Cas is currently and having a little

So the Inter Library Loans people are rapidly reaching the top of the list of people I really don’t like to wake up to in the morning. Pretty much the only person who I have even less desire to wake up to is the Misogynistic Belgian.

I have just had another message from these wonderful wonderful people saying that they are charging me £116.36 for the book I returned on time last week.

The ILL lady was very helpful on the phone (this one still had a brain it seems, unlike last time’s). Turns out “they have had a few problems with clearing it off my card”, but I am fine – I’m only liable for the fines incurred from the 19th to the 23rd when I was late returning it.

I thought I had already sorted this!

So I explain, yet again, to the nice ILL lady, that I had returned it at around 11 am on the 19th, the day it was due back, complete with the disc it was meant to have, and that I didn’t really appreciate being charged. Especially when they had already admitted they’d been a bit slow clearing things that particular weekend.

She very nicely assured me that she had cleared ALL the fines off the account, and that she has put a flag next to the item so I won’t be bothered by it again.

All I can say is, watch this space.

(and woot! this is my hundredth post!)

Cas is currently and still rather

It’s official. I am a special and wonderful person. I’ve even got the letter and some cards to prove it.

I have been giving blood regularly for a while now. Here is my swanky card.
.

One of the main reasons I give blood is because a fair few of those I know and love have had to rely on donated blood at one point or another, and feeling a bit icky one afternoon every four months after a donation is a tiny price to pay for all the good you are doing. I also give blood because it is a prerequisite to donating bone marrow.

When I was younger a very good friend tragically died from recurring childhood leukemia. For nearly seven years she relied on regular bone marrow transplants and, as none of her family were a match, all the bone marrow came from donors, so I have seen first hand the enormous amount of good this procedure can provide.

For one reason and another (mainly badly timed piercings, tattoos, and illness) it has taken me till a couple of months ago to get on the Bone Marrow Register. So I was overjoyed this morning when the following letter and card arrived in the post.

Link to the nice letter I got with the card.
I just hope that I never get called, because if (when) I do, that means someone is in a similar situation to Lily and her family, and no one should be in that situation.

Now I’m not saying you all should up and join the British Bone Marrow Register (or whatever your regional equivalent is). That’s something for each and every one to think about with regards their individual circumstances, but please do take a moment to think on it. I know Lily would never have seen her 12th birthday if it hadn’t been for the kindness of complete strangers. When held against the benefits, the transient pain and discomfort experienced by a donor pales into insignificance.

(And yes, if you are curious, I am also a registered organ donor. It’s not as if I am going to need them when I’m dead now, is it?)

More information about Bone Marrow donation.
More information about Blood donation.
CLIC – the children’s cancer charity that gave so much love and support to Lily, her family, and all her friends.

There, that’s me done with the guilt tripping. I’m off to be told how monumentally unfit I am by a man at the gym.

Cas is currently with a side order of which is severely hampering her attempt to

Today I am in such a good mood, even finding out that the Misogynistic Belgian is to blame for bollixing my server yesterday, has barely put a dent in the day. What is wrong with me! My brain has completely turned to mush and I am unable to form coherent thoughts. In the event that normal cognitive skills do not return I may be forced to subject you, my dear readers, to severe giddiness and an overuse of smilies . Should you become physically ill upon reading, I shall not be held responsible.

Thank you for your patience, please stayed tuned. I expect normal service to resume in a day or so, give or take, depending on what path events take.

So I have decided that Pool is not such a bad game after all. I’ve spent the last twenty odd years of my life determined that I am no good at it, that it is a silly game, and that I don’t like playing it. So why I agreed to go out and play a few games with the Cute Canadian last night is quite beyond me.

But play I did, in a rather nice pub called the Mitre, and all the five games we played were won by yours truly.

I would like to claim that it was my innate skill at the game showing through, but I do have a policy of telling the truth, even if it isn’t the whole truth, on this blog, so I have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, the CC’s skill was better than mine. He just cracks under the tiniest amount of pressure. Remarkably easy to distract as well.

He then got his own back by challenging me to a game of Fussball. By the end of the game I was pretty much down to ritual suicide as the only way to reclaim my honour.

Still, I won five games of Pool, he didn’t, so

Cas is currently

So it turns out that I am not quite as unfit and overweight as I had dreaded being, which is always nice to know.

The reason I know this is that I forked out £18 to a very nice man called Adrian at the gym today to have what they call a ‘full body assessment’. They measure everything from height, weight (I do like the set of scales he used. Lost half a stone just by going on them!), peak flow, grip-strength, stretchiness, the number of push-ups you can do in a minute, your body fat percentage, your aerobic stamina, the full shebang.

Turns out I am pretty much in the average and happy range on most things. My aerobic stamina is pants, but then I already knew that. My grip-strength is asymmetrical, which is a predictable hold-over from all those years of archery. Great on one side (my right), slightly less great on the other. The computer predicted that I would be able to do 11 push-ups in the space of a minute. I showed it who was boss and did 55. Again, upper body strength courtesy of archery.

