So leaving everything to the last minute actually was a godsend. It meant that I worked my ass off harder than if I’d finished before my deadline which meant that I had a lot more evidence and information in my folder for my trip to the office. Which turned out to be a bit of a shambles anyway since the guy who was supposed to be running me there was off that day and my boss ended up driving me down. Ohwell, at least I got there.

I got praise for my folder, the way it was laid out and some of the ways I had shown evidence and explained things. I went further than just typing out lists, I got well into the drawing flow charts and pie graphs and so forth. It was awesome when the training woman took evidence from my folder to add to her own! Now that’s kickass.

This Thursday we are having a birthday party in the store to celebrate Spar’s 50th. We’re having a Grease day, with us dressed up and playing the soundtrack, wine tasting, freebies for the kids and karaoke and raffles. I can’t wait, it’s going to be awesome. I’ll post pictures, I promise!

Anyway, enough of work. I got a compliment on my hair the other day, some girl asked me where I’d got it coloured and when I told her that I do my hair myself she was a bit shocked. She was even more shocked to discover that I use Tesco ownbrand shampoo and don’t use any (well, not usually) products in my hair. Rock on natural beauty!

[edit] I got my costume sorted. A black and white polkadot shift dress, neck scarf and ballet shoes but the wedged ones. Plus a quiff in my hair. It rocks. And cost me nothing!

Tomorrow is going to be a crazy one in work. We are stocktaking, which means me, the boss and our area manager stay in the stop after we close (10pm) to download the guns to the computer and then check any discrepencies. We’ve done this 3 times before and been lucky to leave by 2am!

Stocktaking isn’t actually too bad in its self, it’s just that there is so much stock in our shop that everybody needs to work at least a couple of hours tomorrow and do nothing but count. At least it’s all done by computers and scanners. I would not like to stocktake manually. That sounds horrendous.

Obviously I want this stocktake to go well, if we can account for nearly all of the stock that we’ve bought into the store the manager & supervisors get an additional bonus which is always nice. Saying that, we have been hit by a lot of shoplifters recently despite my heroic antics trying to stop them.

I got my first payment from PayPerPost yesterday. Granted it was only £2.40 or something but it’s nice to see some cash in my PayPal account. I have an other payment from them today for $12 but I can’t accept it, I keep getting a 404 which is rather annoying. I just want my money. I’ve emailled their support team so I’m just waiting for them to sort it out for me.

I’m also looking to sell a few clothes and books on eBay, or even just via message boards, just to raise some extra cash for my driving lessons. One thing I’ve realised about having to go to H.O every month is that I’m going to loose hours. They cannot pick me up at the shop so I either have to make my own way there or meet somebody from an other shop and get a lift with them, so it ends up that there’s no point me going to work first thing in the morning since I’ll need to leave as soon as I get there to go all the way back to the office. Not that I’m complaining about a lie in every fourth Wednesday, in fact today I took a half day since I’m owed hours.

It was such a great day to take a half day aswell! The sun is still shining and I have caught the sun quite nicely on my face and chest area. Makes a change from me being milk bottle white, I’m now slightly burned. I’m thinking about going up to the shops to buy cigarettes and jumping into the sunbeds for a quick 3 minute session just to intensify any colouring I got today. Although knowing my luck I’ll end up looking like a lobster.

On Saturday I went shopping as planned and spent a good whack of money in a few, short hours.

The boyfriend and I hit the shops in the early afternoon and by 5pm we were done and about £150 down! I did manage to buy quite a lot though, including a gorgeous Chocolate Java Chip Frappe from Starbucks. I think I maybe obsessed with them. Other purchases included a hot pink swing jacket from Primark, a cream tunic dress with green and brown leaf pattern (ouch, that sounds disgusting but it’s lovely), a brown belt with a huge bronze star buckle, 2 necklaces and a pair of earrings, a pair of black slouch pirate boots, new socks and pants and a lovely jacket for my boyfriend.

I also bought Katie Prices’ (AKA Jordan) new book, Crystal, which is really quite good. I didn’t believe that she could write but I take that back! It’s a good book, typically chick-lit but a nice read all the same. Watch out for a review sometime soon.

Before I goto work this evening I’m going to go and get a copy of my birth certificate and the form for getting my provisional drivers licence. I’m fed up with taking the bus everywhere so I’m on a mission to be driving legally by Christmas. Especially now that we might be changing the rota in work so that myself and the other supervisor never work an evening shift again. That is awesome, but it also means that I’ll be working 4 day shifts a week and that means waiting for a bus at 6am and then getting an other one at 6.25am to get to work. Which is not fun in winter, as you can imagine.

So, after I am paid on Friday the 17th August I only have three more pay days until Christmas. Granted I will have an extra £500 on my last wage from my savings scheme which I pay £100 into every month plus my quarterly bonus which I’ll get in my August wage (I think that it’s £141, which is better than nothing).

