manic kitty

Get The Lowdown

Name

Celeste

Date of Birth

1st August 1977 (so I'm 28 at the mo)

Place of Birth

Jessops Hospital, Sheffield, England. I mention the hospital because it's closed down now. I always thought it was a lovely building.

Location

Stalybridge, UK. (Just east of Manchester.)

Current Occupation

Operations Support Clerk (I process orders for fixed phone lines... it's dull)

Ideal Occupation

Sitting at home making things all day and making enough money to support Porl, Myself, a couple of sprogs and the cats. Or more realistically, working with people with Special Needs which is what I used to do.

Education

Plenty, I've got a BA (honours) in English Language, with English Literature and Information Technology, I've got my fair share of good GCSE's but I had an intellectual dip around A-levels time and just scraped through English Lit, but did fairly well in General Studies. I've done one course in Care Work, and will hopefully be doing some more soon. Occasionally I toy with the idea of doing a nursing degree, but that would be at a distant time when I could actually afford it.

Love Life

Yup, Porl and myself live in our little domestic bliss with our 2 cats. We've been together for nearly 10 years, and he's my best mate.

Porl

Also known as Lynskey He's ace, he looks after me. He cooks, we share the cleaning, we both hate washing up, so the dishwasher in our new house was a god send. He's musical, plays guitar, piano, drums, anything he sets his mind too really, he writes stuff, he's a great producer. He teaches me stuff and makes me think and laugh and cry. Basically he's great, I just wish he realised all that.

Cats

We've got 2 cats, Duke and Gonzo (named after the characters in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). A friend asked us to look after them on a temporary basis because it looked like they'd been abandoned, this was in April 2000. I'd never had any pets before (except for goldfish that only lived for a few days, and stick insects which took me about 3 weeks to realize they were dead). I love these two ~~little~~ chubby munchkins to bits, and I'm mildly obsessed by them. Duke prefers Porl's company, although he generally keeps to himself. Gonzo is like my shadow, and will usually be within a few feet of me.(Whilst I'm writing this he's curled up on the other end of the settee, and has been all night.)

House

We moved to Stalybridge in September 2004, after 8 stressful months of house hunting around south Manchester. We used to live in Ormskirk, but couldn't afford to buy anywhere there, so we decided on Manchester as Porl was doing lots of music work here, and it is halfway between both sets of parents.
For 8 months every day off I had was spent house hunting and travelling to Manchester to view houses. During this time the prices kept climbing and the quality of the house got worse and worse... eventually the houses went beyond depressing and became funny, at that point against all our friends advice we gave up on Manchester and started looking at Stockport postcodes.
One Saturday afternoon we arrived in Stalybridge. The minute we saw the views and moorland around here we relaxed. The first house we saw was on the same road we live now, the couple selling wanted to move to the village where I grew up. They told us loads about Stalybridge and recommended we go and look around the town. After seeing the newly restored canal and lock in the town centre, and some more of the spectacular views we went and cancelled all our Manchester viewings for the day and signed up with every estate agent in Stalybridge. The next day we had a viewing for this house. The size and layout was exactly what we wanted, the decor was exactly what we would have done. The price was under our price limit, and across the road we have fields of cows and open moorland. We still had some tense moments, thinking we'd lost it, but eventually it all worked out. We're here, happy and settled.
Many of our mates still think we're daft for wanting to live "in the sticks", but we're only 12 minutes on the train from Manchester City Centre, and we'd go mad living as City Rats.

I like

Spinach +++ books +++ Telnet +++ dark chocolate +++ 1980's (the fashion, the music, and the fact i was a kid) +++ aga's +++ DrPepper +++ jumpers +++ kids +++ blue +++ sprouts +++ pasta +++ words +++ colouring-in +++ DrMartins +++ coal fires +++ Anglesey +++ Isles of Scilly +++ pistachio nuts +++ milkshakes +++ Buffy +++ Mini's +++ Spinach and Riccota Cannelloni +++ buildings +++ snow +++ cats +++ Johnny Depp +++ Ally Sheedy +++ The Breakfast Club +++ making stuff

I don't like

Gene Wilder --- spiders --- green --- rice --- bananas --- wearing shoes --- being loud --- milk chocolate --- wearing glasses (so I don't, but I should) --- milk--- being cold--- ironing --- wearing skirts

Food

I admit it, I'm vegetarian. Don't worry, I don't rant or try to convert people (unless they really wind me up), I just don't like meat, or didn't like it much, but after 15 years although my tastebuds have changed loads I'm sort of in the habit of not eating it. The only problem is I'm really fussy with other foods. I've only just started liking spicy foods, which Porl is pleased about because he loves curries (and makes fantastic ones) I will try most things, because I hate offending, but if they include rice, bananas, peas, or sweetcorn, I can't even try them because they all make me feel really ill. Oh, why did I turn vegetarian? It was a bet. I won.

Website

The site is in Textpad. I used to use Dreamweaver, but realized it made me lazy and I forgot lots of code, so I now code purely in HTML and CSS
The photos are taken with one of 3 cameras. The purple ones are taken with a logitech webcam. It is a very poor quality one, so I use Photoshop to make them more interesting. The better quality photos are taken with either a SiPix Blink or more likely a Fuji FinePix A204. All photos are edited using Photoshop v7.0.
I also use Bulletproof v1.15 to upload everything.