Blah... and some yay :)

Suddenly got a annoying feeling... Suddenly I'm sad and very nervous, although I don't know why. I guess it could be a guilty concience for just ordering a few new tatting shuttles (I really can't help myself when I find brands that I don't already have!). Heh. And my biology exam is in just a week! I don't usually get nervous until the day before or something, but it's an oral exam, and that makes everything a lot worse. I can be very confident on a written exam if I'm a little unprepared, but on an oral exam I feel like dying no matter how hard I've studied. My mind goes blank and I stutter a lot. Utterly useless :( Good news is that my troublesome infection seems to be gone, and I feel a lot better now :) I've lost about three weeks of study time because of the troublesome infection, but I think I've managed to catch up most of the work the last few days... Exhausted!

Or I could just be hungry :p Will go home and have dinner in a few minutes, and hopefully things will improve :) Tonight we get visitors for a Warhammer RPG session, which means lots of crochet time for me, hehe. Perhaps my second Great Big Firefly will finally get his wings today? :)

Excuses, excuses...

Just thought I'd post a little something about why I've been gone so long.. There are two main reasons. One is that I've become completely hooked on tatting since this summer, so I started a tatting blog to have a place to show off the things I make and buy (there has been some serious shuttle shopping this fall!) because there is just so much of it, and I didn't want to clutter up this blog completely :) This place is mainly for crochet, hedgehogs (of course!), some random craftiness and bits of my life.

(Warning: Long story ahead! Skip to the last paragraph if you're not interested...)

The other reason is that I've been sick for a while. I think I mentioned in the Pumpkin post that I had some wrist pains a few weeks ago, so I stopped crocheting and tatting for a few days as soon as the pumpkins were done, and the pain went away. A few days later my right breast started feeling really warm and sore, and then I found some lumps, so I immediately went to the doctor to check it out. I figured it was an infection of some sort, and I really thought it would be easy enough to get a prescription of antibiotics and be done with it. But nooo... The doctor examined me for about four seconds and told me I had something called Fibrocystic breast disease/disorder (or something), which was fairly common and harmless. And there was nothing to be done about it other than wait until it went away. I was sceptical at first, but then another doctor came and took a blood test to check for infections and the test came back negative, so I finally believed the doctor. He gave me a referral to get a mammogram and/or an ultrasound to confirm what he suspected, and then I went home, happy that it was nothing serious.

Curious me went home and looked up the condition online and read all about it. Pain was normal... So when the pain started getting worse, I didn't think much of it - I was going to get it looked at soon anyway. Or so I thought... The clinic that received my referral managed to lose it in a pile of papers or something, so I didn't get an appointment until two weeks later. By then my breast was swollen and red (the redness appeared the last two or three days before), and there was no way I was going to let them squish it in the mammogram machine of horror! The doctor took one look at it and said I didn't need to :) He did the ultrasound and said it was an infection that needed immediate treatment, and he made an appointment for me at the hospital the next morning.

I don't want to get too graphic with the rest of the story - let's just say it includes getting stabbed with a VERY large needle (twice!), and then a scalpel when the needles didn't work... The first treatment only made things worse, despite me chewing antibiotics like candy, and the second treatment just wasn't enough. Now I've been to the hospital five times in the past week, and finally it seems to be healing up nicely. Got a week left of Penicillin and going back for a check-up next Thursday, and that's it :) Crossing fingers...

Whew! Long rant. Hope I didn't make you queasy... Now onto something more pleasant: I've done some yarn shopping today! Feeling that much better :) Got more yarn to make some new Great Big Bugs. Progress is slow with the one I'm currently working on - I've lost count of how many times I unraveled it - so perhaps it is best to do something else in between. After my wrist started acting up I've been taking it slow with the crocheting - only doing a few rounds a day - so if you get bored with the silence in this place and want to see what I've been up to you could always check out my tatting place :)

Bags are packed...

And I'm sort of ready to go home to my apartment. But only sort of. I hate traveling alone, especially by bus. Have tons of luggage and I have to change buses two or three times. Always worried I won't get everything with me, or that someone else will take my bags :/ They are locked and tagged, but still... And then the buses are so crowded this time of year, all the students coming to town at the beginning of the semester. At least I'll have things to pass the time on the ten-hour bus ride. Tatting shuttles wound with thread for a new project, yarn  & stuffing to make some Bug legs, and best of all, my new laptop has batteries to last at least six hours of music and movies :D Perhaps I even get to sleep some of the way, that will shorten the trip a lot.

But, when I finally get there with my 30+ kilos of stuff, I have to drag it with me virtually uphill all the way from the bus (can't afford a taxi on a Sunday), and the forcasts say it will be 24 degrees C and bright sunshine! Whew, think I'm going to die... At least Bollan and Glyptodon are anxious to go! Wish I could be carried home in a bag, too :) (Um, you know what I mean!)

