Everyone come!

Silly tutorial group

Right, so for one of my modules, we have to submit comments on to an online discussion board, and our comments are assessed and it all goes towards our mark for the unit. So we're supposed to have an online discussion on the internet about various literature.. Except the rest of my group seem to be either computer illiterate (which I highly doubt), have no views on literature or very shy. Or perhaps lazy. Admittedly I only post about a day before we meet, but still, at least I post! And the main reason I haven't before that so far is due to Jewish festivals taking up so many days when I can't use the computer etc. And also the lack of discussion on there, and so the absence of anything to further discuss after one post. Meh.

I was bored

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF - The Survey
Name:	Naomi
Birthday:	21 December 1986
Birthplace:	Kenton
Current Location:	Manchester
Eye Color:	Blue
Hair Color:	Blonde
Height:	Not sure. Around 5'4"/5'5"
Right Handed or Left Handed:	Righty.
Your Heritage:	Umm my parents, duh.
The Shoes You Wore Today:	Flat black ones most of the time, trainers the rest.
Your Weakness:	Pedantry.
Your Fears:	Being unhappy for a long time.
Your Perfect Pizza:	Oooooo good question. Loads and loads of cheese, lots and lots of vegetables, and you mustn't forget the artichokes.
Goal You Would Like To Achieve This Year:	Being happy?
Your Most Overused Phrase On an instant messenger:	okies or indeedy.
Thoughts First Waking Up:	What's the time?
Your Best Physical Feature:	My upper body, blonde hair and permanent smile. :)
Your Bedtime:	Variable.. often after midnight, sometimes 11.
Your Most Missed Memory:	If I miss it how do I know what it is?
Pepsi or Coke:	Coke. But it better be diet.
MacDonalds or Burger King:	Neither.. ranching, deforestation, globalisation grargghh meh mrrrrrhhh
Single or Group Dates:	Single
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea:	What's Nestea?
Chocolate or Vanilla:	Vanilla.
Cappuccino or Coffee:	Coffee, more to drink that way.
Do you Smoke:	No.
Do you Swear:	People normally say "that's the first time I've heard you swear" when I swear.
Do you Sing:	Yes.
Do you Shower Daily:	Yes.
Have you Been in Love:	I am.
Do you want to go to College:	I am at uni... does that count?
Do you want to get Married:	Yes.
Do you belive in yourself:	Yes.
Do you get Motion Sickness:	No.
Do you think you are Attractive:	Not overly. I don't see myself as majorly ugly though either.
Are you a Health Freak:	Not really, although I do love vegetables.
Do you get along with your Parents:	Yes.
Do you like Thunderstorms:	Yes.
Do you play an Instrument:	Yes, clarinet (and most woodwinds amateurly..)
In the past month have you Drank Alcohol:	I have drunk alcohol, yes.
In the past month have you Smoked:	No.
In the past month have you been on Drugs:	No.
In the past month have you gone on a Date:	Yes.
In the past month have you gone to a Mall:	Yes, a shopping centre.
What Do You Enjoy:	Being happy... too much to list individually.
In the past month have you eaten Sushi:	No.
In the past month have you been on Stage:	No.
In the past month have you been Dumped:	No.
In the past month have you gone Skinny Dipping:	No.
In the past month have you Stolen Anything:	No.
Ever been Drunk:	Tipsy, yes. Drunk, no.
Ever been called a Tease:	No.
Ever been Beaten up:	No.
How do you want to Die:	I don't think of such things, but preferably happily.
What do you want to be when you Grow Up:	Don't know yet.
What country would you most like to Visit:	Australia or somewhere in Africa.
In a Boy..
Favourite Eye Color:	Anything worth looking into.
Favourite Hair Color:	Not blonde.
Short or Long Hair:	Short.
Height:	Taller than me.
Weight:	Not too much less than me.
Best Clothing Style:	Something that suits them.
Number of Drugs I have taken:	None.
Number of CDs I own:	Lots (although according to many not enough)
Number of Piercings:	None.
Number of Tattoos:	None.
Number of things in my Past I Regret:	Umm.. never really counted.