It also turns out I am also one of the stretchiest people Adrian’s seen in a… ever, were his exact words. Then again, I already knew I was stretchy. I can’t quite get the legs behind my head any more, partly due to a buggered hamstring when I was 13, and assorted other bits and pieces going wrong and threatening to drop off, but if I’ve done the proper warmups, I can still get my head flat on my knees when my legs are straight out on the floor. Ahh, the benefits of being forced to do ballet as a young child.

I won’t be getting my personal training program till Tuesday 9 am, but when I get it you can be sure I will share at least parts of it with you. Yes, you heard that right, I am going to be in the gym at 9 am on a Tuesday morning.

Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with me either ^*1*.

And now, because my bed is looking very very good to me right now, I am going to go curl up in it and go to sleep. It is a very comfortable bed. Though I do have a whole noise/conspiracy rant I am working out in my head about beds, but I need to work out how to word it without sounding… well, work it out for yourself

Cas is currently

So a couple of people have been asking why I am so keen to get out of the current flat and find a shiny nice place of my own. At the moment, I would settle for a not-quite-shiny place so long as it wasn’t this dump. I think the following picture illustrates it pretty nicely.

Today is rather wet. I had to go out, so took my umbrella to keep me as dry as possible. This proved to be a mission: impossible, but that’s for another time. Still, I got home, and needed somewhere to put the umbrella to dry it out. My room was out because there wasn’t going to be enough room for me and the umbrella, and I had work to do, so I put it up in the bathroom.

There is something wrong when your umbrella takes up the entire room

And this is my small handbag sized model! ^*1*.

Cas is currently

So today they obviously decided to have a scary right-wing politics morning on both sides of the House.

Exhibit one, we have Mr Clarke (the Home Secretary, Labour, nominally leftish) with his global database of anyone who might have been a bit naughty. I may be oversimplifying, and I sure as hell know the BBC reportage isn’t giving the full story, but when the dude from the UN gets worried, you have to think twice.

Exhibit two, we have David Cameron (current favourite to take over the Conservative leadership, scary, well, Conservative) giving Conservatives a bad name. Withdrawing from international human rights conventions?!? What happened to the fluffy nice and new Conservatives they keep promising us?

I am on record, I think, with my whole “war = bad idea” ethos, including my opinions on the whole “war on terror” debacle. Yes, we live in a climate of danger and threat, we have to do something about it, and I don’t have much of an idea what we should be doing about it. But I sure as hell know that what we’re doing now ain’t exactly working. I think the figures are at something like 100,000 Iraqi’s dead since the ‘war’ began. That is ‘war’ in quotes, because, remember folks, they never actually declared war. Just a bit of police action between friends.

And as soon as I get one wiki working (even though no one seems to be actually using it yet), the other one goes on the fritz. As I already look like an extra from the “singing in the rain” number, I feel no inclination to tromp all the way up to the lab to see what the hell is wrong with, but as it is currently holding all my thesis notes hostage, I am going to have to go negotiate.

Damn it! My planned evening had better be a whole lot more fun than the morning’s been so far. Grrr.

Cas is currently very and a little bit

What do you get when you get a load of very stressed computer archaeologists, human origins people, osteologists, marine archaeologists, and one lone man from Hull, and put them together in a building that sells alcohol and food?

Answer, a great evening. Even the presence of the Misogynistic Belgian couldn’t put too much of a damper on the evening. Saw Tilly and Sk8er Dude for the first time in a while today, and I got in some light musing duties whilst I was about it.

Finally, everyone now has a blog-name. It’s taken me near a year, but I got the last two tonight: Celtic Vixen, and Pimp Girl (said with complete love and affection – the girl is a total darling. It was suggested by herself). Jeff the Pimp ^*1* is also finally reconciled to his name. He did moan that everyone else had fun names, whilst he was stuck with Jeff, but when I explained the rational behind it again, he cheered up.

Also, Jeff is the latest convert to Firefly, coming to the party after being forced to watch the ‘Serenity’ episode with the Cute Canadian and myself on Sunday. He didn’t enjoy it much the first time round because the pair of us kept laughing over the jokes, and spoiling the plot etc (we’ve both seen it far too many times), but Jeff watched it again last night, and went straight on to ‘Trainjob’ he enjoyed it so much.

Roll on September and the release of Serenity.

Right, I’ve just been informed that I have to make Jeff sound cool. So, here goes: I would like to announce to all you random internet people out there that my friend, Jeff, is a cool person. So cool, in fact, that icebergs go to him for advice on how to stay chilly. He is the veritable King of Cool. There is no one cooler on the planet than my friend, Jeff. Yep, Coolie Mac Cool has nothing on Jeff. Cool is not only his middle name, it is his first and his last as well. Lock up your daughters. You have been warned.

Now, having blown any cred I might have had left on that whole “Jeff = Cool” issue ^*2*, I’m off to go over some edits and re-write the ending to a longer story so I can start to post it in a couple of days.

Best line of the evening has to be from Pimp Girl:
“When I’m dancing on the tables I know I’ve gone too far”.

Endnotes:
^*1*I’m really not being mean with all the pimp comments here. There was a strange confluence of t-shirts and… You just had to be there, but the Turf War over lunch in the courtyard was hilarious^Back
*2*In all seriousness, he is a total honey. Love the boy. Jeff, sweetie, I’m sorry ^Back