girlofprey

( Last night's Apprentice )

Meanwhile, on Springwatch, they're doing a running story on a fox family with eleven cubs this week, living in someone's garden. I love fox cubs. They are probably my favourite baby animal. I put them even above wolf cubs. They have huge ears and are orange. So it is really quite pleasing for me.

This time next week, I'll be in Spain. Assuming there are no more clouds of volcanic ash. At any rate, I'm not quite prepared for it. I haven't done any holiday shopping, but happily, I have been buying new tops recently. Unfortunately some of them are those new tunic tops, and I don't really have anything to go with them. But I do have tops. And some pretty new jeans. And my dad bought me some new trainers, because he wouldn't let me take my current ones which are black with flames up the side. I can't imagine why. But anyway, I've got some stuff. No swimming costume, and no night wear, really. But I'm sure I can pick something up and get it all packed by next Saturday. Probably.

A thing I have done is finally paid off my final bills from my flat, emailed the paid bills to my landlords, and got my deposit back. Which is probably the last thing I'll have to do about my old flat. My deposit turned out to be a lot more than I thought it was going to be a few months ago, at £365. My only problem now is what to do with it. It has quite nicely paid off my overdraft, so I could just leave it there and switch to a regular account that I don't have to pay £7 a month for and one I wouldn't have to pay off if I wanted to switch to another bank. But my mother has suggested putting it back into my savings account, and given how much I have been taking out of it lately, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea. OR I could keep it, and...spend it. There's a lot of nice stuff I want. Nice nice stuff. The possibilities are not endless, but difficult to choose between.

( DVD talk for a bit )

One thing I DID try to buy earlier, though, was Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay, which I'd seen for sale at thebookdepository.com a month or so ago. I finally decided to buy it a few weeks ago, but when I went to thebookdepository.com, it was out of stock. I was worried that it wouldn't be available anywhere, but it was on sale at amazon.co.uk, and at play.com. I ordered it from play.com, and the web page said it was in stock, and 'usually dispatched within 24 hours'. I waited a week, and never got a 'We have dispatched your item' email. I thought maybe my order had gotten lost, so I cancelled it, and ordered it again. And again, I didn't get a 'We have dispatched your item' email, and when I checked the page again after a few days, it had changed to say 'usually dispatched within 6-8 weeks'.

Not wanting to lose my chance at getting it at all, I didn't cancel my order, but looked around, and found a seller on ebay.co.uk selling the books, brand new, for not much more than play.com would have charged. I ordered it - and recieved no 'We have dispatched your item' email. Something I'd ordered the day before came, the t-shirts I'd ordered from threadless.com a few weeks before came, and still no book. Finally, last Wednesday I checked my email, and there was an email saying they'd dispatched my book, and it would probably be there the next day. And sure enough, the next morning it came. But my mum has my youngest nephew over on Thursdays, so I spent most of the day with him, and then I was watching TV in the evening, and then our internet was on the blink that night. I managed to get on my dad's internet the next day, but I was meant to be going to get my oldest nephew so he could come to our house, and I forgot to go to play.com and cancel my order. That night, I went on again, went to play.com, thinking I would probably be okay since they'd said it would be 6-8 weeks. And what happened? They were bastard packing it, so I couldn't cancel the order. I can't cancel the order. So I'm going to have to wait for this book to arrive, and then send it back, which I've not done before.

Unless anyone on LJ would like a brand new book about the history of colour, and the travels of the woman researching it, for £7.49 plus postage? I haven't read it, so I can't say much about how good it is, but it looks pretty wicked. Alternatively, I will swap it for a DVD of Brotherhood. Or Danny Phantom.

Anyway. Enough of my capitalist woes. One thing I did buy without too much trouble was a little guide to British wildlife, in WH Smith reduced from £7.99 to £3. It is quite good, and I have also realised while reading it that the cutest baby animal, in my opinion, is fox cubs. Part of it is that they are adorable, part of it is the colour, and part of it the knowledge that when they grow up quite a lot of people will probably consider them vermin. But still. Fox cubs.

And I also realised that the more I learn about pikes, the less I like them. When I was at university part of our university handbook had something to say about the pike in the campus lake, and the fact that skinny-dipping wasn't a great idea given that it had been known to bite off fingers 'or other body parts'. The next year they brought out a new handbook, and made no mention of the pike. Naturally, I smelled a cover-up. I actually did a piece about it for the student radio I was involved with at the time. And the research I did on them for it gave me more than enough extra reasons to fear them. Check this out, from the new book: "The pike is a vicious predator that hunts alone. It lurks motionless amongst vegetation, waiting until its prey is close enough to reach." And, "At breeding time, the female is courted by two or more males and will eventually lay up to 500,000 eggs"(!) And, "Once they have reached three centimetres in length they begin to feed on small fish. From then on they are fully carnivourous, even eating other pike or fish the same size" (my emphasis). As far as I can tell, pikes? Are out to get us.

I was considering making this post just a big list of all the dvds I wanted to buy, but couldn't really afford. Count yourselves lucky you didn't get that.