Sunday 20 March 2011

Site has been changed!

So I am very aware that this address is silly to remember and awkward to type out. I have therefore decided to rename the url for my blog which means I have moved!!

All posts on this blog have been moved over to the new site. But this one will no longer be updated.

Please check out my new site here.

Friday 18 March 2011

HAPPY RED NOSE DAY!! Lisa's search for a red nose.

Happy Red Nose Day to the whole world!! This is by far my favourite day of my whole 'fortyearly' life!! As a way of celebrating I shall be updating the blog as the day progresses. Awesomeness in a bag is this day!!

08:55
Just got into work and LOVED the amount of people I saw walking the streets in either their pyjamas or some form of red garment. I too have donned my red top and am revelling in the marvelousness of this day. When I just stop to think for even a tiny moment about how much money is going to be raised tonight... this day is awesome and people's lives are going to change!!

Oh and I have not been able to find me a red nose so far... I'm very aware that I am running out of time and can't see a way of getting one before tonight given that I'm working all day...

Mini challenge ACCEPTED!!
I shall find a red nose before the day is out, even if it kills me.

Until later, peace out.
I love you.


10:15
Challenge not going so well so far. I have discovered there is a Sainsburys near my work place, however it is a car journey away and I have no car... This is proving to be problematic.

I will not be disheartened though! I shall find me a fellow red nose day lover who does own a car and appeal to their charitable side, after all it should be in full flow on today, our most charitable of days!

Other than that, I am pouring comic relief love onto everyone around me. People are starting to get excited about this day as well. Hazaah!!!!

Speak soon

I love you.

12:00
What are the chances?? I have just spoken to three people in a row about how I am desperate for a red nose, each and every one of them have said to me 'Oh I wish you'd come to me sooner, I've just come back from a Sainsbury's.' WHAT THE HELL?? Has there been some kind of partay down at Sainsburys that I have not been aware of?

Only have 7 more hours to go until I have run out of time. My mind is starting to run through ideas of what I could do if I do not succeed. Must find some way of doing it however that still means raising money for Comic Relief... I'm thinking possibly using red lipstick on people and getting them to pay to kiss me on the nose until my nose is fully red... not too sure how appealing that may be to people.

14:06
I feel like I'm failing Comic Relief. Alas my day has become all busy and I have had no time to do anything worth blogging about. Not quite sure what I hope to achieve by adding this entry to my post.

16:45
Some might see it as a failure on my part but I do not! I see it as a chance. A chance to be inventive and exciting. I have admitted defeat in the buying of a red nose and have opted for making my own one.

It will be a thing of beauty. Just watch this space.

19:00
It's started!!!!

My food is ready.


My duvet is on my sofa.


And I'm ready to go.

20:20
I made my own nose!! Will have to donate via my red button instead...


Watching second part of Masterchef right now! Love Miranda and Claudia together!

Speak soon
I love you.

21:18
Take That have just performed. Sounded very Robbie Williams inspired.

I wonder if Davina will kiss Dermott as well...
(oh and FYI, Doctor Who was amazing. New series is so close I can almost taste it!!)

21:24
Holy crap. I've just watched a video on a hospital having to sacrifice one child out of four due to there being a lack of equipment to save them all. How does someone make that decision? How can you even imagine such a thing? And the illness that child will die of is a completely preventable disease!!

Donate now through the Red Nose Day Website.

21:43
Just watched the music video done by Peter Kay.

I am not a fan of Peter Kay at all but that video was HILARIOUS!! I feel like I now know him so well.

10:35
Choir of chefs singing out of tune... horrible. *Shudders uncontrollably.* That blonde one blatantly given the solo for the way she looked rather than her actually being able to sing!! ... Stating the obvious? Pretty much. HIDEOUS.

10:50
Today Smithy from Gavin and Stacey has come back and just did the mother of all sketches as he debated with famous people on who should go to Africa and do a video. There were so many famous people, HUGE people there. It was the most immense video clip I have ever seen. If you don't do anything else in this life, click on youtube and search for the Smithy sketch on Red Nose Day 2011. It will change your life.

