girlofprey

My parents gave me £50 for my birthday. And apparently, the Playstation 3 is coming tomorrow. Which is very nice of them. Especially since I realised that even if I have the Playstation 3 and manage to hook it up to a decent screen, I don't have any games to play on it, and I can't afford the ones I like. But now I can. I'm a bit excited really. This is the first time I've ever had a games console, aside from the time my sister borrowed a Playstation off a friend of hers for a few days when I was in highschool. We played a bit of Tomb Raider for a few days, couldn't get out of a cave, and then gave it back. Good times.

We went out for lunch as well, to The Rustic Arms, which is a pub in Ackworth that I haven't been to since I was a teenager, and used to go to a bit as a kid. It had a big playground and a lake/pond, and we thought it might be better for my nephews than the slightly posher place we normally go to. The playground has either been changed or I remember it being a lot bigger, and the pond was fenced off for the local fishermen/people, but it was lovely, and really child-friendly, and the food was really nice, so it was quite a nice day out. We came back to my parents' house for some cake, and brought my grandma down, which she ended up complaining ferociously about (as always), but there were no real fallings-out and it stayed quite nice. And then I came back and watched the Dancing On Ice final, and Chris Dean and Jayne Torvill danced the Bolero, and Craig Mclachlan, with beautiful scruffy hair and a load of stubble, skated a little bit of his routine he did in the first week. Which was all lovely.

However, I am not so pleased about this habit of me having to lose an hour of my birthday, world. I dimly recall it happening before, I think. Less of that, please.

Anyway. In other news:

• Since reading all of Gastrophobia in the last week or so, I thought I couldn't love it more. But then I saw the latest strip, and it turned out I COULD love it more. New Who lovers may want to, um, not read that. ETA: UNLESS YOU LOVE PARODY. Maybe you should read it then.



• It's a Cracked.com article, so possibly on shaky ground scientifically or prone to exaggeration, but apparently crows are even more intelligent and slightly terrifying than we generally thought they were. Crows will TELL THEIR FRIENDS YOU ARE DANGEROUS AND TRIED TO HURT THEM. I love crows. And even after that article, am only slightly afraid of them.



• I also spent a lot of last night reading various Cracked.com articles about many comic book stories/characters you will probably wish did not exist. It's the combination of hysterical laughter and horror that is such a big draw for me.

A mere week after the show started, we are finally close to Craig Mclachan getting to skate on Dancing On Ice. He could be awful in real life. He could be a terrible skater. If he's fine in real life and a terrible skater, I might find it hard to not vote for him anyway. Last week he called himself Craig "Blades" McLachlan, and said in a taped interview bit that he was Australian, he's built for winning. I love him quite a lot even up to now.

I went to Wakefield and Leeds yesterday, as my actual shopping trip. Well, "looking at the sales" trip. Sadly the sales are now at the point where there's hardly anything left in the clothes shops except sizes 6 and 8, and things you didn't know had even gone into the sales are now sold out. I went looking for a scarf and pair of slippers in Accessorise only to find they'd gone. I went looking for this cardigan from New Look, which you may notice is sold out on the site, just in case they had a few left in the shops. I actually found two in the New Look in Wakefield, on hangers marked 12 and 14. I was about to get very excited and try on the 14, assuming it would probably be loose enough to fit, when I realised they were on the wrong hangers, and were actually sizes 6 and 8. Oh well. It wasn't as pretty in real life as it was on the website, anyway. And I think I like the style more than the actual thing itself. It's something to put on the list for next winter anyway: Oversized Cardigans.

Another thing I went looking for was a dress in Miss Selfridge. Last year, I saw a beautiful, much too expensive for me dress in Miss Selfridge that I kept going to have a look at. It was grey and floaty and covered in beads. I went to have a look if it was in the sale after Christmas, but by that point it had gone. I had a look to see if they had something similar this winter, but could only find a similar dress in "Nude" colour. Then after Christmas I was checking out a few clothing websites, and found them selling the dress or something basically the same, and it was in the sale, and it was already sold out in anything approaching my size. It's one of my other least favourite things shops do. Anyway. It wasn't there. Maybe next year, who knows.

I also realised a general flaw in my clothes shopping style, which isn't really a flaw so much as a long-standing problem: I only really like coats and jackets. I suppose it's not so much a suprise, since coats and jackets are outerwear, so they're designed to sort of look good on their own and be eye-catching, rather than you having to imagine them as part of a larger outfit. However, you still can't really justify a wardrobe that mostly made up of jackets. Do you remember that lovely purple-ish coat I was talking about a few months ago? Well, I bought that. Last week at Junction 32 I bought a jacket that's not really like anything I usually buy, but is quite beautiful, and was quite cheap. And still, I end up looking mostly at the coats and jackets on sale in most clothes shops I go into. I don't think it's entirely my fault though, when they make so many beautiful ones. Look at this one. And this one. And the current trend seems to be baseball jackets, which just seem to be beautiful at their default setting. And then there's this one, which is grey leather. GREY LEATHER. I'm probably overstating my case. I actually think I paid more attention to tops yesterday than I ever have before on any shopping trip. Which is ironic, because I don't so much need them with all the Threadless t-shirts I now have. Still can't just buy all the coats and jackets I like though. Or, really, afford them.

In other news, I still really need to tidy my bedroom. I might make that my job for this week. Also I need to go into town tomorrow and get my prescription of Mefanamic Acid refilled. Yes.