Thursday, June 28, 2007

Welshy was down again!
We booked ourselves a couple of nights in a hotel overlooking the Upton Park pitch! and it was great! all West Ham themed!
I stole a pen as a memento! It'll go in the drawer with the other things i've pilfered over the years. The teaspoon... the wine glasses... the bar mats and stuff!
Anyway, we also took the train down to Brighton for the day!
I love the beach! But it was just too cold to go Swimming! I played in the surf for a bit, splashing about and getting freezing cold and wet jeans while he stood by and watched!
And we ate chips on the beach! And he squealed like a girl when I made the gulls come (didnt you! hahaha)
And off to the sealife center and the pier where we played in the amusements and sulked over the fair rides being closed and stuff!
Ace couple of days!

Monday, June 25, 2007

Because of me, this notice was read out in the morning brief.

"Gallery assistants are reminded that the plastic bags for umbrellas are not to be worn about your person. Please kindly remember that you are representing the museum and act accordingly."

I feel so proud!

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Phew!
One of the drawbacks of working at the museum is that I have to work 3 weekends out of 4 (its ok, I've got the ones that Charlton are playing at home off already!)
not that I do much over the weekend anyway, now there's no football, but it sucks knowing you're in work the next day while everyones out and about.
Anyway. After work I found Welshy in Greenwich and we went for a meal and then another internet friend got in touch and we went to meet him at Covent Garden.
And we ended up all going to some random little club, playing some cheese! Whooyeah! At at 3am, I found myself wandering the streets of London with Welshy, still in my work uniform.
I've blogged about my adventures on the Night Bus before, which has left me with a deep horror of getting it again, never mind the fact that it takes just under two hours to get home on.
So we decided to find a hotel room, got totally ripped off at 90 quid for one near Covent Garden (It didnt even have shampoo! I had to wash my hair in the morning with a bar of soap! Just like in the Movies!)
So by about 4am, we were snuggled up for the night, me still clutching my work backpack.
7am and I bombed back home, just in time for the morning brief at work. STILL in my contacts (bear in mind I'm only really supposed to wear them for 7 hours at the most) and still in the uniform that I wore when I left for work the day before.
Yeah! Go me! Classy! Not even time for a change of socks or anything!
I feel quite fine about it all though, not hungover (unlike one certain grumpy Welshman this morning) and I've only just started to succumb to tiredness!
Quality fun night! Although far more money than I was expecting to spend on what I assumed would be a simple tea in a local pub!!

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Things that I learnt in my gallery today.
If you put your foot in each flagstone squarely. It should be 38 steps to walk through the "Your Ocean" section, depending on how you walk the route it can reach 39 steps.
If I walked very slowly around the upper deck I can make it last 4 minutes and 37 seconds. If I walked averagely I can walk around it in 3 minutes and 5 seconds. If I walked at my normal speed I can do it in 2 minutes and 12 seconds.
I kept a tally of how many visitors came by different galleries in a 5 minute period. This broke down as follows:
1 - West Street - 36
2 - Passengers - 37
3 - East Street - 18

4 - Cafe - 3

My Gallery - 10

People that then went into Your Ocean 5

Tickets Entrance - 21

Tickets Exit - 23
Left Ticket booth - 3

Right Ticket Booth 8 - equalling 32 people in total

this added up to 164 people (not counting my added bit of who then went where)
So using the power of a calculator I then worked out the mean average, so 164 divided by 10 means rougly 16.4 people went to each to each part of the museum.
How can you only have .4 of a person? what is that? an arm? a leg? How can I have got so bored to have dedicated my day into doing this kinda research?

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Welshy came to visit last night!
Yay!
He suggested it on Thursday and I didnt really believe he'd come all this way cos i'd hardly get to see him this weekend and even him texting me all the way down, didnt really sink in until I saw him enter the pub!
I kept acting like a real girl, laughing at him and telling him, he wasnt supposed to be here! He was supposed to be at home! In Wales!
It was a pretty good night actually, before this, I got invited earlier in the week to "Lark in the Park" a picnic organised by one of the guys from work. We'll call him Clumsy. Now i'm always covered in bruises from walking into things or accidently kicking things. But he's possibly the only person I know who's more spacky than me.
I mean, when I met him, he bounded over to meet me, like a little labrador puppy or something and immediately fell over a chair.
So about 14 of us had this nice picnic in the park after work and then some of us headed into The Yacht, which was great, although in a fit of over-generousity I insisted on buying the entire group a drink - and then The Idiot Brothers came in, who i've mentioned here in the past, as the family that treated us like we were infectious, well still do really, when Dad got sick.
Anyway, we see them out and about down the Standard or at the shops round the front occasionally, and I make the point of saying Hello and making them feel awkward, but I dont mind that so much cos I can then walk off feeling all smug and moral for forcing them to acknowledge me. But in the pubs and things I hate meeting them, I get all agitated and literally shake with rage and I know if I met them when I was really hammered, I'd probably confront them and that wouldnt be a smart move, so as soon as Welshy arrived I made him leave the group with me and we went to another pub and the night resumed smoothly.

