Funnylingus

My regular readers will know that I like to indulge in a a little wordplay now and then, the saucier the better - observe the gratuitous use of the word "pussy" in my post titles.

Anyhoo, a source of amusement for me was delivered this morning, quite literally, to my doorstep. It's the bill from my milkman and yes I do know it's cheaper to buy from a huge multi-national conglomerate like Tesco who are only a few hundred yards down the street but I haven't the heart to kill off yet another of our traditional trades.



Take note if you will of the circled portion. It's supposed to be detailing a charge for a small box of organic vegetables, yet it says to me and my dirty mind "Orgasmal Box".

Ooooooooh Matron! I can't wait for that delivery!

Support your local milkman!!

A pink kink in her think

As I’m sitting here writing at the kitchen table, my progress is being monitored by one of my cats. She’s sitting purring loudly and staring at me over the laptop screen. She’s on Prawn Patrol. Her hunted eyes follow my fingers’ every move just in case they should produce from behind my ears, Paul Daniels-stylee, a pink morsel.

Prawns are, you see, kitty crack and Cami’s a prawn whore who’s going cold turkey.

When Cami first came to live with us almost 5 years ago she was the smallest cutest bundle of fluff you have ever seen. She had peculiar tastes though having apparently been weaned onto Weetabix and milk rather than catfood. Her first night home she didn’t show any interest in the food we put down, she preferred to nibble on cat litter instead. She did develop more conventional tastes and now when she gets the crunchy munchies she eats ordinary cat food. And prawns.

Things have got out of hand just lately and she’s got a little too used to having them often so she’s been cut down to a few every weekend. This makes her alternately very sulky and very adorably affectionate. I like the affectionate bit and it’s hard not to reward nice behaviour with a little treat, trouble is once she gets what she wants she wants more, more, MORE!!

With hindsight I think Cami and her brother Dougal were too young to leave their mother but I also think we saved their lives by bringing them home when we did - they were infested with fleas and I believe that if they’d been left any longer without intervention that they probably would have died from anaemia. Their third litter mate had died already so I think we got them just in time.

The couple we got them from said to me as we were leaving on that fateful Saturday, “they might have one or two fleas”. One or two? Bloody hell the poor little buggers were absolutely heaving with fleas and would have to pause every couple of seconds mid-playfight to stop and have a good scratch. They were being eaten alive and I couldn’t get them into the vets until Monday.

So I sat with them on my lap and a mug of hot water beside me and combed them with a flea comb. And combed them and combed them. The fleas came off on that flea comb clustered like tiny bunches of grapes and I swiftly plunged the comb into the glass of hot water to kill them. I sat and did that for over an hour changing the water every ten minutes to ensure that it stayed hot enough to kill the fleas. When I got to the vet on the Monday night he could only find a couple of fleas on them.

I wish I’d carried on with the regular combing, they have very dense, long fur (I think they have some Maine Coon or Siberian in their genes, definitely some Husky somewhere in there) and they hate being combed now. They love being outdoors and getting muddy and matted from creeping through the undergrowth. I frequently have to extract twigs from their fur and they usually leave me something prickly after they’ve been snoozing on the bed.

kasjrdobcljasroiacjamslkdljLDLKLDJqowueojvlzn,\ c x,cxnlkgjpaswlhjegjasgdd I have to go now, she thinks I have some prawns stashed in the keyboard.

Dancing in stilettos in the snow

Saturday night was spent at our annual Dialysis Unit Christmas Party. This year’s was actually a ceilidh - we had a live 7 piece band playing Irish folk music with dancing plus of course great food and company.

Cap’n Marvel is fairly musical and was fascinated by some of the instruments used on stage. The one that most took his interest was a strange looking contraption that from where I was sitting looked like a small fat viola with a keyboard and a wind up handle. It turned out to be a hurdy gurdy and it would seem that the player was used to being asked about the instrument because when the Cap’n went up to ask questions the guy said “Here, I’ll give you a leaflet.”

A warm mince pie and a dollop of clotted cream to anyone who makes the connection between the post title and the subject.

