My Everchanging Plot of Life

1. ONE OF YOUR SCARS, HOW DID YOU GET IT?
Cooking

2. WHAT IS ON THE WALLS IN YOUR BEDROOM?
Paint

3. WHAT DOES YOUR MOBILE PHONE LOOK LIKE?
Small and pink.... it wasn't my choice!

4. WHAT MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO?
Classical

5. DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME YOU WERE BORN?
9.00 a.m.

6. WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?
A hug!

7. WHO DO YOU MISS?
Several people

10. WHAT’S YOUR MIDDLE NAME?
my mum's first name

11. THE BEST TV SHOW EVER CREATED:
ummm......

12. THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO?
A friend

13. DO YOU GET SCARED IN THE DARK?
No

14. THE LAST PERSON TO MAKE YOU CRY?
Someone who doesn't know he made me cry.

15. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOGNE / PERFUME?
no idea

16. WHAT KIND OF HAIR/EYE COLOUR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?
If I like the man, I like his hair/eye colour without thinking about it.

17. WOULD YOU RATHER BE SMART OR FUNNY?
Kind

18. COFFEE OR ENERGY DRINKS?
Coffee

19. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE PIZZA TOPPING?
Cheese, peppers, mushrooms.

20. IF YOU CAN EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
Stir fry veg

21. WHO IS THE LAST PERSON WHO MADE YOU MAD?
My vicar!

22. DO YOU SPEAK ANOTHER LANGUAGE?
French, a bit of Spanish, Church Latin!

23. WHAT WAS THE FIRST GIFT SOMEONE EVER GAVE YOU?
A toy rabbit!

24. DO YOU LIKE SOMEONE?
I like lots of people!

25. ARE YOU DOUBLE JOINTED?
No!!

26. FAVOURITE CLOTHING BRAND?
Whatever fits and is comfortable

27. WHAT’S YOUR DREAM CAR?
How would I know? As long as it's got the requisite four wheels and goes, I don't mind!

28. WHAT COLOUR IS IT?
Whatever doesn't show the dirt too much.

29. WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE KIND OF EXERCISE?
Swimming

30. WOULD YOU FALL IN LOVE KNOWING THAT THE PERSON IS LEAVING?
Dunno

31. WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO TELL SOMEONE HOW MUCH THEY MEAN TO YOU?
Just tell them!

32. WRITE A NUMBER FROM ONE TO A HUNDRED:
42

33. BLONDES OR BRUNETTES?
I refer the reader to my aforementioned answer at Number 16

34. WHAT IS THE ONE NUMBER YOU CALL OFTEN?
My best friend

35. WHAT ANNOYS YOU MOST?
Cyclists on pavements, mobile phone users in quiet carriages on trains, mixed messages and double standards!

35. HAVE YOU BEEN OUT OF YOUR COUNTRY? WHERE DID YOU GO? WHAT PLACE DID YOU LIKE BEST?
France, Austria, Holland, Belgium, USA and New Zealand. Probably Austria

36. YOUR WEAKNESSES?
Chocolate and books

37. FRIES/CHIPS, RICE OR BEANS?
Chips

38. FIRST JOB?
Paper Round

39. EVER PRANK CALLED SOMEONE?
No

40. WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE YOU FILLED OUT THIS?
Reading a book

41. IF YOU COULD GET PLASTIC SURGERY WHAT WOULD IT BE?
I wouldn't!

42. WHY DID YOU FILL OUT THIS MEME?
Felt like it!

43. WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST?
Piano playing.

44. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF ALCOHOL BECAME ILLEGAL?
It wouldn't make any difference to me, I'm allergic to it.

45. WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY?
....something I can't have!

46. HOW MANY KIDS DO YOU WANT?
I wouldn't like to keep goats.

47. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?
Not that I am aware of.

48. DO YOU WISH ON STARS?
Yes!

49. WHICH FINGERS IS YOUR FAVOURITE?
Chocolate fingers!

50. WHEN DID YOU LAST CRY?
Last week

I'm peeking over the parapet, briefly, before getting immersed in the next round of talks, discussions, where do I go next, and the chaos that happens liturgically from now until 12th April!

Then, I go away for ten days complete silence.

No phone access, no internet, no computer, no books.... other than one! No talking to anyone other than to the one person I'm meant to, just once a day.

Gulps. Best make sure I pack some good supplies of chocolate!