I love you.

Wednesday 16 March 2011

My body's trying to kill me.


You may have heard me before talk about my body as if it is something separate to me. I do this, not because I am crazy, but because I swear the thing has a life of it's own...

...

... Okay. So I realise that is something a crazy person would say but hear me out and make your own decision.

Every so often, when things are going fine in my life, or my mind has been distracted with other things, my body decides that for no apparent reason it is going to kick up a hissy fit and become broken. On these occasions there is usually no reason for why it does this, I have done nothing to upset it, I have behaved exactly as I normally do, but it will decide that right at that moment it just wants to fall apart. And let me tell you, when it does this, it refuses to do it quietly.

For those of you who are now imagining myself with limbs falling off and bones protruding out of my skin, you can relax. This is not the way my body likes to malfunction. It usually goes for the outwardly more subtle approach whilst inwardly I might as well be dying.

An example of when this has happened was only a month ago. I work in a hospital and on this particular day I was standing in the A&E with a friend from work. Literally just standing there. No movement was being made on my part.

I was talking to this friend when my bag fell off my shoulder. Not wanting it to fall to the floor I did the logical thing and lifted it back up onto my shoulder again. I should have known better. I should have guessed that logic does not apply when my body has not had attention in a while. My brain was busy elsewhere with work related things and my body decided at that moment that enough was enough. So when I moved the mere centimetres it took to put my bag back on my shoulder again my body decided to send a shooting pain down my arm.

It was a feeling not unlike cramp and at the time that was what I thought it was. I stretched my arm and tried to massage the pain out with my amazing self taught massage abilities. However the pain stayed put and no amount of stretching was doing it any good. It was at this point that I began to get suspicious. I could recognise one of my body's frantic grasps for attention when I saw one. I kept a close eye on the arm, waved goodbye (with the other arm) to my work pal and started to make my way home.

I had a relatively uneventful journey home and it wasn't until I had to get off the train that I remembered my arm had been playing up at all. Of course my body knew this and wasn't going to let me off lightly. Instead when I went to put my bag on my shoulder again as I stood up to leave the train, it sent a shooting pain unlike anything I have ever felt, down my arm and froze it so that I could barely lift it higher than my waist.

I don't know if anyone reading this has ever had the experience of being wedged in between two sweaty business men on a rush hour train and finding yourself suddenly completely overwhelmed with urge to scream that you feel you might explode, but let me tell you, it's not nice. It's not nice for you, it's not nice for the woman whose face is inches from your purple one, and it's not nice for the sweaty business man's shoulder you have just sunk your teeth into to stop yourself from making a noise.

I somehow in some way managed to get out of there and make it home. However once that door was shut, I was no longer the quiet little British girl who would suppress her pain until her eyes popped out to stop herself from making a scene. No, in this house, in my beautiful little maisonette, well I'm pretty sure the neighbours assumed I was being murdered that night. Slowly. Through torture (Side note: A little upset no one came to check that this wasn't actually the case, although not surprised due to all of them being British as well).

So it turned out that my arm could not physically be moved. For no apparent reason it had just stopped working. However because I knew my body well and was used to these little temper tantrums it would have for the attention it so desperately craved, I chose to ignore it the best I could. My reasons for this are simple. If past experiences had taught me anything, my body would eventually get bored of hurting me and as quickly as the pain had come, it would go again. I would just have to wait it out.

So I did for the next two days. This was not easy, you do not realise how much you use something when suddenly it no longer works. Washing my hair was interesting, it involved a lot of bending my head down to my hand so that I could rub the shampoo in. I developed a whole new way of putting on a coat and simple moves like opening a door looked like a dance move as I would have to lift my whole body up so that I could reach the door handle. The worst moments of all though were when I had forgotten about the arm and instinctively lifted it. On the second night, one of those led to a particularly interesting screaming match with myself in the mirror where I said some very hurtful things about myself.

