Saturday 19 February 2011

Collapses At The Finish Line

Hurrah, I in the last two hours I have come to the end of my work marathon! I HAVE TOMORROW OFF!!!! I HAVE NO MORE WORK UNTIL 7:30AM MONDAY!!

What's better still, after I finish work on Tuesday morning I am being whisked off to Manchester by my wonderful best friend, who has just informed me we have an appointment to try on dresses at a VERY exclusive bridal boutique in Didsbury. Yes, yes, I know I already have my wedding dress upstairs in my wardrobe. That's why Catie has told the shop assistant that we have a budget of £1,500, so that there is no way I will get tempted to buy anything else. AND WE GET TO TRY ON AMAZING EXPENSIVE BRIDE STUFF! Let's face it, this is my only chance to live the bridal dream. I'm totally taking my camera.

And I have a Mac makeover booked for Wednesday to experiment with "wedding beauty" (eek), and then I'm going out for cinema + dinner with Sam. We're going to Thai Sabai which is where we had our first date (and haven't been back since, as we seem to go out to eat together twice a year at the most). Basically I am being spoilt and finally getting to properly enjoy wedding preparations and excitement. Which is brilliant because I am crawling with knackeredness and missing spending time with my friends.

The other good news is that Aerockbics made it into Stylist magazine's Top 5 Things to Do in Leeds this weekend! Time to push the media boat and get my Monday night busy enough to expand....

Monday 14 February 2011

Working Weeks (and more weeks and more weeks)

I am currently in the middle of a 13 day working week, and my GOD you'd think I was recreating the universe I'm so tired and moany. I must be updating Twitter about every 20 seconds with another whinge about how exhausted I am and how I'm jealous of everyone else's lovely weekends of rest and tedium. I bet God didn't do that. Mind you he only had six days and then he got to put his feet up, the lucky bitch.

I don't know who decided to have five days of work and two days of rest, but they knew what they were on about. I know a four day week would be mint and all that, but at the other end of the spectrum, having six days of work and one day off is exhausting and I don't seem to be getting used to it at all. Five days on two days off is clearly needed for my sanity. And now I don't even have a day off on Sunday either! Well, not for a bit anyway. I've got pink rabbit eyes and blotchy skin and I'm hell to be around, snapping at everybody and making them all do press-ups.

My Pilates course is brilliant though, and it will all be worth it in the end.

In other news, today is Valentine's Day. I've forgotten what Sam looks like (tall? scruffy? think I passed him on the way to the bathroom at some point on Friday night) so it will be nice to watch a slightly weak film together and actually COOK and eat the same meal at the same time which honestly I don't think we've done yet in 2011. Shame on us.

Anyway, there will be no flowers, chocolates or champagne. Instead there will be daft "cards" drawn with felt-tip and Molly Ringwald on the telly.

Pretty excited actually. A lifetime of V-days like this will be great.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

The Big Day

I've just watched the saccharine, ridiculous film Bride Wars (starring Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson). It's about two best friends who grow up dreaming of their big day. Isn't that funny, that so many girls supposedly grow up with a kind of vision of their wedding day? Who are these people who while away their childhoods imagining themselves in dresses and the handsome groom and the cake and the flowers and the blah blah blah? Do they even exist?

Is this a culturally perpetuated myth, that little girls always dream of their Big Day?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some crazy feminist who never wanted to get married in the first place. I just didn't really think about that much either way. I figured if it happened, then that would be dandy, and if it didn't, oh well. Stuff like having kids, a career and owning a house all seemed much more important than prancing around being the centre of attention (which is what I thought getting married was all about).

So I definitely didn't have any set ideas about how I wanted My Big Day to be.

Until now.

I appear to be condensing 30 years of not being bothered into 5 months of being VERY BOTHERED INDEED. You may like to call it unhealthy obsession. I am at the stage now where 100% of my reading material is wedding based. I'm buying those silly bridal magazines even though I wouldn't dream of having a wedding remotely like anything they print and promote. I watch wedding reality TV non-stop. I am glued to Twitter for the latest update on the 123948293 wedding blogs I now regularly read. And apparently I am now watching really bad romantic comedies, providing their plot centres on the W word.

And MY GOD do I have spreadsheets, lists, and endless, gushing ideas of what we will be doing.

I am boring myself, frankly, so God help those around me.

