Fluid Overload (1)

a.k.a. "Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Drink"


Day 11 of the water crisis around here.

Many parts of the UK were drowned in the rain & ensuing flooding that started a couple of weeks ago.

My local water purification plant was flooded so any tap water would have been contaminated.
So it was announced that the water was going to be switched of very soon, so everyone filled their baths, buckets, etc so they'd have stuff to wash with or flush the loo.

Thing is, I had been away for a few days and got back home to go straight out to work again, so I returned the next morning from the night shift to find there was no water full stop.

This posed a problem.

Particularly the first time I forgot and used the loo as normal. (Only a number one luckily)

I didn't have any spare water, so, begrudgingly, I tipped my one bottle of mineral water down the loo. And nothing happened.

You see, I'd recently had a bit of a clean-up and chucked a load of tisues & kitchen roll in the loo, to be flushed next time I went. Bad timing, it turns out.

So I thought to myself, what else can I use to flush the loo. I went to the kitchen & discovered a nearly full bottle of Asda cherryade that no-one else had wanted after the last BBQ. Brilliant. Straight into the pan it went.

Now here's an experiment you can try at home - it appears that aforementioned cherryade reacts a bit with urine. And fizzes quite a lot when you pour it from a height, Tom-Cruise-in-Cocktail-style.

The red liquid frothed up and up in the bowl, with tissues floating atop the sickly sweet-smelling scarlet bubbles like rafts. It very, VERY, nearly spilled over the side (while I was shouting that No NO thing people do when pouring a drink - I was that close to sipping just to stop it overflowing...)

Thankfully, the tide came down to leave a few inches of froth & tissue mulch. I closed the door & haven't been back into that bathroom since!

Straight to supermarket to get bottled water - none left.

So I was in a predicament... but luckily I live next door to a hospital... They must have water in a hospital, surely?


TO BE CONTINUED...

Absorbing

Coo, it's a bit wet out...


I drove most of the way back from London without a hitch. Then I got to a flooded bit.

Traffic wasn't even crawling. People were parked. It took me over an hour to travel a mile and a half. I had to get home soon. I was starting a night shift in a few hours and I wanted a power nap before. At this rate I might not even get to work on time.

Was I stressed?

Hell no. I fished out my copy of Harry Potter from the boot and read a few chapters, inching the car forwards every minute or so. Lovely. Only spoilt by people in the other lane constantly shouting out asking if it was any good.


The eagerly awaited sequel to "Harry Potter & The Half-Price Blood" (or whatever) came out at midnight yesterday. Fans had been queueing for ages, days even.

er...why? I wandered into Tesco's at 1am and they had a mountain of copies & no queue.
I wandered out again though 'cos they were charging full price. Silly buggers - who's going to pay 18 quid when Asda down the road were doing it for a fiver?! I ask you...

The author, JR Hartley (or whatever), has let it known that two major characters die in the book. It's kinda obvious who it has to be, but I'm hoping she'll surprise me. Incidentally, she hasn't mentioned that a number of other less important characters die...

As for the plot - well, I'm going into hiding for a week. Normally, I barely watch any telly, instead I read dozens of blogs. But I can't take the risk now - someone's going to give it away. I can feel it.

For the previous book, I saw a youtube vid of people who drove past the queues of eager Harry Potter fans outside bookstores and used a megaphone to announce "******* dies" before driving off giggling; twistedly funny but inherently evil. Think of the children.


No, I'm not going to take any chances. I'll miss it, but I'm just going to have to avoid surfing the webnet for a bit.

(I will post in the meantime, but with my eyes half shut in case I see some Internet out of the corner of my eye.)


Right back to... er... work... (or whatever)


******* = Dumbledore. Oh sorry, I thought everyone knew.

G33k

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

A: To get to the same side.



I love geeky jokes - do you know any more?

Overdrive

In other news, I nearly got killed a moment ago.

Bombing back up the M40, I notice the truck in front of me, full of rubbish, is being buffetted around a lot by the wind.

Suddenly several large planks of wood suddenly getting picked up by the wind, fly out of the top of the lorry and head towards me (or rather I'm heading towards them) at 70-odd mph.

Next thing I am aware of is that, alarmingly, I'm not doing anything to avoid my impending wood-car collision. After all, at this split-second in time, there are chunks of wood apparently suspended in mid-air, in the lane directly ahead of me, and the lanes either side, just waiting for me to hit them.

Where could I go? No hope of braking in time. And I'm pretty sure that my car has never flown - although if I hit any of the debris the wrong way, it would be likely to lift the car up and maybe over.

It was like something out of an action film.

