It’s June!? Yikes. An update.

/ Lisa

I haven’t been feeling that great over the last few days, you can probably tell.

And, to a certain extent, I’m still not. I’m not really sure what causes it, it just happens.

Right now, my mood probably has a lot to do with the lack of job prospects. It’s hard to stay positive when one after the other, you get job rejection upon job rejection. Whether you have had the interview or whether you have applied for one that you really wanted and you got nowhere with it.

I’ve kind of been in that phase for a wee while now, but things are starting to look up again.

I had a job interview last week, alas I did not get it. But this week I have some casual work, which will give me a bit of much needed money. And next week I have a job interview/testing for a job that I think will really suit me.

It’s amazing how little things can turn your mood right around. However, if I don’t get the job next week, I may be back to feeling a bit shit again.

But, after a month of having no money coming in whatsoever, I’m finally making headway with WINZ. I have an appointment next Wednesday to get it sorted and I’m hoping for back pay! Going into overdraft because you’re not earning anything is pretty lame. I haven’t exactly been spending anything either.

So I keep applying for jobs and hopefully something will stick. It has too.

When I was at AUT we had a career advisor come in to talk to us. She said it takes around nine months to find a job. If I go from when I was let go at my previous position, I’m now at six months. I’ve had five interviews. I’m starting to think that is a pretty good track record and I’m actually on track for getting a job. It just takes one.

Unfortunately I have made no more headway in my photography course. Yikes! And I need to finish it by the 29th. So I best get on that and do some tonight/every night and over the weekends. I’m not going to fail it and waste money. I will get it done. I will.

I kind of just realised that is is the first of June. Where they hell did that come from!?

Do you know how hard it is to come up with titles? Yeah. This hard.

/ Lisa

It’s one of those days where I just feel blah.

I can’t decide what to do, because I have so many things that need doing and I don’t want to do any of them.

I couldn’t decide what to wear and I’ve already changed my pants once. I’m likely to do it a third time. And change my top because it’s getting cold.

An indecisive day it is. I just want to lie on the bed and sleep. Forgetting that this day ever existed.

It’s not often that I have these days. They’re few and far between. Sometimes it is better for me just to do nothing and wait for the mood to pass or the day to be over.

But I have so many things that need doing.

I have jobs to apply for. I have photography work that needs to be done because the deadline for my course is looming. I have blog posts to write and a potential article to research.

Yet all I want to do is climb into bed and read. Do nothing else. Forget the world exists.

But even if I was to do that, I would not be able to relax. There’s the small problem that I have no money whatsoever coming in and I still need to figure out a way to live. I’m sick of sponging of my parents. Even if they are not supporting me, I’ve just changed to sponging of Man Piece. I hate my situation right now.

Hate it to the point that I want to crawl into bed and forget the world exists.

Or maybe it’s just Sunday.

What has been lost.

/ Lisa / 2 Comments

I have just finished watching 5 Days In The Red Zone which aired on TV One last night.

It follows a group of police that travelled from Ashburton to Christchurch to help after the February 22 earthquake.

It was so intense to watch, I was actually crying. I would like to tell all of you to watch it to see what it has been like down there, but I know I can’t force you. It is on TVNZ OnDemand if you wish to.

I’m not really sure what this blog post is actually going to be about. But watching In The Red Zone started to remind me of my Granddad.

He passed away on February 19. It came as a major shock to me and I still have moments where I just have to stop and cry. I think it was made all the more worse by the quake three days later. I now think the memories of the two events will always be linked in my mind.

One day I hear that my Granddad, a solid rock my entire life, is no longer with us. Then three days later I see a city I once lived in and love destroyed. Within three days I had lost two very important things in my life and was going through that agonizing wait again to find out whether friends and family were alright.

But back to Granddad. Since February I have wanted to do a post on him, letting you all know how much he meant to me and tell you about the things that I remember most about him.

Granddad served in the army during WW2 and was stationed in Christchurch. His barracks were on Manchester St opposite Cokers Hotel. Pac’n’Sav is now there and I believe Cokers was lost in the September quake.

The reason the two will be forever linked for me, is because I am actually glad Granddad never got to see the devastation that Christchurch has witnessed. It breaks my heart to see a city that I love fall to pieces and I hate to think what Granddad would have thought.

I also can’t imagine what people in Christchurch are going through when I’m feeling like this. It must be 10 times worse.

I really want to be in Christchurch right now. To see my sister and friends and give them all a big hug.

Once again I have gone off on a tangent.

As kids, my sister and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents place and with them. They are my paternal grandparents and we were closer to them than my maternal ones who both died when I was younger.

We were quite lucky to have known and had the type of relationship we had with our Granddad, it was almost one as a second father.

