seriously vodafone why so hard to contact? SERIOUSLY. IT'S THIS FUCKING BIZARRE, DIFFICULT TO FOLLOW MAZE OF "PRESS ONE FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE. TO CONFIRM YOU WANT TO SPEAK TO A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE, PRESS ZERO NOW."

YES, YOU CUNTS, I WANT TO SPEAK TO A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE. FFS.

So I cocked up, right, and accidentally paid one bill the amount that I was supposed to pay for another bill, so I called up vodafone to say, hey, I have cocked up, please to be giving back my fucking money now.

And ended up speaking to some jaded disaffected youth who was all, what is your bank account number? And, it'll take one to two weeks to get back into your account.

FUCK YOU SIDEWAYS, VODAFONE. It transfers from my account to yours overnight; you are a modern business; what do you MEAN it's going to take UP TO A FUCKING FORTNIGHT to return my fucking money to me you fucking asshats!

... is what I did not say to the customer service rep, because it's not her fault that the system design is so fucking poor.

Anyway, am home sick with a headcold, tired and cranky and still reading Star Trek: the AU. *facepalm*

I have had a headache since about 9am yesterday morning, and have spent a lot of the intervening time sleeping, a portion of it grumbling, and some other bits reading young adult fiction. Whoo! Actually it's been kind of shitty and I feel really bad about not going to class to learn about trespass and whatever the fuck we're doing in Contract (I think privity? Maybe?).

That's about it. I haven't gotten dressed yet and I've spent the day hanging out with my cat.

When I woke up this morning for the first time, all I could think was that my head felt like a bowl full of jelly. And I thought about that for a while, and found myself thinking that I am really strange, because the normal analogy is "stuffed full of cotton wool". But that wasn't right.

So I called in sick to work and spent 6 hours sleeping.

My head does feel like it's stuffed full of cotton wool now.

Um. So I'm feeling kind of conflicted. In my head (and hopefully on digital paper) I'm reasonably able to communicate my thoughts, but when I try to talk to people it comes out in grunts and stutters and short phrases all muddled together (I get like this when I'm sick and when I'm tired and when I'm drunk, and I'm sick and tired at the moment), and I don't think it very likely I'll be much better tomorrow. But! I've got work; I've got class; New Girl starts tomorrow; and I'm meant to be doing stuff for mooting. But!

I think I might take to my bed with a Terry Pratchett novel and see how I feel in the morning.

Work blah this week; didn't go in today as had a headache and instead spent the day alternately sleeping and reading and knitting. Sort of tired of this whole uni thing, but have 11 weeks to go this year. Should be done with law degree by mid-2014, assuming I don't fail anything and keep going at the pace I've been going at. Feel sort of mutinous and a little weary.

Everything on my ipod is making me grumpy. I have about 29000 songs to pick from but don't want any of them. Woe is me, et cetera.

I have failed to manage work this week. Monday and Tuesday I was exhausted and headachey so I stayed home and slept; today I managed to get to work, but came home at 9.50. Ugh. I have started coughing, in the I-really-should-find-my-inhaler way; I am entirely sick of my house; and I was really looking forward to sushi for lunch today. >:|

I have apparently picked up a bug from somewhere. Cue a headache and nausea yesterday which kept me home from work, followed by a headache and nausea that sent me home from work today. And ( tmi. And you know if I'm calling it tmi, IT'S TMI. )

So I think I'm going to take a nap sometime soonish - I'm dressed in trackpants and will probably end up going braless shortly, which will make napping very comfortable - and then, like, IDK. Wait for this thing to pass? When I was telling one of my counsel I was going home she was all, that sounds like what I had last week! So I blame HER for this, and told her so. She was suitably apologetic.

I don't think the paragraphs in this post tie very well together at all. Maybe I mean sentences. I don't know what I mean! Oh god. Stupid nurofen is not helping either maybe I could take panadol at the same time as well idk god I am making so many typos in this it's not funny - like, the ones where you type an entirely different word? those ones - I hope I've caught them all.

So I decided this morning not to go to work, as I slept REALLY badly last night and when my alarm went off I was just like "nnnnnghblah". This turns out to have been maybe a fantastic plan, as I seem to have inherited the cold nishatalitha had last week. :|

I also had a dream in which I was pregnant. And buying strawberries at a dairy/roadside stall.

Ahaha, so I'm going back to work tomorrow, because while the cold hasn't entirely gone and the antibiotics haven't completely kicked in and I'm still using my inhaler every four hours like clockwork - (1) I am completely bored shitless at home and have read all the fic ever (or at least can't be bothered hunting more down), and (2) I have a lot of shit to do at work, including but not limited to starting classes tomorrow.

I was looking forward to last week at work, actually - it was my last week of hour-long lunchbreaks in a while, my last week of finishing at 5 (which is not quite dark) instead of 5.30 (which totally, totally is - and nevermind the prospect of tutorial AFTER that 2 nights a week), and also I had all sorts of interesting work lined up, including the end of the gender equity blah blah review, which I did HEAPS of work on and wanted to conclude in committee.

