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Weddings, shopping and lots of working... |
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One of my goals this year was that I was going to try and update this journal at least once a month. It's much harder to do than it used to be. I just don't have a lot of free time now I'm working full time, and when I do have free time there's always too many things I want to do with it. So Journal writing has suddenly shot down the priority list.
But anyway. There's not a huge amount of new stuff to report anyway. Still working at Specsavers. Work has been busy. We had several staff leave within a short period of time, and our boss David couldn't replace them straightaway so those of us still there were rushed off our feet for a few weeks. The good thing about this changeover of staff though, is suddenly I've gone from being a newbie, to suddenly being a senior staff member pretty much. I've been given a set of keys now, so sometimes I get rostered on to open the shop early in the morning, or to close up at the end of the day. We had a new girl Ellen starting about a week ago, and because Claire had the day off and Marcus had the whole week off, it fell to me to spend the day training her. I think I did okay, but I felt like I was talking constantly the whole day, there was so much to explain, I don't know how much she took in.
It was a bit weird though, being given these extra responsibilities. I've only been working here seven months, and Victoria's been here longer than me and hasn't been given these things. Oh well. Maybe it's just because I'm older than her or something weird like that.
Aside from work, it's just been the same stuff. Hanging out at home with Taina. Catching up with friends from time to time. A couple of times we ended up hanging out with Whattie, which is nice, because we don't always get to see him a lot. It started because one day I was in New World supermarket in Silverstream, grabbing some last minute stuff one night, and happened to run into Whattie at the checkout. He was like, 'When's Taina free? We should catch up' and then we both had Thursday off that week so we went to the 7 Bar that night with him and a couple of girls he's friends with, who both seemed really nice. This one girl Sinead invited us back to her place afterwards where we sat around and drank coffee and chatted about random stuff.
A week or two later we went to the Charlton bar in Silverstream with Whattie and another girl he's friends with, who it turned out was this girl Morgan I used to know back at Maidstone Intermediate, she was in my class in Form One. She was quite popular at school and so mostly didn't pay me much attention, but she was always semi friendly, most of the time. She had changed a lot over the years though, and she seems really nice now, it was cool to hang out with her that night.
On St Patricks night I ended up going out into Wellington with Lisa and Nerida. Not because of St Patricks day specifically, but because Taina figured it would be cool for us to have a girls night, while he had a guys night at home, playing PS3 and stuff. In the end, he left it a bit late in inviting people, so the only guy who came was our friend T, who Taina works with at Countdown. The two of them spent pretty much the whole evening playing Rock Band, while me, Lisa and Nerida went into town, had dinner at One Red Dog by the Waterfront, and then went to a couple of bars. One bar we went to, I think it was called Boogie Nights, I ended up seeing my old family friend Janine Pilcher there. It turns out she was there because a friend of hers was having her hens night. I talked to her and met her friends briefly.
After me, Lisa and Nerida got back to Upper Hutt, we hung out at Lisa's place and watched her DVD of Shaun of the Dead. It was pretty good. Nerida's quite a fan of horror movies and such. It's not really my thing, not because I'm a wuss, so much as I just don't find most of them that interesting, compared with comedies and romances and such. I think I voted to watch Shaun of the Dead, as it is a nice compromise between Nerida's enjoyment of all things gross and potentially scary, and my preference for things that are funny.
Then last week me, Taina, Lisa and Nerida went out to Porirua for a day, to go shopping. It was pretty good. I hadn't been out to the Porirua mall in a very long time. There was some cool stuff. Me and Taina got particularly excited when we got to Kmart and saw how cheap all their homeware stuff was, and so we ended up buying an iron, an ironing board, some sheets, a bowl and some new toothbrushes.
Sad I know. I remember shopping trips when I was like 13 or 14. I'd be excited because I would have saved up my pocket money for several months and would have like 100 dollars. And I'd spend it all on stuff I didn't need but just felt like I wanted, like Dolly magazines, and nail polish, and sparkly hair clips that shed glitter all through my bag. These days I go shopping and get excited about buying sheets and household appliances.
