Stephanie's writing journal

Felix is a bit poorly so I am lurking for a bit until I am absolutely sure that Calpol has done its work and his temperature is down and he is sleeping a bit better. Poor Felix! He is ill so rarely (due to his rarely mixing with other children probably) and gets so furious about it when he is.

Stuff:

1. I don't have much to talk about and so consequently I am not talking much.

2. I have just finished Holly Would Dream by Karen Quinn, which I am ashamed to say that I enjoyed very much indeed. Am just about to start The Mesmerist by Barbara Ewing. Have been, unusually for me, sticking to my plan of writing down all books read this year but I am afraid that it does not make for edifying reading. You wouldn't think from this list that my favourite books are War and Peace and Vanity Fair and my favourite writer is Balzac would you? Also, note that all books (bar Toddler Taming, which doesn't count) are by female authors.

3. The atheist is nice and has given me the new MCR live album. He has also FINALLY ordered my birthday present amidst much fuss as he had to use amazon.fr. I am so excited but he isn't letting me have it until my actual birthday in October and I bet it comes in a cellophane wrapper so I won't be able to sneak a look when it arrives.

4. The atheist is taking Felix to the Doctor Who exhibition in Cardiff as a male bonding exercise after the baby arrives. We are going to keep it a secret from Felix. :)

5. I am probably going to be a bit quiet for the next three months as I will be hard at work earning all the money I need to buy stuff for the baby (yes, okay, £330 pushchairs aren't essential but they are jolly nice and frankly I deserve one after three years of uncomplaining Maclaren Torment) and for Felix's room and STUFF.

6. I feel very calm now about the stuff that I was panicking about yesterday. Am going to be going to the birth centre after all and trying not to worry about things. Not long now.

7. Has anyone ever rented a self catering apartment in Rome? Help!

8. Very excited about The Dark Knight now and also for the upcoming sequel to 300. Less thrilled about the plans for a Friends film though.

9. My name is Mélanie and I am addicted to crisps. I am getting better though and have started forcing myself to eat an apple or tangerine every time I start craving a packet of cheese and onion crisps. It is working really well. So far.

10. The atheist goes back to work tomorrow. Woe. On the other hand it means he can start talking to people about moving to Edinburgh so yay.

11. One of the main reasons for general silence this week is that we started potty training Felix on Monday and it is Not Going Well. In that we have not a single success to show for it. Am amazed by how patient and nice we are being about it although we did resort today to slowly tipping water between a jug and a pint glass in the hopes that it would help things along. It did not. In fact it had such a soporfic effect on him that he ended up falling asleep on his potty. We remain optimistic and his school have been very nice and said that I can take him in for a couple of hours next Monday for an acclimatising session anyway even though we had to cancel this week's one due to lack of progress.

And that's it.

After the first Forcan installation was discarded/stolen by our cleaners, we set up a new Forcan (known as Forcan II) in its place. This time with a white fork, for a bit of variation. This morning, as we expected, it was gone.

Today we've decided to raise the stakes. Forcan III has 2 elegant metal forks in place of the prior plastic utensils. Will they take the can and leave the forks? Will they take the can and wash up the cutlery? Will they recognise it for the fusion artwork that it is? Stay tuned!

I wore my lovely new butterfly patterned top from the New Look organic cotton range, with a new cardi from the same range & was complimented. Yay for me! No washing machine though, so it'll have to lurk for a while before I can wash them & wear them again.

Andy ordered a new washing machine online last night.

I spent the day with adults & we had a good giggle.

It's Kate's sports day tomorrow & Andy has the day off. We're going out for lunch after taking Holls to nursery & will have a date afternoon:)

I have a ginormous, huge, massive (literally!) pile of new clothes too as my neighbour's daughter has passed on loads of brand new unworn clothes. It even includes 2 lovely coats, though I have my funky boden mac & a lovely winter coat from the M&S autograph range all ready. Spend money on good quality coats, guys, as they last for years & are cheaper in the long run than a new cheaper one each year. Saying that, I tried on a beautiful cashmere Nicole Farhi coat 2 winters ago in Harney Nicks that made me look like a super model, but it was rather out of my price range ...