I am entirely unprepared for class - I haven't even bought NOTEBOOKS, let alone textbooks and course notes and all that jazz. In fact, my text from last semester is overdue at the Parliamentary Library and has been since, I don't know, late April? At least there are no fines.

I really hope I can sleep tonight. And that I wake up when my alarm goes off. And that I don't cough too much through the day. And, and, and.

Went to the doctors, and apparently what is up is that I have asthma, which I haven't really had in about a decade and which SUCKS because it's, you know, a chronic condition rather than a disease, and so is managed by CONSTANT PREVENTATIVE MEDICATION rather than a dose of antibiotics or whatever.

They put me on the nebuliser. Pure oxygen gives you the shakes, man. I won't be back at work until monday because apparently I'm running a slight fever and also I'm not really with the concentrating at present.

Um. Fic question: what is a space heater? This has come up a few times in fic set in the Northern Hemisphere winter. I assume it's either what I'd call an oil heater or a fan heater, i.e. a heater designed to heat up one particular room, that is plugged into the wall. But, seriously, the terminology confuses me - how do they work? Oil heaters are tallish, perhaps 50cm, and have fins and radiate heat so they warm a room up slowly and very evenly; fan heaters are like giant hairdryers - they suck up electricity like nobody's business but warm up a room very, very quickly.

I ask not because this is particularly relevant to the fic, but merely out of curiousity. Also, how expensive is central heating to run? More importantly, how awesome is it to live in a home where you never have to wear a hat and/or blanket and/or four sweaters and gloves indoors for warmth?

Still sick, still at home. Currently unable to read anything funny because it makes me cough and it HURTS. Have ordered dominos pizza and am waiting for it to arrive, life mishmash of tragedy and heartbreak. Don't know if I'll be going to work tomorrow either and think that at some point it might be wise to like seek medical attention or some shit. Am going to go drug myself now WHOO.

We are just now being ENORMOUSLY OBNOXIOUS order-y people with Red Tomatoes on Kelburn, where we are trying to get pizza and desserts delivered to our home. They don't have a menu online so we're forced by dint of NONE OF US BEING WILLING TO COOK to make the poor girl give us the menu over the phone, and it looks like this has been successful as tamarillow is now paying.

It's cold and we're all lazy and sick; I haven't left the house in days; and, my god, I'm sitting an exam in two and a bit days and I am entirely unprepared. That could be the cold, though.

So last night as I was changing into my pajamas I noticed a rash on my chest and stomach. I thought it was maybe some kind of allergy thing, but an hour later it had spread to my wrists and waist and up to my jaw. That prompted nishatalitha to get out of bed (I have the best flatmates) and change my sheets - this was midnight - while I took a shower and changed into clean pajamas.

I didn't go to work today, and now the spots on my upper arm have begun to maybe blister a little. I guess I'm going to the doctor's tomorrow, as I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to magically disappear in the night. I also have a slight cold, an ear infection, and what may be joint aches but WHO KNOWS. I think I'll go to bed with a good book - or five, or ten - and try to sleep.

Was meant to be having lunch with one of the cleverly disguised tomorrow - he's leaving old!work, finally - but I suspect I'll be texting my apologies.

One of the nice things about my cough being a lot more contained now is that I can consume dairy again - I tested this on Friday with a double chocolate frappichino from Starbucks, and given that chocolate icecream has made me cough for my entire life (I keep eating it anyway) and I didn't cough more than usual I figure I am good to go. This mainly means I can drink tea again, which I have missed A LOT in all it's sweetened, milky deliciousness. My flatmates both quite like fruit infusions but I'm not so keen: if I want something fruity I'll have a hot blackcurrent cordial, ta muchly. It's been a great pleasure to be able to go look at our many black teas and pick one.

I took all the music off my ipod this evening and reloaded it from scratch. This is a scary thing: I even created new playlists and all. But now it's a little more organised, and this makes me happy.

Civ IV: Beyond the Sword continues to be awesome awesome, even though I've no idea what I'm doing with my spies yet. :D I'm just saying.

This morning I woke up with a headache, coughing from the moment my feet hit the floor and angry from the moment my hand fumbled and found the off switch on my alarm. There's something deeply, deeply uncool about coughing when you're not coughing up anything: the whole process feels futile. I spent a good five minutes after I got home from work coughing in the kitchen, hoping that this burst of uncontrollable, uncontrolled hacking would be the one to bring up the glob of whatever it was I could just feel (it wasn't, and it didn't). The inhaler seems to be working, more or less, although I have a headache every day.

Work continues to be interesting. It's weird to think that some of the stuff I'm working on really will affect people's everyday lives, even if all I'm doing is the formatting. It's also weird that all the emphasis, all the political will, gets concentrated around Acts when really it's the regulations where things happen at an individual level, a lot of the time. I guess the Acts are the principal law - but a lot of them give the right to make a regulation on anything that might even be vaguely connected to the principal law (think Umbridge. No, seriously), and I think that regulations as a whole deserve rather more public analysis than they get. Even though there's, like, 400 of them a year - maybe especially because there's 400 of them a year.

