It's been a while since I blogged... I wasn't sure what to say what with the shock of being engaged! There have been several different reactions to the news, ranging from my Dad's complete and utter shock to people being completely unsurprised. Interesting.

My Nan and Grandad (my Dad's parents) sent me a card and a cheque in order to 'buy something for my bottom drawer'. I wasn't completely sure what that saying meant, but they supposed that 'young ladies still have a bottom drawer in these modern days'. I looked it up and it means, 'a collection of household items such as linens, silver, and clothing that a young woman traditionally accumulates in anticipation of marriage'. So I learnt something new. I expect it'll get spent on something, especially if I live much longer without finding paid work!

But on the work front there are a couple of vague possibilities. Hopefully something'll pan out. The nice man I'm doing volunteer work for keeps being really complimentary about everything I'm doing. He gives me instructions and then goes out, leaving me alone to get on with things, which is fine by me. Yesterday I was sorting out all the archaeological reports that have accumulated - there's a lot to put on the computer system and I suppose if I stick around I'll get to do some of the work. He keeps trying to figure out a way that he can pay me, which is good. I like being paid, however much I enjoy doing the work for free. :)

There are a couple of web jobs, too, and a job at the archaeology unit that I'll probably try for, although there's internal interest apparently, so... But things will work out.

I told the guy I'm doing volunteer work for I'd become engaged at the weekend and he was overly happy for me, which was odd. He said Rob was a very lucky man and being engaged 'couldn't happen to a nicer person', and other things. He was the first non-Christian I've told who doesn't know me that well, so he had a slightly different outlook on things. He was saying that it depends what it means to you as to whether it really makes any difference, and I told him that it would make a big difference to us since we're both Christians. However much I miss Rob when he has to go home it's going to be very strange to be living with him and doing all the things that go along with that. *ahem*

Anyway, John's coming soon, so maybe I ought to go and get dressed and stuff... we're going to do lots of Christmas shopping this weekend. I'm going to spend his money. :)

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): stargate (sky 1); neighbours (bbc 1); the dead zone (sci-fi) / READING: edge magazine; last man standing (david baldacci) / LISTENING: lavinia (the veils)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 10:14 AM 0 comments

Drat, just blogged and lost the entry when I clicked send and the connection died. Boo!

Anyway, I have some news. I'm engaged! Rob asked me to marry him last night and I had to say yes. I can't imagine living without him... It was a bit of a surprise since he'd said he wouldn't ask until his birthday (21st January), but we went out to Grange Farm (where we met for the first time) and he asked me. It wasn't planned so I don't have a ring yet. I'm waiting until I get given the 'perfect ring' that's been proposed. :)

I think one of the catalysts was that we bought something called 'The Marriage Book' on Friday, which is a Christian book on such things. And I'd read it by Saturday evening. In the back it had seven tests of knowing whether you're ready to get married, and it looked like I was. Or as ready as I'll ever be. Although there'll be a nice period of engagement. :)

So that's my news. I expect certain readers of this blog will be asked to attend the wedding, when we've decided on a date. And some might be asked to perform wedding related duties...

Scary! But nice.

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1) / READING: edge magazine; last man standing (david baldacci); the marriage book (nicky and sila lee)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 6:57 PM 0 comments

Finally, The International House of Mojo is back up and running! Boo to the evil hackers, but now all is well. Lucasarts news, mmmm...

posted by Fiery Fred @ 3:45 PM 0 comments

Oh, and the place with the interesting church was called Tickencote.

posted by Fiery Fred @ 3:38 PM 0 comments

If you're one of the squermillion people coming here looking for an MP3 of Poets of the Fall's excellent song Late Goodbye, go here, get Kazaa Lite and download it. Yes, I know such file sharing is very bad but you can't buy the song and the Poets's site says the song should be downloadable from the Max Payne 2 website. Which it's not. So I think, all in all, it's okay to download this one with Kazaa. :)

I did some interesting things over the weekend. Ali, Rob and I all went to Papworth Everard, which is near Cambridge. We stayed in Ali's dad's flat, which was fun. On Saturday we went to Cambridge, which was very busy, then to a pub in the middle of nowhere for lunch, and to Newmarket. On Sunday we went to St Ives, sat by the river for a bit, walked around a field fairly pointlessly, had a roast dinner, drove to St Neots, walked around the riverside park, and drove back to Leicester. That's a very concise summary. :)

Hmm, not much else to report.

