girlofprey

That feeling when they mention the water in Derry.

I've been aggravated this week. One of the morning women at my job is on holiday, and my boss couldn't find anyone to cover for her, so I worked from 10am till 7pm today, and will do so until the end of the week. I've been at work so long, it feels like Thursday, but it isn't. However, they've been super good about my breaks, so I get a lunch hour as well as my usual half an hour at 4 o'clock, and actually today was fine, and sort of super busy, and maybe that'll be good for me, taking my mind off things.

I don't know what it is, but somehow the takeover at work and the summer holidays seem to have culminated into some sort of perfect storm of constant activity. I'm spending way more time on the car park than usual, because the 30 redundancies the new company made pretty much as soon as they took over came into effect on Friday, and a bunch of people left, so we have way more empty spaces than we used to. And a lot of the people who are still at work are on holiday, both people with permanent spaces and people on the waiting list, so I am just hammering through the list way more than usual. Plus they're doing some sort of desk/floor move thing, so the Facilities team - which is 3 people - have been crazy busy all week, and then we had about 4 contractors in for various things in yesterday. Today my manager had to go to the Manchester office, but just before he did an executive assistant reminded him they were supposed to organise our meeting rooms for a Town Hall with the CEO, which is like a big meeting/presentation thing, so he had to leave the other 2 Facilities guys rushing to hastily set it up in the 15 minutes before it started. And then, while he was in Manchester, a crowd of teenagers came to the building, claiming to be from a Citizen's Service, and they - and the adult with them - said they had a meeting with our woman who does a lot of charity liaison stuff, but unfortunately she left the business on Friday. I ended up signing them all in to have a talk/tour with a woman from HR, but that meant we're now down to about 15 visitor's passes, because the visitor's book is nearly empty and the guy that orders the new one is on holiday till August 8th. Oh and some people showed up to clean out the ducting in the kitchen, and that stunk the whole place out for about 2 hours. Right around the corner from the Town Hall meetings.

So. Interesting times, at least.

I feel okay. Tired, but like I said, at least it was busy. We'll see if there's any cumulative effect over the next few days, but hopefully I'll make it to the weekend. And like I say, they do kind of need me at the moment. It's just really bad timing, given everything else that's been going on lately.

Also, I know it's a lot of pretentious wank, but sometimes you get to a point in a situation where you just can't feel anything about it anymore, and it's not because you're heartless, it's because you're heartbroken.

But I called my local mental health service yesterday, and I'm having a telephone assessment on Sunday to see about them giving me some further support, so we'll see how that goes. When I told my mum about that, she said "what do you think these people are going to be able to do for you?". And then we mildly argued about whether she got slightly upset the first time she found out I was seeking mental health support, when I had counselling back in University, and she said she felt like she didn't know why I couldn't just talk to her. Spoiler: she did say that.

Also I finished Trails of Cold Steel 2. You might think I finished it long ago, when I talked about the final fight, but no. After that fight some crazy shit happened, all sorts of unexpected revelations, and then suddenly it was 2 months later, in a different city, and I was playing as 2 people I'd never met before. And then we went back to the school, so our main characters could finish off their school year. Then some more weird stuff happened on the campus, and I discovered what the actual final fight was. It was considerably harder and more irritating than the other final fight. And the main character made it really clear beforehand that there was no point to it, they were basically just killing for fun. But I did it and I finished it, hurrah. It made the ending slightly sour for me. But now I can wait for the third game, and see what finally happens to all my lovelies. If indeed I make it through any of those final fights. It's still slightly sad though, because the new one won't be coming out on PS Vita, so this is the last time I'll play it on there. Not sure how much I'll enjoy the grinding on the PS4, when I have to play it at home. But we'll see.

There are many films I want to see coming out over the next four weeks. The one I'm most excited for is The Hitman's Bodyguard, and that's two weeks away. I hope it's good. But anyway. It's not a terrible problem to have, I guess, looking forward to something.