Cold War

It's funny that Shaz should mention her microwave/convection oven in the previous post's comments because one is going to feature in today's story. It goes thusly:

The building I work in is a former aircraft hangar dating from WWII and was converted into offices just after the war. It gets pretty draughty at times due to having a huge uninsulated roof space and suspended ceilings. Heating is in the form of ancient cast iron radiators that resemble dinosaur ribcages. Unfortunately the valve that controls the one in my office wrung off many moons ago and now I have to turn it on and off with the aid of an adjustable spanner - there is no middle ground, it's either on or off. It's such a palaver that usually I don't turn it on until it gets really cold and I make do with a little fan heater to take the chill off until I can stand the cold no more.

It's the same story for my Lt's office which is a windowless, airless room just off mine and the previous occupants have never actually felt the need to have their radiator on at all. However, my new Lt was stationed in Arizona previously where it gets pretty warm most of the time and she's been feeling the cold since moving over here so when she moved in she wanted her radiator on. And mine too!

Every morning I walk into my office and exclaim "bloody 'ell it's hot in here!" and proceed to turn on my fans while the Lt proceeds to combat the draught by turning on her portable air conditioning unit that doubles as a heater. This morning was no different, I walked in, said my piece at which the Commander appeared at his door (my office is at the centre of a suite of offices for the Command Section ... it's a glorified reception area and I'm prone to a lot of through traffic and have no privacy) to see what was going on.

I explained the situation to him and he went over to my radiator to try and turn it off but for some reason turning the valve one way made the radiator so incredibly hot it was like the surface of the Sun and we could barely get close enough to it to turn the valve the other way. This didn't actually turn it off this time, merely turned the temperature down to blast furnace temperature.

Hurrumph.

Anyway, half an hour later this strange hot smell started to permeate the room and I began to worry that the heating was about to melt down like Chernobyl. The Commander came out of his office again and moaned at me for complaining about the heat and then putting on my fan heater. I told him that I hadn't at which point the Lt piped up and said that she was bakng cookies for everyone in her new microwave/convection oven. The Boss and I just looked at each other for a moment and then he went off for a meeting.

A few minutes later she emerged with a pile of cookies and said to me "Gosh I feel so bad, making you smell these baking when you aren't allowed to eat them". She swiftly flounced off to deliver said cookies to the rest of the staff.

My gast has rarely been so flabbered, how insensitive can you get? Shaz if you can tell me what you did to your oven I shall endeavour to do the same to the Lt's.

The Contaminatrix

The results of the latest swab from the line in my chest came in today. I apparently have a coliform bacterial infection. Go on and follow the link, have a good shocked gasp and get it out of your system and then come back and read the rest.

I'm devastated and at a loss for how I managed to acquire this little lurgy. Let me just state for the record that I am very careful about changing my dressings. Everyday after showering and before changing the dressing I wash my hands with hot water and antibacterial handwash, apply an alcohol hand rub, use only sterile swabs soaked in Betadine solution which is supposed to kill all pathogens.

Might as well use Domestos. Kills all germs. Dead.

So the solution is to have intravenous Gentamycin, a particularly noxious antibiotic. When the nurse looking after me asked her colleague to fetch the Gentamycin, she added "Oh and remember to bring the anaphylaxis stuff too".

Gulp.

Bloggus Interruptus

To my trio of faithful readers, yes I am still around, sorry I haven't written much lately but it's all been so blah that I haven't really wanted to share all the shitty nitty gritty itty bitty details.

Suffice it to say that I've been ill with a cold/sinus infection, I've covered about 400 miles in the last 2 weeks for numerous hospital visits for scans in preparation for my next surgery (which should be after Christmas) and my Mum ... oh my Mum is going downhill fast.

And I'm completely knackered.

Only a week and a half to go and then I have the week off before Christmas, I'll be on my own during the day so I will have some precious me (and maybe you) time.

Per ardua ad astra

I was lucky enough today to arrive back from lunch just as a couple of incentive rides were taking off. An incentive ride is essentially a prize for doing something really special like winning the Wing Airman of the Quarter Award and it involves a flight in a fighter jet - Boeing F-15Es in this case.

It's quite something to watch and hear as they're taking off but it must be something else to actually be inside the jet because once the jet has lifted off the runway the pilot throttles forward the engines to full afterburner and climbs vertically about 60,000 feet into the sky. I've been told it's virtually impossible for the passenger to breathe even with a g-suit.

