sunday 31st march
wedding invites for my sister day.

saturday 30th march
the fact that ice age was sold out actually made the evening a lot more enjoyable. funky dispelled the myth that he can cook (in fact shockingly well) as we watched one sixth of a day portay murder, espionage, undercover operatives, kidnapping, and key-cards as we ate and i finally got to get the dirt on all the activity!

following an email from brad i got to thinking about when you understand people are feeling bad you shouldn't always say what you think; it's the step after that. you say what you think you'd like to hear if you were them.

near-side rear goes the lowest.

friday 29th march
lbc got clean, holly got to paddington and i got sleep and food. thinking of lou every now and then; it's coming soon; i hope they're okay.



thursday 28th march
as the curtain road odd-job men plastered concrete under the front door ready for the tiles to go down, collin the doorman and i spectated from his reception booth, taking five. he whistled the first few bars of singing on a star, all the time missing his living room which is also undergoing construction work. i whistled in the following bars, the workmen looked up as if we were stupid then collin and i looked at each other and agreed out loud with, 'hudson hawk' and laughed at our own in-joke cleverness. 'five thirty-six? swinging on a star.'



happy birthday, sis!

wednesday 27th march
sunroof open on the way to work, sunlight on the way home.

tuesday 26th march
unfortunately i can't remember much about shampoo planet. i only remember it made me think and dream and that i liked it so much i read slowly, making it last.

monday 25th march
out the front door, down the steps, raise head to the sky, searching for the sun, a quick wobble of the nose and a sneeze of the trademarked solar variety. people who know me well expect me to sneeze twice on exiting a building in daytime, and i rarely disappoint. today was no different, except with my eyes closed i closely missed a cyclist flying past. 'bless you' he said over his shoulder as he disappeared down the road. 'cheers, mate!' i yelled back. he saluted and stretched his arm out into a wave, pedaling all the time.

sneeze ticked off, next on my list was theft. when i move i'll be very chuffed i stole it.as i got to the car a traffic warden sloped away from me round the corner. i saw the sign detached from the pole (maybe it was waiting to be hung), opened the boot and slid it in, all the time paranoid and nervous. it's brand new, and will always remind me of parking where i do, in the first car i have ever had. of course, i'm not proud of myself but i am proud of the sign that sits above our fireplace. even the chimper-cheese i live with likes it and that means i did good. right, cheese?

lbc was nervous before his visit to the doctors for his yearly check-up and came out with a tighter handbrake, new fluids through his arteries and a fresh antenna. he's happy. soon this will be elevated to ecstatic. all he needs now is a wash.

...a relax in our old m.a. park and a pocket drive to solve friday's problems. easy, innit?

sunday 24th march
put simply, a walk in the park.



saturday 23rd march
impromptu visits to almost-strangers' houses. a nice change, apart from me inadvertently saying to someone 'oh my god - a tragically hip t-shirt. you must be really old!' instead of 'wow. the tragically hip? i used to listen to them ages ago!' in the immortal words of homer simpson: 'd'oh!'

friday 22nd march
meetings with people who just don't ever get to the point and technology undoing the only productive day i had this week. it took 4 hours to get photoshop 4 open so i vented my frustration around the studio indiscriminately. shane took the brunt. he was caged by three very long cardboard tubes. well, it serves him right for stealing my old space and the nicest spot in the room.



thursday 21st march
new clothes two days ago, new hair today. maps, american praise from somewhere near - or in - washington. plus the wonder stuff on the way home; radio ass-kiss on the air helping to put my brain in neutral. need... more... luck...



wednesday 20th march
if i ever needed to wear my lucky red top it was today.

tuesday 19th march
a horrible day, but that's not what the webcam saw:



monday 18th march
mum always says she can tell when i like clothes i have been bought because i put them on straight away. today i wore new trainers, new jeans and my new red, it-reminds-me-of-helen top which is actually surprisingly painless and ironically a bringer of good fortune, it seems. looking different makes you feel different and i need to get more clothes, more colours, more more more.