It was my mum's birthday yesterday. Apparently, she got woken up by her sister at about twenty to nine in the morning - her sister is in her seventies, had a stroke a few years ago, and her only daughter is currently in hospital recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumour, but they were expecting her to come out of hospital a few weeks ago. Then my mum had to go to a CPR training session. And after that, she decided to let my ON come over, because it was her birthday and because he normally comes down on a Tuesday, but she was working today. And - I didn't get the full story of this, but it was something like; a community/school nurse was at my sister's house, and wanted to weigh the kids and measure their height. My MN and YN weren't in, so my sister either asked my mum to go look for them, or my mum was just driving away with my ON and saw them. Much, much further away from the house than they should have been, considering my MN is 8 and my YN is 5. Apparently, when she stopped to pick them up, my YN was crying, and saying something about how a man had chased them, threatening to call the police, because my MN was throwing stones. My MN, at the time, just refused to get in the car, because he'd found some older boys to hang around with. It was around this time my mum's sister called her again, crying. But, after that was all done, we went out for a meal, and it was pretty nice.

Today my mum had a twilight shift at the hospital, which basically means she's working from 12pm to 12am - pretty much all her shifts are 12 hours these days, but sometimes she does day shifts, which are about 7am to 7pm. She normally only does one a week, but for some reason the shifts have fallen, this week and last week, so she's doing two on consecutive days. So she did the CPR session yesterday, is working a twilight today, and is working a twilight tomorrow.

So she was up this morning, getting ready for a 12 hour shift at the hospital, and apparently my sister called her, asking her if she could look after my MN for an hour, because she wanted to get ready for a Jobcentre appointment, which had been rescheduled from last week after she was 15 minutes late and they refused to see her. Because my MN is still not at school till tomorrow, because she didn't sort out his transport. She apparently said her appointment was at 11:40, and "you're not at work till 12, are you?". At which point my mum had to point out that no, she had to get to work for at least 11:45, to be ready for the start of her shift. In the end, she agreed to watch him, and my sister said she'd just meet her before she went into work, and pick up my MN then. Let's hope that worked out. Before that - I essentially woke up to mum telling me my sister had called her, while she was getting ready, and she also told me that my MN had apparently said that while he was out on his jaunt yesterday "an old man had forced him to smoke weed". When my MN came to our house, the story had apparently changed to it being one of the older, 12 year-old boys he was with who'd forced him to smoke weed.

Tonight, I came home and asked my dad if he'd heard about mum's exciting morning, and he said he'd had an exciting afternoon, because he'd gone over to my sister's for something, and my MN was acting like a lunatic. Apparently he was running around with a mop, and then my dad took it off him, so he started jumping on furniture, trying to push things over. My sister didn't react much to this, so my dad told her to do something with him, she tried to tell him to stop, he told her to fuck off, and she ended up kicking him. After which he ran outside, picked up a brick, and threw it through a window of their shed, smashing it. There are three windows in the shed, and he's broken them all, apparently. My dad then started talking about how my MN needed to go away, just go away somewhere, probably to a padded cell. And how my sister's been ruining my dad's life since she was 13, and it's all just bollocks.

And I'm not doing very well, to be honest. This might be obvious from the posts I'm making lately, but...this is just exhausting. And awful. And honestly, it might not be so bad, but given everything that's going on with my job at the moment, I just don't know what's going on with that either. If I could be confident that I could stay at my job, getting my wage, for as long as I wanted to, until I chose to leave, at least that would be something I could feel secure about. But, even though there's no particular indication the new company are going to let us go, I can't feel secure about it, not until we get some concrete news one way or the other. So I don't know what's going to happen with my family, and I don't know what's going to happen with my job, and I don't know what effect either of those things are going to have on my mental health. And I'm just really tired, and I can't tell if it's because the weather changed over the weekend and everyone's tired, or I ate too much, or I'm just actually not sleeping enough, or it's my hormones. But I just feel miserable. I cried at porn the other night. It was this really good dubcon, which was mostly overall consensual, just a bit pushing, but wasn't just about the 'empowerment' of complete submission, and it crystallised some of my attitudes/issues around dubcon. It was around the same time I saw a post on Tumblr shouting out to and supporting our new label, 'hypersexuals', who are apparently people who have kinks that upset or disgust them, have sex all the time, and have sex as a form of self-harm with people they don't like. Maybe? Maybe all of those features are supposed to be separate? I don't think they should necessarily be lumped in under one label anyway. But I definitely don't think it's helpful to just put them under one label and passively accept them in a way that lets people avoid talking or thinking about subjects, rather than thinking or talking about why people have those feelings or do those things. I'm sorry, I'm not being very progressive right now. I probably just don't understand tumblr, or young people, and how supportive but also critically-thinking they truly are.

