I’ve had such a busy weekend, done more than I usually do and it’s made me so tired even though it was fun.

On Saturday morning I spent about 4 hours (and £30) finding charms, memory wire, pendants, beads, findings, chains, business cards, well everything really for my new website - honeybee-designs.com - where I’m selling all the jewellery that I make. I opened it on Saturday morning and I’ve made £20 already. Like, that’s crazy. I didn’t expect to make anything until I’d added all the stock and advertised it a bit more. The best bit? I only sold two items, a matching earring / necklace set to one girl. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to spend more time making jewellery than I expected. The fun bit is actually sourcing everything that I’m using to make my pieces, I’m especially into finding antique / vintage jewellery and giving it a new lease of life by updating it and making a brand new piece from it.

Later that night I headed down to the boyfriends house, where we started watching Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Gosh that program is sick but I actually really like it even although some of the cases that they’re solving made me feel ill. At around 8pm I had this sudden thought in my head that I didn’t have my shop keys to open up on Sunday morning, surprise surprise I’d left them in the shop safe - again. So I headed down to the shop to pick them up and decided to pop along to my friends Andy and Carly’s house/flat warming party. They’ve just moved into a flat just along from their work (my old shop) and 10 minutes away from my work so I couldn’t really not go see them. Part of me wishes that I hadn’t as I was so tired in work the next day and there were two people there that I don’t get on with (an other supervisor and his boyfriend, who I’d only met that night. Oh my god, camp as hell. Usually I love camp guys but this dude was overwhelming with his high voice and annoying habit of trying to talk to me when I wasn’t interested). The other part of me is so glad that I went - I love Andy to bits and I miss working with him so much. It was a great night, and I’m seeing him again on Thursday after a meeting at the work’s head office, yay!

Sunday during the day I was working, which was boring. When I was filling out the wage sheet I realised that I’d worked 54 ½ hours last week - that’s crazy. If you include Sunday (ie working Sunday-Sunday) that’s 64½ plus 3½ hours unpaid lunch breaks. No wonder I’m bloody tired.

Since I’d done so much in the shop over the past week I decided that we were having an easy day; everything was done and not much needed doing, just paperwork and tidying up. Although I did find out that my idea of an easy day and the staffs are two different things. It’s starting to piss me off how little they seem to do, or slowly. There’s two members of staff that are awesome and two that aren’t quite so awesome to work with. Funnily enough it’s those two that dislike me because I expect them to work. Hello, you’re in work getting paid, I’m going to make you do something for that £5.57 an hour. Like I’ve said before though, I’ve done the whole making friends in work thing, now it’s all about me getting my promotion and running a fantastic shop. I don’t care if they hate me, it’s my job to make sure that the shop’s run to the best standard that it can be and if that means I expect you to work stock then damn right I’m going to tell you when you’ve done it wrong and make you re-do it. Hah. No wonder I’m known as the bitch (in a loving way, you understand) with my ex-workmates.

• Richard Hammond in another Morrison’s advert? Noooo! #
• Jewellery site nearly ready to go live, woot! #
• http://rev.iew.me is keeping me awake. #
• http://honeybee-designs.com/ <- please fund my Christmas partying. Adding new products all the time x #
• radio1 live lounge 3 is amazing #
• The Automatic - Love In This Club is freaking amazing. #
• Google keeps crashing out on me #
• wohoo, got approved for the Knight Rider (2008) fanlisting. I feel like I’m 16 again #

1. Websites had version numbers in the titles - like AshesFromStars.com version 26 - punkrawk!
2. Everybody had plugboards in their sidebar?
3. We all felt rather ?
4. It was mighty important to tell your visitors what you were currently wearing, drinking, eating, watching, thinking…
5. Greymatter and Bravenet guestbooks ruled the ‘net
6. Speaking of sidebars, why did we have them 100px wide with 6pt justified text? Or was that just me?
7. Scrollbars were coloured to match layouts, especially when they were for an iframe
8. exotic backgrounds included black and white grid boards and punky photoshop brushes yanked from LiveJournal icon communities.
9. We didn’t use words for navigation, preferring to use 001, 002, 003, 004, 005 with no title tags instead.
10. TodaysDomainOnline.com was the place to plug your site?