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1) / READING: wuthering heights (emily bronte); edge magazine; last man standing (david baldacci)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 3:36 PM 0 comments

It's come to something when you go through your spam folder (deleting all the porn/herbal remedies/painkiller ads) and see a Playstation one, then once you've clicked on it think it was a porn ad after all, then later on realise it was genuine. Genuinely not a porn ad, I mean. Rather, an ad for WRC 3. Bizarre.

posted by Fiery Fred @ 7:04 PM 0 comments

Thought I'd better post stuff. Although to be honest all I can think about lately is how much I love Rob. Which is horribly soppy and everything for a weblog, but... I spend as much time as I can around him and I think about him all the time when I'm not with him, so I suppose if the blog were to have the correct percentages of words for time spent on each thing I should actually talk about him more.

Hmm.

Tuesday and Wednesday we went to Wales. Ali has a friend in Swansea so we drove hundreds of miles and slept there for the night. The next day we went to Cardiff and looked around the shops. There were some nice arcadey shops... we went to a specialist food shop (had lots of foreign stuff) and I bought some Pfefferneuse, which are German biscuit things. Ali hates me because she thinks they're really delicious and we've eaten them all, so there are NO MORE PFEFFERNEUSE! Oh no!

We drove back through the Brecon Beacons, had a walk around a foresty bit (with a picturesque rivery stream as well), and drove up through Wales. Then we went east through Shropshire. It's my ancestral home, so I know more about places in Shropshire than most counties. We drove over the Clee Hill, which is a fantastic hill, but it was dark so all we saw were the twinkling lights below us. Oh well. I expect I'll get there again one day. Shropshire is probably my favourite county. I like the way it seems more wooded than most countryside, as well as having fields and hills and moorlike bits. Narrow countryside lanes are much better when they're treelined. Rather than having hedges.

Um... what else. We did a sort of tour of Rutland today, although the map was pretty unclear as to which directions to go in most of the time. Annoyingly. And although the weather started off okay it grew cloudier and windier and eventually started raining. Gale force winds and rain aren't great for touring the countryside. So we came home without doing the whole tour. We went into a very interesting church... I think it was in a place that began with a T... I took pictures. It had an incredible Norman arch inside with weird animal heads all round it, as well as some really bizarre heads round the ceiling. It was insanely over the top for such a small church in a hamlet. But cool. :)

Hmm, that's about it. I've been trying to find somewhere I can download The Servant's song Orchestra, but no luck so far. I hate it when I really like something that's not out yet, or I've missed it, and I can't get hold of it. I wish there was a new music site I could download things from... I'd pay 99p for it. Something like Virgin's download site. I'd rather download things legally. The guy from The Servant looks a bit like Ben Stiller.

Ah... can't think of anything else. We're going to Cambridge tomorrow. Should be fun!

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1) / READING: wuthering heights (emily bronte) / LISTENING: orchestra (the servant); drugs (simple kid)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 6:53 PM 0 comments

I was thinking about taking the Fyrrra link off of the top of the blog... I cancelled my SWG subscription a while back. I hadn't played it in days... I don't just neglect my blogging, you see, but all forms of computery entertainment. With the exception of Mr Payne I haven't done any real computing in ages. I've ignored e-mails (although my spam levels are increasing to an insane level), I haven't posted in roleplay stuff... about the only thing I've managed to find time for is one single web forum. Sad. And I've popped by my nation every few days to sort out their governmental problems.

I felt kind of narrative a while back, although now Ali's watching Dark City so I keep losing concentration. I'm weird about certain things. I have to pay complete attention to films, I can't do anything else while I watch them. Same with books. I can't have music on. I have to dedicate everything to imagining what's going on. And I have to listen to CD's at least once paying absolute attention to them. Is that strange?

Let me see... I'm waiting for my voluntary work guy to call me back. I phoned him and he said he would, but he hasn't yet. I can't do other things while I'm waiting for him to call, although it's getting a bit late now. That's another thing, I don't know if people have it, but while waiting for calls and things I can't relax. But I hated making the call in the first place, so...

I'm such a geek.

It was nice going home for the weekend. My brother invited us to go and watch some fireworks in Southend. They were good fireworks. Some of them were the display sort. It was more of an excuse to go there, though, really. And Rob moved the hard drive over from the old PC so that we could move Dad's data - things were much more complicated before CD-ROM's! So Dad's all sorted out now.

