State of the Rodent

Jan 09, 2013 18:29

(NB: at the moment my dongle is content-locked, so I may not be able to view comments to reply on Livejournal. I can reply on Dreamwidth, so please consider posting there using OpenID or just signing an anonymous comment with your LJ handle).

So, I'm in a bedsit in Nottingham.

I've been getting better for a while now - able to cross the road, then able to get a bus, then able to go and study in Wigan every week. I wasn't very happy in Wigan for various reasons, so I went to stay with my mum over Yule, and found Nottingham to be full of things to do, close to her home. Part time jobs and voluntary positions abound.

I started volunteering at a charity shop, and I'm doing three days a week, six hours a day. If this was paid work, it would be just enough to live on. I'm hoping that one day this year it will be paid, if my health doesn't give out yet again. So far so good: it's been two weeks and I'm less ill and tired now, at the end of a shift of hard work, than I was after my first 6-hour stint. Mostly I steam clothes, which is mindless physical work that I really enjoy. Today though, I seem somehow to have ended up creating a system to log when various items are going to need to be culled, and thus when 'new' items will have to be priced up ready to go out, and how many.

I came home to slow cooked beans in a spicy tomato sauce. The bedsits are in a converted house - you have a room with a kitchenette in it, the bathrooms are shared but the landlord cleans them weekly, and water, heating, electricity and council tax are all included in the £65-a-week rent. I did have some issues with things being broken when I moved in. They were all but one fixed on the same working day as my complaining email, and the one that isn't fixed needs a spare part ordered.

Last night, I went out for a social with Kincaid in what seems to be the nicest pub I've yet seen in Nottingham. The only reason I didn't eat there was because I'd managed to get hold of a whole fresh trout for £1.60, so I cooked and ate that with some buttery carrots before going out. Well, wouldn't you? Kincaid seems very happy with his life just now, and it was a great evening.

Pol and I continue to communicate, in fact rather more than we had been doing. We're still firmly an item, I've just buggered off for probably about six months. I'll have to go back now and then to sort out the garden.

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pol, voluntary work, nottingham, reasons to be cheerful

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