July 3, 2009 at 12:47 · Filed under Daily Life
This was one of the headlines plastered across London yesterday as we suffered in the sweltering heat.
It’s true that the tube is unbearable. On the way home yesterday I thought I was really lucky. As I hit the bottom of the escalator there was a train in the station. I jumped on and managed to grab myself a seat only for it to sit there for ten minutes before moving. Of course, if I’d been lucky, I would’ve found a seat near one of the windows on the emergency exits at the end of the carriage. Those windows are often the only relief to be found in the sardine cans. But no, I was right next to the door with no window. And it just got hotter and hotter. A few stops later I was lucky – one of the seats near the door became free and I dived for it. It seems Victoria Line trains actually have fans, and if you’re careful enough to sit on certain seats, you might just get a lucky blast of warm air. Still, air movement’s better than hot, still air and a little goes a long way in this heat.
For the most part I’m lucky with my regular journey to and from work. Yes, the Northern line is one of the deepest in the capital and therefore one of the hottest, but it does have those blessed open windows and aside from travelling through the middle of the city, it’s not too packed. Having learnt my journey well, I know when I can get a seat and sitting is nowhere near as bad as standing in the crush at this time of year.
And this was the headline greeting Londoners on this morning’s Metro. I’ve experienced this. It’s the same every summer and last night when I hopped on a bus that heater was blasting on my legs. All you can think is “Help! My legs are on fire!” Next time I’ll remember that if I can walk it, that’s got to be the better option. It’s really no good when it’s colder outside the bus in a heatwave, than it is inside.
Of course you may just think I’m complaining about nothing. 31°C isn’t that high, really. Well give me 31°C in Brasil over London anyday. The problem with the heat here isn’t that it’s hot, but the muggy stickiness that comes with it. The heat hangs thick in the air like clouds that weigh down on your shoulders. Sure, the sunshine is great but there’s nothing nice about a London heatwave. It’s no wonder we all try to get out of here come summer.
June 30, 2009 at 22:53 · Filed under MEMEs
I totally pinched this one from Jen and Mrs BN, basically cos I have nothing better to say right now. I mean, what could you say when you’re melting in the heat?
Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Bold Strike out the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game, post it!
- You moved like honey in my dream last night Fiona Apple – Slow Like Honey (Beth)
- On the ground with my world upside down I got a vision of your face
- Dive in to a life, fall in to the green, out with my breath, bursting unseen Heather Nova – Follow Me In Grace (Beth)
- I wake up every day, it’s a daydream Dizzee Rascal – Bonkers (Beth)
- Todo dia, toda hora, quando eu pego na viola
- Feel me don’t talk, don’t rush this walk with me along the edge Brie Stoner – Can You Love Me (Urbanvox)
- Você me tem fácil demais mas não parece capaz Paula Toller (Urbanvox)
- Meet you downstairs in the bar and hurt, your rolled up sleeves in your skull t-shirt Amy Winehouse – You Know I’m No Good (Jen)
- It’s been about a year now ain’t seen or heard from you
- The hour has begun, your eyes have now opened
- Baby the harder you work the further you get with me, with me The Saturdays – Work (Jen)
- Feeling weak today, run the risk of tears
- I remember it well, the first time that I saw your head round the door as mine stopped working Damien Rice – I Remember (Urbanvox and Beth)
- Is this for real, this can’t be real, are you for real, I must be dreaming
- What if I wanted to break, laugh it all off in your face, what would you do?
- When the calls of conversations, accidents and accusations
- Vou deixar a vida me levar pra onde ela quiser Skank – Vou Deixar (Urbanvox)
- We are the crowd, we’re c-coming out
- Me sinto tão estranho aqui que mal posso me mexer, irmão Detonautus – O Dia Que Não Terminou (Urbanvox)
- I got a man with two left feet and when he dances not to the beat Alesha Dixon – The Boy Does Nothing (Urbanvox)
I had considered not torturing you with this one as you can see I’ve got rather a few Brasilian songs on my iPod. But hey, I’m not so nice and wonder if even the husband will get half of them.
