The good, the bad and the bitching!

So it has been a long weekend! I took off work for half of Friday so that I could make the cake and set myself up for Bens present unveiling.

The cake, as mentioned turned out well… although it did take forever to bake. And then I made slice which always turns out well. everyone loves that slice… I’m not sure why… its OK I guess, but people go mad for the stuff!

I set up the presents on a rug and numbered them 1 – 30 (although 28 and 29 were in the fridge and 30 was me!) and waited… Ben ended up coming home early that day and his face when he saw the presents was just priceless. He was like “What have you done!” and as he opened each and every one it was funny seeing his face… especially on the joke presents (like the sex vouchers!) and it was great just watching him enjoy them all.

Its not like I got him anything amazing – there was some clothes, underwear, a new wallet, dvds, cds, but he loved it, he seemed just so appreciative of all the effort. As I showed him the peppermint slice I made him and the fact that I bought him his favourite cold rock icecream he was very happy. We sat there and looked at the presents as he played around with them all and it felt good to do something that made him so happy!

That night we went out for Mexican and watched the footy and I fell asleep nice and early, which I was happy for!

The next day I went off for a haircut (thankfully turned out OK, new hairdresser is good. she gave me a side fringe) and came back as all the boys turned up to take Ben to the footy. They got the house tour as they hadn’t visited before and off they went. I then spent the day icing the cake, getting things ready for the party and trying to relax. I was very stressed about the cake!

Eventually time passed and my parents picked me up and off we went to dinner. We ran upstairs quickly and decorated then came and said hi to everyone. One of the first things his friend said to me is that the present idea was awesome and Ben was really excited about it… so yay, he wasn’t just saying it to my face! Hehe

We had dinner and my parents met Ben’s parents for the first time (Which I think went ok) then everyone started arriving and we headed upstairs. The night started off well, everyone chatting and getting along. People made an effort to talk to Ben’s and my parent’s as well which was good.

Eventually it was time for speeches and two of Ben’s friends got up and said some words, which were really sweet. Listening to them talk about this great guy I have dated for nearly 9 months I realised just how lucky I am. He really is a sweet guy who doesn’t have a bad word to say about everyone and the longer I am with him the more I feel myself calming down, letting a lot of the anger I have with people go. I take things so personally when I shouldn’t and it causes me to hold grudges. Ben is the opposite of that really… sure he might get mad but he won’t hold it against people.

The rest of the night continued on, people got drunk, they danced, everyone had fun. We got home at like 3am and were veryyyyyy tired. Slept until 1ish the next day and although I felt OK, Ben was very seedy. We grabbed some breakfast, did the food shopping and headed back home and vegged. We watched some of Coupling (I got him the box set for his bday) and went to bed early.

All in all, the party was fun and well worth organising. But more importantly, I am even more in love with that gorgeous boy of mine every day!

Friday I took half the day off to make Ben’s birthday cake (or birthday brownie!) and thankfully it turned out well! Here is the recipe

Choc Peppermint Brownies

125g butter
200g dark chocolate
½ cup caster sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
¾ cup plain flour
¼ cup self raising flour
125g milk chocolate
125g peppermint chocolate

Choc Peppermint Icing
1-2 tbsp milk
1-2 drops peppermint extract
1 tbsp cocoa powder
6 tbsp soft butter
3/4 cup icing sugar

•    Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celcius (150 degrees in fan forced)
•    Grease and line a 20cm (8 inch) square cake pan
•    Melt butter, dark chocolate over low heat in a saucepan
•    Stir in sugar and eggs into chocolate mixture, add flours and chopped chocolates and stir until combined
•    Spread into cake pan
•    Bake for 30-40 minutes
•    Allow to cook
•    Make icing by combining all ingredients in a bowl, adding milk (or water) until desired consistency

Wala!

Choc Peppermint Brownie!

It is really fudgey and moist, so much so in fact that I had trouble getting the knife through it! Was a big hit with everyone though! To get the size I made I basically x4 the recipe and it was huge!