Between now and Christmas I have lots of money going out which I don’t normally have. My passport, for one, will be about £60 or something. My driver’s license is £40 (I think?). Our holiday to Tenerife will knock about £400 out my hands and driving lessons come in at £20 per hour. Ouch. I also hope to sit my two driving tests before Christmas, coming in at around £90 just for them. Plus I have my monthly bus tickets, dig money to my mother, paying off my overdraft, lunch at work, cigarettes, going out from time to time and our Christmas night out to pay. There’s also the small matter of a new laptop which is essential for my Management Training Course. I think, as always, I’ll stick with a Dell Inspiron. I love those laptops/notebooks with a passion and I’m gutted that my 6000 is dead! I’d be using one of many Dell coupons that are available, just so I can save some more money.
I am, probably, going to be even more skint than I usually am. Oh, (Christmas) joy a’right!

I’ve started buying Christmas presents already. I have purchased a few pairs of jeans and t shirts for the boyfriend over the course of the last three months, just as little extras. I also have a make-up brush set for my mother, one she has been going on about wanting for a few weeks that I managed to pick up in Debenham’s sale at half price.

Not only am I thinking about what I would like to buy as presents for other people, I’ve started writing my wishlist. Hey, give to receive is my motto. Selfish, or what? Ironically most of what I want is from USA-based stores, especially delias.com They have such a great selection of logo tshirts, I think I maybe in love! I’ve noticed a theme in logo shirts over here in the UK, really garish black or white tops with ‘I love boys, music and shopping’ plastered over them in Frankie Says Relax-style font and layout. Ugh, not nice the first time, not nice now!

I have a wish list for Delias, since that’s the only way that I could possibly get anything from the site. I would love to get any of these items - they are so much better than stuff I can get in Scotland at the moment since we’re going through a fashion-death I feel! Of course, if you were buying me a tshirt from my wish list (yeah..right!) you could always use a dELiAs.com coupon for it!

All of these stores have great savings to be made using coupon codes when you checkout, which for me is an absolute bonus. Why would anyone pay full price for something when they can get some cash off of their purchase?

I must look crazy, talking about Christmas already when it’s only August, but when you’re on a budget like mine you have to be organized!

Why are the photographs that I take with my phone outside always such a better quality than those that I take inside? It’s probably because of the light but inside pics always look really shitty and grainy. Grr. I took that picture of the bus because it was so old. It was like walking onto a time warp. But old things are good, they make me smile.

I can’t believe I actually took a good shot of it once I got off the bus and it was driving away. Not bad for a phone camera.

In other news I am getting all my hair chopped off on Saturday. I can’t wait, my hair is just about shoulder length at the moment and it’s far, far too long. I re-dyed my hair black tonight and its just so sexy. Hah, my mother hates it when I dye my hair black because she says that it makes me look really pale but I love it. It’s the sexiest colour in my book.

Oh, and I’m going to do a ‘Day In The Life’ thing tomorrow, because they’re too fun. Photopost a -coming!

I had a whole week off work, which was spent de-cluttering my wardrobe. I actually really enjoyed doing it, I found lots of things that I had lost and found stuff I thought I’d already chucked out! I ended up with 6 full black bags of things for Oxfam, clothes and books mainly. I felt so good about myself for being generous (and not selling stuff on eBay like I was planning) and finally tidying it all out (after a year!).

The de-cluttering extended to my laptop. Initially I cleared about 5GB of junk from my internal drive which I was proud of. But then I decided to install Linux as a duel-boot OS which was all fine and dandy until it refused to boot at all about 4 days later. I gave up trying to fix it and just re-installed WindowsXP. So here I am, starting again. This is exactly why I keep all my music and must-have files on my external drives.

When I went back to work on Friday though everything came down with a crash, literally. At around 7:05am I heard an almighty crash and immediately ran out to the shop floor. It turns out that a delivery van had reversed into one of our shop windows (our windows run full height of the shop) and had smashed it. Although the window didn’t come crashing into the shop it was still smashed. It was - and still is - being held together by the full sized fascia stickers on the inside of the window.

I felt so bad for the guy that did it as well. Accidents happen and although it was a stupid one it looks like he’s lost his job out of it as it was a different driver that showed up yesterday morning. Oh well…

The weekend was fun, the boy and I went shopping for a new bed and he ended up getting a big divan bed. We went with his mum (hey, we needed her driving skills!) and spent about 4 hours trawling across the south side of Glasgow for a bed! Apparently he’s never going shopping with both of us again. Ah well, at least we have a comfy bed now.

I’ve just finished an other shift and I’m starting to feel like I am never away from the shop. I only work 39hrs a week but I’m always either there early or stay back to talk or finish what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job but I could do with a break (again, I took a week off in January). I suppose it’s a good thing that I have a weeks worth of holidays to take before the end of March then, huh?

My wages seem to be so little this month for all the work that I’ve done though. I keep forgetting that I put by £100 per month into a company savings account automatically and I can’t touch it until June/July. I love this scheme because there’s no way in hell that I would put money aside off my own back. It means I should be able to buy a little second hand car in the summer when I pass my driving test.

I’m applying to do a Trainee Manager’s Course with the company - out of 50 stores from anything from 7 to 30odd staff (at a guess) they only pick 4 candidates a year but I’m praying that I am one of them this year, I would love to do it and 3 of the 4 who did it last year are now managers of their own shops. That, sadly enough, is my absolute dream - a shop of my own to run (even if I don’t actually ‘own’ it). I know I probably won’t get to do it this year because I’ve only been a supervisor a few months but here’s hoping!

Anyway, to bed I must go - even though I’m off tomorrow I’ll still end up waking at 6am.