When I get home I need to put together a proper CV and start applying for jobs. Really scary stuff. Worried I can only get crappy jobs, or that I won't be able to do the ones I do get. Maybe I can't find anything at all and end up on welfare or something... I know I can probably get a job as a cleaning lady fairly easily,  but I'm not sure if I want to have that as my first option. The cleaning itself is not that bad, but I've become allergic to the gloves that are used :( I've tried wearing cottong gloves inside the latex ones, but that only helps a little... 

Plus I'm no longer a university student. Was going to take a year off anyway when I couldn't begin a Master in Arabic this fall, but now I've decided to give up on languages & linguistics pretty much for good. It's all very exciting, and I'm pretty good at learning new languages, but I've come to realize that I'll never find a job with an education like that. I wouldn't survive as a teacher, getting a PhD also includes teaching and stuff, and that's pretty much all there is as far as I can see right now...

So, I've come up with a new plan. Since I'll be working for a year now anyway, I can just as well spend the time doing something useful, like studying! :p I've decided that if I go back to the university I'll study biology. To qualify for that I need to take some math and/or biology classes at high school level. I sent in an application to a school which has adult classes in the afternoon, but they were all full, so my only option is to try doing this by myself. Signed up for an exam in math and the beginning course in biology, and we'll see how it goes. Off to buy books tomorrow, and hopefully I get to spend most of next week reading biology :) 

Well, time to have some breakfast before I go! Ugh...

Worst song ever!

Today has been a really long day at work! Not because of the hours, but because every second I spent cleaning I had the most annoying song ever stuck on my brain :( I get songs stuck very easily, and some of them stay for quite some time. The longest I've ever had the same song was a whole semester, about five or six months... Beethoven's ninth symphony. Not the worst song, but still annoying enough if you listen to it for too long. Today it was a song called "Oah" by Alexander Rybak, the guy who won the Eurovision Song Contest for Norway last year. Thankfully not with that song! I feel like such a traitor for hating his guts (and his songs!), but I can't help it. I just can't stand listening to pop music for too long, or I'll go crazy, I'm more of a rock 'n' roll kind of person :)

Anyway, this song has been playing on TV a lot lately, because the guy has a new album coming out, plus I sometimes hear bits and pieces of it when I'm cleaning people's offices and they have the radio on. I guess the melody is fair enough, but the lyrics make me want to cry! I first heard the song when I was at the dentist, and I almost choked when it came on the radio: "Oah, I love you Moa, you're way too young for me, but I don't mind!"...


Oh, so HE doesn't mind? Well, that makes everything okay! Hmpf! This guy is only 23 or something, which makes me wonder how old the girl is (or was when he wrote the song)... *shiver* If you should want to listen to this atrocity yourself, you can follow this link (haven't listened to it myself, I just can't, but there are others in case this is crap). 


At lunch I couldn't take it anymore and complained to my mother. She tried to give me "Aiken Drum" ("Åkken Bom" in Norwegian) instead, which also gets stuck in your head really easily, but even that had to give way after a while, to the horrible OOOH AAAH, I love you MOOOO-AAAAH.... Didn't make cleaning toilets any more fun! *sigh* I even tried humming the Hamster Dance song to myself, but that didn't help much either, now I have all three songs in my head playing on top of each other :/ But the hamsters sure are cute! :D


There, just had to get this out of my system! Sorry for the long and relatively pointless rant (and apologies to any Rybak fans out there), but I hope the song will disappear from my head soon! Hoping for a better day (and song!) tomorrow :)

Work, work & apologies

First I'd like to apologize to my readers and commenters for being really bad at responding to your nice comments the past weeks. I know it sounds like I'm lazy, but I just haven't had much energy for keeping up with my "online life" lately because of my job. Jobs, actually. Plural... I've been cleaning the town hall five days a week the past three weeks, and last week I also had the job of cleaning the town's public toilets & showers. That's not really much, just a couple hours twice a week, but it's still something I have to do after I finish my other job. Right now there isn't a lot of people working at the town hall because of vacations, so I use less time than I normally would, which is great, because I don't think I could manage to stay there for five hours every day. I guess this can sound like a piece of cake to some, but I'm not used to working this hard, and when I get home I just crash on the couch and can't really do anything for hours. Of course, my crafting really suffers because of this. I don't get much crocheting done during the week, creating patterns just takes too much energy and effort :( I sure hope I get used to living like this really soon, because if my creativity has to go, then... well, it's not the life I want :/