Needless to say, I just found one of my old websites and cringed.

For example:
reviews.chemical-69.org
hellodarling.org
sparkling-stars.co.uk

lookiez I made a layout for glowenshi and it bloody well rocks! I love it love it love it love it love it! hehe…it’s totally, and utterly….well go see for urself anf sign da gbook while ur at it! hehe
xox

- sparkling-stars.co.uk blog entry from August 03 2001.

I will go silently and die of embarrassment now.

I can’t quite believe that I’m still awake, even though it’s only 4.30pm. I’m amazingly tired, having worked the past four days and I’ve not got a day off until Saturday, then I’m in again for 4 days. Who ever said that working in a shop was easy was lying through their teeth.

Even though I was working this morning, it was only a wee half day in for stock taking which went wrong in every possible way that it could - goodbye bonus in February. Stock was missed, discrepancies were all over the place and the boss was stressed out so when he told me that I could go home at 11am I was out of there like a shot. It’s a good job too because an hour after I got home the door went, it was the postman with my Scotland hoodie, Radio Clyde t-shirt and various other novelty t-shirts that I’d ordered from the internet last week in a bid to start my Christmas shopping early this year.

This afternoon I’ve started making some of my necklaces and other jewellery for my website - honeybee-designs.com¹. I’ve got 5 necklaces and two pairs of earrings made already and I’ve bought a load more stuff to start making my jewellery out of; it’s really exciting me and the actual making jewellery bit calms me down after a long day in the shop.

I’m starting to feel that I’m neglecting the internet again - I can’t help it due to never having a bloody minute to myself. I’m out of the loop, again. But I’ve signed up for Rev.iew.me, which is a reviewing site… you know, like yoursite.nu used to be when Linda owned it. Anyway, it’s fun but I’m pissed off that I forgot to stick afs.com onto Maintenance Mode when I broke WordPress the other night and now I have two crap reviews. Gutted.

¹honeybee-designs.com has not launched, yet.

Dearest customers,

If you happened to buy food from our hot food take-away or any in-shop baked bread today I’m really, really sorry if you end up with food poisoning. It’s an outside chance, since the ovens are all on timers but just in case - sorry.

See, the boy who does the hot food / bake off at the weekend turned out still drunk this morning. Couldn’t stand up quite right drunk. And obviously I’d to send him home which meant I’d to make the bread and cook the sausages and bacon for all your breakfasts. Now, that sounds easy right? Yeah well I can burn water.

I’m guessing that you’re pretty safe with the bread and croissants and pastries that I made (apologies for the bad icing job on the cinnamon swirls!), it’s just the bacon and sausages that I’m worried about. Saying that I had a roll and sausage for my breakfast and I’m ok so we should be good.

Normal service with the hot food will resume tomorrow!

Yours,
Melissa
Supervisor who doesn’t like shouting at her staff, even when they roll into work drunk

Winter Weekend Uniform by AshesFromStars

This is what I’ll be wearing all winter.

At long last, after ten years of ohhing and ahhing about what I want to do with my life I’ve actually realised what I was born to do.

In those ten years I’ve tried my hand at a few jobs, a few college course and 8 Standard Grades which have little relevance to my vocational calling. The good news is that I’m already on the ladder to my chosen career; and nearly finished a course in it. Of course - retail management.

Yes, I know I’ve been training to be a manager for over a year with this course that I’m on through work but I only applied for it in the first place because I wanted to learn more about the job I was already (and still am) doing and didn’t for one second think that it would end up in becoming a store manager myself in the near future. It was also something else to stick on my CV when the time came to move on as I’d done in every single job I’ve had before now. I always grabbed something from the company I was working for to boost my qualifications, experience.. whatever.