From the ground it's amazing, a friend of mine got a ride a few years ago and I was allowed to watch him take off right from the end of the runway. Even with double hearing protection the sound was deafening and with those twin Pratt & Whitney F100-229 engines at full throttle you can feel each one of your internal organs vibrating.

On a clear day you can watch the jets until they're just a tiny speck way up above you. Today was cloudy so the cloud ceiling was low and they disappeared pretty quickly but this was offset by being able to see the stripey twin cones of the afterburner flame against the dark grey of the clouds, you just can't see them on a bright day.

As you can probably tell I'm a bit of an anorak when it comes to planes.

I almost got to have an ride myself once, not in an F-15 but in a KC-135 refueling tanker belonging to the Alabama Air National Guard. Unfortunately some bureaucrat decided that they didn't want to take a "foreign national" ie me so my friend Dave got to take the flight instead. He smuggled on board a Union Flag as a protest against the decision which was later presented to me with a lot of ridiculous pomp and ceremony by my squadron commander!

Here's a picture of the flag and a certificate, you might be able to make out the text, maybe not, but trust me every time I read it I have to giggle as it's all so ahem, serious

Pussy Galore

According to Scary Duck (not scary and not a duck but pretty freakin' funny) and someone he can't remember the name of, starting a new blog is "like getting a kitten. You either lavish your undying love on it for the rest of its natural life; or you get bored of it after a fews days, brain it with a rock and leave it for carrion."

How true. If my blog were a kitten it would be stuffed full of tuna and tuckered out from chasing the feather-and-jingly-bell-on-a-fishing-rod toy one day and shut in the porch with nothing but the litter tray and a manky spider-plant for company the next.

Poor wee thing.

There's a rat in me kitchen

Well actually it's either a shrew or a vole, hard to tell which as its head has been gnawed off by one of my cats. Typical really they catch something and then bring it indoors and drop it in front of their food bowl while they have a nibble of Go-Cat. Still I should be grateful that they haven't brought in another bat and let it loose to fly around the house.

Little darlings.

Count Fistula

Looks like I shall be having more surgery just before Christmas which will be difficult to say the least especially as I was supposed to be cooking the Christmas dinner this year. Cap'n Marvel (my pet name for my husband) may have to do the catering instead ... he can just about manage beans on toast or mashed potato.

The surgery will be to either fix my existing fistula or to create a new one in my other arm. The current one clotted and collapsed following a procedure I had yesterday to X-ray the blood vessel. I'm fairly depressed not only because of the surgery but also because it means that I have to have this blessed tube in my chest for at least another 3 months.

I've spent 18 months trying to get a functioning fistula in use, I've had 3 operations so far - first to create one in my left wrist (it never worked), the next in my left elbow (it developed a kink that narrowed the blood flow) and finally I had surgery to remove the kink.

But it's not all doom and gloom, I'm finally starting to lose some weight - 1.5 kgs in the last month! Only another 20 or so and I can finally get on the transplant list and then life will get really interesting!

Frozen Cherryrita

I like a little tipple, me, so when I discovered a new item in Tesco's alchie alley called Sourz Cherry and what with it being a. cherry flavour, b. sour and c. ahem alcoholic I just had to try it.

YUM!!!

Neat it's quite nice, a little syrupy, maybe a bit like cough medicine. I also mixed with some diet tonic and it made a lovely drink.

Considering it's only 15% alcohol I got tipsy quite quickly (it happens with kidney disease, I've always been a lightweight when it comes to how much I can take but it's worse since I started dialysis) and I couldn't finish the second (or maybe the third? hic) drink that I made up last night so I decided to freeze it.

Tonight I retrieved it from the freezer and found that it wasn't quite frozen solid and with a little help from a fork I managed to break it up in to fairly slushy crystals. Now that's good stuff - very refreshing and fun to eat/drink - a kind of cross between a granita and a frozen Margarita.

Apparently also available in Pineapple (can't wait to try that one) or Apple (meh).

Kaboom-cha

Over the last year or so I've become addicted to butternut squash, I absolutely love it - roasted, boiled, microwaved, mashed, souped - it's all good.

