D-Day minus 7

The interviews for Woman Kind are going to be done on the 24th January, which is one week today - every time my phone beeped off today with an email I was scared to open it in case it was a generic rejection notice, but I haven't heard anything from them yet and I don't know if this is bad or good... To be fair though, the closing day was only Friday ,so maybe I should give them a chance to actually have a look through the applications!!

I went along this morning and did one of the volunteering projects that I'm involved in.  Monday's one is at a Chinese centre on Hill Street and we spend a couple of hours talking to the women there about they're experiences coming over from China and building a life here, etc.  Most of them don't speak much (or any) English but they're all really nice and friendly and they smile away all the time.  We have a Chinese girl there who works as a translator and she asks them questions and then we put together scrap-book pages for each woman based on what they told us.  Then we whip out all the arts & crafts and they all go wild!  Glitter and glue dots, and sparkly butterflies, and anything bright and shiny and sticky, they just can't get enough!  It's really good fun and all the woman that come along seem to have a good time.

Afterwards I went round to my granny's with some lunch, and discovered that my granny likes sushi!  I had one of the wee lunch box sized packs from M&S and she had a couple of the wee seaweed rolls.  She also inadvertantly ate a handful of ginger in one go, and, despite claiming to love ginger, I think she was feeling the heat for a wee while afterwards!  Anyway, I never thought my granny would like sushi but now that she does.... hello Yo! Sushi!  Oh, yes.  Even though the lovely hot sushi chef man appears to not work there any more - I have a good stare in the window every time I pass, and I've been in many times with ALA and KM and have never seen him again since that one time I chatted to him and decided to marry him.  Hot and he makes sushi, what more could you ask for, really?

Anyway, I won't hold his absence against Yo! Sushi because it really is my favourite eatable place in the town, and I think I'll introduce my granny to it's conveyor belt of joy one day soon.  Last time I went with my mum she couldn't get enough and ended up with a mountain of plates at the end.  I think she only realised what she'd done when it came to adding up time.

I happen to have not 1, but 2 vouchers that get me 40% off a bill at Yo! Sushi so if anyone fancies a bit of Japanese delight just give me a holler and I'm there!

After saying that the yoga class yesterday was a load of crap, today I must admit that I can feel a good pull in my legs and thighs.  It's not sore but just quite satisfying, in a way, so maybe I'll go back to the class this week.  I guess it can't hurt, eh?



A lovely, simple pearl on a short silver chain.  I love it!

 Oh yeah, today I went in to Accessorize and bought a wee chain for myself - I still had a gift voucher to spend and I'd been saving it til I saw something that really caught my eye, and today, I saw this:





 I think, in the interest of actually being able to sleep tonight, I'm going to say Sayonara to the laptop and get the lavender oil going in my room.  Sometimes I wish I had something stronger.  If you could get liquid Rohypnol I'd skoosh that on my pillow and catch the express train to the land of Nod.  As it it, I'll need to make do with the lavender and hope for the best.

Hasta la proxima!

It's one o'clock in the morning and I am totally wired

I hate it when this happens.  I'm a bit of an insomniac, and sometimes even when I'm really tired I just can't sleep and my mind buzzes away and drives me mad.  I try and combat it by forcing myself to get up early the next day and not having a nap or anything, then getting a good nights sleep the next night but this only seems to work for one night - the night after I'm wide awake again!  Maybe it runs in the family, ever since my mum had her brain haemorrage last year she's not been able to sleep either, sometimes she's up til 6am before she finally gets off, and then she's knackered the next day, obviously.  No fun.

The worst bit is that there's no-one up to chat to, on MSN or Facebook or whatever.  Although actually maybe that's a good thing cos if I was able to chat maybe I'd never get to sleep!  I think being on the laptop is the worst thing to do, cause the bright lights make your brain think it's day-time or something.  Never mind. 

Was just having a good think there about this job (I know, I can't stop going on about it, I really hope I'm not setting myself up for a big fall...) and how much fun it would be even just going for the interview.  They mentioned in the job ad that they might ask you to do a presentation or something instead of an interview, so I was trying to work out how I'd feel about that.  Surprisingly, though, I don't think I'd be too bothered.  For some reason, whenever I have to do a presentation, or an oral exam, (like for Spanish at uni) or whatever, I feel so sick and nervous beforehand and I feel like my heart is going to beat right out my chest... but then as soon as they call my name and I'm up, all of that turns into nervous energy and I feel fine!  So, hopefully that'd still be the same if I had to do anything like that for a job interview!  I think maybe it helped doing that shite year as a teacher in Spain, too.  I got pretty used to standing in front of a group of people just sitting there staring up at you and either full of expectation (yikes) or not giving a toss, and not bothering to try and pretend.  So maybe I developed a thick skin, I dunno.

I really should stop psyching myself about this job, cause even though it seems like a slightly niche, feminist market, there's still bound to be hundreds of people who've applied, and I guess a lot of them will have more experience or something.  Whatever, I can't do it, the negativity just isn't in me, I'm such a bloody optimist!!

As part of my not being able to sleep, I thought I'd check my Chinese horoscope for this year, the year of the rabbit.  I found out that my career will be slowly but surely on the up, I may be celebrating a wedding or engagement (not mine, presumably) and my Zodiac stone is a garnet (good thing I have a garnet ring then, eh?) and my Zodiac flower is a narcissus, which is very pretty, really. 

For some reason, I have a totally random song buzzing around my head, it's that one that goes, "I love it when you call/ I love it when you call...but you never call at all..."

What even is that song, and who's it by? Answers on a postcard please.

Quite looking forward to yoga tomorrow, I've never been to a class at this gym (Gorbals) before, so I hope it's good.  I used to go one on a Saturday with this teacher called Maurice who was amazing and I absolutely loved his classes.  But with it being on a Saturday morning, I kept missing it when I'd been out the night before, and then when I joined the gym and got yoga classes as part of the membership costs, then I feel like it would be stupid to go to the other one with Maurice and have to pay for it.  So I hope whoever does it tomorrow is good, otherwise I'll be very disappointed!  It makes such a big difference, like the first time I went to a Pilates class I wasn't that impressed, but the second time it was with a different teach, and I thought it was great!  My shoulders are still quite tight from yesterdays efforts, but I'm hoping that the yoga will loosen them up a good bit, rather than being the nail in their coffin!

Ach, right, I could rabble on here all night (oh yeah, my Chinese horoscope also said that 'writing is highlighted in a most positive way' this year, so maybe that's referring to my blog, ha!)... but I think I'll switch off the laptop and do this the old fashioned way: read a book til my eyes are drooping!  I'm reading some Agatha Christie book of my mum's just now, I quite like them despite the weird old fashionedness it bits of them.  Calling someone a 'queer' for example, and generally referring to women as nervous hysterics who, if they get done in by their husbands, practically drove them to it.   Hmmmmmmmmmmm.  Despite that, I quite like them, so here's hoping sleep is a-calling.

Buenas noches!