But now there’s an actual chance that I could end up as a store manager. It’s a slim one, but it’s there all the same. So now I’m applying myself even more to prove I’m the obvious choice for the vacancy which will be coming up in the not too distant future. This situation is a far cry from the problems I was having a few weeks ago which nearly resulted in me handing my notice in!

Point of the story is I’ve spent the last 4 hours reading online versions of trade magazines (some of which I already read in the shop) and realising that retail makes me quite excited. And that it’s an area where I can continue to learn things each and every day. We have problems in the shop with making money due to a Tesco opening up down the street and the local high school being rebuilt miles away from the shop so they’ve (I need to get used to saying we since it’s my shop now) lost all the customers from there. So I’ve been racking my brains coming up with ideas and it’s amazing - I’m finally comfortable with what I’m doing and confident about my job and my skills.

Not bad for a decade of wondering ‘what will I be when I’m older?’ and it certainly beats what I wanted to be when I was at school - a receptionist!

Yup, November. The time where I start worrying about Christmas presents that I’ve to buy, how I’m going to out-do myself over the presents I purchased last year and how the heck I’m going to stick to my budget. Oh, and the fact that I only have two more pay days until Christmas.

Not only that but I have my mother’s birthday between now and Christmas too; and she’s the hardest person on the planet to buy gifts for.

Usually I love shopping, even window shopping. But come November I hate it due to the Christmas music, decorations and people seem to become so rude when the holiday shopping season starts. I’m trying to do as much as I can online this year to stop me wanting to kill Santa’s little helpers and throttle unhelpful temp staff that seem to take over the shopping center.

I have some amazing ideas for gifts this year, I’m just thankful that I have a small group of family and friends because every year it’s getting harder to think of gifts for each and everyone of them. Take for instance my grandmother. She’s nearly 80 and her entire life is made up of reading magazines, doing crosswords and watching the few channels on cable she can work out how to access. Every single year I struggle to find a suitable present for her. This year I’m taking the easy way out - £40 in Debenhams vouchers.

Have any of you started your holiday shopping yet? Or are you one of the amazing people that can leave it all until Christmas Eve and still end up with the best gifts ever?

You can share your own shopping confessions over at shopandconfess.com and win up to $1,500. Just remember to use my blog as your referrer!

read more »

Ok, I’m in love with the new WordPress dashboard. Seriously, it’s sexy. Well as sexy as UI can be.

In honour of a new WordPress release (even though it is beta) there’s a new theme up too… which I hate already. Good times.

WordPress Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Eric M Martin.

Smiley pumpkin, originally uploaded by Mini Pixel

Originally uploaded by Kristofor808

Since I’ve not got any skills whatsoever in carving pumpkins, I thought I’d just post about the best ones that I’ve found on various blogs that I visit
The WordPress one wins by far, though.

I went out for coffee the other night with a girl I used to work with, N. We met at 6.30pm, I got home at 10.15pm. As somebody who doesn’t go out with girls at all, I loved it all. It was great having somebody to gossip with, somebody to tell The Biggest Secret In My Life Right Now © and generally just be me for the night.

You see, at work I put on this act. For a start I’m Melissa in work. Hate that name, but they’ve started calling me it in the shop (probably because, you know, it’s my name) so I suppose it’s there to stick. I’m cool and confident (around 90% of the time), know what I’m talking about and put up this amazingly large wall around myself. In the space of a month I’ve gone from working with mates who I talked about nearly everything with to, well, not talking about anything other than date checks, orders or how short the tills were the day before. It’s getting to me quite a bit. Even if my previous workplace I had a wall up around me, but two people got the key to the gate and were the only people in the entire world that I spoke to about certain things. That’s quite a bit sad really.

