Tuesday Tabs #17

What an eventful week it's been so far, and it's only the end of Tuesday. I started my second job today, so I'm properly knackered, my poor feet! It's funny how I was at home for 9 months and never had one proper job, yet I have been here for less than a month and now I have two jobs, in that respect it was definitely a good choice moving here.

I took Doll to the vet after work today and she's okay, just suffering a bit from not eating or drinking properly for a whole weekend. She's been given some antibiotics so I'm hopeful I'll have my bouncy kitty back in a few days.

I'm super sleepy, but here are some things I've found in the last week.

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Passport cushion, £69, Dwell


ASOS Alibi Suede Chelsea Ankle Boot, £50, ASOS
I'm is such dire need of new boots, my poor River Island ones are no longer smart, I have my eye on a few that I'm hoping will crop up in the sale.


Jeffrey Campbell Black & Tan Cowboy Shoes, £75, Urban Outfitters
Sorry I'm a bit shoe-mad this week, I was on the hunt for some smart ones and I got a bit distracted. Aren't these Jeffrey Campbell shoes a dream?


Payton Table Lamp, £40, John Lewis
A side lamp is one of the last things we actually need for the house, as our living room has three lights and one is much cheaper. This one is so cute, I would hope that with the right lightbulb it would light up the room properly but I'm unsure. It would look so nice on our bookshelf.


Sign Language Tote Bag, £16.01, Lilli Mandrill


Paper Doll Cushion, £42, Chocolate Creative
These are so awesome.


Personalised 'Happy Birthday' Card, £2.90, Laura Skillbeck
This is such an adorable card, but no ones birthday is coming up soon. :(


Aqua Green Hi-Top Blazer Nike Trainers, £66.99, Office
Dream.


This is my favourite song this week.

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Link Love: ♥

Holly Exley's Ode to the Internet — A neat list of nice things that illustrator, Holly Exley likes to look at when she spends time on the Internet.

Mint lace collar blouse from Lavish Alice — I love things with nice collars right now and this one is one of my favourites so far, it's also a fairly reasonable price and in one of my favourite colours.

CMYK Embroidery from Evelin Kasikov — I love this idea, I wish I had the patience, they'd make such a good piece of wall art.

Exploded Flowers Series by Fong Qi Wei — Amazing yet simple series.

Vogue charts the Rainbow Queen — I definitely appreciate this from a picture editing perspective, who knew the Queen was such a colourful lady.

Never Seconds — A funny yet bleak blog by a primary school child documenting his school dinners.

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I suppose a part of me is sorry about all the shoes, but I'm proud that I've yet to by any, aside from work ones. I hope you have a good week, mine promises to be a busy one, I must make sure that I find time to update my CV in between working all the time. Thanks for the kind comments about Dolly ♥

The Saga of Little Doll.

I would have updated sooner, but given that this is mainly a personal blog, I don't think it would have felt right carrying on as normal when everything over the last few days has been so up in the air. I'm so distracted today, I can't seem to keep an eye on just one thing. I'm so glad I'm working tomorrow just so I can concentrate really.

Anyway, if you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you may already know this, but on Friday, after letting Doll out, she ran away and basically, didn't come back. The horrible little animal had me agonising over the whole situation with my heart just feeling broken. She was my little cat and my responsibility and my mum had told me to look after her and I knew her going missing would make everyone super upset, I just felt like the whole thing was my fault.

Moon was the most amazing boyfriend ever, and searched up and down the whole neighbourhood for her, sadly with no success, I think he definitely cares for her a lot more than he would like to admit. On Saturday morning, after no sleep, I rang around all the vets, and Cats Protection and put out an alert for her. The Internet is a stupid place to go if anything bad happens to you, all 'advice' pointed to her never returning, although Twitter was amazing at getting the word out. After speaking to a lovely lady at the RSPCA, I was ready to make a rather gruesome phone call to roadside services come this morning. We went out a few more times and put little fliers with her picture through people's letterboxes and put up posters but there wasn't much else we could do but wait, which is a lot worse, I think.