Not that I've been exactly sociable for the last two or three weeks. Removing myself from the human race, except for work purposes, seemed kindest all round! To me and everyone else. I just didn't seem to have any words to express where I was, and what was going on in my head at all. So, it seemed best not to try. It wasn't a nice place, but it seemed strangely OK to be there.

The words are slowly coming back, and I'm feeling a bit more sociable.

I'm glad I made another major decision, and implemented it last night. It's a complicated church related one, but I feel loads better for the change of church environment for the evening, and I'm going to go there occasionally of an evening for the next few months. Some church anonymity is called for, and just being a part of the congregation.

Coo... I'm having a really nostalgic evening here! I don't like opera, as a genre, and normally turn the radio off if opera comes on, but I do like "Dido and Aeneas" which I studied for A level, and which I'm currently listening to. I can sing along to a scary amount of it still!! We will not, however, dwell on how many years ago it is since A levels were taken.

I had a nice day out, coffee shops were frequented, bookshops browsed, libraries raided, and gentle ambling along indulged in in a city I know my way around well, but not the city I live in!

And the deep thoughts?

Sometimes people occasionally astound me. Not that this is new information, to me, or to you, I suspect. But, today I am yet again astounded. It's not a month since I had to tell Second Person to get off my back about my communicating with Third Person. Something, that quite frankly, was none of SP's business in the first place.

Today, SP decided to ask if a postponed meeting had been re-arranged with TP. SP knows it had been postponed, and more over knows exactly why. If TP hadn't postponed, I'd've been saying "Don't be so stupid, I'm fine, you're not, get back in touch when you can." I'm really not expecting to hear anything for a couple of weeks at least, if not more. That's fine with me. Essential information can be communicated, we don't need to meet right now.

Luckily, I saw this one coming, and had my beautifully crafted answer all ready for SP, and left no room for further inquiry. It's very tiring though!

I am just about to go and have one!!!

It's been a long week, and next week is looking as chaotic, but a gentle day to myself in a far away place, sounds like a very good plan to me.

Today, being Wednesday in this Re-arranged Week in the Plot, I'd toddled off to the One Day Job an Hours Bus Ride Away in smallish town. A lovely day was had, despite most of my regulars not being around, and I toddled back to the bus stop content with the day's work.

I met a woman who I got chatting to who, after we'd done the usual pleasantries of when the next bus was due, and had we just missed one, cheerfully informed me what a lovely time she'd just had at church. I stunned her somewhat by remarking back I was sorry I'd had to miss the World Day of Prayer as I was interested in how the women from Papua New Guinea had devised this years service, but I wasn't going to get back to the smallish city in which I live in time. (A very ethnically diverse city, unlike small town where my work is.)

She then asked if I worked in smallish town because my face was the wrong colour to get a job where I live()I thought of asking if she objected to my freckles, or maybe my Scottish ancestry, but I managed to say I worked in a somewhat specialised field of work, and smallish town provided me with the ideal opportunity. I was devoutly thankful the conversation was terminated at that point, as the bus I wasn't going to get on drew up to whisk her away.

My jaw is still on the ground.

Luckily, I'm off out to a wild party tonight!

But, today is supposed to be the only relatively normal day in this week.

Wonder what exactly are the chances of it actually being so?

Wednesday is normally devoted to my one day a week Paid Job, an hour's bus ride away. Today, however, I've been doing other things, including telling a Bishop Things He Needs to Know, and discussing legal and illegal drugs with ten year olds. In between hanging around for the aforementioned purple attired clergyman, (who was responsible for mucking up my week's routine,) I got a fair amount of paper work sorting done.

Oh, and mending a broken chair. I seem to have succeeded. It's now much more comfortable.

Now, if the motivation to tackle the clothes mending pile would appear that would be handy.

But first, I've got to go to choir practice. I've managed to avoid it for a few weeks, what with One Thing and Another, but if we're to stand any hope of learning anything for Easter, we need to start work tonight!!

Am as as much of a bookworm as I think I am, and most people who know me think I am?

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and bold those you have read and italicise the ones you own but haven't read yet.... I've done bold and italic, as it's really hard to tell the difference between bold and not bold in this template!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Actually read: 49/100 (Does it count if I've read two in both French and English? Or is that just showing off?)

I could revert to tomorrow being Wednesday, but I think now it's definitely going to be all on Friday, rather than split between Monday and Friday, we'll leave it that way, and I'll do all the jobs I didn't think were going to get done this week in the gaps of tomorrow instead. (Mutter, grumble, rant...)

