The Summer Party

Last Friday saw the work summer party arrive. Planned by moi and my ever-awesome pal and colleague Catherine, it was a bit of a new venture for us. We have our respective Christmas parties for staff and volunteers but this was a chance to have a great big mid-year thank you for all our fabulous team and get all the staff and volunteers together in one place. We had a cracking year in 2014 and this year is shaping up to be even better (fingers tightly crossed for the next four months, obvs) so it definitely seemed like party time.



Look at that lovely lot! Volunteer management is not the easiest thing in the world but it's very good fun at times like these. The amount of conversations I had about petticoats was fantastic!

We had a photographer there to record the evening which was amazing (only partly because he captured the funniest photo ever of my boss) but on the unfun side, I loathe all the photos of me and have basically been looking through them in absolute horror about how much my arms look like ham shanks. 

Note to self, don't stand between a glam babe of a professional singer and a glam babe who's the pretty brunette at work.

Oh well. My new dress is nice, right? And petticoats and snazzy green heels always make me feel spiffy, even if the pics don't reflect that.

We even had our own bakeoff competition but I was so busy hostessing and compering that I didn't get any cake. WAAHHHHHHH. This is most unfair.

I made one, mostly so that the fellow special-needs-food people could have something to eat, but I didn't get any of that either. Instead I got to do some tidying up and then get changed out of my party frock and go and scrub the loos with Catherine. Oh, it's a glamorous life...

Sparkly frog shoes one minute, scruffy Converse the next...

Dress - Lady V London
Petticoat - Vivien of Holloway
Party shoes - Irregular Choice

An Eventful Weekend

I don't talk an awful lot about my job on here. You might get the occasional bit of moo-ing about how busy I am (I should really stop doing that: I'm always busy and it never changes!) but mostly I love it. Never boring, always different and the people I work with are an amazing bunch.  What more could you want?

The past few weeks have been somewhat stressful though. Due to some staff changes and shortages, I somehow got landed organising one of our biggest and most complex events of the year.  Am I a natural event organiser? Hmmm, the jury is still out on that one. I don't think I'm relentlessly positive enough and I do have a shameful tendency to start crying when people are vile to me at the end of a very long and knackering weekend.  Proper event organisers probably don't do that.  Ah well, at least I waited till I was alone in the car.

I cope alright(ish) with the long hours though!


8am


9.30pm

But y'know what? I reckon if you can survive through a day when it's absolutely bucketing it down with rain and you're on your second waterproof coat of the day by 9am (it still hadn't dried out by 7pm that night) and you're dying a little bit inside because the event you're running is outdoors with very little in the way of wet weather provision and you don't think anyone is going to turn up, you're doing alright.

If I could have waved a magic wand on Saturday morning and put a giant bubble over the whole event field, I would have done. As I attempted to stop the gazebo roof from turning into a water butt and only managed to give myself an impromptu cold shower to the face instead, I was positively dreaming of a lovely, easy to run, indoor vintage event. If only money were no object and I could have magicked up that bubble, hired in stacks of beautiful event supplies and funky retro chairs and tables, made everything utterly perfect and had a busy, busy day with loads of visitors, I would have done. But I work for a charity and we've never got any money so there you go.  Also we're British. Suck it up people: it rains here!


As luck would have it, summer returned with a vengeance on the Sunday: it was gloriously hot and sunny and we had thousands of visitors. Hurrah!  I do still mildly hanker after that "perfect" vintage event but I think we kinda do things in our own style and it suits us.

Anyway, it was totally worth it just for the fact that I finally got to meet one of my longest-standing blogging pals, the truly amazing Vix! We've been talking online since before I even started blogging, back in the MSE forum days, and we'd never managed to be in the same place at the same time in all those years. She's fab.



Pic borrowed from Vix.


Up next: my vintage treasures purchased at the event!

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Working Those Shoes

Last week I was standing bleary-eyed next to the kettle at work, desperately wishing it would boil faster so I could get my morning caffeine hit. In walked the boss.

