Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Sole searching

Eye infection alert! Get them all the time. Woke up at 5 in the morning, blinking, trying to shift the cruddy film that had developed across my right eye.  Feels a little burny, but nothing I can't handle. Eye infections tend to look particularly grotesque on blue eyes. Makes you look a bit mad and junkie-esque. Considering I can't put my lenses in and have lost my glasses (MUST get some....as soon as I get that holy grail of French society, the Carte Vitale), I'm essentially blind for the moment. Got told by Mum to go to the pharmacy, but I'm considering using old-fashioned techniques to try and rid myself  of the gunk. Compresses, salty eye washes (might want to google that, sounds like could possibly have opposite effect?), etc.

Because we moved to Ireland in my last year of secondary school, and because once I'd finished that I left the country, I don't have any friends here. Which means that my time at home, such as now, turns into the life of a housewife minus the being a wife part. I get up, grind some fresh coffee using my Dad's loud and ugly 80s coffee grinding thing (which he has kept for sentimental reasons, because he had it when he lived in East Germany, or something). I then glide around the house alternating between reading books, flicking through glossy magazines, napping on the couch, and making bacon sandwiches. Occasionally I might do a little light laundry, and half an hour before everyone comes home from work, I go on a massive clean-up operation, brushing off breadcrumbs from various counter tops, de-fatifying the frying pan, plumping up the couch cushions.

So I've got not much else to do other than cook for people (tonight - boeuf bourguignon) and organize some Strasbourg stuff. It's quite sad actually - my Dad didn't help me move to Sheffield for uni because I said I would do it myself. He didn't get to come to my graduation because I didn't go myself (might have been a bit weird had he turned up all by his lonesome). So he really wanted to fly to Paris, rent a car, pick me up in the one-horse town I now cannot wait to be rid of, and drive me down to Strasbourg. Except the CROUS are being anal about the whole thing and have told me my room will be available from the first of September. Grr. My Dad checked at work, and he has a meeting on that actual day. So my options are:
  • Make the move alone (no big deal, but quite sad as it was something he wanted to do)
  • Go down earlier and stay in a hotel for one or two nights so he can drive me down and then get back to Dublin on the 30th
  • Hassle the CROUS to see if there can be any give on the date
I'm going to start by attempting option 3, and if that fails - I'll cross that shaky bridge when I get to it. Email has been sent to dear old 'Yannick', the guy in charge of us BGFs - I've received an email from him before, which was very cool, dismissive, and uninformative. I realized that his signature has a link to his email address: except the html is wrong, and links up to someone elses email. I thought about adding that as a P.S., except I realized I could use this as a secret weapon based on his reply to my dates enquiry. If he even so much as DARES to get shirty with me, WHAM! I will destroy your htmling confidence, Yannick. Hehehe. HeeeeeHEEEEEHEHE. BWAHAHEHEHEHEHE! [/end evil laughter]

Anyway! I'm on a mad desperate frenzied search for these boots:

Don't ask me why, they aren't particularly special, but I just *want* them, you know? That's one of the horrors of having your family living in Ireland: a whole world of Britishness is spread out in front of you, but without the access to the perks. They've got (practically only)  British shops here, so you can only use the British website, but inevitably there's always some sort of stupid fucking problem, because newsflash, Ireland isn't in the UK.
So I got an email saying (in a nice, jovial tone): "Thanks for your recent communication, Hannah. Your order has now been cancelled". Noooo. Called up pleasant Glasgow call centre. In this particular case, the Stupid Irish/British Problem was...they ship abroad from warehouses only, and they don't stock those particular boots in their warehouses. Why don't you just get your own shoe shops, Ireland? Same with telly: they have RTE, their Irish channel, but it's shit and no-one watches it. People watch BBC Northern Ireland instead, but their papers give normal BBC listings. So you think you're watching the Grumpy Guide to Food, and instead end up watching The Impressionists: let's learn more about them, and their boring works.

So once the nice woman at the call centre gave me the downlow on the warehouse Irish/British Problem, I cheated the system by ordering them to my gran's address in Barnoldswick. Felt pretty self-satisfied, until I logged on to my 'account' on the Office website, and it now has the same 2 pair of boots as 2 different orders, both with the status: 'PENDING', which over the last 3 days has been modified to 'pending', 'Pending' and 'PENDing'. Very descriptive, Office.
I suppose all I do now is sit back and wait for the fuckers to arrive. Maybe I'll get two pairs. Maybe I'll get one. Maybe I'll get none.

I vote the last option.

2 comments:

  1. Option 4 for Strasbourg - I go with you. I'm more than willing if none of the other options work out!

    And those boots are a MUST. Hope the order gets figured out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Heyyy that's true, forgot about option 4!

    They are a must, right?? The heel doesn't look big at all, and they're nice and narrow

    ReplyDelete