Anyway. My main mission, as part of this shopping trip was to get a new dress. Not just any dress. I wanted to buy a dress that would be just right to wear to a wedding.
I have a lot of dresses already. But they're mostly dresses to wear to the beach, or to a party, or else right at the back of my cupboard at home I have my really fancy dresses, like my old ball dress and the bridesmaid dress from Michelle and Taina's wedding. But I didn't have much that was in-between.
I didn't have much luck finding anything in Porirua. The clothes in Kmart were kinda cheap and trashy. Glassons didn't have many dresses at all. And the few shops that had stuff were really expensive.
The silly thing was, as I was looking in these shops, I knew deep down where I needed to go. Pagani. But there wasn't one there. So after exhausting the Porirua mall, and after taking Lisa's advice to try the Dressmart mall in Tawa where all the outlet stores were, we decided to go via Lower Hutt on our way home, and went to the Pagani store in Lower Hutt.
My instincts were right. As soon as I walked in, I saw several dresses that were perfect for me, and were actually within my price range. Well sorta. I don't normally like to spend $65 on a single item of clothing, but given the prices at other stores, I knew I was getting a bargain. The dress I bought was purple, made of a satin/silk type material, with a flower pattern on it. About knee length, and it had a belt around the waist. The moment I tried it on I loved it. And that's really saying something too, because buying clothes has always been very hard for me. The fashion industry is very elitist, and if you are over a size 12, it is very hard to find clothes that are genuinely flattering, without paying a fortune.
Anyway, the wedding that I was buying this dress for was my Uncle Davids. David is one of my Dad's brothers, and the father of my cousin Laureen. David's first wife, my Aunty Bobbie, who was Laureen's mother, died nearly ten years ago now, when Laureen was about 14. Bobbie had severe arthritis, and died from complications caused by the strong medications she was having to take every day.
At the time, David, Bobbie and Laureen had been living up in Rotorua, but after Bobbie's death, David and Laureen moved to Lower Hutt to be closer to the rest of the family and have lived there ever since. Another of Dad's brothers, my Uncle Greg, well his wife, my Aunty Ann, has a sister called Kathy who we all knew already from various family get-togethers. A couple of years after Bobbie's death, David and Kathy became good friends and eventually ended up going out. And finally they got married a couple of days ago, on Saturday night.
It's weird, I already knew Kathy's children, as they are the cousins of my cousins, but now they are officially my cousins too. And they're now Laureen's step-siblings. And Greg and Ann's kids are now related to them twice over. It sounds odd, but I guess it's not really.
The significance of this wedding however is that it was the first family get-together that I had brought Taina to. I had already brought Taina around to meet my Grandma a couple of weeks earlier, but now he has met everyone else too, albeit briefly. Plus with everything going on we didn't get a chance to talk to everyone much. But Uncle Adrian came and sat with us for a while.
In my last entry, I mentioned the site I've been using to keep track of calories and exercise and such. Truth was, at first I didn't want to tell myself that I was going to lose weight. I've spent so many years wanting to lose weight and so many years failing at it and feeling like crap about it. But I've been weighing myself once a week, to record it on the site, and so far I've lost 7.5 kg. Something's actually working. So far anyway. I still feel nervous about it, like I shouldn't talk about it in case I jinx it or something. I haven't noticed a huge difference to my appearance, but I think there has been a steady improvement. Truth is, I sometimes think even if I lose all the weight I want to, I'll still think I look fat even if I don't. I think this whole thing, after all these years of obsession, has become far more of a psychological thing than a physical thing. But I'm still going to keep going with this, see how far this one little website can take me.
Taina says I'm beautiful as I am, and I know he means it, but I need to try and do this, for my own sanity or something. I want to be able to see in myself whatever it is he sees in me. And right now, and most of my life all I've ever seen is an unattractive fat geeky girl. And I don't like seeing that.
weezieishness · Mon Apr 02, 2012 @ 06:31am · 0 Comments |
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