Wednesday 29 February 2012

Can't wait for payday...

I broke. I'm dipping into my savings again, and I hate it. Thankfully, I know I have a big paycheck coming up, but I so wish it would come sooner.
So I dipped into my savings to book all my bus journeys for the weekend. All three of them. I'm buying the two train tickets on top once my pay comes in. Its going to be a busy weekend.

Tonight is the OTC talent show :D I won't be drinking (no money, remember?), or performing, but I think it'll be great fun just to go and enjoy it. Its to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust, so its going to be a good night, for a good cause. Looking forward to it.
 (PS. the guy from the earlier posts - still a douchebag)

Anyway, this weekend is truly jam-packed. I have a lecture on friday morning, followed by a couple of hours at the gym (which I'm totally loving, by the way), then a chemistry workshop, hopefully followed by enough time to grab my stuff, head into town, buy some new bras and a dress for saturday (because being at the gym means nothing fits me anymore) then get the bus to Perth. Stay overnight in Perth, and get the early morning bus to Glasgow, have an all day band practice, then get a train to Gleneagles, somehow get from there to my sister's place and head out to a ball with her and her husband, stay at hers overnight, then back to Glasgow for another band practice, then a late bus home to Aberdeen on Sunday. Phew. I'm going to be shattered on Monday. Thank goodness I only have 2 lectures on Monday.

On the subject of clothes, as touched on there; there is one outcome from running and weight-training that is perhaps not so welcomed as the other advantages (because I'm doing it to increase in general fitness, stamina, speed, and upper-body strength - not for weight loss) and that is that I'm totally changing shape and size. I now need a belt on my jeans that I used to have love-handles hanging over. My 30 band bras are not tight enough anymore, and tightening the strap to the last hook means I have a bit of a "quad-boob" going on, meaning that my band size is getting smaller, but my bust is either staying the same, but looking bigger, or actually are getting bigger (probably thanks to the chest-presses, as well as the fact that most people in my family seemed to be late developers). I think I might just about drop down dead if this means I become a 28D. Not even the speciality stores around here hold 28 band sizes in store.
Also, my size 8 dresses are gaping a bit, especially around the waist, shoulders and, remarkably, the bust. (because they don't sit right thanks to the straps because of my narrow, ultra-sloping and low-set shoulders - remarkably the strapless dresses are fine, just too big everywhere else)

Yeah, clothes rant over.

Mainly I'm just looking forward to putting back the money I took out of my savings. Because whats the point on having savings, if you're not actually saving them?

My three-hour long lecture today was on the subject of hunting and the rituals often associated with it. It was very interesting actually, but my thoughts on that can wait until another time - I have to write a piece for a couple of weeks time, so I might address that after thats all marked and done with. It was mainly based around the Inuit beliefs and traditions with regards to hunting, but also touched on some controversial issues, primarily fox-hunting. Another post for another day.

Jumping about a bit, again. My brain won't function very well today. I am in some desperte need of a good long sleep. See you all soon.

Monday 27 February 2012

21 things to do before I turn 21 - Completed list, and current progress

So back to my list of things to do, to bring it up a bit, and attempt to fill in the remaining gaps.
1) Get into 3rd year at uni (that means no failed years, or semesters)
2) Rent my first flat and get some flatmates
3) Get a decent-paying job to fit around uni, band and OTC commitments (few and far between)
4) Date a guy I like
5) Save up and get that tattoo I've been pining over for years.
6) Make a ball gown from my own design
7) Keep up with my blog here (ie. at least once a week - yell at me if I don't)
8) Learn to shoot safely and well
9) Organise a night out, instead of just going to them
10) Go abroad
11) Take part in a Great Scottish Run
12)Pass an OTC PFA, and every one thereafter (50 sit-ups (2 minutes), 22 press-ups (2 minutes),and a 2.4km run (13 min or less))
13) Learn to ski
14) Learn Reveille, first post, and last post on the bugle
15)Buy my great long-time friend (who is younger than me and has known me since she was merely a few days old - we are like sisters and grew up together) her first legal drink from me on her 18th.
16) Try to keep enough savings to tide me over a few months if I'm broke
17) do what I want and stop caring about rumours/talk from others. Those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter.
18)stop eating junk. No really. Stop buying stupid, unhealthy food when you're drunk/hungover/bored/cant be bothered, because there's always a better tasting, and just generally better alternative.
19) sing in front of someone. Whether it be in a group, solo, drunk or sober, I want to get the guts up to perform with someone there.
20) play my fiddle at least once a week, every week, for at least a year.
21) have a super, dooper, birthday party that I will always remember (or not remember, as the case may be)