I was going to have fried rice for dinner only there is no soy sauce in the house and then I was going to have frozen peas only there are no frozen peas and now it is quarter past nine in the evening and I just cannot be bothered.

It turns out that I have asthma, or at least asthmatic symptoms, and thus I have the blue inhaler and if my symptoms persist I must see my doctor again and probably get the brown inhaler - which, from memory, is nowhere near as effective at making my heart rate go up if I take too much on purpose. Not that I'll be doing that again in a hurry, but I do remember it quite fondly.

I ended up not working on Thursday afternoon or Friday, and then spending the entire weekend in my trackpants (and, hell, most of Saturday in my slightly-stained, low-cut hot pink and turquoise nightgown) playing the scenarios of Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, which, for the record: awesome awesome AWESOME. Also I read a lot of fic: SGA and HP mostly, but I appear to be heading in the direction of Smallville, which is a fandom I have had several lust-addled weekends and dirty months with over the years, even though every single hint of canon has made me cringe. Except for the vids, because in the vids there is no dialogue.

It looks like we'll be moving to Wadestown in a few months - our current landlords have a house there that we'll probably take over once their son leaves home and they downsize. It sounds really lovely and within our price-range, plus our landlords are very prompt at dealing with shit and otherwise leave us alone except to ply us with wine and chocolate at Christmas and offer us a renewal of the lease.

My cat has, in the past five days, hunted and tried to eat a baby bird, a mouse - he killed that one: I found the back half on the living room floor, and nishatalitha found the front half in the washing machine. After it had gone through a cycle. No, we don't understand - and, just now, a teeny baby mouse. I removed the baby mouse by lifting up the chair it had scampered under, waiting for Tobias to pounce and take baby to under the table, and then catching the mouse in a teacup and throwing it outside into the bushes. Tobias is a mighty hunter indeed but I wish to god he would stop bringing live prey into the house.

Apparently I have asthma, or at least asthmatic symptoms, and am thus taking the blue inhaler. And a lot of painkillers to deal with the constant low-level (but with spikes!) headache brought on by all the coughing. Back to work Monday. Spent most of today in nightie and trackpants, and plan to do the same tomorrow. Should probably go back to bed, where hopefully I shall rediscover pronouns.

I'm really cranky - like, in my head, I am really cranky, and I keep thinking really horrible things about the world. I'm sure this'll abate when I'm not feeling quite so guilty/sad about nana being dead and I've slept some more and possibly I'm on the good drugs, but until then I'm feeling dissatisfied and angry and like a bear with a sore head (I do in fact have a sore head).

Also I cannot stop coughing and it is pissing me off.

Also today at Borders I bought a blank-page notebook slash journal slash diary of my true life feelings and a pen and then I sat in the Borders cafe and wrote in my notebook slash journal slash diary of my true life feelings with my new pen - which is shitty - and my writings were shitty and I drank a shitty mixed berry smoothie thing which wasn't cold enough and had seeds and was largely syrupy and disappointing and it was shitty. After that I went with my flatmates to the Occidental and ate rare sirloin and three chips, even though the main reason I'd bought the sirloin was because I'd been craving salt. But it was good sirloin. But I still felt shitty.

I'm. Just. Seriously, if I thought that throwing an awesome bitchfit and swearing a lot at everyone and everything and then maybe going and lying facedown on my bed and moaning a lot would help (and not send me into a coughing fit) then I would do it, for this has been a shitty, shitty week-and-a-bit and it is not over and I just want to call something a cunting dicksmack and be done with it. But my voice is kind of croaky and it's just not effective.

/whine

I got back from the funeral on Tuesday evening and spent yesterday playing Civ IV (I got the extension packs at the mall at the Mount) and coughing. Today I went to work, coughed a lot, and then left work at noon - I have a doctor's appointment for tomorrow morning. Possibly I have bronchitis again. In February. Again. *facepalm* So don't email me at work, dear people who normally email me at work! Email me at home!

I sort of kind of feel better now - at least, today is the first day since Saturday that I haven't needed an afternoon nap (and the hour I spent in bed this morning between 11am and noon DOES NOT COUNT because I was listening to music and could focus on the words, even), and this leads me to believe that I can maybe possibly go back to work tomorrow. Stupid winter colds. I'm still sniffling and coughing sporadically and my right ear is blocked with STUPID wax but these things are trivial provided I can stay conscious for, like, a whole entire day.

Also, and this is kind of pathetic, I'm feeling an overwhelming urge to make pumpkin pie. I have, like, a recipe and pumpkin and evaporated milk and sweet shortcrust pastry and VICTORY SHALL BE MINE on the understanding that VICTORY=PIE.

I'm listening to Celine Dion and reading Fall Out Boy fanfiction.

Oh, my life.