Woohoo!
Mood:  special
Yay - just checked my BMI here and I'm back in the underweight range! I know by definition underweight is bad but I'm very slim built, so this is better for me. I still need to do more exercise and eat less ice cream though :) Not for weight but for what it must be doing to my arteries! Yesterday I had, let's see... chocolate-biscuit cereal, bread and paté, pizza and about 4 pints of beer. Really healthy, well done me. I'm just so *hungry* all the time and easy food is always bad for you (except fruit, I know, nature's candy yadda yadda but I just can't get in the habit of carrying it round with me).

Watched Unbreakable last night... it's amazing how much more I 'got' it having read comics recently... the colouring and framing of the shots and that. Wow, check me out, pop culture girl ;)

Grauniad link
The Grauniad's corrections and clarifications column is always good for a laugh. My favourite is from August 12th this year:

'In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: "Our team was the worst in the First Division and I'm sure it'll be the worst in the Premier League." Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was "Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I'm sure it'll be the worst in the Premier League." Profuse apologies.'

Tee hee.

In limbo
Mood:  not sure
So tiiiiiired and it's far too hot! The other half and I are fed up of living in our halfway house and can't wait to get into the one we actually want... In the meantime we torture ourselves watching interior design TV and get stressed out. The completion date is actually only 2 weeks on Thursday but even that can't go smoothly - apparently we can't hire a van to drive ourselves due to not being 25 (other half is 24, damn him!) so we'll have to shell out for a removal crew and try to move in one go rather than over a couple of days. Why is nothing ever easy?!

But it should be worth it. What I am very much looking forward in the new house:

1. The housewarming party and other barbecues and gatheraties* with friends;

2. Summer evenings on the little patio with a bottle of beer;

3. Choosing the decor and living somewhere that isn't painted magnolia over scummy textured wallpaper;

4. Putting in a super-duper electric power shower and revelling in water that stays the same temperature and washes out shampoo properly;

5. Buying those little odds and ends of furniture, lighting, gadgets etc. that every home needs;

And last but not least, 6. Getting a pet cat. It will be a girl and called Buffy but it will not kill frogs or birds, only the occasional mouse. I have never been a member of a cat-owning household before so this is a step into the unknown for me, though the other half grew up surrounded by them so he more-or-less knows what to do. I can't wait...[jitters about excitedly].

*A cross between a gathering and a party, i.e. it is celebratory of something but everyone fits in the one room.

Ballet and mayhem
I had a busy night on Wednesday. First we viewed a potential temporary home (quite nice).

Then we went to see the Nederlans Dans Theater 2 at the Lyceum. This is a company of young dancers, aged 17-22, who get experience of live stage ballet before they feed into the adult NDT1. The show was brilliant - very contemporary and weird but great fun. My favourite segment was 'Subject to Change', choreographed by Paul Lightfoot and Sol Léon, and set to two pieces of music, Franz Shubert's Death and the Maiden string quartet number 14 and Gustave Mahler's Andante con moto. It was basically a highly charged pas-de-deux which took place on a piece of red carpet that the other dancers pulled around, lifted up and rolled up in at various points. It was really cool. My other half read stuff into it about an arranged marriage and rape and stuff, but I was too caught up in it to analyse it. I was almost in tears by the end! I loved it!

After that we went to see our friends' band Dangerlust who were playing their first gig as part of a night put on by Sheffield University's Alternative Music Society. They rocked mightily, sounding kind of glam-metal-pop in a good way. I took lots of photos - might scan them and put them on the website if they're any good when I get them developed. Apparently there was AMS DJing afterwards but we were too tired after the frantic activity and went home to bed!

I ist house!
Mood:  happy
At bloody last! We are exchanging contracts today - so at last we can open that bottle of champagne :-)

Of course, it's still not completely simple. The completion date is either 31st July or two weeks after they give us notice! But I don't care - the house is mine, all mine! Ahem, I mean ours, all ours, obviously. [muffles evil laughter behind hand]

My mum is coming to see our 'halfway house' next week. I hope she isn't expecting to sleep there though! We have a bed for us - a lovely kingsize bed with curly metal headboard and footboard - but not much else...

Phew!
Just had a call from the solicitor - apparently we can complete on the house on 31st July. That's a relief, though it is 6 weeks later than we'd have liked! Apparently the vendor refused point blank to go into temporary accommodation, but that's OK because it looks like our short-term lease will go through in time. Funny how quickly things change, isn't it? On Tuesday I was all upset and desperate and now I'm quite upbeat - it's just that the intervening days have been the most stressful of my life!

Bastards!
Mood:  sad
Well, we finally got our solicitors to admit that they haven't been on the ball. Turns out that we can't move into our house until the end of July at the earliest, which is rather different from the "sometime in June" line they'd been sticking to so far. So we're going to have to find a short-term lease somewhere - who knows where? Maybe miles from our workplaces and our friends - and put all our plans on hold while we hole up in a bedsit. Perhaps that's melodramatic, but I certainly don't want to cough up to hire a whole house that we won't have time to use. I am heartbroken and almost in tears. I know everyone has horror stories about moving house but everything seemed to be moving along at last. What do you guys think? Shall we try and charge the additional rent to the vendor? Or to the builders who are being so tardy in finishing his new place? Why can't he move out early and play the squatter?



I sound very negative and bitter, I know. My other half broke the news to me by saying: "Froggy, you know how the Chinese word* for 'problem' is the same as their word for 'opportunity'? Well, we've got a big opportunity!" Which was a bit cruel, because I thought it was good news! But I suppose he has a point. Maybe we can get an unfurnished place and start accumulating tables and cookers and stuff. Retail therapy is very soothing and it would make the stopgap place seem less of a stopgap. On the other hand, if we bought a lot we'd then have to pay for a removal van...



It's annoying on the financial front because I arranged insurance cover from 1st June, so that's 2 months insurance - about £50 - going to waste, and I rushed to get the deposit through, wasting £25 on a CHAPS fee. But far worse than that is the emotional cost - we have invested all our hope and dreams for the future in this and they are getting further and further away...



A melancholy QOF



*If I'd been more on the ball I'd have replied, "Chinese? What language is that then?!"

Gahhhhhhhhhhhhh!
They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do. 'They' are right. We have to leave our current place by the 17th June, but we've no idea when we can get into the new place... Eeek! We are going to be homeless! Luckily we've been renting so we don't have too much stuff to put into storage, but it seems very unfair that we're shelling out tens of thousands for a place of our own, and then we have to pay more to keep our stuff safe and impose on the hospitality of friends too. Bleh. I'm not quite pulling my hair out, but I'm close!

Bad news, people
Mood:  surprised
I've just discovered that if you go to Google and enter "frog" and press the I'm Feeling Lucky button then you go straight to this horrible frog dissection site! That means this is the most popular site for a search on frogs. You sick bastards...

Frame war
Today has been a long and difficult day. Not the Internet's fault, just one of those days at work where some is off and someone else is in a meeting and the upshot is that you have to do everything and you are stuck at your desk all day without a break! Still, it's nearly over.

Today I tried to make my index page all framey, and I mostly succeeded. The main problem is that things from the navigation sidebar kept opening in a new window instead of in the main frame, and I don't know why because I did everything the picnic lady said. Also, making things framey apparently upsets Angelfire so you get a much higher percentage of those amusing error pages. Sometimes one in each frame. So maybe I will abandon it.

On the Scienticians website (see left) we've found a cool gif that we want to make into an image map, but just looking at the code for that blew my brain so that may have to wait too.