Shorthand! Nine in the morning! Everyday!

Sorry, what?

And for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of Steven Seagal's up and coming music career...

Oh god help us all.

Lots of free gigs coming up which is ace - after seeing the delectable Paddingtons last week I get to cover the Eastern Lane gig they're supporting at. I believe the word in cases such as this is huzzah!

Autumn has the potential to be sunny and joyful but more often than not ends up covered in gloom which is pretty much how it's been this week making us tired and mildly wishing to return to the warm embrace of the Known. Still, Zane Lowe and Annie Mac djed at the Union last night which was brilliant and we have actually met real, honest to god people and the course is going to be excellent so I'm sure we'll get into it soon.

I hate gloom.

_____GEEK ALARM GEEK ALARM____

My quest to read every single graphic novel in Cardiff central library continues apace - rather faster than my efforts to drag myself through Essential Law for Journalists alas - and continued last night with my first dabbling of Hellblazer. Met Mr Constantine before in Books of Magic but bloody hell, I wasn't quite prepared for how disturbing it was - child abuse, rape, homelessness, all dealt with in a fair, unflinching way that was excellently written but delivered a bloody great punch to the stomach. Phew. Not entirely sure that Kenau Reeves (slow, dark, american) is quite the right choice for Constantine in the film (british, blond, chain smoker, haunted) but it'll be bloody hilarious if it goes wrong.

(once again - joss whedon for X4! Rumours MUST come true. Dammit. Astonishing X-Men is fabulous)

....GEEK END....

Wow. I knew you could sell anything on ebay but the fact my *ahem* pop accident cd will eventually go for pretty much exactly what I paid for it is remarkable. TWELVE people want this cd! Or bid for it anyway. The internet is a truly marvellous thing. Shorthand on the other hand is worse than crosswords.

Devestation ran rife yesterday as new heights of geekery were reached - I maxed out my library card. R chastened me hugely and general loserness prevailed. We checked out Ifor Bach (or as it's much more pronounceably known, the Welsh Club) yesterday, taking full advantage of beats, funk, rock and all-out wonderful music, gallons of sweat and our new pretty skirts to dance around like fiends and generally have lots of fun. My brother and his housemates etc rocked up and we whiled away the last hour dancing shamefully/enjoyably to misplaced cheesy disco and pop klassix (TM). It's really good to have found somewhere like that to go and dance in though, lots of variety and some rather sexy gigs coming up. I get to go see The Zutons and Futureheads for the grand sum of free in a few weeks - yay for Wild! Yay for me! Yay for libraries and shorthand avoidance through books!

I'm still here, only with loads more graphic novels.

I won a competition yesterday - I got onto the radio and everything. The tragedy is of course that I have the backbone of a jellyfish and so ended up speaking to darling lovely Liz Kersahw in the most spasmodic accent imaginable. Hideous. Still, I get exciting goodies so not all bad at all. Cheers Mr Brian Molko!

Cardiff gets curiouser and curiouser as anything would be wont to do if you hadn't spoken to anyone you knew for three days straight. PLeasant amblings and readings and musings and then starting to go a little crazy. C rescued me though which was brilliant and took me on an incredibly surreal 'date' to Ikea which was unfeasibly large and really rather terrifying. We feasted on 65p hotdogs and admired shelving before toddling off through an extremely fast approaching mist to have tea at the flat. C taught me bits about the docklands area and corrected my Welsh pronunciation which is, unsurprisingly, shit. It's very odd not being able to speak a foreign language at all - even with spanish I can have a 70% chance of getting the sound vaguely in the right area. Welsh - no. dd, d, f, ff, they're all different, mad and beautiful.

Apparently Cardiff consumes more alcohol at the weekend than London. I am unsure about this but my brother promises it to be true. I may have to stop believing what he says...

A lovely fairytale courtesy of Anna...ace.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess
happened upon a frog as she sat, contemplating ecological issues on the shores of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle. The frog hopped into the princess' lap and said: "Elegant Lady, I was once a handsome prince, until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you, however, and I will turn back into the dapper, young prince that I am and then, my sweet, we can marry and setup housekeeping in your castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children, and forever feel grateful and happy doing so."