So get to it then.
June 25, 2009 at 16:51 · Filed under Daily Life
I can remember when recycling collections first came in. I was still living at home and our previous attempts at recycling extended to taking the booze bottles down to the bottle bank. Separate your bottles and breathe in the aroma of stale wine as you listened to them crash to the bottom of the huge bins.
Recycling didn’t go down well in our area. Each house was delivered a second, green wheelie bin and at first all was well and good. You’d chuck whatever in it and once a week, on the same day as your regular bin, you’d haul the thing out to the pavement and wait for it to be emptied. Then the council decided they weren’t going to do that anymore. One week they’d collect the rubbish, the next they’d take the recycling. What were the residents to do? If rubbish was left out for two weeks there’d be rats and fleas, disease and maybe even famine.
The council being the council, they’re still doing things that way now.
But however they collected the recycling, it taught me good lessons. Bottles in the garage until we could take them to the bottle bank, rubbish in the bin, recycling on that corner in the counter and all those vegetable peelings in the bowl on the side which you must take out to the compost bin when it’s full. On pain of death.
Moving out was a different way of life entirely. The local council from our first flat didn’t recycle yet. Brasil was a bit different. Then it was back home, to the recycling dictatorship. When we checked in to the mother in law’s they had a small blue bag for newspapers and magazines. In our next flat, there were no recycling facilities and the one after that had a small sized wheelie bin to cater for over 30 flats. It was that token gesture that said ‘at least you can’t accuse us of not providing facilities’.
Now we’re well off, recycling wise. We have our bin, and two plastic crates for recycling. They’ll take just about anything as long as it’s recyclable. At first I did want to get a compost bin (see all these good habits my mother instilled in me) until numerous people pointed out that I had no need for compost and nowhere to send it once the bin really got going.
Being a Mummy kindly (or is that no so kindly) tagged me for a recycling week challenge. One challenge, five rules:
1. Visit http://www.recyclenow.com/ and sign up to one of the pledges to waste less.
2. Share the details of your pledge on your own blog.
3. Chose five other bloggers, who will also be up for a bit of recycling fun.
4. Come back to this post at The Rubbish Diet and share your pledge with others, by placing a link to your pledge in the comments field.
5. Optional – as a thank you to all involved The Rubbish Diet will be publishing a British Mummy Bloggers’ Recycle Week carnival on Monday 29th June. To be included, simply submit your favourite post revealing the progress of your pledge by Saturday 27th June – email to karen[at]therubbishdiet[dot]co[dot]uk.
I already do quite a few of the things on the list at Recycle Now. My main downfall, however, is carrier bags. I do find them useful to have around the house, but I’m going to make a rather large effort to reuse, at least until my stash has disappeared (because what else would I use for small rubbish bins?). In fact, to make sure I don’t forget, I’m going to put some of my stash in my bag now.
p.s. Consider yourselves tagged!
June 24, 2009 at 11:34 · Filed under FAIL, pregnancy
Yesterday was the 12 week scan.
I left work super early because parking had been so bad last week, only for us to do one lap of the car park and find a nice space in the shade. It left us with some time to kill so we grabbed a coffee (or a flavoured water in my case) and sat out in the sun for a while.
Unlike the last scan, when the baby looked more like a slightly mutated egg yolk, this time the baby actually looked like a baby. There was a head, you could see a moving arm, make out the feet. But the measurements were off. 3.7cm. 9 weeks and 6 days.
It didn’t surprise me in the slightest. At the last scan the sonographer said the baby was smaller than it’s dates. It happened with the boy too; he had his date yet the scans kept saying he was smaller and therefore younger than that date. He still arrived a week and a half before his date.
