FAULTY LAPTOP DISPLAY NOOOOOO

D:

I replied to a meme thing on jehanne1431's DW, and these are the questions she asked me:

( questions )

copy pasta from my email:

15 more live dates in the US and Canada have now been announced for 2010. Tickets for these new shows all go on general sale on Saturday 19th December (apart from Chicago which goes on sale on Monday 21st December). The pre-sales for the 15 dates announced this week start today! More information, including the pre-sale links, is in the news story below, but in the mean time, here are the full list of shows for the US and Canada...

27th February - Gwinnett Center, Atlanta, USA
1st March - Patriot Center, Fairfax, USA
2nd March - Wachovia Center, Philadelphia, USA
5th March - Madison Square Garden, New York, USA
6th March - TD Banknorth Garden, Boston, USA
8th March - Air Canada Centre, Toronto, Canada
10th March - Bell Centre, Montreal, Canada
12th March - United Center, Chicago, USA
13th March - Palace Of Auburn Hills, Detroit, USA
15th March - Sommet Center, Nashville, USA
17th March - Fort Worth Convention Center, Dallas, USA
18th March - Toyota Center, Houston, USA
29th March - Rexall Place, Edmonton, Canada
30th March - Pengrowth Saddledome, Calgary, Canada
1st April - Pacific Coliseum, Vancouver, Canada
2nd April - Key Arena, Seattle, USA
3rd April - Rose Garden Arena, Portland, USA
5th April - The E Center, Salt Lake City, USA
6th April - Odeum Colorado, Denver, USA
9th April - US Airways Center, Phoenix, USA
14th April - Oracle Arena, San Francisco, USA

For more information on any of these shows, check out the tour dates section on muse.mu.

:D

(today I don't have one, so I'm just going to tea-leaf a meme from zeenell and catwalksalone)

If I came with a warning label, what would it say?

1) WHERE ARE MY COMMENT NOTIFICATIONS, EL JAY? D:

1) Christmas shopping is pretty much done! I win! \o/

2) The House of Fraser on Oxford Street has totally rearranged their cosmetics and perfume bit and now the Urban Decay stand is huge and pretty and potentially very, very bad for my bank balance. I did, however, totally need more black kohl and mascara, and the lipstick I also bought was totally not my fault, it was entirely because they were having a promotion thing and I got free stuff out of it. I then spent a further five minutes silently coveting the new set kits. I may actually have to venture out into New Year sales for the first time in forever seekrit message to mayatawi: I asked, but no nail polish :(

3) I mentioned being practically done on Christmas shopping, right? :D

5) Also, I totally spent this evening wrapping everything, so that's done too! Fitch decided to help by attacking every bit of sellotape that I precut and stuck to the side of my bookcase, and then by sticking her tail right in the way every time I was trying to apply said tape to wrapping paper. So, y'know, all my family are getting bonus cat hair with their gifts this year.

8) I still have a palpable/audible respiratory thrill going on and it's driving me crazy. It does seem to be resolving (what, you think we use the stethoscopes at work for diagnosing the animals?), but I still feel the need to complain about it because maaaaan, my left and right caudal lung lobes are itchy on the inside and it seriously sucks balls. The next person who tells me to try coughing out the mucus is going to get punched in the head, however, because hi, it's not like I hang head-down off the edge of a surgical table and get people to coupage on my back for fun, y'know?

13) And my voice is still all screwy. I need to talk with Timmy the PTSD T-cell about the state of my vocal cords.

Okay, so, hi! Not dead in a ditch somewhere! Despite, y'know, the best efforts these past couple of weeks of all the viruses in the world ever and all the gonadotrophins in the world ever.

...and the fact that significant parts of my brain chemistry reacted to the cumulative effects of above by basically flaming out. Small camp fire, on the scale of things (and, hey, I have a few volcanoes rumbling around in the past), so not really that much to worry about. La la la!

Things what I have been doing wise:

Last Thursday was our work Christmas party, for which we went to a BestEverParties organised thing that had belly dancers (both male and female), acrobats and mostly naked men dancing around things that were lit on fire. Which, y'know, would have been more enjoyable if lacking the 'work people' aspect of the equation (especially, oh, gods, the bit where the drunken practice manager started laughing about how she's done belly dancing lessons and--just--NO. NOT A MENTAL IMAGE I WANT EVER).