I have no idea if I'm making sense here.

Ah well.

We sat out in the garden Saturday night and watched the lunar eclipse. There was a moment when a very high, thin layer of cloud with a perfectly straight edge overlapped with the partially eclipsed moon... it was very pretty. And when it reached totality the moon was a strange orangey brown colour. Cool. :)

Oh, we went to see The Matrix Revolutions on Friday but it was... disappointing. I never found the films as amazing as most people, and the second film had some fairly boring long sequences (it started to be more art and shiny effects over content), and the third one, well, it took that a bit further still, I think.

I still wonder what was going on with certain things.

I can't help but feel a little cheated.

Boo hoo. :(

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1) / WATCHING (CINEMA): the matrix revolutions / READING: wuthering heights (emily bronte); edge magazine

posted by Fiery Fred @ 4:21 PM 0 comments

I was too busy to post, what with Mum being here and all the decorating and stuff, but I'm here now. I was thinking that although I feel I ought to post I don't have anything to say, but I've officially passed my MA. So I should probably mention that. I was told two days ago that I'd passed, and today I went into uni to have a rundown of my marks. As it turns out I had an average mark of 66 point something, which is a good pass, considering that 70 is a distinction. I managed a distinction for a couple of things, I think, but overall I wasn't quite good enough. Still, I didn't mess it up. Phew..!

Apparently that website job's still in the pipeline. My costing seemed fine and he passed it on to the person who needs to approve it. Then I get to make it and invoice them for lots of money! Well, some money. Which would be nice. I've found ways to spend all the money I made on eBay selling everything I could bear to part with... I've bought lots of Christmas presents and the like. Some sort of income would be preferable to the no income existence I'm living at the moment. But things could be worse. Even though I have no income I'm not exactly poor. :)

Hmm... what else can I say? I feel terrible that I haven't even had the time to check Zotria for days, let alone write some sort of halfway decent RP posts there. Boo hoo.

On the plus side the dining room's looking very clean and fresh. Mum and I wallpapered it, and she did lots of other excellent jobs too. Like fitting a new lock on the front door, putting up draught excludery things on the front and back doors, cleaning out the moss infested gutters and the drain, removing the gas fires (they were disconnected when we got central heating) and covering them over in various ways, amongst other things. I did what I could to help but I don't have the skills that were required to be that helpful, DIY-wise. I mean, I did a lot of wallpaper cutting and pasting, and I painted a thing on the bit of wood covering the hole left by the gas fire in the front room, although I don't know whether that's okay or not. I liked the different textures (I did it with sponges) but it looks a bit rubbish. Or that might just be me. I don't know.

What else... I've been going out with Rob for four months. I think it's four months exactly today. I'd have to look it up again to be sure. But I think it's four months. That's a third of a year. Wow...

I think that's about all I have to say. I'm still reading my way through the top 21 books.

Hmm... no, can't think of anything else. ;)

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1); mash (paramount); stargate (sky 1) / READING: wuthering heights (emily bronte)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 5:25 PM 0 comments

Does anyone else get the advert, "this blank space brought to you by google"? I keep getting it. It amuses me.

I've done a bit of tidying this morning, because my Mum is coming soon. She'll be here in, I dunno, an hour and a bit or something. Maybe less than that. It depends on many factors. Anyway, I've done general tidying and laundry and the like. I wondered about hoovering... I might in a minute or two. Hmm. My Mum is visiting for a week, you see, to help wallpaper the dining room (amongst other DIY jobs that we can't cope with).

The more I think about Max Payne 2 the easier I think it was. I keep thinking of more bits in the first game that were very tricky. Like the guys in the bottom of that docked boat. And fighting through the car park. And the baseball bat part, obviously. But there was nothing like that in the second game. Hmm.

I don't really have much to say. The only other thing I've done this morning is sort out and post some more eBay stuff... I sold a fair bit in the hopes of raising money for Christmas presents. I could go on the dole for a bit but I hate it... I really hope doing volunteer work will lead to some sort of paid job.

I guess I'll do something constructive now. Bye bye...

I have been mostly.... WATCHING (TV): neighbours (bbc 1) / READING: birdsong (sebastian faulks) / LISTENING: late goodbye (poets of the fall)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 11:22 AM 0 comments