It's now almost half past eleven and it's time to go to bed, I start work at eight tomorrow morning. My final week in this job, and then I'll have some time off before I begin looking for a new one. Hopefully a more comfortable one, but beggars can't be choosers, so I guess I'll take more or less whatever I can get (within reasonable distance from where I live since I don't drive)... Anyway, once again I apologize for not replying to comments and stuff. Don't think that I ignore them, I really do appreciate all the nice comments I get! Thanks, and good night :)

New design & new job

Notice any changes? Yep. I've changed my blog design again! I just discovered that Blogger has a new way of customizing your blog that makes everything a lot easier. I can even have three columns, and I don't have to battle with the html codes :D Woohoo! You can still edit the layout in html if you want to, but I don't :p

Wednesday was my first day at my new job. It was also my last. It just didn't work out. Now, I don't want this to be a post about me writing bad stuff about my boss, because I don't like to talk about people like that, but seriously... When I asked for the job I expected to work the register, some cleaning and sorting around the store, being friendly with the customers etc. The customer is always right and all that... What I didn't expect was being told that I'm not chatty enough! Apparently I looked too much at the buttons on the register and the change I was counting when I should have been chatting with the customers! About what? Goddammit, I had been there for a few hours and I needed to see what I was doing so I didn't make mistakes :( I have never worked in a store before, she knew I needed training, but it didn't seem to be enough. She made a huge point (several times) out of telling me how important the customer was, and that it was not their fault when I made a mistake. Obviously! I never even implied such a thing, I smiled, said hello and was polite. That's the best I can do. She also told me several times that it was an unusually slow day, and that the line of customers usually were around the corner. She said it looked like I was struggling (which I weren't), she almost felt sorry for me (!), so I figured she was trying to tell me that I didn't fit in. She was probably trying to encourage me or something, but it didn't help much... Being told that I'm not good enough doesn't make me work harder, it just makes me give up :( It didn't help that I was the only one she'd found to work there either, I didn't want to be there just because she didn't have anyone else. Or because she felt sorry for me, or because she knows my mother! I'd still feel that she didn't think I was good enough. I'd rather be broke than depressed.

After three years in hell during High School (Junior High, I think is the closest term in English) I'm not very social or chatty person (in person, that is - online in writing I can be "normal"), dealing with new people is really scary, and I think smalltalk is pretty useless with complete strangers, especially when I'm trying to work! In my mind, and in the town where I usually live, the point of working in a store is not to talk to the customers from they enter the shop and all the time until they leave... She asked me to come back on Monday to get three more hours of training (so I'd have a full day), but I won't suddenly become a social butterfly over the weekend, so I told her to find someone else. (Well, I had my mother tell her, because I was curled up in a ball, unable to do anything useful for the rest of the day...)

Yesterday I got a new job! I'm going to be a cleaning-lady at the town hall, starting some time in July. Which suits me just fine :) I don't mind physical work, as long as the company is all right (in this case it means being ignored). So I still have a few more weeks of holiday and lots of time to crochet :D I actually applied for the cleaning job a good while before I got the store job, but somehow they managed to screw up when sorting all the applications, and I got a letter saying that I'd applied for the wrong job! Since my mother works there and knows these people (she's the one who told me about the job in the first place, since it wasn't advertized anywhere), and they apparently had no idea what had happened. They would sort out the mess and send me a letter saying my application was received. I never heard anything... I figured that the cleaning job was long gone when I got home, but then my mother told me that they just started hiring people yesterday! About a month too late... But hey, the screw-up means that I now have a job, so I'm not complaining :)

Html, you are not my friend...

Don't know if you have noticed some weird stuff going on with my blog lately, but if you have, it's because I've been trying to fix it up a little, and me and html coding just don't mix...

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Virkverket, one of the blogs that I read regulary, had got one of those neat little boxes on the bottom of the blog posts, similar to the like-button on Facebook. It's a nice way to see what people think, even if they don't have time to log in and leave a comment. So I asked her how to do it, and it's really not that complicated! At least it shouldn't be...

First of all, you can try by going into the 'Layout' tab of your blog. Then click on 'Edit' in the lower right corner of the 'Blog posts' section, and you'll see what to do :)

So I tried to do all that, and nothing happened. No neat little boxes on my blog... Then I tried to reset my settings to the default template or whatever (but of course I downloaded my old template first), and my blog went back to the standard Minima template, and all my widgets were gone. And still no boxes... It said that it would be easy to retrieve your old settings, but of course after the whole thing changed I couldn't figure out how to do that. I was stuck, and all my stuff was gone. I thought. Don't know what I did to get my widgets back, but I did it somehow. At that point I was so angry I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, but instead I uploaded my old template and decided I'd live without the boxes... 

