So my wireless has crashed in a minute meaning I will have to get up and go downstairs to connect by WIRE into the modem - sheesh!  The hardship.  This is of course assuming that the internet has not died in some massive cosmic joke.

Upload post and then I was logging off anyway.  I have so much Scout work to do before the committee meeting tomorrow.  I will not let the website nonsense drag on another month.  I will not and can not.  Posters, flyers, letters and certificates.
And I can’t find my list of passwords!  Yes, I wrote them down.  On a bit of paper no less.

Sigh.  Anyone else fancy taking over my life tomorrow?  Seriously, then I get some shut eye.  I was awake all day today - all day!  How the hell did I used to do this?  That’s right - coffee.

Oh damn it, now I’m just too tired to bother.  I have bits of time tomorrow so sleep now and awake all… whatsitcalled? Awake and refreshed and ready to type like a mad fool.

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I just know I’m going to be unable to get to sleep now!

No, surprisingly I’m not going to talk about the new Aaron Sorkin project.  I am holding my virtual breath with anticipation but right now it’s a hand up and ‘No comment’… with a side of ‘Oh no’ and a pondering about whether or not this is the project in which I lose all respect for him.

Was out of bed very early, for me, today.  At around 6:30 I rose, put the kettle on and fed the cat (mostly to shut her up as she was performing her version of… something painfully loud and operatic… possibly by Wagner.) A cup of fruit tea with Mum and watching news in a trance gave me a time loss of about two hours and then came the panic getting dressed for the Scout’s electrician who was bring round the paperwork we needed. Lovely.

He left and about 10 minutes later I was asleep.  Yes, it was one of those days.

Waking at around 4:30 this afternoon I came to the realisation that I am never going to get things finished if I don’t stay awake and such have come to bed early this evening in a vague attempt to… y’know… be productive and normal tomorrow. Don’t laugh.  I almost kind of mean it.

The funny thing is that was two hours ago and I have just blathered about reading news and blogs and talking to people on MSN that I…well damn it, I’m awake now.

Productivity is a dream.

Of course, though, as soon as I buy a gift for anyone I have second, third and fourth thoughts about it… and then I start to panic about it.  That happened last night… but to be honest it was too late to… y’know?

LUCKILY, he loved it and now, forever, we have a goto gift… so that’s one less thing to stress about.

SO, I was awake long enough to give him his gift this moring before he went to work… and then I got up again about 4:30 this afternoon. I get the feeling that this may be the way things are going to be all weekend (tomorrow I have to be up early for Scout things and then on Sunday sorting out another PC with a virus and have to be up for Dad’s birthday meal… oh and then another early morning Monday.  Oh fun.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Dad - big one next year!

Today was a day I wish I was different.  Really different.  Like the person across the road.  It wasn’t a ‘bad’ day or anything - it just felt like a day which is going to continue forever.

Yes, this is a bleurghy post and I’m sorry.

While I write this I am frantically searching for  something amusing to end the post with…  but the world is failing me.  The only news I’ve really seen today has been the C-Span DNC coverage on BBC Parliament for about 10 minutes.  I turned over to my news channel of choice (yes, I am a BBC whore) and saw Hillary being jostled while acclaiming (is that right?) Obama to be the nominee - how does that work then?  I know - go google it.  The rest of the news that interested me was the huge and pretty stage Obama will be making his speech from and that nonsense about the ‘disapeared’ millionaire that owes huge wads of cash to everyone and who’s house has burned down.  Oh.  I wonder what happened?

Local news had the World Firefighters Games on for a little bit (loved the New York firefighter that called Liverpool FC ‘Merseyside’ - not really funny - just tickled me a bit.)  Yes, it was a very very very slow news day.

I applied for many more jobs.  Hope is becoming an issue.  I think I may be in a call centre for the period up to Christmas.  I am PRAYING there will be data entry positions available… Shall we just say having dealt with customers at Christmas before and having to call them on the day before Christmas Eve to tell them that their orders will not be arriving has given me an aversion to doing that ever again.