I bit the bullet on day 3 and decided the body had won. As I hadn't registered with a GP yet I had to sit around in my local A&E (for the second time in as many months but that's another story for another time) for hours so that they could give me something for the pain. The doctor, on seeing me, told me that I had pulled a muscle and that it would take a week of popping pills and doing exercises before it would start to feel better. She then went on to say that if after a week it hadn't eased then I would need to see a Physiotherapist and so on and so forth.

I left the A&E feeling a little bad that I had blamed my body for this as it seemed to have been a genuine injury and promised it that I would have a little bit more faith in it next time.

That sneaky freakin body knew was it was doing though. The next morning I woke up, ready to start my intensive regime of therapy and suddenly, without any reason, the pain was gone. My body had got what it had wanted, it had had a trip to the A&E and all the attention it could ever desire from the doctor. It was satisfied so it decided to take the illogical pain away.

If you said I was crazy at the beginning, you must see now that I speak the truth. It's like a needy little kid that whines to you until your within a inch of you're sanity and give in to it's demands then it runs off with a smug little smile on it's face.

Theories on how to put it in it's place would be much appreciated.

Monday 14 March 2011

Tis a grey area...


So yesterday I had plans to leave the house and see people but somehow they all seemed to fall apart. This was in part down to my body, when I wanted to make my body move and get out of my Pyjama's, it simply didn't want to comply. Instead it sat on my sofa stubbornly, insisting that it was tired, even though when I had tried to have a lie in earlier, it kept on reminding me that it wanted to be awake and sleep wasn't in it's plans.

Now if my brain had been more active it would have kicked my body into gear and told it that it was time to move. However my brain was being distracted by the world of the internet and the geek part of the brain kept on telling the reasonable 'we must see the sun at some point' part of the brain that we would get ready after one more video. However one video would always have links to another video which would then make reference to another video and you can see my dilemma.

It's my fault really. I had let the geek side out and take over in full force the day earlier during the Doctor Who Experience and so it was still clinging on to the dominant part of my brain and refusing to let go. This was proved even more as when I did finally run out of videos I wanted to see, I was suddenly completely overcome with the urge to watch Christopher Eccleston's series of Doctor Who. All in all, my chance of seeing the sunlight and actually talking to real life people seemed pretty dim as the day progressed.

When it got to about 4pm and I had just finished a whole family sized bag of Dorito's with Salad Cream (yum) and felt the familiar sensation in my legs that can only be associated with keeping them in one crawled up position for a large amount of time, I tried to reason with my brain and coax it into letting me leave the house. I must add that by this point, my body had changed it's mind about being tired and insisted that it would move around the flat aimlessly if I didn't let it out.

I told the geek side of my brain that I would feel completely wasted if I didn't at least have some small thing I had achieved on this day. My brain's answer to this was, 'Okay, put some clothes in the washing machine.' I was surprisingly satisfied with this task as it showed me being grown up and responsible on my lazy day. I did this with my head held high and a little smug smile on my face.

When I sat back down again after grabbing a Cornetto to award myself, (I snack a lot when I don't have anything else to do) I started back in on the Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Blogspot saga that had become my reason for existing in that day.

However, at 6:45pm when I should have been dressed and leaving the house for the second time that day, I quickly realised that this wasn't going to happen either. I questioned the anti social behaviour I was displaying, forfeiting real life conversation for videos of guys called Charlie drinking a bottle of Ketchup. I wondered if this was a good road to be travelling down, especially as I lived in my house all alone, and whether this meant that I would soon be subject to a life of hermithood where I referred to my computer as my best friend and would shield my eyes from any natural light.

You'll be pleased to know that I justified my way out of this one as well through the powers of my geek brain. It reminded me that not only had I spent all day yesterday with at least four other different people (score, I'm cool), but that also I wasn't being anti-social at all, I was socialising with people, just on the internet instead of real life.