Anyway. That post annoyed me. But they crying thing, I genuinely don't know if it's because it crystallised a few issues for me, or because I'm feeling incredibly emotionally raw because of everything that's going on at the moment. I got a bit teary last night, because my mum turned 68 and started asking if she was an old woman, she wasn't an old woman was she? And my dad started reminiscing about when he was young and used to punch people so hard he detached their retinas. I think they both miss their youth, and it upsets me to think in ideal circumstances, I will outlive them and they'll die and I'll have to live without them. And also their present is so awful, and that upsets me when I think about it, even though we've all kind of accepted it as normal at this point. I followed that up with a dream last night where my sister was younger, and just had one young kid, but kept coming into our house and insisting she should stay with us and eat our food because she didn't have any food for the kid at home, and she tried to make this up to us with beautiful singing, and I had to tell her that no matter how beautiful the singing was, it did not in fact make up for her invading all of our space and our house, and shouting at her that she was an awful cow and she was ruining all our lives. I told my mum about it this morning, and she was like "that was no dream".

Anyway. This sucks. I don't really know what to do about it. I could go see my doctor, but I honestly don't know what they can do for me. I'm already on anti-depressants, that I'm pretty sure I should have been weaned off of this spring. Other than that, I don't know that I have time for counselling or anything. I could call Samaritans to talk about this stuff, but they can't really talk back to you about stuff because they aren't trained, so it wouldn't really be like having a conversation about it. I'm just...I don't know if I should just hunker down, and hope for the best, wait for it to sort of get better. I've already had to take a step back from video game news, because it's just too stressful given what some arseholes on the internet think. I feel like crying right now, but I don't know if it'll help to just let myself be emotional about it. Because at what point do I stop? I should probably talk to my mum about this. But I don't really want to put any more on her shoulders. But I don't think I'm coping super well at the moment, and it might help the both of us to talk about it.

Alright summer, you have summered it up, it's great, you can go now.

My mum is back from London. Which is nice, because I was a little anxious about her, given the state of things. Purely for anxiety reasons, I know logically it was unlikely anything was going to happen to her, and things do tend to actually be safer when everyone's on high-alert than the rest of the time, really. But still. It's nice to have her home.

I don't even know what to think about the state of the country right now. It's so sad, but I'm also constantly waiting for news of reprisals against Muslims. There already have been some, and yesterday a guy who works in our post room stood and watched a guy from the Centre for Muslims on our (silent) tv that just shows Sky News all days, and then said "bastards!" not quite under his breath, and walked out. And I know people want to feel safe, and it's good for people to feel safe, but seeing all the soldiers on the streets sometimes just makes me think of those dystopian films where you get flashbacks, and it's like 'this is when martial law started'. And maybe if the Tories hadn't cut funding for the police so much, and the numbers of police officers so much, we wouldn't need so many soldiers. We're going to have an election soon, in this atmosphere - I genuinely think they should postpone it, but I guess that would be letting terrorism mess with the political process, which wouldn't be great either. It's just...fucked up.

Anyway. Since talking about how I never get anything done at the weekend, I sorted through my jewellery collection - I have a lot of jewellery, is my takeaway from that, and I really like ceramics and glass - and I cancelled my kickboxing membership, and I picked up my new prescription for the pill, and I renewed my application for working tax credits. I had to call them up to tell them about my change in circumstance, in that I no longer qualify for the Disability element, timewise, so I basically had to do it over the phone. But it was relatively painless, once I had all the information. I think at best I'll get much less money than before - they might even want some back from me, since I haven't qualified for the disability element since March - but you know, it was nice to get it in the first place, and I wasn't expecting it. So we'll see what they decide in the future. I've told them what I can, at least.

I got all of this done pretty much by not playing video games for a bit. Except, you know, an hour and a half of my vita game every day, and Pokemon Picross when I'm bored (I'm on the alt-world challenges). So basically now, instead of playing video games all the time and feeling bad about all the stuff I haven't done, I'm doing things and feeling bad about all the video games I haven't played. Sucks to be me.

