Spiders!!

I'm Terrified of spiders unfortunately Riley is also not a fan of spiders. This leaves me with somewhat of a problem. What do I do in the event of a spider sighting?

(Luckily most of the 'spiders' we have in our flat are more of a cross between a daddy long legs and a spider. So I don't view them as real spiders, they are still spiders so they still scare me - just less so. This is the reason behind the fact that we sort of had a pet spider in the bathroom that we named apple... she lived in the corner of the bathroom for about 5 months, mainly because we were both too scared of her to evict her. She was eventually evicted by Riley's nephew when we decorated in January. It's strange we were kind of sad to see her go.)

It's quarter to 5 in the morning, I'm in the bathroom as a 'Real' spider darts in under the door. I half scream and jump in the bath - never thought I would ever hide from a spider in a bath. It darts back under the door (I think it might be a human phobic spider). The problem is now I don't know where it is now: is it waiting outside the door? Is it still under the door? Has it gone into my room which is next to the bathroom and I left the door open. I can safely tell you that it took me a long time get the courage to leave the bath. (Also bare feet feel VERY vulnerable in this kind of situation.) This incident was 2 weeks ago... I still didn't see it again, and yes I still worry about where it went, and still keep watch for it.

My question is what do adults do when they are scared of spiders. I used to pay my brother to move them, then in Uni there was always someone around who wasn't bothered about spiders. But what do I do now? What do adult arachnophobics do?

I can't afford my job. WTF?

I have found myself in a very odd situation, as it stands at the moment I cannot afford my job.  Despite being told by both the Jobcentre and Housing benefit that my part-time job would not effect either claim, it did.

Not only that but work messing up has complicated things:
1. Due to being ridiculously unorganised at Easter I ended up working well over my contracted 10 hours
2. They forgot to pay me for the first day I worked - so they paid the missing hours 2 weeks later
3. When paying me the hours I was owed they didn't mark it as back pay on my payslip

So my Housing benefit had to be reassessed this meant I needed to send them my payslips, and they work out how much I earn a week by working out the average. Unfortunately the above reasons the average was pushed up way above what I actually earn a week.

This results in a drastic decrease in the amount of housing benefit that I get meaning the money I have left to live on is less than half of what the government says you need.

So as the title of this post says - I can't afford my job and all attempts to find another part time job to go along with this one are failing.

I wish the fish didn't party so hard

Noise Complaints

 We recently had a noise complaint this is now our second and we are confused, very confused. Now is where I should inform you that me and Riley are boring, and we don't 'party'. Our days mostly consist of reading books, watching TV, cooking and sleeping. She goes out to uni and I go to work. Our flat is a pretty quiet place, so quiet in fact that the loudest thing in our flat is the noise of downstairs kids (and god they spend 90% of the day screaming and crying). And they have the cheek to complain that we are making noise.

The most recent noise complaint is even more baffling to us, as apparently our pet is too noisy... Yeah we only have 2 pets and they are both Goldfish. I may be wrong about this but as far as I know Goldfish don't make noises. They swim around all day and occasionally they might move a stone or two and other than that the only other noise is the pump to their tank. However I can't hear said stones or pump over the noise of downstairs kids! I really must tell the fish to stop partying while we are asleep.



(Maybe it's our flat ghost Dennis... )

Erm who do I work for?

Again apologies for the lack of posts.

As my last post said I have a part-time job. I have a small and a little embarrassing problem - I don't know who I work for.

The woman who hired me (the head of the department) has seemingly disappeared I saw her on my first day and then she vanished. this resulted in the first month of working there being absolute chaos. Resulting in the very awkward situation of trying to clean a caravan around the guests that have already unpacked.

But finally after working there for two months I now know who I work for - Yay. Now I can pretend I knew all along.

A different perspective

My flatmate Riley has started a blog, also about starting adult life and stuff. Fortunately she is a more frequent blogger than I am, and she is pretty funny. The blog is called Growing Up Broke and well worth a read you can find it here.

So far she has posts covering:
- Moving in
- Neighbours
- What your parents didn't tell you
- Deadlines
- And why adults don't have sleepovers

Totally unrelated - Blogger's spell check doesn't recognise the words blog or blogger.

A job at last

I think the title might say it all, but I finally have a job. It's only part-time (10hrs a week). but it is at least a step in the right direction So now I am focusing on trying to find another part time job to fit inbetween monday and friday.
I also finnished my 8 weeks of work experience and the manager gave me flowers to thank me for helping with the stock take... it's the first time I've been given flowers which is pretty pathetic concidering that I'm nearly 22 and no-one has given me flowers before. I also don't have a vase so they currently live in a wine bottle so having a small collection of wine bottles is in fact useful.

Christmas, Paint and Work Experience!

So it’s been a while since I last posted almost 5 months… and I would like to say that my lack of posts for those 5 months were due to me being too busy… well for 2 and a half of those months I can say that, but for the rest I can’t…  but I do have a lot to say about the past 5 months.

Christmas!   -  You can’t leave the UK while on jobseekers without signing off, which became a problem for me since my parents moved out there, and this meant that I couldn’t spend Christmas with my family so this was the first Christmas I spent not with my family. I wasn’t a bad Christmas though, it wasn’t the same but it wasn’t bad, if fact it was good. And it made me appreciate what I have here (I spent Christmas with my flatmate and her family) and isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be about.

And it also meant we got to decorate the flat :)

 Uh-oh, Oh shit! – At the start of January I finally put some of the paint that I’ve had since September on my walls the day was pretty much full of us constantly saying “uh-oh” and “Oh, Shit” as we painted ceiling and made other small slip ups.  For some unknown we decided that midnight was a good time to start painting the bathroom – this was filled with considerably less “uh-oh” and “Oh Shit” ‘s as by 1am we just didn’t care.

Work Experience, Yay! – So half way through January I started do an 8 week work experience with The Works (done through the jobcentre), this is the scheme that got a fair bit of publicity recently as someone took the jobcentre to court about it being slave labour.

Firstly this is yet again something the jobcentre managed to cock up as I got woken up with a phone call at 10:30am on a Monday from the jobcentre asking if I had gotten a phone call over the weekend – which I hadn’t…

“Oh, because you were supposed to start work experience this morning at 9. You weren’t told you’d got the work experience?”

“No”

“How soon can you be here?”

Oh how I love being messed around by the job centre.  And you know what I can see where that woman how sued them is coming from the work experience consists of 40hrs a week and has to include Saturday, that is a lot of hours for nothing but travel expenses. In fact doing the work experience actually cost me money as I had to buy stuff to make up lunch with, since when I’m at home I don’t really eat lunch I just have some toast.  While doing my work experience in a shop I wasn’t allowed to actually serve customers (is that not a key bit of experience in retail?) and I don’t really think I gained any skills from my work experience. The only thing I gained was not being in the house and a grain of social interaction.

So do I think it’s slave labour?  I don’t think it’s slave labour but I do think things need to be changed to make it fair – like maybe the option of quitting the work experience without them stopping your benefits, and possibly less hours 40hrs seems excessive to me just for work experience. (and of course it would have been nice to get a little money from it even if it was just a £5 extra.) But it was a voluntary thing I signed up to do… it just would have been nice to also have the option to leave.