Posted: Mon 13 November, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Health, Travel |
Ah, you can tell it’s Monday 13th.
It’s 8am, and I’m still at home. By now I’m supposed to be in London, and pretty much on my way to Kings Cross in order to get my arse on the Cambridge train.
Only I feel like crap, having developed a cold and cough, and slept through the alarms. And now, well, I’m going to be late.
Still, it means the trains won’t be as crowded, with luck…
Posted: Fri 3 November, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Health |
Now October’s over and done with, the default colour for D4D™ should’ve gone back to Yellow.
As I said at the time, D4D™ went that horrible pink colour by default for October as part of Breast Cancer Awareness month.
What’s really sad and geeky though is that I actually just wrote a simple little script-bit that’ll change it automagically in October from now on. I really need to get out more…
Posted: Tue 31 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Health, Thoughts, Travel |
Why is it that even whem I’m utterly knackered, having been awake since 5.30 this morning that my body wakes up again at about 9.30pm ?
It’s now half midnight, and I’m not even vaguely interested in going to sleep.
Grrrrr….
Posted: Tue 17 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Health |
So yes, Holmes Place, the snivelling bunch of bureaucratic tosspot scumbags. I really can’t begin to emphasise just how gobsmacked I am by their attitude to customers, but I have to say, I wouldn’t ever recommend Holmes Place to anyone ever again.
Fair enough, I understand, they have a minimum contract, and they make their money from the people who sign up in January in a fit of the New Year resolutions, do maybe a month or two, and then don’t come back. That’s where the profit and cream comes from for the business – after all, if people have to pay, but choose not to use the facilities, that’s their choice.
What I object to on just about every front, though, is their attitude when this isn’t the case, when you’ve moved (or, in my case, am primarily based) somewhere else, where there’s no Holmes Place within a radius of 65 miles. I can’t help that, and it’s down to the company not having a facility in the area. If there were a Holmes Place in the area, I’d be using it, and I would’ve transferred my membership over to that one. But there simply isn’t the facility. Yet I’ve still got to pay for four months where I can’t use the gym, not where I decide not to.
I’m still going to find the name of their customer services director, and write another snotty letter to them. In the meantime, well, it’s time to get D4D™ into the top ten on Google for a search on Holmes Place. Currently I’m only at about #15…
Posted: Sun 15 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, Letters, Work-related |
OK, I wouldn’t go so far as to imply that I’m actually getting better with money – I suppose I’m heading in the correct general direction to be getting better with money, but all the same, I’m nowhere even vaguely close to good, let alone fiscally responsible.
I should explain that a bit – I know how much I’ve got, I know what’s going out when, I know how much I owe (remarkably little, thankfully) and I know where the next lot’s coming from, and when. So on that score I’m fairly well organised. It’s just that I’m utterly bollocks when it comes to things like saving, or planning for the future. I can’t deny it, I’m shit. I’ve got money at the end of the month, I can always figure out what to spend it on. Save? Maybe next year.
So it’s been a bit of a shock to the system that this weekend I’ve
- Completed all the paperwork for a savings account, including the little bit that says “Direct Debit for £xxx per month to go in to the savings account“
- Also completed all the paperwork to sort out starting up a pension plan. Nothing earth-shattering or special, just a simple stakeholder pension that I can take with me from job to job without paying the earth to transfer it.But it also means that I’ve
- filled in another “take £xxx from my salary and shove it straight into the pension” form
and
- filled in some extra crap for the new pension company to find out what the fuck happened to the one I started when I opted out of SERPS when I was 16, on some very dodgy advice
- Bought a book about financial management and fiscal ‘personality’ (Alvin Hall’s “You and Your Money“, which looks like it’ll be an interesting read)
- And finally, sent a cheque to the thieving cunts at Holmes Place who won’t let me cancel the membership, despite being sixty-fucking-five miles from their nearest premises, but insist that I have to pay off the year’s contract. £260, the tossers. But there was a vaguely civil letter that also got sent with the cheque to the arse-wipe tollsters, and then there’s going to be an utterly impolite one that goes off to their customer services director, when I can find the name of the elusive little fucker
So I’ve been pretty organised, and there’s been a bundle of other stuff that’s been completed this weekend too, which makes it into a worthwhile weekend.
Although it’s still bloody scary, getting this organised – particularly when it comes to money and savings etc. Now I just need to actually do the paying-in bit…
Posted: Wed 11 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Getting Organised, Health, Travel, Work-related |
Oh yeah, that was one thing – breaking in new boots.
A few weeks back, I bought some new Cat boots to supplement the use of my normal steel-toecapped things. Up ’til now I’d worn them short-term (i.e. for a couple of hours at a time) on a few occasions, but this week has been the first week of constant wear. I chose this week as I emphatically wasn’t going to be walking serious distances, as the hotel I’m using is effectively just round the corner from the office. But of course there’s still the entire “walking from the station to the office” thing, and I’ve still done a fair amount of walking in them.
And of course they’re not properly broken in yet. So even with doing less walking than usual, the sodding things have rubbed against my heels, and I’ve a (broken) blister about the size of a 50p piece. Which is, needless to say, quite sore.
So yesterday I ended up buying some blister plasters (just to stop the sodding thing getting rubbed all the time) and a couple of pairs of hefty thick socks. And today my feet feel much better, and hopefully the blister will now start to heal up a bit.
And I need to buy a new pair of steel-toecap ones before long too…
Posted: Mon 2 October, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Health |
If you’ve never bothered setting a default colour-scheme for D4D™, then you’ll notice that the site is – for October only – using the excessively foul Pink colour-scheme instead of the standard bloody-horrid Yellow one.
There’s a reason for this – it’s Breast Cancer awareness month and as such a number of sites are going Pink for October. Live with it.
Or just change the default colour scheme to Yellow by clicking on it up there somewhere.