Too embarrassed for words.

Part of my job, as an EPOS worker, involves taking products off the shelf which no longer scan, because they’ve been deleted from the tills.

So, if one of the checkout girls finds an item which doesn’t scan, they’ll call for a member of EPOS, tell them what the item is, and where it is, so they can take it off the shelf, fill out a reduction sheet, sell it at a reduced price or whatever.
Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work…

Today, while I was in the freezers, Gemma, one of the checkout backs, who looks after the checkout staff, called for a member of EPOS. Only too glad to get out of the freezers, because they’re, well, freezing, I wandered up to checkout 19, the hub of all grocery activity.

Once I got there, Gemma informed me that there was an “item” in the toiletries aisle which wasn’t scanning.
Very helpful, I’m sure, as the toiletries span three aisles, and they’re crammed in like sardines or something, Dunnes sells a ridiculous amount of toiletries.
Still refusing to name the item, Gemma began walking toward the toiletries, with me following her, slightly bemused.

She then informed me that it hadn’t been scanning for two days, and it had to be removed, as she “couldn’t cope” with any more of the checkout girls asking her to put it through manually.
“It’s some sort of… ring” she explained, with an extremely red face.
Comprehension dawned upon me and I began to be more amused as she described her tribulations with this bothersome item.

She continued to complain as she turned into the first toiletries aisle. I, now well informed as to what I was seeking, directed her to the next.
“I don’t need Seán Hennessy explaining what it is to me! I just couldn’t see because his hand was over it!”

Continuing to giggle, I retrieved the offending item from the shelf and promised not to let it be seen again.
Gemma thanked me profusely and retreated to the safety of checkout nineteen again, secure in the knowledge that she would no longer be forced to interact with this pesky piece of merchandise.

The item? Here.
Gemma wouldn’t even let me say what it was called. =)

Pathetic Fallacy

Six of them sat around the table, all with trays in front of them, varying amounts of food left on their plates.
The four sitting left-most on the table, three of whom had sat down only ten minutes ago, were discussing the law essay they were all working feverishly on.
With only two days until the deadline, the work rate had been stepped up dramatically.
It being a late March day, the day was dull, and the conversation similarly so. It meandered aimlessly around the table, resting finally on the new paintball bow Dave had brought into college that day. With five of the six regular attendees at archery practice, it was naturally an item of great interest to most of the people at the table.

The sixth, Fitz, had no interest in the bow and turned to the girl sitting opposite him to discuss what the topic of their law lecture later would be.

Having only half listened to his question, she turned to him with a slightly bemused expression, as if he had asked something ridiculous of her.

She informed him that their law lecture that day was cancelled, as the lecturer had announced the previous Friday.
Fitzy’s eyes widened in delight and the other two law students sitting at the table whipped their heads ’round in disbelief and astonishment.
The girl stated again that the lecturer had informed them of the cancellation on Friday, then recalled belatedly that none of the three of them had attended those lectures.

Bright sunlight suddenly spilled through the windows, lighting up the faces of Ciarán, Sunner and Fitz with a beatific delight.
Dave, having watched this brief exchange with some amusement, but not participating as he was a science student, commented wryly that it was as if the weather itself was celebrating.
Giggles and droll acknowledgements came from around the table, and conversation carried on with slightly more vigour than before.

*boom*

Clumsiness.
I has it.

I wish I could be one of those people who swans around the place looking effortlessly graceful and magnificent. That would be so cool. I’d be like some sort of small graceful thing. Or something.

Anyways, that’s kind of random and pointless. Graceful and elegant I most certainly am not.

At this point, my friends are pretty used to it. Obviously I’m used to it, I’ve been dealing with it for the guts of nineteen years now.

Clumsiness comes with its own distinctive markers. It’s a regular occurrence for me to stumble randomly while walking somewhere. It’s those damned invisible stones, they’re always out to get me.
Bruises are par for the course, naturally. In fact, at the moment my shins are littered with them. I have five bruises on my left shin and I could not tell you how I got a single one of them. Bruises just appear on me, like magic.

Anyways, the reason why I’m writing this post is so I don’t have to think about writing my law essay. It’s horribly boring, and very intense, and I really don’t want to have to do it.
So, yeah, I’m procrastinating.

Plus, I fell up the stairs earlier. Luckily it was one of those small falls where you only change your position by about two steps and can get up quickly. Poor Shane, my sister’s boyfriend, came running out to see if I was okay, whereas my sisters just ridicule me. That’s what happens after they get used to it.

