The 5-timeperiod poll

[ailbhe]

I also did this on 19 October 2002, and on 17 October 2001.

What I was doing. . .

• 5 minutes ago: Responding to a post by Dr Rivka, and thinking about what to eat for dinner
• 5 hours ago: Wandering around town buying sweets for trick-or-treaters, looking at pine furniture, and talking to Mike - Oh, and waiting to meet my friend Ellie.
• 5 days ago: It was a Saturday - I baked a cake, and went to Uitlander's birthday party.
• 5 weeks ago: I was waiting to tell my mother and parents-in-law that I'm pregnant (I was about 10 weeks pregnant then, and was waiting for 12). I was beginning to feel a lot better, and had not only begun to eat again, but had started cooking. My clothes were beginning to be too tight.
• 5 months ago: I had just stopped working all day in a job I hated which sapped my life-energy and made me ill. I was signed off sick for my notice period, but worked from home some days anyway. I was planning my wedding. I was trying to hand in assignments for my Open University course, but wasn't actually well enough to do them properly - I did them well enough to pass, though. Sometimes, I made lunch for myself and Rob in the back garden, and we ate in the sunshine, which was great. I did a lot of pre-wedding introspection, which was variously useful.
• 5 years ago: I had moved to England (after breaking up with my boyfriend in a miserable and traumatic way for both of us) and was, in October, on the verge of officially becoming Rob's flatmate. I was going out with someone else, though, and I think he was too - I don't know when they actually broke up; the break-up wasn't finalised until after I moved in, I know that. It was all very nasty and upsetting. But I had a decent job which was moderately interesting (partially because I got several sets of conflicting instructions a day, but at least they were interesting conflicting instructions) and was beginning to find out what this internet thing was and how a webpage worked. It was around this time I found out what HTML was and started my first website, which mainly consisted of journal-type things; I didn't start an online journal per se until the 10th of March 1999. I also went home for my 20th birthday around this time; it was already too late to book cheap tickets to go home for Christmas. That Christmas was possibly the best one in my life; Rob and I spent it together, as flatmates whose families were elsewhere, and we had a great time. I should write properly about it someday. 1998 was a very, very busy year. Oh - that was the year I met Simon Barrett, and all the afp people!

Comments

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I like this. Must write my own when I get a moment.

You and Rob were flatmates before you got together? So were niallm and I (for all of eight days, mind you, but still...).

[ailbhe]

I went out with Rob's flatmate at first, so I was around the flat a lot, and Rob found me a job where he was working and we had lunch together a lot, so we got to know each other pretty well. When the flatmate moved out, I moved in - that was around the beginning of November 1998. At this point Rob was still engaged to someone else (who lived/ lives in Canada) and I was still going out with the flatmate.

Rob broke up with his fiancee before Christmas 1998, and I broke up with my boyfriend in early April 1999, and Rob sent me an email on 10 April 1999 (at about 2 in the afternoon; I forget the minutes) suggesting that maybe we should spend the rest of our lives together. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, I do like to note that after we settled the arrangement over tea in a fast food place (and we shook on it, too) we spent the entire day watching films so that we wouldn't have to talk to each other. And we couldn't eat properly for a week. It was a bit of a shock.

We had our first kiss around three days later.