I saw this on Karyn’s Pretty In The City website, and I am in LOVE with her apartment. Especially that silver cuckoo on the wall there. Its the kind of thing Im going for in my place with the black and white, but on a much more simplistic level!

From Pretty in the city

OK I know I said I would stop talking about work, but really – it’s a big part of my life! And I’m happy. I just got a BIG payrise, like 15%. Which kind of sucks in a way because now I start paying off my HECS (student loan) debt, but I will be getting slightly more money and that is always a good thing. And its not as if I am on a huge wage getting moved to an even bigger wage. I earn the least out of my friends (and still do) but I accepted that lesser income when I chose my career. But it’s a good start. And it makes all those thoughts about “am I doing the right thing by staying” subside, for now!

Went out Friday night for my birthday and got wayyyyy too drunk. To the point where I don’t remember a lot of the second part of the night… I especially loved hearing that my friends kept feeding me shots even though I didn’t want to drink them! Apparently I was sitting there just looking at them and not knowing what to do. But I’m a trooper, so I drank them… and then I threw up when I got home. That is only the 4th time I think I have ever thrown up from alcohol. Such a graceful way to start off my year of being 26!

But its been a good time for reflection about everything and how happy I am… my life is coming along really well and I am so lucky to have all these great friends. 27 people turned up for dinner on Friday night, and that makes me feel so loved! Not everyone has this in their life and I need to start realising that the little things that piss me off aren’t worth sweating. Ive been a little more zen about work issues since all this promotion business happened and I feel as if I am getting somewhere so the little annoyances haven’t bothered me too much.

This weekend is Ben’s 30th and I just want to throw him a great party and make him happy. One more pressie to go and a cake to bake and we are there!

I promised an update on why not to hire 18 year olds. To preface all the bitching I am about to do, keep all this in mind: my friend H and I convinced our boss to give this girl a chance. He did not want to hire someone so young, but she looked friendly, well presented and seemed to have half a brain.

That opinion changed within a few days. She went from being nice to everyone, to getting nastier and grumpier the more she seemed to realise that her position as receptionist meant that people were going to ask her to, you know, work.

I tried really hard to like her, but she would come have lunch with us and spend her time on the phone to her boyfriend, meaning nobody else could talk because she was on the phone. Whenever she had a problem relating to marketing, she would ask me and I would sit there patiently and explain to her why what she had written wouldn’t work and get her to draft and re-draft again and again.

But at the end of the day, she isn’t the brightest crayon in the pack, if you know what I mean. And my biggest pet peeve is people who aren’t good at their job because they negatively impact on my time here.

She also had real issues with my friend H. H is in charge of training her but getting her to do anything was a real struggle. You tell her something to her face and she would stare blankly at you, and seeing as she would never ask anything to anyones face, it became easier to email because at least you got a response.

Fast forward to just as we are getting promotions and H asks her to do something and I reminded her of something. And then the email came in… she accidentally sent an email meant for her boyfriend to H bitching about us and how dare we tell her what to do!

So we ended up having a meeting about it where she started crying the second my boss started talking… in the end she tried to pull everyone down with her saying that we always ask her to do things and that isn’t fair and its like, sorry love, youre the receptionist.

She apparently took offence to me emailing back to her to say why don’t you try and write the letter yourself and I will help you out once you’ve given it a go, and various other emails she has sent me first. So I said to her, “what is so offensive about that?” and she couldn’t answer and I’m like “you really shouldn’t say I offend you over things I am just replying to your original email. I think you need to clarify that.” So she goes, “yeah you’re probably right, you don’t send me offensive emails.” I’m like “thankyou. I don’t want you giving people that impression when it is not the case. And have I not tried to help you out heaps since you got here?” “Yes you have.”

So the end result is that my boss told her to stop being so sensitive to emails asking her to do things, and emails in general, and for her to stop emailing us with requests if she doesn’t like the way in which we are responding.