I have lots of ideas in my head about how to kick start my life but finding the energy is awfully hard.  I had to be up this morning and was trying to be awake all day but even after mainlining coffee I still had to have a nap for a couple of hours this afternoon… 5 more weeks until the ‘cortizone’ blood test…

Okay, so not amusing but awwwww… A baby Giant Panda was born on Tuesday at Oji Zoo in Kobe, Japan.  It is the first to be born following successful artificial insemination.  That’s hope for the species right there.

And it’s already got squeaking like a mad thing down perfectly!

My internet is bouncing up and down like a yoyo and it’s not fair because I just want to post this and go to sleep. And it’s not long!  Amusing thing of the day:

This bloke wants to use ‘Lloyds is pants’ as his banking password (Yes Lloyds TSB is the bank of choice) and an ‘enterprising’ customer service advisor changed it to ‘No its not’.  When the guy complained he was told he could change it but not to the pants comment or even his second choice ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ or the third ‘Barclays is better’ (the correct answer to that is ‘No its not’).  It had to be one word (so he chose ‘censorship’) but that wasn’t it either - it had to be no more than six letters.

What kind of rubbish password is that?  When most websites recommend no less than 8 letters and a capital letter in there somewhere and a mixture of letters and numbers - but over the phone it’s a one word six letter password?!

Customers of Lloyds!  Leave!  Now!  Run for the hills!

Except for your current one (obviously) has anyone used any amusing passwords in the past and had trouble with them?  I, for one, remember being told I couldn’t have Algernon (which was the name of my imaginary dragon friend as a kid) because they weren’t allowed to take made up words. Yes.  I left that bank.

It was a bit of an odd day.

Petty annoyances and waiting for things that only happened after I went out.

Further doctors appointments (about the tiredness) and more referrals - this time to a counsellor for an assessment to see if I am suitable for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This could take months to even get on the program so is not helping my immediate not being awake for most of the hours of the day… but  who knows?

The best part of my day was spent talking to a kid I used to babysit for.  She recently passed her A-Levels (4 A’s and a B - yes, she rocks) and is going to uni in four weeks time.  She describes her feeling as 10% excited, 90% scared… I miss that feeling.

Going to uni was one of the best decisions I ever made, but for the worse reasons.  I was looking for an escape at the time and doing the thing I thought I should do.  It lead to me finding out a lot about myself and deepening mysteries that I still will never get to the bottom of.

I learned exactly how much Tequila I can drink before my legs go numb, and the answer to why I should never dance on tables.  I learned to avoid men with scary eyes and I learned to always make sure there is at least one other person in the computer rooms so that if you fall asleep while working at 3 in the morning they will wake you as opposed to the class arriving at 9.

One thing I didn’t learn, to my eternal detriment, was how to buckle down and work while coping with the emotional crisis of the day.  It’s ridiculous how much I used to get off on the drama drama whereas now I will do anything to avoid it.  I want a little boring in my life now; and, I think, had I had it then I would have finished my degree and be… a little more successful now.  A little less crap.

It’s been a hard week trying to find jobs and getting rejected over and over.  And it’s all because of the tiredness… and the mistakes of the past.  Yes, this is me being self-involved.  What a surprise.

When is someone going to invent that damn time machine?

Oh holy God, today sucked.

Biggest problem of today? The TV.  Or maybe it was just the rubbish being chosen by my family.  It was so bad I went and sat outside in the increasing wind to get away from it.  Location Location Location followed by Ground Force followed by some awful cheesy kid film followed by old Poirot and then more freakin’ Ground Force.

It got so bad I told my brother I would have a look at his laptop which had been running a ‘little slowly’.  10 minutes after turning the evil thing on Windows finally loaded… with a huge number of ‘antivirus’ programs.  All of which had viruses and adware and you name it attached.  Turns out my darling baby 23 year old brother had switched off and disabled his antivirus software after a scan started making a game he was playing run a little slowly… and that was a week ago… oh, and he hadn’t downloaded any updates for it in a couple of months!

Then the damn thing started BSOD-ing and that was me left with two choices: -

• Throw the damn thing out of a window
• Wipe and start again.

