Even the bad things come to an end.

I actually forgot today was the 31st of the month because the date was the last thing on my mind when my mum dragged me out of bed at 7.30am and told me I was getting a haircut 30 minutes later.

£39 later I was destroying my grandma's kitchen, and then I got to trash the living room whilst my mum went to Homebase to get some filler 'for that massive hole you left in the wall'. Oh well, I thought it had been impressive. (So not my fault. My mum said she was going to knock through that wall anyway so I was just using initiative.)

Then I went shopping and ended up being ravaged by the boob lady who flying-tackled me as soon as my mum said the word 'measured' in the M&S clothes department. I'm still living down what happened last time.

This has been a verrrrry long month. But now I'm a three-times NaBloPoMo survivor so it's so worth it.

Tomorrow I have to talk to crazy ladies (oh okay, so I'm the crazy person) and get up at very stupid times to see my doctor who has never even heard of 'afternoons'.

Then I get to go to work and make Argos giftcard towers/fortifications whilst being cashier number three, as always.

Love from,

Sunshine, lollypops, rainbows and- oh, sod it.

I have a fixation with pretty things at the moment. Last night I bought this pretty thing. (It was either this or a Make Your Own Gingerbread Moominhouse kit. It was a close call.)

(From BeadsStory's Etsy store. Check it out.)

So that's all for today. Go look at stuff on Etsy.com. You will lose hours of your life.

Whups.

I have my tail between my legs (that's what he said) tonight because I nearly killed someone at work.

Well, it probably wouldn't have killed them, but they might've had a nice bruise for a few days.

Stupid conveyor belt.

That is all.

I'm not actually here. No. Really.

I've sent this post forward in time because the official line is that I'm at work for the next week solidly and Gawd, is this what real life feels like?

My official job title is 'Customer Advisor' which means I spend one helluva lot of time with los customeros, assisting them, losing my mind and such. I also have the worst unofficial case of tourettes ever (apparently my vocabulary is just obscene) and me and my work pallies enjoy nothing better than airing our stresses by ribbing each other and generally pretending to hate everything whilst exuding a calm, welcoming appearance so that we may get some goddamn sales this week.

It's a tough balance to keep.

Anyhoo, I mentioned 'Pleb' the other day, and here is the story of Pleb:

Pleb is the word we use at work to mask any expletives.

The end. It's a simple lesson to learn.

'Shitting Hell' might become 'Plebbing Hell' or even 'Plebbing Pleb'.

'Ahh! Fuck! The fucking shelf dropped on my fucking, fucking foot!' becomes 'Ahh! Pleb! The plebbing shelf dropped on my plebbing, plebbing foot!'

'Piss off you arse-faced prick' becomes 'Pleb off you pleb-faced pleb'

Shimples.

I made a video of it. It was that bad.

Last night I had to knock myself out just so I could get some sleep.

My sister who I share a room with had a friend sleeping over and this friend snores like a train. I had to be at work at 9am later that morning. By 3am I was desperate.


Snoring. Grr. from Nicole Smith on Vimeo.



Woe is me. Being all quiet and courteous whilst this bulldozer of a child keeps me awake.

UPDATE: So, I didn't lose my job. I got my contract extended again. Can I get a hell yeah?

Because TV is an absolute mirror of reality.

Weird shiz I have seen on TV this week, this very day in fact:

1. Toddler beauty pagents. Surreal as anything.

2. A 'stand-up medium'. Like, she says she can talk to the dead and does so in front of live audiences. Extroverted schitzophrenia, anybody?

3. A bald cat called Ludwig (LA Ink).

4. An advert for socks.

What has the world come to?

So, what does a teenager who doesn't go to school do during the daytime, Kent?

I've had a really up-down-up-down day. I don't think there's a word that equates to up-down-up-down because I typed it into an online thesaurus and it was all what ya chatting about, asshole? Which makes me suspect that it's an American thesaurus. Mostly because I've always assumed that thesauruseses (thesauri?) have American accents.

...Right?

Cookery books have French accents.

Anyway.