Fast forward half a day and she sends me an email. Great! So I check with H and my boss, is the reply I’m sending her non-offensive in everyway? Everyone agreed yes, but apparently she didn’t think so. When she read it she went straight into my boss and complained. He promptly told her, I approved her sending you that email because she was trying to be very sensitive to your feelings, and there is nothing at all insulting in there so you need to get over it.

Another reason you don’t hire 18 year olds: I swear to god she is coming in hung over every day! Today she will barely talk to anyone and is half asleep. She also got busted in a sickie! We had a bunch of invoices to send out and so we stayed back late setting them up for her because she hadn’t been in that day and H was out the next day. A few weeks go by and 4 of the invoices have come back because they were put in the wrong envelope (and the potential issues that could have caused was huge!) and so she told the accounts lady “sorry I was really hung over that day!” and the accounts lady told us laughing because she thought it was funny. Uh no. So we had to tell the boss because who knew how many were wrong, and he asked her and she denied saying it, as did the accounts lady (who has since been fired for lying about a billion different things.)

It was then we realised that the day before all those invoices were done, she had called in sick. So she got busted for calling in sick to go drinking!

But the funniest thing is how she got caught out lying about all of this – my boss was reading her emails (and yes he can do that) and there was one to her boyfriend saying “oh my god I just did a poo in the toilet and it smells like Jim Beam and Coke.” Gross I know, but friggen hilarious, and side note: who says that to their boyfriend anyway?

It’s also quite funny to watch her think she actually got us into trouble for sending her mean emails… she still thinks we are in trouble. What she doesn’t realise is straight after that meeting I stayed behind and was promoted. She chose to listen to only what she wanted to hear – and not that she should take a leaf out of our book because we were loyal workers with a passion for the company. Ah well. I don’t think she will last here too much longer, not unless she pulls her head in and stops turning up hungover!

On a side note- I did a Wordle and it came up all about work, so I will aim to stop that! Make this a more positive upbeat blog, especially because I have so much to be thankful for. Ben is getting a camera for his bday so hopefully I can start taking more pics and write more about the cakes and stuff that Im making!

click to make it bigger!

So when I last spoke about work I had gone for a job interview, it had gone well, and they wanted me to come in for a second interview.

This time felt different to the last time I had job hunted… I think it was that I knew I would get that job if I tried. So I felt really guilty, and thought that after 3 years and a close relationship with my boss I really felt like I couldn’t ever put him in that situation of “I have another job, what you gonna do about it?”

I hadn’t spoken to my close friend at work about it and wanted to get her opinion on asking my boss, so I told her and she confessed that she wasn’t interested in staying past the end of the year if things continued on in this way. I decided to just suck it up and talk to my boss.

Not knowing how he would react – it pretty much can depend on the day in these situations – I was pleasantly surprised. I simply said Ive been thinking of leaving, and so we went through the reasons why (financial and my future being a big one of those) and what I would be leaving to do and he simply said, you would be silly to leave and do marketing elsewhere when we are a marketing company. What can we do to make you stay?

A part of staying would have to mean KPI’s and an easily trackable value system, which he said would normally mean going into sales, but I convinced him that I would be better spent in client relationship managing so he could track how good a job I was doing without me having to do something I am uncomfortable with.

But this change in my job would mean that 2 other people’s jobs would be seriously changed (1 for the better and 1 not so much) so my boss called in my friend, got her opinion and as a result we both have been given pretty decent promotions.

A lot of it involves taking all the admin and client managing work off our sales and marketing girl – another close friend of ours, but one who I have spoken about before (she is the one who has a kind of dodgy love life). The thing is, we both love her and consider her a good friend but her personal problems are not only affecting our relationship with her (she makes herself feel better by putting us down a lot of the time) and her work is slipping. When I first started, she was awesome at her job and someone to really aspire to be. The last year though, she has gone through waves of good and bad. But the last 6 months her work has just not been up to standard, she is fully in charge of sales and holds the company’s revenue in her hands and she is coasting by on old customers and loyalty. As a result we have lost a lot of good possibilities and everything is quietening down. Her excuse is that she has too much admin to do and she blames everything that goes wrong on my friend.

