Everything I’ve done today seems to have broken or screwed up. I’m not a very happy bunny.

For a start this site went berzerk. Totally and utterly broken. And the best bit? I didn’t do anything. Hadn’t touched it, or logged on, in days. After reinstalling WordPress 15 times in an hour, finally everything is back on track except the fact barely any of my posts or pages have tags anymore, or if they do it’s the wrong ones. But I’m working on that as we speak.

What I really should be doing is finishing off my work for the Management Training Program since our next meeting is on Wednesday. Seriously thought I was finished but I’m no where near completion. I can see an all nighter on Tuesday happening.

I went shopping earlier for a few things for T In The Park which is 3 weeks away. So excited. I bought a waterproof jacket (it’s Scotland. That means rain), a pair of brown army-style shorts, bag to keep my tickets, camera and purse in, a million pairs of socks and a new top which is white and lime green with swallows and polka dots. It sounds horrendous, but it really is lovely. Spent more than I meant to, but hey what’s new?

The one good thing that happened today was RTDOBE’s Doctor Who episode. It made me *squee* outloud. A lot. And cry, laugh..generally become a hysterical fangirl again. I knew Bad Wolf before Donna said it, because I am the Bad Wolf queen. I just can’t believe that A) I need to wait til next Saturday to see part two and B) I’ll miss part three because I’ll be at T In The Park.

Expect a full review once I rewatch it…and have some sleep.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about my life recently; where I am, what I want from life etc. Up until now everything has just been this big game to me - I still feel like I’m 16 years old when the truth is that I’m 22. There are so many things that I should be able to do by now but because I don’t take life seriously I’ve never completed things that other people my age have. The only responsibility that I have is work - counting £1000s of pounds daily and opening or closing the shop. Not really impressive, is it?

Other people my age have been able to drive for 5 years, have their own cars and houses - heck some people I went to school with are now parents, married and in some cases, dead (ok, that’s not what I want from life but that’s where we all end up so I suppose it’s inevitable).

I can’t even manage 4 weeks worth of wages, you can guarantee that by week two I’m all out of money, granted half my wages go straight to my mum to pay back my debt to her but that still leaves me with £100 a week to myself, and it goes all too quickly. I might want to grow up and buy a car and have children (oh, and pay for everything else that goes with them..food, clothes,a crib, crib bedding, toys, pram, high chair) but if I can’t even manage to survive a month when all I have to pay is my bus ticket then what chance do I have?

So I’ve set myself a goal, after having a really long hard thing about this. I’ve managed to cut my smoking down to around 15 a day, but I want to get this down to 10 and then 5 and the none. The money that I save on cigarettes is going into my ISA. Well, most of it anyway. That means that when I pass my driving test, which should be within the next 6 months), I’ll have a bulk of money to either pay a deposit on a new car or buy an older one outright. Failing that, it’ll be used for a deposit on a flat. I’ve given up the thought of living with the boyfriend and I’ve worked out that in one years time I’ll have paid off all my debts so any money I have left I can spend on moving out or a car, or both.

I’m hoping to be living on my own again within 18 months - with or without the boyfriend living with me. I actually managed really well when I moved out of my mum’s house before until I lost my job but I have about 95% job security where I am at the moment and the only place I can go is up - and with that comes better wages.

My plan is that if I write about it here then I can’t give up saving and moving towards my goals - that is the idea anyway. I’m sure I’ll stick to it.

Messy Room, originally uploaded by Melissa Gray.

This is a photo I took of my room on the 22nd April. It’s now the 3rd June and even though I tidied it all back then, it’s in an even worse state now. So my task for this afternoon is to completly gut it.

I’m going to rearrange it, throw out everything that I don’t need anymore (like 8 year old nail varnish, anyone?) and sell anything that’s still in good nick and people will find useful, like my old Dell Inspiron for spares & repairs only mind because it’s wrecked.

I can also see all my books being sold, they’re threatening to take over my room at the moment, as well as clothes. I have so many but can never find anything to wear. I’ve been to Oxfam 4 times so far this year and yet I still keep finding more clothes lying around…not to mention that bags and bags of my stuff that’s at the boyfriends house.

Right, enough blogging - I’m going to tidy. Anything to take my mind off the fact I’m not smoking and have a horrid pain in my lungs :/

US coffee chain Starbucks has come under fire for a new logo that critics say is offensive and overly graphic.

The Resistance, a US-based Christian group, has called for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant.

It says the chain’s new logo has a naked woman on it with her legs “spread like a prostitute… The company might as well call themselves Slutbucks”.