My day was kinda awesome at first because I set up the Wii and turned the volume up so I could walk around my house with the controller and nunchuck and box things whilst listening to the poor guy on the TV getting the crap beat out of him. Scared the neighbours when I went near the window though. Never a good idea, they have a big lump of rottweiler that's just gasping for exercise.

Then my exam timetable arrived, cementing the whole oh hell no, I am NOT going back to school thing nice and tight.

Had two panic attacks consecutively after that.

Watched Animal Park which is just awesome because I'm absolutely in love with the wonderful, lovely, too-eccentric Lord Bath, who is probably most famous in the US for being the crazy guy in the sweater from Guidespot's "Awkward Family Portraits will make you say 'WTF?'" (first portrait on the left).

And then I adopted the word 'Pleb' with a capital P because it's my new thing.

And that was my day. See how little I have to work with here?

My shiny new meds are making me high.

You know when you feel slightly insane? It's AWESOME isn't it?

Don't answer that.

I spent all morning lolling around on (note 'on', not 'in' which makes me absolutely not even remotely lazy at all ever oh my gob shut up) my bed pondering how much it sucks because you can't even cough without it creaking like a leather bikini, pondering about the logistics of turning my bedroom into an inbuilt aquarium.

I ate three strawberry cornettos in ten minutes.

I kinda sorta attacked my sister in a flying-hug-without-affection sort of way and ended up lying on the floor for twenty minutes afterwards laughing and yelling 'CURSE YOU VILLAIN, SHE'S DYING' at the ceiling.

And then we laughed a lot. Me. Cleo. Laughing. With her, not at her.

Something is tragically wrong here.

Afterthought.

I have a hard time just letting things happen.

Maybe because it's because I'm so headstrong that I don't like to let things I have no control over just happen anyway. I like to have the ability to yell 'woah woah woah, what the shit?' if it gets to be too much and to be heard and to have that acknowledged.

Lately it feels like I've been sat on the sidelines struggling to follow the storyline. I can't really grasp any of it because it's constantly changing and seems so blurry.

So, this is home.

One typical thing of parents breaking up is the custody battle that follows afterwards.

My parents have been pussy-footing around the whole who-gets-who thing for a while now. My mum has inheritted my grandma's house so we're fixing it up and she's moving in there, but that won't be for a few months yet. From the moment I realised that Uhh, Shit, my parents are breaking up, I've always said that I'd stay in Walmgate.

My mum had this idea of her jumping between houses, just so we wouldn't have to choose, but that fizzled out. She also said she wouldn't go anywhere until I was fixed, like a bike or my weak-at-heart bed.

As it stands, I'm staying in Walmgate with my dad, Cleo's going to live in Beans Way with my mum. Opposite sides of York really.

I love my house. Despite the arguments, accidents and occupants it's the place I'm most comfortable in right now. It's the place where I can sit on the kitchen counter whilst waiting for something to cook. It's the place where I can occupy the top floor for days and not come down. It's the place where I can sit on the doorstep on the balcony wrapped in a blanket and not be in the way. It's the place where I feel like I'm not trying too hard.

And that's just fine.

Out of order.

The thing I use to make Stuff That Happens into blog posts stopped working this morning, normal service will resume... ohh, I don't know. Tomorrow maybe.

Colour me ink.

I've been tapping at this, trying to write this for an hour. I had another idea in mind but I've been watching Miami Ink again.


I love tattoos. My mum has a blurry star tattooed on her shoulder blade, and I was always obsessed with it as a kid because I couldn't feel it (Mum hates it because the tattooist was drunk).

I still gawk when I see people with particularly badass or pretty tattoos.

I admire tattoo artists. Not everyone realises just how much skill is involved in tattooing, and how complex it can be.

I really want a tattoo, and whenever I watch Miami Ink, LA Ink or anything like that I start drawing, but I'm a crappy artist.

I love these guys.

The day the tigers- I mean, the cake, broke free.

Happy birthday to Mo-Balls, who is getting old.

So yesterday I made a cake and was killed execution-style with an icing gun.

Today the cake tried The Great Escape.