The reshuffling of jobs takes away all her places to hide. She has no admin anymore, and once she has sold a marketing job, she has to hand it over to me. She can’t take the brief, do the interviews, or anything. She simply has to move onto selling the next job.

All this was going on while she was away, but she came back on Wednesday, and was promptly told about the changes. It hasn’t been a happy time since.

While she is just a little bit distant to me, she is being downright mean to my friend (I guess because Ive known her longer and a lot of her real insecurities come from having a 21 year old take half your job… I’m just doing more of what Ive always done.) And even though she was told the new changes start immediately… well she is still not doing a single one of them and if we try to encourage her to do them she bites.

To my boss’ face she was good about it and said she thought it was a great idea, but we know that she isn’t. She is just waiting until he forgets how it is meant to run and will continue on the way it used to be. We tried to force a discussion meeting with my boss involved but he doesn’t want much to do with it anymore, because as far as he knows its all happy moving forward.

Today I am having a meeting between all 3 of us and we will discuss this, and I will put the guilt on as her friend and let her know she has to do this. It hasn’t been done to her detriment. Sure we both got promotions out of it and are now moving to the management team, but it was done with the companys interest at heart. Why else would our boss agree with it? It is also to help get her back on track – she has lost her sparkle and a bit of competition and fighting for what she loves should come back in and hopefully she gets back on track.

The thing is everyone who knows about it so far thinks the idea is great. Except for her. So its going to be an interesting few months ahead here. My boss expects us to get really busy straight away, but I think she will fight it and therefore my position will be relatively unchanged for a few months I would say. Time will tell.

So this feels like a good move, and I’m giving it until the end of the year to see how I feel about it. in which time I can get my surgery, have a holiday, and work out if this is the right move. But you have to give things a chance. I love this place and the people, so it would be silly to leave without trying.

That said. Still no sign of a damn pay rise! And I am in a tough spot now. Ill have to decide what to do on Tuesday when the pay comes in. If I don’t get one within the next few weeks, its going to make me really mad. We discussed that it had been 1 ½ years since my last one, so its due. But now does he want me to prove I can do this promotion? Which I am fine with, but I think that I am at least entitled to an extra 5 per cent to combat inflation to make do until I have proven myself. If only my damn boss wasn’t so tight!

Up next – why you should never hire 18 year olds.

Today, I am another year older. I am OK with this birthday. How can I not be? I might be getting old and eventually I will be all wrinkly and won’t be able to go out drinking and dancing anymore, but my life is great. I have the best boyfriend, great friends and family and things are starting to look up work wise. So it’s a good birthday.

That said, why does my ex think its perfectly fine to ruin it by messaging me the second its deemed an acceptable hour? And then announce that he will be calling me at the end of the day. As if hearing from him isn’t enough to ruin my day, but him deciding the first time I will talk to him in nearly 9 months will be my birthday.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I knew I couldn’t not reply. It would be rude and I know he was sitting there sweating it out. So I wrote back thanks for the bday wishes, I am really well, and I am busy all tonight but I might be able to chat at 5. He said ok back. Now I regret that. I want to message him and say no actually, I am just not OK with talking to you.

Its so stressful. I have no feelings for him whatsoever except maybe guilt. I don’t know why. He was an ass to me, and breaking up was the best decision we have ever made, its just, I know how much it hurt him because he regretted his treatment of me the second I broke it off. and then he begged and cried and pleaded for another chance, and I can’t get those words out of my head because they make me feel so bad for saying no. There is no way I ever would have gone back, but I am someone who is easily guilted and I don’t know how to say no to people.

So I don’t know what to do. I just smsed him to say I couldn’t talk to him because it was stressing me out and I was sorry for that but I just can’t do it. Am I a bitch? What do you owe to your exes? Anything? Nothing? I know I said we could be friends but in reality I don’t think that could ever happen. What are we going to do? Have coffee with our new partners? I don’t think so.

He just wrote back that it was ok and its hard for him so don’t worry about it. I feel as if a weigh has been lifted!

