Well, haven’t I been a busy girl recently? Along with working over 45 hours a week I’ve managed to find time to work on my management training program quite a bit (currently sitting at 25,000 words!), arrange all my Christmas shopping before I even get paid and go and buy it all and set up two websites for clients! Granted the clients in question are family friends but still - it’s great to have something to add to my folio again. You’d never think that I could actually code a website from scratch considering both my website and livejournal are themes that I’ve tinkered with a lot!

As of next week I’ll have finished my Christmas shopping, paid off the remainder of my debt and finally had a night out with my old boss - it’s the shop’s Christmas night out on the 8th December and I can’t wait! It might just be a pub dinner and then heading into Glasgow city center afterwards but it’s going to be a blast since I haven’t seen boss-lady in a while and a few of the other guys that are going no longer cover my shop so I’ve not seen them in ages either!

It’s a shame that I won’t have my new camera by then, since I’m getting it for my Christmas from the boyfriend, but hey - I’ll take lots of camera phone pictures!

So, ladies and gents, what is Santa bringing you this year?

Well, haven’t I been a busy girl recently? Along with working over 45 hours a week I’ve managed to find time to work on my management training program quite a bit (currently sitting at 25,000 words!), arrange all my Christmas shopping before I even get paid and go and buy it all and set up two websites for clients! Granted the clients in question are family friends but still - it’s great to have something to add to my folio again. You’d never think that I could actually code a website from scratch considering both my website and livejournal are themes that I’ve tinkered with a lot!

As of next week I’ll have finished my Christmas shopping, paid off the remainder of my debt and finally had a night out with my old boss - it’s the shop’s Christmas night out on the 8th December and I can’t wait! It might just be a pub dinner and then heading into Glasgow city center afterwards but it’s going to be a blast since I haven’t seen boss-lady in a while and a few of the other guys that are going no longer cover my shop so I’ve not seen them in ages either!

It’s a shame that I won’t have my new camera by then, since I’m getting it for my Christmas from the boyfriend, but hey - I’ll take lots of camera phone pictures!

So, ladies and gents, what is Santa bringing you this year?

I found out yesterday that Asda, one of the most horrible companies in retail, are to open a store in my home town. They will be putting in an application to the council within the next few weeks - and I will be putting in my complaint against it.

Ok, so the area where they wish to build this 60,000 sq ft building is derelict. It’s covered in graffiti and there hasn’t been a company opened in the office buildings that currently stand there for at least five years. Yes it needs a new company to move in, but why not utilise the current office buildings that stand there? If South Lanarkshire Council lowered their rates, somebody probably would move in - Vodafone were the last inhabitants, I believe, and they didn’t last very long at all due to spiralling costs.

Why do I have such a problem against companies like ASDA? Probably because I work for an independent convenience retailer. Granted, we’re part of a symbol group but we’re still independent..

I know how hard it is to get customers through the door of a small shop with a large supermarket down the road. I know how badly sales are hit when a new shop opens, or said supermarket gets a re-fit. I see how much stock costs and the low markups on everything. I might not own the shop I work in, but I know how hard it is to keep it afloat and actually make a profit.

With monopolizing stores like ASDA and Tesco moving into every spare piece of land in the country it’s making life for the small, independents hard. In fact in East Kilbride town centre there are shop unit after shop unit lying completely empty, their To Let signs more of a common occurance than actual shops. The place is becoming a ghost town, and the council are going to sign it’s death warrant by allowing ASDA to open on a nearly-out of town piece of land.

Imagine the situation. Mrs Smith needs to go and buy her grocery shopping for the week. Plus she needs to buy a new pair of trousers for a birthday party she’s attending at the weekend. Oh and buy a present and card for the party…while she’s at it she’ll need to put on her Lottery ticket and top the car up with petrol while she’s out and about. Currently her only option for doing this is going to either a local, independent grocery shop then a card shop and then drive to a petrol garage which might or might not have National Lottery status - so she might need to go somewhere else to get her ticket. Plus going to a clothing shop somewhere to get her outfit. By doing this she’s giving at least four different retailers her custom.

If ASDA opens she’ll be giving her money to one, money-grabbing, world-polluting arsehole of a company.

I can’t wait for the letters page in next week’s East Kilbride News. I for one will be signing the petition against ASDA in East Kilbride…I know that somebody will start one. And if they don’t…well, I will.

Around three weeks ago my boyfriend’s mum told us that Marilyn Manson was playing Glasgow again. Since I couldn’t find it online I didn’t believe her, but he is!

