07-02-2005
– Ding dong, the car is dead… Yes, for my beloved car is a smouldering heap in the car park thanks to bad roadmarkings, even worse parked cars, and just plain bad luck. Waiting to hear the prognosis from the mechanic as we speak.

In more cheerful news, I went to the zoo at the weekend! A parental ploy to cheer me up after the afore mentioned car disaster, and it worked for a while 🙂 This week’s quote was overheard being said by a ten year old lad to his mother when asked why he didn’t want to see the zebra’s. So you can add the humble zebra to the list of evil animals that also includes (if you will cast your mind back a few months) pyscotic penguins.

03-02-2005
– Happy (belated) new month. Just a quickie because I have a 2000+ word report to have written by tonight. We do indeed have a new flatmate, but first impressions are positive. Will keep you posted.

Films watched in January:

• House of Flying Daggers
• Alexander
• Garden State
• The Aviator

Yes, that is one per week (got to love Orange Wednesdays :D). Saw A Very Long Engagement last night but that goes in the February tally.

And now, I shall stop prevaricating and do some work. Tally ho.

31-01-2005
– Today has the makings of being a VERY soggy toast day! Just went into the kitchen, and the door to the one remaining empty room in the flat is open. About two weeks ago, we all got the fright of our lives when we overheard someone being shown around the flat, and looking into the empty room, but we persuaded ourselves that lightening doesn’t strike twice, and that we weren’t going to get another new flatmate without being told. Looks like we were wrong. I haven’t actually seen anyone move in yet, but all the indications are that they might be. Gulp.

Some explanation about the current flat dynamic – six of us, sharing one kitchen (with one cooker), one fridge, one freezer, one bathroom, and two toilets. Five of us get along really well. The sixth, not so much. The thought of adding a seventh to the mix does strike terror in my heart. Looking at it objectively, we can’t be that unlucky twice in a row, but there just isn’t room for a seventh person! There are only six shelves in the fridge, and that is a tight squeeze as it is. Grrrr. Yes, I know I am just being territorial and a wee bit petty (I hate it when that girl is right), but some warning would be nice! Or being asked! It’s not like we are dirty dirty undergrads (to quote the cute canadian), we are grownup postgrads (graduate students for those of you over the Pond) and we have to work. Our living environment is crucial!

I repeat, Grrrr.

27-01-2005
– Quick status report:

Cured schema of identity crisis and made it go ‘green’ – check.

Tried to link xml file to said schema, failed to make it go ‘green’ – check.

Irritating bugs in XRay found that:

• Add extra tags at the bottom of a file randomly, making the thing that was green a minute ago go yuky orange for no reason other than it feels like it.
• Error messages that tell you there are errors on lines that don’t frelling exist!
• General inability to validate ‘live’ when the document is on your hard drive and not the web.

Grrr. Other than that, things are going peachy. Watched Aviator yesterday (good, but long), quit my job (finally!), discovered that Muller Jaffa Cake Corners (possibly) have evil colourings in them that trigger my allergies, and made a parental unit realise that yes, the course I am doing might just be useful in the future, and that quitting my job was acutally a sensible thing to do because the deadlines are slowly driving me further up the wall.

Speaking of deadlines, I am now off to write all about how to manage a digitising/archiving project. I swear I know more about digitial image processing than anyone would ever want to.

26-01-2005
– I have a new system to classify my days: the Toast System. A day can eiither be a soggy-toast day (bad), or a hard-toast day (good). I am not yet sure if there will be graduations of the scale. I get the impression that toast exists in a binary state – soggy or hard – but I think that there is room for some research into this topic. Either way, soggy-toast days are normally precipitated by me running into a certain housemate whilst in the kitchen making my breakfast, and wanting to get out of the kitchen as quick as possible, so not leaving time for my toast to cool before I butter it. Now would not be a good time to get into my odd preferences with regards toast hardness, just accept, for now, that I prefer it cool before the spread goes on. (This in itself leads into my Taiwanese flatmate having thought for three months that I just liked to build houses out of my breakfast material a la Drew Barymore in 50 First Dates, but I digress). To tell you all about the infamous soggy-toast day that spawned the system would get me into a whole rant vis-a-vis the Cas Lending Library, bathmats and wine, destructo-girl, and a discussion of my relative pettyness, and this isn’t (unfortunately) the place for it. You never know who is going to stumble across a lonely little website.