 "Morning, Alex" said he.

"Morning. Tea?" said I.

"Yes please. Wow, you have distinctly mediocre shoes on today."

Sorry, what?!

He may have added "by your usual standards" but I was too busy gawping in shock to pay much heed. Sorry, what?!
 I had Converse on. TWEED CONVERSE. Admittedly not as frivolous as my usual footwear but tweed shoes can never be a bad thing.

They're lovely!!

Perhaps he was swayed by the rest of my outfit? (fat jeans and a plain grey jumper aren't the most glamorous combination but at least I matched) Perhaps he's been practising opening gambits for conversations and it all went horribly wrong? He's usually rather sweet so I do hope he didn't mean it as an insult.

It got me thinking about how much my clothes provide a talking point for the gang at work. I don't think I'm the most outrageous dresser in the world but I do seem to have developed a reputation for prints and shoes. Irregular Choice heels always go down well, particularly with the girls. One of the blokes came out with the immortal but baffling line "oh you've got your prostitute shoes on today" when I was wearing my Rosepea pair.

Personally I can't think of anything less suited to a lady of the night than red suede but hey ho, maybe he knows something I don't!


I'm in the fun position of being able to wear pretty much whatever I want at work. My role is limited by practicality on some days - I can cope in heels when I'm doing normal amounts of walking but definitely not when I'm spending the entire day dashing round. Sensible flats, jeans and a work fleece are often the practical solution. Not exactly worth blogging about but then that's why I don't do daily outfit posts. It generally has a lot more wardrobe flexibility than most of the other jobs on site though. Dresses and lavishly decorated shoes would not be a sensible option for some of my colleagues. I reckon they like to live vicariously through my wardrobe to a certain extent and it doesn't bother me at all to be known as the work shoe queen.

 Hit me with the best comment you've been given at work. I can't be the only one who is the recipient of some absolute corkers. Are the people you work with as interested by your wardrobe as my colleagues are?

Working from Home

I had a brief moment of bliss last week.  I was lying on a huge beach towel in the back garden, grass tickling my toes, sun baking down on my back, listening to the strains of Ocean Drive by The Lighthouse Family wafting over the garden fence.  It was spookily like being 13 again.

Except instead of revising for end of year exams, I was doing this:

Yes, I was working. In the garden.

I don't care how blasé and grown up we all are, you've got to admit that it's quite cool, haven't you?  I don't get the chance to do it often but if there's a project that needs some serious planning and I know I won't get a moment's peace in the office, the boss is usually quite happy to let me have the odd day at home.  It's bliss. Just me and Oscar.

He was always very fond of helping me revise and he's still equally interested in what I'm up to now.

He is not helpful. But he is extremely cute.

Alas I couldn't spend the whole day out there with him.  My morning was spent planning and writing, my lunch time was spent sunbathing but I did eventually have to head indoors and fire up the laptop.

Any real working-from-home types probably have a neat office set-up going on. I had to shovel bits of sewing machine and Tudor costumes out of the way in order to make a bit of space on the dining room table.

I was quite cosy though and really productive! It's astonishing how much more work I can get done when I actually have peace and quiet. I cope pretty well with constant interruptions in the office (which is good, because it's always like that. I'm lucky if I get 5 minutes to myself to concentrate on something). But oh, the bliss of being able to work on one thing at once and not have my train of thought derailed by the phone or an urgent email or an "Alex, do you know where XYZ is?".

Good view from the office, huh?

13 year old me probably didn't ever imagine a world where working from home was an actual thing but 30 year old me still finds it madly exciting.  It's such a treat!  If only I could do it all the time.  I reckon I'd be some sort of superhuman work machine if I had that level of peace and quiet.  Or I'd become a recluse who wore pjs all day and existed solely on coffee and crisps.  Yeah, it's probably safest that I have to go to the office five days a week, isn't it?