Overdue update in Diary

Oh man, December was so busy, I had no time at all to just sit down and relax. Today is the first time in about a month I’ve had time to myself.

After my family were all flooded, I went up for a few days to help them tidy up. Mam and dad’s house was in a right state when I arrived, they didn’t know where to start. I got them motivated and, by the time I left, they were almost back to normal. They had to throw out their washing machine, dishwasher, fridge, sofa, dining room table, a couple of kitchen cabinets and a bookshelf type unit. So that was all still missing, but we brought in their conservatory furniture, wiped all the mud off it, got the TV set up so they could once again use the living room instead of living in the bedroom. I helped them get the kitchen cleaned up, washed the mud out of the cupboards so they could get everything back in and gave them a mini fridge that Jay has had for years and never used.

While I was there, I was overwhelmed with how much people were helping each other. There were loads of people knocking on the door offering help, from the council, local tradesmen, and groups of Muslims who had collections at their Mosques and travelled a hundred miles or more to come and help. The local church hall was set up as a community centre where anyone could go and get free tea and coffee, hot soup and help themselves to anything they needed which had been donated by people and shops (while we were there, a big Aldi van arrived full of toilet rolls, bottled water, food, cleaning products etc.) Wellies, overalls, fizzy pop, tins of soup and pasta, rubbish bins, mops and buckets; anything you might need and it was all free for anyone to take. It was amazing!

Mam and dad have now replaced everything they had to throw out, Sonja is moved back into her house and is still drying out the porch. Nana and Granda are still out of their house, though; we went into it and it’s still really wet inside. There are heaters, fans and dehumidifiers running all the time, but it’s been three weeks and still going to be a while before they can start putting it all back together.

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The week before Christmas was mental for me. I was working the 6am-3pm shift at work. One night, Jay had tickets to go and see a band he likes called Slaves. I told him to try and find someone else to go with him as I was on early shift at work, but he couldn’t find anyone so I went with him. He drove there, then he had some drinks while I stayed on the pop and I drove back. The motorway was closed for essential roadworks so we had to divert off it onto the local roads, so there was a big queue of traffic, even at 11:30pm. It was after midnight when I got to bed and had to be up again at 4:50am for work.

I struggled to keep my eyes open all day at work but we had our Christmas party that night! Luckily they’d booked me a hotel room as I lived a long way off, so as soon as 3pm hit, I went straight to bed for a nap! Nick from work kept ringing me and waking me up, but I was ignoring it as I wanted to sleep. I finally got up at about 6pm and rang him back to see what he wanted; he was asking where I was because they were all in the bar already drinking. I had no energy! I finally made my way over and we had a really good night of a free three course meal and a free bar! Lots of people were really taking advantage of the free bar and got absolutely wasted, but I knew I was at work again in the morning and didn’t want to go with a hangover so I took it easy (four pints of lager, two glasses of wine with my meal and one shot of vodka as Graham was lining them up.) The rest of them were doing shots and making weird cocktails. The office was just full of zombies the next day, it was quite funny as I had a clear head, just a bit tired. It was the first time I really enjoyed my work Christmas party as I work with a great bunch of people, we all get along really well and conversation was flowing all night, as well as lots of dancing :o)

The very next night was Saturday and Jay had booked us tickets to go to an event called Blast Off, which is in a concert hall with a capacity of about 4,500 over two rooms and they play loads of Britpop and Indie music from the 90s. Still tired, I went along and had a good night reminiscing about being a teenager. Bit disappointed that they played about 10 Oasis songs and only one Blur song, though.

The rest of the week was finished off my Christmas shopping, present wrapping and packing ready to go and visit my family. It was a crazy mental couple of weeks.

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OH! Jay passed his driving test a couple of weeks ago! He’s now having great fun driving himself around everywhere and I’m having great fun NOT driving him around everywhere, after six years of giving him lifts everywhere. I’m looking forward to our next long journey so we can actually split the driving instead of m struggling to stay awake for four or five hours while he snores against the window.

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I got a weird temporary promotion at work for a couple of weeks. Our boss is off on a cruise and her deputy was panicking about managing the helpdesk on his own (there are 10 of us) so he asked her if I could help. To be honest, I should have got his job in the first place. They didn’t allow anyone to apply for it, but they just promoted him straight off. But he doesn’t really know what he’s doing; management wise, all he’s done is a couple of job interviews, he doesn’t seem to manage the team at all. He’s always asking ME questions about our contracts and other parts of work, even though we’ve been there for the same amount of time. Next time a promotion comes up, I’m pretty sure I should get it, but that will only happen if our boss or her deputy leave, and that’s not going to happen any time soon.

Anyway, I’m the deputy helpdesk supervisor for a couple of weeks, without the salary to match. I’ll just have to show I can do a good job, just in case anything does come up.

And we all got a mini payrise this month as we’ve all now passed our six month probation. When our boss said “One, er…” I thought she was going to say “One thousand pounds.” Sadly not, it was “One per cent.” which is better than nothing, especially in the private sector, but nothing to get excited about haha.

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I’ve written enough for now and have all your blogs to catch up on which is going to take a while. So I’ll write about Christmas and New Year in my next entry. Happy New Year everyone!

edit I’ve just been to read your entries but I don’t think they’re all coming up in my bookmarks list as I keep finding random ones, so I’ve probably missed a bunch of your entries; sorry!

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Last updated January 01, 2016