So progress so far: 1 is going well, as I passed my first semester with first class honours. My sewing is improving for 6. 7 you can see here for yourselves. My plane is in the process of being sorted for 10 for a trip to Switzerland with the band. Im only 40 seconds behind for the run in 12, though the push-ups are a long way off. I have just about nailed the short reveille for 14 if I could get the high note better. 17 is getting easier each day. 20 is going well so far, but I still have to keep it up.

All in all, good progress methinks.
PS, sorry if my jumping around of topics annoys anyone. This is a place to empty my thoughts into, and my head does jumble up and jump around a lot. It can be difficult to calm it down when it want to have four trains of thought going at once. It's the beauty, and annoyance, of multitasking all the time.
Have a good day, everyone. :)



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Friday 24 February 2012

Testing, testing

Yeah, you can pretty much ignore this post if it pops up.
If it does: YAY! BlogPress is working again. ( = easier for me to post = possibly more posts for you)
If not, you won't see this anyway.

Here goes...

See you all soon :)


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Lucky me..

I'm so lucky to have a friend who I can phone at all hours and will drop everything for me.
That's all I have to say. Have a great day everyone :)

Wednesday 22 February 2012

Feeling Sad

For some reason, I woke up today, and just couldnt get out of this pit of sadness I'm in. It's all like every little thing which has been bothering me has come down on me at once.
First of all, I'm ill. I have had it slightly for a couple of days, but today I slept through all my alarms and the testing for the fire alarm, missed my first lecture, my hearing is wierd, my sinuses blocked, my voice is about gone and all my limbs ache so much I really really don't want to get out of bed.
Secondly, I've found myself between two groups of friends. We're all trainee officer cadets. One group I'm good friends with, and have good banter, but most of them lack tact around awkward or sensitive situations. The second group are largely misunderstood by many in the first group, even though they are the only ones who actually cared about me when a particular piece of news was spread around the rest of the training corps. I had a bit of a heart-to-heart with one of the girls there last night, and I can't help feel that everyone has the wrong idea about her. She's like me, she puts on a face a lot of the time, to stop people pecking at our worst scars.
Also,tom not sure if I mentioned this before, but there's a certain guy I confessed to really liking him. Yeah, well, he basically took me home last week after a very drunken night out (on valentines day, of all things). I am now very pissed off and upset that he took advantage of me , and he never texted me, totally ignored me at the training corps last night (who all know about it and made certain it was mentioned more than a few times in the mess), and seemed to disappear with one of the other girls later when we all went out. Im sure the news will reach me by the weekend if he did. Douchebag.
Urgh. I just feel so horrible. It's good to get all this out, but I still feel kind of dead inside. It's like, so many of my friends don't have the tact and sympathy to talk about this kind of stuff with them, and at the same time, I don't want to bring those that would understand down with me. There is so much about me that even my closest friends don't know. My mask is my security blanket, and sometimes a good friend can peel away some, but what is always covered up is what sometimes makes me feel so alone, even among the best friends I could wish for. I guess in a way, it's why a blog is good for me, even when I don't feel like it.
Dear me, now my eyes are filling up, and I can't even tell if it's my illness or my sadness.
I really want to go out tonight, but if I'm still feeling sad, I'll definitely be staying off the alcohol. I may not be such great "craic" as we say, but it's much better than alcohols tendancy to kick you when you're down.
Sorry for the depressing poem, but it pretty much describes how I'm feeling.

CRYING (written by me)

I cannot cry.
I often want to.
A lump gathers in my throat,
And my eyes sting;
But little water wells
To even wet my eyelashes;
Let alone produce tears.
I hurt inside,
But it rarely shows.
I am stuck in silence,
My emotions supressed
By an invisible wall in my head.