Given how I figured that I pretty much had one (singular) functioning white blood cell in my entire body (a lonely and battle scarred T-helper cell, sitting amongst the fragmented remains of viral proteins and cellular debris, rocking backwards and forwards and mumbling they just came out of nowhere, man) I was going to be a good girl and Not Drink.

That resolution lasted until I figured that, 1) the only non-alcoholic drink redeemable against the free drink tokens we got as part of our ticket price was Red Bull, and, 2) soft drinks actually cost upwards of £1 LESS if you added some kind of spirit to them, so I switched to Bacardi and coke and limited my intake.

The meal was okay (I pushed the boat out with plain chicken and all the asparagus ever, which I basically nicked from over half our table as they were turning their noses up at it), and I was part of the first group that arrived there, so we managed to arrange the seating around the circular table so that Boss and the practice manager where sandwiched between their respective spouses and therefore could be safely ignored for much of the evening.

Oh, wait, outfit. I wore a dress (it happens sometimes). It's a sorta dark-teal silk heavily over-embroidered with black and silver thread and I picked it up in New Look for the princely sum of £3.50. When I bought it, it was slightly big, but nothing that a strategically bolstered wonderbra wouldn't solve. Two weeks of rampaging viral load (I'm telling you, man, they just came out of nowhere. Johnny din't stand a chance.) and five days of rampaging hormones and the attendant inability to eat anything more than a single water biscuit roughly every 27 hours, however, had seriously impacted on--well--let's just say on my ability to carry off any kind of strapless dress without suffering a wardrobe malfunction of epic proportions. Which led, upon my realising this, to much in the way of frantic sewing on Wednesday night. It didn't look too terrible.

I did have to suffer an entire evening of comments from certain coworkers about how different I looked and, wow, they'd never seen me in a dress before! Which, okay, I can maybe forgive the vets, because they've only ever seen me in a work context, and that means either Greens or theatre kit, so the comments were managable in their inanity. The PM, however, has seen me wearing both dresses and skirts. At pretty much every one of the (rare) work outings (both social and professional), and definitely at the two previous Christmas dos. And I may be being naive here, but I don't particularly think that either floor-length art deco beaded black efforts (last year) or fully corseted raw silk ballgown efforts (year before) are that inconspicuous. Particularly not given my natural skin tone of OMGPALEYETSPECKLED. So, y'know, the rum certainly helped me in not putting her head through one of the marquee walls.

The other thing that helped was the fact that there were DODGEMS and, did you know that legitimately being able to side-swipe (I was going to put 'rear-end' but I can see you all heading for the gutter) your Boss AND being involved in an ad-lib death race type thing where every single coworker, including said Boss teams up to spend the entire five minute session pinballing the car containing the practice manager around the arena, with utterly no mercy? Those are wonderful things for reducing stress. It was even totally worth the fact that my legs were too long to fit properly under the steering wheel and reach the accelerator, so my right knee now goes 'click' and has all the bruising ever, which is getting more spectacular with each passsing day.

Work the next day was kinda, ugh, partly because some idiots had managed to book all the operations ever in, and partly because apparently the whole idea of employing a fourth receptionist so that the whole mess with the nurses having to pull double-duties if/when holidays and/or sickness screwed things up means that....guess what? When one of the receptionists is off sick, the nurses (i.e: muggins who was on the late shift) have to cover. I felt like a right prat checking people in at reception, running through to my consult room to consult them, then following them out to reception to finish them off. and, y'know, the same minus the consulting (but plus a degree of assisting) for the vet consults. That were happening simultaneously.

The receptionists' work contracts, apparently, do not include a provision requiring overtime cover. Because THAT'S sensible (this is the same week where the PM seriously tried to pull a pouty at me for having an overtime sheet that defies mathematical analysis, and for not comping back the time. When? When am I supposed to comp back the time? When I'm racking up more overtime covering reception, maybe? Or perhaps when I'm being turned into a virus zombie? YOU tell ME)

And after that mini-rant about not having time off, I can report that I have today and tomorrow...off work. Yeah. Using up annual leave and also wedging some time off in between the consecutive weekends I've ended up working because the rota near Christmas is strange and possibly designed by concussed bees.

So I've actually done some Christmas shopping. Today I can reliably report that Bluewater is horrid and busy and bah, humbug! (especially the bits of it that were small and having a tantrum in the middle of the concourse and decided that a valid way to conclude this display of terrible twos was to bite a random stranger (that would be me) on the ANKLE. Which--WHAT? D:) and I only managed to get part of my shopping done. Partly I am hampered by the fact that everyone is HARD to buy for this year, and partly I was hampered by the crowds and also the small child gnawing on my right ankle.