At home? Yep another act, if only because me and my mother don’t really see eye to eye on anything. I barely see her, and if I do you can bet she’s drinking and I can’t stand people who drink. So I lock myself away in my bedroom, listen to music, read, browse the ‘net and generally act like a 15 year old.

So that leaves time with my boyfriend. I’m mostly ‘me’ with him but again, there’s things I don’t feel comfortable talking to him about, especially work because he’s just not interested in my job. I don’t blame him, as soon as he starts talking about his job I switch off too.

I don’t have any female mates. I get on better with boys, or so I thought. It was such a relief talking about stuff that’s going on in my life just now with somebody who’s sort of in the same boat. And hearing everything that’s going on in her life made me realise a lot. It’s crazy, meeting up for one cup of coffee has made me come to such a serious decision in my life.

If I haven’t been offered a managerial position within the company that I currently work for, and am training to do, before my 23rd birthday I’ll be looking for something else

I turn 23 in April. That’s 6 months; more than enough time for me to prove that my 18months of training has paid off and I have the skills to run my own store. Yes, I’m young. But so are a few managers in the company. I know that I can do this, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. The company obviously think that I can do it, or I wouldn’t be on this course.

Finally I have a week off of work when the boyfriend is off too, we’ve been trying to arrange the same week off together for what seems like months and finally we’ve got it. Not that it’s going to be a week off for me though - I’ve got a meeting at the office on Wednesday for my MTP and tomorrow night I’m going out for coffee with a girl I used to work with for a gossip session. He’s at the dentist today and will currently be knocked for six with whatever drugs they’ve pumped him full of this time, as he’s the world’s biggest scaredy cat when it comes to the dentist and goes to a specialist who gives him drugs before doing any work, so I’m not seeing him until later on. Oh and I’ve got a million and one things to do tomorrow during the day including posting the things that I’ve sold on eBay, buying something pink to wear for the meeting on Wednesday as they’re having a Breast Cancer dress-in-pink day and try not to spend money on clothes that I don’t need.

I was planning on going somewhere this week as well, we’ve been checking out last minute breaks for the past few weeks, just looking for a couple of days away somewhere. I wanted to go back to Blackpool because it’s my favourite place in the UK outside Glasgow, because of the Pleasure Beach and the tacky shops and the trams. I’m a geek, I love getting the tram in Blackpool. It’s not because I’m some anorak or anything, it’s just because I go everywhere by bus and the trams are different to what I’m used to! The chips are amazing too, and nothing beats Blackpool Rock!
We were also looking at Cardiff, but that’s just because I am a geek and want to stand in the same place John Barrowman and David Tennant have in Cardiff Bay…

As it turns out, we’re going nowhere. There’s no point going away for a couple of days when we can just stay in the house which we’ll have to ourself. Sorted. I’ll just drag him into Glasgow for a change of scenery when shopping…

So much for me trying to make money this month, I’ve ended up paying out more than I have - typically. Although I’ve not bought myself anything other than new hair combs and hair extensions. But they’re for a party and I needed them (honestly.. it’s for Halloween).

I have raked in quite a bit of money but I’ve been buying Christmas presents already. I was planning on using my staff vouchers (money back when you spend a certain amount) in the shop to buy alcohol for some presents but they’re stopping them so I’ll need to use them before Christmas and I’ll end up buying cigarettes and boring things like bread and milk… darn, I’ve got quite a lot of the vouchers saved up as well.

I’m enjoying working in my new shop, but I miss my boys. It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it’d be but I messed up a bit yesterday - my own fault for being so dizzy sometimes. I lost £100 from the money I was banking because I was paying for change at the same time as putting it together and looked absolutly everywhere - including the bin! Turns out it was in the safe the whole time, which I was sure I’d checked. Stressed me out, but it only happened because I was so tired.

cupcake 004, originally uploaded by Melissa Gray.

My new hoodie, how cute is it? Seriously lovin’ it.