Well, it's finally happened. My exams are done, and for the first time since last summer, I don't have any responsibilities looming over my head. So, I'm not really quite sure what to do with myself, since everything I can think of sounds like it wouldn't be quite awesome enough and therefore a waste of my precious free time. However, I did go out and buy some video games (Mirror's Edge and Dragon Age: Origins). I'm glad that Mirror's Edge only cost me £3 because I am so incredibly, inhumanly bad at it that I actually gave up on the tutorial level after the game failed to register my 900th attempt to swing on a bar. Dragon Age, however, is a much more entertaining game, assuming you like elves and ancient evil scourges threatening to consume a once-peaceful land. I'm not so big on elves, but I do love stabbing ancient evils in the butt with ridiculously large swords, so I'm enjoying Dragon Age quite a bit. This has basically become my schedule:

10am - wake up, scratch self
11am - find way to couch, play dragon age
3pm - movement of sun makes television too dark to see, take nap
7pm - sun has set, continue playing dragon age
2am - sleep
drink beer and eat things that would make a dietician cry - throughout.

Also Kat's girlfriend Kitty is in town for a few weeks. So far it's been really fun having her around, but she's only been here for like, three days. We'll see how happy I am about squeezing three people into an apartment the size of my bedroom in Tennessee later.

Blah

Yeah yeah I know, school, work, hiatus herp de derp. Anyway, I'm back in black (well, dark purple) and it's a new year!

Okay so I got a new apartment! It's beautiful but unfortunately there aren't any pictures yet because my camera is dead, but let me just say that it is very nice, liberating even, to live in a place with molding on the walls instead of actual mold (see what I did there). My room is tiny, but I can't complain, because it does afford me a nice view of the teenagers passing out in the alley below me. :/

I also have resit exams for the next week. Basically, I have to resit everything with "organic" in the name. I've had three already: metal ions in biochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, and organometallic chemistry. Metal ions wasn't so good, atmospheric was pretty good, and organometallic... well, that's something I would rather forget. >_> But! I still have four left, and I only need to pass two to progress. So there's that!

Anyway, so Kat and I came up with the House Drinking Game. It's an excellent way to get really, really drunk in about an hour and a half:

HOUSE DRINKING GAME

Drink heavily throughout the opening credits.

Drink when:

House pops a pill (drink twice if it isn't Vicodin)
Cuddy is a bitch
Someone bleeds out the butt (finish your drink and crush the can against your forehead if it's one of the doctors)
Foreman has an Angry Black Man moment
Wilson cares
House and Wilson have a bromance moment
House commits a felony
Someone says "autoimmune" or the name of any autoimmune disease
House ogles Cuddy
House has a "House moment"
House says something racist
Thirteen says something lesbian-y
The patient has a seizure less than three seconds after they give him a new medicine
There is a lumbar puncture
Chase does something stupid
Bad CGI indicates that the patient's body is about to shit itself
The patient / patient's boyfriend / girlfriend / parent / housepet lied about having an affair
House thinks the patient has an STI (finish your drink if the patient actually does have an STI)
The patient has a seizure / cadiac arrest / other plot device while inside the MRI
And finally, if the clinic patient helps House solve the main case, finish your drink, drink another, then ram your head against the wall until you forget what lupus is.

And that's all for now! Until next time!

Nightmare on Elm Street, Exams, and Plant Liberation Army

So Zaheen just left yesterday, and I was sitting around in my room moping when Kat came and pounded on my door and insisted I do something outside (instead of sulk). We decided to wander around outside and found ourselves outside the Brighton Odeon where Nightmare on Elm Street (the remake) just happened to be playing. Honestly, don't bother. It sucked bad. However, I enjoyed it for the same reason that all people over age 19 enjoy bad horror films; the opportunity to see teenagers die. (Also, the fact that Freddy Krueger, this time around, was played by the pedophile from Little Children / Rorschach from Watchmen seemed... strangely appropriate. I think Jackie Earle Haley is going to spend the rest of his life doing pedo/creeper roles).

Kat reacts to the deep shittiness of Nightmare on Elm Street. Also, I had just raked my hand down her back Freddy-style.

The most notable part of the outing was not the movie-- which really blew, bad-- but what happened before and after. I don't know what it is, but whenever Kat and I go out, we always find the most random things just lying around. Last time we went out, we found a fake-gold Casio watch. This time we found £5 on the way to the theatre, which I immediately turned into two large ice creams from Ben & Jerry's via ice cream alchemy (there's a B&J in the theatre). Turns out they were also doing a promotion, buy a large ice cream and get an iPod sock:

Deeply mooving.

Anyway, on the way home we found yet more entertaining things. Kat insisted we check out this random 24-hour grocery on the Grand Parade. We were not disappointed:


To complete our Random Shit Harvest, we also found a plush daisy that says MIA on it, designed to be stuck in a car window; a hubcap from a VW (I always thought they were metal. Guess I was wrong); and a half-dead tomato plant (hence Plant Liberation Army-- I liberated it from someone's garbage). The tomato plant is actually looking much better today, although still a bit droopy. Does anyone know how much sunlight / water tomatoes need?