I have always been like this;
So long that many don't know me ever to be sad.
But today was different:

Today I cried

Sunday 19 February 2012

Feeling delicate

So here I am again, after another messy night out, and perhaps feeling not so sturdy anymore. Still loving the absence of a sore head, but missing memories, plenty of stories around the billets, and full-body aching of muscles, along with a fair collection of bruises suggests it was a very interesting night.
I'm currently on a bus with all my hungover band-mates, heading back to good old Aberdeen. We've been in Edinburgh for the weekend with a couple of other bands and some familiar faces around. There's been every kind of weather possible, right from snow and and a blizzard of hail, to bright sunshine. All in all it was a good weekend.

I was surprised to hear about a fire in my hometown of Perth. The paper in the recycling centre at the Inveralmond Industrial Estate caught fire and made quite a blaze.
I also had a really good night on Tuesday, but that's another story, perhaps for another day.
Also, it seems BlogPress has stopped working on my iPhone, which is a pain.

I would love to say I can give you a poem, but I don't think my brain can handle it at the moment.

Sunday 12 February 2012

A bad mood and a pitiful excuse for a hangover

Okay, so I'm not exactly in the best mood today. We have some catching up to do now, because the last few days have been rather interesting, at least from my perspective.
Point No. 1: a few days ago, maybe Monday or Tuesday, I made the sudden realisation that I actually really like this guy. So Tuesday night was a bit awkward to say the least. It's the weirdest thing to actually try to act normal, even though my head tells me it's probably doing the exact opposite. On top of that I've been getting jealous of other girls. Not the girls we both know, because most of them already either have boyfriends or are interested in someone else, and just consider him a good friend. It's the people I don't know that I'm wary of.
Yesterday, you wouldn't have believed my jealousy when I saw him drunkenly kissing another girl in the nightclub we were all in. Hence the bad mood this morning.
It bothered me long enough that I knew drinking wouldn't help, so I took a sobering 40 minute walk home. One of the other guys there might have thought something was up, because he called me to make sure I was okay and got home safely. Then again, he could have just been looking out for me, as we all do on nights like that.

Anyway, off the topic of guys, I have a fair set of bruises coming up from our ceilidh last night (there was a ceilidh before the nightclub). There's nothing like a good few drunken strip-the-willows to give you brown, blue, purple and green coloured upper arms. In fact, if you don't end up with bruises, you ain't doing it right!
So I now have only my surprisingly sharp memory, bruises, sore legs, and the need to drink a couple of litres of water to remind me of last night. Not that I'm complaining about the lack of a hangover. It's not every day you can easy wake up bright and early, with complete absence of a sore head, at 7am on a Sunday morning after being out on the town only four hours earlier.
In other news, my first labs of the semester were last week. They weren't that hard: titrating EDTA and zinc in chemistry, and drawing cells as we saw them under the microscope in biomed. Fun times. Unfortunately, everyone's having trouble with the uni wireless for our laptops. It's very difficult to do our online lab tests on time when the Internet connection keeps disconnecting. Apparently the problem is the same for people all over the university.
Also, I joined the gym. My induction is on Tuesday to get my work-out plan made up. Hopefully it'll help me become fitter. I can't believe how unfit I am compared to what I used to be like.

Anyway, sorry for the ultra-long post. No poem today - my bad mood means everything I come up with is annoyingly depressing.
I'm heading to lunch now. Have a good day, everyone!


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Monday 6 February 2012

Monday Again..

And not so bad either. I got up nice and early to go for a roundabout sunrise walk to the post office, to send a little package by special delivery to my mum. I'm always surprised by how much happier I am when I wake up early.
Anyway, I spent the whole weekend near Dundee with the folks from the OTC. The band had pretty much the whole drum corps there, but was rather lacking in pipers. Either way, I got bass and tenor music written out for all but the two tunes we havent got out from the pipers yet.
The plan to do some rifle training didn't quite go to plan, but we will at least hopefully get around to doing all that by the time summer camp, if not spring camp, comes around.
There were two birthday celebrations on saturday night. There would have been three, but one person was not there. Three pints (roughly the amount usually contained in our usual yard glass, which was back at the mess back in Aberdeen) was downed in quick succession by each, as per tradition, and it was all in all a good night, regardless of how tired everyone was. We had a 2 mile run on Saturday morning, but our PFA (physical fitness assessment) was postposed on sunday due to ice. Thank goodness. There were also blizzards reported on facebook by friends, and apparently some problems due to the weather in London.

