girlofprey

I'd really like a week off, but at the moment the timing just isn't quite working out. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think 4 weeks of holiday a year is enough. I know it probably just sounds like I want to be away from work more often, and maybe that's true, but here's the thing: I think 4 weeks off work is perfect. A week off every three months, or you can save up for six months and take a fortnight off? Amazing. But that means you can't ever, ever take a day off here or there, or you ruin it. If you're going away for the weekend, and it makes sense to take a Monday or Friday off, or if you need something doing at your house and it makes sense to take a day off for it, then one of your full weeks off is gone. I've had a couple of days off, so I've got two weeks and three days off left for the rest of the year. If I take a week off now, then I'll be a third of the way through the year with only one week's holiday left, and a couple of days. And if I want to save those days for the odd, useful day off here and there, then I really will have only one week's holiday left - if I want to use them, then the best I could do is tack them onto a Bank Holiday, and even then I still wouldn't get a full week off. So I really want to take a week off, but I don't think I can and still be able to manage the entire rest of the year, constantly worrying about when to take my last holiday. Which sucks.

But Easter's coming pretty soon, and that will have a long weekend, and then a very short week afterwards because I'm taking the following Friday off for a game that's coming out, and then the few Bank Holidays in May. Which I think will help out.

And work has been particularly rough this week, because - after spending last weekend pretty much on edge, because I had to look after the dog, I realised afterwards - I got in this week to find one of the morning receptionists was on holiday for the week. And it was the more helpful of the morning receptionists, K. My manager had asked me to come in early last Friday a few weeks ago, and I hadn't twigged why he might have done that, and also completely forgot about it. So I got in on Monday with the prospect of doing all the work for both car parks all week, and also having to get up and come in earlier on Friday. But the other receptionist, C, didn't even just do none of the work - and I do mean none, there's a very basic job we do at the beginning of the car park allocations which hasn't changed since C used to do it years ago, and the draft emails are right there in our Drafts folder for her to see, and she just left me a note saying she wasn't sure how we did it these days and if we did it differently, and she didn't want to do it wrong. But she didn't even just do no work, she actively made the job harder. I got in on Monday and she was still on the desk and I asked her if there were any problems, and she said it was just that the car park had been empty, and people had been asking her if they could park in the afternoon, and she'd said it was pot luck, they should just take any space they can and just see if they get in trouble for it. Which is fine, IF the car park's empty. But since then, I feel like I had way more people emailing me and driving in and asking to park in the afternoons, when it wasn't so empty, or just straight up parking in a space they hadn't been given.

AND - we have a woman at the company we work for who's been off for a long time with stress. She's lovely, and I sympathise. She came in a few weeks ago and said she was planning to return to work, but she thought a parking space for her first week back might help her out, could we offer her one? And I spoke to my manager, and he okayed it, and so we did give her a space. She then won parking in the lottery for the following week, but turned it down because she was on holiday. She then said that she was back this week, but off next week, and then back to work as normal after Easter, so if she got any parking through the lottery for the weeks she was in, could we please let her know about them at home. Which was fine. I got in on Tuesday, and found a note in our diary from C saying she'd given this woman a space for the whole of this week, because she'd been off sick and was returning to work. There were no emails about it though, she'd just assigned a space to this woman on the sheet. And it wouldn't be so bad, but a guy who always bugs us about parking spaces and who's using them had been down asking about this woman, and why she'd had a parking space, and if she was due to have another parking space when she came back to work again. So I spoke to my manager, and he told me to just leave a note for C asking if she had emailed this woman the space, and explaining that this woman shouldn't have one. So I did, and she replied with a really snippy note saying this woman had come into work to speak to HR, and she'd asked over the desk for a parking space, and C had said yes, because this woman had been off sick a long time and was on a phase back to work, and was given a space for her return to work, and that I should read her note from yesterday. And I can't talk to C or get a straight answer from her. Then my manager emailed her, which she apparently didn't reply to. And then I just ended up going up to HR myself to figure out what had happened, had they said she should have a parking space. They hadn't, and then Annoying Guy came to the desk, because he was actually this woman's manager, and he definitely didn't think she should have a space, and she wasn't actually on a phase back to work, just taking holiday that she hadn't used while she was off sick. And in the end we just decided to do nothing, because C had already given her a space, but it was a lot of running around and annoyance that I didn't need when I also just had more to do at the desk.