The trouble is, they can only perform the nuchal scanonce the baby is 4.5cm, which 12 week babies should be. That’s no problem. We’re going back for another scan in 3 weeks. The real problem is (as announced by the sonographer with the words “there is one problem though”) the accompanying blood test has to be done after 9 weeks. By their dating, when I had the test last week, I was 8 weeks and 6 days. One measly day out.
They were good about it though; booking a new appointment there and then and bringing someone up to redo the blood test. This time I was lucky: only on vial and a closed room. But the needle went in and I heard a click. A click rather like the noise an iPhone makes when it’s trying to resemble a camera. Yes. The husband was taking pictures. Of me. With a freaking needle stuck in my arm. And then I thought it was all over and looked down. But that freaking needle was still stuck in my arm. And I felt more than a little sick, although that could be due to the fact that we were stuck right next to the kitchen and it was as good as dinner time by that point. But that, people, is why I definitely don’t be getting an epidural.
The only real annoyance with this, is that the whole thing could’ve been avoided. If, when I first told the doctor about the pregnancy, she’d bothered to ask about my cycle length, then there would’ve been an indication that the scan could be left until later. We’d discussed that the test I’d taken at five weeks was negative so it shouldn’t have been too hard to deduce that the baby is younger than its dates. The letter I produced to the surgery, only a day later, confirmed that the baby was measuring much smaller than the dates. With a little communication in the right direction, the scan could’ve been left until later.
It’s not that I mind having to go back for another scan, or even, now it’s been done, being jabbed with another needle. But you constantly hear so much about how the NHS is understaffed and underfunded. When things like this happen, you don’t have to wonder why.
*Because of the obvious difference in dates. I’m going to stick with the original one, but figure it might also be interesting to see how the second one changes over the coming months.
June 23, 2009 at 10:27 · Filed under Daily Life
I went to the doctors last night for a completely non-pregnancy related issue, but happened to ask if they’d had the results of my blood tests through. It was a bit of a long shot really as I was fairly sure that they would go straight to the midwives and eventually, in a few weeks, make their way across to the surgery.
No, there was nothing on the system. But the doctor opened up internet explorer, typed in a few very basic details (name, date of birth, sex) and up came my entire pathology record. On the plus side, all the tests (including glucose, which was the one I was particularly concerned about) came back fine.
But the negative side is just how easy it could be for someone to access all that data. Pathology was just one tab on that site and it leads you to wonder how much more data about any one person is held there, who can access it, and from where. If the data is on a website, just how secure is it? I noticed that the doctor entered no login or password information and while I assume this was probably saved from previous usage, there is no way for the average person to know that. What if it’s not?
At the end of the day, this website is probably a useful tool, and better that the NHS as a whole has access to my records rather than them being shipped from surgery to hospital every time. Nevertheless, it still leaves me feeling a little uneasy.
June 18, 2009 at 12:12 · Filed under Random Mutterings
The window was open as I lay in bed last night trying to fall asleep. In the distance I could hear trains running down the tracks, rushing through the night air. The train tracks run nearly a mile away.
It reminded me of being home with the parents. How I used to head to the bottom of our garden and sit by the river and listen to the cars passing on the dual carriageway over half a mile away.
Or the summer nights spent in the caravan in Scotland. How even at 11 at night the sky through the skylight was never fully dark and when the tide was in you could hear the waves crashing.
There’s something about the night. The way it wraps itself around everything, drawing you deeping in to its embrace. Everything seems so still, so silent, that you can latch on to sounds so far away. Whilst you sit and wait under a starry sky.
June 17, 2009 at 12:17 · Filed under Daily Life, pregnancy
Yesterday was a day I’d been dreading. It was time for my blood tests.
Now to most people that wouldn’t seem like a problem. But me and needles have this thing. We don’t do well together.