That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on a repast of lightly sautied frog legs seasoned in a white wine and onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself: "I don't f***ing think so."

My brother and I went to the world's saddest acoustic night on Tuesday - one man and his guitar, playing Lord of the Dance and Ocean Drive. Oh well. My brother nipped off and I went and chatted to this one-man-jukebox and ended up drinking cider and singing along to Sam Cooke and getting to play on a Fender Stratocaster electro-acoustic so not a bad evening at all! Even better - he turned out to be a journalist so another random crazy link for R and I on our career schmoozing.

So much for keeping up the social pace - instead of going to Ifwr Bach to meet a Wild contact I fell asleep and stayed in. Two days of excitement is clearly more than enough - boo.

Wow! And to think I'd had my last school lunch years ago. I'm temping as a dinner lady, yep, a dinner lady, a profession that requires me to wear yet another utterly ridiculous hat/ apron combination in the name of hygiene. The agency actually drives me there which is a godsend as a) Cardiff is a LOT bigger than I had previously thought and b) I'm lazy. Lovely little primary school so got to go "aaah" over the tiny infants getting fractious over their lunches and also hand out pudding. And everyone likes the pudding lady best. I got a terrible reminder of how awful primary school kids are when doling out lunch to the older ones as a blonde girl ran up to the counter and with a smile Beelzebub would be proud off uttered the dreadful words "he really fancies you" whilst pointing at some poor cringing boy looking as though he'd rather die. "Aha!" I thought, "revenge shall be had" so picked on his hyena-esque mate instead by saying he fancied the girl. I'm so eight years old it's pathetic. Hahahahah!

Went to Café Jazz last night in search of relaxation and jamming at the Jazz Attic (somewhat confusingly on the ground floor) and ended up singing with a really good pianist which was lots of fun. A Jazz society's being set up soon which sounds like it could be really good so not a bad couple of days considering I've only just moved in.

Still no hot water, I'm showering at the brother's tonight as I think I'm starting to ripen.

Truly the streets of Cardiff are paved with gold! Or at least they were this morning when I acquired a job, gave blood and sang in the sunshine doing a little surreptitious dancing as I went. The flat is broken in places - no bloody hot water for starters, cold hairwashing, mmmm! - so marched off to CPS to get things fixed (won't put up shelves the book hugging bastards) and promptly forgot about the mysterious key which will happily open locks from one side but not the other. The temptation to call it Jekeyll is just too...strong.

I'm sorry.

Continuing the "lalalala!" aspect of settling into Wales, I was made thoroughly at home by bumping into Beanie Hatted Rock Matt who I bump into every in Durham and seems perfectly natural to do so here as well. I terrified the bejesus out of the poor guy by pointing wildly, shrieking "a-HA!" and generally flailing a lot. Sorry ducks. Went off to give blood as true Cardiff initiation ritual and proceeded to have the most painful blood letting ever followed by a bit of staggering and the utterly devestating sight of assorted nurses padding damp cloths on the back of my neck, putting me on my side and fanning me furiously with large pieces of card. I kid you not. It was shaming. Got a nice keyring though and a patch on my arm to make a hypochondriac weep.

Flat is inexplicably "un" for a furnished flat so dear parents bought saucepans and cutlery yesterday and I went out to seek out poundshops and places called Hyper Market to buy household crap for cheap. Um, yay. Got an amazing and entirely unnecessary selection of Hoegaarden prayer candles and a Virgin Mary to watch over us though so cheered up a bit. Raining like buggery now though.

Brilliant! Photos! God I love wasting time on computers. Apart from virus fighting. That's just tedious. Seeing as I have a good five to ten years before I can legitimately start boring people to tears with sodding baby pictures, this is my dog. She got a rather unfortunate addiction to the red thing and is now going cold turkey, which seems to involve sitting and staring at the door behind which the toy's hiding. She's now addicted to a grey rug instead.

Posted by Hello

Yet another reason why my mother is cleverer than me: Minstrels in the fridge. So cold! So yum! So handy to dip your hand into when going outside! Mmmm...

Cleverer. More clever. Hum.

