InBlogNito

So it was my birthday yesterday… maybe it will make the lawyer happier when he gets back to know I’m a whole year older now . It was a great day, I didn’t sleep very well or very much the night before, but I woke up to pancakes with banana and maple syrup yum! Great way to start the day, thanks to flatmate K. She also bought me a beautiful set of mugs, which go perfectly with the little theme I’ve got going on with my mugs. I like matching sets for everything else, but my mugs are a random collection of single mugs, with a floral theme going on, and so the ’set’ she bought me are actually 4 different mugs, and all in the kind of floral design that I like.

Here’s the birthday haul (click on image to go to flickr, there are notes there):

I also got the most beautiful picture from a friend: 

It’s gorgeous and totally perfect for me, she knows me well! The butterflys are embroidered on, and the purple is silky fabric with the darker butterflies printed on.

I also went out to dinner with a couple of friends, and had lunch with the butterfly picture friend the day before, so lots of birthday meals and treats. Next weekend my whole family, brother included, are coming to visit me! I’m a little worried about the weather, we’re right in the middle of winter here, and had a massive storm over the weekend, with another one due this week. I’ll have to think hard about all the different things we can do. We’ll take it day by day, doing all the outside activities as soon as we can, and save the indoors ones for rainy days.

Last night, brother H text me and said ‘Happy birthday, hope it’s been good, haven’t bought you a present, any ideas about what you want?’. Only I had NO idea who it was. I have three other numbers for him, but apparently none of them are current. I knew it was family, because he called me by my nickname, and I knew it was close family, cos only my parents/brother/grandparents give me presents. But I just couldn’t think who it was! So in the end I asked, and H’s response was: ‘That’s ok, it’s only your brother’. Oops… I blame him of course, he should give people his new number.

I woke up at 2am this morning with a runny nose… guess who’s got a cold? Lucky me! At least it’s right in between my birthday and my family coming, it should be gone by the weekend, it’s not bad, just that annoying dribbly nose kind of cold.

And, last but not least, I have to shout out to Kari, who’s running an awesome raffle this week for a Flickr Pro account. I would totally love to win, but I’ll keep the game fair and encourage everyone else to link to Kari and let her know so you’re into win

So after noting that Friglet’s blog didn’t remember me cos I had to login to see her worst blogger post in full, I have to confess that my own blog didn’t remember me! I had to go searching for the silly blogsome login link I have stealthed away in my favourites folders because my history with this site is so old the browser didn’t remember me.

Anyways, I too, confess to being the worlds worst blogger. I had to login however, because there are some things I need to get off my chest. One in particular in fact: the new flatmate sucks. She’s hopeless, can’t recycle or refuse correctly, leaves the bathmat down on the floor, has her friends over who turn our bath and my facecloth orange, turns on music while I’m watching tv, leaves the door to the hall open EVERY.SINGLE.TIME she goes through it. Did you not see our last power bill? We’re trying to both stay warm and conserve energy here, not an easy task as it is without someone making it worse. It’s so infuriating, we just had one bad flatmate, we didn’t want another! And the annoying thing is that she’s not just plain stupid like Amber, she’s just plain disrespectful of other people’s lives and possessions. Like when she admired my coffee table (most expensive piece of furniture in my living room!) then threw her jacket on top, zips, domes and buttons hitting the wood. I try not to let my preciousness show be precious about these things, they’re there to be used and all. But do you have to go doing something like that? Seriously?!

We’ve also rearranged not one, or two, but FOUR rooms to accommodate her crap. I tried to reconcile this with the fact she is saving us money with appliances that we now don’t have to rent. However I just can’t reconcile any longer. This is what our living room looked like before:

Not the greatest picture, but you get the idea. I’m pretty proud of my efforts to furnish this room, I did it el cheapo, something like $1000 or a little more for all the furniture you see there, and only the couches are second hand (one of which I bought from the lead singer of a famous NZ band).