I tried to take my mind off things, although Moon still believed that she would return, I genuinely didn't feel as though she would come back to us, and certainly not just by bounding across the lawn, ready to be fed. We had quite a good weekend all things aside, we went to a tiny vintage market, and Newbury Racecourse carboot sale. She was always at the back of my mind, but I had to get into the right state to begin my first shift at Vue - which went very well by the way. So anyway, after my shift ended, because it was 10pm, Moon came to meet me and we were still nattering away about her, Moon even mentioned that some decent human being had torn down one of the posters we'd put up. We were in the door all of two seconds when the doorbell rings and a lady's standing there. She asks if our cat is still missing, and we say, 'yes', and she says, 'I think it's in my garden with another cat, it doesn't sound very happy'. So off I went with this lady, just a few houses down and off ran whichever cat Doll was talking do and there she was. Amazingly - considering her nonchalant personality - she recognised me straight away and came running over as soon as I called her. I scooped her up with no problem, thanked the lady a million times and went back down to our house cradling a very dirty little cat. It's quite amazing really, we gave her a quick bath and she was very quiet, not chirping away to us in her usual way.

She's clearly very shaken by her recent adventure, and I'm kind of pleased she's ended up feeling as exhausted over the situation as we were. She's done nothing but sleep nearly all day, which I read is something that often happens. She's hardly eaten yet but I'm hoping she'll be back to her normal, naughty self in a few days.

So there you have it, I've got quite a big backlog to share with you over the next few days so stay tuned, but like I said, all I really want to do today is make sure Doll is alright. What I should have done was work on my CV and clean the house but I've not really done 10% of either.

Duck Egg.

I wish I had more things to paint, painting is so much fun, although it's much easier to do it outside without a little cat trying to interfere every few minutes.

So, my Gran handed me down this box, she says it's called a butter box but she couldn't tell me why as she's always used to use it for extra bathroom bits. I figured it would come in useful for us so that we wouldn't have to worry about Dolly tearing up all our toilet paper (something that's happened before). All it needed was a lick of paint, so I figured why not.

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Once again, Wilkinson saved the day with their sample pots, although I don't think these shades went as far as the ones I used before as I had basically run out by the time I was finished. The amount was fine though and I think it's best to have the exact amount rather than be over or under.

I went for 'Duck Egg' and 'Tealtastic', two of my favourite colours.
The 'teal' was a bit more blue than turquoisey but I still think it complimented the duck egg well.


Before.


I decided to paint the inside of the box too, which was much more hassle than painting the outside. It is better I did though, mainly because it had seen better days and was kind of mucky, but also because the mushy red didn't go to well with the clean, crisp colour I'd chosen for the rest of the box.


After.
I'm quite happy with the end result, and although our bathroom is mainly white - with the grossest shower curtain, which is why I haven't shown it to you - most of the accents are a turquoise/teal colour, so I picked everything so it would go.


RIP sanding block, this was Moon's contribution to this project. obviously we couldn't wait to buy smaller screws to screw the handle back on (we totally could have), so he improvised and used my sanding block to hold everything in place. It's a good improvisation to be fair and means that the handle holds well, and it does look a bit silly but hardly anyone would ever know...

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I'm quite pleased with this little project and it took a lot less time than the chest, probably because I only stuck to two colours more than the fact that the chest is a lot bigger. Now the toilet rolls have a safe home!

I'm in the corner.

(via GIRLS Caps)

So, yesterday... I got a job! I am feeling a little less Hannah Horvath than I was the day before yesterday. This now means I can worry less about where my rent money is going to come from and that I won't be stuck in the flat on my own all day. I'm hoping that the hours aren't too bad as I would still like to get to see Moon on the odd occasion, but I'm sure everything will be easy enough to arrange and for now I'm just happy that I've got a job. I'm playing it up like it's something amazing, but really it's just a customer service assistant role with Vue. So I'm still an undiscovered genius, but now I have less money worries, plus I love the cinema and will now get free tickets for myself and everyone so it's pretty sweet. Tomorrow's my induction day so I guess that's when I'll be finding out more, it seems like it's time for another CV update.
As we're on the subject of job hunting, two additional things happened to me yesterday. The first was receiving the bluntest, rudest rejection email I have had throughout the whole time I've been applying for jobs, claiming my CV was too 'Photography-biased' and that maybe if I tried harder, I might have had a shot, yeah okay. The second was a lovely telephone call from Grace at Give A Grad A Go who provided me with a great morale boost regarding my experience and CV, just before I got the offer to start with Vue tomorrow. Maybe the former was just having a bad day, but I thought it was important to mention GAGAG as I've seen them floating about since graduating and I think they need commending on their stellar advice, service and overall polite manner.