I've been zipping all over York today (I've been on a bus six times, my life expectancy has dropped to 50, those people do not smell healthy). At 9.30am I bussed down to the surgery and was given shiny-happy-pills which have made me go strange already because the side effects include falling into a coma, stroke, heart attacks and moments of extreme ecstasy but so far I'm just hyper has anything and breathing funny. Seriously, I'm typing so fast I have to keep going back over everything I've written to correct it all.

I got home and packed the cake into a bag, I donned on my favourite (not mine) boots which are awful for walking in (as shoes, that's a pretty big issue) but never mind and took off to school to see my brethren.

I got down the steps to my house in one piece.

I walked towards the ran and was halted by a loud metallic bang which snagged the attention of most people on the street, and the bag flew up in my hand like a big weight had been taken off it.

The first thing I noticed was that the cake tin was on the floor.

The second thing? It was upsidedown.

Third thing: Buggerbuggerbuggerbuggerbugger...

I looked around, Walmgate wasn't particularly busy but there were still enough people who saw me debating whether or not to leave the cake behind or bend down to pick it up sheepishly. I did pick it up. Eventually.

I didn't get a chance to check it over before school (I was running late... angry messages on the phone from BFF Main Gay.5 aplenty) but 'hell in a handbasket' was close.

Still, I got praise for a bad job done well that made it all worthwhile.

Have a nice weekend.

We've got a Klingon captain!

A few days ago my friend Mo-Balls asked me to make a birthday cake for her.

I was dreading it because I'm terrible at cooking sweet stuff. I tore around town in the morning, blowing way more money than I needed too (I should've checked... we had everything I needed and more at home) on ingredients and then getting to work.

I had a plan:

It was going to be awesome. Vanilla-y with chocolate icing and red decoration and stuff. I knew it wasn't going to go to plan because I'm me and I love to improvise on everything.

So I set up, with a trusty coke-and-chicken-fajita combo and my back up cake on the bench incase I cucked up and needed something to ice that didn't resemble a round, charred brick.

What can I say? It ended dismally. I got bored of waiting for the cake to cook and started playing 'Star Trek Meets The Mob' and then I decorated the cake, which turned out to be oddly picturesque in a vision-of-hell sort of way.

Afterwards I went outside to cool off and walked into a delivery man on the balcony, who took a look at me in my Donald Duck t-shirt, jeans, neon green socks, pink sparkly headband and skeleton apron and said "Well look at that! Someone normal lives around here after all".

Bonus pictures: Playing Star Trek.

Meets The Mob.

Arty B makes everything better.

I was a-talking to my friend about the day/date/time (I have a very shakey grasp of these things - no school = no concept of time at all) the other day and was HORRIFIED to discover that it's only the 17th of March so far.

Happy St. Patrick's Day by the way.

NaBloPoMo makes everything so drawwwwwwwn out. Until I was told otherwise I was sure it was the 42nd of March and that I could stop it with the typing and the clicking and the posting, but no.

Anyhoo. That's a roundabout way of saying that I've run out of things to say today, so let's all talk about my aunt's dog instead.

A few months back I posted about a critter called Lil' AB who looked an awful lot like this:

Well that was six months ago, and I did say he'd grow to be bigger than Bufflar (code name for 'Elizabeth' the insane jack russell terrier), and by God, we definitely can't call Arthur Boscastle 'Lil' AB' anymore.

This is Arty B.

He's insane. He is hyper and huge and jumpy-uppy and very, very licky. He knows I'm allergic to him, so he lies all over me when we're confined to small spaces i.e. the car. He just love me that much.

So heavily drugged up on allergy medication that I have to wear sunglasses to hide the fact that they are trying to knock me out.

We get on like a house on fire, just so long as he confines the tongue-down-the-throat thing to my sister so I can laugh and not suffer the same slobbery end.

Bonus picture: Arty B and Bufflar. Bufflar likes to think she's still incharge and she does boss him around a lot, if he goes near other dogs she will knock him the hell down. I'm sure she loves him really.

One being that doesn't love the dough-eyed Arty B and definitely doesn't love the loud-mouthed Bufflar?

Morello.

Morello is my late grandma's cat who has an insane attitude problem. Grandma says she named him after the cherry trees at a place where my aunt works but I'm pretty sure she actually got the idea from Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine.

Excellent...

