This month has certainly crept up on me... Not quite sure why, as it was only just over a week ago that my best friend celebrated his 40th birthday by having a weekend away. So now it's just over two weeks till I turn 40, and I've let most of a month go by without any blogging.
For the most part, I haven't had a great deal to say, or have had more pressing or interesting things to do than blogging. Last weekend, for example, I popped over to the MCM London Comic Con at ExCeL. It was a fairly disappointing day (well, more like a couple of hours), though that was perhaps skewed by the fact that I was on my own, and I'd normally be with a friend. That said, there were no real 'stars' to speak of, there wasn't a great deal of interest on the retail side, and some of what I bought ended up being 'wrong' for one reason or another.
I picked up birthday presents for a couple of friends but, after getting them home, developed the strange feeling they both already had what I'd bought them. This has turned out to be true for one of them so far, so I'm even less confident about the other. For myself, I picked up a couple of Wii games, and it later transpired that my girlfriend had bought one of the for my birthday (it was, after all, on my Amazon Wish List). I also snagged the second half of Cowboy Bebop... only to find I'd picked up the Blu-Ray version, not the DVD.
On the upside, I bought a new Darkstalkers artbook, which is fantastic (and not the one I already had on my shelves) and a couple of TransFormers which look as though they won't be making it to the UK anytime soon, since Hasbro UK's 'Thrilling 30th Anniversary' has been effectively cancelled in favour of promoting the new movie toys... even though they're only being released as part of the new blandly-packaged generic toyline, with most of the good ones being Toys'R'Us exclusives. Hasbro's marketing folks really need their heads examined...
The last week at work was weird. There were Marketing jobs that were on some nebulous schedule which our head of department knew about but had neglected to mention to the rest of us... all of which needed to be completed and delivered by the Friday. We also had a whole slew of Marketing materials for the magazines to put together from botched templates created by that same head of department. We also had our regular work on the magazines and directories, plus the work not done by the head of department on her magazines. In that latter case, at least one of the Editors is fuming because the head of department insisted they stick to a schedule for supplying work to be set... only to neglect the stuff that was put through for her over the last four weeks. Apparently she claimed to have been working on "an important Marketing job" but none of us can figure out what she was talking about unless it was a reference to the botched templates we had to finish off... Personally, I suspect she was working on a freelance project on company time.
Yesterday, I popped out to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, and was thoroughly impressed... Not least because the movie effectively erases the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, a movie which basically did everything wrong in the name of grand (visual) spectacle. This kind of semi-reboot trick is nothing new to Marvel, of course... their myriad continuities mean they can resurrect a character, change their identity, or just about anything in order to fulfill the needs of a new story.
In other news, I have a new bank account and will be closing my Barclays account at some point soon. I've banked with Barclays for about 30 years, since I first opened a Supersavers account. They've never been especially brilliant but, over the last five years or so, they've really annoyed me. First, when I was just getting started on the property ladder, they couldn't be bothered to get back to me about a mortgage (possibly because my boss at the time rather overstated the amount of money I'd want to borrow). Then, several years later, they failed to take on my existing mortgage, supposedly because I couldn't adequately prove my identity or income (having banked with them for over 25 years at that point). Most recently, while I have internet banking and receive all kinds of ridiculous emails and postal advertising from them, they didn't let me know my funds were depleted until I incurred a charge due to being overdrawn. In this day and age, I don't believe that is a service one should have to ask for, let alone pay for... particularly when I had two accounts with them, and only one was depleted - the other could have covered the overdraft easily.
Clearly I expect too much from a bank.
So, the sooner I can switch all my money away from them - particularly my savings - the better... Though I still need to figure out what I want to do with my savings account...
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