I am just back today after two days off (Wednesday and Thursday), and I have the same time off next week apparently. A shame I'm not off on Tuesday, as I would have liked to have gone to my friend Matt's place for what is called First Tuesday Songwriting Group, but sadly it is not to be, yet again. Perhaps I should mention it to work, but then perhaps they would drop my hours for making "such an outrageous suggestion!" You never know, but I am scared to suggest it for that very reason.
During the couple of days off there were a few bits done around the flat, but we basically stayed in. Both day's dinners were variations of salad, both consisting of prawns and some sort of fish - salmon on Wednesday and Mackerel on Thursday. Tonight at work I have brought a hotpot with me (Morrison's meat free range has some great choice - other supermarkets are available if you so wish).
Al this time we have lived in Newark, we have been looking forward to ASDA opening, and yet we have still yet to shop there properly. I guess that has something to do with an incident during Christmas.
We bought a present for Louise's dad and then found out that someone else had already got it for him, so we thought we could just take it back and get our money back. That was not to be. We went there to actually do our weekly shop and thought that we would go to Customer Services first with the DVD to get the money back. The woman behind the counter said to us, "I'm sorry but our policy has changed where we no longer give refunds to customers for Entertainment items, and you have to exchange them for an item or items that equal that price or higher." If truth be told, it was actually a few days after Christmas, which is why when we bought the DVD it was around £15, but now all the DVD's they had were on sale, so were a few pounds each, and not a bloody good selection either I'll tell you!
We must have spent the next hour and a half looking for items in the Entertainment section to make up that amount of money, eventually settling on three sale DVD's (none of which I would have got otherwise), and a pack of blank DVD's. After that we couldn't do the full shop because I was leaving for work at 8 o'clock and it was now just after 7. We would have to rush to get things ready for me leaving for that night shift, and had to wait a further five days to do the full shop, which we did at Morrison's (and Aldi). We have sort of avoided the place since.
There is also the fact that with the amount of space they were given to build on, it is a small supermarket. Incredibly so!!! Because of that place the new bus station is around half the size of the old bus station that was pulled down, and we have lost an enormous car park that so many people used when they came to Newark, which means that the town centre isn't getting as much trade as it used to. Not too long ago, Newark was somewhere that was well known for it's market, but now it is more known for it's expensive parking costs, drunks all over the place, and the occasional sight of people urinating in the church grounds because they can't be bothered to use the free toilets that are in the plethora of public houses in the centre of town, never mind the twenty pence toilets just off the market place that boasts a touch screen television that brings up useful tourist information and the like - hey, way to go on spending our council tax on something useful there!
Before anybody suddenly speaks up telling me to leave Newark if I don't like it, I will let you know that I still love Newark very much, but there are just a few niggles, just like people are niggled by things all over the place.
Thursday we were going to go out, but we couldn't go to visit who we wanted to because they would be out until 3 in the afternoon. Unfortunately this would mean either going to somewhere else on the way there and spending money that we can't really afford to, or staying at home because at midday the stairwell was painted, meaning that they couldn't be used for the five hours it would take for the paint to dry - bare concrete stairs you see.
So we decided to stay in and watch some things while doing some jobs. We actually only watched a couple of things, because the jobs took longer than expected. My jobs included wading through paperwork, receipts, and all sorts like that. Doesn't sound like much, but whittling three boxes of stuff down to two is actually quite something I can tell you, especially with all of the boxes that we have! It is no exaggeration to say that when we moved in, we lost three quarters of the living room, a quarter of the bedroom, and three quarters of the kitchen to boxes. A situation that has changed very little since. That's what happens when two people move in together for the first time - they each have stuff, and in our case we were basically moving two flats' worth of things into one flat! I have done a lot of sorting of things, having sold probably about 50% of my DVD collection to start with, and now I am looking at my CD collection in the same way, which is frightening because I have spent a long time getting that together, and there are so many that I would rather not get rid of, but there is just no room for a few thousand CD's. If you think that is an exaggeration it isn't. At one time I bought CD's in a way just to get more CD's, so some of those that I have are a no-brainer for me to get rid of - Spice Girls, Girls Aloud (although Louise may argue about the latter), and that sort of thing.
Some though I would not be happy about - Alice In Chains, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Pantera - you get the picture. Louise doesn't like heavy metal anyway, so the fact that we don't have our own space in the flat means that those CD's would never get played anyway (except for when she is out and I am on my own, but then Titus the fish doesn't like Heavy Metal either - outvoted you see).
The sooner we get somewhere else the better, but then you have to find the money all over again to put down a deposit, month's rent in advance, and what they call an Administration Charge - Administration Charge!!! Don't they get enough flaming money already without all of that as well??? You can't just go and look for somewhere and move in now like you used to, there are hoops to jump through, checks made, and money required that takes years to save up - even if you're renting! More ridiculousness!
Sorry, I'm ranting here and never intended to.
I was actually going to write about two films that we ended up watching on Thursday while we were doing bits around the flat. Well, actually we watched them afterwards.
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| Sid James and Terry Scott - Bless This House |
First of all Louise said that she fancied a good comedy, so I put on the Sid James film Bless This House, which was a really good laugh. There were the classic British comedy people there in the shape of Sid James, Peter Butterworth, Terry Scott, June Whitfield, Robin Askwith, and more (even a small role for Wendy Richards as a waitress in the diner).
The second film we watched was the film In Time, which we have wanted to watch for a while. Now I am very much a fan of Science Fiction as many people know, and finding one that Louise is interested in is very much a job in itself. I knew the idea behind this film for a long while, being an avid reader of SFX and Sci-Fi Now (admittedly more the former because it's rare that I can afford more than one magazine per month). The idea seemed similar to Logan's Run in a way, but here the idea of buying time was sort of intriguing. I knew that it could be either good or bad.
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| Timberlake and Seyfried - In Time |
Thankfully I found it to be the latter, and in fact thought it was really good. Justin Timberlake was better in it than I thought he would be. I like his music, but have seen many musicians/singers who make terrible actors. It was also good to see Vincent Kartheiser in it, as I recognised him as Connor from the television series Angel (and Louise recognised him as somebody in Mad Men (Pete Campbell) - a show she is irritated by because she watched it avidly and then it was moved to SKY, which we don't get (I can't afford it unfortunately, and I really miss it too I'll tell you that for nothing). I could download it, but that would be illegal. I wish that in some ways these people who sell the programmes would think, "now which station would most people be able to watch it on?" Instead though they are probably thinking, "which station will pay us the most money for this?" That way probably causes more people to download illegally.
We started watching a programme on Channel 4 I think it is that is called New Girl starring Zooey Deschanel, but even though it is still being shown in the US, they have stopped showing it over here, and I don't even know why they've stopped showing it over here. Have the makers decided to sell it off to the highest bidder again? I suppose that we have to watch this space, or indeed not because it has gone into the SKY, then we most definitely won't be viewing it. Not at their prices!
Anyway, that is much more than I was intending to say and, so many subjects that I wasn't intending to discuss as well. I'd better get the rest of this shift done now then, and leave it there. Oh well, it is called Ramblings of a 40 Something, and this blog is exactly that!
Thank you for reading and please take care.
April 27 2012 (40 years, 5 months, and 1 day old).
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