Enter the flatmate (you can also just see the top of a whole box of her crap near the bottom corner of the front door, it’s been there for weeks):

Boring, barren, and the lounge suite is totally not my taste (withholding true feelings about it so as not to offend anyone who might enjoy L-shaped couches, leather or cushions!). And while you may be thinking ‘nice, looks like a cosy couch, lotsa cushions’, let me tell you. It is not comfortable. Cushions are annoying, they move. The bottom cushion things slide forward all the time, and yep, they are cushions, flimsy soft filled-with-cotton-wool cushions. Not comfortable at all cos your ass just hits the base when you sit down. And the whole corner just looks so barren without the bookcase there. The bookcase is now in my room. Bedrooms are for beds. And clothes. That’s it. Not desks and tv’s and bookcases.

Here is where one couch got stuffed, no one can sit on it without knocking themselves out on the bench, so it’s become the place I keep my bag. Bag’s really don’t need WHOLE couches to themselves.

The other couch is in the study, which has been accommodated there thanks to other flatmate moving her desk into her room.

So here’s the plan, the only way I can live with is to unrearrange the living room back to how it was. I know how this sounds, but aside from the fact I just plain don’t like the new couch, I can’t actually sit on it. It wrecks my back, which doesn’t need any further wrecking, it does quite well on it’s own in that respect (it’s also missing the lawyers comfy bed ). Then my desk will go in my room, which kinda makes sense right now cos it’s too damn cold to be in that study and it takes way too long to heat up. Plus did I mention that power bill? Then new flatmate can have the whole damn spare room for her stupid couch. So long as there’s enough room to pump up an airbed and have someone sleep over.

I do feel kinda silly about this sometimes, especially when she’s saving us money with some of her excessive and over-priced belongings. However, her rent is somewhat subsidised in return for this. And then she’s just completely obliterated the rest of the house with her crap. When we advertised we clearly stated ‘everything you need is here, you just have to furnish your room’. We didn’t need a new couch, we didn’t need boxes of crap lying around. We didn’t even really need appliances, I was quite happy to pay to rent them (which I still kinda am anyways). Plus she was really rude and pushy about me getting rid of the old ones, she emailed me half way through monday morning to tell me to arrange movers to get rid of them, which I had already done. And you don’t even get movers to do it, you get the appliance rental people to do it stupid.

So that’s my bitch and moan, complete with pretty pictures. Am I being fair? Maybe there are some more tolerant people out there who would think not. However I’m not tolerant, and I know that, and feel completely justified in saying ‘enough is enough, I want our house back the way it was’. I’m especially intolerant right now because soooooo many other things are going on in addition to this that I’m on more than one type of medication to deal with it all. On the upside, the lawyer text me today. From FRANCE. I was fully expecting not to hear from him at all till he got back, but just over a week in and I haven’t been entirely forgotten . I had an angry few days when I realised how quickly his trip was coming up and how much I was relying on him, but I’m still pretty confident I’m not liking him, in that ‘let’s get married and have babies (even though he can’t)’ kind of way. I am however confused. I would say that I’m missing the nice things he does for me. The dilemma is that I’m not sure that I’m missing him, which sounds terrible. Isn’t the fact that he’s nice and does lovely things the same as him just being him, that’s his personality, that’s who he is? I feel like maybe I just take him for granted, and soak up the luxury of all the baths, coffee’s and breakfasts in beds, and the massaging of all the knots from my neck. But I do like him, I really liked him for a long long time, we all know that! And of course I love spending time with him. And I wish I could do more in return, but I can’t have him over at my house (plus my tv is worth about 1/100th of his and 15 of my stereos would fit into one of his wharf.dale speakers so he wouldn’t wanna come anyways probably!). But I wouldn’t say that I’m missing him right now. Argh. Am I making any sense to anyone? Probably not, so now that I’ve burnt my dinner writing this I’m going to leave my rambling thoughts hanging there and just forget it all for now. He may not even be interested in picking things up where we left off when he gets back anyways.