Because I knew he would be quite pissed off if I threw it I grabbed the recovery disk and loaded everything back up. Luckilly he is good at keeping his files of flash drives so the only thing he was going to lose was his music… At this I would be crying my eys out proclaiming the end of the world, he wasn’t bothered - walking away with a ‘I’ll just transfer your iTunes library to my computer.’

And by ‘I’ll…’ he meant, ‘You, sister, will do it becasue you are quite the mug.’

And the stick he gave me to do it with?  512Mb.  Yeah, it took some time!

My reward for transferring at 16 Gig this way?  An episode of American Chopper (the best thing on) and a piece of my Mum’s chocolate cake.

The cake was particularly tasty as, other than a tiny bit of dinner, this was the first thing I had eaten all day - new thing - not hungry.  Which can only help the losing of weight!

But I made my brother take the oath to never switch off his antivirus again…  He, taking the easy way out, has started looking at the Apple Store.  So in his head,right now is a small fight - Sony Vaio vs MacBook.  Easy for me but as he said, James Bond uses a Vaio…

How many other people are going to use this title today?  I never claimed to be original.

Anyway, as a Brit I just wanted to clarify a few things.

• It doesn’t always rain in London so umbrellas are not carried around by everyone at all times
• We don’t all cross the road on zebra crossings all the time
• Our red buses do not turn in topiary versions of London
• Jimmy Page does indeed rock
• We have far better singers than Leona Lewis and we are sorry for inflicting her and her like on the world.
• Oh, and Boris Johnson rocks. (Thank God it was him, and not tosspot Ken Livingstone, who is the mayor of London now)

Thank God we seem to have sorted out which logo we are using now - this Union Jack version is soooooo much better than the unholy crapola that was the pink one.  Yes, I may be changing my mind on the logo.  Yes, I can change my mind if I want to.

Oh, another point.

• We do have other famous people than David Beckham
• As proved by our 19 Golds, we do have other sports in this country than football.

Actually the football thing in the Handover was kinda funny as our English football team is appallingly bad at the moment… but hopefully there will be a Team GB Football Team at London.

I am getting ridiculously excited about 2012, and really hope I get to volunteer at the event.

That’s how I feel right now.  Side effects have kicked in.  I have been awake for two hours today and most of those I was dozing for.  Barely moving and unable to concentrate.  Feeling like large crap.  Ate some strawberries and that was it.

At least I’m going to lose weight this way!  Now I go back to sleep.

When I finally arrived at the hospital (after the damned bus didn’t show up) I felt sick to my stomach, memories of the last time I was here flashing through my head like a ‘Previously on Hospital Visits From Hell’ - the humiliation and the sense of powerlessness.  I felt like running, but the empty waiting room was like a cage keeping me there. I should have taken someone with me - how on earth did I think I was strong enough to face up to a doctor and, yep, I forgot all the research I had done the night before so I wasn’t even armed with knowledge.  I would sit and be lectured to and babble like an idiot.  Why was one type of pill better than the other?  Why was one hormone not to gone near?  Why didn’t I bring my Mac with me?

Right outside the door of the waiting room was a vending machine full of Coke.  That would settle my raging stomach.  That would help.  Should have eaten something before I came out.  I moved to stand up to get caffeine and sugar and that was when the nurse appeared to weigh me (oh fun). And that was today’s first surprise! I have lost 1 and a half stone in 4 months.  Yeah baby! And I have apparently grown an inch as well.  Fun.

She left me in the exam room for a moment and then I was called in to see the Doctor. Second pleasant surprise - he wasn’t the guy I saw last time!  And this one listened!  I now feel a little bit more confident about things if still a little apprehensive about what will happen with the pills.  I have blood tests to make sure they are not turning my body into, I don’t know, slush.  I am starting off slowly… he will not be putting me on the bad hormones that made me crazy…

While I was waiting at the pharmacy drinking a bad bad cappuccino things started to race.  The blood tests will also include Cortizone levels and a glucose test.  More things to google and stress about… but could this be the thing that leads to me being able to ‘get up and go’?

Today was a real step one.