Giving a crap

One of the perks of my new job is that since I am less stressed out I tend to notice more things around me. I also tend to give a crap about more than just my job and getting enough sleep. Last week on one of my lunch time wanders I noticed this sidewalk art. It was nice to see and made me think of childhood and playing with chalk on the sidewalks outside my house. None of my creations were this good but I was also between the ages of five and ten.

How much for your Monarch?

HRH Queen Elizabeth II costs me 66p a year, or so the Yahoo news bulletin says. I don’t know about you but I am happy to pay up my 66p. I can’t even buy a candy bar for that anymore. I would much rather have all the fun that comes with having a queen. My normal grande latte from Starbucks could buy me 2.776 monarchs of similar price. Not sure I would want to pay that much for Prince Charles, he is a little out of touch with reality but I would be more than willing to pay double for Prince William and triple for Prince Harry(what can I say I’m a sucker for carrot tops). All said and done I think the Queen is good value for money. I give the government about £5000 pounds of my money in income taxes a year and I think this is the best 66p of it they spend.

oops

So I made a mistake at work. Not a big one. My manager pointed it out just so it I would know the correct way to handle the situation in the future. Now I am paranoid. I don't think the Big Boss is smiling at me when I walk past(I doubt he even knows I made a mistake since it did not impact him at all). Everyone who was so friendly before is looking at me like that poor idiot girl. I know this is all in my head, I just hate it when I do something wrong.

I am sure the reason the Big Boss is not smiling is that the company just lost 5.2 billion pounds or something of similar ilk. I really should get over myself. Shel Silverstein wrote a poem not sure exactly how it goes but it is something about the niggling little what ifs and questions that run through your head late at night when you can't sleep. This is me today. Okay now I am officially going to stop obsessing over this and get on with my life.

Overheard on the train

On my train home last night there was a young couple with their son who was around four years old I would guess. His mother had handed him a match box size dump truck and he was happily playing with it making the appropriate dump truck sounds. As we pulled into Stratford the sight for the 2012 Olympics and he saw all the construction, trucks, and what not his eyes got really big and he asked if father what it was. “A huge waste of money” came his reply. “Why?” Asked the little boy. “Because we are spending billions of Pounds to build everything needed to host the games and then all of it will sit empty.” “Okay” said the little boy and continued playing with his dump truck. A few stops later a lady in her mid sixties boarded the train and sat down opposite of the young family. “What are you making?” she asked the little boy. “A huge waste of money.”

Classic Emma Moment

I am at a different office than normal and needed to use the toilet so on my way back to the staff kitchen I noticed some. I saw a little man on the first door so I assumed the second door was the ladies and did not look at the plaque. The urinals were the first clue I was in the wrong place. Being in la la land where I spend most of my time I just walked back to the first door and walked through. Now you would think the fact that I had walked into the wrong one the first time around would make me take extra care and maybe look at the plaque, well you would be wrong. The urinals were red flags again and I walked out pretty rosy cheeked from blushing and this time I realized that both doors had little men on the plaques. Turns out the women’s was down the hall.

American vs British English

My husband and I spent about a year deciding how we wanted to redecorate our living room after we moved into our new flat. It took us so long to decide what colour we wanted to use on the walls and what stain of wood flooring that I needed to head back to the US to change my visas. To say that this bothered me in the least would be extremely false. In my eyes I had just won the lottery, not only had my colour been the one we decided to use but I was getting out of all the hard work.

Fast forward six months and I am back from the US and I have a beautiful new living room with freshly painted walls, newly laid hardwood floors, and the original fireplace striped and varnished. I did notice however that my husband had not put up the blinds. When questioned he said that he had thrown the old wooden blinds out because he did not like them and figured we could choose new blinds or drapes now that I was back over in the UK. This like every other joint decision did not run smoothly and it took us about six months to finally decide on what we wanted. This was quite and inconvenience since we live in a first floor flat on a busy street and every one can see into our flat. It had become the running joke in the family about our lack of window treatment. Once we had finally made a descion I called my mother in law with the great news, the conversation went something like this.

ME “Philip and I have finally decided to hang sheers in the living room”

MIL “Why would you hang them there and not in the shed by the drive way”

ME “Well we really need them in the living room and it seems kind of strange to put them in the shed before the living room”

MIL “But why would you need them in the living room?”

ME “So that I can run around naked without the whole street knowing”

At this point there is a silence on the other end of the line and you can hear the light bulb going on.

MIL “Oh you mean you are hanging net curtains”

ME “Is that what you call them over here?”

MIL “I thought you were talking about garden shears and that really made not sense”
It just goes to prove that American is definitely a different dialect.

Marriage Counselling

My husband and I only own a laptop. We have a small flat really not a lot of room to store the whole kit and caboodle, plus we use it for the normal stuff. Internet, word processor, store photos, and as of late music for the I Pod. I did warn my husband not to rip every CD he owned onto the computer when he got the I Pod but excitement over took him and one can hardly blame I know how excited I get when I get a new toy.

It began slowly, just the CDs he wanted on his I Pod at the time, then all of his 200+ collection. Then 50 of his brothers, then 50 of his best friends, and all of a sudden we had absolutely no C: drive space. I tried to overlook it, he loves his music and this gave him easy access to it. How could I be a horrible witch and tell him that now it was all on his I Pod he needed to delete it off of the computer?

Friday night this all came to a head when I tried to download a TV show I had missed and it would not let me because I didn’t have enough disk space. I spent an hour and a half cleaning up as much of the C: drive as I could. Enough to watch my program but I knew we were only a few CDs away from breaking the camel’s back. So off we trotted this morning to Curry’s to take a look at external hard drives. For £49.99 we are now the proud owners of a 160GB external hard drive. For about the same price as an hour and a half of marriage counselling I got therapy from watching all of his music files and an insane number of American car photos being transferred. Then I got even more therapy deleting all of the files. To complete my therapy I emptied the recycle bin. I am sure to get the warm fuzzy feeling I have right now I would have need 4-8 sessions with a therapist, so I am voting this purchase into the money well spent category.