Now, as for the exams part. I have exams. In three weeks. I have 10 exams in a two week period. I have an exam at 9:30 on a Saturday morning, because apparently Saddam fucking Hussein's ghost is in charge of the exam board. I also have five deadlines on one day (this Thursday). THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE, RIGHT? OKAY, JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE. BRB GONNA WATER THE TOMATOES AND THEN OFF MYSELF. YAY.

whooo

just got this email

Dear All

                 As you may know, this Thursday (18th March) the University and College Union UCU plans a one-day strike in connection with proposed jobs cuts. If this strike goes ahead it will involve many staff, and we do not want to oblige students to cross picket lines. This means that assessments and assessment deadlines are postponed. You should hear from the Academic Registrar, but deadlines for work due in on Thursday 18th have uniformly been extended to 19th. Arrangements for end of term tests have been left to course organisers, but these may well be postponed to next term; this is inconvenient, but under the circumstances may be the best option. We will make alternative arrangements for those (e.g. visiting students) who cannot attend tests in the Summer term. Please check emails from the Course organiser.

                 In summary, we do not expect any student to be obliged to cross a picket line. Hence unless there is specific agreement in advance between the teacher and students there can be no compulsory teaching or assessment on 18th. Lectures, seminars and tutorials may run that day, but we would hope that reasonable provision is made for any students who miss the class.


Please let me know of any questions.

Best wishes

thursday, the day i have a test and a lab due in! why can't we have strikes every week? :D

Welcome to Brighton, Jewel of Southeast England

that's not a slug on the window, it's a seagull... offering

I had a really good Christmas and New Year's! I got to spend it with my family (+ Zaheen who was visiting) and we had lots of good times, like buying the Dr Seuss of Christmas trees and purchasing 50lb. of salt which the deer, for some reason, absolutely refused to lick. (And watching my dad light 12 sparklers at once on New Year's Eve and stand there, holding them, going "oh god guys i think this was a bad idea help"). And baking. Lots and lots of baking.

But now all that is done and I'm back in Brighton, a town where, as you can probably tell from the picture I posted, has decided that road salt should be reserved only for the widest and flattest of roads, so all the narrow twisty streets on 30° grades (of which there are MANY in Brighton) have been pretty much told by the council to get fucked. Which is why I get woken up at 9AM every day by the sound of tires squealing and cursing from the guy across the street. Also, seeing as snow is somewhat of a rarity in Brighton, nobody is, shall we say, sartorially equipped to deal with it... so campus is just full of girls in miniskirts, leggings, and canvas sneakers acting like they're not cold. Just like my first winter in Toronto. Road salt will do a number on chucks, guys.

As for the school end of things... I guess I should talk about that a bit too. Campus has managed to be open every day this week in the face of nearly insurmountable obstacles (3" of snow), so I got to meet all my profs yesterday! Technically the first day of school was two days ago, but I had such a blinding migraine I couldn't see straight, so yesterday was actually my first day. Anyway! Impressions.
The first class I had was Atmospheric Chemistry. I thought it was going to be really interesting until I realized it was being taught by the same guy who did Bonding and Spectroscopy last term and utterly fucked it up by insisting they rearrange the course so all the spectroscopy stuff came before the quantum mechanics stuff that was meant to explain it. Apparently on the first day, he admitted he had no idea what atmospheric chemistry was (he's a physical chemist) and was sort of learning it as he went along. What the christ.

Anyway, then I had a really long break, which I used to run errands (yell at Barclay's, yell at the library...) apparently Barclay's shipped my debit card on the 16th of December, which is news to me, so they put a block on it and are mailing out a new one, which I should get in "a few days". Which probably means somewhere around April. Next, I went to the library, as they were charging me £20 in overdue fees for a book I returned almost a month ago. So I copied down the serial number and, sure enough, there it was on the shelf. I have to fill out a form to get my late fees back, though, since they think I just went back into the stacks and mysteriously "found" the book in my pocket or something. ENGLAND

After that I had States of Matter, Organometallic Chemistry, and Strategy in Organic Synthesis. I don't know why they can't just call these courses physical, organometallic (okay that one they kinda did) and organic, but who knows.
States of Matter is, as I said, physical chemistry, basically. It seems like pretty standard stuff. The professor is Eastern European and painfully skinny and has a ridiculous accent. I'd say more about the content of the course, but as I said, Eastern European prof. Meaning, I have literally no idea what he was saying the entire time. I'm going to need to spend a lot of time looking at the online notes for this one...
Next up, Organometallic Chemistry. This one sticks out in my mind because the course handout had a giant picture of a ferrocene molecule on it. That fucking molecule is stalking me I swear to god
And then, finally, Strategy in Organic Synthesis aka Hope You Like Drawing Arrows. This is basically exactly what the name suggests: learning the rules and basis behind various reactions and how they "go". However, I mainly noticed how ridiculously French the professor is. I mean, if he came to class wearing a beret and a striped shirt, I would not be entirely surprised. He asks us to guess mechanisms before he tells us, and then he walks around the class looking over everyone's shoulder and muttering "Tres bien" if you get it right and stuff like that. Also, when he messes up drawing something, he goes "Merde!". Ridiculous.

Okay, that ended up being pretty long, but hey, I had a lot of stuff to recap. And now, I have a lot of lab to prepare for. :(

[edit] Oh yeah, guess I should say something about yesterday being my birthday. Yesterday was my 22nd birthday. My lovely housemates gave me a stack of old comic books, two cards, and a cake <3 :D

merry christmas!

... which means it's time for my Christmas jet lag! :D

it's 5 AM and i'm sitting in my mom's kitchen, drinking root beer and watching Red Dwarf. I'm not even sure if this is jet lag anymore or just my body being all messed up from exams and stuff. But at least Zaheen is coming tonight so yay!

HIATUS OVER

guys i think the amount of deadlines i have this week (4) has had a strange effect on my choice of essay topic

also just so this isn't a completely wasted post, here's a picture of an ice cream truck (excuse me, 'ice lolly lorry') i took from my bedroom window

MIND THAT CHILD