Don't you just hate it when your pc switches itself off in the middle of your coursework? yes.

I think I'm making progress with the film review. It needs totally reorganising, I need to check it through, and I need some more colloquialisms, but I think I can get there. By Tuesday. Hopefully. :/
It's difficult. More difficult than you'd think. Trying to make something sound natural, and as if it's just rolled off your tongue, and then also trying to put in all this stuff like sophisticated words, knowledge that you don't really know much about... you get what I mean. I clearly just can't write, naturally or structuredly.

Lucy and Martha's party (at Lucy's house) was great. At about 1pm, just after having my glasses fitted and while I was on my way to work at the hospital shop, I got a text from Luce. It was warning that we would be sleeping outside (in a tent, but outside nonetheless) and to bring warm clothes. Unfortunately for me, I'd packed my bag at 8 that morning and left the house for a final time at about 11.45am. So that meant I was stuck with whatever I had. Which was what I was wearing and an extra pair of tights, two pairs of socks and my pyjamas. Luckily for me I was wearing a really thick hoodie/jacket, a thinner hoodie, a blouse and a vest top. So I was pretty covered. As the night got colder I found myself wearing footless tights, adding socks, adding tights, adding more socks, adding pyjama bottoms, and realising my skirt wasn't helping so taking that off, adding a sleeping bag, adding a blanket. My top half was warm enough, my legs were just cold.

Technically we were planning on all sleeping in the compartments; there were three outer compartments and a huge middle "hallway" that we all sat in to watch the movies. When it got to about 3am and we'd finished watching however many films, we realised nobody would be warm enough in their own compartments. So there were about ten of us in one compartment and a bit (4 or 5 were in the main compartment, or partially so). We woke Becca up, because she'd crawled into a compartment on her own and would freeze. We left Chloe and Rachel in the compartment they were in, because we figured they'd keep each other warm. All in all, it wasn't too cold. If you were squished between two people. Which lucky for me I was. In the middle of the night I was *ahem* nearly suffocated by Sophie's feet, as she propped them on top of my head, but otherwise I lived just about.

In terms of sugar, we ate too much. Let's not dwell too long on that. Heroes, Quality Streets, Chocolate Orange Slices, two Cadbury's party bags, two bags of mini chocolate bars, Fruit Gums, Build-a-Burger, Cherry Gums, Teeth (vampire kind), Chocolate buttons, more chocolate, more chocolate. Oh, and we had pizzas and Doritos and salad foods with dips (peppers, cucumber, that stuff). Filmwise, we didn't do too badly. Bridget Jones' Diary which I like more or less, Morris: A life with bells on which was cute but really not brilliantly made - it took the form of a documentary almost but hey, and Dead Snow. That was the highlight of my evening! I think it's technically supposed to be scary, but it's just soooo funny. Ridiculously so. Zombie Nazis kill people in interesting ways, they fight back. We had quite a few intestines out, but it was just such a ridiculous film. If you're not squeamish (even though the blood is VERY fake) I REALLY REALLY recommend this film. Might even have been good for my film review.

I was going to talk about work yesterday, but I'm not going to take more of your time with irrelevant parts of my life you probably don't want to know.

Alicia xx

Work Experience

Before I go to Lucy and Martha's joint party tomorrow, I want to tell you about my work experience. I went to the vets near Bradfield - Tutts Clump. I was very lucky to get a placement there. Naturally I was very excited about my week, if a little nervous.

However, after the first day, I was seriously questioning my career path. My reason: I almost fainted, first thing in the morning. 'If I'm going to be a vet, I can't go fainting during operations, can I now?' I got seriously disheartened. Despite the fact that after I'd had a drink, I got right back up and walked straight in to watch the rest of the bitch spay. Spays are the worst kind of operation for fainting.