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I'll stop rabbiting on now and get the the real point of this post and that was to tell you that I might have gone and broken my clothes-fast after just under a month. Not a bad effort really, and in my defence, two of the items I bought were in the kids section and therefore super-cheap! You know what though, I might even pop out later and break the fast even more, although this time it's much more reasonable - I need dark, smart things of which I have none; smart, yes, dark, yes, but not the two combined.

Multi-way handbag, £12.49 eBay
I blogged about a similar bag last month and although I ordered it a couple of weeks after that, it only arrived yesterday. I have to say I'm slightly disappointed, but I think it might just need a bit of wearing in, as it's very 'out of a warehouse' stiff right now. It's useful to have anyway as I have a 'good' bag and an everyday bag but nothing for in-between so I'm hoping this is where it will come in, for the price I'm not complaining too much anyway. I'm also a bit excited that it doubles as a rucksack.



Dresses, Both £5.99, H&M Kids
These were a confidence boost, I took a bit of Gem Fatale scrimping initiative and ended up wandering into the kids section of H&M yesterday. I couldn't resist the cute heart print which I've seen everywhere lately, and I figured I don't really have anything block-coloured, so why not break my fast with these bargains (I didn't think they would fit anyway)? I got these in the largest kid-size 14y so that's nice to know. If you want a proper look, they're the same dress pattern as these ones on the website.


Belt, £6.99, H&M
This isn't super-exciting but I've not been impressed with my belt collection for ages, it was a toss-up between this minty one or the same one in coral, would it be wrong to go back and pick up the other one too, you can never have too many belts when you have as many dresses as I do.


Cropped blazer, £14.99, H&M
I mainly got this because of how 90s it is, but also because I was a bit bored of my other jackets. It's the perfect colour for when the sun decides to show it's face too.

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Thanks to yesterday's good news I'm not half as sorry for these purchases as I was going to be. As it was the first time I'd bought anything in ages I thought I'd share them with you anyway. Have you found any bargains in the kids section before? I'm pleased more than anything, maybe I'll take the time to browse more often.

Sunshine on my shoulders.

So, in leu of today's 'surprise' terrible weather I've given my blog a bright facelift. I'm still umming and ahhing over it and I'm considering tableting up myself a custom header but this will do for now. On a sun-related note, I've been tagged by lovely NUJ buddy, Megan, for the 'Sunshine award', which is quite exciting, so here it goes!

Megan is currently documenting her year in a Project 365, you can check out her blog, 'Megan's Musings', here.

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So, the way this works, is you get nominated and then you pass it on to others. ♥

Instructions:

Include the Award’s logo in a post on your blog

Answer 10 questions about yourself

Nominate 10 other bloggers

Link your nominees to the post and comment on their blogs letting them know they have been nominated

Share the love and link the person who nominated you

10 questions

1. My favorite colour: Teal
2. My favorite animal: I like all or at least most animals, but my favourite is cats.
3. My favorite number: 8
4. My favorite drink: Coca-cola
5. Facebook or twitter: Facebook
6. My passion: Photography
7. Prefer giving or getting presents: Probably getting, but surprises are nice.
8. My favourite pattern: Something chintzy.
9. My favorite day of the week: Sunday
10. My favourite flower: Sunflower

I would like to nominate these blogs for the “Sunshine Award”:

1. Attempted Illustration
2. Hannah Curson
3. Suitcase Packer
4. Goodnight Little Spoon
5. The Cookie Button
6. A Beautiful Mess
7. Sophie Etc
8. The Dainty Squid
9. Goodnight Prudence
10. The Chatttt Along Blog

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Thanks for nominating me, Megan, it's very much appreciated, brings me back to Myspace days. :)