Trying Pics in Scottish Meanderings

Okay I’m going to have a go at uploading some pics to see how I get on.

Lily all dressed up for Burns night last month complete with cute kilt (of course).

Thinking she was too quiet one day Nikki went to investigate and found she’d raided her knicker drawer ......

And on coming back from a walk one morning I went to make her a snack but obviously wasn’t quick enough ...... she knows what’s in Nikki’s ‘emergency bag’ and she was hungry!!

This is our ‘say cheese’ photo face.

The boys are all fine. Snarf is hanging in there - literally.

Bailey would still rather he didn’t exist and has a swipe at him occasionally and Snarf takes it out on Willow and takes a swipe at HIM in passing but most of the time it’s all pretty harmonious.

Trooper is just Trooper. Plods on through life getting his social activity from Wendy the dogwalker who walks him twice a week at lunchtime. Dogs will do anything for a treat as is obvious from this photo (Trooper’s the one on the left).

I’m settling into my new job okay - a few glitches but of course there always are with a new job. I’m working with folk that I knew already and that helps tremendously. The location is not ideal but could be worse and is okay for now - there are moves afoot which look very healthy for this charity as I discovered when I took minutes for a committee meeting on Wednesday evening - one of these moments where you think My God these folk are in the right place at the right time - I won’t say any more just now but will expand on that at a later entry. Link below to their website but it’s currently a tad out of date due to them having to rely on the goodwill of certain people to provide them with services like IT, web design, e-mail services and the like and of course when you rely on goodwill you can’t shout the odds when the service is lacking as it has been recently.

http://www.sensationall.org.uk

Nikki, however, isn’t in such a good place I’m afraid. After the nursery where she works creating an entirely new job for her as cook in the kitchen which meant she could get more time with Lily in the afternoons, she finds she’s missing the stimulation of her old job, made worse by watching other people do it and managing to do all she needs to do in this job by around 11 a.m. then having to find things to do until 1 p.m when she clocks off. I feel for her but at the same time think she’s been lucky in that they’ve bent over backwards to accommodate her as much as they can.

They are after all a business not a charity.

Bottom line - she needs to look for another job but hasn’t the confidence. This week she was ready to hand her notice in and just exist on benefits (which she could do quite comfortably frustratingly - don’t get me started on THAT one) but didn’t thankfully so I don’t know what she’ll end up doing. Staying there is doing her head in and of course as all Mums know it’s not just about you any more - your child is a big consideration as well and if they’re in a nursery place where they’re happy that’s worth its weight in gold and makes you reluctant to change anything.

She got anti-depressants from the doctor to try to help deal with her OCD. That was well before Christmas. She hasn’t started them yet. Oh I tell a lie - she took one one night and felt sick so decided that was it - she couldn’t stand them.

That’s my Nikki.

And I took an executive decision this morning and decided to stop mine. I’ve been on them for 6 months now and can’t see that they’ve made the slightest bit of difference - in fact I think they’ve had more of a negative effect than a positive one.

I may eat my words in the near future.

I’m still waiting for an appointment for CBT - been waiting since August - but there’s a course that I’ve applied for which is run by the Scottish Recovery Consortium - a fairly new charity set up to promote addiction recovery in Scotland - which may help a bit in that respect - more in a later entry. It’s for 5 weeks in March and will mean changing my work days but the 2 Susans (my bosses) are fine with that so I’m just waiting to find out if my application is accepted.

Well that all seemed relatively painless.

I’m certainly finding it easier to write in here although miss all the bells and whistles of Open Diary and the individuality of everyone’s diary but no doubt I’ll get used to that and it’s great to know that all my friends are still here although such a shame we don’t have our ‘histories’ available to read any more. But then some folk have welcomed that because of the whole ‘starting a new page’ thing and I totally get that - I’m just supremely glad I spent a fortnight last year printing out every diary entry in OD, notes an’ all (at work!!)

As you may have seen from the notes the troubles I had when I first logged in here were due to my browser because I was still using an ancient version of Internet Explorer. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why more folk weren’t complaining about the site because it was unbelievably difficult to read and view ....... until I tried opening it with Chrome one morning ...... and all then became clear ......

So now I’m relatively happy with the place and hope that that will mean I’ll write more public entries than of late. I think writing so many private entries last year was a means to help me through what I was going through and now there may not be a need for so much of that any more.

Certainly hope so.

Last updated March 29, 2018