Time flies by so fast. Christmas is fast creeping up on us. This is not a bad thing, I just feel like I need to get things organised a bit faster. My plan for a general Christmas present idea, for various people, involves some time spent making it. It is something new for me, so I’m trying to get it done first time if possible. I’ll try to remember to blog about it afterwards – but obviously can’t say more at the moment, because people who read this blog will be the recipients of the presents!! Anyone out there feeling curious now!?!
I’ve got lots of time off work this month. I’d planned to take holiday for the trip to my Grandparents the weekend before Christmas (it’s their 60th wedding anniversary – can’t miss that), and because I had so much holiday left, to use it all up, I decided I might as well take from 18th to the end of the year off. I’ve also now ended up with a few hours of holiday next week as well, this was not planned. Normally I give my relief hours to my contracted job, and the hours get fitted around, but this time the rota for the contracted job was sorted earlier than normal, and some of the shifts clashed! I couldn’t be offered any different hours, so I was told to take it as holiday.
I’m not quite sure what’s up with my stomach today – well since about Midnight really! Before going to bed last night, my stomach started to ache, almost like it was hungry, but it was too late to eat. It then got a bit worse and I ended up trying to find the most comfortable position in bed so that I could go to sleep. It stopped feeling so bad at some point during the night, because I definitely slept, but this morning it still doesn’t feel right. It feels unsettled. There’s been no D or V (I do hate V!!) and I don’t think any of the things that I ate yesterday would cause me a problem. I was planning on walking to work this morning, but I’ve decided to drive.
I’ve recently come across a great Christian website called Eden.co.uk which seems to be striving to offer competitive prices online. We wanted to buy the Glo Bible, which is for sale in the Christian books shops at £49.99, but wanted to pay a bit less. The Glo Bible is an interactive software programme, which the Bible in various translations, it also has pictures, videos, commentaries, timelines, maps… It’s pretty massive. Things link together, and it’s updated through an Internet connection.
For a better description:
“NIV Anglicised Text
7,500 encyclopedia articles
463 virtual reality tours
102 expert videos
2,382 high resolution photos
689 works of art
147 maps and much more
Glo features the whole of the NIV Bible with British spelling, grammar and punctuation. Within 2 clicks, find a chapter faster than a paper Bible. The Bible is in its natural order and easy to read in a magazine format.
With a timeline, readers of Glo can view where events happened chronologically and in context with one another through a zoomable interface.
There is an atlas in Glo where major stories and locations of the Bible appear geographically with a zoomable Google-maps style interface along with map overlays, tours, photos, and videos from experts.
Glo is topical. Relevant verses for thousands of subjects are searchable by keyword and include commentary from leading authors, scholars and other experts.
With Glo, there is a huge collection of media to browse through, including HD video, virtual tours, articles, high-resolution photos, artwork, maps, and historical animations. The video library includes the “IN His Shoes” HD interactive documentary, that has stunning on-location footage and expert insight from Norman Geisler, Max Lucado, William P Young, Dr Joel Hunter and other scholars.
You can also personalise your reading plan with Glo with MyGlo. This is a special section that houses all your notes, experiences and content. MyGlo also includes a Bible reading plan to help you track your progress and set Bible reading goals.”
I’ve just ordered ours for £41.99!!
So on Wednesday I cancelled my order with CDWOW – for my Bonjovi CD. Thursday and Friday I was too busy (working) to check the email account I used for this order. It turned out, within an hour of getting an email from them saying that they would cancel my order, I received an email saying that the CD had been dispatched!
I’m so glad that I didn’t bother to buy the CD anywhere else. If it arrives I will keep it, really can’t be bothered with the hassle of returning it.
What I’ve learnt from this experience: Don’t use www.cdwow.com, it’s not worth the hassle!
Sunday was interesting. I went to church – that was good. We popped into Tescos afterwards to pick up some drink to take to friends who were feeding us. As we were walking away from the till and towards the exit of Tesco’s I started not feeling right…in a confused sort of way.
It’s the weirdest thing ever to describe: Imagine as well as your normal thought pattern, you have thoughts/memories come into your head, which aren’t relevant and you’re not sure if they really happened or if you just dreamt them. It was a bit like an extreme da javu feeling, but that kept going.