I can’t wait for Friday so that I can buy my tickets. Such a shame it’s in the same venue as last time as it wasn’t that great but I’m so, so excited! I love Manson with a passion, I don’t care if people think I’m freaky for liking him. The music’s awesome and some of the lyrics that he writes are out-of-this-world amazing.

Roll on December. Oh and for all those who disklie Marilyn Manson because he’s ‘freaky’, then listen to this song called Last Day On Earth. It’s gorgeous, sad, powerful, heart moving and angry all at the same time;

I know it’s the last day on Earth,
We’ll be together while the planet dies.
I know it’s the last day on Earth,
We’ll never say goodbye.

And the dogs slaughter each other softly,
Love burns it’s casualties,
We are damaged provider modules,
Spill the seeds at our children’s feet.
I’m so empty here without you…
I know they want me dead.

The winner of Britain’s largest Lotto win, £35.4 million lives in my town! Lucky, lucky, lucky…why couldn’t have been me? My boyfriend had three numbers and won £8!

My weekend at T In The Park was certainly an interesting one. After starting to queue for the bus at Buchanan Bus Station at just after noon, we finally got onto a rickety old double decker bus at about 3.45pm. In that time I managed to smoke around 10 cigarettes, mainly out of pure boredom. One of my friends got booked for smoking a joint and having some weed on him, the idiot. It made me laugh though!

It turns out that we were on the bus to Balado for..7 hours. It’s only 44miles from Glasgow to Balado and 50% of that is either a motorway or an A/B road. We completly missed the Friday night’s bands, which was shit. I really wanted to see Lily Allen and The Artic Monkeys. Still I could see the NME/Radio 1 stage and the big wheel from the window of the bus for about 2 hours. I should have just gotten off and walked. On the bus I managed to smoke a further 20 cigarettes and eat 3 bags of sweets and a packet of cookies. It’s a good job that I did because my gosh I needed the energy. The bus dropped us off at the opposite end of the arena from the campsite entrance, at least 2 miles away. We had to walk the rest, through inches and inches of mud with huge backpacks and camping chairs. Amusingly, our friend fell head first into the mud which was one of the funniest things that I’ve ever seen.

Once we actually got to the entrance to the campsite we very nearly turned back and got my mum to come & pick us up - the campsite was in even more mud and there was absolutely no where to pitch a tent! And the fact that Scott have wandered off with the 6 man tent didn’t really help much, it meant that Craig had to sleep in mine & the boy’s 2 man tent that night. Eh, just what I wanted. Obviously couldn’t let him sleep out in the cold though. I found the smallest space to put the tent up and sat smoking and really needing to pee while the boys put it up. I wasn’t even going to attempt to go to the Portaloos at 1 in the morning so left it til morning…

Even although I didn’t get to bed until about 2am I was up at the crack of dawn due to the sun blaring through my side of the tent and turning it into an oven. The boys went to find Scott at the welfare tent and to find somewhere to pitch their tent. While they were away I made breakfast (noodles and stockcubes) and attempted to go to the toilet. As soon as I stepped into the portaloo I suddenly didn’t need to go any more. It was the most disgusting thing that I have ever smelt and seen. Usually I’m ok with the toilet situation at TITP but my god it was nasty.

On the Saturday the only band I saw really was The Killers, who were bloody fantastic. I think I may love Brandon Flowers, he’s so energetic on stage. On the Sunday I managed to see The Fratellis, Scissor Sisters, Just Jack and Queens Of The Stoneage.

Oh..my writing mood has run out. I’ll write more about my weekend soon.
TBC

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.

Finally I have gotten around to actually setting up a web site again. As usual it was due to surfing the net and getting needy for a pretty website to write my thoughts too again (which, of course, isn’t my livejournal).A proper introduction is in need. My name is Melissa and I’m 20. I live in the (at the moment very snowy) wonderful city of Glasgow, Scotland and am a web designer working as a supervisor in SPAR 5 days a week to pay off my debts and keep my mind from rotting.

The soundtrack of my life includes Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Franz Ferdinand as well as a thousand other artists. Music=♥=life. I can’t play an instrument to safe my life but I make up for it with listening. My laptop is a huge MP3 player, backed up with my trusty iPod and o2 Ice phone for when the battery runs dead!I have a gorgeous boyfriend, whom will be referred to simply as C, of 4 years who is my rock. Most weekends are spent lying in his bed watching TV shows like Torchwood, Doctor Who, CSI and NCIS and smoking far too many roll-ups and drinking way too much coffee.

At the moment I’m using a pre-made theme for WordPress until I get my copy of PS CS2 back from my friend! But don’t knock it, I’ve messed about with it a little a lot!