girlofprey

My mum got a call on Sunday night from my sister's neighbours. My nephews were apparently in the garden yelling and throwing stones and throwing stones at cars that passed, and my sister was coming out occasionally to call them morons but not do much else. Apparently, my nephews have been doing plenty to these neighbours, such as weeing in a bottle and throwing it over their fence, and throwing stuff over the fence in general, and throwing large amounts of stuff from their bedroom windows into the garden, or into a gap between their garden fence and their conservatory. The woman who lives their used to teach my ON at his school, and they're very sympathetic to the kids and my sister, but they say they've been living in that house for 42 years, and now it's just like being in hell.

So that's nice.

The thing of it is, it's not even like the kids had been in all weekend and were going stir-crazy. My parents had my MN on Friday night, as they usually do, and he slept over, even though there was no football the next morning. Instead he had a presentation, and all of the kids went to that, even though my ON was a bit weird apparently. Then they came back to our house for a few hours. And on Sunday their dad had them, and took them out for the day. So what else can be done? Frankly?

Based on that, my sister/mother called a meeting with my sister's social worker, which went...okay, apparently. The neighbours, on my mother's advice, reported the kids to the police for anti-social behaviour, and now they're not sure how far that's going to go. But it sounded like there was stuff the social worker didn't know, like genuinely how often my parents have the kids. So maybe something will come of it? But who knows. At the moment we're mostly preparing to have their dog, Frank. I wish I was more excited, because I do want a dog, but again I wanted it to be my dog. And all I can think about is how this is going to disrupt things for the cat, if they never get familiar with each other, and how we can never have the doors open when it's hot in summer again, and we're going to have to have a walk schedule and someone's going to have to pick up after him, and etc. But apparently she's still forgetting to feed him, and she hasn't had his coat clipped in months, so I don't know if there's much else we can do. In good conscience. Other than call the RSPCA or send him to the pound. I'm sure it'll be lovely. He's a lovely dog. But it is basically just cleaning up after my sister, again.

I called the doctor's yesterday, to see about talking to someone about my mental health stuff. Apparently I can't book an appointment, because all the pre-booked ones are now taken until the middle of August. The best I can do is call them in the morning to try to get a same day appointment. Which means getting up to call them at 8am, just to see if I can get through, and if I can get a suitable appointment, and at the moment rushing around to change my routine at short notice isn't going to be good for my stress levels, to be honest. But it is the best shot I'm going to have apparently, so I'll probably try to do it later in the week, or next week or something. I also looked into one of the helplines my mother recommended, and it was closed down, but I told my mum and she said she'd just spoken to them a few days ago, and it turned out I had the name slightly wrong. So there's always that if things get bad.

But still. You've got to laugh, haven't you?

Soaps just seem to be full of rape victims being tormented by their rapists these days.

And on a similar note, the police were apparently around at my sister's the other day, because my MN and his arsehole little friend were 'perving on some girls'. On the one hand, I'm not surprised given that similar things have happened before. On the other hand, I genuinely never thought my nephew would be the type of boy who would hurt girls just to impress other boys. But here we are.

Right. I was going to do a picspam over the weekend, but sort of forgot how long screencaping takes. Especially when you decide to just screencap the WHOLE THING. And then yesterday I learned that you're not even safe from Bank Holiday family outings after you've moved out. But it was fine, mum and dad brought my nephew down and we went to a kids theme park thing. I learned his favourite number and colour (4, and pink). And we played in a maze. And saw a monitor lizard. Oh, and they had fallow deer! That was quite good. Generally speaking, a good time was had by all, except when my nephew tried to spit on me.

Anyway. In all that I mostly forgot to post, and probably as a result didn't mention that my job for next week was pulled forward to this week. I had my first day today. It all seems alright. After some kerfuffle with the buses and the internet not telling me where they are it turns out they go from the town centre every ten minutes and only take ten minutes to get there, and because I'm only working 27 hours, I get a day off every week and get to go 45 minutes earlier than my other jobs. I'm working in basically the NHS complaints department, which means we get to order investigations into how wards and clinics are being run. We also look into inquests and homicide reviews, which should be, y'know, fun. And due to the sensitive nature of the information, I'm not allowed to speak to anybody about what I'm dealing with. Not even other NHS staff, who may or may not be being investigated. IT'S A BIT STRANGE. But quite interesting, if sometimes horrible. That's meant to be going on until the end of September, unless they can get someone permanent to start before that. And apparently I'm perfectly welcome to try for the permanent position. Hmm.

The other two days working round the corner were quite good as well. There was an IT crisis, which meant my computer wasn't connected to the network and an IT guy kept asking me to get off it so he could try to fix it, and there was an event they kept asking me to create registration forms for, but mostly it was quiet. It was quite strange really. I've never really been down that road before, even though it's just round the corner - it leads to a bad area - but there's tons of stuff down there. A big supermarket selling fresh fruit and Polish cake mix. Which is nice to know. And it turns out the cleaner from the NHS clinic I was working at before goes to the place I was working at last week quite regularly, where they try to set people up with employment. Apparently he's an expert in renewable energy, and has had dozens of papers published. But according to his contact there he doesn't present himself very well in interviews and they have trouble converting his degree (from Sudan I think) into an English equivalent. Which is apparently an English degree. All of which was suprising, and really quite a shame.

Anyway. A fascinating fact I learned in my last week at the NHS clinic - Mary Mary, Quite Contrary is actually about executions. Mary is Bloody Mary, who was executing quite a few people at the time for religious reasons. "Gardens" is apparently a reference to graveyards, the "silver bells" are thumbscrews (they looked like that it seems), "cockleshells" is supposedly a torture device they attached to your genitals, and the pretty maids were a reference to guillotines. Bet you'll never look at that nursery rhyme in the same way again. And I have the second series of Arrested Development. Hurrah!