Morello 'Fat Lad' Rogerson-Gaines-Smith. He's like the Mr Burns of cats.

I tried caring once. Then I stopped trying. The end.

I'm having what my mum likes to call a bad day.

I call it one of those days where I think you say I'm ill but really you all drove me crazy.

It's just one of those days where I sincerely do not give a crap. It's a day where I hate Dr. D for not seeing a problem and fixing it instead of turfing me out and onto counselling which I need like a frog needs sunburn.

I don't see how it helps, talking about stuff around me when that's what bothers me in the first place. It's stuff that can't magically disappear either, so there's no use trying. I fucking hate talking about myself. (*she says, talking about herself*)

What I need is a really long holiday, one where I don't need to worry about whether or not each time I go to work will be my last (job insecurity is a bitch), whether I should go to school or not (the answer is usually a resounding negative) and whether or not I should just call it a day and fuck off to Lapland or something.

Lapland is awesome this time of year, by the way. And you don't need to learn the language if you're all by yourself (though I did have a stint with Finnish a few years ago koska olen fantastinen).

Sleeping is probably more productive than moaning about Dr. D right now, so I'm spent.

Not even my teefs know where they stand on this one. Poor teefs.

Are you all aware of just how God-awful having braces is?

Let me tell you.

They glue shit onto your teeth which rubs against the inside of your mouth so it's as sore as anything. Then your teeth start to ache so bad you're eating baby food for a week (Mmmm... mash potato...). THEN you get stuff stuck in them so you have to excuse yourself to dig it out. Then your tongue catches on it and that makes you cry a lot (which sounds like bleh-blub, bleh-blub because your tongue has been disected). Then you get your lip caught in them randomly and that hurts like hell. Then everyone wants to see them. Then just when you get used to them the dentist calls you in and Bingo! You have then tightened so it happens allllll over again. Every six weeks. Indefinitely.

I'm not gonna complain too much because my mouth is hurting and mostly I just want to sleep so it goes away, but there is a particularly godly chicken fajita sat in the fridge that I haven't been able to eat yet and I don't want to liquidise it.

What are you smiling at?

Send help. I'm in pain. I want a bacon sandwich and I have to go on a jewelry training course with work tomorrow. There is nothing remotely good about this situation.

"Alright, everyone. Look angry."

- Instructions to everyone at work when two customers walked into the store 11 seconds (we do a countdown) before we were due to close.

I feel sorry for those customers really... They spent five minutes trying to look for an item whilst we all gave them blistering looks as we hung around the front desk like a bunch of vultures, then when they went to the till they were told it wasn't in stock, so they had to do the walk of shame out of the door with all the staff watching them.

Mwahahahaha...

So yesterday I accidentally took part in a 48-hour bender, and then when I got to sleep my imagination was all "OmigodOmigodOmigodWhereHaveYouBeenWe'veGotSoMuchToTellYou!!!!" so I was in that kinda shallow state of sleep all night and then I went to work all day. And then it was Mother's Day here in little ol' England so I had to do Mum things with my Mum and Grandma before I could FINALLY just die on my arse like I've been dying to do for oh... 56 hours or so.

So that's the sorry tale of Nicole vs. blue food colouring.

In other news, my sister who spent most of my lower school years (11-14 for argument's sake) calling me 'pizza face' and 'metal mouth' has a big juicy spot on her chin, and I've SO reaped the rewards on this one.

On seeing her this morning looking particularly grumpy...

"Hahaha... You've got a third eye. Sucks to be you."
"Shut up Nicole."
"Ohhh hell no. I'm gonna milk this. Looks ripe, by the way."
"Fuck off! You had spots for years."
"Yeah, but not now. You can't just do epically stupid shit like pointing out that I had spots and then expect it not to bite you in the ass later. You're just like Hilter, Zitler."
"That's not funny."
"Ohh... Zitler, it's hilarious."

Nicole 9, Cleo 2.

I'm sorry. I'm tired. Look! Zzzzzzz...

I somwhow ended up staying awake all night last night because I'm something of an intellectual anomaly. As we droved to my grandma's in the morning, passing all the well-rested people I thought "Bastards..." I've been feasting on MaltEasters all day to keep my energy up and I can't say that it's worked. I fell asleep standing up at my grandma's house, as soon as I got home and was ready to crash BFF Main Gay.5 phoned and made me go shopping with him.

