Kitten

I’ve now moved on to looking up calligraphy classes, where there’s one on the day after my birthday in the evening which is just under £60. Clearly something in me is highly distracted today.

Today I am suddenly hit with the urge to go to a stationery show, which apparently means stationeryfest in Wigan. Train tickets are £70-90 one way so clearly this is not going to happen but the urge to randomly go to something is clearly clawing at me. I assume mercury is in retrograde or something.

Is this a cross stitch of the dinnerladies? I feel it has the blue overcoat vibes coming through! 🤔

If anything I think there should be more emphasis on going back to understand things you’ve struggle with, because without those you won’t be able to hand type from scratch “the firefighters struggled to put the fire out”. Because sentence construction is hard going, let alone the words themselves.

Frequently I feel stupid in learning Japanese, by the way. It’s a stupid course. I don’t understand anything and it’s not explained. I doubt it’ll help in Japan at all; and I’ve been doing it for 2168 days straight. I don’t think it should just encourage you forwards the way it does.

You would think that as i progress through Duolingo I could go back and do the “mistakes” course and show improvements but actually what happens is it does the most recent mistakes I’ve made not the ones from earlier in the course and naturally, I still struggle with them, and feel stupid.

It looks beautiful, and I bet it’ll look even better at the end. Your commitment to completing these beautiful crafts astounds me, I don’t think I’d have the patience 😅

So, pre-Covid times, I used to wear platform stilettos to work all the time. I haven’t worn them in a while (because I feel my weight would make it impossible) but today I thought fuck it, how else am I going to get back into wearing them. I feel like a sexy goddess in them, and I honestly love it.

Really sad, I wanted to watch the BBC’s new Lord of the flies adaptation but the fisheye lens view of filming makes me incredibly nauseous so I’ve had to turn it off. I love LOTF and this was something I was excited about so that kind of sucks.

Additionally I had a at-work nurse check up and, aside from being too heavy for my height (which has grown half an inch apparently) I am pretty good for health. No high BP, ok cholesterol level and no chance of diabetes. So. I guess I’m on a good path?

In the past 2 weeks, two different people have told me that they’re shocked I’m turning 40 this year, and had assumed I was “mid twenties”. I am unnervingly pleased about this and yet I know it’s just genetics, and I have done nothing to make this happen.

I have finished writing the guide to the process I created and it’s 147 stupid pages of stupid ness. but it’s complete; and now I only have to edit it and create a second, technical document (aka the formula document for when things break).

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work:

“And what’s the problem at this location?”

Genuinely saddened to hear that Catherine O’Hara has passed. I had the wonderful experience of seeing her perform as Sally doing Nightmare Before Christmas live with my father pre-covid and it was such a magical experience.

Today someone genuinely said to me “I thought you were about 25. And you’re not even wearing make up? Such young skin!” In a very shocked manner when I told them how old I’ll be next birthday. It’s a privilege to look so young. Nothing to do with all the virgin sacrifices in the basement.

What is with things expecting everyone to have common advanced levels of knowledge? It’s not like we’re asking to be trained in astrophysics! 😭

Also, I will admit this book does seem to assume you understand things quite a lot, and I do not 🤣

No nothing that fancy yet; I’m about to flesh out power pivot in chap 10 fully by the looks of it, then move onto power query. I can’t do the chapter on power bi because I need to be given access & our system won’t allow it unless we have good reason to have the license! I think next is vba coding?

It’s all to do with pulling the data from one place to another as a sort of flexible table that isn’t a pivot, but my god it’s just crazy hard for me to get my head around. I’m beginning to think “power pivot” is a catch all for “any crazy data table playing” in excel at this point.

Cube formulas? Really nothing I’ve ever come across before. I’ve read it. I’ve reread it. I’ve learnt what makearray, lambda, let functions are. I still can’t get my head around cube formulas. I’ve accepted for now that I have to just move onto chap 10 & hope it makes sense ignoring the last chaps.

Chap 7 had out of date links (but managed to use something else to learn from it, and adapted). Chap 8 has power BI which I have to apply for access to officially and so can’t learn yet. Chap 9 is about using cube formulas with the data model.

I have tried. I really have.

One of my objectives this year was to learn about power pivots. I appreciate this is probably basic stuff but I don’t have official training modules or anything so have been slowly working through an ebook version of “Microsoft excel pivot table number crunching”. From chap 7 onwards I’ve struggled.

Oh my gosh, that is delightful - and so intricate. The sleeves, the pockets - that collar line? Amazing work!

Ahhh I know, that’s a good plan- but I can’t eat that many lychee in one go!

It’s lychee season again, which means I bought a punnet Friday; ate 4 and then today the remainder were mouldy and need to be thrown away and I am sad. Why does this always happen with lychee?

I recently bought now 62, which has t.A.T.u’s classic All About Us on it, inspiring me to re-listen to their first album, and I find it’s possibly the only album I ever hear in both languages when I play it - I mentally hear the Russian when playing the English, and vice versa. It’s very odd.

Me: maybe I’ll look into other gym gear now tikiboo is going into administration (allegedly). Oh? Vixnfit look fun… wait. A UK 12 is a large? Wtf? No I think I can go without being shamed into thinking I’m an XXL just because I’m between 16/14 thanks. Pretty sure 12 is not LARGE.

While this is sad for you, think of the treat this will provide the birds and other wildlife nearby. (Yes I am clinging at the straws of positivity, I think this Monday sucks so far 😩)

Could you bribe yourself with a reward for doing any of it? Game-ify the action itself? I find that sometimes I can convince myself to do boring admin bits if I promise myself a reward of some kind (new stickers etc)

Me Today: I’ll buy the yen for our Japan trip in November! The exchange rate is great!

My friend this afternoon: oh I don’t think I can go now, I can’t afford it.

(There are several of us going but it’s meant to be a 40th birthday trip for us all, her included)