So I have a poem with regards to the cold weather. The past month or so, I have heard of many reports of flowers and animals coming out for spring early, thanks to the better weather this winter. Unfortunately these animals and flowers are often very succeptible to sudden bad weather. Most spring-times, a blizzard can cause a lot of trouble for the young animals, expecially the lambs, and last year was no exception, so here I have a poem, inspired by their struggle:

THE LAMBING FALLS (by Me)

The freshness of the new grass;
An avalanche on the senses.
The sights,
Smells,
Sounds,
Of spring.
The strange,
Though not unpleasant smells
Of ivy
Climbing up stone
Into the soft sunlight
Dancing in streamers
Between the clouds.
The ewes are lambing,
And little bleatings of joy
Are in the air.
Then once again the sky falls,
In little white tufts,
On the land of hope,
Turned fear.
And another fight against nature begins.

A long while later,
As the sky lightens
And colours to blue,
The survivors appear.
Shivvery lambs enjoy the grass once more,
And fresh sprigs appear above the whiteness,
Happy,
Sad,
Cold
But strong;
The survivors of the lambing falls-
The spring snowstorm.


So, now I'm back home and contemplating a gym membership. Students at my university get cut prices, so it works out well. The plan is to increase my stamina, my upper body strength (and learn to do 25 push-ups by this time next year - I can currently do one, if you're lucky), and hopefully, my flexibility.

I read an article today about a woman trying to do 23 things before her 23rd birthday, in memory of her brother, and I think its an amazing idea. I would like to think I could try to do 19 things before my 19th birthday, but with uni, band etc, etc. I think timing and money are issues for me. So, I have decided to try to do 21 things before my 21st birthday. Here's my list:
1) Get into 3rd year at uni (that means no failed years, or semesters)
2) Rent my first flat and get some flatmates
3) Get a decent-paying job to fit around uni, band and OTC commitments (few and far between)
4) Date a guy I like
5) Save up and get that tattoo I've been pining over for years.
6) Make a ball gown from my own design
7) Keep up with my blog here (ie. at least once a week - yell at me if I don't)
8) Learn to shoot safely and well
9) Organise a night out, instead of just going to them
10) Go abroad
11) Take part in a Great Scottish Run
12)  Pass an OTC PFA, and every one thereafter (50 sit-ups (2 minutes), 22 press-ups (2 minutes), and a 2.4km run (11 min or less))
13) Learn to ski
14) Learn Reveille, first post, and last post on the bugle
15) Buy my great long-time friend (who is younger than me and has known me since she was merely a few days old - we are like sisters and grew up together) her first legal drink from me on her 18th.
16)...
I'm out of ideas for the moment. I'll update again once I think of more things I would love to do.

PS. sorry for the ultra-long post

Friday 3 February 2012

A new week of Lectures

Afternoon, everyone.
So, I was launched into a new week of uni lectures this week. The first week is always hard, if nothing else just because we need to get into a routine again. Luckily, my first lecture of the day is pretty much the same subject and at the same time all week, so it's easier to get into a routine.
One of my OTC friends have joined in my course lectures. Apparently, the biologists have to do this part of our course, in the same way that I have to do parts of the chemistry course. Anyway, it was comforting to be sitting with someone equally hungover in our early morning lecture.
Yeah, we were hungover. There was a friends 21st party on Wednesday, which went way into the morning. That was, however, before the last-minute decision that the band was going on the OTC training weekend. So tonight may be a celebration again, as it is actually her birthday tonight, and we will all be there. Not too bad though, or our army Physical Fitness Assessment may be hellish tomorrow.
Anyway, the main point is to learn all the stuff that comes with learning to (reasonably safely) shoot a gun. Plus get some band practice in.

So, in honour of my friend turning 21 today, let me give you a birthday song that is traditional for big birthdays in our family:
(to be sing to the tune of happy birthday)

Hippo birdie two ewes
Hippo birdie two ewes
Hippo birdie deer...(name here)
Hippo birdie two ewes

:D

Location:King St,Aberdeen,United Kingdom