I feel like I haven't blogged for ages, and yet I haven't had anything majorly blog-inspiring happen to me, so I haven't blogged. But I have intended to, I just haven't had the inspiration!

We've been set all of our English assessment essays.. and the first one, due in in November is on 'The Whitsun Weddings' by Larkin, which has made me ever so slightly rather happy. ;) One of the other essays is a choice between the opening of 'Endgame' and some rap lyrics.. I do find it funny how we study hip hop and rap this year.

On Saturday night some of us went bowling, and I managed to come third in my lane! Even if we did have bumpers... (oh and there were five in a lane)

Hmm.. I think I should get back to the worky work attitude, although I do love to procrastinate. ;)

Caught up!

Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) meant I missed two and half days of lectures and things, which I've now finished copying up notes from! Hoping I understand the maths and it looks like the English lecture was just talking about "medieval" films and from the seminar today as well as the notes doesn't seem like I missed too much.

Was down in London for Rosh Hashana, and it was nice to be back home for a bit. :) At the same time, it was nice returning up here too. Despite having only been here for a couple of weeks, most of us still missed the place for the couple of days we were all away (everyone went away for the new year).

Free concert!

I went to the Manchester University introductory concert this evening; Bernstein's Overture Candide, Ives' Tone Road No1, Mendelssohn's Symhony No4 and Britten's St Nicholas. The best thing was.. it was free! Good orchestras, although they did sound like they were a bit rusty.. I thought the winds were slightly out with each other (and obviously therefore at least a few were out with the orchestra) and the person I went with thought that the strings weren't getting all their notes. The second half (the Britten) was very well done, with excellent and beautiful music.

Home tomorrow afternoon for Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year).. after three hours of lectures and seminars.

Heat! Hot water!

Yay they've fixed the heating and hot water in our flat! :D Our radiators are now fully functioning and we actually can get hot water out of the hot taps (before the only place to find hot water was out of the shower..) so there is a slightly warmer outlook for the winter. :) And more hygienic for that matter too..

Went to MUGSS (Gilbert and Sullivan society) last night, which was fun.. We're doing two productions this year: Rock Trial (a modern version of Trial by Jury) in November and a modernised Utopia in March. Fun! After last night's rehearsal, after Harry's Bar, we went to the Fab Cafe, which is a really funky and groovy bar. It has a dalek! And Betty Boop on the TV screens! And Tin Tin on the walls! And Doctor Who stuff! And the original style space invaders! (Okay, I think you get the picture.. the exclamations could go on for a while.) Down side (part of an up side though) was that I came back stinking of smoke from the smoke machine.

Book sale!

Woooo! There was a second hand and new book sale in the building that I had my lecture in today so I went book shopping! Squeeeeeeeee. Oh I am such a sucker for book sales. I spent £7.50 on three books: some Ibsen, some Stoppard and some Armitage. Yay! :)

My room stinks of smoke

And so does all the stuff that isn't in a cupboard or drawer. Grrrrrrr.

The story: one of my flatmates decided it would be really nice to have a chocolate evening here, and her plan was to melt chocolate and then we could dip fruit in it and everything would be lovely, fine and dandy. (The next is all what others have told me and I can guess, as I was actually out throughout the whole of the next bit at wind orchestra.) So my flatmate breaks up the chocolate, puts it in bowls and bungs it in the microwave. And then (I've no idea how long it was left, but any sensible person knows you should check it every 30 seconds or so anyway) there was loads of smoke billowing out of the kitchen (which I omitted mentioning is adjoining to my bedroom, and no others) and out the windows and she called the fire brigade and a whole load of fire alarms went off. Anyhow, the main result is that my room is basically the only one really affected, with most of my clothes stinking of smoke and nearly everything else that was out (I haven't checked stuff in drawers). Humph.