And my manager just tells me I get too stressed out about the car park and that I should just accept it's unmanageable, but I don't think he realises that it's him who stresses me out, because he acts like he doesn't care until someone complains and then we have to change everything, and I'm the one who has to send the awkward emails about it. He tells me to make my own decisions, and acts like he's happy for C to do whatever she wants, because he'd "rather people make a decision than do nothing" - but the last couple of decisions I've made for myself, I told him about them just so he'd be informed and he told me to change them. Which he tells me to do because "it's not worth upsetting people upstairs about it" by doing something new, and then he acts like upsetting people upstairs isn't at all part of his reason for trying to get me to change a decision, it's just that I made a wrong decision. And I don't know what he wants me to do anymore, and if I ever said that to him he'd just tell me I was worrying too much. And I do actually accept that the car park is ultimately unmanageable, totally, but I don't think C should be unmanageable, and I don't think my relationship with C should be unmanageable, and the fact that my manager constantly has no reaction to the fact that I do tons of things with the car park and C does almost none of it, blows my mind. How can you claim to be the manager of a group, and have no problem with one person in the group not sticking to the generally accepted rules for the rest of them, and just not doing whole parts of the job? alsfjkdlaksdfjl;adskjlk

So I was a little frustrated at work this week. Maybe I should just stop doing the car park.

Also I spent quite a lot of this week trying to pre-order the Diamond Loot Chest Collector's Edition of Borderlands 3 (hush, I can spend my money how I want), only to find out that it's a Game exclusive, and they're only allocated one per store. And I was the second person to ask at both of my local stores. Curses!

And I did start replaying Red Dead 2 to try to do some more horse collecting, only to once again come up against the fact that they only allow you to have 4 horses at a time throughout the game, which isn't enough. Foiled at every turn!

I did get a buckskin horse though, which is one of the prettiest coats there is, so there is that.

Hello. I'm back from Spain. I got back on Sunday evening, even though it was meant to be Saturday afternoon, but I'll explain about that later. ( My holiday, including a paragraph about the shoes I was wearing most of the time, and the reason why we got back so much later than we were meant to )

I went to Jongleurs comedy club last night. I assumed that being a comedy club it would be something like the last comedy club I went to. Basically, a bar in which you could buy drinks and the doors to which were eventually closed so no-one could come in while the comedians were performing, and in which you could sit quietly watching said comedians. I did not expect it to be half comedy club, half nightclub. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. First, because I didn't have a ticket, the girl behind the bar just let me pay there when I went in a few weeks ago, I didn't have a seat booked. I had to sit for a while on a stool at a little table just behind a stag party, the stag of whom ended up yelling at me about "cheering up love, it might never happen". The people eventually found me another little table, in better view of the stage, which was nice. But there were quite a few stag and hen parties in. They played loud music when the comedians weren't on, and the compere had a really blokey style of humour which I didn't much like. You know the kind of blokey that's basically offensive? That kind. Then at the end of the show, they were talking about pushing all the tables out of the way to make space for a dancefloor, so I think it actually is a sort of comedy club/night club thing. I just wasn't really expecting it.

But anyway. The comedians were the main thing I was there for. There was a female comedian on first who I really wanted to like, because she was the only woman performing, but her jokes were mainly about "looking like a lesbian", how pathetic morris dancing is when a) it occasionally has knives and is hardcore and b) according to K, is actually a little bit racist, which is potentially the main problem - and a bit about spanish female flamenco dancers having unibrows and little mustaches. So. Hmm. The next man was Welsh and a bit better. And then there was Tom Stade, who was the main reason I went to the show, because I saw him a few weeks ago on Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow, and thought he was a bit great, despite a potentially slightly homophobic bit. That bit was there again, but mainly he was great. There's a few clips of him on Youtube, like this one, and I understand he may not be for everyone, but I've decided I quite like him, hurrah.