Jamie Oliver seems to have caught on to it too but I feel rather smug knowing that I started eating it before it became trendy. Ol' wubber lipsth wrote a recipe for it recently in our Sunday magazine, it was a variation on Pumpkin Pie and he used the seeds as a topping by roasting them off and sprinkling them over the top.

It got me thinking that I might try and do something with the seeds the next time I got a squash rather than just chucking them in the compost bin. It just so happened that instead of a butternut squash I bought a Kabocha which looks like a small green version of your standard Jack O' Lantern type pumpkin.

I scooped out said seeds and set about washing the pulp off them (which was revolting as it felt like dense, slimy, matted hair). I then dried them off, put them on a baking tray and drizzled over some oil, some salt and smoked paprika. Then I put then in the oven where I was roasting the flesh along with some other veggies and a turkey breast.

After they had been in the oven for about 15 minutes I tried a couple of them - and found them somewhat crunchy - the seeds were considerably thicker than in a butternut squash. Still I thought I would persevere with them, perhaps they would be better if cooked a little longer.

After the seeds had been back in the oven for a while I was busy washing up when I started to hear strange noises coming from the oven. Kerpow! Pop! Kerpow! Ping! I rushed over and looked through the glass door only to the seeds dancing in the oven and exploding. I got the tray out of the oven and almost lost an eye as the damn things were cracking open all over the place.

I could see inside the cracked shells that there was a brown kernel but it was impossible to get out whole so I gave up in the end. Sigh, another cooking calamity ... the salt and paprika was an inspired combination though, it smelled gorgeous while coooking so I shall give it one more try with butternut squash seeds before I write-off the experiment completely. Stay tuned.

My God, it's full of stars!

I took a week off last week and spent the time mostly on Christmas shopping. One of my favourite shops to visit is Lush. I don't in all honesty buy much there, I often tend to go in and drink in all the delicious scents and being unable to decide which lovely thing to buy I often just walk out again.

This time however I took the plunge and bought some black licorice soap which is supposed to be great for the complexion, an exfoliating bar for spotty botties (not mine I hasten to add) and a big bar of Angel's Delight soap which smells heavenly (boom boom).

I first used the Angel's Delight at the weekend and I was rather disconcerted to learn that it contains little gold foil stars like table confetti. I hadn't noticed them when I bought it and I was a little miffed to have to fish them out of my delicate bits as they were rather sharp!

Big Bang Theory

Hands up everyone who remembers Space Hoppers! My Space Hopper was my favourite toy when I was a kid. I spent many happy hours bouncing round the garden pretending that I was riding Black Beauty or Champion The Wonderhorse. I have a picture somewhere of me sitting on it in an extraordinarily short dress with my own coltish legs on display (God, how I wish I still had those legs).

I don't know what happened to the original but I am now, at the tender age of 39, the proud owner of another Space Hopper courtesy of Hawkin's Bazaar. It's not as big or as sturdy as I recall and I'm a little concerned that it might burst under my not inconsiderable weight, but all the same I spent the evening bouncing round my living room like a complete maniac. It was truly liberating and I can heartily recommend it as a supreme method of stress relief.

Oh yeah it's best to wear a pair of Tigger ears for full effect. Bounce, bounce, bounce!

Moonstruck

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the Moon. If I ever get my finger out and write this novel that I've been mooning over for years, it will probably be set on the Moon.

At the top of my Christmas list every year for the last umpteen years has been "Moon Globe". So far I have received an array of Earth globes in styles ranging from antique schoolroom (which is intriguing to pore over and look at how the country names and boundaries have changed) to inlaid with semi-precious stones. I even have a globe with the constellations on it. But alas, no Moon Globe. I know they exist, people just aren't looking hard enough.

For instance, last night as we were driving home from a day out at about 5pm, the sky over my home was a beautiful dusky lavender and set into this sky was one of the largest full moons I have ever seen. It was stunning, golden yellow and looked as though it was illuminated from within. The man in the Moon was perfectly visible too. It wasn't just a disc in the sky, it was 3 dimensional, you could tell it was a globe.

That's not too much to ask for is it?

Rubber Bullets

I recently took the probably unprecedented step of actually forwarding the link for my blog to my boss. I needed him to know what caused my near-breakdown last week especially as the Shirt had wrongly indicated that it might have been the new Lieutenant who had stirred up the trouble; I couldn't adequately express what the problem was in person so I wanted him to read it instead.