Now I can look forward to my night of thai and cuddles with Ben! Ive had so many messages and calls, facebooks wall posts, that I feel so lucky. I got a gorgeous necklace from by boy and some great new sheets from my parents – see. Btw – that is Rupert. Dad isn’t impressed with Rupert, but really, Rupert might be a silly teddy but he is our silly teddy!

So no more stressing about this, ive got a heap to fill you in on about work and all that, but need the time and its still evolving, so I don’t want to write the incomplete story!

I am at a bit of a cross roads at the moment. I gave up my job hunting a few months ago because I wanted to see what I was up against in terms of needing surgery, I thought we would go overseas and well, I also started to get a little happier at work.

But all that has slowly been changing in the last few weeks, months even now that I think about it.

Why? Well it is the same old problem I always have at this place. Despite the fact that I love the work I do (not the pay though…) it is always overpowered by my boss’ hiring of stupid people. And I know that I shouldn’t let other people affect my work day so much, but I can’t help it. I love where I work, I love most of the people and when someone comes in and disturbs that, well, I get mad.

Its being exacerbated by the fact that we have two annoying people at the moment. One – our 18 year old receptionist with the worst attitude I have ever seen. This girl really is just dumb. She couldn’t even put the right invoice in the right envelope and when confronted about it, she just said she wasn’t feeling well that day because she had a hangover! Seriously!

Also annoying is our art director. She is meant to be a leader, creative and organised, but is none of those. Every month we find ourselves slipping further and further behind deadline, struggling to make up the time she cost us on her first issue (she caused the issue to go out 2 weeks into the NEXT month because she took so long.) It is so demotivating to work your butt off, write great articles and in record time, only to have them sit there for days on end with no design work done, and when you finally do get to proof read the magazine you see your words accompanied with the laziest design ever. I shouldn’t have to tell a designer how to design. But that is what a lot of my days are spent doing.

Having people like this around the office puts everyone – even my editor who would never say a bad word about anyone – in bad moods. They stress out, get angry, and basically talk about how good things USED to be.

This isn’t the first lot of poison apples we have dealt with. It seems like whenever he fires one, he hires another. And the cycle continues. He always has a go at me and my friend at work for not giving people a chance, but its simply not true because we have welcomed with open arms every new staff member, made friends with most of them. But certain few we can see straight away they won’t work out. I don’t know why, but on people’s first days we can tell if they will get fired or not. It is getting to the point where we can even tell how long until they get fired too. For example – art director has maybe 2 more months left in her… receptionist is going to be a long term struggle. Boss really wants her to work out, which means putting up with her surly nature for at least until the end of the year.

So I think I have had it. And as a result, started the job hunt a few days ago. That resulted in me getting a job interview. It went really well. I have been asked to write an exercise for her, and once that is done, go back in for a second interview.

Now I am scared! All I can think about is what if I take this job and I fail? It is outside of my journalism stream into communications. While I have experience writing marketing material, I don’t know an awful lot about the technical side of it – what are those marketing ideas called? Could I come up with multiple marketing ideas and campaigns when I have never studied the subject itself? It is a risk, but I know creative thinking is one of my strong points.

It also seems like a very busy job. I’m not scared of busy. But I do value my work life balance. The hours are 9 – 6, so I wouldn’t get home until quite late which means less dinner cooking, less gym and less relaxing. It also means goodbye to seeing my family mid week which had been our goal. The pay is also the same as what I am getting now, which is a shame.

But all that I can deal with if it is the right job. Its just, how do you know it’s the right job? How do you put these fears away. How do I have the guts to take that leap. I would love to talk to my boss about this but I just don’t know if it is the right idea or not. So yeah. Stay tuned. I may or may not do something with my life!

Went to a party at a high school friend’s house on the weekend. And it was just like that. High school. She never really has gone past that high school phase. You know the kind of party, its in the backyard even though its winter, everyone sits around drinking their pre mix or cheap wine, there is no music, its not too entertaining, oh and of course, the first thing her stoner boyfriends friends did when they arrive – take a hit of the bong.

