MysteriousAliWays

Floods! Not through our house, thankfully, but the police have closed the bridge in the local village, and the fire brigade have evacuated 49 of the houses next to the river, despite the flood defences that were built several years ago. Apparently the Tyne just downstream from us is around six and a half metres higher than normal, which is about half a metre more than they've recorded since records began sixty years ago.

I had to drive through a few inches of floodwater on the roads several times on the way home from work.

Luckily, our house is fairly high up the hillside from the river, so we're not in any danger of flooding, but it must be dreadfully disruptive for the people affected. It makes you wonder why builders ever looked at the wide, flat piece of land along the bottom of the valley, running alongside the river and thought "That looks like a nice flat bit to build houses on", rather than "flood plain". It seems painfully obvious, but then we have the benefit of hindsight and having seen that bit flooded several times in recent years. It's not as if the houses are that new either - most look Victorian/Edwardian - but then maybe they were more optimistic that they could contain nature in those days.

Well, the current advice against non-essential travel will give me an excuse to stay at home inside in the warm tomorrow rather than ferrying the kids all over the place!

This popped up on my Facebook page:

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[Xxxxx Xxxx] shared a post.
12 May at 14:43 ·

[Xxxxx Xxxxxx] 'STAY STRONG STU !'
I'm very pleased to be able to announce the kind donation of 2 more pellets of semen for sale on behalf of Stay Strong Stu. [Xxxx Xxxxxx] and [Xxxxx Xxxx] have ...
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I have to admit to doing a double take. On reading the whole post it turns out that the donations were of semen from a couple of champion bulls, to be auctioned on behalf of a charity appeal fundraising in the name of a local young farmer with an inoperable brain tumour.
A sad reason for it, but they're done really well with the fundraising - over £100,000 so far - and the announcement made me smile :)

That's the sort of thing you get on your FB timeline when you live in a rural community :)

Hello folks. Gosh, it's been a while since I posted, hasn't it?

The new job is going pretty well - I'm really enjoying working in the shop, a lot more than I would have expected. Granted, my previous experience of working with the general public was coloured by shadowing check-in staff at Heathrow years ago, and that's not going to show the public in their best light. (Flying is stressful - some people are really horrible when they're stressed ...)

The only disadvantage was the lack of hours (and hence low pay) as it was averaging three days a month. Still, that may be changing, as the boss messaged me today to ask if I'd like to do more hours at home updating the website, which would be great, since it's really under-utilised atm and we could have a ton more stuff on there to sell. So yay!

I was at a meetup for dance teachers this week, and I've also committed to having two jewellery stalls at some upcoming dance events in December and January, which is great (especially as the stalls aren't going to cost me anything), but since most of my jewellery stock is in the wool shop right now, I'm going to have to get busy and make a ton of stuff :)

I've been vaguely thinking of starting up a bellydance class in the local area, but hadn't done too much more than think about it and mention it to a few people. Tonight I got a call from a local dance friend asking if I'd be interested in teaching her dance group, since my previous teacher switched to Pilates a while ago and there isn't a bellydance/raqs sharqi teacher in the area any more. Her group have been doing their own choreographies and rehearsing together, but without a teacher it's easy to lapse into bad habits and get stale, so they want someone to work on their technique and develop their dance. It sounds like a great opportunity - the venue, night of the week and the students are all in place, all I'd have to do is come up with stuff to teach them! We had a bit of a discussion and a six-week trial course of lessons sounds like a good idea. I'm going to meet up with them in a couple of weeks or so to discuss what they want to focus on.

Lots of stuff I want to do, and most of it has just dropped into my lap, huzzah! Let the universe know what you want and sometimes the opportunities will present themselves :)

I'm going to be ridiculously busy though!

- Smelled gas in the kitchen, so I had to turn off the gas at the mains and open all the windows. Luckily it was a beautiful day, so that wasn't too much of a hardship! The gas had dissipated by the time I got F on to the school bus, and I had an unusually busy day today, so didn't call the gas leak people till the afternoon - I figured that since the gas was cut off it should be safe enough. A very nice chap came and fixed the valve at the back of the cooker - just as well, as it was starting to get cold with no central heating.

- The loo blocked, and I couldn't get it unblocked, so I had to wait for Mr Ali to come back from work and fix it. Fun thing to do after a long day at work, ew!

- Car got serviced on Friday, but they found the suspension was knackered to had to keep it in over the weekend. Courtesy car had to go back this morning, so ended up with no car and a dental appointment for me halfway across the county and a doctor's appointment for C in the opposite direction at about the same time. Had to order a taxi, who managed to get lost trying to find our house, AND at the other end - at least I got a small discount for being late :)

- Garage bill came to £984.37 - meep! Going to be an expensive month, and I have nearly £5000 of dental implants to pay for in the next month or two.

On the plus side, I got the bus back from the dentist's and it went along a route I'd never been before - through some gorgeous countryside, on single-track roads, through tiny picturesque villages with lovely stone houses, past fields of lambs, spring flowers and the last section ran alongside Hadrian's Wall, where you could still see the Roman earthworks. Brilliant sunshine made everything look beautiful, and reminded me how lucky I am to live somewhere so pretty.