Actually, stairs and I don’t really get on. The catalyst for me deciding to give up drink was falling down the stairs on New Year’s Eve. I’d blame tequila for that, but I had fallen down the stairs in my own house a week previous stone cold sober…

Another stairs related incident? I was walking to a French lecture on a Friday morning and got hissed at by a cat. Decided to text Dave about that, and while looking at the phone I managed to walk into the stairs in the Callan building.

So, in summation! Aislinn is trying to avoid having to write a law essay, and she’s decided to tell the world at large that she’s clumsy!
Oh well, at least I’m not left handed.

Earth Hour

It’s Earth Hour at the moment – I’m sitting in the sitting room with my sister, with all the lights off and everything bar the TV and Bob turned off.

Actually, I’ve had the lights off for most of the day – since I was the only person in the house from when I got home from work until Sinéad came in at about ten past eight, there was little point in turning all the lights on.

Earth Hour in itself, of course, is not enough. To save the planet we need to do more, but at least it’s a start!

I’m gonna keep this blog post short, since I can’t see the keyboard, and while I can touch type, it’s a lot easier when one can see what one is doing!

Now I’m off to see if I can navigate out to the back door so I can recycle the pizza boxes.
I have a horrible feeling that I’m gonna come into rather painful contact with the kitchen table. You’d think I’d be able to navigate around my house blind by now, but apparently not – I’ve already had an incident with a door frame.
Ouch!

Cleaning out my closet

Not that I like Eminem or anything. And also not like I was actually cleaning out my closet – that mammoth task is only to be attempted on a long, boring day when I have plenty of spare time and lots of energy.

Nah, today I just cleaned my room, ’cause my Gran’s coming to visit this weekend, therefore my sister is sleeping in my room.

Anyways, in the course of cleaning my room, I tend to come across a lot of crap, because I’m practically incapable of throwing things out.
Among the debris which littered my floor and both my beds I found:
Roughly twenty expired train tickets, which I could only just throw out.
Seven odd earrings
Six uniform shirts
A band jumper, a band t-shirt, an orchestra t-shirt and an orchestra jumper.
More odd socks than any one person should ever own
An insurmountably huge number of pyjama bottoms (where do they all come from??)
A graphic novel (Watchmen, I must read that, and give it back to Dave)
Ten books which escaped the clutches of my bookcase but didn’t manage to make it all the way to being read
Seven books of manga, five of which don’t belong to me
Two posters, both of which I stuck up with:
A two centimetre diameter ball of blu-tack
Six dictionaries (One English-Irish/Irish-English, one Irish-English, one English-Irish, one French, one pocket French and one English)
Small change in five different currencies (Euro, Sterling, Canadian dollars, American Dollars, Swiss Francs and Norwegian Kroner)
Seven musical instruments (Two clarinets, one sax, two keyboards, a recorder and a ukulele)
Somewhere in the region of two hundred sheets of music (mostly band, some orchestra, some personal stuff)
Five teddies, which had *all* managed to fall off the box I had them perched on
Fifteen empty or mostly empty bottles (water, mostly, don’t worry, I’m not a complete alco.)
And a naggin of vodka. (?? Didn’t know that was there, I haven’t had a drink in three months!)

I should clean out my room more often, it can be quite interesting! Obviously some of the stuff I knew was in there, but some I’d completely forgotten about.
I should stop hoarding stuff…
What kinda stuff do you keep in your room?

Dreams.

Dreams are crazy things. I don’t often dream, or if I do I don’t normally remember them. With me it’s generally a case of head hits pillow, fall asleep, next thing I know I’m awake trying to throw my phone out the window before I realise it’s plugged into the charger.

However, in the last few weeks I’ve had a couple of dreams which I remember.

They’re weird old things, dreams.
Today, when I was walking around college with Dave he recounted a dream he had last night, that we’d been on a bus and then ended up somewhere in Laois. Then he delivered my baby.
Didn’t know I was pregnant, like, but there you go!

Last week I had a horrible, horrible dream, where my brother died (*touch wood*).
I don’t even remember most of it, but I know there was a funeral, and a whole lot of crying.
Incidentally, when I woke up that morning my pillow was soaked. Strange, I don’t often cry in my sleep.

Last night I had a sex dream about my friend Dave. That was really, really weird.