As a teenage, jabs were a nightmare. Our school was also the village leisure centre and they would line us up in the bar to sit on a stool and get jabbed by an uncaring nurse brandishing a needle. It was a production line placed in stinky, sweaty old man land. When it came to the heaf test for the BCG, I refused. There was absolutely no way I was going to let a class of 30 other kids watch whilst some random woman stuck six needles into my arm at once. I assured my mum that the only way it was going to happen was if she took me to get it done elsewhere. She gave in on that part, but refused to drive me almost an hour away to the nearest place to get the test done. The result: if there’s an outbreak of TB now, it’ll probably be my fault.
Last time I was pregnant the midwife told me to do the blood tests at the same time as I had the first scan. It was late in the day by the time the scan had been done and when we arrived for the tests they were already closing. Come back another day they said. But by that point we were caught up in the whirlwind of weddings and immigration and I all too easily pushed it to the back of my mind. We’ll do it when we get to Brasil I said, and much to my delight, the husband agreed.
Of course, by the time we got to Brasilia and got sorted, I was five months pregnant and feeling very smug that I’d avoided the needle for so long. The husband’s aunt put paid to that feeling though. At the crack of dawn one morning she drove me, the husband and P (who just wanted to come along for the ride) up to the hospital in Sobradinho where she worked. I was going to get jabbed.
I sat down, they stood around with me, and that needle went in. I felt sick, tense, breathless and they just couldn’t get any blood. Oh, did I mention that I fainted? In the end they had to stop because it was just one big exercise in futility.
The next time round was a little better. The oral glucose tolerance test. Only marginally better because I was made to lie down and move around as little as possible but it still involved needles and that horrible glucose drink. I’d much prefer lucozade any day. Of course, the results of that test meant weekly finger pricks to test again.
When we were last in Brasil I had more blood tests done. That time round I was smart; I lay down first and gave them plenty of warning of my problems. They took the blood and I was all ready to get up and go. That was, until I sat up and got really dizzy. Yeah, it might have been three years later but obviously I’d not gotten that much better.
And so I’ve avoided needles like the plague.
Until now. I knew this time round there’d be no putting it off, no getting out of it. I’d just have to go and do the tests.
I had an appointment for 3:15. The husband came too (I’d said to hold my hand but I’m sure it was more to make sure I actually went through with it). We drove around the car park for 20 minutes looking for a space to park. I swear it would’ve been easier to find a place at the mall on Christmas Eve. We raced through the door just past 3:15 and filled in the usual forms. I was ready to get this thing over with and hoping to be on my way home by 3:30.
No such luck! Turns out my appointment was to go over all the different tests and make sure they had consent and the like. For the blood tests themselves, I’d just have to take a number and queue like the rest of the world. For the best part of an hour and a half. Right in front of the communal blood drawing room. Yes, that’s right people, this room processed three people at a time on it’s production line, just like being back in the bar at school.
I handed over the forms and the vial that the midwife had given me and tried to get myself prepared when the nurse reached over into a trolley and pulled out another vial, and another, and another and another. At that point I stopped looking; it could’ve been six, not five or even more than that.
The good news was that I didn’t faint or get dizzy and my veins didn’t clam up and refuse to let anything out. The bad news is I’ve still got a whopping great big hole in the crook of my arm.
I hope I don’t have to do it again for a long time.
June 15, 2009 at 15:42 · Filed under Daily Life, pregnancy
As is the danger with my current condition, I will have to keep buying new clothes. It’s a shame really: with the loss of a few pounds and the addition of a few new pieces, I would’ve had quite a nice summer wardrobe. Now, seeing as there’s no way I should be losing pounds and my stomach will only be expanding, I’ll have to completely re-evaluate things. Sure, some things will hopefully last out the summer – things I bought over the spring were bought with possible pregnancy in mind. But, for the most part, I’m going to have to be buying.
And that’s where the problems start.