I drove to our friends from churches house. We sat and chatted, and I kept finding that if I did not concentrate on remember what was being said in the conversation, then I would start forgetting what had been said, and therefore loose track of what we were talking about! My short term memory was playing games with me! It did ease off as the afternoon went on, but because I’d found it hard to keep track of the conversation earlier, I found myself repeating what I had said before, because their response was that I’d already told them that!
I felt bad that I couldn’t really say how I was feeling (/thinking) at the time. It’s one thing telling people some thing hurts, they can suggest painkillers or something to relieve it, but how do you tell people your thoughts are all confused and messed up! It’s certainly one way to kill a conversation. I’m afraid my coping mechanisms kick in at these times, and I try to deal with it myself.
I’m not quite sure of what the cause is, but I’ve had this kind of thing a few times before, for varying periods of time. After multiple tests: brain, heart, blood… the only thing that came up as not quite working right was my thyroid, it was borderline underactive. I had a few blood tests (every 3 weeks) which came back borderline, and then one that came back normal, and then did not get asked to have any more blood tests. I did wonder at the if it had been underactive before, could it be again. I don’t claim to understand it. Following Sundays weirdness, I booked another blood test to check my thyroid function, for which blood was taken today. I now wait to see what it shows.
Anyone medical minded out there, if you have any idea of what it might be, please share your thoughts. Just so you know last time I had an MRI and lots of checks on my heart (cos I had ASD closure in Jan 05) with no abnormalities. No other health probs (not diabetic – I’ve checked).
On the 5th November, I ordered Bonjovi’s new CD from CDWOW, because the price was £1 cheaper than I could find it elsewhere online (incl postage). This was my first purchase from this company. Last week, bored of waiting, I logged onto my account, to find that my CD’s status was “BACKORDER”. After looking at FAQ’s I found out this means they are out of stock, and waiting for more. This annoyed me, for two reasons: one it had been in stock when I had made the purchase online, two no-one had emailed me to inform me it was out of stock. I sent them a message (via their “Contact us” form), and had the reply saying:
Grrrr! I don’t think this is good enough. This is what what their website says:
“Out of Stock Items
In most cases, out-of-stock (back-order) items are on order from the manufacturers. In some cases, we may be awaiting or researching information from one or more of our suppliers. When we receive the product, we will ship it to you promptly. Back-order titles usually come into stock within 1 to 2 weeks but can occasionally take longer. If your order is not ready to ship within 10 days, we will send you an update via email. If for any reason we determine that a back-ordered item will no longer be available at all, we will notify you immediately by email, cancel the item from your order and delete the item from our catalogue. We will refund your payment for this item or you may select an alternative of the same value.”
The annoying thing is that all I can do at the moment is wait for them to deliver/get in touch with me again. I can’t cancel the order, because there is no option to do that, although they’ve happily already taken my money.
I would not be complaining if I’d CHOSEN to buy something not in stock at the time of buying, and wait for it, but if I’d have known it would have taken so long, I would have bought it from elsewhere.
This is probably the last time I consider buying something from this store. If anyone is considering using CDWOW, my advice is don’t bother. Go to Play or Amazon!
For some reason I’ve recently decided to seach for freebies online. I’ve also signed up to some survey companies that offer rewards or chances to trial things.
I was watching TV this evening, and an advert for Colgates Sensitive Pro-relief came on the TV, so I thought to myself, hmm, I wonder if there’s a free sample of it… a quick good search later, and here it is:
http://www.colgatesampling.com/
It’s interesting what you can get for free – we already had vouchers for beer, chocolate and Hovis bread!
I did learn today, that you might not be able to get the freebie if one of the neighbours, with the same postcode has already requested the item!! Grrrr! Not fair – there’s loads of houses with the same postcode as us!
Over the last week we’ve been trying to tidy up our flat. It all started when we realised that we were going to have to move the sofa in our living room, because we can’t have a leather sofa by the window, when the heater by the window is turned ON… otherwise burnt sofa! We may have only been in our flat for just over a year, but I think we’ve already set up a twice a year living room rotation! It’s like we have an autumn and spring clean, in which the sofa and table swap places!
After we’d done the sofa/table swap – and hoovered – we then realised that we really needed to tidy up other bits of the room, so that was basically how we spent out weekend!! You can tell we’re carefree, young, wild people at the weekends!… OK maybe not! We did go out to watch fireworks (from the car – it was wet) and have a meal at the Mill on the Exe.