He's a good egg and we had a heart to heart the next day and everything is fine now. He also seems to have taken on board the fact that I'm neither happy nor challenged in my present job and asked me was there anything else that I could take on. I told him that I fancied having a go at maintaining the squadron website to which he agreed and said that any training the squadron could fund I could go for.

I am now thinking that I might have bitten off more than I can chew after my first HTML lesson with the squadron's resident pointy headed computer whizkid, Codename: Tigger. A week ago I couldn't even spell HTML never mind would have considered writing my own code.

Now I know a little about code, and you know what they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well I'm armed and dangerous, luckily I'm armed with blanks but I have to tell you when you shoot yourself in the foot with a blank it still frickin' hurts!

Fortunately the only casualty so far has been my own blog. I had recently attempted to post images by clicking on the image button in the Blogger editor but each time my pictures have disappeared into the ether. I've tried troubleshooting with the Blogger Help files but have actually found them spectacularly unhelpful.

Today I decided to try writing an HTML tag (giggle, check out the techno speak) and after writing several broken tags I finally managed to get a picture of my husband uploaded (yes he's sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 simulator, but that's another post). However, the picture takes up most of the screen and as much as I love the guy I figured my profile and all the links to archives, hit counter, etc, probably would be useful to have on display - he was obscuring the lot. So I moved him to the bottom of the page instead but my stuff is still missing in action.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!

Oh well back to the drawing board. Now where did I put that 'HTML For Dummies'?

Mission Improbable

Today is my 17th wedding anniversary. We lived together for 5 years before we eventually made it legal, aside from my few spells in hospital over the years we have never spent more than 2 nights apart. I've known my lovely husband for more than half my life and I cannot happily visualise life without him.

We met a month before my 17th birthday in a pub called The Forest which sadly is no longer a pub but a large private house. On that fateful day we had both been dragged up there by our respective best friends against our wills. His best mate had wanted to introduce him to my best mate but fate intervened.

He was (and still is) a biker, not the grubby grebo kind of biker, instead he was a cleancut lad who happened to only have one mode of transport - a Honda 250 Superdream. I loved his cheeky grin and twinkly blue eyes framed by gorgeous long eyelashes. He still has the blue eyes of course but the cheeky grin with its slightly crooked teeth has been replaced by some dodgy crowns of which he is very self-conscious and now he rarely smiles.

I don't know what he liked about me. I was wearing some white trousers which used to be my karate trousers but I managed to convert them into day wear. As it was the mid 80s I was also wearing my New Romantic navy blue boots that had zips that curved from the front of the foot round to the outside of the calf - I had used some pink ribbon to make little bows and tied them to the zip-pull. I thought it looked cool but probably I looked like a dork. On top I was wearing an almost backless teal sweater. Like I said, it was the 80s - no-one ever made fashion sense in the 80's.

My 'friend' did her best to distract his attention and wore his leather jacket and basically draped herself over him as often as she could while I contented myself with squirting a soda siphon into a little gremlin charity money box, convinced that I was going to be left on the shelf again. But apparently he only had eyes for me.

When it was time to go home we didn't exchange phone numbers or make plans to see each other again and I thought that was that. However, the next night I was on my way up to my friend's house when I heard a bike pull up next to me and it was him!! We stood and chatted for over an hour in the pouring rain - all the time he kept his helmet on because he'd been down at the burger van eating burgers with raw onion and he didn't want me to smell his breath. He told me he was on his way home to watch, wait for it, Dynasty! Once again we parted company without making any plans.

The next day I decided to look up his phone number and give him a call but he wasn't in when I called. I went out for a jog in the woods feeling like an idiot for calling and when I was on my way back I saw in the distance someone walking up the road with a Golden Labrador. Thinking it was my unpleasant next door neighbour I started walking away as fast as I could but fortunately not fast enough because it turned out to be my future soulmate walking his boss' dog, Solomon, trying to find my house. He came home with me so I could wash and change and then we went out for a walk together. The rest as they say is history.

