Kelly Rolfe is a beautiful princess

Just putting it out there! 

I know people don't actually read this blog...

...but JUST IN CASE they actually do!

Please would you sponsor me: http://www.justgiving.com/SuffolkWholeHog

Me and some other chumps what I know are doing this crazy mud run, and I'd feel like the whole thing was a little less mental if a charity was benefiting from it. (Although I'm really just doing it for very selfish, personal reasons- it looks fun, it will be a story and it might help keep me in shape!)

Thanks!

Upcycling- a new addiction

I've been most enjoying the sunny weather recently but my cheap table and chairs for the garden is now about 5 years old and everytime you sit down on it you get covered in this white crap, not ideal!

Also recently I've developed an addiction to Pinterest, which had led me into a false sense of confidence about my DIY skills. I decided that rather than get a new set, I would upcycle my old table and chairs into something very fabulous! 

I went and brought some straight to rust pink paint and got to work! 

My enthusiasm lead to a few over-sites
1. Lots of thin layers are better than one thick layer

2. It's a good idea to cover bits that you don't want to get paint on for example, the floor, the chair seats, your clothes
3. Don't have a BBQ the day after you have painted your chairs, even if the paint does seem dry- if you have painted it too thick it's not actually dry and all your guests will get pink paint on them.

Nether the less, I managed to get the pink paint off my guests and also found out my little corner shop sell turps so no harm done!

After a few more coats of paint I was happy with the pink, but thought the black seats looked a bit weird now (plus they were spotted with blobs of pink paint) so I decided to change the seats as well.
I'm not very confident on my sewing skills so I didn't want to recover the seats but if Pinterest has taught me anything it's that I can spraypaint the shit out of anything I want!

Unfortunately the colour I wanted was only available in teeny tiny cans instead of the normal size can so i had to buy 9 cans to finish the project!

                       

Anyway a few lessons learned along the way but otherwise I'm pretty happy with the results and hopefully I'll get a few more years out of them and we will have lots more lovely weather so I can get good use out of them! 

 

I'm back (for now!)

My lovely friend Jess has recently jumped feet first into the world of social media starting a Facebook competition, twitter account and a fancy new blog all in quick succession (it’s very good check it out here). 

Her venturing’s out into the online world reminded me that I also have a blog! One which I don’t appear to have updated in over two years …

A few little things might have changed since my last post, for ease I will bullet point below:

• Matt and I broke up. It was all very sad at the time but we are good friends now.
• I’m now doing an Open University degree ‘Computing and IT’. The dream is to become an awesome computer programmer and make more money than I do now!
• I lost and gained 3 stone. At least I’m no bigger than I was when I started.
• Quit smoking, it’s been 3 months so far so I’m counting that as a win.
• Turned gay. Well not turned gay, I was born that way and all that jazz. I've been with my lady love Kelly for nearly 2 years now.

Anyway that’s everything just about caught up.Hopefully I won’t leave it another 2 years before my next post but we will see!

Oh and in case you were worried, I'm still trying to master drawing on MS Paint. Here is a picture of Kelly wot I drew

She is a proper lesbian so she plays hockey and has short hair.

Phone gonads (and my lack thereof)

I need phone gonads :(

I completely suck at calling any kind of customer service line. I used to think it was because I was being kind and sympathetic to the person on the other end of the line. I would think 'It's not their fault X went wrong, they just have got a crappy job in a customer service department, I shouldn't be horrible to them'

It turns out, its actually just because I'm a massive pussy who doesn't like confrontation.

Today I had to call up Vodafone to get my PAC code as I got a new contract with orange (YAY! new phone!).

I'd checked online first about what upgrades vodafone would offer me and I checked in phones4u where I brought my original contract from and their upgrade offers where shit compared to the shiny new contract offer I had found online.

Anyway, when I called up Gemma, the customer service rep I got through to, asked all the usual security questions and then asked me why I was leaving Vodafone. I said I'd found a better deal else where.

I thought she would leave it at that, but instead she just got really shirty with me and the rest of the conversation went as follows

Gemma: Well you didn't check with us first!!
Me: Uh... sorry, well I checked online, and I went into phones4u where I got my phone from...
Gemma: You are aware phones4u are not vodafone?
Me: Oh, uh, yeah... I checked on your website as well, sorry.
Gemma: Well we reward our loyal customers so you will miss out on that loyalty bonus by leaving vodafone.
Me: Oh, um, uh, I'm sorry

What the fuck is wrong with me that I turn into a quivering wreck on the phone?

