First World Problems

Our cleaning lady at the office is a total disaster.  She’s only been with us for about 2 months, but it has gotten so bad that I dread Wednesdays, the day that she comes to clean our office.  She cleans very well, that is not the problem.  What gets to me is that she is totally careless and makes me think of a bull in a china shop.

She has hit me on the head with the mop handle, not once, but twice already!  And she has this habit of totally rearranging your desk in such a way that you yourself isn’t quite sure where everything went to begin with.  She also waits for you to come back from lunch / the loo / the shops before cleaning your desk, when she could have done it while we were out.  When you ask her to leave your desk, because you are too busy, she will stand right by your chair until you eventually get up, and then start cleaning and rearranging it.  It is so frustrating!

She’s so rough that she manages to unplug power cables from computers and telephone cables from the wall while she is sweeping, but the worst habit she has is that she wipes our chairs.  She takes a dripping wet cloth and completely soaks the seat of the chairs.  And every single week we have to tell her not to wash the chairs and if you forget, you walk around with a wet ass for the next couple of hours.

She just doesn’t seem to listen or understand, and every week we have to ask her not to do the same things over and over again and she just does not get it.

Weekend inspiration and surprises

And in the blink of an eye, yet another weekend had come and gone.

I had a rather uneventful weekend, which is just what the doctor ordered.  I absolutely love going home, especially when my uncle is quite normal again and when there isn’t anybody else visiting either.  These two conditions seem to go hand in hand lately, so I ingeniously arranged a way to secure my next 4 visits  to be, just me, my dad, the uncle and my sister.   We were watching Come Dine With Me before lunch today and talking about the food they were making and yours truly, had the inspired idea of starting a Come Dine With Me; Farm Edition.  Surprisingly, this idea was met with no resistance, not even from the always otherwise sister.

So over the next four months, we will each take turns in making a lunch every month.  I still have to work out the rules and see how it’s going to work as we will score the meals and have a prize for the winner.  As this was the first time I’ve ever seen Come Dine With Me, I’m not entirely sure what it entails, so some research will have to be done.  As the first lunch will be made by me, on the 11th of March, there isn’t that much time to work out the details.  I’m quite excited.

The most surprising bit of the weekend was our one cat who kept bringing me little surprises the whole weekend.  She was bitten by a snake about 2 weeks ago and have been at the vet until Thursday.  I guess she is so happy to be alive and back home again, she couldn’t help but show her gratitude;  I woke up Saturday morning with pieces of rat all over my bathroom, by far the worst “gift” of the weekend.  Saturday night she brought a live bat into my bedroom and sat meowing on the bed as the bat flew around and around the ceiling until my dad finally caught it and let it out and Sunday morning I was greeted by a dead mouse lying next to the bed.  Cats are the weirdest creatures, but it was impossible to be angry at a meowing face that looks so proud of her little gifts.

Finally, it’s Friday

It’s been a really long week for me, and I am so happy it’s finally Friday.  I have been very tired this whole week.  No matter what I try (except getting really drunk, which only happens over weekends when I do actually decide to go out) I am still not able to sleep properly in my new place.  Combined with the very noisy and rude neighbours, incessantly barking dogs, the noise of the trains (even though the landlord told me you can’t hear it in the house before I moved in) and the weird noises of the house itself I am just not sleeping properly and the fatigue is really starting to get to me.

On top of that I had this total unwillingness to come to work.  I basically had to drag my body out the door while my mind kept wanting to stay in bed in the mornings.  Nothing major has happened work-wise and it has been a relatively quiet week for me, but I just did not want to do the whole job-thing this week.  If only I could make my own hours, or even better, work from home.  In my bed.  In pajamas.

I’m going home for the weekend.   Well, actually I’m going to my dad’s, but it will always be home for me.  This weekend is going to be spend relaxing, drinking wine and sleeping late.  Actually, just sleeping will be fine by me.  And then, hopefully, next week will be better again.

How did this happen?

Die Antwoord has been around for a while now, and even though I always got the chorus of Enter The Ninja stuck in my head whenever I heard it on radio, they were easy to ignore.

I, I, I
I am your butterfly
I need your protection
Be my samurai

To be honest, Die Antwoord just didn’t fit into my idea of music.  And for someone like me, who is completely open to some weirdness (that’s what makes life interesting after all), they were just too weird and zef and horrible.  And while we’re talking about weird, zef and horrible, what the hell is up with Yolandi’s hair?!

On Monday I read this article about Die Antwoord’s latest CD, Tension with a link to their new single I Fink U Freeky.  I watched it.  It was weird.  I listened and it was interesting.  So I listened to it a couple more times and to my absolutely unsuspecting horror, I realised that I actually liked it.  This led to me listening to a couple of their other songs, eventually downloading quite a few songs and I have been listening to Die Antwoord, every day since!

If you are interested, give I Fink You Freeky a listen over here.

Sellevision

I recently read my first Augusten Burroughs novel, Sellevision.  Ever since watching Running with Scissors, I have wanted to read the book but have never really seen it in book shops.  As I was wondering through the shelves of a second hand book shop, I suddenly found an Augusten Burroughs novel.  It wasn’t exactly Running with Scissors, but at R30 for a book that still looked brand new and un-read, I decided to buy Sellevision.

It was one of the strangest books I’ve ever read and left me going WTF at the end.

*Warning – This post contains spoilers*

The book is about 4 people who are all hosts on a home shopping channel and how each of them have something happen to them that they have to deal with.  Firstly, there’s Bebe, who is a forty-something single woman, who has a shopping and hoarding problem and then meets a man over the internet.  Then there’s Leigh who is dating her boss, who’s married to someone else.  But when she finally realises that he will never leave his wife for her, she publicly outs him on the shopping channel.