Ive got a confession to make here. I have never tried any drugs (except for alcohol of course.) Most people find that hard to believe, but I never really had an interest. Well, I was tempted at one stage, but by the time I was 15 and we started to get into all the drinking and drugs my friend (the same one that had the party) was already so far into her drugs that I really didn’t want that for myself. We were 13 when she started leaving school early to go chroming with her friend from public school in the park. By 15 and I got offered my chance at the bong, well, she was already a regular user, depressed and having some scary little hallucinations. I thought about it and realised I didn’t want that for myself.

And you know what, that’s never changed. Whenever I think of trying something like that, even something supposedly “harmless” as weed, I think of her.  I think of how she used to be, a smiley, happy, smart girl. And how she is now, still a very smart girl but so unhappy and incapable of doing anything with her life. I hope this changes for her and she gets her act together, but we are 26 now and she shows no signs of giving up the bong.

So as I sat on her “outside” couch and tried not to freeze in this mid winter party, and watched all these people I used to go to high school with walk straight over to the bong, I was suddenly hit with this (and sorry if this sounds smug) very happy feeling about how good my life is. I don’t need drugs, I don’t even need alcohol. I just need the people that make me happy and I hope one day my friend finds something that does that for her besides drugs.

Meanwhile, Ben truly is an angel, because he is just as anti-drugs as me, and he sat there at the party and didn’t complain, or make any funny faces as we kept seeing and hearing the bong go off. We just did our time, caught up with a few people and were home in bed by midnight. A fun Saturday night?

Last night we went to see the taping of Rockwiz, and it was a heap of fun! We got tickets through a family friend of ours who had a few spare seats. You have to get there nice and early (from 6pm onwards) and about 6:30 they ask everyone to pick one person from their table to come up and try out to be on the show. Our person was picked, up she went, and promptly got herself selected because she knew SO much about music!

For those not in the know, Rockwiz is a music trivia show where music guests compete alongside audience members on teams… its pretty music nerd questions but very funny. I actually enjoyed the show more live than I do on tv, because there is a lot more jokes.

They film two shows in each sitting and on the first we saw Max Merrit, who sings that slipping away song, and Catherine Brit, a country music singer. They did an awesome duet of Slipping Away and when its released on you tube ill definitely post it up!

The second show – the one our table representative was on – featured the Wolfgram sisters – who are three back up singers as far as I could tell, and Leo Sayer – my mum would be so jealous! Leo was very good and entertaining to watch.

All in all, a really fun night, that ended after 11! Long time to sit in uncomfortable chairs, but oh well.

Driving home though, not so fun. We were sitting at the stop light when we heard this big screech and it was so long that we didn’t know where it was coming from – until it rear ended Bens car! This idiot claimed that he thought the light was green because he thinks he saw some green up ahead. I just said to him, “The light is still red, it was red for a minute before you even got here, and there are other cars sitting here waiting for the green too!” I then took a bunch of photos of the damage with my phone camera and he was looking at me like “what are you doing?”

But seriously, you hit us! In the stupidest way possible. And HARD. He would have been doing about 30km/h when he hit us, it wasn’t a small bump. He tried to go “Oh is there much damage to yours?” as in “do we really need to worry about this?” and its like, yes we do.

So Ben got his information, the guy who hit us didn’t bother to get ours – which makes me think perhaps he is dodgy as. I think he would have to be drunk or stoned to do something that dumb. Even if the light had have just turned green, he still would have hit us and even harder, because we wouldn’t have even begun moving by the time he smacked into us!

The thing is, my back is really sore today. Bens was sore last night. We decided not to put it in on the insurance forms because it is his work insurance and didn’t want to be too much of a hassle as we both have pre existing back problems anyway, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that my back is sore today. Originally I thought, well at least the force wasn’t hard enough to give us whiplash, but now I’m thinking a little clearer than last night, it was a pretty hard hit.

But the damage to Bens car isn’t TOO bad – scratches, loose bumper, dent… thank god for his tow bar! That thing took all the force really. I could only imagine what would happen if he hit my little KA!