helen-louise's journal

I am a million, trillion, zillion years behind with livejournal. Or about 10 days. Same difference :)

Stuff in my life is generally "ok". Richard had a birthday! We went out for delicious curry at Joy with hatter, mjl, otterylexa and rowan_leigh & fluffymormegil, who we don't get to see enough. Sadly, the sekrit surprise guests hiddenpaw & sangluna couldn't come due to stock issues. I bought Richard a The Sun Is Trying To Kill Me sweatshirt from J!NX, and also their Disobey hoodie, and my mum got him the most excellent heavy metal t-shirt in the world ever. To my disappointment, it does not feature hexavalent chromium, but many other heavy metals are represented in true metal font.

Had an asthma & allergy review which was spectacularly boring. Apparently I do absolutely everything right, and there are no other drugs they can give me, so I'm going to have to live with my current level of chronic snot forever (or at least until they invent something new). This is really quite depressing. People without chronic snot can almost certainly not understand how debilitating it is (it's like having a cold or hay fever, with all the head stuffiness and confusion, and itchy nose and ears and sinus pain, and irritability due to itchiness; only it never goes away, and never gets any better). I'm ridiculously allergic to dust mite faeces and sulphur dioxide, and also slightly allergic to pollen, mould spores, various scents, generic PM10 and ozone... there is no season in which I am not constantly snotty, and I'm sick of it :X

I have a new printer which is revolutionising my work environment. It's an HP Officejet which can print and photocopy in full colour double-sided, and has a sheet feeder. It takes less than a minute to print a quantity of material which would take my crappy HP home printer over 15 minutes. It is very sexy. Bizarrely, I bought it through PC World's business division, and got to pay £70 less for it than it would have cost me to buy it from the regular store. Apparently businesses are heavily subsidised compared to home users. New HP-branded ink cartridges were around half of the home users' price (or about what I normally pay to get my existing cartridges refilled). I wish I'd known this - ooh, four years ago when I started being self-employed :P

The tricycle may actually be ready to ride tomorrow. Hooray. Have been exhausting myself walking everywhere. Excitement will be postponed until I know if the repair worked.