Particularly because a few seconds later I was out of the other side of this cloud of wood totally unhurt. Didn't even hit the car. Maybe air vortices, maybe divine intervention, I don't know, but somehow the dozen lumps of wood & I did not collide.

I felt shaken but very alive for the rest of the journey.

I got home, feeling that maybe, maybe, someone out there was looking out for me.



To find that some fucker had just nicked my bike.

Job

I survived MMC!

My future employment status hung in the brink when I didn't get any interviews on the strength of my "application form"(a.k.a. Essay in Creative Writing & Jargon Shoehorning) in Round 1a. But when Round 1b was created so that everyone else got one sympathy interview, I got offered my top choice of job! Which was nice.

My deepest sympathies go out to the people who've been screwed over by the system. Some of my good friends are currently still jobless (with Round 2 already well underway) - no-one knows what's going to happen, but it appears that their current employers have a responsibility to help them out if they get nothing - ironically these doctors are probably highly skilled in the competitive specialties where there are very few jobs available - what a waste.

Other casualties include relationships - I know of several couples that have broken up because of it, including Hippychick & I. When do we get Patricia Hewitt's head on a spike?


But as for my job - thanks to a quirk of the rotas, my new job doesn't start til November, so it looks like I'll have September & October off (after I locum for a month).

What to do? It's the perfect time to go travelling, so I intend to spend most of September abroad.

Can't decide whether I should go on Safari, or go round Oz & New Zealand, or do some charity work somewhere for a few weeks.


No idea where to look - any suggestions?

Catch-up

Oh dear, I've fallen a bit behind with my blogging!

Here's what's been going on in the last week or so:


WEDDING - last weekend

Absolutely hilarious & great fun from start to finish!
The stag-do started out playing cricket on a beach, then visiting a beer festival & ended up with us being kicked out of a pub about 3am.

The next morning, the groom and best man were unable to be found until 2 hours after they were supposed to show up. Luckily all went well for the rest of the service which included:
- torrential rain
- a rather confused atheist elderly lady vicar
- a bride in a maternity dress & a groom with sweat dripping continuously from his forehead
- & an organist who, bored with Bach, started playing the theme tune to Grandstand instead

The reception was great - I was even allowed to do a few songs, which demonstrates how drunk everyone must have been...


AMATEUR TRANSPLANTS GIGS - last week

Two gigs at a three-hundred-seater theatre in Central London, sold out - everything went pretty well (apart from realising an hour before curtain that there was no way of connecting my digital piano to a sound system)

We got a good reaction from the whole audience (apart from one confused friend of ours who had assumed we would've changed our style in the last 5 years - silly boy).

The audience was a random mix of mostly non-medical people - schoolkids, grandparents, paramedics... in the bar afterwards, I met a convict on day-release who had to go back to jail after the gig, a girl who was in the Harry Potter films (no, not Hermione) and a friend of mine who had lost one leg since I last saw him (who...er... I drunkenly may have tried to push over... sorry mate!)

And of course there were some lovely ladies. One girl, describing herself as "Adam's biggest fan" and believing Adam to be the sexiest man alive, travelled over a hundred miles for the show; I'm telling you this because, entirely coincidentally, she happens to be profoundly hard of hearing and registered blind. No, genuinely.

All in all, the gigs were a lot of fun - test-ran lots of material for the new album - plus we made a video recording, so maybe one day there'll be an Amateur Transplants DVD... (or YouTube clips at the very least)!


To calm things down a bit - I did 2 shifts on ITU this weekend, with an unrehearsed band gig 3 hours drive away in between! Could've gone better - I badly injured my index finger beforehand (there's still a big chunk of skin missing), broke a bass guitar string & nearly fell asleep driving home afterwards (remember kids: don't sleep & drive)..



But now I've got a few days off... and I've got nothing to do*!
Bloody typical...


*nothing apart from getting ready to move house again, booking a holiday, rehearsing for band gigs, finding a charity to work for this summer, catching up with friends, getting some exercise, tidying my flat, writing new songs, etc ...

Morning After

The two shows were a fantastic success!

The audience feedback was...er... wholly positive, and you laughed in all the right places!

Will write more when hangover fades...

-S-

Monitoring

Hmmm... my computer monitor seems to have had a stroke while I've been away this weekend.

Now only the middle third of the screen is working. Everything is stretched painfully tall & thin, with black on either side. I've had to shrink the screen down vertically as much as possible just to be able to read what's on it.

But now the working part of the screen is about the size of a mobile phone's, floating in a sea of black on the big monitor. I'm expecting its complete demise any moment now.

Can anyone recommend a decent (probably flatscreen) monitor I can replace it with?

(It's great having a blog sometimes)
-S-