January 2005

So here we are, one month into 2005 and it feels like the longest month in living memory.  The first day of the month, which seems a lifetime ago now was spent by Kat and I at my parents house where a large number of my family came over to visit and a pretty good time was had by all I think.

The next day however things weren't so great.  Kat and I went into Romford to do a little bit of shopping and decided to have a panini at a coffee shop for brunch.  Immediately after this both our tummies felt a bit weird but this feeling faded away after a while.  We went to this quiz night in the evening and met up with the parents of a number of friends as well as Del and Jo.  It was as we were leaving that I started to feel ill.  Del drove us round to see a few of the outrageous Christmas decorations that were on display and as much as I wanted to see them and as much as I wanted to stay and talk to Del my stomach had other ideas and I was truly grateful to get back to the safety of my parents house where I started to show all of the classic symptoms of food poisoning.  Minutes later Kat was doing the same.  We hardly got any sleep and were very agitated until we were able to take some medication when my parents woke up the next day.  As both Kat and I were affected and as the only thing we had eaten all day that no one else in the perfectly healthy family had eaten was the panini, coupled with the fact that we felt a bit grim at the time lead us to blame the coffee shop for our current state.

We'd intended to get an early train back home but it was later in the day before we felt up to moving.  It was a very draining journey back with not too many words spoken between us.  We didn't feel completely better for a few days after this.

We bought a new TV and DVD player in January and had it delivered a week later.  I went back to the same store to get a computer monitor a few weeks later and was treated like a moron by the salesperson, himself doing a good impression of  moron.  The last monitor left was the sale one.  So I left without the monitor and a tad disappointed.  What I'll do instead I haven't decided, I'm sure I'll come up with something.

We also saw the film White Noise in the cinema this months, one of the most frightening films from start to finish I have ever seen.  I was unable to sleep two days later as all I could think about was the film and as a result managed to turn off the alarm on the alarm clock causing Kat and I to oversleep by an hour and twenty minutes - ten minutes after Kat should have been at work.

Spent a lot of January reading the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books and am now keenly awaiting the next in the series.  I'm currently reading Street Lawyer by John Grisham.  Its interesting but isn't as good as the other books I've read by him.  My stockpile of unread books is diminishing, I'm going to have to find some more soon.

I've also desperately been trying to get myself a new job with little success so far.  Same old story, no one replies to me whatsoever, its incredibly frustrating.  Thankfully one company did respond to me positively, inviting me to an interview tomorrow.  I got a bit twitchy about the interview over the weekend but I'm a lot calmer now, but not completely.  Oh well wish me luck, I'll report back next month.