I tried to add boxes to my other blogs as well, and the only one that it worked on was my pattern blog. Weird... I figured that was because I haven't installed some fancy ready-made template on it, but simply added a pretty background.

Yesterday I decided to try again, after another blogger (SUADDA) linked to this great site which explains step by step how to fix things by editing the html codes of the blog. You can find it HERE, but it's in Swedish... I can't remember exactly what I did, but at some point the boxes actually appeared on my blog. Hooray! I think it was when I reset my template to standard Minima. And then they disappeared when I edited the html to get three columns... Which really shouldn't mess with the ending of the blogposts! So last night I was up for ours, copying and pasting and editing that bloody html, installing different templates and resetting things and THEN some more editing, but there was always something wrong, and the darn boxes were just gone... I finally gave up and went to sleep.

This morning I decided to screw the boxes and install my old template again, and what do know! I have boxes! *sigh* I really don't know what was different from the first time I tried, but now it worked... My other blogs now have boxes, too :) I'm still not friends with the html thing, but at least I've learned enough to change the width of the columns, which I felt looked a little squashed. But now I'll stop tinkering with this blog, or it will come back and eat me one day!

Sorry about the long rant, I just had to vent a little  :p

Now what...

Just found out that I have to wait a whole year to apply for a Master in Arabic, because the institute doesn't have enough people... A new professor will apparently be hired from the spring semester, but I have no idea who it is. So, I suddenly have no plans for my immediate future :/ I guess I'll just wait and see if the job I have this summer is allright, and if it is, I can always apply for more store jobs. Hm, the local craft store, perhaps? :)

Crap!

Utter crap, I tell you! Failed my exam agian :( That course is going to be the death of me, I swear...I'm not even sure what the point of the course is, we have just read a lot of useless linguistic theory,  Leonard Bloomfield was an idiot and Noam Chomsky is a pompous ass! There, just had to get that out... 

So now I just have to get through this semester, for which all motivation vanished about five minutes ago when I got my exam result... This means I won't be finishing my Bachelor degree this semester, and I'll have to postpone my Master by a whole year, unless I get lucky and can start with the spring semester... Shite and crap again. It's not an entirely hopeless situation, though, because I already have a Bachelor in Arabic, so I could always apply for a Master in that. I can still use my linguistics courses for something, I guess... Ugh!

Useless...

That's how I feel right now. It's a little past five in the morning and I should be asleep, getting ready for studying tomorrow. I have a final exam on Tuesday, the course I failed last semester. I feel like I understand more of it this time, but I'm not really motivated...

Earlier this evening we were out with some friends (my boyfriend's friends anyway, I don't have any friends of my own here), and I, "the linguist", got asked some questions I couldn't really answer. I felt like crap. All those people are either finished with their Master's degree or working on their phd, but that doesn't make everything better. One guy argumented quite strongly about something and I couldn't say anything against it, even though I disagreed. I'm just not good enough at what I'm supposed to be doing. A while later my boyfriend and I went home and continued the discussion. A big part of my problem is talking in front of lots of people, that is, more than two persons I don't know really well.

Anyway, after a while we sort of agreed to disagree. I'm not a religious person like he is, I do not believe in much, including myself and my opinions. So I was sort of back where I started, I feel like I don't know what I'm talking about.. I mean, is this how my life is going to be? My career as a linguist? Writing up thoughts and theories that someone smarter tears down as soon as it's published.. I don't know if I can do that. I have no idea what to do with my education, I just like learning languages and figuring out how they work. I'm pretty good at it, too, I just can't find any use for it.. I refuse to become a teacher on high school or something, that would be the death of me. I had a job once and I've never been more depressed in my life, despite the money I was making. Money sure isn't everything in this world...

I'm not even sure if this post will be here in a few days, I just needed to vent a little frustration. Hate to read this depressing stuff about myself. Sorry about that...

:(

Had my final lingustics exam today, and it went totally shit (pardon my French). I studied all day yesterday and thought I was pretty well prepared, but I guess I wasn't :/ My motivation this semester has been pretty much absent, and besides, the fall semester is way too short to really do anything constructive.. When you finally get around to studying, the finals are something like two weeks away, and on top of it all you (may) have started thinking about Christmas preparations and presents. My head was everywhere but in the exam room today. After doodling a little and writing a page and a half (which was about a quarter of the whole exam and not nearly enough for a passing grade), I started designing a crocheted scarf pattern in my head. *sigh* I actually envied the other people who had an exam in geology or something...

Oh, well, I'll just have to take it again in the spring, which will at least give me a little more time to read. I came home and went back to bed and slept for three hours, and now I feel a little better. Certainly wont let this ruin my Christmas holiday! It's finally time to finish up all the projects I've started, Christmas presents, Advent calendar things and other stuff. Yay :)