We came back to my house and played a game of Monopoly until I was all but drooling on the carpet.

Then he more of less shoved me into bed.

I'm at work tomorrow morning.

Stupid mistake - very, very sleepy.

Miss Soft Touch

My family seek to destroy me from within.

No, wait. That's not accurate. My mum and sister seek to destroy from within.

We were walking back from Wetherspoons (because we're classy like that) where we'd spent the entire meal next to a table of women who were cackling like hyenas. After I made some passing comment about them all being very, very single, my mum piped up 'Nah... They're all married. To builders. So they have stacks of money and think they have loads of class when really they've got shit-all in that department.' Too true, too true.

Anyway, we were walking back from Wetherspoons and we went to the shop to get some toilet paper because SOMEONE (Cleo) very inconsiderately caught a cold and used up all the loo roll in one night. Walmgate's corner shop isn't particularly lush, it smells of cat pee most nights and is a hub for all manner of chavs, smelly old men (who have really bright personalities, I've found, because I stand on street corners making small talk with smelly old men at 3am whilst waiting for my kebab to be cooked) and other people. It's full of small brands and soon enough my mum comes along yelling "Nicky! Nicky, guess what we found!"

It was toilet paper. And it was called 'Nicky Super Soft Touch'.

Since that moment I have been hearing 'Oh, Nicky is so soft!', 'Nicky feels great!' or 'Ahh... Nicky!' erupting from the bathroom all night.

My family are strange and somewhat awful folk.

My friends are the spawn of awesome.

My friends are awesome. All of them are just inexplicably, irrevocably awesome. With knobs on top, and on the sides.

Interesting mental image.

Anyway.

It's come to my attention that awesomeness must be genetic (except in my case, seeing as my parents are far from awesome when they are together) because Friend Who Will Go Unmentioned's Dad did something SO FAR beyond the valley of awesome, that I kinda want to eat his mind.

And I have to leave Friend and her dad unmentioned because it's also slightly naughty/illegal/vandalism.

And also situated outside the police station. Rock on.

In the UK there's this campaign called Change 4 Life that is about losing weight because we're all FAT FATTY MCFATTERSONS and Friend's Dad couldn't hardly help himself when he saw the advert on a phone box outside the police station.

Click to enlarge, it's easier to read that way.

It's official, we're all the spawn of awesome.

(PS, I went into school today and collected my exam results, you know, the ones I didn't revise/study for. Got an A in each one. Suck it, logic!)

Awesome count: 7. Oh, wait. 8.

Eat my shorts.

The Simpsons/Family Guy is what my family aspires to be, I think. Sometimes.

I've seen an episode of The Simpsons at least every other day for most of my life, my sister has possibly seen more, and my parents have too. Same with Family Guy. Same with Futurama.

So it's a pretty standard thing in my household to hear quotes from The Simpsons, Futurama and Family Guy in my family. I don't even notice anymore, but my friend stopped by the other day and she professes that her mind was BLOWN.

"Nicky, can you open the car hole please?" (Garage)

"DAD! BENDER BURNT THE FOOD AGAIN!" (Oven)
"Kill him! Stun him! Turn him off!"
"How do you do that?"
"Ask your mother."
"MUM! HOW DO YOU KILL BENDER?!"

"What language are you learning this month?"
"Robonian. The language I didn't make up."

"Hello. Where's Mum?"
"I dunno."
"Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mummy! Mummy! Mummy! Ma! Ma! Ma! Mamma! Mamma! Mamma! Ma-"
"WHAT!?"
"...Hi."

"Hey look! Hot-air balloon!"
"Hey there, blimpy boy..."

And so on.

I'm telling you this because The Cleveland Show has just been aired in the UK, and my sister and dad? They love it.



It's so weird it's kinda awesome.

(And I've totally called someone 'chocolate person' before. I was four. It happens. I'm sorry.)

Know your enemy. Or something.

Today I'm milking the new 'pages' feature on Blogger with my fabulous and probably wholly unnecessary 'About me' section.

