This post is brought to you by the letter G

I'm not normally one for fancy dress. Well except in South Carolina, we were all about theme parties then. But normally, it's not my favourite. There's pressure to come up with something and sometimes they can be hard to pull off (not the costume itself, you understand, unless it's particularly tight).

But at a new school it's important to jump in! Well, once I had established there was actually, definitely a fancy dress party; I wasn't falling for that old chestnut.

The theme was the letter G and so a quick look on Google (which someone went as, by the way) I had my idea.

I thank you. And Google.

You suck, Monday

Ever keen to get one blog post in in September, here I am. There's so much to write about too, largely to do with starting in a new school and living in a new place, and my niece's third birthday (suffice to say all you other aunts have some work still to do to catch up with me and best aunt ever status) but as I have a ton of work to do for tomorrow and a trip to Tesco to fit in I'll tell you about what happened to me just this very morning.

I don't normally like to do very much in the morning and that even extends to speaking or eating. If I have to get up, I like to do the bare minimum. If I can I'll shower the night before, dry my hair and then straighten it in the morning. But last night with Downton and ironing (I know) it didn't get done. So I set my alarm this morning and got up for a shower.

I'm never normally ahead in the morning, always running behind, so imagine my surprise when, at 6.50am, I was already drying my hair. 'Loads of time' I thought. Ha!

Not three minutes later I had a big knot in my hair. Like a big knot. I get knots quite often. Comes from having thin hair but lots of it. My hairdresser got me using a tangle teezer so I thought that would quickly sort it. Ha!

When that wasn't really helping, at 7.10am I went to the sink to wet my hair again. Nothing. Then I added more shampoo. Still nothing. I went back and added conditioner. Nada. While it was smaller than it was, it was still so tightly knotted together that I couldn't get it out. At 7.20am, I was still in my jammies and had just ten minutes before my usual leaving time so

I took the only option left to me: I had to cut the knot out of my hair.

I could have cried.

My head physically hurts from all the pulling at my hair and I now have a strand of hair that is considerably shorter than all the rest.



Yay Monday.

Ikea Belfast Customer of the Fortnight

I've moved. Again. This summer I had the joy of moving home to my parents for a month. And they had the absolute delight of me living with them again. It's hard to know who was more thrilled. Me having a freakout at their eating noises (shut up, it's a brain disorder, don't mock the afflicted!), or them because I am so bright and sunshiny in the morning.

After my birthday, Mum and I went to London for the Anniversary Games. It's not the point of this post, so maybe I'll blog about it in, say, October. Then home for a few days before Castlewellan. Straight after Castlewellan was Moving Day. As I hadn't even moved stuff from the hall when I moved home at the end of June, I definitely didn't see the point of moving stuff when I came from Castlewellan. What?! My parents love me, ergo they love having my crap clutter up every square centimetre of the hall because it reminds them of me. I don't see the problem myself.

So Moving Day was more like Moving Fortnight. Well, it's hard work in my car! I'd work out what needed to go next, think it wasn't that much stuff, load the car all the while thinking what I could fill the extra space with and bam, the car was full.

And then came the trips to Ikea. It starts off so inspirational! The Warehouse of Dreams! You dream big dreams of how you're going to organise the space, you measure, you check, you colour match. You go back to the store, you head straight to the Market Hall and warehouse with your trolley. You double back because you forgot something. You head to the check out, you have fun with the little scanner barcode reader. You use your own 40p Frakta blue bag, because you're a pro and you have one, which you brought with you because you're that organised. You load up the car. You relearn not to take the direct route to the car because your trolley cannot jump the curb on the other side.

At home you speed up the next trip by downloading the app. You measure, you check, you decide, you go back to the Warehouse of Illusions. You get annoyed at other customers with their slow dandering aspirational walk getting in your way. You get distracted by other things you 'need'. You forget things that weren't added to app's shopping list because you couldn't quite remember how to spell 'Snarkeldöff' correctly. You can't be bothered to go double back on yourself, because let's face it, you know you're going to be back tomorrow or the day after, getting other things and making returns for things that didn't quite fit/work/match like you'd hoped.

You start to recognise workers and have the awkward do-I-say-hi-because-he-served-me-last-trip moment. You start to get a complex about how much you've been here recently and maybe he thinks you're stalking him. You have to decide whether you put your head down, busy in the Ikeaing moment or give a shrug of 'I should just move here, eh?'. You fall between two stools (or two Frostas, if you will) and end up giving a very determined shrug while power walking with a trolley through the table lamps. You feign interest in a massive floor lamp simply because you can hide behind it to get some distance between you and him.

You get to the right warehouse location using the app, but the stock information tells you it can't update stock numbers because there's no signal in the Warehouse of Disillusionment. You don't care, you're here: they either have it or they don't. You didn't realise there was a rush on Smarchetts since you left the house. You look hopefully in adjacent locations, but damn this Swedish efficiency, of course there are no more Smarchetts. You start to think through your other plans for the week and when you can possibly come back when they get Smarchett back in. You leave, having driven out for a handful of small items that really weren't urgent at all. You try to tell yourself it's good that you have the storage boxes without the storage solution they're designed to be used with.

You get the picture, right? In fact, you probably have it in a Ribba frame too. How can a place with so much bright sunny yellow turn so grey so quickly? I have plans for no new trips to Ikea this week. Except I might return that massive photo frame that's adding so much to living room, leaning up against the wall, wrapped up in its cellophane.

Or I might not. 90 days return policy, see.

Well, you sometimes don't know when you're going to be headed that way.

33rd International Tina Day. Now with royal approval!

The day we've all been waiting for! The media have gathered for days and finally can report on the news they've all been anticipating: I am 33.

I've had a lovely day. It started with watching the Tour de France from yesterday (because Karen made me a wonderful paleo dinner. More on that to come!) then I had lunch (a panini, since you asked), then I saw the bestest little people in the world! Now, I'm enjoying a summer night with a fire pit. Good times!

And of course, the actual big news today was the future king was born! I love a national event and so was excited when I woke up this morning to the alert on my phone (which have just started on my phone and I haven't worked out how to turn them off).

I was excited, not because Kate was in labour, but because Kate was in labour and the future monarch could be born on my birthday! A birthday future of national events!!

Just as I was leaving on the drive back down this end of the country the news came through. What was I actually doing at 4.24pm, when the third in line to the throne was born? Sitting, sweating in a roasting town hall watching a kids' production of Peter Pan.

Following the leader. Indeed.

The awkward silence

It didn't start out awkward but it definitely is now. I didn't mean not to blog in 2013, it just sort of turned out like that. And once you don't blog, the stories build up and then it becomes more awkward because you have too many stories to tell you don't know where to begin.

I've been asked by, literally units of people when I'm going to blog again. Ruth even asked me when I was going to delete my blog. I'm surprised she asked me that though because she lived through Lost in Space and knows I throw nothing away and the collection of stories, photos and recollections this blog brings up for me is far too valuable to throw away just out of embarrassment at not having blogged for seven months. I mean really, what's seven months between friends, eh?

At some point though, you just have to take the bull by the horns or the blog post by the keyboard and put something down. So here it is. My first blog post to break the awkward silence. So how have you been keeping...?