Tomorrow, therefore, means more shopping for other people. Boo. I may have to console myself with Urban Decay makeup (today I consoled myself by finding the most ridiculous pair of shoes ever in Evans (black suede and coloured-like-my-icon snake-skin print heels and soles!) that I'll never be able to walk in and also crank me up into giraffe like levels of height and defiantly buying them)

Now I am going to go and snuggle with the cat that is gradually oozing its way up my leg and over my wireless mouse and purring hopefully at me.

There is a conspiracy of snowflake cookies. It makes me go :D

(real post to follow when I have ability to braaaaain. ish)

Oh, look. Depression.

...right. So the crippling abdominal pain now would be related the the period that just shown up, hard on the heels of the viruses of doom.

Thanks for that, body. Thanks a whole bunch.

HE HELLO HI! If you have access to and haven't already, then go and avail yourself of this week's Friday Night with Jonothan Ross. Partly because it involves Laurence Fishburne being awesome, but mainly because the live band are MUSE and they are all actually-playing-live and yummy and stuff.

If THAT isn't enough, then let me tell you that after the end credits, JR challenges all his guests to a child-size pedal car race around BBC television centre, and the person that wins (pedalling away with his ridiculously bony knees plastered upside his head) is Matt Bellamy and--just--HEARTS. RIDICULOUS, RIDICULOUS HEARTS.

So I managed a walk (okay, okay, shuffle from bench to wall to bench to bus stop) to the supermarket earlier and purchased (and have now eaten half of) a carton of Covent Garden chicken soup. Mmmmm. Except that now I feel all over-full and sick. Maaaan. I did also lay in supplies of lucozade, however, as I figured that my intestines are going to be for shit for at least another week or so, and some kind of oral nutrition would be nice.

I spent the five hours after getting back from the supermarket laying spark-out on my bed because, hi, I have the energy levels of suckitude.

One thing I did do was accidentally bump into L, one of the receptionists from work, who informed me that it's not just me that Boss infected when he came in on that Friday: From Tuesday (the day I called in sick), the three other receptionists and the two vets all phoned in with various levels of porcine influenza badness, and the whole week at work was apparently really shitty, including the PM actually having to cover reception (rather than her usual trick of saying to the receptionists that she'll cover it, and then magically palming it off on whichever nurse is unlucky enough to wander past first).

Heh. This is me, not feeling guilty :P (apparently, V the receptionist and K the vet were the two worst afflicted and--coincidentally--were the two people I was working the late with on the Monday, and the three of us spent the most time around Boss on the Friday, so we were obviously brewing up some serious viral load between the three of us).

I'm betting that the PM is regretting flapping around enough about re-rearranging that arthroscopy from Friday (ending up in not rearranging it), because that was the only reason that Boss came in that day, and in doing that he managed to kill off 50% of his entire workforce for four fifths of a working week.

...I'm not laughing, really (no really, I'm not. Actual laughter involves wheezing and coughing and then maybe puking. I'm not above mental laughter, though)

Finally, I balanced on the scales in work earlier and, yeah, kinda have lost a bit of weight. Like, um, just over a stone (that's around the 6kg mark for the metrics, and around 15.5lbs for the differently imperials) in five days? That'd explain the fact that my bone structure and I are saying hello in the mirror. I've got a kind of morbid fascination about how much more I'm going to lose because there's only so much (i.e.: not a lot) that I can actually eat at the moment without feeling violently ill, and there's a limit to the amount of sugary rehydration drink I can stomach without also having issues.

Which, okay, I'm not going to deny that I really need to lose it, but the part of me that has nutritionist skills is maybe freaking out slightly. I'm going to see how I go for the next few days--now that, y'know, I can actually eat shit, even if it's in minimal amounts--but if I continue to drop weight at the same rate then I'm off to the pharmacy for my favourite (there does not actually exist enough sarcasm in the world, so you'll just have to deal with the italics) things in the world: liquid meals. Not the god-awful quackery of the meal replacement brigade, the proper you-need-these-if-you're-ill ones. Which I have a childhood history with--ha--irony of fucking irony, involving the last time I had a run in with a supercharged influenza-type pathogen (only that one landed me in hospital. And, um, kinda paralysed for a month)

D: NAUSEA NOOOOOOOO

*cries*

I have achieved fresh bed linen and a shower! Mainly because I was truly with it enough today to realise how icky both the bed linen and myself were. Standing upright for the 20 minutes of the shower was surprisingly hard until I remembered that, oh, yeah, cracker and that--given GI badness hadn't occured--I should probably forage for food.