I had left some comments, I had watched my Doctor Who video climb from 8 views to 53 views in the space of one day (ten of those may just have been me watching it again). I had talked to people on Facebook, Twitter and I had text two whole people with my Mobile Phone device. I then concluded that if I had actually left the house I wouldn't have spoken to nearly as many people! Therefore I had chosen the more sociable option after all! Hazaah!

Doctor Who is talking about it? Lisa is.
The last thing that I decided on yesterday is simple. I'm a writer, it's what I do with every free time I have, (yesterday excluded) so naturally I steer towards writing my thoughts rather than speaking them out in Vlog form which is what so many other people have been doing. However I can't ignore the natural pull internet goers tend to have towards the visual rather than the reading. Due to this I have decided the following. All my blogs will stay in typed format with a photo or two to make it easier on the eye. However I will be starting a Doctor Who series via Vlog. This is predominantly designed for when the new series starts and I will then discuss it afterwards (I appreciate how geeky that sounds and I'm okay with it). This can be open for discussion afterwards through comments or videos of your own. Hopefully it will be entertaining but I'm not promising anything as me alone with a camera is not something that has worked too well in the past! If it sucks, let me know and we can revisit the idea.

Other than that... peace out.

Saturday 12 March 2011

I went to see the doctor today. Doctor who? I hear you ask? Exactly.

Lisa Harries would like to apologise for the future blog. It is entirely Doctor Who geek based. If you are not interested in such things (for reasons that I simply can't fathom) then sorry I'm so focused on something that you don't understand, but trust me, the whole thing should be part of your life. There is a video if you don't feel like reading about Doctor Who, it can be found at the bottom. Next blog will be more generally based I promise. (Oh and the first bit isn't Doctor Who just in case you want to read something.)

Today has been a pretty darn awesome day. It has been one that I have been waiting for since Christmas and I was not let down. Today myself and my younger brother Daniel went to the Doctor Who Experience in Kensington. It. Was. Awesome.

Now there is a video below highlighting the exciting times that were had on this day. But there were a few moments that were not captured on camera. I shall inform you of them now.

I woke up nice and early at 7 and did my morning 'pre-outing' photo, summing up all that I was to experience on this day.




Yes that is a Doctor Who calendar and yes I am that cool.

The non Doctor Who bit.
I quickly got myself all totted up to fight time and space and promptly left the house (I say promptly, actually I left ridiculously early as is my custom when I'm stupidly excited about something and can't wait to get there).

My journey up there was not without it's moments, I had a rather bizarre moment as I walked to the bus stop and noticed a young pregnant woman in her thirties walking in the opposite direction. It wasn't until I got closer that I realised that, not only was this woman not pregnant but that this woman was in fact a man. Yes I had confused a rather chubby looking man (with a beard on closer inspection) to be a woman. I automatically felt wracked with guilt that I could have been so wrong and made the decision to avert my eyes from his as I walked past. I think it worked, by doing so he didn't seem to suspect a thing.

The second confusing moment of my journey was whilst I was waiting for the bus to arrive. An elderly Chinese man arrived at the bus stop, he waited for about five minutes before tutting to himself and sticking his head out into the road to see if he could catch a bus on the horizon. So far, this is perfectly normal, in fact I am myself guilty of this action at least five times per bus stop visit. What happened next was the part that left me confused. After searching the horizon to find the bus and realising that there was none arriving, he promptly turned to face me and gave me the most murderous glare I think I've ever been subject too. It almost was as if he was blaming me for the whole bus situation! As is custom to me, my natural instinct was to automatically go through any possibility where this could have been my fault but I came up empty so I decided that I should probably just pretend it hadn't happened. (I did wonder if perhaps he had somehow discovered my internal mistake earlier with the pregnant woman/chubby man scenario but decided that I would have to accept he had super powers in order to go with that theory and I was far to excited about where I was going to pursue that thought any further.)

