Bubble and Squeak

There's not much to write about for today in itself, so I'm serving up a Bubble and Squeak of the weekend's leftovers... or something like that.

So, on Friday we arranged our mortgage. The Halifax (who are selling the house we're buying) seemed to be doing their best to manouvre us into taking out a mortgage with them, so we took great delight in getting a mortgage with Nationwide instead. Gotta love exercising the power of the consumer :D

And then, also on Friday, I FINALLY SORTED OUT THE FUCKING BILLING. I now intend to spend as much of the next week as possible testing it, but Boss M and I are reasonably happy that it's as correct as it can be. I've suddenly started writing lots of Audit reports for it too. Funny that.

Saturday was exceptionally cool. Began with going to tell the Halifax that our mortgage was all sorted, which put both Alison and myself in a wonderful frame of mind. A brief trip to Kenilworth's local toy shop lead to the discovery that they were selling Star Wars Lego Clone Troopers, individually, for 50p each. So I bought 6. My Republic Gunship now actually looks like it's ready to take on a droid army :D

Then it was on to Merry Hill to meet Anne for lunch and then an afternoon of shopping and chat. Basically Alison had loads of Merry Hill vouchers to spend, requiring lots of time in clothes shops. There's only so much clothes shopping I can take, so I spent most of the afternoon with Anne. A fair amount of time around the middle of the afternoon was spent in Starbucks... we stayed in there long enough to bagsy one of the sofas, and were doing rounds!

Anne's entries have enough about the Angel/Buffy related sadness that we displayed in Waterstones so I won't really go into that. There were texts to follow it up that evening which proved us both to be appalling Faith junkies... although that being said Anne wasn't the one drooling over the pictures of Amber Benson in the 2nd Watcher's Guide.

There was a hilarious moment in Smiths when I was admiring the gatefold cover of this months MAXIM (no descriptions, go look yourself) and Anne was talking to me about the magazine she was reading. Then she looked across as she was talking, and saw the cover. And she stopped dead. I think the follow on comment once she'd picked her chin up off the floor and wiped the drool away was 'I can't beat that'. There was a similar incident with the new Britney Spears video but I can't be bothered typing up all of that.

And I have to mention Ann Summers! Even though Anne mentioned it in hers! We wandered in for a laugh, and were staggered to find that as well as taking a push-chair in with them (ok, fair enough), a young couple had taken their 6 or 7 year old son in too. He was picking up the tins containing inflatable dolls and looking at them curiously when we first spotted him. One for the social workers, I think. The other thing I noticed about the place was its the one shop where the shop assistants don't pounce on you asking if you need help. Surprising, that.

The various perusals of Buffy books lead to many comments on how many of the fanfic writers out there do much better jobs than the authors of the officially sanctioned books. The idea of writing 'This fic rocks!' inside The Book Of Fours was particularly noteable. I won't say whose idea that was, if she wants to own up to it she will ;-)

There has also been a debate this weekend over a little short-story fic that I wrote, and whether or not it was right for me to have Willow say 'cunt'. Taken out of context that sounds very bizarre, which is exactly why I've taken it out of context. If you read the fic you'll get what I'm talking about, if you haven't/won't you'll just think I'm dropping killer swearwords into the conversation for the sake of it... and you might well be right. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I mentioned it in the first place, so let's just forget the issue.

Today has been marred by the discovery of a wasps' nest at the end of the garden. Ack ack ack. Part of me wants to be able to just demolish it because I hate the fuckers, but somehow that really wouldn't be wise...