For those of you who don't know what it's like to faint, I'll explain. You feel very, very hot, as if the room's got really warm. But you don't notice for a while because it's quite gradual. You just take off your jumper in the middle of a freezing cold room, thinking it's just heated up for some reason. Then you become very aware of your other senses; mostly you're aware of the smell of the room and the sounds, you're not worried about what you're seeing yet. Then, just as the vet's nurse rushes you out of the room to sit you down, your vision starts to black out. You don't even realise you're fainting until this happens.

Anyway, after the first day I got on really well. I was surprised that they didn't always care much about what the patients were called. There was "pancreatic dog" and "the cat castrate" and "bitch spay" and "mammary lump". Pancreatic dog was called Henry, he had pancreatitis and absolutely stank. He was also very old, and a bit grumpy, but I guess anyone would be after four days in the kennels - obviously he was walked while he was there, but that was it.

Most of the week I sat in on ops. There were so many castrations that I couldn't believe it. There also seemed to be quite a few x rays. You have to hide while they take those. Today was probably the most interesting. We had a dog in who had a problem with his leg - wouldn't use it at all. Anyway, we x rayed him, and his kneecap had slipped round, so every time he took a step it would dislocate, which I imagine to be quite painful. Watching them fix him was pretty cool. They opened up his leg (oh by the way, when teachers say your blood will spurt out if you hit an artery (vein?) it's so true! they hit one of his, was too cool) and had a look at the bone. The vet, Stephen, showed me where all the cartilage had been ground away by the constant dislocating. The way they fixed it was awesome. To cut out the gory bits as much as possible, they used a bit of wire to pull the bone back around and tie it in place, and stitched his leg right back up.

"Mammary lump" (Tilly) was in today too. Very cool. It's essentially a dog version of cancer. In this case breast cancer. Sometimes I look at something and think, "Can't he just cut it out? It would be so much easier if that was possible." In this case, he could just cut it out. Literally. He cut round the lump, pulled it off, and loosened some skin around it so he could easily stitch it back up. So cool.

Also quite cool was "pyo dog" (pyo is short for something or other) who had to have her uterus removed because it was full of pus. The thing with it though, was that the uterus was so full it was absolutely huge. Also, because dogs have litters, not single puppies, they have a uterus that goes round in a 'U' shape to both sides. It's quite interesting. I suggest finding a picture.



While I'm blogging, completely off topic, I want to share this link, because I think it's pretty cool. A combination of science and art to give a message about the environment.
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/22/blood-powered-lamp-makes-you-bleed-for-your-light/

Anyway, that's all for tonight.
Bye xx

Woo! A whole five new emails! In one day!!!...........................oh, wait. they're all from me. emailing work home. damn.

Just been through my inbox selecting all of the emails that are from myself and moving them into the "school stuff" folder. Those emails completely fill my inbox all the time. It's a shame I never get real emails. Oh, wait. That's a lie! Sometimes I get lovely emails from my friends. That I don't need, but keep my life insanely random and...well funny really. It cheers me up when I should be doing homework anyway.

Turns out I'm not as behind with my P.D. work as I thought. I have a rubbish mark - as stands - in Criterion 1, but it's only out of 8 and the section we're doing at the moment is worth 32 marks, so I'm working on that before I go back and sort out my rubbish work. I've spent four hours today drawing eight lamp designs. I am too much of a perfectionist. If I want them to fill the A3 page, I'm going to have to annotate like crazy. Lucky I'm good at rambling really. I knew it'd come in handy one day.

Had a bit of a rubbish day. Nothing particularly bad happened, but I woke up tired, left the house in a rush trying to avoid the massive row going on. I didn't want to get involved, because then I'd get targeted myself. To be honest it was a pretty terrifying morning. I'm deliberately not going into details. However, it did leave me biting my lip trying not to cry as I waited on the platform for my late - as usual - train. Then I got to school and nothing was going to cheer me up. I found myself utterly incapable of becoming excited about trivial stuff, something I've realised that I do waaay too much. I'm going to go have a long bath now and go to bed. I'm hoping when I wake up I'll be in the mood to be overly positive again. Let's hope so anyway.