sunday 17th march
on fire on court today. bang!

saturday 16th march
like unnamed songs on the radio you find on a nothing cd years lateri've remembered them, knowing in the back of my mind that some day i'd have some.today everything fell into place and with steve beside me going 'get them. just get them... what?... yes!' i did, despite the £110 price tag.

six years ago she walked into the m.a. studio with messy dyed red hair, a baggy cardigan, ripped jeans and the coolest pair of trainers i've ever seen. they were grey with big lumps of green plastic oozing out of the soles like cheese that's been under the grill too long and i wanted some. today i found them along with new things to play, wear, hear, watch and eat.

leaving the gap's changing room, with five pairs of jeans in my hand i stopped to give the assistant my don't fits.
'right. i'm done. god, i hate shopping.'
'why?'
'because i'm too thin. can i give you these? and i don't want these... or these... or these. but i do want these. mmm.'
'are they the ones that make your bum look cute?'
'what?! oh... did you see that earlier?'
'yeah, i did.'
i wait for her to say something else, anything, but she just looks down, folding jeans in that i-work-in-a-shop way that nobody else can do. i haven't a clue where to look or what she means so i just go silent and blush, knowing that, later on, i'll come up with a really humourous retort i wish i'd used.
'ah,' i say and walk to the till, the spirit on the stairs.

friday 15th march
i quote, verbatim: 'fEEL FUCKING FAB NOW. Oohhps caps lock on.

Gotta sarnie and a coffee caffe nero stylylee in frount of me now. Had a
bloody mary and double JD for lunch which was so good I ran all the way back
to work.'

also, this is fantastic fun. play god and watch people burn!

thursday 14th march
as i walked out of the house this morning a german bus was waiting in the queue of traffic perpendicular to our front door. it was full of german secondary school pupils, all of them female, presumably here as part of their english exchange or something. about half way down the bus one of them had written 'hello how are you?' in fat red squeaky pen. judging by the amount of colouring-in she had obviously been very bored or perceived it as some form of art. it made me smile, and she saw, then waved, and i just smiled and jangled my keys as i went to lbc. she knew. later in the disused theatre next door to work, exploring as if i were a child again with 'what's over here?'s and 'ooooh's i felt younger than the girl on the bus.



wednesday 13th march
the last thing i thought of as i fell asleep tonight was 'tired is when your head is sort of fuzzy'.

tuesday 12th march
alex and i laughed across the phone line so hard at this that the onedotzeroers had to call people back. within five minutes i'd gone from bored to having stomach cramps and tears from uncontrolled laughter. last time that happened i was in a gondola. it's all true, plus there's some muppet-chimp hybrid hassling me for retro 'tunes'. see?:

what about ring-rang-a-dong for a hol-i-day by mc miker gee and dj sven.
please can you get that for me? you have claimed in the past to be able to
track anything down, yet i have requested this record twice already and you
have failed to deliver on both occaisons. you managed to get rockwell, so
you must be able to get this.

this is not a joke. i want a copy of this record. do you understand me? i
want a copy of this record. did you hear me? i want a copy of this record.
kabbish? i want a copy of this record? how many times do i have to ask you?
i want a copy of this record. you borrowed my brand new cd. i want a copy of
this record. do you get me, sweetheart? i want a copy of this record.

please get me a copy of this record. i want a copy of this record. the mc
miker gee and dj sven version of madonna's holiday, within which is the
line, "we're gonna ring-rang-a-dong for a hol-i-day." i want a copy of the
holiday rap. and you can quote me on that, so long as you get me a copy of
this record.