Anyway. The main news is that I'm back from holiday. ( Devon and Rome )

And now I am home. I actually have quite a few things to talk about, but not really much time or space left in the post probably. I'm back on Jobseeker's, and hoping to get my housing benefit paid for the time I was away, which they said I might be able to. I had my first counselling appointment this week, and I was horribly late, and then the woman was in another office, but eventually we managed to get into the appointment, and she's lovely, so it was fine in the end. I saw the new Harry Potter film, I LOVE DRACO AND TOM FELTON, OH. I've been watching a lot of TV I quite like, especially Coronation Street (OH DAVID AND TONY AND MARIA) and The Supersizers Eat... (I LOVE IT, and the last episode is tomorrow, but that's fine because I was pretty sure the last episode was last week). And no-one told me Dragon's Den was back on. And there's other stuff. But as I say, this post's getting kind of long as it is. So goodnight x

Mostly I've been having very good taste lately. In that everything, almost everything, I want and pick up and then put back down again until I've proved it's not just a wild impulse, is gone by the time I go back to get it. I saw a necklace in a local art gallery that I really really liked, and I went literally the day my parents came up with my birthday money, straight after that play we went to see, and they'd sold it that morning. I've got in touch with the woman who made it actually, who's based in Nottingham, and she's kindly agreed to make another like it, and she said it would take about a week depending on how long it would take to source the materials. It has now been about three weeks. But oh well.

Cornwall was sold out. There was another holiday for the same weekend, but it was only two nights, which means two days of travelling and one day of holiday, which was slightly more expensive. So no. The next holiday they had similar was in June, when they will no longer be having the special thing with the bulbs flowering at the Eden Project. I told myself that I wasn't going to (finally) get Castle, Waiting from the comic book store to cheer myself up about this, because I wanted to get it on its own merits. When I went back the next day, they'd just sold out, and it would be another week before it might be back in stock. Another week was Thursday, and they didn't have it, so now I should wait until next Thursday, or the Thursday after that. Castle, Waiting is becoming quite apt. I was going to get Angela Carter's Book of Fairytales last night, but was already buying something else, so didn't want to splash out too much. When I went back today, it had sold out. Another week before the new order gets in. Also there are no Flamenco classes in Nottingham, an interest in which was the main thing I took away from Happy-Go-Lucky. Hmph.

But the mail is still working, and what I do have, as of Wednesday, is the DVD of the John Simm version of Crime and Punishment. Not released in the UK, but released in the Netherlands. The front is all in English, and the back is almost all in Dutch. I love it a lot. And I was so right to love John Simm's Raskolnikov. He wanders around staring at things. He has the most beautiful messy hair I've ever seen. He shouts in police stations then faints. He is great.

I also got the first series of Peep Show because it was £4.

( Spoilers up to 1.3 )

And stuff. I still have to buy flat shoes and two new pairs of jeans before the gig in two weeks' time. Hmmph.

Well, we've booked a holiday. A weekend, in the end, and perhaps more, but my sister is having things delivered in the middle of the first week, which screws things up a bit. So we are going for the first weekend of my parents' two-week holiday time. To Centre Parks. The one in Sherwood Forest. That's right people, for my final, last-ditch holiday with the family before I go back to Nottingham, I am going to - Nottingham!! My flatmates are going to have a ball with this.

It looks interesting enough though. I always wanted to go to Centre Parks when I was younger. You get a 'lodge' in the forest, and probably there will be birds and squirrels and deer and such. And you can order hampers to be there when you arrive, which is nice. And there are lots of activities, like climbing and paintballing and clay pigeon shooting and fencing. All of which cost about £200. And my mother has made noises to the effect that she and dad are paying for the holiday and the food, so we should pay for our own activities, which is fair enough, but...saving for uni! I have tried to explain this with my eyes, but to no avail. Mope. Weekend of cycling and perhaps walking here I come!

In other news, if you like Family Guy, or A-Ha, or just to laugh, you should all go look at this. All of you. Everywhere. I feel slightly bad, because I get all my links to interesting things are from links in other people's journals - I am really no good at this internet thing - and I'm sure you've all seen it before, or I'm stealing love from the original person's journal, but some of you won't see it there, so I'm really just spreading the love and YES.

Also, I appear to have scared lots of people with a comment over in nerdcakes' journal. Excellent.