I'm still awake & it's nearly 9.45 pm. I've been going to bed at 7pm for the past couple of weeks, as soon as Andy gets in from work, as I'm just exhausted by that time usually.

I may carry on volunteering in September, helping KS2 special educational needs children. Getting paid for it would be wonderful, but that won't be happening. Still, what goes around, comes around. I've given away all of my 0-3 months & 3-6 months baby clothes & 2 - 3 years girl clothes, hundreds & hundreds of pounds worth & have been given a lovely pile of new clothes for me by someone else :)

I'm promoting Coldplay's newest Album, Viva la Vida. Click the pic to see more please. = D

( Pregnancy related - hospital visit )

The washing machine is going to cost £200 to fix, so with the money we spent on fixing it last year, it is now more economical to buy a new one. *aarrgghhhhh** at dirty clothes mountain & *aarrgghhh*** at researching what to buy, where from, getting it delivered & plumbed in so I can wash clothes again.

Gah!

We set up an impromptu 'art gallery' at work yesterday, with lots of interesting creations (the 'bloc party' made of wooden cubes and tinsel is inspired). Today we came in and found all of the exhibits still there except for 'Forcan' - a plastic fork taped to a Coke can. A pavlovian response from the cleaners? Or art criticism? Who knows!

The washing machine broke mid cycle (catastrophe as I wash twice a day) & I had one of those horrible dreams were nasty things kept happening to me in bed & I'd wake up & think I was ok, but I was still actually dreaming & the nasty things were still there. I woke up properly eventually & was then too scared to get out of bed or go back to sleep.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

He Who Makes White Rabbits, crisper, asks us to give our take on Film Pitches That Might Not Make the Mainstream...

Go enjoy, participate. It's all good.

( Pregnancy Related - midwife appointment and shopping )

I really should have done better than this.

Then again, it may harbinger doomsday.

=)

As stolen from nmg - plenty of gaps here, then!

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see."

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicise those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

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 Faulks
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 Hitch Hiker'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' 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 (reading now! :)
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

I want my bed, I feel crap :/

Anyway, have hoovered downstairs (takes ages as full of fur) washed & hung out washing, made tea for the window cleaners, played football with Holly (until I kicked the ball into a neighbour's garden - whoops!) read to Holly, read lj, coughed, sneezed, done the school run, made breakfasts, made Kate's packed lunch & read Kate's reading book with her.

Is is bedtime yet?! :/

Please send get better vibes my way as I still feel dreadful, bit it's back to normal as it's a school & work day.

I hate ants.
I hate ants.
I hate ants.
I hate ants.
I hate ants.

I'm mostly packed, just got a few things left to sort out and bills to pay. I'm leaving at half 10 tomorrow. Annoyingly they do things differently in Manchester so I'm having to move my stuff to Dave's old house in Fallowfield first as we may not be able to get into the new house until the evening or tuesday. I feel pretty overwhelmed and daunted about the whole thing at the moment. I've lived in Sheffield since I was 5 and have my parents and pets here plus quite a lot of friends. I know I'm doing the right thing regarding my career and being with Dave it's just hard not to think about how much I'm going to miss people. I know it's not far away but due to lack of money and my health it's going to seem further, plus I'm going to be pretty busy once I start uni.

I'm going to be without the net for a few days but ppl can get in touch by texting/ringing my mobile if you need to, number is on a post in my memories.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

I went to bed yesterday lunchtime, though did emerge briefly last night to watch Doctor Who. My tablets have kicked in, so I have the energy now to read & use my laptop. Andy, Kate, Holls & Barney are at the racecourse, so it's peaceful. I hope I feel better tomorrow as this cold is not nice. I have runny nose, sneezing, sore throat, temperature, sweating, headache, achey eyes & zero motivation to do anything.