The other 2 characters, were much funnier and weird and their stories are a lot more interesting.     We have Max, who accidentally exposed himself on air during a show for kids.  He then gets fired and cannot find other work as the “penis incident’ was just too huge a scandal and nobody would employ him.  Except of course, the porn industry.    Then we have Peggy Jean, the most popular host of Sellevision.  She is highly religious, but very conceited.  Her character was by far my favourite;  She gets a stalker, develops a drug and alcohol dependency to deal with it and gets moved off to rehab by her husband.  Stalker turned out to be her son, and her husband ended up running away with a 15 year old girl.

I ultimately enjoyed the read, but just as all these characters were getting to grips with their problems, the book abruptly skips to 1 year later and everything is sorted out.  It just felt like a big chunk of the book was missing.  I hope his other books are better, because I most definitely still want to read Running with Scissors.

Some ramblings

At the end of the first month of 2012 I am feeling a bit up and down, hot and cold and inside out.  I seem to be struggling with my focus and I start one thing only to drop it and move onto the next thing, leaving a wake of unfinished clutter all around me.

This weekend was a little bit of a best-of-both-worlds kind of weekend.  I went out on Friday and Saturday nights, had a lot of fun, a lot of drinks and a lot of laughs and then spent Saturday and Sunday at home in pajamas without even opening the curtains.  It was a perfect time warp and spending the days watching Gossip Girl and reading, was a perfect balance to the busy nights.

I’m still not really in the mood for socialising, but having moved so far away from my friends and my favourite spots, means I have to make a bit more of an effort to go out or I might just turn into a hermit!  Plus with the extra pressure I have put on myself with my studies, I will probably not be going out much anyways, and the fact that I am still waiting on my Unisa study material is making me a bit anxious.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately and have decided it’s because my bedroom is all wrong.  So yesterday I’ve moved my bed around and I feel much more settled and relaxed this way. I have so many craft ideas for doing up my room, but with my current start and stop attitude, I don’t think now is the best time to start all that, so it will have to wait a little while longer.

The Week That Was

This week just flew by, and it is with a sad heart that work has basically returned to normal.  Soon, the relaxed atmosphere of December will be all but forgotten.  Our head office is also showing us just how much they value us, by responding that they will only consider an increase for us if they fire our driver.  Firstly, we haven’t had increases in 2 years and secondly, 2 people have just resigned after being on unpaid maternity leave for the last 5 months, and now they are basically refusing to give us increases even though we have been working like maniacs the last 5 months and are expected to carry on until the end of June, before a third consultant will be moved to our branch.

I have also finally registered for the new semester at Unisa, and in my madness I accidentally registered for 7 subjects when all I wanted to take was 5.  God alone knows how that happened, but I guess I will just have to work my ass off this semester seeing that the universe decided that I need to do this.  I was hoping to have received my study material before the weekend, just so I can see what I have gotten myself into, but alas, it will hopefully arrive early next week.

I have also set up an appointment with an insurance broker for next week to try and sort out the issues I have been having with my medical aid.  I have been finding that I am paying for things that I thought was covered by my aid and with the amount of money I spend on my medical aid every month, these things should surely be paid for by them.

The best news of all is that I received a call from Vodacom, who upgraded my cellphone contract for me telephonically.  I am getting the new BlackBerry Curve 9360 along with some great discounts on my call rates and my subscription fees.  I should get my new phone on Monday, I can hardly wait.

This seems to be the year for growing up and getting my act together.  It might just be a good thing, as long as I don’t forget to keep having fun and smell the flowers along the way, though I would much prefer the Peter Pan lifestyle forever.

If you had the attention of the entire world for two minutes, what would you say?

If I had the world’s attention for 2 minutes I would tell them to “Get off your arses and save our Rhinos!”

This issue really gets my blood boiling!  I just cannot believe the way that humans are eliminating a whole entire species, because there are retarded idiots who think that rhino horn is some magical muti and that some money grabbing fuckers are willing to brutally slaughter these amazing creatures to fuel this insanity!  It’s in situations like this that I really do wish there is a hell and that all these mutants have a fiercely hot and horrendous place specially reserved for them where they will be tortured over and over again for all eternity.

Oh, and the blood of rhino poachers cure aids.

Interesting messages

Lately my uncle has gotten into the habit of sending random late night messages.  Normally he just shits me out about whatever he thinks up at the specific moment, but I received he sent the following message at 00:47:

Message from Uncle:  The gun is in that airplane model?

Me, slightly freaked out and wondering what airplane model he is referring to and why he feels the need to tell me about where a gun is hidden:  Uhm, what airplane model?  And even more disturbingly, what gun???

Uncle’s reply:  Fracture! I stopped the video so am dying to know, but I think he switched the cop gun

And finally, realization dawns;  I lent them the DVD, Fracture (with Anthony Hopkins)

Me:  Ah, for a seccie there, I thought you are losing your marbles

Uncle’s reply: YOU WILL GET A SMACK!

Crazy messages, just some of the things that make my family so special

Is this the date?

It was with quite a shock that I realised that we are half-way through January already.  It seems that 2012 is planning on going by just as fast as its predecessor.  I’m not sure if that is such a good thing.

Anyway, it is high time, I finalised my to-do list for 2012, and even though it isn’t a long one, I have definitely set some serious challenges for myself and have some old favourites from previous year back on here.  I swear, this year that credit card is being paid off for sure!

Now that the easy part is done, it is time to start ticking some of those things off my To-Do List for 2012.