The rest of the journey was uneventful other than my ipod deciding to play "Teenage Dirtbag" from Wheatus on the tube which made my day as I hadn't listened to that tune since I was 13. Oh and a couple who decided to sit on each other next to me on the tube and kiss passionately for the majority of the journey which made me feel a little less than comfortable, especially when the action caused them to rub up against me at one point.

Other than that I arrived about an hour early and sat around impatiently, waiting for my excitement to begin.

The Doctor Who bit
The majority of my geekdom at being in the presence of so many Doctor Who artifacts is evident in the video below but there were a few areas where cameras weren't allowed that simply made my day and I fear I might self-combust if I don't at least share them with you in word form.

The 'experience' part of the Doctor Who magic was the section where we were not allowed to film. It consisted of watching the highlights of the last series on a wall that had (something that I noticed the moment I arrived) a large crack running through it. The highlights ended by lighting up the crack and the wall split open at that point to show the library from 'Silence in the Library' and 'Forest of the Dead'(from season 4).

Doctor Who suddenly appears through the screens after being locked into the Pandorica for a second time. Then the single most amazing moment of my life happened as, as if out of nowhere, the TARDIS appeared and the door opened. Yes that's right ladies and gents, I got to walk into the doors of the TARDIS and I can tell you now it is bigger on the inside, I've seen it with my own eyes.

Not only that, but once I was in, I got to navigate the TARDIS!! Daniel (the younger brother) did get a little rubbish at this point and kept on reminding me that I was not a child like so many of the kids who were experiencing Doctor Who with me and that apparently, according to his logic, they had first dibs on using the TARDIS navigation tools over me. I failed to see how he could come to this conclusion as everyone knows that the TARDIS is in fact a very complex and grown up piece of equipment and so if the Doctor was going to entrust anyone with it, it would be the older and wiser people in the group. He then went into how I was taking this too seriously and pointed out that the eight year olds didn't seem to be as excited about all of this as I was. Of course they wouldn't be, I mean they're eight, what are the chances that they fully understand the laws of time and space?

There was some fighting with the Daleks and Cybermen and then a walk through the forest of the stone angels (I reminded Daniel on several occasions not to blink but also not to look them in the eye, I'm pretty sure that that is why we are both still alive). We did all of this and after a particularly thrilling 3D experience we rescued the Doctor from the Pandorica and saved the world. Not bad for a single days work.

Then we got to see all the outfits of the previous doctors as well as see all of the different enemies he has had. Here is a picture of the Face of Boe telling me the secret of the universe.



The rest is in the video below. Enjoy!!

Thursday 10 March 2011

I think I have acidic armpits

I bought this amazing cream jumper from Jane Norman in November, it's beautiful and warm and yummy. I wore it a total of three times and I was as happy as a clam. After I moved, I wore it for a fourth time and suddenly my world was turned upside down as I went to yawn and discovered this.



A hole!!

I was sad. In fact I was near on depressed. I mean this jumper had been my interview jumper for the job I now work in. It had lived such a short life but it had already served me so well.

It was when I wore the darker jumper I had also bought from Jane Norman a mere week later that I started to really fret because, even without sleeves it had somehow been ripped and had suffered the same fate.



Although this saddened me deeply, I placed it with my other jumper and assumed it was a Jane Norman thing. One day, when I was truly grown up, I would be able to go back to those jumpers and sew them back up. But until then, I would have to settle for a simple memorial service most weekends where I would take them out of the drawer, hold them up in front of me, and sigh.

This week, I went from being accepting of what had happened to being downright outraged. I pulled out one of my favourite (non Jane Norman) jumpers, put it on, went to work, yawned and saw this!!



It's an epidemic!! My clothes are disintegrating and all in one place, under my armpits! It can only mean one thing. My armpits must be secreting some acid like substance which is leaking into my clothes and causing holes to appear. It's the only explanation that I can think of and I'm sure you'd agree.