Anyway. TODAY!! (This is turning into an epic!) I had to go clothes shopping for something that can be combined for both OF's wedding in July and CL's in November. Clothes shopping in itself is always traumatic. (its alright for you guys, you can walk into Debinghams without being accosted by a hundred orange-skinned sheep trying to force you into their chairs so they can attack you with the latest Super-Duper Mascara or tut at the dirt in your broken nails or something equally horrid)
And clothes shopping for events like this is always traumatic, cos it involved boring hours of looking at clothes and the constant "This'd be so much easier if you just gave in and wore a dress or a skirt" and my refusal to wear something flowery. Or black (well apparently black and green are BAD WEDDING COLOURS). Or White. Well white is a bad colour for someone incapable of keeping neat, clean and tidy. And I refuse to buy a pair of trousers, however nice they are, that cost £40 especially when I will only be wearing them twice at most. And I will still need to spend on a top, and new undies, and the accessory shit that HAS to go with it.
Its not that I want to be awkward... I'm just stubborn! After 2 hours Mother admitted defeat, and we went home, although I really need something to wear as jeans and trainers are out! So it'll be this whole debacle over again at some point. I'm dreading it, I really am!

Thursday, June 14, 2007


Oooh exciting!
I spent the day down the hill in the Queens House which is an art gallery. I'm not really an arty-farty person, but some of them are absolutely amazing and you can spend hours looking at them and constantly spot new things.
This is one of my favourites. You cant get it as good here, obviously as in the flesh, but there's something about the widow in black and the woman in purple behind her, you almost can feel how soft their clothes are and I love the man who's sitting there silently smoking his pipe. I was making up a little story about how he was an ex-sailor, longing to be back on the open waves.
The other good thing about that post today was that I discovered the research computers. Some internet sites were blocked, but I managed to find my way to the Charlton site to get the new seasons fixtures and i discovered that I can play the crossword, wordsearch and match the pirate game on the museum's website.
so that wasted a good hour or so, while I played rather than patrolled!

Monday, June 11, 2007






So! Let me tell you a little bit about my job, three weeks in!
Although employed by the National Maritime Museum, I seem to spend most of my time here. In the Old Royal Observatory - Home to the Meridian Line (Yawn), the timeball, which is no where near as good as it could be and Harrisons Clocks (Bigger Yawn)
If telescopes and clocks turn you on, this is like being in your very own porn movie.
However if like me, you couldnt care less about them, you spend a lot of your days with a glazed look on your face or running from the on the hour chimes and ticking clocks! Some galleries are pretty good and you spend all day on your feet learning stuff (I now consider myself a minor expert on Horatio Nelson) or staring blankly at a blank wall.
The people are all really nice and I like the fact that I get to sneak home 20 minutes early when I do the relief shift, but its very dull with nothing really to keep my brain turning into mush (I dont seem to be able to find a medium - plenty to keep my brain busy at the shop and fish, but not a lot to do and vice versa here!)
My favourite position has to be on the North Courtyard, where you get an amazing view over onto the city and I can stop and look out on the wildlife, in fact I've already started naming some of the pigeons and indulge in bird spotting, admiring the cheeky little tit birds and very excitedly seeing my first woodpecker and jay!
And of course I get to eat my dinners and share my breaks with the squirrels, deer and ducks!













Friday, June 08, 2007

Welshy's leaving me!
The bastard!
Incidently I gave him the address to this place, so say Hi to him!
He's pissing back off to Wales to get some money together and shit and we're doing grown-up things - which sucks, I swear I mean, I was almost getting excited about the pension plan at work, what the flying duckfuck is that about?
Anyway, hopefully it'll only be for a short while, and I'll be going to visit him on my long weekend in June. So! Lets all hope it goes better than my last attempt at a long distance thing!

Thursday, June 07, 2007

I took Welshy to the stables yesterday for a ride!
He did pretty well for a first-timer and I showed myself up completely, with a loss of concentration and crashed my pony into his!
Afterwards, we went with some of his uni friends to the Globe to see Othello, I've not read it before but I knew the vague story outline and got totally engrossed in it, it was awesome and they sold Ye Olde Ben and Jerry's!

Oh and as for the other thing? Loads and loads better and not half as painful now, I really quite enjoy it - not that I didnt before when we tried!

Friday, June 01, 2007

ouch!
As interesting as that was, not quite sure it was worth the wait!