Maisie Paws
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derelict
Oh, and my Mom says she might sell the London flat and come to Harrogate if she can buy a 'derilict house'. She doesn't want to do it up or anything, she just wants it to be derelict. I think it would make her feel more at home. She lives in this huge mansion flat in South Hampstead that is all falling to bits. All the other flats are kitted out with super duper kitchens and bathrooms, parquet flooring and sunken quartz halogen lighting. Then there is hers in the middle with no heating, very dodgy electrics and the same carpet and green plastic textured wallpaper that we put up in the 60s (complete with marks made by cat on the first day).
Anyone know of a derelict house they might want to sell then?
Maisie
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A215
Everything has suddenly got very confusing but it will all be OK when I have sorted it out. I have been buying purple boxes to stick my house bits in. I am on this course called A215 (Open University) and it's called 'Creative Writing' but I haven't even been keeping my blog up to date. That is the only reason I am in here today. Guilt.
When I get home I am expecting to find my new Memory Foam Topper in the garden. It is a slice of memory foam to put on top of my bed mattress. You never know, it might help.
I joined 2 yahoo groups. One is about snails. All I get is descriptions of snails dying. The other one is about getting yourself out of a creative block. I get about 30 emails a day now with people linking to their blogs with journalling and pictures. It's really good but reading it means you don't do anything yourself. Just like the OU A215 web site. Anyway if you would like to see this group you go to the web page of Danny Gregory called Everyday matters - he wrote a book called The Creative License.
Maisie
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what it does to my brain
Going back to work after the break has done terrible things to my brain. I can't understand what people are saying to me. I've done wierd things to my hair. i mean my wool. I chopped bits off and stuck them back on again.
Today. My OU course material arrived. On a whim last week I signed up to do a creative writing course. it's not even a short one it's a last all year 60 point course and it's Level 2. I haven't been able to finish a Level 2 course yet. I did two Level 1 courses for 60 points each but then I went and chose Philosophy at Level 2 and got stuck there for two years. Skipped the exam. This one hasn't got an exam it's all based on coursework. Actually it looks good. I have to do some funny things though, like 'Write a haiku every day', 'Free writing' (no problems there) and 'Cluster writing' - like what! the diagram looks suspiciously like those mind map things. After the course I have just finished I don't want to see anything that looks like business. Yuck yuck yuck. It looks nice nice nice though. I enjoy nothing so much as receiving an OU mailing in the post. Honestly, I could eat it. By the time I get to the first assignment i will probably hate it of course. I will also be thinking 'Why do I put myself through this?'. It's not like I need to get a qualification or anything. I just can't resist those OU packages. Yum Yum Yum.
Please please please don't let me hate the teacher.
Maisie
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oh oh oh
Well it was back to work today. I can’t even bring myself to comment on it.
Maisie
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work tomorrow
Can I get to bed on time? No, course not. I turned out the light at 11 p.m. and pretended I was asleep for a while but I couldn't kid myself so I got up again. I am going to be wrecked in the morning when I have to get to work by 9. I hope the Lord Oswald doesn't pull a sickie because I need him to make me tea tomorrow for sure. We have a new workmate joining us. Fortunately, I have met her before. By sheer coincidence, my friend has worked with her for fifteen years and I am assured that she is going to be a top notch work mate. When there are as few of you as we are this is very important. We will have to look at each other every day of the year except for bank holidays, weekends and 25 annual days leave each. That's a lot of days. It's a shame that tomorrow morning I will be probably be grumpy. She is apparently a morning person but I have already warned her that The Lord Oswald and I are most definitely not. She might have to wait till lunch time to see me smile.
I keep thinking of ways I could adapt my house so that my friend could come and stay with me when he is in England. He is a wheel chair user which basically requires extra space and things like wider doors and a bathroom that you can just wheel right into and turn on the shower - a 'wet room'. That would also be good for my mother if she would ever agree to come and stay with me and i wouldn't have to have nightmares about her forgetting she was in my house and falling down my stairs in the middle of the night (she lives in a flat).
All these things require money which I don't have but it is fun to speculate. I had another bright idea about putting a cat flap into the wall in the bathroom (upstairs) and thereby being able to cut off the sitting room downstairs and make it a cat-free zone. I wouldn't need to go in there either if I had a kitchen upstairs. I could keep it pristine neat and tidy just for visitor days. When I was little all my friends had a sitting room like that which were never allowed to enter. I hated that idea at the time but now I can see the benefit of it. And if there was a bathroom downstairs nobody would ever need to go upstairs so I could be as messy as i liked up there. Also, perhaps people would stop accusing me of being in bed when I go downstairs to answer the door. Everyone around here seems to go upstairs to bed which means if you come down the stairs you must have been in bed. or in the loo I suppose. Anyway, mad. It only makes me want to use all the rooms for unintended purposes. I could sleep on the bathroom floor if i felt like it. Who would know? Why would it matter?