Click.

So that's your job today. Go check me out. See what you're dealing with.

No words. Just wisdom.

What would have made this trip better? If I hadn't found my harmonica in two pieces before I left. Nooooo..!

So yesterday I went to Whitby.



Whitby's where Bram Stoker wrote Dracula and it draws on that so of course I had four or five run-in's with big-ass, steroid-chugging spiders (who wants a spider, pincers and all, displayed in a glass block ANYWHERE in their house? Who pays for those things?) before I could flee to Kettleness, down the coast.



Kettleness is basically just a few houses and a cliff, but I love it anyway. You can see for miles and it's totally wild.

I got to take lots of photos of rocks and things (ohh, the thrill...)







"This, children, is an excellent example of sedimentary rock..."



Hell yeah, that's a Snufkin bag.





I got to spend an hour pondering the colour of my hair. What colour is my hair? Is it blonde or brown? I used to be blonde (diddums...) but now I'm all... I don't even know.



This was the moment when I was too dope for the camera. Very, very white.

Also saw an absolutely gorgeous sunset when driving back over the North Yorkshire Moors.

The one where I probably end up homeless.

Dear York City Council,

Hey guys... It's been a while, huh?

As in, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? I live in a council house so I'm kinda living in your house and therefore you should probably come round tout de suite and warm my feet up, because they're kinda in tootsie heaven right now.

I've got to go to work in seven hours, darlings, and that's to pay your rent, and I can't sleep because my feet have, for all points and purposes, died in the last two hours or so.

My legs keep spasming, probably because my veins have just been converted into ice luges.

It hurts to type because my fingers are so cold.

Yes, the windows are closed. Yes, I have put on socks. Yes, the heating is on.

Wait. Is it?

Okay, it is now.

What? Stop looking at me like that! It's cold okay. There are like, ice cubes in my head or something.

I still blame you entirely, York City Council.

Lots of love, ish.

Nicole "Blue Butt" Smith.

Odds bodkins

We (bloggers) all have the friends who make us think "Thank God I clicked that link".

Have we all met my friend Rach?

She's possibly four or five times more awesome than I am, which proves that you can go past infinity.

It was only by chance that I joined a networking site called Lunarstorm when I was 12 (by clicking on an advert... on Neopets.com... shut up), and then chance came along again when Rach sent me a message saying that she liked my profile (it had tiny guitars on it, rawk on).

She ended up calling me 'little sis' because I was 12 and so took the full brunt of the internet's mean-ness and I kept running/clicking to her for help.

We first met up on Valentine's Day 2007, which was fun.

The next time we met up, we saw Within Temptation (awesome band) live.

The third time we met up we went to Holland. You know, like you do.


Guess who's accidentally stoned in this picture. Clue: It isn't Rach.

We stood in a huge venue with 7998 other Dutch people who are generally Really Fucking Tall. Most of them where taking advantage of the 'cannabis for all!' laws that I so want the UK to introduce (you know, for kicks) and by the end of the night I was feeling all kinds of 'wooahhh, my hands are like... huge' and I distinctly remember crawling into the lift at the hotel.



We've seen Within Temptation twice, Nightwish once, and then a £1500 handbag that looked like a skinned cat on string.

She introduced me to Nightwish (who I love insanely), I introduced her to cheese toasties. It's tit for tat.

And finally, we're slightly very eccentric:



We totally slayed Paramore's Born For This that time.

A confession.

I have a confession to make.

My name is Nicole (K) Smith and I'm an addict.

There's something about the gummy combination of glucose-fructose syrup, wheat flour, sugar, dextrose, tocopherol-rich extract, ascorbic acid, citric acid, strawberry concentrate, blackcurrant juice, apple, tomato, radish and pumpkin concentrates and beeswax that just makes my heart go boop... boop... bo-bleh! What the hell was th- boop...

I'm talking about strawberry laces.



Just looking at that picture is making my mouth water. Mostly because, even as I type this, I have a mouthful of strawberry laces.

Laces, whips, ropes, pencils. So long as they're strawberry flavoured (or at least can do a passable impression of strawberry) I'll jump on them.

