I can't get no sleep

Today was a very exciting landmark: I went to the TIP. Miss H agreed to take me, because she is a wonderful person. We are now I think fourteen months into our bin strike, and while various people have very kindly taken my recycling for me during that period, my usual volunteer has been busy lately and I've accumulated rather a lot (mostly cardboard - the packaging for the new IKEA bookcase was particularly bulky) since mid-November. I also keep a box of "things to take to the tip" that aren't the standard recycling - electrical cables, lightbulbs, hard plastic, etc, which are a bit unfair to dump on other people, so that was a year or more of accumulation. My spare room is so nice now!!

One of my university friends used to celebrate "Bins Clear Eve", which was the day before the first rubbish collection after New Year, and it feels rather like that.

Otherwise there seems to be rather a lot of terrible things happening to my acquaintances; in the last week, deaths include one friend's brother, a second friend's stepmother, and the very unexpected death of an distant internet acquaintance. Also a swimming friend has had a bad prognosis for a while but now sounds to be likely in his last few weeks. I would like it if someone I know had a sudden and unexpected nice thing happen next week, please.

I keep trying to play computer games and then getting bored and wandering off. On the other hand, I have read a lot of books (most of them very frivolous). Partly it may be because it's so much nicer in bed than anywhere else, what with the cold spells so far this year. I did manage twenty minutes of Dave the Diver today; isis, I don't know if you ever did play it after you recced it to me, but so far it's both quite fun and making me feeling very concerned that he's being exploited by his "friend" Cobra *g* (the set-up is that he's on holiday when his friend calls him up with promises of fancy sushi that turn out to be an "opportunity" for him to spend his days diving for fish to turn into sushi and nights serving the sushi to customers... his "profits" go into repairing the bar, which appears to be co-owned by Cobra and the sushi chef). However, I am only one day in, so it could all change.

This has been a fantastically expensive month so far. Aside from purely frivolous expenditures (my 99p ebook habit does add up!! but not all that quickly) I renewed my passport on Thursday (they already sent me two emails to tell me to send the old one in! cool your beans, people, it was less than 24 hours! I posted it on Friday anyway!) and then bought a bunch of clothes today - hopefully replacements for things which are getting rather tatty. I wanted to get a hoodie from the Florence gig but I couldn't try it on and I wasn't sure it would fit, and £85 was too much to gamble on! So now I have ordered a less cool one from M&S but on the other hand it wasn't nearly as expensive. And if it's too small, I can return it.

Oh, but what is nice: I've been given the keys to my new garage! I should go and check I can actually open it (after first looking up the deeds to check which one it is, now I can't identify it by the combination of hardware around the lock...) before I get swept up in next week's choir-all-the-time and next weekend's exciting visit from shreena and quizcustodet. Today would have been a good time to do it, since it's actually not raining for once, but, well.

Candle update: my candle parcel sat in the depot for ten days and then they emailed me to say that I was being refunded. At no point did anyone say anything about trying to deliver it. Also, they don't re-send undelivered parcels and the sale is over so I can't re-order without paying a bunch more money. I did burn the candle my dad gave me, but it was horribly sooty (black snot!! it was like being in London before the congestion charge, only worse!). On the other hand, it also burned super fast (maybe eight hours total time for a candle that looked like it ought to do more like thirty), so it was over fast. Now I'm back to the IKEA tea lights.

Sunday night I went to see Florence + the Machine, and that was fabulous. I wasn't, like, super hyped up by it, but it was deeply engrossing somehow; the gig went by really fast, and her music is just so good. She didn't do either of the songs I was really hoping for ("You Can Have It All" and "Kraken") but everything she did do was great. The stage show was great. And the mixing wasn't terrible - like, pop gigs always seem to be mixed so that you can feel the bass in every individual bone in your body but also can't hear the lyrics, and that was absolutely a problem for the opening act (Paris Paloma) who seemed cool and might be good except I couldn't actually hear her. But Florence was mostly audible. Of course, with a voice like that she has an advantage...

I had Monday off to recover after the late night (concert finish: about 22:45; reached car park around 23:00; left car park around 23:45... always so great) but was back at work today. On Friday I finally finished a horrible task I'd been putting off, so now I'm trying to catch up with the eight million other things I'd been ignoring; I managed to empty my inbox, but only by moving everything into a new set of folders so that I only have to confront one set of them at a time. Also deleted a lot of duplicates (emails from earlier in a chain, etc), things relating to the Horrible Task, and so on, so the many folders only have about 80 emails left instead of the 150 I started the morning with. Then I realised that there's a whole new Horrible Task with a tight timeline, so that's going to be fun for tomorrow.

But I did achieve some small household tasks, cleared out a few personal emails, and only ignored reality to lie in bed with a book a little bit this evening. Maybe I'll even manage the washing up before I go to sleep, it could happen.