It was my birthday yesterday, happy birthday to me. My alarm went off in the morning and after hitting the snooze button and rolling over in a disgusted fashion as I do every morning my mum came in. Now we’d agreed no presents in the morning but she said, as I had a week earlier on her birthday, that something small won’t take long. So, that morning I got two cards, one that had my new name on it - Samantha - and actually sang Happy Birthday to Samantha in it, the other had a cute picture of puppies on it. We took the singing card to my Grandparents later and set it off when we had cake. I also got given the DVD of Hustle (Season 4) which is really good because I like that show and have watched the first three seasons that I have on DVD so many times I need some fresh episodes. My mum also gave me a coffee mug with Sam written on as well as some information about the name. I’m going to use it to replace the one I have with my old name on it and use it for display purposes, unless I start drinking coffee again sometime soon.
I then had to go to school which isn’t as bad as it sounds. I drove off listening to Michael Buble’s Feeling Good “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life and I’m feeling good” and well felt pretty damn good. I saw my friends Mel and Vicki when I got there and then later Vicki, Jess, Richard and others arrived. They all wished me a happy birthday which made me feel good. Not even my second least favourite lesson Computing with a specific teacher could ruin my mood. I then had a free lesson which I would normally spend working but today watched a CSI:NY episode Sweet 16 which I hadn’t watched in ages and had been meaning to watch for a while as there was some things about the finale Snow Day which I couldn’t understand because there was some plot continuation that I couldn’t remember. I also talked to my friend Rosie, she went to the shop and bought a tube of pringles and presented them to me for my birthday. I shared them in our next lesson which we shared - Politics - and that was fun.
School day over at lunchtime and I drove to meet my mum at the Bakers Oven where we had, if I’m completely honest a rather disgusting sausage roll, before we went to the solicitors and signed the deed poll to change our names (mum changed her last name only). There was one funny moment at the solicitors, I had to write out my old name in full and I couldn’t do it. No sooner had my mum said that my middle name (Ann) didn’t have an E on the end had I written one. What an idiot! They printed up another one but it was funny at the time that I could write my new name perfectly but not my old full name. Mind you I never have written it out in full ever before.
After that we went to the bank and I told them about my name change and they asked me if I wanted a current account rather than just the cardcash account I currently had. Now, a few weeks before my mum had told me I couldn’t have one until I had got confirmation of my student loan because I would have no source of income. She’d got confused though between a student account and a current account so I could have one. Yay! It comes with a cheque book, debit card and I get a credit card as well so I can use PayPal and Amazon and other online shops without having to ask my mums permission or get her to write one out. It’s not like I’m going to go crazy and spend money I don’t have (I’d never do that) I just really like the independence.
After this we went to my grandparents where they gave me a nice cheque for £200 which I’m going to buy some software with from Adobe as soon as my student card gets here. My mum gave me a TV, it’s a Samsung, I can’t remember the model number but it’s a flatscreen and can do high definition and has a built in freeview tuner which is really cool. She also gave me a Panasonic Hard Disk and DVD recorder (which can also play DVD’s). Now, this is really cool. I set the TV and this up last night in my room. There’s no space. I had to put the TV in front of my computer monitor so I’ll have to swap them over when I want to use my computer (I’m on my laptop now at school) and disconnect my printer so I could use the shelf it was on for the recorder. I borrowed my Grandma’s VCR, she has one in her bedroom that she never uses and she said I could borrow it. I hooked that up to the recorder device and so now I can transfer all my video tapes to DVD even the commerical ones, not that I would do that of course although it is just for personal use I would never honestly dream of doing anything crooked with it. I’ve recorded a bunch of stuff of the TV like almost the whole Cagney and Lacey run which isn’t available on DVD so I’m going to make my own boxset which will take up a lot less space than the 20+ video tapes I have now and also the quality won’t degrade anymore than it already has.
Last night I was flicking through the guide (it comes with a TV guide just like on the Sky pictures) and I saw that there was a Cagney and Lacey episode on today that was one of the five or so I don’t have on tape and so I set that up to timer record. It was going when I left the house this morning (7.30) but I’ll have to wait and see until I get home to see if it has completely worked recording the episode onto the HD. There’s another episode I don’t have on on Tuesday as well which is great fortuitous timing. I now just need to look out for the rest (there’s a couple that they refuse to show which is a shame as I’ve never seen Heat which Tyne Daly won an Emmy for unless I’m very much mistaken and it looks like a great episode). Anyway, it’s really exciting. Just need to get though politics until I can go home and see if it worked (and if it did start transferring my tapes over, I have probably a couple of hundred hours to do just from recording off the TV, I don’t think my Grandparents are going to get their VCR back for a few weeks).