We've just had our Easter dinner, since mum was working yesterday, and the kids are all downstairs. It's very hard to remember isn't a Sunday. And tomorrow isn't bank holiday Monday. And that I have to go in to work tomorrow. Not even in to work, in to work early. I offered to go early to meet the note-leaving woman ages ago, and it never got sorted till now. We haven't had any problems recently, and I'm worried she's going to think I'm going in just to tell her how to do her job, but. There are some things we need to discuss, and it'll be nice to meet her, finally.

It sure is quiet on Dreamwidth. Someone should do a friending meme. I would do one, but I never got the hang of how you get the word out.

So. I got yelled at today by an extremely aggressive employee of the bank, who at one point referred to me as "the woman" to his friend. He was angry that I wouldn't let him through the barriers, into a BANK, without his security pass, and didn't want me to call his manager down to authorise a temporary pass. And my boss is on holiday for a week, so I can't talk to him about it, and the guy in charge in his absence I think is the guy in question's friend. So. There's that.

Also, before that, I was an idiot and decided to look at the comments on an article to do with video games and racism, and found out that everyone except the "far left" thinks that America should be mostly white and Mexican immigrants are trying to take over part of the country. I always thought that it was a bit wanky to just assume left-wing politics had the moral high ground, but apparently no, it's the literal definition.

And now I'm going to eat chocolate and watch D and D videos.

News of the Girl

• The train company that runs my usual journey to work is on strike tomorrow, so I'm going to have find creative ways to get there and back tomorrow. It doesn't surprise me, because my journey home has been rubbish for months now - always packed, even though it's not rush hour, and never on time, and the staff are always the ones who end up getting the abuse, rather than the company owners. So I am quite supportive of this strike. But it is still quite annoying. There is a bus tomorrow morning, but it's a lot earlier than my train, so I'm going to get a lift into town tomorrow morning. And then tomorrow evening, there will be a bus at some point, but how and when I cannot say.



• I saw Logan last week. I liked it. I can see why people say it's the best comic book film ever, but it is still a comic book film. And I didn't really like the ending. ( Massive Spoilers )
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• I did not go see anything this weekend, because I decided I wanted a weekend in. I do want to see the King Kong film though, even though it mostly looks like a big, gun-happy film. I still quite enjoy Tom Hiddleston though, even if he is quite embarrassing lately, and he looked quite good in the trailer, even though the trailer also looked quite weird.



• I hate Theresa May, I hate her. I see her walking around sometimes, like nothing is wrong, and I think "is this just sexism, why I hate her? Is a lot of it sexism?". And then I remember Yarl's Wood and I just get furious. I can't believe we're just allowing her. I can't believe she is just walking around and smiling, and has the gall to say the Conservatives are a party 'of the people and by the people' or whatever the fuck she said, and I just can't believe it. I can't believe we're allowing this.



• Dear EU Commissioner who said he'd like us to eventually get back in the boat with Europe: I would love to be in the boat. Please save me a space in the boat.



• Mostly what's happening at the moment is I think about making an LJ post, and then my thoughts collapse before I get to the end of what I actually want to say about them, and I go back to playing Horizon: Zero Dawn instead. I'm really enjoying Horizon: Zero Dawn, and I really like playing a massive, big game starring a female character, but it is kind of a shame that Aloy (the main character) is 18, and not really by our standards a fully adult woman, and that despite the fact they were all "she's grown up in a very matriarchal society, she goes looking for her mother!", a lot of it is really about her relationship with her father figure. And all the dudes who obviously want to bang her. All the dudes who want to bang her is great, and a nice flipped version of "every sexy woman the male hero meets and helps wants to do him". But I am hoping for another main female character to come along sometime shortly.

aslofdkijnASLKNFDcklsamndckAM<NSdklnblaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh

It turns out the revelation is: it's really shitty to have a cold.

And on top of that, of all the coughing, today featured: period pains, more emails about the car park than you would believe, mystery dry cleaning, someone parking where they shouldn't in the car park causing someone else to park in another business' space causing the person from the other business to overpark and block them in, packages no-one seemed to want to collect, and coldness on my poor, sore throat.

But anyway. In Stardew Valley, I have started to date Shane, which so far is underwhelming, but then he had a really adorable cutscene, and I couldn't believe it. Also I have an adult pig, and it hasn't found me any truffles so far. Also I have a current quest to get another Prismatic Shard, I want to see what that's all about, but it is Slow Going so far.