This would be all well and good but as I mentioned before I am not far enough into my independent woman experience to know how to sew up holes and breakages in clothes. I don't even own a sewing kit... I have a cross stitch that I'm working on but if I use those threads then I'll never finish Tutankhamun's head.



But if my acidic armpits continue to strike then I will soon have no clothes left and that simply won't do. So I am asking people, if you happen to have either one of the following you will be helping a rather confused woman out.

A: A sewing kit that you are happy to give away (for free, I could pay you in hugs perhaps?)

B: A cure for the acidic armpit. Be it in tablet form, injection form or liquid form, I'm not fussy in fact I'm desperate.

or

C: A fashion line you are able to make instantly famous which includes holes in the armpits of garments as its main feature.

Of course the other alternative is that I simply never get tired again and so never have the need to yawn and expose my gaping armpit holes. I'll probably just go with that option, I'm already partially addicted to caffeine anyway, might as well go the whole hog.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

A woman who is prone to (L)OCD's

I would like to add a disclaimer to the following blog: Due to me not actually having been diagnosed with the following issue, it is purely my own observations and kick ass thoughts that lead me to believe it is true. I will leave you to come up with your own theories. As I am not a doctor I will change OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) to LOCD (Lisa's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) which is what I have personally diagnosed me as having in my capacity as a real life person.

I have a little problem with LOCD. I have had since I was 14 and sat in a caravan with three friends whilst watching Tim Henman lose once more in Wimbledon. It was bizarre the way it came about but basically I was sitting there, my friend Lauren turned the volume up to 33 and suddenly I became overwhelmed in a flurry of emotions and asked (or demanded, I can't remember due to the long period of time since then) that it be changed to either 32 or 34. The moment Lauren changed it I felt a lot better and that started the period of my life that was forever governed by even numbers.



This was a rather awkward period of my life and it lasted in it's extreme for about 8 years. Literally EVERYTHING had to be done in even numbers,

Eating: I would always eat my crisps in two's and if there was one crisp left at the end then I wouldn't finish it. Burgers were eaten only in even bites. Gum if offered would have to be given to me in two's or, if I didn't know the person well enough to ask for that, then I would simply break the gum in half and eat it that way. NB Now, although I no longer eat gum in two's I still break them in half out of habit.

Volume/Temperature: Anything that was measured with a number to indicate how high it was must be put to an even number, even better if I could get all numbers even; EG: 42 instead of 32. NB Now, this is still exactly the same. It just plain creeps me out being any other way!

Drains: I couldn't walk over one or three drains, only ever two or in those rare occasions 4. NB: Out of habit I still do this without thinking however I have developed enough as a person now that if I am thinking about it then I get a little rush by walking over three drains like I'm doing something I wouldn't normally do and therefore pushing my boundaries!!

There were others but I think you get the gist. Basically even = good, odd = bad.

Out of the birth of such a silly little LOCD came a lot more interesting ones that I have picked up on. I would like to stress that these do not make me 'slightly insane' or 'bizarre' or 'not quite there' as some people have said in the past. I just simply work by the theory that if you do something a certain way and enjoyed it that way then why not do it that way all the time?

An example of this is one that I have picked up in the past couple of months in my little maisonette. The way my home is put together, the moment you come into the house you're confronted with stairs that take you up to the second floor where all my rooms are. There is a light switch at the bottom of these stairs for the downstairs light and two light switches at the top for upstairs and downstairs. My biggest rule in the house is this, upon arriving home of an evening, the two light switches at the top of the stairs must be facing the same way once I turn the light out to the corridor.

Confused? I thought so, so here's a photographic aid:

A good example of the light switches.



A bad example of the light switches.



I don't think I am asking for much for this to be done. And sure it means that I have had to sit down and work out what position they should be in in order for it to work when I leave the house. And yes it has meant that on more than one occasion I have had to feel my way down the hazardous stairs in the dark to rectify the situation if they have somehow managed to come out of sync. But look at how beautiful they look the right way up!

There are more LOCD's I am guilty for but I shall leave them for another time.