Starbucks says the image - based on a 16th century Norse design of a mermaid with two-tails - is not inappropriate.

Rather, the image is a more conservative version of the original Starbucks design, which hung above the chain’s first store when it opened in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in 1971.

‘Rubenesque’

It says the image - the longstanding logo for Pike Place bags of coffee - is appearing on some of its cups as part of a promotion, and will remain “for several weeks”.

Howard Schultz, who bought Starbucks in 1982, described the emblem in his memoirs as “bare-breasted and Rubenesque; [it] was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself”.

Although its share price has plunged in recent years, Starbucks has 16,000 coffee shops in 44 countries worldwide, employing more than 170,000 staff.

The chain has just opened its first outlet in Argentina.

Based in San Diego, the Resistance claims to have more than 3,000 members across the US and has gained a reputation for espousing diverse conspiracy theories

Source

Sorry, but what?! How on earth is that slutty? As far as I’m aware, this was the original Starbucks logo which is being used again. It was originally used between 1971-1987. It was only in 1992 that the Starbucks lady lost her body to become the familiar logo we see today.

At the moment, the boy is driving (that’s a lie, his grandfather is driving) to Edinburgh to pick up the pool table I bought him for his 24th birthday. You have no idea how excited I am, I’ve wanted to buy him a pool table for so long, and in a few hours it’ll be all set up in his garage.

It took a long time to find one to buy, we ended up going with one off eBay that was slightly damaged. There’s nothing wrong with the actual playing surface, just the little window at the side where you see the potted balls is missing, which is easy to fix. We got it for 10% of the retail price, which is £3,100. There’s one other problem, the cloth is lilac but I’ve been reading up on recovering / refelting pool tables and actually it doesn’t look that hard. Plus our friend’s dad is an absolute pool shark and should be able to give us a hand doing it as he’s done it before.

At this moment the boy plus the 5 students we’ve bought it off of will be carrying the slate bed down 2 flights of stairs, don’t envy them one bit! Funnily enough they failed to mention that they lived in a flat when we bid for it.

Anyways, I’m going to read my new book that I got in the RBL last night for 50p, Number 10 by Sue Townsend. Looks excellent, so I’m going to sit for a while with a huge cup of coffee and an Easter egg (yes, we still have Easter eggs left!) reading it.

Oh, random.. The Fratelli’s new song is excellent. Just heard it on E4 music. New album soon please, boys.

I’m having the nightmare of all nightmares. It all began yesterday…

My area manager came into the shop and wanted to talk to me. I thought he was going to pull me up for being 10 minutes later the other day, but he was in fact telling me that in 5 weeks time I’m moving to an other store as a supervisor (ie my current job within the company). The way it goes is that I’m leaving the shop that I’m in (and love), and I don’t have a choice in the matter. Apparantly the manager, other supervisor and I have ‘too close a working relationship’ and are too clique-y. Uh, what? Surely getting on with your work mates is a good thing, and we are a bloody good team! Also there’s the small fact that an other supervisor HAS to be moved from the store that he’s in and the only one he can come to is mine, and that means one of us goes - ME!

The shop that they’re proposing that I move to is hard for me to get to because I don’t drive - it’s 8 miles away and the bus stop is one mile away from the store, and I’d need to walk through an industrial estate at 10pm to get to said bus stop. I’m not putting my life in danger to get to work in a shop I don’t want to go to, even though that’s exactly what seems to be happening. I admit that this new shop is a lovely, lovely shop if it was tidy and that I need experience in as many different shops as possible before I get offered a manager’s position but the fact that I’m being pushed into it isn’t sitting well with me at all.

I can say no, as I have a joker up my sleeve - my contract which states that I do not have to move to another shop unless it is within a certain distance of the current shop that I’m working in. I’m still waiting to hear back from the second time that I said no to the area manager earlier this morning. But, he’s also said that ‘to think about what I’m saying no to’ which confuses me a bit.

Needless to say, I’m not a happy bunny at the moment - I’m stressed and worried and downright pissed off that I’m leaving the shop that I love and my friends. But, saying that…everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?

I’ll keep you updated!!

A few hours ago I opened up my GoogleReader and began reading through the 100+ feeds that I’ve managed to neglect over the course of the past 4 days. I was quite content reading away until I came across an entry from Nettuts.com about creating a layout. I loved the end result of the tutorial and ended up creating my own theme from the tutorial. It’s very similar to the tutorial, but at the same time, it’s not really. Uh, whatever. I love it and it’s staying for the long run (i.e. about 2 weeks).