I cannot fathom how we have managed to stay together so long because we are so different. He's a leg man, I have limbs that can only loosely be described as legs. I like tall men, he's the same height as me. I like kissing, he likes to get right on down to business. He's a clean & tidy freak, I'm the world's worst housekeeper. I like to cook hearty meals from scratch, he likes something frozen and out of a packet. He is Yin to my Yang, Crockett to my Columbo, Beano to my Beckett, Captain Birdseye to my Nigella Lawson, Jimmy Osmond to my Jimi Hendrix.

Somehow by a miracle we have stayed together through more differences than sames, through happiness and tragedy and my love for him grows stronger every day.

Halloween

All Hallows Eve in Twisted Pines
A night to stay inside
A gibbous moon ‘neath hazy cloud
Casts feeble light but wide
Goblins, ghouls and skeletons
Are creeping round outside
I sit by the fire and wonder
What’s going on out there?
A ghostly force quite playfully
Starts lifting up my hair
I hear cackling and rattling
Strange shadows pass close by
My hands are weak and trembling
I let out a quiet sigh
The doorbell rings, I start to shake
Perhaps it’s Frankensnail?
I creep to the door my knees a-quake
I fear my legs will fail
I open up that dread portal
My heart skips half a beat
It’s far, far worse than I imagined
Surprise! It’s Trick or Treat!

<©> Calamity Jane

I See Dread People

OK this will be my last rant for a while, just need to get this out of my system.

Just lately I've developed an enormous core of bubbling contempt and resentment that I fear I'm about to go off like Krakatoa. My boss had the misfortune of walking in yesterday just when the pyroclastic flow was about the reach the surface. Just as well that it was him really, if it had some dumb little Airman he'd be forming some rare exotic igneous rock called Ignoranticite by now.

As is usual with us gals it's the stupid things that set us off, we're dealing with the heavy stuff just fine but someone comes along and utters some banality and suddenly the end of the world is nigh.

Episode the First: Last week I was talking to the Shirt outside. A Tech Sergeant comes along and asks the Shirt how he likes his Volvo. Shirt says he likes it just fine. The TSgt say he's unhappy with his brand new Volvo, just had to have the fuel tank stripped out because of some fault with a sensor. Shirt says oh did you have that fixed by the dealer in Bury? TSgt says no, he's ha ha, been, ha ha, barred from that one ha ha, he takes his to ha ha, Downham Market.

Mental screech of brakes - barred from a Volvo dealership? WTF? What the fudge did he do? The Shirt asks the same question.

Apparently the TSgt went in one day to see if they could take a look at the problem, they tell him that he really needs to make an appointment as they are rather busy. TSgt says what do you mean I need to make an appointment, I want my car fixed! So it turns out that to appease him they take a look under the bonnet and there appears to be a faulty sensor which they fix and he goes away.

2 months later the same fault happens again. TSgt screeches to a halt outside the showroom storms in and throws his car keys at the service manager and yells at him something to the effect of you said you fixed it, I want it fixed properly NOW! The service manager of course doesn't take too kindly to this attitude and he throws the car keys back at TSgt. TSgt loses his rag and in the ensuing slanging match makes a mess of the service manager's desk and the receptionist's desk. TSgt gets ejected and is barred.

Now I know the service manager, the sales manager and several of the staff at this dealership - my husband has bought 2 new Volvos from them in the last 3 years. They are extremely nice people. I am ashamed that someone from my squadron could be such an arsehole to them and relate the story in such a braggardly and unashamed fashion with a British national standing by. I am even more ashamed that I didn't have the nerve to say something to this guy but he was escorted away by the Shirt before I had a chance. I'm having to suppress keying his Volvo every time I drive past, I content myself with giving him Paddington stares instead.

Episode the Second: The RAF Commander gave me a message for my boss that there had been a complaint about engine noise from our engine testing facility and could we supply him with our rules of conduct as far as noise ordinance goes. I passed on the message and we had a little conversation about noise in general. My boss said if I was bothered by the noise then I should move. I took it in the way it was intended, as a joke but when a senior NCO made the same remark but with more barbs round the edges I got a tad annoyed.

It was the general tone rather than the words - We, the Mighty US Air Force, are Your Protectors! Bow down before us and be grateful that are here to wake you at 4:45 am every morning! If you don't like it move! Forget that your family has lived here for generations! Never mind that house rental to Americans has pushed the house sale prices up to unaffordable levels!