Putting all that to one side, today is shaping up to be a soggy-toast day, literately as well as figuratively. (My spelling certainly seems to have taken the day off). There was a man in our kitchen this morning ( :O! ). He’d come to check on our ventilation system (I am anticipating any jokes you could be thinking right now, and none of them are funny) and had timed his arrival to coincide with me being in the kitchen, fresh from the shower (hair all over the place), still in pj’s and fluffy bunny slippers, making my toast. Now those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of cohabiting with me know that I am not on top form first thing in the morning. Like a classic car I need tlc, gentle prodding, and a bucket of tea to get started. Bad analogy I admit, but I’ve only been up an hour or so, and I don’t tend to function fully till about midday. One thing that definately doesn’t work that early is my eyes. Being as blind as the proverbial, I need glasses to resolve anything over a few feet away, but first thing in the morning, glasses are the last thing I want, so I tend to pad around the flat whilst preparing breakfast not being able to see much. This morning, to finally get to the point, I totally failed to spot that there was a mildly attractive man in our kitchen before I walked in. Cue much embarrasment, hasty breakfast preparation, and soggy toast.

And with that all said and done, I am off to try and cure my schema of its identity crisis, and in the process undoutably loose whatever shreds of sanity I have left. Ah well, I’ve given up on ever attracting the Cute Canadian, or the other leading candidate, so perhaps a straight-jacket is a look that will work for me?

Mildly ironically, I have just noticed what the acronym for a soggy-toast-day is. Lol.

19-01-2005
– Ok, I should be doing XML right now, but I can’t, which leads me into my mini-Post Office rant.

Our post gets delievered every day, around 11 am, and gets put in our postboxes. All well and good and as you would expect. The postboxes themselves are fairly small, but they are in a secure place, so you would think that parcels too big to go in them would be left underneath. You would be wrong. You would also think that, in the event of an item being too big or being recorded delievery, the postman would ring our doorbell to try and get hold of us. Oh, you do dwell in a fantasy land, don’t you? No, what you do get after waiting in all morning for a parcel to arrive from Amazon with the one book you really, really need to help you finish an important assignment, is a rather annoying little card from the postman saying “Sorry you weren’t in to accept your parcel, I’ve taken it back to the depot. Please leave 24 hours before coming to collect it. We can also arrange for it to be redelivered. Please leave 24 hours before trying to contact us.” Now, the depot is a good 30 minute walk away, with no direct bus routes, and no parking at that end so driving isn’t really an option either. And I can’t arrange for redelivery, because the postman doesn’t believe in ringing the doorbell to let you know he is here… To compound the problem, I can’t normally get to the depot before 5.30 each day due to uni and work commitments, and it closes at 5pm.

I am not sure what annoys me more – having wasted the entire morning hanging around for the book, the “sorry you weren’t in” when I WAS in, or the prospect of when I finally do get hold of the book it will be too late for the assignment and I will have wasted £20. Normally I’d be able to go tomorrow morning before class, but I can’t, because I am helping out all day at the bloody conference. ARGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Um, that rant was slightly longer than planned, but I do feel marginally better now I have vented :S

17-01-2005
– Because I can, an edit done whilst sitting in the cafe at uni, drinking a cup of tea and eating a clementine. I am a multi-tasking goddess! Sort of. Ah, I love wireless 😀

Well, things have been frantic here lately, and I can’t see me sitting down to do a proper update anytime soon, so here goes:

Films watched: Far too many! I’ll list them when I get home and can look at the ticket stubs 😀

Assignments completed: 1, the easy one.

Assignments still to do: 2, both nasty, evil, horid ones.

Lecturer’s who think I am a ditsy female: pretty much all of them.

Lecturer’s disapointed because I can’t do something with her data that I said I would: 1.

Work do’s missed because too busy with uni: 1

Nights where spent hours getting to sleep because pannicking about assignments not done: far too many.

Random people telling me they read my site: 2! :O Hey Jas and Eric 🙂 And what were you trying to complement me on Eric? The guestbook cut you off just as it was getting good!

Um, lecturer’s must go and see now to get more data off for evil assignment due in in under two weeks: 1, so toodles…

*turns into white rabbit* *disapears down rabbit hole saying “no time, no time”.