So I started to wonder - maybe if I'd gone to tap class and pony riding lessons like all the other proper little girls I would have this shit LICKED by now. Maybe if I'd done my hair in ribbons and wanted to wear dresses when I was younger, I would have it all out of my system, because thinking about your wedding day is what those kind of girls do. I'D BE READY TO GO. But no, I chose to spend my youth copying pictures of Korky the Cat out of the Dandy and playing army with big sticks, and watching Predator when my Mum thought I was watching the Care Bears Movie.

So now I've ended up doing the girlie flouncy look-at-me-I'm-the-prettiest-princess-of-them-ALL shit as an adult who should really know better.

Oh it's so bad it's almost embarrassing.

Oh but my shoes WILL BE SO SPARKLY.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

Engagement Shoot

Today Sam and I are having a photographer friend come round to take some pictures of us, ostensibly so we have something nice to put up at the wedding and on our invitations, but in reality so we can be silly and pose. Actually, what they call this in the whimsical (and often widiculous) world of weddings is "An Engagement Session"

See how the photogenic couple incorporate their hobbies and idiosyncracies into a set of adorable pictures? Did you throw up yet? Oh my God, when I first found out these things existed I nearly split a side. And yet after five weeks pouring over wedding blogs and endless engagement session shoots I have now decided it's quite sweet really. Especially as we have so few decent pictures of us together. And it was all our photographer's idea anyway, or something.

So the plan is to de-twee the whole thing and dress particularly nerdy, look highly unattractive and try and get the cat into as many pictures as possible.

Watch out.

EDIT: Here be some!

Friday 4 February 2011

Friday!! Knackered.

Crawling towards the weekend on my hands and knees. I don't understand why I can't handle these long days, I need to toughen up. One of my workplaces shut down last week and I'm having to beg and plead my last 2 months wages out of them. Cheque turned up (finally) yesterday and they'd decided to pay me £8.50 per shift rather than per hour. I think it makes it more exhausting when you're working your nuts off and people are screwing you out of money so's you don't even know if you can pay your gas bill at the end of the month. Just as I've lost that job, my other job have decided to stop paying us for teaching classes, and stop paying us commission for signing up new members, so we're back on a basic wage there. Staff morale? Anyone?

Still applying for other work though. It'll come. Has to.

My own freelance P.T is good fun, and my clients are getting excellent results. My rock aerobics class is starting to build a following and I LOVE teaching it. I need to count my blessings that I get to call this part work. The self-employed side of what I do is brilliant, and empowering. It's the bits where I have to work for other people that make me a bit depressed. It's steady work though, it's needed.

Going out tonight with my Catie. Last weekend off work for 2 months, so I'm going to make the absolute most of it. Wedding shopping tomorrow with Ellie. Hopefully get to do something nice with Sam on Sunday. I love it when you cram so much into a weekend that it feels like three days instead of two.

Thursday 3 February 2011

Back To The Blog

Let's face it, 140 characters was never going to enough for me.

I used to have a fitness blog a few years ago which you may or may not be able to find... it actually got almost popular (no, really, it did - I didn't tell you about it because it was all a bit too personal). The pressure of having to come up with a nutcrackingly brilliant entry every day eventually made me want to explode. Then I got made redundant and I had the perfect excuse to chuck it in, seeing as everything I wrote from then on would have been achingly depressing anyway, and nobody likes a moaner.

Almost exactly two years on and I miss my diary.

And this time it WILL be a diary, not some pseudo fitness/social commentary. So it will be about my life, and mostly dull. So, there! I have set out my stall, and I have nothing to live up to, which is my absolute favourite place to be. YESSSS

Things that have happened to me since I stopped blogging: I lost my job, spent six months retraining as a fitness instructor, qualified, failed to get any work for months then as soon as I got a job, I had a car accident and spent the next six months not being able to do a right lot. Finally starting to get back on track now, skint as the proverbial church-dwelling mouse, got 99 problems etc. But it's not all woe. I have an awesome band and some wicked friends and I'm getting married in June to the best human being in the whole world and I'm VERY excited.

And the roller-coaster has taught me a lot, to be honest.

Consequently, this year I've decided I'm bored of the mundane and the shite. The feels-like-everything-is-going-wrong syndrome. Bored of being bombarded with platitudes. "When one door closes..." honestly if one more person says that to me from the comfort of their lovely secure, stable career I'm going to BRAIN them. I miss being happy, miss winning at life, miss being good at stuff, miss going into work and being treated like an vaguely intelligent human being and not a treadmill mopping, minimum wage moron.

I've paid my dues, two years of relentless bollocks. Time for things to start swinging the other way, I reckon.

It's already started.