(I promise the rest of my life won't just be Stardew Valley updates. Soon, there will be Mass Effect: Andromeda updates).

Also, the news is sad.

Well, today was exhausting. First, I had a doctor's appointment to review my pill - which I just remembered I forgot to take today. The nurse didn't seem at all concerned about the whole 'bleeding for 3 weeks out of 4' thing - I started bleeding again yesterday - and asked if I wanted to continue on it. I said I wouldn't mind trying a different kind, to see if that works better, so now I have a prescription for a pill that only has a 3-hour window - taking it 8 hours late probably wouldn't be a thing then. Although I can't tell if that's for periods, or just for getting pregnant. But anyway. Then I had to go around town trying to buy something for my ON's birthday, since I figured I'd see him tonight but then it turned out he was going out for a meal with the family (which I couldn't go to, because I work too late, whatevs), so I had to get him a gift and card and get it to mum before I went to work. Then, after getting into Leeds, I ended up going to do a little shopping, and having to run back to the office, to make it on time for work. And THEN - we had more visitors than you could possibly believe, at work. The company's being bought out apparently, so they had a bunch of people from the company who's buying them, to try to work things out, AND just regular people for meetings, AND a group of people for interviews. I signed someone out who had pass number 10, shortly after handing out pass number 63. Like that. And, we have a new signing in book, which is terrible, and some people don't know how to use properly. AND we had some guests we hadn't been told about replacing some guests we had been told were coming. AND a bunch of those people needed security cards. AND the key log didn't seem to have been filled in properly. AND I had a CEO's bag to guard with my life. AND then a bunch of people for an interview, for which one woman was half an hour late. Just straight-up, "I was told to come at half past" late. Which I had to sort out.

Tomorrow I think it's going to be like that again, but also I will have to do the car park.

But anyway. In between all of that, I did manage to get on the internet a bit, and learned that Scalebound, the one game that made me even sort of interested in an XBox One, has been cancelled. 4 years into development, and with it looking pretty finished and polished actually at E3 this year. Strange things are going on with Xbox. And slightly worrying things, if you like Xbox and/or the console wars. Also I'm generally sad no video game of being BFFs with a great big dragon is going to exist. The world will be poorer for it.

I did it. I finally found the base post of a joke I've been laughing at for about a year now.

That was me yesterday, only instead of skipping breakfast, it was me thinking I'd just catch a train home from Lancaster.

It was appalling. When we got to the station, it said my train was delayed, but not by how much, but I figured it would only be a few minutes at most. It turned out it was delayed because of a trespasser on the line, which due to the time of year and how long it took them to resolve it, I'm going to now assume was someone trying to kill themselves, which is really sad. But it meant we were just stood about at Lancaster station for an hour, with them every now and then making announcements that the train was still delayed, they still didn't know how long it would be till it arrived, and then trespasser was still on the tracks. The best part was, the problem was happening at Morecambe, which was nowhere on my route home, but our train was coming from Morecambe, so we just couldn't get going till it was done. They cancelled 2 trains to Morecambe over the next hour, and started talking about replacement bus services. I stood out on a freezing cold platform for about 25 minutes before I realised that what with the cold and all, that probably wasn't the best plan, then went and had a chocolate brownie from Costa and sat in the passenger's lounge. My mum called, and my phone died, but happily there was a plug socket right in front of me in the waiting room, and I managed to charge it up enough for it to last the rest of my journey home. Finally, after an hour, they announced that a (delayed) train to Preston would have a connection to Leeds, so anyone who'd been planning to get on my train should probably get on that. Which was no easy feat, because it was packed to the rafters, particularly around the doorways - and not really in the aisles, so clearly people just didn't want to move. But eventually we got to Preston, and eventually we got on a train to Leeds that wasn't too packed, and I managed to give my parents some idea when I was getting home so I could get a lift from our local station. And the scenery was really beautiful in the sunset and the twilight. So it wasn't all bad. I did try to have a nap on that train and then as soon as I sat up from it ended up coughing my lungs up, while everyone on the carriage looked at me like I was Patient Zero, including a Brenda Blethyn-looking woman at my table. But anyway. After a short, cold stay at Leeds station, I managed to finally get home.