On that note, I kinda want to shuffle through to work and weigh myself (why bother buying bathroom scales when your workplace has huge-ass platform digital ones?) because the other thing I decided while in the shower (apart from the fact that I would fail at getting an Plympic medal for verticality) was that I've probably lost some weight. I mean, there were hip bones, people. And I'm not sure what kind of idiot loses weight from their ankles, but now I have veterinary nurse calf muscles of doom and skinny little ankles, both of which conspire to make my big feet look like LotR film style Hobbit feet. D:

It's faintly disconcerting (except for the feet thing which--I have enough issues with my feet already, without comparing them to that), but probably shouldn't be because what else did I expect from five days of being a virus factory?

Of course, given that I last went shopping over a week ago, pretty much all of the stuff on my fridge shelf was making a bid on evolution, so tomorrow's big goals are probably going to be: 1) being vertical, and, 2) going outside, for, 3) purposes of local supermarket, and, 4) actually being outside because I'm starting to go STIR CRAZY. But we shall see.

Tomorrow is also the last day of Tamiflu, which I'm glad of, because that is doing weird things to my insides (but not weird enough that I'm going to stop taking it becuase whatever else it's doing, it's definitely hoovering up viruses).

And finally, massive, massive, MASSIVE cyber hugs (guaranteed virus free) to everyone who commented on any of my posts. You're all rockstars and I ♥ you really quite a lot.

GUYS. I have totally just EATEN A CRACKER. And so far it's staying internal! Staying internal and not yet killing me with abortive attempts at peristalis! A WHOLE CRACKER. THAT I ATE.



...I would feel ashamed about how flaily (albeit it from-in-bed-flaily) I am about this BUT. This cracker (oh sweet, sweet, cardboard-tasting stale cracker) is the first thing since Monday--apart from the battery of pills, potions and electrolyte solutions--that I've actually had the will, desire and ABILITY to ingest.

Later, I might attempt a SECOND cracker. And, who knows? I could push the boat out and have my first cup of tea since Sunday (teeeeaaaaa, I miss you D:)

I also think that my mentit is capable of being compos for more than 40 minutes at a time. I CAN NOW WATCH TELLY FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS WEEK AND HAVE A CLUE ABOUT WHAT'S HAPPENING (seriously? Being with it enough to be bored witless--this was yesterday, FTR--and yet unable to actually brain enough to parse the difference between characters, therefore rendering any attempt at media watching a confusing blur of "but why are they all the same person?" sucked hardcore. lamentables' colouring book saved me from beating my head against a wall)

The moral of this story, guys, that that if you have the opportunity to be vaccinated against swine 'flu? For the love of anything, DO IT. and if you don't have the opportunity, for the love of EVERYTHING, DON'T CATCH IT.

The amount that I ACTUALLY look like a zombie would be all kinds of amusing if, y'know, I was wearing any kind pf prothesis or makeup AT ALL. As it is, I just look and sound (and possibly even smell?) like someone who's been dead for a couple of days and not noticed and--ew.

I would really like a shower, but my house is freezing (and my internal thermostate can't decided between Arctice and volcanon still) and verticality is posing several problems (the main one being: how do I achieve it for longer than about 52 seconds? (the amount of time it takes me to move the pathetically small distance from my bed to the bathroom--normally something that takes less than five seconds and doesn't require two pit stops), as it has been since Monday.

Still.

Anyway. Am feeling pretty much compos mentit enough to start feeling guilty about not being at work, especially since I can kinda, y'know, hear most of the working day happening next door. I know, I KNOW. You'll be pleased to hear that there is a 'but', for once in my life: The rest of me has actually figured out that being unable to theremoregulate, speak (and, okay, breathe) without coughing up something grim, stay awake and coherent for more than about thirty contiguous minutes or, oh yeah, actually stand up--quite apart from probably still being the viral mothership of the entire county--is not really conducive to work type things.