Rambling on is not making me any more tired. It's even more annoying because for the last 10 days when I haven't had to go to work I have been sleepy most of the time. Not at night though. I have become nocturnal. Just like Yeh did when he was staying with me.
I can hear a cat crunching biscuits. Bet I know which one that is. If you observe properly you can differentiate who is eating the biscuits by the style of crunching. some just wolf it down while others carefully crunch each one. the same goes for breathing noises. One of them (the one from the working men's club that visits) snores really loudly. I want to yell at him to shut up sometimes. I wouldn't put up with a person snoring. I would go and turn them over or something. Stuffing your fingers up someone's nose sometimes puts a stop to it. Only temporarily though. It must be awful to live with someone who has a really loud snore. That could be me actually. I often hear myself snoring when I am semi-asleep.
Have you ever had that thing where you are completely awake but can't move a single muscle? I forget what it's called but it does have some sort of condition name. Then there is the feeling of someone sitting on your chest. Could be a spirit but maybe something medical. Funny how those things only happened to me in one particular flat though. Weird flat that was. If you went away for the weekend it sort of resented it and you could feel it being pissed off when you returned. creepy. It was basically one room. I lived in it with a bloke for eight years. Then we split up and married different people and he was my landlord for a bit when I lived in it with the bloke I married. Not when we were married but before. he couldn't live in it anymore anyway because of becoming a wheel chair user. he doesn't use that term. He says he is a 'crip'. You can do that if you are. All the lads and lasses at the hospital he was at said the same. people who had been at it for years were called 'vets' (short for veterans). They had inflatable loo seats which were rather nice. We had one too somewhere we lived before which was a strange pre something. Anyway he lives in Portugal and when he comes to England he can't stay in my house. He's only been in it once and that was a tricky manouevre.
I'm still not tired. Bother.
My mother rang up and left a message on my answerphone asking if I could give her a ring as she 'looks most peculiar'. Apparently, since talking to me in the morning her face had inexplicably swollen up, especially her lips, until she could hardly speak and she said it was extremely difficult to drink her glass of wine 'I don't know how Diana Dors ever managed it!' she said. My friend in Portugal reckons it might very well have something to do with those glasses of wine in the first place. We may never know as she has no intention of going out of the front door before it is back to normal. She has turned off the hall light so her neighbours will think she has gone away. I made her promise she would give me a ring if it got worse. She said if she loses the ability to speak or breathe she will ring me up and make unintelligible noises down the phone so I will know. Great.
I am going to go off and have a look at some other blogs. Who else is awake?
Maisie
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I have survived
Yeah, it's OK I have survived. I always think I might not. Something might just happen minutes before midnight but no, it's OK I am still here.
I read some bits from my new book. I got it in the second hand bookshop in town. 'The Norton Anthology of English Literature' for £7.50. It would have cost £30 new. Tonight I read from it, the whole of 'The Real Inspector Hound' Tom Stoppard's wonderful play and a piece by Anita Desai (city vs mountain life with hippies) and then George Orwell's account of when he had to shoot an elephant and then 'The Dumb Waiter' by Harold Pinter - which I was surprised to find I had never read before although it's one of those titles you know so well I thought I must have seen it at some point, didn't recognise any of it so I couldn't have. I will amend that... I am quite capable of forgetting things I have actually done let alone seen but I am pretty sure I am correct this time. Nothing like 'The Caretaker', nobody needed to go to Sidcup.
Maisie
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the little bit that hurts
There is always a teeny weeny bit of me that hurts. Ever so slightly. It serves to remind me how fine I am actually feeling and what it could be like if I wasn't. Otherwise I might forget that I don't have 'flu, toothache, unmentionable lady ailments, etc.
Last week it was a swollen taste bud. Right on the tip of my tongue. It spent a few days with me and then it was replaced by a slightly bruised nail bed.
Just now I had a little reminder what it would be like if nobody had invented optical assistance or if I had no access to it (as many people don't). I am indeed fortunate that just by placing a couple of bits of plastic in my eyes, or suspended quite close to them, I can see my computer and the TV and read a book and know who is at the door.
One thing I should always remember though is... to make sure I know where my glasses are before taking my lenses out and putting them in liquid that they must not be removed from for 6 hours or they will make my eyes sting intolerably.
My friend Yeh (sim, es tu meu amigo) pointed out that if I always did this in the same place and put my glasses/lenses in the same place I wouldn't have this problem.
Occasionally though things do go wrong. Today for instance I had knocked my glasses on to the floor which was enough to make them invisible for half an hour. Eventually I solved the problem by shining my quartz halogen strap-it-round-the-head (like a miner) lamp all around until they made the shiny bits twinkle. Hurray! Just a little reminder of how it would be if I didn't have any.
Maisie
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