Whenever Mum and Dad would go away for a weekend, we would stay with Gran and Granddad. My sister and I used to fight over the cheese bowl that Granddad grated the cheese in for our scrambled eggs, we used to actually alternate, just to be fair.

When we asked what was for dessert that night, Granddad would reply “W and S”, which was short for wait and see and in the Rapley household it meant custard. So naturally we would chorus “Oh no, not custard!”

Granddad would take us down to Cornwall park and lift us up on to the concrete lions that are there, push us on the swings and help us feed the ducks.

I have so many treasured memories of my grandfather. He was always proud of me and he insisted that he see me graduate from university, which he did. My grandparents travelled to Christchurch to see me graduate from the University of Canterbury, both had huge smiles on their faces.

Part of me is sad that Granddad will never see me succeed in my dreams of becoming a journalist, but he was always keen to read anything that I had written. He was so proud to see my name in print.

I remember when he came down to Christchurch one time, whether it was for my sister’s graduation or not, I can’t remember. But he insisted on going to visit Cokers. All of our friends were laughing at him because he kept saying he wanted to go to Manchester St, which is the red light district of Christchurch, most were wondering why this old man wanted to go there. But Dad took him down there, they had a photo outside and a drink in the pub. The smile he had on his face afterwards was amazing.

And that is how I’m going to remember him.

I wish I could post the photo of him outside Cokers, or even any photo of him, but my laptop is currently unable to be used (see previous post), I may update with a photo once it is back up and running.

I miss my granddad and just watching that documentary made me think about him and Christchurch and what has been lost this year.

Hopefully the rest of the year will be better for us all.

My poor laptop and other things…

/ Lisa

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that I had a job interview this week. I am yet to hear anything about it though. So I continue to wait.

I hate the waiting. The waiting is always the most painful part. You’re stuck in limbo. Do you do more job applications or do you wait? Because if you do more job applications you then have to tell them, “Oh sorry, I got offered another job”. I always feel they will ask, “Well, why did you bother applying?”

I know, it’s lame, but that’s just how my mind works.

The bad news is that my laptop kind of shat itself. And by laptop I mean the power supply, which in turn means laptop because my battery only lasts about 30 minutes these days. Utter fail.

So I am without a laptop. The only way am managing to write this is because of Man Piece’s Mac Mini which is hooked up to the TEEVEE. Kind of awesome.

Alas that means there probably won’t be too many job applications going on over today and tomorrow. I did manage to copy my CVs over to the mac mini before laptop died so I may be able to do some. I just don’t have word or the equivalent on mac to write cover letters. I guess I could always write them in the body of an email. Awkward.

But hopefully a new power supply is on it’s way. Dad has a universal one lying around his workshop, he said it should do the trick. If it doesn’t then I probably do need to source another one from somewhere and who knows how long that will take. Oh well. For now the mac mini is working well.

It does make me consider just buying a whole new laptop. It has not been having the best year, or more just the last 12 months. Saying year I feel implies 2011, but the troubles began sometime last year. Poor lappy. It will be three years old in August.

So that was the good news and the bad news. I just keep trucking. Doing whatever I please because I don’t have a job. But at the same time, I can’t do whatever I please because I have no money and no benefit coming in. I really should do something about that…

Anyway, supposed to be going out for drinks tonight so I should probably extricate myself from the snuggliness of the couch and go shower. Because I’m one of those lame people who doesn’t shower till mid afternoon. It’s a #lifeoftheunemployed, what you gonna do about it?

Oh, and it’s raining and I should not be allowed to make fudge ever again. And by fudge I mean delicious chocolate, peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk all mixed together, chilled and cut into tiny addictive pieces.

Ear worms can be dangerous.

/ Lisa

I am absolutely falling in love with Adele.

I’m going to blame @thatjohn for implanting the ear worm and Glee for confirming it.

My favourites at the moment are Rolling In The Deep, Turning Tables, Chasing Pavements, Someone Like You and Rumour Has It.

I’m not sure which songs are off which albums, but she has two ’19’ and ’21’. I kind of wonder how she named them. Was she that old at the time? It kind of fits.

This is the video for Rolling In The Deep, which is one that I have on repeat, because it is truly awesome. I love the video as well. Especially the glasses filled with water and it moves with the bass. Such cool imagery.

But you may recognise this song, Chasing Pavements. It was released a few years ago and I quite liked it at the time. When I started listening to her albums I had one of those “Oh it’s her!” moments. Don’t you just love those? It used to play quite a bit on C4, that’s how I know it, because I used to watch C4 religiously. Not so much nowadays.

And from listening to her albums I have really started to like Someone Like You, Turning Tables and Rumour Has It.

And one last one, Glee – Rolling in the Deep. Rachel Berry and Jessie St James. Oh *swoon* He is so sexy and his voice is amazing.