I may even have told the practice manager that (over the phone. Not the house mates, because I've not even heard a direct peep out of them, or even a cautious 'are you alive?' note-under-door. Which leads into a whole different 'don't you just love living with people you'd never pick in a million and four years?' rant that I'm not with it enough to get into, except to say that one of them has already had swine 'flu so, y'know, she's got a better than even chance of being immune to me). Well, what I actually said, in response to the "and how are you feeling? Just so I can plan what's happening the rest of the week--" question was: "I'm--*extended bout of truly horror-film-esque coughing sounds, culminating in a thud-thud-bang as I had to dash for the toilet (which I nearly dropped my phone down) in order to be violently sick on an empty stomach for about the eleventh time*" which, if anything, I think is a fairly convincing argument on why I'm not going to be in work until next week sometime.

To give her her due, the pm has actually been phoning me fairly frequently to check that I'm not dead, and also keeps on buying me painkillers (for the danced-on-by-velociraptors symptoms) and lucozade (and it's sad when the only thing with even a hint of calorific content that I've been able to keep down since Monday is a bright orange fizzy sugar drink), although she really, definitely, absolutely and truly does not mind me not paying her back ever yet. Not even if I soak the coins in vinegar (although I think that reference went right over her head).





So, uh, yeah: hi. I know there's approximately a lot of influenza and influenza-type viruses out there in the world, but I'm beginning to feel that anyone who's immune system actually has to deal with full-on H1N1 should be made exempt from influenza infection for the rest of their life because this disease sucks hard. D:

lamentables is the BEST of all things, but particularly of things shaped like colouring books with added annotations ♥

ION, when they say that Tamiflu causes hallucinations (particularly in those people who are already tripping the light fantastic because of, say, truly epic hyperthermia), they are not kidding, yo. As C may have found out to her deteriment (and confusion) when she texted me yesterday and was treated to a protracted rant against penguins (both the chocolate and bird flavoured kinds), and why they were trying to assassinate me. The outbox in my phone is the home of weird at the moment.

IOON, am vaguely willing to admit to being part of the human race today? Albeit the part of the human race that is mucopurulent, falls asleep roughly every twenty minutes, and feels like it's been trampled into the ground by rampaging velociraptors

Swine 'flu with respiratory complications it is, then.

I'll spare you the details of how I've just spent the past ten hours, except to note that hte Pandemic Flu service people are lovely and obviously used to dealing with people of very little brain at all hours of the night, and that I've to despatch someone to the nearest pharmacy as soon as it opens for Tamiflu. Oh, and if my breathing gets worse, I'm to suck up the embarrassment and phone an ambulance.

...uh, yeah.

Guys, guys, guys! Muse added a second Wembley stadium gig yesterday because the first one sold out in less than ten minutes. O_o

(hi hello HI, I'M GOING TO SEE THEM EEEE!)

So I was thinking earlier that I should really pull together some of the disparate threads that pass for thought and do a post about Stuff What Has Happened At Work. This is not that post.

Then I remembered that I hadn't posted anything at all about The Waters of Mars (summary: pillow+me=OTP), and I should really do that and therefore stop failing so HARDCORE about being fannish (y'know, in a way that doesn't include blowing not insignificant amounts of money on going to see the same band repeated times). This is not really that post, either.

Then I figured that I could maybe get my head out of my own ass long enough to put out some kind of opinion about the handbasket also known at the European Union (beyond, that is, singing "Eura-shah! Shah! Shah! Shah!" at the co-workers, causing them to break out the post-it note of NO MORE COFFEE FOR E-CAT), and maybe some stuff relating to the actual real-life world--as opposed to the somewhat technicolour one in my head where I spend most of my time--except that I realised that, hi I do not ever have the brain for that kind of actual thinking. So this is most definitely not that post (nor will it ever likely be).

What I do have is laryngitis (my oropharynx brings all the party!viruses to the yard) in addition to the tonsilitis, which is not as bad as it sounds, because I'm mostly through the exorcist-style expectorating and the twin feelings that not only has someone filled every joint in my body with hot superglue, but that same person has also carefully lined my throat with Africanised bees, and am now skating merrily back into croaky-to-husky-to-no voice territory. Y'know, the situation I was last in while bumming around some fields in Knebworth in August. Which was making answering the phone at work today all kinds of fun.

Which means that what this post actually turns out to be is a somewhat pointless ramble through the back of my own head.

Also, this is a post with a title that has the most ridiculous typo ever, so I can't possibly correct it, because it would remove the vestigial awesome that was lurking around.

Jeez, someone ask me questions or something--help me become less boring and inane and maybe actually post something with actual content beyond rambling and/CAPSLOCKS.