Where do you want to go today?

Hell, I forgot to do the other half of this !meme after replying to it on emperor's journal:

I want anyone and everyone who reads this to post in here something they would LIKE to do with me SOMEDAY.

Then post this in your journal to find out what I want to do with you.

Money money money

Bank balance is looking a bit more healthy, and will get healthier still in a couple of days thanks to a timely cheque from hoiho (to whom huge thanks are due, and also apologies).

I earned six whole pounds in cold hard cash yesterday for spending 20 minutes counting red blobs on a screenful of green blobs. Isn't psychology great? Have had a look at the info about being on the volunteer panel for MRC and the application form doesn't look as daunting as I expected, so I may well sign up for this, it being a Good Thing as well as a useful source of occasional pocket money. I'm not sure how to answer the question about depression on the form, though.

Applied for an egg card last night in the hope that I could transfer cc balances one last time to somewhere that the interest isn't eating me alive, and pay them all back this time. But no reply from them yet, despite saying that they'll email me "shortly" ... anybody have any experience of how long it takes?

One of the areas where I tend to spend a lot of unnecessary money is buying lunch in town -- Cambridge is not the cheapest place to buy sandwiches etc.! However for just 99p I have got lunches for the next three days, in the form of a huge bag of new potatoes which I'm using for potato salad. Mmmm, potato salad. Now everybody will probably tell me this is ridiculously expensive and they manage to feed a family of four for three weeks on a pound, but shrug. It's still an improvement.

Et viola

Good karate lesson last night. Because I'd moved my lesson at the last minute (bad j4!) I ended up sharing a lesson with a blue belt and a brown belt (that's the two grades below black) who were revising stuff for their upcoming gradings. Which meant that while they were going through a lot of stuff I already knew (the syllabus is cumulative) they were going through it at a much faster pace -- hard to keep up with but sometimes it's useful to try to push myself a bit more. I thought I was doing pretty well at nearly-keeping-up until I realised they'd already been going for 2 hours when I started... and in this heat! Phew.

Rest of the evening was moderately productive: phoned a friend, phoned my mum, told my mum it was unlikely that I'd make it home this weekend to sort out books and stuff which have been tagged for possibly getting rid of (or at least relegating to the loft) but I do want to do it a.s.a.p. to free up space in their house. There's certainly no more room for books in sion_a's house so they can't come here!

Phone-calls dispensed with, I had an unsuccessful attempt at ironing my 1950s rock'n'roll skirt (which I want to sell on eBay) -- it's made of Shiny Stuff which seems to be completely iron-resistant. Gave up on that and fiddled (hah!) with stringed instruments instead. Tuned my old viola (not the nice one that nou gave me, but the orange-varnished one I bought for 20 quid from my school) to C-G-C-G (instead of the usual C-G-D-A) just to see what it was like playing it like that, and found that it made it much easier to improvise random folky stuff. Which was nice. I still can't improvise well, but I'm really just trying to get through the mental block that says if-you-can't-do-it-well-don't-do-it-at-all -- I figure you have to do it badly first.

Oh, and...

I selected a bunch of words at random and made them go pretty colours!

toaster
ophthalmic
knob
curious
sigma
fnord

W00+! p|-|34r /\/\y I_33+ |-|+/\/\I_ 5|

Eggsasperating

Just got a completely blank email from ec@egg.com, subject line "Getting your Egg Card. You're almost there". My inbox claims it's an 11K message but I can't see *anything* in it.

I post the headers in the hope that somebody can offer enlightenment...

(NB: I have SAUCE set to the most lax settings possible.)

( view headers )

Update: Problem solved. I'm dozy, and the text of the mail is in attachments, though I'm not sure why they weren't flagged in the body of the message as they usually are. Thanks simont and ewx.