I should have pointed out that if they valued me that much then they would offer me their best upgrade deal online, instead of making me ring up and haggle with them. I got my new contract online without having to speak to some pushy salesman (which if you haven't guess I'm also not very good at) and it was a lot cheaper than what vodafone were offering online (£28s for an 18 month contract compare to £30 for a 24 month contract and loads more "free" minutes & texts).

Also I'm really not sure what Gemma was trying to achieve by being such a bitch, like I'd suddenly go 'Oh you made a good point by being aggressive and insinuating I'm a moron, I'll cancel my new contract and stay with you!

Of course if I wasn't such a blubbering wimp, I've have said all of this at the time, but instead I just stammered a load of apologies and hung up feeling like a failure.

A quick Google search for a visual aid for this post has lead me to the perfect product for me:

Shame I didn't get an iphone.

Old Sofa

A while ago I posted a list of horrible things I do to my boyfriend. Since I posted it, I've added a few more things to the list including buying a lighter that gives you an electric shock and leaving it out for him to use and trying to trap him (unsuccessfully) in the bathroom.

Tonight in a stunning display of my creativity and opportunism I successfully managed to annoy him again and as a result amuse myself greatly.

Our sofa is pretty old and beat up now. Its actually a sofa bed, but the metal supports in the bed snapped in half and now every time have guests to stay (and force them to sleep on our broken sofa bed) the sharp pointy edges of the bed tear the sofa open and its ended up looking like a pack of rabid dogs with knives have gone to town on it.

Thanks to one of these massive rips (and my destructive nature) I’ve been absentmindedly tearing out chunks of the foam stuffing and shredding it up.

Until last week I needed the sofa, as despite having its insides hanging out, I didn’t have any other alternative. My apparent disregard of my own property deterred me from forking out for a new one, so I’ve been stuffing the shredded stuffing back into the hole I made like nothing had ever happened.

Fortunately, my mum just brought a new sofa in the January sales (£500 for two leather sofas, she is really pleased with herself), so I get her old one! Since I’ll be getting the new sofa this weekend I decided to put the shredded foam to good use.

So when matt came and put his slippered feet up on my lap, there was only one logical course of action. And that was to secretly fill up his slippers with as much foam as possible before he noticed.

I began stuffing tiny bits in and first as I was worried he would notice that his slippers were swelling up, but he didn’t seem to notice so I started shoving larger and larger chunks in.

I was sure he had noticed because every time I caught his eye he would give me a knowing smile. But when you are trying to annoy someone a smile isn’t the reaction you are going for so I kept stuffing until he said something, or as it turns out until I ran out of foam. Eventually he just got up off the sofa. I still thought he knew but was trying to be a ‘bigger person’ and just ignoring my slipper stuffing antics.

But he carried on walking around all evening with half the seat cushion on his feet, so long in fact that I forgot what I had done and completely missed the big pay off when he actually took the slippers off.

All I heard was a stern ‘BECKY’ shouted from the bedroom before he marched through and threw the foam pieces in my face.

It turns out that he hadn’t noticed at all, he thought I was just rubbing his feet like a nice normal girlfriend. And when I confronted him about the smiling, he said I had been smiling at him in what he thought was a kind and loving way but was actually a mischievous, evil way.

Although I missed the visual glory of the conclusion of my trick, I’m going to grant myself a few bonus points for causing my boyfriend some emotional pain of the realisation that he cannot tell the difference between my look of love and my look of mischief. Not to mention my cunning use of resources available and my quick thinking. It may have not been the most elegant in design but it will certainly bring a smile to my face for the next couple of month.

I mark myself B-. 

Why I could never move back home (Part 1)

Over the festive season I spent four whole days at my parent’s house which is the longest I’ve spent there since I moved out five years ago. I always go and stay at their house on Christmas Eve and spend Christmas day with them but I usually only make it till Boxing day before I have to escape back home to the land of peace and sanity.

However this year I knew that my fridge was empty and since I’d turned the heating off before I left it would be sub zero in the flat when I got back so I decided to stick it out until the Christmas leftovers had run out. And if that meant enjoying their toasty warm house for a few more days then so be it.