I’ve got a couple of things still to add, my Reading Library to chane back to running off a plugin rather than a script from another site, and I’m not too sure about the text at the top…too much like a menu, maybe? I don’t know. I’ll see if it grows on me by the morning.

It’s a miracle that I’m still awake, I woke up pretty early this morning because the sun was blaring through my curtains. I’m impressed that the sun was shining on a Bank Holiday to be honest, such a shame that I had to go to work though - I spent half the night staring out the front door wishing I was sitting in a park, eating a picnic and listening to music with my mates! And after the chaos trying to get to work I really wasn’t in the mood to be working at all. I’m off til 4pm on Wednesday and I plan to fill those hours with as much as possible rather than my usual of sitting watching TV or reading a book.

I want to do all my laundry and take old clothes to a charity shop since I’ve got clothes everywhere which I hardly ever wear. And I really need to plant all the bulbs that I bought a few weeks ago in the front garden so that when summer finally arrives the garden will be nice and colourful rather than just grass and a few roses. I like having something pretty to look at when I’m sitting outside reading.

Other than that, I don’t know how I’m going to fill the next two days - I have no spare cash so anything that I can do must be free. If it’s nice again tomorrow I’ll probably take the dog down to the local country park for a while, I’m sure she’ll enjoy it and I could do with the fresh air.

Since around 9am this morning (it’s now 4pm) I’ve been sitting online, jailbreaking my iPod touch and sorting my music collection, which was a vast job. I’m still nowhere near finished. I’m pretty anal (hah, I can imagine the search referrals I’ll get with that one) about my music collection being titled and tagged correctly. And all the ‘The’ bands are sorted alphabetically, like ‘Verve, The - Bittersweet Symphony’. I don’t know what made me start doing that but I like it that way. And somewhere along the line in the past five years I decided that all the nice little album artworks that were included with albums I’d downloaded were taking up valuable space and deleted them all. Uh, what a mistake. I’m now re-downloading album artwork and manually adding them to albums in iTunes since obviously there’s lots of albums that I have that iTunes doesn’t have. I’m special that way.

Anyway, I digress. Is it so hard for people to upload files to the internet and tag them properly? It would save so much time for people like me.

I’m currently sitting in bed, still in my PJs, waiting for the in-laws to leave on holiday so that I can jump downstairs and make breakfast and coffee without having to make smalltalk with my hair everywhere (seriously, having short hair is murder when you wake up) and yesterday’s eyeliner still on. I could, obviously, brush my hair and take the eyeliner off but I can’t be bothered. I’d rather stay a mess until I have to get ready for work. Hey, it’s Sunday I’m allowed!

Tomorrow is my 22nd birthday. I don’t want to be 22. I think I stopped wanting to get older when I was about to turn 20 and could no longer be a teenager. Being 22 means that the next milestone in my life is 30 and that’s a scary, scary thought. And the fact that I’m 22 and still cannot drive (legally), don’t have any savings and am in debt to my mother for nearly £3000 is rubbish. I still don’t have a concept of money, it just burns a hole in my pocket. The best example being that my mum gave me £50 yesterday as part of my birthday so that I could at least go out this weekend and have money to do so. I spent £20 of it getting to and from work (taxi each way because I was feeling lazy - how stupid am I?), about £6 on lunch yesterday, £5 on cigarettes, £2 on lottery tickets, £8 on random rubbish in the shop - Lucozade for the boy because he was hungover, cakes, smoked sausages for our dinner, a kids Lucky Bag because it’s the tackiest thing that I’ve ever seen, chocolate bars. So that leaves me with £10. And I’ve nothing major to show for it. Grrrrr. I should have put the whole lot of it in my ISA that I opened up yesterday. It’s the only way that I’ll save money - direct debit straight out my account into a taxfree account that I can save up to £3600 a year in. I’m planning on sticking just £50 a month into it. But I also have a direct debit going to my mum each month for £450 to cover my phone, Council Tax, dig money and the money that I owe her. Still, it leaves me with just over £300 a month to spend as I like, or save…

I’m using an app on my iPod Touch called PocketMoney to help me understand where I’m wasting money, even though I know that all my money goes on cigarettes, taxis and lunch in the shop. I’ve cut down the amount that I smoke but it’s not making much of a difference. And every so often I take lunch with me, but I’ve usually bought the stuff that I’m taking with me so it doesn’t make much difference.

Wonder how long it will be until I’m posting that I’ve ran out of money?