Since then I’ve been trying to tackle our spare room, lovely known as the “Green room”, although Big John would like it be named his room (but NO!), which was a scary idea. The Green room had gone over to a bad place, it was no longer easy to walk from the doorway to the window, well it was a struggle to even get in the door! The floor had turned into an assault course – it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Anyone who has seen my bedroom, knows I’m not the most tidy, I’m happy to live with organised chaos, and then 4 years and a bit ago, I married a lovely man, who also isn’t the most tidy… oh this story sounds bad!! Anyway, I’m a “blitzer”, once a mess has got too bad, I’ll do a bit tidy up.
ANYHOO, our green room is currently looking much better. It’s amazing the amount of rubbish I got rid of, mainly unneeded paperwork, envelopes, old work/NVQ related stuff. I have a bit more to do, but it’s getting there. I need to go through all my craft/card making supplies some time and tidy them into less boxes, I think all the stuff is currently in 4 boxes, and some stuff loose! It’s not good!
My inlaws are really struggling against things at the moment. They’ve had so many problems trying to move house, and now that they finally are another problem is crashed into the mix. I say crashed quite literally. My mum-in law was driving up her road, moving it out of the way of the removals lorry, and someone comes up behind her and crashes into the back of her car – writing the car off!! No fair! This is the last thing they need on the day they move house. They had enough to deal with, with moving all the stuff, and dog (who’s so confused about what is happening at the moment). I’m glad it’s half term, so that Sarah isn’t needing to go to work this week, but next week will be back to the school where she’s headteacher. Getting from their new place with only one car between the two of them will make things complicated!! Shame we can’t get Ross’ old car to be reliable, as she could use that.
I feel like I’m neglecting this blog a bit these days. I blame Facebook and Twitter – when I’ve got something short to say I put it on them, and twitters come through to my blogs side bar anyway.
Life is going OK at the moment. Tuesday youth group was a bit crazy. We only have 4 leaders, so we decided to make things easier on ourselves and just carried on the same games that the younger youth group had been doing – as they’d had a Wii night set up, and also had the two table tennis tables out. The older ones it seems weren’t as impressed, and a group of boys decided that it would be more fun to hide themselves and various Wii parts (controllers) in the corner of the hall by the soft mats. They got bored and basically decided to ruin it for those who wanted to play the games! It was a bit of a rough evening, with the mucking around resulting in there being no tuck shop open, for ANYone!
I feel the location of the youth group, limits what we can do in the autumn/winter months. We meet in the primary school, and have use of the hall and entrance/kitchen area. When it’s light outside we can use the field, which is great for giving the boys (it mainly is the boys, rather than the girls) a chance to run around and use up some energy. This time of year it’s just too dark outside between 6.30-9pm.
This week we did have some crafty type activities to do, but the mess made is crazy, and I’m not sure it was quite right for them. I’m thinking I might teach them to make friendship bracelets. When I did an American Exchange in 2003, and the Americans came over, many of the girls were into making thread bracelets/necklasses, using the method of wrapping one colour round a few times to make a patch of colour, then swapping to another thread… I’ll have to practice first myself, work out how much thread is needed for a bracelet/necklace and buy some threads. I’ve glad it’s an older group, because they should be able to manage safety pins without too much danger (as long as they are sensible) to pin the thread to their clothes – easiest way to hold the top end, so both hands free to hold and move threads. Probably find some of the boys are keen too, but any mucking around with pins and their out.
We’ve ended up using a yellow/red card system at youth club, to illustrate a result to bad behaviour. The system is the the child is given a verbal warning (ideally away from the others) and told if the behaviour continues then they will be given a “yellow card”. If they get a yellow card, they cannot buy anything from the tuck shop near the end of the evening. If after getting a yellow card, they continue with bad behaviour, they will be given a red card, which means that they will not be able to come to youth group the following week. If anyones got any thoughts on this, please let me know.
The Glo interactive Bible… thanks for Dave Walker for Twittering about it. Check it out on the Church Times website.
It’s being released today in the United States. “Glo brings God’s word to life with HD video and documentaries, high-resolution images, zoom-able maps, 360-degree virtual tours and more. Glo is the Bible “re-imagined for a digital world,” according to Gloco-creator Nelson Saba.”
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