While I don’t have a problem buying a couple of pairs of black trousers and a few t-shirts in a slightly larger than usual size, you may or may not remember that my office does have a problem with such attire. Yeah, the wonderful no t-shirts rule. I pushed the boundaries last year and wore what could be considered a tank with frilly bits over the sleeves. I chucked it with a skirt and hoped for the best and nobody commented. So my first intended purchase was exactly the same in black. Still hoping for a version in pink because that same skirt lasted me through the last pregnancy so I’m sure it’ll cope with a British summer.
I had a budget. £40. Not much in the world of fashion at the best of times but maternity clothes seem to be twice as expensive as everything else. I guess because it’s just not so easy to mass produce in the manner or Primark, who don’t, but totally should do maternity clthes. We started in Mamas & Papas. They’ve just opened a new store on our local retail park and I’d still not checked it out. Well, after looking at about three price tags we checked right out. No way I was spending the best part of my entire budget on one top.
Next stop: New Look, where I hoped to get quite a few things on the cheap side. No such luck as most seemed to be very casual and definitely unsuitable for work. I tried a few things, but as was the theme with everywhere we went, the didn’t fit. You see, it seems that the ideal maternity top will section off boobs and bump. Nice section for your boobs, tight band underneath, big section for your bump. Lovely if you’ve got regular sized boobs. Not so lovely if you’ve got two massive boulders stuck on your front. You guessed it! Every single top of that style cuts straight across the bust giving me that attractive four boobed look.
Still, I did manage to get one top, although it’s so long it could also be used as a very short dress with leggings. It’s very flowery. Not entirely me but I’m sure it’s growing on me as I’m wearing it today. Then trousers, after more driving out to Mothercare (again, rather too expensive for my liking) and Outfit (to pick up that black not-t-shirt) in Croydon, Asda in Sutton for trousers (a steal at £12!) and back to Colliers Wood for a rather nice pair of cropped linen trousers in Marks.
So I’m hoping I can make this work wardrobe wise, if only until the end of autumn. Otherwise, this is going to be a long seven months ahead.
June 12, 2009 at 09:30 · Filed under Daily Life
So there was this job I wanted. PA to the head of the department. I didn’t want it for the title or who I’d be working for, but because it was in employment, and that’s where I want to work. And so at the same time as I told the team leader that I didn’t want the job I was covering now that it had become a vacancy, I also told her that I wanted this other job.
And the team leader was so enthusiastic about the idea: throwing ideas; checking I was on board with the new proposed allcoations for the team; discovering that I was ok with this and that and that I thought it might work if we did it this way.
And I could hope.
But the next day I had to tell her I was pregnant and, although I couldn’t afford to care at the time, I knew I’d blown my chances.
But I could still hope.
Two days ago I was talking to a friend; she’d popped down to see the team leader about jobs. She mentioned that the team leader had told her about the two going here: the one I’m covering and the one I want. The friend, being a friend, said that she knew I was really interested in the one job. She told me, but she also told me the team leader’s response. In a voice that is exactly the team leader’s. The one she uses when she has to acknowledge something she wants to ignore. “I know”. The team leader wasn’t there, so the friend left to find her, leaving me feeling a little deflated.
A while later the team leader storms down to our floor in a foul mood: somebody’s ruined her plans and she hates it when people go behind her back to do things and mess everything up. Because she’s so above board with everything. Did you hear the sarcasm on that last point? And she’s mad because it looks like she’s about to lose another member of her float team, but more importantly, because now she has to find someone else to cover a role. The role I want. The role in which she’s completely dismissed me from the running.
Because I’m pregnant.
June 10, 2009 at 15:38 · Filed under Glowstars: Reviews
EMI. Yeah, those people. The ones that look after the likes of Coldplay, Katy Perry and Lily Allen. Yeah, that EMI. Why would you look at their website? Erm… I wouldn’t. Even when I googled some of their bigger name artists, the EMI website (or pages from) didn’t appear on the front page. These days, once they’ve been on an artist’s website, all anyone is interested in is twitter and myspace and youtube. Why on earth would you head to somewhere like EMI?
To find out why, head on over to Glowstars: Reviews.
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