And a couple of years ago I had a period of about a week and a half where every night I dreamed about lumpy, rotten milk. They were sick, sick dreams.
For about ten days, every time I went to sleep I dreamed I was getting up in the morning and making tea (with lumpy milk), eating cereal (with lumpy milk), getting a drink (of lumpy milk) etc.
I haven’t actually drunk milk since, except when it’s in cereal or tea.

Yeah, those are some weird dreams I’ve had. Imagination’s an odd thing, especially when it’s let loose. =)

Protected: I know.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Band, band, band.

I’m so bloody sick of band.
Between it and orchestra, I think I’m about to explode.

In the last three days, let’s see…
I had six hours of orchestra on Saturday, four hours of band yesterday and two today. How many’s that? Twelve?

Yeah, can you see yet why I’m beginning to get sick of music?

Don’t get me wrong, now, I love music, I love every aspect of it. I love talking about it, listening to it, playing it, even discussing it.
But the band pieces!!

Oh, God.
The 44th National Band Championships are in three weeks.
So you can only imagine the amount of preparation we’re putting into them.

Nationals work like this: Each band is in a specific section. We (Lucan Concert Band) are in the Senior section, which is second from the top. Ahead of us is Advanced, which is like, DCB and Rathfarnham, etc. You know, the really good ones.

Anyways, each section gets its own test piece. Ours is Passacaglia, written by Timothy Jackson.

It’s not the kind of piece you’d fall in love with. It’s powerful, yeah, but doesn’t really stir me.
Well, not after we’ve spent hours dissecting it with pencils and instruments, marking in places to breathe and working out how Liam’s gonna subdivide the bars, etc. etc.
It’s a pain.
It’s not a difficult piece from a fingering point of view. It’s more a question of breathing and putting the right feelings into the piece.
Anyways, that’s the test piece. All the bands in our section have to do it.

Then we play a second piece, the choice piece. As the name implies, we have a choice in what we play.
Well, when I say we, I mean Lorcan, our conductor.
He picked Diogenes, by Jacob de Haan.
Now that’s a nice piece. That’s the kind of piece which gets stuck in your head, with so much diversity, and colour that you can’t help but like it.
De Haan is a good composer, though, we’ve played a good few of his pieces.

However!
No matter how nice or horrible the pieces, it’s hard to retain any affection for them when you’ve spent day after day, week after week dissecting them, practising them, cursing them, glaring at them and wanting to kill them.
(Is it even possible to kill a piece of music?)

Anyways. Can’t wait for Nationals to be over, and things to return to normal.
Playing only two pieces every band practice is annoying the crap out of me – I’m gonna go mad soon.

Nationals are in Cork School of Music on the 18th and 19th of April. Details can be found at http://iabcb.ie
Good luck to everyone competing (except the bands in my section, of course, ’cause I want to win ;-])

Alan’s Hair is taking over the world!!

Alan’s hair is trending rapidly, on the search.twitter.com homepage. Blog posts are being made left, right and centre, you can find his hair all over the web.
I always knew it had a life of its own…

James Foley, hashtag creator, posts.

The Hair Himself

Conor has an *exclusive* interview with the twitterlebrity, and its mouthpiece, Alan.
Miralize’s post

My post

Declan Meenagh mentions it too

See for yourself

On hashtags.org

Can you Digg it?

Follow the phenomenon from Sydney to South Dublin!

Twitscoop is getting in on it as well!

#alanshair popped up on NowPublic as well

There are tons of other links, I’m still hunting them down. =)

#alanshair

The internet is a wonderful place.
Alan is a good friend of mine, my best friend.
For a long time now, I’ve wondered about his hair…
Is it actually attached to his head, or is it an alien being which has mutated to control his mind and make him do crazy things (like dye it blonde)?

So now, from the depths of my bebo photos, and various band concerts over the last two years, I bring you a small selection of pictures of Alan’s hair – a chilling account of how one man has been controlled by something bigger than us all (and bigger than AIG)
=D
** Did I mention that he stood me up once, because he had a fight with his hairdresser? This hair is a wondrous being, trying to destroy his friendships!

I met Alan just over two years ago. His hair was normal then…

Then, though it began to affect him – his camera whore tendencies began to shine through.

They got worse as time went on…

The blonde began to appear…

I turned around for a few months to concentrate on my Leaving and when I started paying attention again the alien had attacked.

What is this on his head?
Is it a dead cat?
Did he roll around in a farm and forget to pick the straw off his head?
I don’t know.
But it’s trended on twitter here!

Nice one, Alan’s hair! One step closer to world domination!