Home was a slightly different story. I'd been expecting all the sympathy from my mum cos I was ill, and when I told her about it on the phone she said she'd go out and try to get me all the cold remedies. Which I thought was odd, because usually she just gives me whatever's in the cupboard. But when I told her I was going to take the next few days off work, she looked at me in horror, because she'd thought I would just take all the cold remedies till I was all dosed up, and then go into work. She's been fretting about sickness at work and self-certification notes all day, which doesn't really help my anxiety. But I think she has a slightly overblown sense of what rational self-sacrifice is, so I am just not taking her advice. I feel way better now than I did on Saturday, but I think I'm going to take tomorrow off as well just to recover, and then try to go back in on Thursday. My boss has been super lovely about it.

I put the sides back on my new computer tower yesterday. In a show of either confidence, or not wanting to be bothered, my dad said I could do it, and I did. It makes it look very finished and beautiful. I'm currently trying to make a Windows 10 boot disk, even though I can't authenticate it, or do pretty much anything, without internet. But I'm going to try to maybe find a place for the tower, and plug in my keyboard and mouse. No word yet on the ethernet extender my dad was talking about, which is how I'm going to get internet, but it does feel like things are moving on at a decent pace.

I had a dream about the apocalypse last night. Well, first I had a dream about a storm that literally ripped apart most of my home town. Then I had a dream about a proper, everything destroyed, deer and lions in my garden apocalypse, and told my dad (in the dream) "I had a dream about this last night". I think it's from reading the comments in too many posts about the state of American politics at the moment. Although the actual posts are becoming no better - yesterday on ontd_political there was a post by someone saying there was no 100% conclusive proof that Russia was involved in swaying the election, so we shouldn't act like they might have until there was 100% conclusive proof, and the CIA were always lying, and I didn't understand it at all. Until I got to a paragraph about how "anyone who had opposed the smooth, self-entitled rise to power of Hillary Clinton is now accused of being in line with the Ruskies", and I understood what it was actually about.

By the way, can't really explain how furious them calling Hillary Clinton's bid 'self-entitled', when American politics is dominated by men and she has literally been hounded by the Republican press for years, actually makes me. People still say awful things about Hillary Clinton, and I worry sometimes that I'm eventually going to get Truth Delusioned into believing them. But for now I still take inspiration from her.

Anyway. I did end up getting a little stressed out by the overtime last week, although some of that was just about buying so many parts for my computer, and feeling like I had to rush into buying my mum's present so I could hide it within those packages. It totally worked though, because she ended up taking the delivery including her gift, and had no idea about it. As for the PC - I'm in a funny sort of waiting game right now. When I went to buy the PSU I'd been recommended it was out of stock, and Amazon were like "buy it now, we'll send it when it's back in stock". So I did. And now it's been back in stock for more than a few days, and I haven't received any sort of email saying they're sending it to me. Meanwhile, they're promising anyone who orders one now that they can have it the next day, if they choose express delivery! Hmm, Amazon. I'll probably send them an email if this continues. The PSU being the power supply for the computer, it is a pretty important part. And I can't really check if any of the other parts I've bought are faulty or super or whatever till I build the entire thing. But apart from that I've got everything else I need. Apart from an OEM version of Windows I've been recommended by my games shop guy, and - since most of those I've seen are on disc, and nowhere does it suggest the computer I'm currently building has a CD-ROM, a plug-in CD-ROM. I have no idea when I'm going to build it, though. Certainly not before the PSU comes.

Other than that though, yesterday was pretty productive. I took some stuff to the charity shop, finally, and picked up some wrapping paper and a card for my YN's birthday tomorrow, and even managed to pick up my MN and sister's presents. I also got an idea for what to buy my dad this week, and I can pick up my ON's present in Leeds when I'm there for work, which only leaves my YN's Christmas present, and I'm told he loves Paw Patrol. And I'm looking forward to going back to my regular hours next week, and I have the Last Guardian and Trico's amazing, and generally everything's going quite swimmingly at the moment. I am bleeding again though. Which is kind of annoying.

Anyway. Speaking of female artists I used to love and then forgot about, do you remember when we learned to Hit Em Up Style?



I don't really love this music video like I do the last one, but I do love the song.