Thursday, January 8
Back Into The Swing Of Things
I sit here in an attempt to not write my essays that require doing. Thankfully, I have just realised / remembered that one of them doesn't have to be in for yet another week, so I can leave that one aside for now. Until the night before it is due in, as per usual. That leaves with just one essay to write by next Wednesday, which is a Good Thing. No work for me, hurrah!!!
What else has been happening? Well, just about everybody is back in my house now, six from seven so far. We've had a meeting with our landlord to complain about various problems in the house (leaking roof, non-closing windows, scabies-infested beds and a whole host of other random crap), which went pretty well. I felt quite sorry for him at one point, because the other two guys I was there with were quite aggressive towards him. I don't really have a problem with him, I think he's alright generally, but they were fairly vitriolic in their comments.
To put things into perspective, he tends to deal with me as the representative of the household (hey, so I'm the organised one), and doesn't really meet the others at all. This time three of us went down, and although we had a list of complaints / grievances to bring up, the other two then threw in some other random ones, which I knew nothing about. He promised to get them sorted, and I believe him, but it might take a little bit of time. Until then, we're stuck in our shithole of a house for a while longer. Boo.
We're all off to play football tonight, at last. Our household have joined a local 5-a-side league called Power League (ooh, threatening), and should be playing once a week. I can hardly wait, even though I'm going to be stuck in goal for most of it. I don't mind that much, and I'm the best goalkeeper out of us, but I do like to get out on pitch and do my share of running around, exhausting myself. At least it beats paying to join a gym...
I've settled back into London life again pretty well. This basically means walking everywhere, because nigh-on everything that I need is within walking distance, waiting for fucking ages for a bus at rush hour, then not being able to get on it because it is full anyway, and learning to sleep with some bright lights well close to your window. I swear the urban planners deliberately place streetlights directly outside the window of a bedroom. Fucking eejits.
I've finally fixed my poor computer as well. It died a horrible, destructive death just before Christmas, the day before I had to leave to go back to my parents' house for the holidays. I had to leave it in pieces over Christmas, and since I've been back I've been fixing it and installing all of the software which was unceremniously wiped by my anti-virus software before Christmas (Note to all: AVG Anti-Virus is fucking shit, don't use it. Spend some money on Norton or Sophos). It's been such a pain in the ass to have to stack up a pile of CD-Roms of all of the programs which need to be reinstalled, install them and restart the computer about 100 times per day as the programs variously require it.
Also, I really, really want broadband. I've been downloading loads of updates from Windows Update, and it takes forever on my 56k connection. Add to this a 20MB download of the new MusicMatch Jukebox and a 13MB Sophos anti-virus program, and it all adds up to a long time online. Plus Norton Utilities is obsolete as soon as you buy it, which means that as soon as you've spent 20 minutes installing the bugger, it then needs about an hour or more to download all of the program updates. It just doesn't work on a 56k connection!!!
Right, there's other stuff I want to write about, but it can all wait. Cheers people (having checked my site stats, I'm pretty sure that it's people and not person...).