Textbooks

So, I went and bought my maths textbooks today, and boy am I glad that my hall is close to the bookshop. One was really huge, really heavy and really expensive, the other was half the price and didn't even approach a similar size or weight. That's a lot of money for two textbooks, but at least Manchester's School of Mathematics is kind and gives book tokens to those who get AAB (and lots of money to those who get straight As, but that ain't me).

Moment of randonimity: I have decided that fizzy mango stuff is not the way to go. Still mango juice is incredibly yummy though.

Back to normality (if there is such a thing for me..)
Lectures properly started today (I had a couple of introductory maths ones on Friday), with an English lecture and a tutorial for the lecture, and two maths lectures, one for each of the modules. One thing's for sure, I'm glad I did further maths, even if it was only to AS. It's sooooo useful and means that all the would-be confusing stuff doesn't fly whoooosh straight over my head like it has been for quite a few. I suppose we have textbooks to help us along now though. Nice heavy ones. ;) Good thing with my English units: part of our assessment is through what they call WebCT, which is basically an online discussion board/forum thing.. anyone who knows what I'm like and how I get addicted to those will know why I say it's a good thing. Only bad thing is that I seem to be unable to log on at the moment. Doh.

Strange

I was just finishing my lunch today when I received a phonecall from Ms Fink (English teacher from school last year) telling me how the exam board (EdExcel) want to use my English coursework from last year as a model for something or other and they need me to sign a form.. well of course when I'm in Manchester I'm not going to be going past HBS (in London for those who don't know) at any point this week, so she's posting me the stuff. Strange and random phonecall all the same.

Freshers' fair today (everywhere seems to have the apostrophe before the 's', but to me it seems mad, given the fact that the fair is for more than one fresher etc etc), and I picked up a whole load of freebies, including cinema tickets, whistles and food, including food I can't eat but ah well.

I'm in Manchester!

If you want my address in order to send me funky post, postcards or just a random letter, then please email or phone me (my mobile number didn't change in the end) and I will give it to you. For obvious reasons, I'm not posting it here.

So, for the time being I have a double room to myself, which is good as I have lots of space (too much storage space to be honest), the nicer furnishings and the kitchen attached to the room. However, everyone in my flat (two other people at the moment) have keys to my room in order to get to the kitchen. No worries at the moment though.

Registered today, meeting some nice maths people and getting my uni card with a cheesy grin style photo of me on it. Grabbed some freebies, more to follow I'm sure.

My timetable seems to give me nearly every afternoon free, which is rather nice, except at the moment I haven't got the times for my English stuff, or at least one of the lectures was written on my timetable as 'tba', so I'm going to find that out tomorrow.

Anyway, off to get ready to go out etc and meet some other people now...

Gosh, I'm tired.

Very tired. And yes, I realise that very doesn't really quantify how tired I am.

Yay books

My books from amazon arrived today. :) WHSmith are rather useless and despite the book being "in stock" and supposedly only taking 2-4 days to arrive to my local store, I ordered it over a week ago and it should be arriving in store on Friday. Lucky I've read the play I need to read before, eh?

Met my grandparents and sister for lunch today; my grandparents gave me a big bag of food and stuff to "start you off" at uni.

This afternoon has been spent drinking lots of liquid (it's hot, or at least, I have a headache), collecting books to take up to Manchester and decorating the Tribe bag I got free at the weekend. Woo for dolphins and fish and fabric paints. :D

copy copy copy

So, I'm sitting on the floor of the lounge copying all of my dad's CDs onto the laptop I'm taking to university- to be honest, I've been meaning to copy these CDs for ages and haven't got round to it. I think copyright-wise I'm alright, as I'm not profiting out of the music in any way (monetary-wise anyway) and it's all for personal use, so all should be good. After that, I'm going to finish copying all my previously bought music from the PC over to the laptop. All copying fun. Woo.