Cutting and sticking and gluing and sewing feature highly. But, as they are messy activities, I shall do them during a few hours when I've got the place to myself.

I've started the gluing! The comfy chair from which I usually blog is currently upside down, with two legs having been re-glued, and various straps holding them in place whilst the glue sticks the "Extra Fast" it's promised it will do in a few hours time. I have no doubt I'll be resorting to hammer and nails soon. Either I spend way too much time in that chair, or it's coming to the end of it's natural life, anyway.

However, I am also in hiding from the Rest of the Household who is having one of the rare intermittent household cleaning mornings that occur about once a year or so. It's best to leave her to it, because no matter how recently I last cleaned (yes, you're quite correct, it was Saturday, and make no mistake here, I do housework as regularly as most Saturdays!) if something has clicked in her mind it needs doing, then it will get done.

It used to get me very angry and frustrated, this housework thing, and the re-doing of it by someone else who rarely does it. I've lived in the same house as, and known several people who will let someone get on with a job, then surruptitiously re-do it, or point out the bits you've missed, just so you know better for next time. Then, I fixed in my mind that I'd rather use my anger for better things, and that mentally fixing in my mind a few hours a week for the things that mattered to get done, and not getting all het up just before anyone came to stay or visit,(which is what's going on right now!)was far better on my nervous system.

I wouldn't describe myself as overly house-proud, I have my blind spots about some things (um, yes, my desk is in desperate need of sanitising again...and we won't discuss my computer screen...) but I think I'm pretty consistent in the parts of the house that are shared. And, in those areas I'm far more concerned about cleanliness than tidiness.

What does interest me in the whole housework thing with the Rest of the Household is that laundry (not mine, thankfully, I do it when I'm about to have an undergarments crisis, or need clean work clothes) has to be done to a strict routine, and there is genuine uncomfortableness and deep frustration if that routine in broken. I'm quite thankful the day that is pitched on as Laundry Day is one I'm not normally around. But, when I suggested a particular morning for a couple of hours communal housework (a system that's worked for me in the past) not only did I get shouted down for being too rigid by her, but by the other two people who were staying at the time.

It also interests me that when I need to spread work out beyond the confines of my room, that there is much agitation until it's cleared up, but, I'm not the one who has a work room in addition to my own room, and has taken over a large space in a third room as well.

So, it's best to hide away and not think of the wasted few hours I had on Saturday, as everything is re-done. If, however, complaints are made about being over-worked this week, I shall point out it was her own choice, as I said I'd spent Saturday cleaning.

(Just ventured out for some toast... it's scary stuff! But, it's all her own making.)

I'm not actually complaining. It's all stuff I've known and observed for a long, long time, and no matter how calmly and rationally I state my points of view, (other ways do not work) they are not listened to. And, like I said, I've got better things to use my anger on!

But, I am so glad there is an end in sight to it all!

Tomorrow will be Wednesday, as well as Monday, and Friday will have bits of Wednesday in it, too!

Wednesday will be something else altogether, and I may well have lost the will to live completely by the end of it.

Thursday will have elements of Tuesday.

Saturday, however, will be Friday. I'm not getting up until at least 11.00 p.m.

Confused? There's more!

For a variety of reasons in different ways, I'm on perpetual Friday until Easter now. Though, tomorrow, being a transferred St David's Day, will be a Thursday.

But, no matter what else happens tomorrow, I will post the two letters that I've lavished first class stamps on (as well sweat and tears in the course of the writing, incidentally), and I will test out the new toy I bought when I went out to post the letters and got side-tracked and forgot...

New toy? I condemned our ancient bathroom scales to the rubbish bin today, and decided I needed new ones! This may, or may not be a good thing, but given five people at church asked if I'd lost weight, and I cheerfully admitted I didn't know because our scales were so erratic there could easily be a two stone difference from one day to the next. But, my clothes are generally looser, and I also have condemned several bras and knickers to the rubbish for being too loose, I guess I have lost weight. (Do not, I beg you, disillusion me by suggesting that the elastic may have stretched with extreme age! I accept that's a factor, but it's much better for my state of mind to think I've lost enough weight to buy smaller size bras and knickers!!)

Now, to stick up the new timetable for the week, so I don't forget what I'm doing... and pack the work bags for tomorrow.