts and jeans all the way. Whoop de doop.

---

This morning, I was completely disoriented by the sudden flicking on of all the lights in my room (Daddy's preferred method of waking me up in the morning) and forgot that that this afternoon is the company bowling event. Which, apparently, I am supposed to ceremonially open, being the newest person in the company and therefore expendable in such situations. I'm probably going to have to buy socks later. Blast.

(But hooray! Bowling!)

Because I cannot move ahead with my current tasks pending managerial approval, I am helping a colleague apply liberal layers of correction tape to over 300 pages worth of documents, because... Well, just because. To be honest I'm not really sure why this has to be done either, but apparently if it isn't he's going to have to work overtime.

He watched me do the first five pages to make sure I knew where to apply the stuff, then said, apropos of nothing "You know, this correction tape belonged to a woman who died pretty recently." To which I made the only possible response to this sort of statement "I highly doubt any dead person in their right mind would come all the way back to haunt a highly interchangeable piece of office stationery."

I think this is the only time the possibility of a haunting's come up in the undertaking of menial paperwork. 

During my medical checkup, the height measuring instrument indicated that I'm a whole 2 cm taller than I was at 18, which caused considerable excitement. Of course, it could all be down to shoddy tools, but Daddy has confirmed that I have indeed grown. Not only did he measure off my height with a tape measure, but he compared it with Mommy's. It seems I have finally outgrown Mommy. This is indeed exciting stuff.

Who knows. In the future I might actually hit 160 cm and be a medical miracle. They'll call me the girl who finally had her growth spurt ten years after puberty set in. It'll be great.

Documenting the various instances that exemplify why it is unlikely that Daddy will be rid of his belly once and for all:

1. Not ten minutes after he saw an unflattering photograph of himself and cried "Burn this shirt!", Mommy was informed that Daddy wasn't sitting on the tour bus moping as she had thought, but rather finishing an entire bowl of ramen. This occurred shortly after lunch.

2. Daddy decided against eating a proper dinner, deciding instead to snack. He finished a bag of chips, a tub of chocolates and half a packet of dried cuttlefish.

3. He goes through a 2 litre tub of peanut butter ice cream each fortnight. One scoop of ice cream is served with an equal sized helping of peanut butter, because the ice cream is apparently 'insufficiently peanut buttery'.

4. "I can eat all the things I want one hour after exercising! That's what they told me at the gym!"

5. After eating non-stop at a high tea buffet, he decided he was too full to eat anything for dinner. On seeing the order sheet and quizzing me about what I was having, he ordered a portion of chicken wings and glutinous rice balls for himself. When my food came, he went into paroxysms over the chilled tofu and promptly ate a third. He also helped himself to my other appetizers, and decided that the fried rice was too much for Brandon to finish and ate half.

Even though I'm downing copious amounts of water, my skin's decided to go all gross and scaly dry on me. Massive amounts of moisturizer from Boots, liberally and frequently applied, hasn't worked either. After going through the ingredient list online, the various innocuous ingredients in my soap, shampoo and moisturizer turned out to be drying agents and seemed to be the major culprits, so I needed to switch out to something else. With most of the bottles finished anyway, it was as good a time as any to find better replacements.

A trip to get roast chicken for lunch led to a detour to the organic store with 10% off for students, and I emerged with a pretty considerable haul. It was a grocery and beauty hall all in one place, which meant that everywhere I looked, I saw something I absolutely had to get. I basically stopped picking things off shelves when I started struggling with my shopping basket - the one good thing about my being completely weak and nonathletic is that it places a limit on my buying sprees relatively early on.

The internet is full of glowing reviews on the benefits of using coconut oil as a moisturizer (And cleanser, and sunscreen, and on toast. Is there anything it can't do?), and since the 500 ml jar of extra virgin organic coconut oil (It's also Fair Trade, been Cold Pressed and is basically Perfect in every way apparently) was 25% off that day, one went into my basket. I opened my jar this morning, using a teaspoon to carve out a small amount of solid oil, which was a nice clean shade of white, mottled with clear bits. There was a wonderful toasty, nutty aroma to it that made me think of ondeh ondeh and kueh lapis, so I had a small nibble before I started rubbing it into the dry scaly bits on my arms. It's really quite delicious, and now I feel ever so slightly disconcerted that every time I use it from now on, I'm going to want to eat my moisturizer. Or nibble myself after, which is possibly worse.

As far as moisturizers go, it's done quite well so far. The itch on my calves is gone, the scaly bits of my arms seem softer. The oil isn't a thick slick sitting on my skin, but light and easily absorbed. I'm quite impressed. I tried putting some on my chapped lips as well, but I just keep licking it off, so I don't know how effective it's going to be. Ah well, better than ingesting petroleum jelly I suppose.

---

THE LIBRARY WON'T LET ME RENEW MY BOOKS. THIS IS A TRAVESTY.

---

Going to find people who will eat non-Chinatown things with me after church tomorrow. It might be an impossible task.

My life right now: I read about Nazis and dream about all the cake I am not eating. D:

I find myself having to vacuum every other day, given how freely different strands escape from my head. They show up so readily on the wooden flooring of this room, and I shudder to think how much of my carpet last year and the year before that was actually my own hair.

-

Two essays due this week. One of the sources I had my eye on turned out to be a special periodical that I had to pre-order from the library service counter to be fetched for my by a member of staff at a later time. It also could not be taken out of the building, and I had a limited time with it. Any extensions had to be further requested from the staff.

The periodical came in a slim clear folder, and consisted of one 24 page essay specially bound in hard cover. I'd like to say that after all the trouble I went through it was brilliantly appropriate for my essay, but it only covered it in a round about manner, and was really more interesting for revision purposes. Either way, I spent two hours poring over it and making detailed notes.

Felt quite accomplished afterwards.

-

Turns out the research assistantship pay scale only commands £12.89 an hour, alas, but still pretty decent. Using all my mad Googling skills to clean up the links on the document. Should be done with that by this week, then next week I can move on to the more interesting bit of analysing the documents.

Flexible hours rock, I do an hour here and there in between readings when I need low levels tasks to wind down my brain.

I've decided to use the money to take myself out to nice restaurants. A food blog is in the works, but without a fancy camera to take food porn with it's probably going to end up mostly words.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.