It was nice to be back home but it did remind me of why I could never live with my parents again. As much as I love my family they have a few habits that I will never miss:

Dad: the Food Critic.

Dad is an adequate cook. And by that I mean he is better at cooking than mum. He will use oils and other tasty goodness whilst cooking that mum won’t touch. Thanks to a lifetime of dieting mum will sacrifice taste and flavour in order to save any calories she possibly can. Also where mums philosophy is to cook things till they are done, and then cook it again for good measure, dad sees the importance of timings and understands that food doesn’t have to be a dry lump of charcoal before it is edible (dad puts it down to her being worried about food hygiene, I suspect its more to do with the fact mum just wanders off to watch telly whilst she is cooking and forgets about it). He is no Gordon Ramsey though, except for the swearing maybe.  

Unfortunately for us all, mum tends to do most of the cooking. If it was just a case of having to eat mum’s food it wouldn’t be that bad, even if her food is a bit dry and tasteless it’s still a hot meal that I haven’t had to cook.

What spoils mums meal is the fact that dad can’t just graciously chow down on what he has been given and thank mum for cooking the meal like the rest of us.

Instead dad has to go through the whole charade of picking at his food for a bit like a teenage girl on a date, then chewing with a pained expression on his face like he is eating broken glass.

Once he starts going through his little performance, mum always asks him ‘Is it OK? Do you like it?’ After 26 years of marriage I can only assume she has figured out what is coming next, but still every time she looks a little bit hurt and disappointed when he complains it’s too dry, or too cold, or too spicy, or too bland, or too tough (you get the idea). Dad then spends the rest of the meal telling us how he would have cooked it or how he had it in a restaurant once and it was really nice. Of course this rarely prompts him to start cooking meals (although to be fair to him he does on occasion).

As a result of dads armchair cooking I hate cooking for him. Cooking is one of the few things in life that I consider myself to be reasonably good at. I could never work as chef, but I can usually produce something quite tasty for tea and I like to experiment with different flavours and recipes. Just the though of making something for my dad to eat fills me with dread, which has a detrimental effect on my cooking ability, which then means he has something to pick at, which makes me more nervous about cooking for him again and so on so I’m locked in a big cycle of culinary terror.

Despite this however I still have a glimmer of hope that I can cook something for him that he will enjoy and I can achieve some hard earned words of praise. This is probably how I ended up volunteering to cook him a roast duck for Christmas dinner in spite of never having cooked it before. Under dads instruction I followed a simple recipe, to the fucking letter, and while the rest of the family were playing with their presents in the other room, I was waiting patiently next to the oven for an hour and a half, lovingly basting ever 20 minutes, checking the temperature of the oven and generally trying to avoid any major kitchen disasters.

When it finally came down to eating, I was feeling pretty proud. The duck had turned out good! It looked all golden brown and delicious, it was nice and succulent, not dry. It was fatty- but its duck so that’s how it’s supposed to be. I sat there eagerly waiting for him to eat it and tell me how awesome it was and what a good daughter I am. But then it started. I could tell from the first bite that something wasn’t right, he started doing his glass chewing face, and then came the prodding and poking, then another tentative bite, then more face pulling.

I couldn’t help it. I’d heard my mother ask the same question hundreds of times before. Before I knew it the words where slipping out of my mouth.

‘Is it OK? Do you like it?’

As soon as I’d said it I regretted it. I knew what was coming next; he didn’t even have to answer before the familiar feeling of failure and shame washed over me.

‘I don’t think I like duck after all, it tastes gamey and plain. Maybe it would have been nicer with some more seasoning’ etc, etc.

I was too crushed to even try and defend my cooking, or even point out that I had followed the recipe that he had approved. He didn’t think to thank me for the effort I had put into making it. He didn’t even attempt to finish the duck he had on his plate already. Merry Christmas to me.

For all my dads lovely qualities (he is a pretty awesome guy in most other ways) I don’t think I could suffer the humiliation that is cooking for him on a regular basis, nor would I want to give up cooking.  

This is the first reason I could never move back home.

I was going to cover all the reasons in one post, but once I started writing this post I found out I clearly have more issues with my dad than I thought and it’s got a bit long already so I’m going to break it up. Look out for the next installment, Mum: the nudist.