And when the Shirt chimed in with we should restrict everyone to base so they don't spend their money "on the Economy" and we'll soon show the local populace how grateful they should be. Puhlease!! The only businesses that will notice the difference will be the pubs!

Episode the Oh Whatever: I'm too tired to relate the rest of what I hear every day like it's so expensive in this country (oh really, maybe you should try living on a British salary without COLA (no not the Real Thing, Cost Of Living Allowance) or utilities allowance or housing allowance - we'll see how you manage on 975 quid a month) or we get ripped off at the garage because we're American (no you get ripped off because you're a punter just like everyone else trying to get their clutch fixed) or we're a target for crime (try not leaving your thousand dollar stereo on display in your unlocked car or maybe throw a little council tax our way to fund the police so they can do something about it) or raining AGAIN?! (after the driest July and Autumn in living memory? Hurrah! It's raining!) or the roads here are sooo narrow and the cars are soo small and no free refills when you go to McDonalds and where's the nearest mall and gas is sooooo expensive I can't afford to drive up to Scotland for the weekend ... Boo effing bloody hoo!

And so, on to the heavy stuff. I have diabetes and kidney failure. I need to lose about 70lbs before I can get on the transplant list, I've managed to lose about 1lb in the last 5 months of virtual starvation. My daily fluid allowance is only about 1.25litres. I take God knows how many pills very day. I have very little spare time these days, Sunday is my only free day. I'm quite likely going to need surgery on my arm again, this time to be cut from shoulder to elbow to bring those blasted blood vessels closer to the surface. My Mother has Parkinson's disease and is losing her marbles and her mobility. My Uncle-in-law has Prostate Cancer. My Dad can barely walk. I think I've started the menopause. I'm childless and too ill and too old to adopt, too broke for surrogacy. My brother has disowned me for reasons wholly unknown to me. I expect to get a 1.5% pay rise this year - wow what will I do with an extra £160 a year? Whee, let's hit Poundstretcher!!

It's no surprise really that I have to vent a little from time to time is it? Relax everyone the eruption is over.

Serial Monotony

I have a new officer working with me; she’s the Section Commander – basically the squadron personnel officer/customer service manager/Commander’s executive officer all rolled into one. She wants to take work from me and give it to someone else. I run the performance reporting program for the squadron, all military personnel have a written performance appraisal once a year, more often if they have a change of supervision; I request all the paperwork, read and make corrections, track everything and make sure it gets turned in on time.

I’m pretty darn good at it too – my squadron is the only one in the Group that has a 100% on-time rate. I’m a legend in my own lunchtime.

The thing is as the Commander’s Secretary it’s not actually my job, I got the program to look after temporarily about 3 years ago and for one reason and another I’ve kept it. The new Lieutenant wants it to go back where it belongs which will leave me with monitoring the Commander’s calendar and proofreading correspondence that comes in for his signature. Woo hoo.

Most people would be overjoyed at having their workload decreased but I get ground down by the tedium. The logical answer would be to find another job but that’s a tall order if you have diabetes & kidney failure, can you imagine sitting there in your interview finery clutching your CV and glowing references telling the interviewer that you’re wonderful and reliable and oh by the way you will need Tuesday and Thursday mornings off. New disability laws be buggered, you don’t stand a snowball in hell’s chance.

Even within the MOD it’s difficult especially as most jobs that are vacant are only open to staff who are due to be made redundant and have first dibs.

I joined the MOD to get away from being a secretary (not that there’s anything specifically wrong with being a secretary – I just had my midlife crisis early and thought there has got to be more that I can do apart from office management). I left school with the bog standard array of O levels and I took the path of least resistance as dictated by my parents who don’t hold any truck with careers, no dear what you want is a job.

I thought it would be a fresh start, I thought I could get my toe in the door and retrain to do something else. The dream was to do an OU degree or similar in Engineering and transfer into the Research & Development branch. At first I was assigned to Quality Assurance and for 3½ years I was happy. Then a US Air Force regulation decreed that foreign nationals couldn’t do the job I was doing so I had to take the next job that came up – a secretarial job.

According to the local personnel office, the MOD only fund training that relates to the job you’re in already so I can train to be an even more efficient administrator but little else. I feel like my life is slipping away before my eyes without ever having done anything worthwhile.

Sorry I’m just a miserable old bat today.