Put some stuff into crates this morning. New phone arrived too, number hopefully not changing, will keep you posted (although if it does change, I won't post the number, for obvious reasons). This top arrived this morning, having ordered it the other day. The pink is slightly different, less bright I think, to how it appears in the picture. Still awaiting book deliveries, although I have now read everything on my reading list. Although Manchester's English faculty haven't put up any of the compulsory joint honours units, I know the titles of them and used that. I'm just hoping that all the times up on various bits of the site aren't all correct, since I'll then have two compulsory lectures at the same time for different subjects, which would be a bit difficult. Hm.

Last night it was Kajal's birthday celebration. A little early, for my sake I think, since I'm one of the first of my school friends to be starting university, and I'm going out of London too. We went to Pizza Express. Rather funny series of events. Kajal booked for 20 of us, and then lots of people couldn't come, and there were only seven. So instead of being upstairs and being able to make lots of noise, etc they made us come downstairs, which we didn't mind overly apart from the fact that there was actually a really nice seven seater round table upstairs and they had no such thing downstairs. So we went downstairs, like they asked. Being a group of teenage girls, we were bound to be noisy, especially since it was a birthday. And yet the waiter decided to come over and ask us if we could be a bit quieter.. and then told us not too quiet as they still wanted to have some atmosphere! It's not like we were their sound machine or anything! If they wanted ambient chatter for their restaurant they should invest in such a CD or some such thing.. if it exists. If it doesn't, shotgun it's my idea. And then, to top off the whole evening, despite having written in their booking that it was an 18th BIRTHDAY, they still managed to not put a candle in Kaj's dessert. I thought that was terrible. I mean, come on. It was in the booking.

What a wonderful life, eh?

So, Spain was lovely and hot and sunny, and a week away from everything else and now I've returned (well I did on Sunday night actually) and have oodles of stuff to do before the 17th, when I go up to Manchester. I'm afraid very few photos were taken in Spain (we weren't about to take a photo of the random Israeli who chatted up my sister, were we?) and all old-fashioned stylee, so none that are digital and I doubt many worth scanning either. If I had a scanner, that is.

Manchester in 10 days, which is rather scary but exciting at the same time. Still don't know if I have a single or double room in halls- hoping for a single, of course, but everyone hopes for one of them I think.

Finished the sarong late last night, and off to the airport for Spain for a week at around 11 o'clock this morning. Won't blog for about a week, so see you all in a week's time!

Work in progress

Well, I've hemmed one side of the sarong (the extra pair of hands was busy when I wanted to pin other bits though) and I have done some red painting. The paint isn't as transparent as I thought it would be, but that doesn't matter as the bikini I plan to wear the sarong with is red, so showing red doesn't matter. I don't quite know how long the paint takes to dry though.. anyone?

More accommodation forms and info arrived in the post today, asking for three passport photos, money and signatures. Hopefully all should be fine. The first of many sets of passport sized photos to be taken very soon...

Squeeeee I bought material and fabric paints to make a sarong with! Yay yay yay! :D The fabric is golden yellow (sooooo wonderful and lovely) and I bought transparent red and blue paints. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. :D

I bought lots of other things too, but those, to me, are the most exciting. :D

Shopping, shopping and I wonder what else?

So, shopping two days in a row, and I'm planning on a proper full-day shopping spree in Watford tomorrow.

Yesterday I bought a thin summer top from per una in M&S in the sale and two tops from Dorothy Perkins for £3!! That's three pounds for both tops altogether, not each! That shopping was in Brent Cross. I was also really surprised because I went at around 1pm and I managed to find a drive-through space in the Fenwick car park almost immediately, and normally it takes forever just to find a normal space..

Today saw me at my grandparents' in the morning, sorting out their computer troubles and helping them to send photos of Joshua around the world, or at least Europe. They fed me lunch too. And the photos were very cute.

This afternoon I went to Harrow in the pouring rain, so didn't do the full circuit as I was soaked enough from what I did do. Bought some boots for £13.49 in Shoe Zone (just normal walking type camel coloured boots, I needed new ones as previous ones broke), some cropped trousers in H&M which I may not keep and a cheap thin hoodie in Primark (woo for reductions in Primark.. they practically pay you to take the stuff away!).

Off to help with double baby bath-time!!