Found a good present for my great-nephew (god, that makes me feel old! Great-Aunt Ali!!) who's going to be nine this week - a book of Star Wars origami, with specially printed papers for making your own Death Stars, light sabers, Princess Leias, etc. His dad was a huge Star Wars fan when he was wee, and was convinced it was all real rather than fiction (aw, bless!) so I'm hoping he has indoctrinated his offspring into the fandom. If not, at least one person in the household will appreciate it *g*.

Heating is back on, I haz pizza and fic, so am quite contented for now. Getting out into the sunshine really helped my mood today.

Quite an eventful afternoon here - I had to track down the owner of a lost handbag and car keys a couple of walkers had found outside our house, find the phone number of the owner and ring them up (or as it turned out, her husband), return said handbag when a neighbour knocked on the door asking about it (it belonged to a friend of hers) and that was that. Or so I thought. A few minutes later the owner of the bag knocked on the door and asked if I'd seen her mobile phone, as it was still missing. I decided to go and and help her look for it, only to discover that one of the little old ladies lying on the ground beside their car in shock (there were four of them, who had all been going out for lunch until they discovered the handbag was missing). Two of them had got out of the car and the driver didn't realise the third was in the process of getting out and had pulled over to park, resulting in said passenger taking a dive onto the tarmac.

I'd to help lift her off the ground - twice, as she tried to walk the first time and couldn't so we had to sit her down again and get a chair and blankets. For a tiny, frail little lady she didn't half weigh a lot!

Ambulance eventually turned up and carted her off to get x-rayed, mobile phone still not found despite further searches of the roadside. In the middle of all that a rabbit decided to take up residence in the middle of the road, have to be ushered off by a passing driver and then hunker down in the lay-by outside our house for a couple of hours (making the ambulance driver have to drive around it) and then quietly expire. If a fox or something doesn't cart off the corpse during the night I suppose I'll have to deal with it tomorrow.

Scammers belong in the level of hell allocated to spammers and virus-writers. *growls at them*

I received an email from a friend's account, entitled 'Sad News ………' [friend's full name] with the start of the text visible below it saying "Hello, I am sorry for reaching you rather too late due to the situation of things right now."

Given that said close friend is currently undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, my first thought was "Oh my god, it turned out to be terminal and she's died and her husband is contacting all her friends through her email!" but reading the email it became clear that someone had hacked her email account and was sending out the 'we're on holiday in the Philippines and have been mugged, please send money' scam.

I'm hugely relieved that she's ok - she posted a Facebook update to confirm that she aten't dead or in the Philippines and has changed her password - but infuriated that those bloody scammers put me (and probably a few of her other friends) through that.

Bastards.

Today I haz mostly been ... a model.

On Saturday I got a phone call from my hairdresser asking if I'd be willing to get my hair coloured for free as part of the salon's training day. Since I hadn't had my highlights done in ages (due to lack of funds and the fact that my usual cut & colour comes to around £60) and my roots were about four inches long, my answer can be summed up as "Hell yeah!"

So this morning I turned up at the salon. After some discussion, J set to work on my hair with around five different shades of blonde/light brown, and around two hours later my hair looked gorgeous.

And then they really got started.

After trying out some complicated plaiting, they decided on a style to fit the mood they were looking for. At one point I had three hairdressers clustered round me doing stuff to my hair. I spent about an hour doing an impression of Cousin It with my hair hanging in front of my face while they did some stuff that sounded like they were playing cat's cradle with my hair, followed my a period as a unicorn with half my hair in a big knot over my forehead to keep it out of the way. It ended up with a woven criss-cross net of hair over the crown, with long spiral curls to one side and the hair in front backcombed to within an inch of its life and sculpted into an asymmetric shape, with what seemed like an entire large can of hairspray and more hairpins that you can shake a stick at.

Then it was downstairs to be made up, over to the photographer's studio in the next street, much debate about whether I should keep on my leather jacket, then much posing, pouting and exuding. The pics he showed me looked surprisingly good, although whether the salon will actually use them in publicity is another matter, considering that all the other models were around thirty years younger than me *g*.

It was rather fun, although the whole process took six hours. Six hours!! My hair has never had that much primping, even for my wedding :) It was rather fun, although it would be hellish to be a celebrity/model/actress and have to go through that all the time - my bum muscles had gone to sleep about half way through.

Sadly by the time I trekked back to the car through the rain my look had gone from 'dramatic' to 'drag queen hauled through a hedge backwards'. What works in the studio doesn't really translate as an everyday look, LOL, so rather than wander round the supermarket I headed home.

Back to the plain old ponytail tomorrow. Apparently I'll be getting a copy of the photos at some point, which should be interesting. It's amazing what professional photography can make you look like :)

Apophallation:
When some types of hermaphroditic slugs mate, their penises twine together like a corkscrew. If they can't disentangle after mating, one of the slugs will chew off either its own or its partner's penis, leaving the 'apophallated' individual as a permanent female.

It's amazing what little nuggets of info you came across when you're researching!