Gracie’s Life Experiment

I tried to make poached eggs for breakfast this morning!  I think the only thing that could be used to describe it was - “hmmm”!  I’ve not made them before but thought, hey how hard can it be?  I boiled some water in a frying pan.  Salted the water and then swirled it round while pouring the egg in.  Well - the egg instantly decided to swirl out to the edges into millions of strands.  I don’t think that’s right!!  In the end I ended up cracking the egg into the water without swirling - kind of like frying an egg in water.  Then folding up the edges where it spread too much while spooning hot water over the top.  It didn’t look too pretty, but hey, I just grated some cheese on top and it was fine and extra runny yolks for hubby.  My egg didn’t turn out too good - I don’t like yolks so it was made of only egg whites.  Kind of reminded me of a slab of almond jelly.  Again, nothing a bit of bacon and some cheese wouldn’t fix!  Think I’ll stick to frying next time!

Summary of the day:  Tried to make breakfast,  Helped out at Sunday School, Work avoided, Played Zoo Tycoon II (again, it’s just so damned addictive)

I’ve been having some weird dreams again. 

-A few weeks ago I had this bizarre dream that I was pregnant (well, that’s not a dream, but) I was sitting cross-legged and I looked down and saw that I had 5 legs and then realised that I was in labour!  I woke hubby up and told him about having an extra leg hanging out and then he said, actually if I had 5 legs then I would have 3 extra legs.  For some reason 4 legs didn’t seem to be alarming, it was the 5th leg that freaked me out.  What a peculiar dream (I put it down to eating cheese on toast before bed). 
-I dreamt hubby was chasing me round and poking me in the face with a pencil (v annoyingly) and then I woke up in a 1/2 dreamlike state and hubby was holding my arms as I was fighting back trying to avoid the dream pencil. It took me about 5 mins to distinguish between dream and real life.
-Last night I dreamt that I was food shopping at a supermarket and it was like Supermarket Sweep apart from I think I may have been rushing round trying to find ingredients for a party which I guess I was late for.

I do dream a lot, I think I probably dream most nights but can’t remember many after the first 5 mins of being awake.  Some dreams are really cool and I just want to go back to sleep, sometimes I’m sure that I dream certain situations and later in real life I get total déjavu, other times they are just odd.  I don’t have many nightmares thankfully.

Summary of the day:  Went to work, Looked online for a pressie to send for my Grandma’s birthday, Did some process modelling, Had a telecon at 4pm (rerun after last week’s incident), Got home and hubby had made spag bol for dinner, Sold my computer desk (now the study is empty it can start it’s nursery transformation) 

What?  I spring cleaned the house yesterday yet this afternoon there seemed to be a kitchen full of stuff and grease to clean again.  Got back from work a bit early and set to work cleaning - AGAIN.  Unbelievable, where did it magically come from?  Grr!  It’s most irritating that it finally got lovely and spotless less than 24hrs before, and suddenly the one-man husband whirlwind took charge in the kitchen for dinner and there’s board, knives, plates, bowls all over the place.  When I cook there is 1 board, 1 knife, 1 spatula and at most 2 cooking pans.  I’m v economical with utensils while cooking and keep stuff on the board.  When hubby cooks there is flour all over every surface, oil splattered everywhere and various cooked/raw juices of things spilt on the worktops and floor.

Summary of the day:  Work, Tidying, Knackered!

Oh dear.  I had a telecon planned with someone in the US.  I’d talked to some of his colleagues in the same group and they were in Minneapolis so I sent him an email saying if you are in Minneapolis then I will call at 3pm (UK)/ 9am (MN)!  He replies, yes the timings are fine.  I call today at 3pm ….. guess what.  Apparently it’s 7am in the morning, he’s just leaving to go to work in ….. CALIFORNIA!!  wtf?  So after much embarassing grovelling for calling so early I managed to reschedule.  Oh dear.  Worse still I thought I’d better check the other guy we are calling tomorrow (also the same group) and he’s not in MN either, he’s in Pennsylvania!!  So this week we would have had one 2 hrs early and one 1 hr late!!  Good think I checked for tomorrow!  He probably thinks I’m some English fruitcake!

Summary of the day:  Met up with some guy from E.On, Prepped for the interview, Rang up, Rescheduled!!  Came home to find hubby had made a Chicken Chasseur from scratch (me thinks he’s been pretending he can’t cook so that I do it, as it was very tasty indeed).

Today was a nice day at work as there was absolutely nothing in my diary, which meant I actually got loads done in the morning.  Shortly after lunch the builders came in.  I work in a large open plan office (think there’s prob about 40-50 people) and at either end of the office there are enclosed offices partioned off.  It was decided by the powers that be that two of the offices should be amalgamated, so in came the builders and much destruction, banging, drilling and general mayhem ensued.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t sit 2 desks away.  By 2.30 I had a killer headache and by 3pm I had given up and come home to work instead.  Good grief, I don’t know how the others managed to stay at work (maybe because my boss is flexible about our work hours - as long as we get the work done it’s fine, whereas everyone else has to actually book hours).