Finally. After three days of wrestling with incompetent computers, that ntsearch bugger (download spybot, it's amazing, highly recommended and cleans up anything) I've manage to put something for sale on Ebay! This is a glorious moment in the history of computing and myself, although to be fair if I wasn't dogsitting then I'd most likely being doing something that didn't involve sitting for hours at a time fiddling with software. Ace.

I just had a look at some other people that blog and got thoroughly confused. It's like a dating service, or worse, these are just people who want to make themselves look thoroughly interesting. Listing what they like: "fashion, anime, golden retrievers, email, vintage". Vintage? Fashion? See, these are things that would look patently obvious if you met them in real life (hum) but cos this isn't real they go to enormous pains to make themselves appear "cool" and interesting. That mystifies me. It ain't real folks! I think the sun's gone to my head; maybe I'll just go back inside now.

Saw Shaun of the Dead last night - brilliant. S won at the "spot the comedy cameo" game; contact lenses or not I am still incredibly blind. Best sort of film watching, making yourself feel mildly sick on Butterkist and Haribo, then getting disgruntled by the fact that inevitably all that remains are those shitty little fried eggs and hearts. Who likes those fluffy things anyway? More rings! More mini bears! more cola bottles! Yeah!

If you think hell is other people then I recommend calling Transco the Gas Overlords and spending some quality time with their painfully inept voice recognition software. (Cue flat, unutterably dull voice) "If there is a smell of gas or gas emergency, please say 'gas emergency'. If you need help, please say 'help.' I'm sorry, could you say that again? Your address is not recognised." For fuck's sake. Why must it take so much effort to hook up gas and electricity? Why is the agency so incompetent? Why have I not got a monkey specifically trained to deal with tasks such as these?

Transco can be reached on 08706081524, although if you get cross for long enough a real live human will come on the other end.

Back home. Or rather at parents' home. I'm not a big fan of this nomading around, much better to have a hobbit hole of your own to dive in. A friend of the parents has got a mountain of rugs she needs to get rid of though so I now have five beautifully patterned floor-huggers to cheer up the 70's carpeting disaster that masquerades as the Cardiff Flat.

I'd forgotten how odd it is down here - I live in one of the most gorgeous areas of England but as soon as I land I get claustrophobic and don't leave the house except to drive five miles to meet someone. You'd think that after so many years of being driven around I'd relish the chance to escape but I appear to have become conditioned to balefully glare at the world from the safety of a socking great sheet of a glass. Oh goody.

I was lucky enough to get a lift home with K, the guy whose house I was crashing in in Durham. A great drive - sunny, lots of drinks, silly conversation and slightly crazed chanting of the phrase "lemony-limey". Don't ask. We hadn't even got out of Durham however when I saw a small dog, can't have been bigger than a Jack Russell, writhing around on its back with a car pulled in front of it. I managed to convince myself that running would be the quickest way to get back to the dog, not staying in the car and preserving my maltreated lungs and lack of stamina, but either way when we separately reached the place the dog had run off. It had blood running from its mouth, so K reckoned its ribs had been forced into its lungs. I rang a very indifferent sounding vet who said he'd come and look for it. That dog is probably dead now.

New best fun ever: or rather, ongoing best fun, throughly addictive is rating films on empire's website. DIE EXISTENZ! DIE!!! (And don't think I haven't seen YOU Unbreakable.)

Jesus and Satan were having an ongoing argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and God was tired of hearing all the bickering. Finally, God said, "Cool it. I am going to set up a test which will take two hours and I will judge who does the better job".

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away. They moused. They did spreadsheets. They wrote reports. They sent faxes. They sent e-mail. They sent out e-mail with attachments. They downloaded. They did some genealogy reports. They made cards. They did every known job. But, ten minutes before the time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, the rain poured, and of course the electricity went off. Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed in every curse word known in the underworld. Jesus just sighed. The electricity finally flickered back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically screaming, "It's gone! It's all gone! I lost everything when the power went out!"

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all his files from the past two hours. Satan observed this and became even more irate. "Wait! He cheated! How did he do it??!!" Satan screamed.

God shrugged and said, "Jesus Saves"

Bored? PLay Crackman with Mary Kate and Ashley! It would be mean if it didn't make me laugh so much. Hehehehe!

I'm a bad person.