Crisis Talks

Monday marks the beginning of a much needed reading week for some of my modules, so I only have four hours of lectures. This should give me a chance to catch up with note taking and get a decent draft of my literature review in before my meeting on Thursday. I'm actually in a much better position this year than I have been for the past two years, I have a pretty good set of notes for one of my modules and have done the lab class assignments for the other which should put me in good standing for the upcoming assignment. All this and yet I feel really behind; I can't work it out but I have that gut feeling of panic and disorganisation. Oh well, new month, new attitude. I've only missed one lecture so far and if I can keep up a decent attendance and keep up with the notes then I will be happy. More work needed this month and then perhaps that feeling will go away.

Yesterdays rage has been calmed now thanks to a crisis meeting held this evening. Somehow it was all very civil, issues were raised, discussed, agreed upon and resolved and al in all it was a good twenty or so minutes spent. I managed to remain calm throughout most of today although I did vent my anger about the knives (more on that later) to the person in question this morning and felt a lot better for it. It probably would have been a lot worse had it not been for venting some of the rage on here and to my friend who has been external to the whole situation. Now that pretty much everything is sorted, I can relax hoping that everything that was agreed upon will work as it has been agreed although I have my suspicions that it may not.

I don't know whether I was being petty about this (and you are welcome to voice your opinions) but I will now explain the situation that arose regarding the knives. The whole thing started when we moved into the house this year. Last year we had the luxury of a brand new - reasonably spacious kitchen with lots of cupboards and storage space. This year we had a bit of a shock when we ended up with a tiny kitchen, three cupboards and one drawer so we had to find new homes for things and generally limit what we kept in the kitchen. Because of this lack of space, I toyed around with the idea of buying a knife block to keep my knives in which would not only help with space in the drawer but would also stop them getting damaged and blunted. One of the things I cannot stand is a blunt knife because I enjoy cooking and a blunt one is pretty useless and very counter productive. In the end I decided that to buy a knife block with sufficient holes in for all the knives was going to be a bit more expensive than I had hoped. Then I was struck with an idea, a magnetic knife rack. A quick search on eBay and Amazon and I found something that was cheap enough (under £10) and looked sturdy enough too. When it finally arrived, it took me a while to locate a suitable area of the wall to attach it to because I have no powertools I had to use a drawing pin and a screwdriver to drill the holes in the plasterboard and make sure that it was secure enough to support the weight of the rack and the knives. I'd put a lot of thought and effort into the whole process and it has been working very well ever since. Until a few days ago that is.

I came down one morning to find that someone had moved all of the knives into the drawer. Confused at first, I just assumed that someone had put away the washing up and not noticed the knife rack. So I just put them back on the rack without thinking too much about it until the same thing happened the day after. My first thought was that someone was playing a silly little practical joke and that it would pass but after moving them back onto the rack, things got more serious. Saturday morning was when the conflict began. Not only had the knives been put in the drawer but someone had taken down the knife rack and hidden it away. I was outraged, my knives, my knife rack and someone has taken it upon themselves to move it. I don't (and wouldn't) go round playing with other peoples possessions, it's not mine to touch and if I had a big enough problem with it then I'd ask them first. So I raised the subject whilst everyone was in the lounge and after a couple of minutes managed to get someone to own up to it. He explained that he nearly dropped a knife when using said rack and therefore believed it to be a health hazard. At this point I expressed my feelings towards him - that of frustration and anger and asked him in future not to mess with my stuff. I put the rack back up on the wall and attached the knives to it. I thought that that would be the end of things but no, this morning I came downstairs to once more find that he had taken them off've the rack and put them on the side. When I saw him I went through the whole thing again, and told him that if he wanted to continue to use my knives he would have to deal with them being kept on the rack and otherwise he was welcome to go out and buy his own to do with what he wishes. At this point he clearly thought I was over reacting because he said that he didn't know I felt that strongly about it. This has been going on for four days now and each time I have done something about it. I made the effort to re-attach the rack yesterday and yet he still thought I wouldn't mind if they weren't kept there. I didn't (and still don't) believe that he thought that, just that he might be able to get his own way because unless he is emotionally blind then he could clearly see that I was annoyed. I quite suspect that this could have continued for weeks had I not said anything and I don't like it when things are done behind my back.

So maybe I over reacted, maybe I didn't but hopefully it is all sorted now. For the rest of the meeting, my point was made regarding the TV and it was generally accepted that whilst a lot of sport has been watched this week, had I have mentioned to them that I wanted to watch something, they would have been more than willing to let me do so. That is mostly my own doing to be fair to them because I showed no intention of wanting to watch something and simply accepted that I wasn't 'allowed' to. The cleaning rota has been discarded for the moment and replaced with an ask and I will do system whereby if something needs doing then someone will do it if asked (with justification of course). Not sure how well this will work but lets just see how it goes.

I think winter is finally on it's way. Today has been horrendously windy, cold, dark, gloomy and generally pretty miserable. I knew that the mild weather couldn't go on forever but I was perhaps hoping for a more gradual decent into winterdom rather than a sudden change.