Love to all who put up with my moping when they could've done better things.
Alicia xx

I should stop drawing boxes on my home screen and do some homework.....oh, and stop wasting time on the internet! that might help!

This post is actually already proving really hard to write! And I've only done the title and a bit!

My letter 't' is refusing to work unless you press down on it firmly for a full two seconds, which as it turns out is a remarkably long time!

I'm not going to try to backlog all of the weeks I haven't blogged. It'd probably be incredibly boring for you and take me a long time. We all know I'm rubbish at being concise. My History controlled assessment is proof of this. I'll get onto that in a bit.

I think I'll just give you a general update on how things are, because nothing overly exciting is going on. I'm not going to backlog, but I'm going to mention a few things that have happened. I think that's only fair.

I'll start with Greece. Which was an amazing experience! I really loved it. The feel of being on a boat, totally in control is brilliant. And nothing I could've read anywhere about sailing holidays could have prepared me for the amazing sense of communiy I felt with the others on the flotilla. By the end of the two weeks us and three other boats were regularly having meals together. We got on so well. One of the other families (I can refer to them only as 'Oxia', their boat name) was from Manchester or something near there. Dundee? Not sure. Their dad, Andy, was a physicist. He explained the physics I was struggling to understand to me. That was brilliant and inspirational. He's great. And one of the others, the Moffats on 'Kallithea' were great fun. They have two kids Barney's age and younger, but we all got on really well. And the boy, Tom, turned out to go to Toby's school! They're coming over next weekend for lunch. 

That's all I'm going to allow myself on our holiday for now, for fear of rambling.

School's great. I've settled back in faster than ever this year. And on top of that the weeks are going so quickly! I can't say how long we've been back, but it must be well over a month! Anyway, I settled into triple science pretty easily. The physics still isn't quite caught up, but we're getting a study group going so the others can revise old topics, and I can learn them. Or revise, if I've gone over it already. We're doing Motors and Generators on Wednesday. That's one I struggled to catch up.

My letter 't' has come back :D

Maestros is great. I've moved over to Wind Ensemble so Bryony, Rosie, Seren and the others are calling me a traitor. To be honest, I think the move has been good. It's a smaller group so I have to shut up more. Plus we don't get let out late every week as the people in Training Band do. John's famous for not letting them out on time. I think he just does it to keep his reputation now. :L

Regenesis is cool. We've got ourselves - as Kat said - "into a situation where we're too good. So now people expect loads from us. And we're going to loads and loads of concerts. Oh, and they had to abolish the senior girl's choir because we're better than them... so yeah"

Train. Well that's funny as ever. We've already had two occasions where the trains have either been ridiculously delayed or cancelled. Not because of suicides though, thankfully.

I'm trying to think of other aspects of my life. I think I'm just left with school at the moment. No wait.

DofE is OK. The sessions are funny and we're actually starting to do stuff.

My voluntary placement isn't too bad either. I do a two hour shift, because Dan (the guy I work with) could do with an extra helper when he's trying to close up (takes about forty-five minutes to get all the papers and food accounted for and you can get stuck there until four-thirty if it suddenly gets busy when you're trying to close up). I like working there, even though it can be boring as hell. And I've nearly got the hang of doing the till right so it doesn't beep at me really loudly, making me look like a complete twit. Oh, and I'm getting less nervous about people paying by card. I always worry that I'm going to charge them like a hundred pounds for a ten pound purchase. I find it very stressful.

Piano and flute. Cool stuff. Cathy (flute teacher) is making me do loads of performance related stuff this term, which is not cool. I hate announcing stuff to her, it's so weird and embarrassing. But I passed my grade five theory, so now I get to move on. I'm finally starting to work on my grade seven exam pieces next week. (I've mostly just been doing grade seven repertoire).

It's inevitable that I'll have to tell you about school at one point, but I can't be bothered now. I just got out of the place! I think I should go and work on my P.D. so it doesn't get all overdue again. That could be fatal this time.

Alicia

xxxxxx