It's been a strange, entertaining, and frankly painful week by turns since my last post.
The job hunt continues and is looking pretty optimistic right now - I'm hoping to hear about something in the next week, so crossing fingers & toes. If it works out, it's actually a salary boost for me, which will definitely help. Update - I've been re-deployed internally, which does make it sound a bit like someone plans on shooting at me. Military speak in HR, gotta love it. It's a huge relief though - I had visions of joining the hollow-eyed line of despair at the dole office to make rent, and that doesn't appeal one little bit.
I downloaded a fitness app, which is a lot more useful than I thought it would be, although it does tend to scold when you under-eat.
On Saturday, I took my cousin off for an MRI scan, at St Ann's in Tottenham. Poor girl has a lot of grief with her knees at the moment, and since I know all about severe pain when trying to walk, she has my sympathy.
The hospital itself is pretty strange. The MRI unit is right at the rear, and since it doesn't have an emergency unit and we went on a Saturday, it was very, very quiet.
There's something utterly creepy about a deserted hospital; the only thing that comes close is an abandoned school. The buildings sprawl over a huge chunk of land, and all of the units are separate buildings. Once you step into the grounds, all sound from outside disappears, like some sort of aural black hole. The main feeling as you walk along the utterly silent main road that leads to the pre-fab MRI is desolation, and age.
A bit of googling when I got home told me that the site started off as a fever hospital in 1892. I have no idea whether the buildings on site are that old; the actual set-up reminded me of a very large old farm with a lot of outbuildings. I do know that if anyone ever wants to shoot a very atmospheric horror there, they'd have a very good location.
Monday was my turn for a medical issue. I had to go to the dentist for extractions. Anyone who knows me also knows that dentists fit in the same category as spiders, sharks, and my mother in a bad mood. They scare the hell out of me, although to give my current dentist credit she is very good. I'm just very phobic. (I also have objections to paying a great deal of money to be tortured for 30 minutes at a time. It makes me bitter.)
With my usual luck, it turned out they couldn't do all the extractions at the same time (something to do with only being allowed to use a certain number of local anesthetic injections - & it still bloody hurt!), so I'm back in a couple of weeks. The one side got to the stage where I was visualizing the dentist bracing herself with a foot on my shoulder.
I finally lurched out of surgery with an Elvis sneer, looking like I'd been bitch-slapped by Thor. Today I'm making friends with large quantities of painkiller and salt-water, hoping to be able to speak when I go back to my desk tomorrow. Sadly, I've lost the Elvis lip, which I was starting to appreciate.
To add insult to injury, my fitness app gave me lecture on not eating enough calories.It's a bit hard to argue with an app when you have mouthful of cotton wool & nowhere to write about having to gum your food to death, so I've had to satisfy myself by glaring at it and sulking.
Hopefully by the weekend I'll no longer look like a shaved down hamster, and be able to write coherently. For some reason fiction and painkillers don't get on very well, which makes me doubt a lot of the legends about drug-addicted writers producing great work. It's a bit hard to write a masterpiece when you're arguing with your spell-checker about how to spell "cat."
The job hunt continues and is looking pretty optimistic right now - I'm hoping to hear about something in the next week, so crossing fingers & toes. If it works out, it's actually a salary boost for me, which will definitely help. Update - I've been re-deployed internally, which does make it sound a bit like someone plans on shooting at me. Military speak in HR, gotta love it. It's a huge relief though - I had visions of joining the hollow-eyed line of despair at the dole office to make rent, and that doesn't appeal one little bit.
I downloaded a fitness app, which is a lot more useful than I thought it would be, although it does tend to scold when you under-eat.
On Saturday, I took my cousin off for an MRI scan, at St Ann's in Tottenham. Poor girl has a lot of grief with her knees at the moment, and since I know all about severe pain when trying to walk, she has my sympathy.
The hospital itself is pretty strange. The MRI unit is right at the rear, and since it doesn't have an emergency unit and we went on a Saturday, it was very, very quiet.
There's something utterly creepy about a deserted hospital; the only thing that comes close is an abandoned school. The buildings sprawl over a huge chunk of land, and all of the units are separate buildings. Once you step into the grounds, all sound from outside disappears, like some sort of aural black hole. The main feeling as you walk along the utterly silent main road that leads to the pre-fab MRI is desolation, and age.
A bit of googling when I got home told me that the site started off as a fever hospital in 1892. I have no idea whether the buildings on site are that old; the actual set-up reminded me of a very large old farm with a lot of outbuildings. I do know that if anyone ever wants to shoot a very atmospheric horror there, they'd have a very good location.
Monday was my turn for a medical issue. I had to go to the dentist for extractions. Anyone who knows me also knows that dentists fit in the same category as spiders, sharks, and my mother in a bad mood. They scare the hell out of me, although to give my current dentist credit she is very good. I'm just very phobic. (I also have objections to paying a great deal of money to be tortured for 30 minutes at a time. It makes me bitter.)
With my usual luck, it turned out they couldn't do all the extractions at the same time (something to do with only being allowed to use a certain number of local anesthetic injections - & it still bloody hurt!), so I'm back in a couple of weeks. The one side got to the stage where I was visualizing the dentist bracing herself with a foot on my shoulder.
I finally lurched out of surgery with an Elvis sneer, looking like I'd been bitch-slapped by Thor. Today I'm making friends with large quantities of painkiller and salt-water, hoping to be able to speak when I go back to my desk tomorrow. Sadly, I've lost the Elvis lip, which I was starting to appreciate.
To add insult to injury, my fitness app gave me lecture on not eating enough calories.It's a bit hard to argue with an app when you have mouthful of cotton wool & nowhere to write about having to gum your food to death, so I've had to satisfy myself by glaring at it and sulking.
Hopefully by the weekend I'll no longer look like a shaved down hamster, and be able to write coherently. For some reason fiction and painkillers don't get on very well, which makes me doubt a lot of the legends about drug-addicted writers producing great work. It's a bit hard to write a masterpiece when you're arguing with your spell-checker about how to spell "cat."
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