Summary of the day: Work, Did loads of work, Had my packed lunch (me trying to be good and not go eat chips at canteen), Coughed and coughed (I think I have a chest infection going by all the nasty chuggy stuff coming up), Got fed up of the noise, Retreated home, Made pizza for dinner and had homemade waffles for dessert.

It was the last day of term today.  I was sitting with a colleague at work and we were discussing how next week would be good at work as it’ll be nice and quiet and enable us to get some real work done (the last 2 months have been all about student meetings and setting up a case study, sadly my research has not progressed at all).  Over the next couple of days the students will leave town and it’ll be nice and serene again.  Doesn’t seem that long ago since I was an UG student (well it’s 6 years since I was in my final year), time flies fast!

Summary of the day: Work, Tried to arrange interview days with case study participants (all their availabilities have changed and it’s a right headache for me), Had a nice hot Cornish pasty for lunch (yum, it was soooo cold outside today), Tidied house, Went to get some cash out only to find some already in my wallet (wtf?), Went to a meeting with students in the evening, Got takeaway on way home (couldn’t eat much of it as it was terribly salty) 

Hurray the building work is finally done.  And just in the nick of time as it’s been raining - which is good as it’s making the brick dust go away.  The scaffolding disappeared while I went to work and I came home to something resembling home again.   The flowerbed is back to normal and the flowers are now different colours (rather than all brick coloured petals).  The dust is still there and I imagine by the end of the week we’ll have got most of it.

Bad news to go with the good news (life in equilibrium, etc, etc) - I got an email from the case officer this morning (we’re applying to emigrate to Oz) saying that our police checks and medicals receipt haven’t been received.  WTF I sent them on Fri 19th October.  They responded that I needed to send them all separately on different emails so I did that on Mon 22nd, now one week later they’ve disappeared.  So have sent them yet again.  Very stressful, just when you think you’ve done it all, something else happens.  Hopefully this is it now and we are just waiting for a decision.

Summary of the day:  Went to work, Had a meeting which no one attending could remember why it was called (yes, totally pointless!!), Wrote up minutes from useless meeting, Wondered where our email scans have got to, Had leftover roast chicken salad for lunch, Had a student meeting in the afternoon (I seem to be forever meeting students lately), Photoshopped something for a joke, Played piano

Lately I’ve been having strange dreams involving people I know.  The weird thing is that I remember them seeming so real.  So in the past month these are the dreams I can vaguely remember:

- Running to catch a bus with an ex housemate, catching the bus and riding on the top floor (double decker)
- Sitting in a court room as a spectator with one of my gal pals. The judge is Zeus and he leaves the court through the roof and then flying across a large number of fields dragging the ground like a tablecloth bunching up and dragging it into the sea (WTF??)
- Going to a flower show, getting train somewhere and meeting an ex colleague with two australian friends on the train
- Sitting on a plane where the seats could all swivel round.

Very strange dreams, involving some mode of transport. Wonder what it all means.

Summary of the day: Played piano in church, Went suit shopping for Johnlet, Went to Rachy & Lou’s for Sunday dinner, Played scrabble, Did some reading (work, not recreational)

So I’ve been a happy internet banker for the last ten years.  Randomly last week my account details weren’t being accepted (strange as I use a money manager hence know that the details entered hadn’t change).  So I re-register in case it’s randomly forgotten (on 3 of my different computers).  5 days later the new details come and they don’t work either.  Telephone banking doesn’t work either.  Spend 30 mins on the phone this morning and can’t get through the security check (answered 5 questions, then was stumped by the last question about the month and year the account was opened - who can remember that after such a long time?).  I was seriously beginning to think that my account had been hacked so went down to the bank.  All they told me was that I must be entering the details in wrong, and that I have to re-register again tomorrow!  Apparently when the new details come you can’t actually use them till 7 days after you register (as opposed to what it says on the letter which says it will work that day).  Thankfully the accounts seem to be intact as there’s no transactions that shouldn’t be there.  Phew.   Had forgotten the total convenience of remote banking - how did we cope before phone and internet banking?

Summary of the day: Went to work, Had meetings, Got stressed and went to the bank, Rewrote a magazine article, Went to archery (form a bit pants, but nice to be back shooting)

I’m usually a very easy going person, who will help others as much as I can.  Why is it that sometimes people just take the piss and expect you to jump?  I don’t often get very pissed off, but today I am feeling totally used.  People expect you to go out of your way to do things for them, and you have plenty of other things to stress you out to do with your time, yet because you’re such a mug you want to help them and you make time.  I don’t think people realise just how annoying it is, or perhaps they just think I have nothing better to do then to pander to their every need and wait around.  Grr!!

Summary of the day:  Went to work, rewrote a presentation, came home early to get software loaded onto home laptop (need to bring home laptop in for a meeting because work laptop still hasn’t been fixed since nuking itself 20 days ago), fight with Vista (it seems to think it’s acceptable to take 6hrs unzipping a 120MB file), download 7-zip instead (great bit of software and best of all free, unzip now takes all of 2 mins), blitzed house, made wontons for dinner.