< sigh >

monday 11th march
loads happened today, almost none of it out of the ordinary, apart from that's not how it felt. it all began nice and quietly, sliding in to work and then sliding out to the barbican on sunny reconnaissance. then there was torrential rain, curry and pictures of kickers and monsters and screams and the cda and scraping concrete before lifts home and a silent lounge with no tv or music on. today everything is tinged with an eerie shiver that runs down your spine and i'm sure it means something though heaven knows what. plus: it seems the more tired i am the more complicated my involuntary actions become.either that or i've got something like an autopilot switch on my back that people keep flipping late at night. and i'm sure they do it for a laugh, too.



sunday 10th march
'soup! soup! that's the sound of mah lunch' as said by one chimper as dinner was poured.

saturday 9th march
it's on days like this when you regret thumping your laptop through sheer frustration. when i designed my sister's wedding invites a few weeks ago, saved them then tried to open them again i found to my misfortune (and partially my sister's, too) that they were over a bad part of my hard disk. and what does this mean? it means i had to go in to work on what should have been the first day i had a choice of what to do, which pretty much meant i didn't have a choice. still, it needed to be done and now it is. unless, of course, she doesn't like them.

via sainsbury's and the video shop, all in all a great day with lbc and a gale-force wind buffeting us around. when i recommended men of honour (over others we can borrow free of charge) i hadn't realised i'd watched it in barbados the day before tracey was deluxed. as we watched it i couldn't help thinking how films are as much a trigger of memories as music is.

friday 8th march
half day. i need sleep. give me sleep. please. i'll pay.

thursday 7th march
onedotzero6 preview night was a melee of the expected with a smidge of the unexpected thrown in. the title sequence i've been working on for almost as long as i can remember looked absolutely shit. shame, considering all the 3am-ers i've done and the amount of learning lightwave requires to make it what it did and yet didn't look like. all they had to do was plug three plugs in. instead they managed just two with the red component dangling. rather a shame considering the sequence was predominantly brown with purple and magenta highlights. shane talked through it, too, but it wasn't his fault. no, it was d-fuse's.

like i've said before, a million times at least: with your work trust no-one.

wednesday 6th march
+ alison and phil stopped by the studio today, so of course the qrcam came out to record it all, and alison blogged from my work pc! it was so cool!

- keeping a visitor (who has flown from a different continent to see you) waiting is nothing short of rude.

+ cafe provençale for a two-thrids french reunion with deluxe and bluish. more film fun, trickaay and headley and hedwig, complete with stopping points.

tuesday 5th march
more rendering, and a call to tell us the phone's on hold. still can't quite decypher whether this is a good or bad thing. maybe it's just a thing and i should leave it at that.

monday 4th march
the renders i set off before leaving for france were still drying when i arrived at work after lbc dropped alison off. she goes to my home town today and i'm back to work, jealous.

sunday 3rd march
9.30am is the earliest i have been out of bed on a sunday since i was a child with a paper round. clean sheets, flat tidy, unpacking snowboarding gloves, hats, goggles, maps, minidiscs, lounge is finally tidy as the phone rings. it's alison, all the way from houston, asking if i'm ready to meet up. just, i say as i leave, still not having eaten. 'oh my god! i can see you!' i hear her say over the church's far-too-modern-for-this-building intercom. i smile, stupidly - i mean, what else can you do when a camera's glaring at you? she can't work out the door so comes down, opening it manually. we get lost on the way back up to the cavernous apartment, she packs (again) as i lie down, shattered and slightly bemused. alison's here. in london. again. headley headspins! we walk and talk and sit having coffees and accessorise with hats and bangles and dvds and anything else that even so much as catches our eyes. i've missed this; shopping with females on saturday, i only just realised how much. we wander back to lbc via some who-knows-where back streets, all the time talking, asking, speculating and drive to my flat where a large lasagne and a funny spell await us. cured by a short walk to clapham i learn the film game and still lose, despite having 'f-i-l-m-f-i'. she's good - very good. we talk about how to give advice in certain situations, of friends and people and trust and modesty as the cars illuminate their way across the tributaries of clapham common. i'm tired but sleep can wait. today is now and there's always time. after all, alison's here and the visits are quick.



friday 1st march - saturday 2nd march
la plagne, in the french alps, snowboarding.


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