At school, I walk around with a strawberry whip wrapped around my wrist so I can keep chewing at it. Anyone who spends a little amount of time with my during my free periods will complain that I always have a packet of strawberry SOMETHING in my gorgeous leather shoulder bag.

I'm pretty sure I'm alone in the world with this addiction. It's not like any of my others, which include shuffling cards endlessly and taking cold medication when I'm due an exam (they're hardly performance-enhancing, but my brain has a habit of evacuating through my nose when I sit exams).

And drinking chocolate milkshake really fast when I forgot to eat.

And reading all night just to get the damn book finished before dawn.

And opening and playing games of Spider Solitaire on my laptop without realising I've done so until the congratulatory 'Ta-daa!' sounds.

I have a lot of problems.

The calm before the storm.

So, it's 1am.

Today lots of things are going to happen.

1. I'm going to finish that Failure Trifle I made yesterday. It fails so good.

2. An unknown amount of people are going to come around to my house because they love me. Mo-Balls announced on Monday that she was coming round to my house today and I heard that she'd got all sorts of people to come with her. BFF Main Gay.5 won't tell me who's coming, BFF Main Gay.5's girlfriend, Twidget, won't tell me who's coming, and now I think my sister will be off school with a chest infection too. Gosh darn it.

3. I'm going to see Extreme Metaaaaal Band with my dad. I can't remember the name of the band but we'll both get in for free so it's cool. My dad working on the lighting desk (read: I'll end up doing some of it) for this venue and a few others, so it means he gets free +1 tickets all the time. We saw Electric Six a few months back, I worked on the lights. If he's the one performing on stage he makes it sound good and I make it look good. It's a nice compromise.

4. I may recieve a delivery containing two books I forgot to buy. I may also recieve a delivery of seven books I probably shouldn't have bought but did anyway. I bought a few books the other day and forgot the third and sixth books from one series, so I had to order them in. Then I bought loads of other books because I like ordering stuff from the internet because I'm a practising hermit.

I'm going to sleep now. I wonder how much of my day will actually go according to plan.

Ode to my mamma. Who is not fat.

Like I said yesterday, the theme of the month is 'strange' and there's really no better place to start than with my mother.

My mother is a very strange person. She's also totally awesome, and reacts relatively calmly about my frequent rampages over potato famine and ceremonious pot-smoking at funerals.

She didn't argue with me when playing chess, aged seven, I told her that throwing marbles at the king was the 'nuclear warfare' rule.

She doesn't grumble (too much) when I spend all my money on cookies and cherry Sourz.

She lets me do whatever I want because she knows damn well and good that I won't go anywhere anyway.

She doesn't question me when I say 'well, my husband says...'

She has better dress sense than me.

She shares really bad jokes, and makes them funny.

Her password to my laptop is 'cowpat' because she was drunk at the time.

She'll play Monopoly with me even though I always win.

She doesn't fuss over me even when I'm clearly slipping into a sort of blackhole. She knows I hate fuss, and that I hate people who make out that I can't handle myself (which, in fairness, I can't. I just go along for the ride).

I love her because she tells me that I can't just go on for a few months reading and writing and generally being a 'starving artist' because 'you need talent for that'.

I love her when she tells me to 'remember my place' at work when I announce that I punched/slapped/knee-ed my manager... again.

So here's to my mum who is still holding up even though me and my sister are currently going through the whole 'Muuuuuum, she hit me!' 'Muuuuum, I didn't!' routine that she knows and perhaps doesn't love.

It's beginning to smell a lot like Mar-arch...

There's a rumble in the jungle, people.

Which translates in a roundabout way to "Guess what, I'm doing NaBloPoMo again, mofos!"

Like I said, roundabout.

This month's theme is 'strange' which I think I could probably stick to better than December's 'giving'.

I've got an insane amount of time for blogging but I don't keep up with it. For example, I spent all of last night ordering books from Amazon.co.uk and listening to the Moomin soundtrack on repeat.

Yeah. I'm seventeen in less than two months and I'll still watch Moomin with all the contentment of a child on Christmas morning. My parents don't know what to do with me.

But I have to go and stare at Eric Northman on my True Blood poster some more now so...