Since being home my life must have become a shade more boring than it was before, as I haven't been able to think of a single thing to post a blog entry about. I've cleaned both my mum's house and my dad's to help out, applied for a couple of jobs, been interviewed for one, got said job, and done some training for it. Other than that I've spent my time reading, although as of yet I've not actually started reading anything from the reading lists for next term. In fact, I've yet to even buy the books. I will probably do so next week. Maybe.
And speaking of reading, let's have a fascinating meme, shall we?
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;)
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Well, I've read some of it...)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (WHY IS THIS BOOK NOT HIGHER ON THE LIST???)
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (...at least Birdsong was higher than this one ¬_¬)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Haven't read it, but have met the author...lol)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (OMFG. I read this entire series when I was younger! Love it)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
29/100, eyyy. Not bad, I suppose :D
Friday 27 June 2008
Saturday 14 June 2008
"Goodbye", words cannot convey it
Goodbye, dust that appeared despite how often I cleaned
Goodbye, bookshelf that I was in constant danger of head-butting
Goodbye, mahusive notice board
Goodbye, curtain that doesn’t keep out the light from the lamp post outside my window
Goodbye, semi-hidden plug sockets that I only discovered a month after living here
Goodbye, mouldy shower curtain
Goodbye, toilet that flushes weirdly
Goodbye, suspicious-puke-smelling-stain-that-appeared-in-the-kitchen-in-the-four-days-I-was-away
Yes, I will miss you, D-6-c.
I will not, however, miss my flatmates. Ex-flatmates, I suppose they are now. We've had our good moments, we've had our bad moments. But do you know what the icing on the metaphorical cake that I'd love to smush into Nena's face is? I got up this morning to have some breakfast and found that my milk was gone from the fridge. Not gone as in, chucked down the sink, the empty container chucked in the bin. Just gone. Needless to say I wasn't impressed. I have low blood sugar in the mornings and seeing as I'm going to be carrying heavy bags to the bus station, I kinda needed something to sustain me. But there's nothing I can do about it. SO. I opened the freezer to get my remaining 2 slices of bread out to make a sandwich for the journey and...it's not there. I dread to think why she felt the need to take my bread out of my freezer drawer, but she did! Thanks Nena. It's not like I need to eat anything today, despite having a 6 hour journey ahead of me.
Goodbye, bookshelf that I was in constant danger of head-butting
Goodbye, mahusive notice board
Goodbye, curtain that doesn’t keep out the light from the lamp post outside my window
Goodbye, semi-hidden plug sockets that I only discovered a month after living here
Goodbye, mouldy shower curtain
Goodbye, toilet that flushes weirdly
Goodbye, suspicious-puke-smelling-stain-that-appeared-in-the-kitchen-in-the-four-days-I-was-away
Yes, I will miss you, D-6-c.
I will not, however, miss my flatmates. Ex-flatmates, I suppose they are now. We've had our good moments, we've had our bad moments. But do you know what the icing on the metaphorical cake that I'd love to smush into Nena's face is? I got up this morning to have some breakfast and found that my milk was gone from the fridge. Not gone as in, chucked down the sink, the empty container chucked in the bin. Just gone. Needless to say I wasn't impressed. I have low blood sugar in the mornings and seeing as I'm going to be carrying heavy bags to the bus station, I kinda needed something to sustain me. But there's nothing I can do about it. SO. I opened the freezer to get my remaining 2 slices of bread out to make a sandwich for the journey and...it's not there. I dread to think why she felt the need to take my bread out of my freezer drawer, but she did! Thanks Nena. It's not like I need to eat anything today, despite having a 6 hour journey ahead of me.
Thursday 12 June 2008
Long post is long
Oops, haven't posted in a while...I've thought about it at various times, if that counts for anything...heh.
Tomorrow is my last full day in my university accomodation flat. I don't feel overly sad about that just yet seeing as I have already been home; last Thursday my mum came and picked me up, taking practically all my stuff home with me, so I could go home for the long weekend (and that's a pretty epic tale too, but more on that story later). I am currently living out of a suitcase, with just a tin of spaghetti, two slices of bread and a lone pear to tide me over during the day tomorrow. Oh and of course I made sure to keep my laptop here, else I probably would have been driven to despair by boredom.
I thought I would be fine, as long as I had internet connection, but even that is giving me beef. For some reason it keeps trying to disconnect me, and believe me it is not at all fun to have to reconnect every two seconds when all I'm trying to do is check my emails, reply to someone's comment or read manga. Oh yes, I was quite happily reading a chapter of Ouran High School Host Club when all of a sudden I was kicked offline. Even restarting my usually trusty laptop didn't help the matter, onemanga just refuse to load up. But never fear, Saiyu to the rescue! Her first plan of reading it on a different website didn't work, so onto Plan B. 50 screencaps sent over msn later and I finally got to read the chapter. Was it worth the hassle? HELLS YEAH. asdfghj there was epic lulz with the twins, Honey being ridiculously cute, Tamaki being a loveable spaz, and Mori being his usual dotty self. Er. That is, he didn't say anything, just dotted a lot, not that he went dotty randomly. :3
So yes, despite my internet playing up, I have survived my last week here. To be honest the only reason I returned after my weekend at home was on the off chance that I would receive an email informing me that my two assignments were finally ready to collect, but as no such email has been forthcoming and tomorrow is the last day of term anyway, I don't think it will be happening. Which is a bit annoying as it means I came back up here for no reason, but what can ya do. It did at least allow for another epic pizza adventure with Saiyu, although we ventured from our usual Pizza Hut route to try the wonderous and unknown Zizzi's. It was really very exciting.
And now for my epic weekend in a nutshell, because it's getting late and I want to sleep, plus this post is already pretty long so I probably shouldn't write too much more.
Like I said, mutti picked me up Thursday night. 10pm Thursday night, to be precise. Why was she so late? Because she had an appointment in London earlier that day which majorly over-ran, meaning she was late up to collect me too. By the time we'd packed up the car with all my stuff, it was nearly 11pm. The trip back home takes a minimum of 3 1/2 hours, so I figured I would just sleep on the journey. BUT NO. Mum was all "I'm tired too, so you have to keep me awake :3" Greeaat. So not only did I not get home til 2:30am, but I also talked pretty much non-stop for over three hours. A++. And by the time we'd unpacked everything from the car, it was gone 3am, joy!
I'd planned to get up at about 10am Friday morning so I didn't sleep the day away. 10am arrives, alarm clock goes off, Laney thinks "f*** that, I'm still tired @___@" and continues to doze. About half an hour later I was just thinking that I really ought to get up, when I happened to look across my room and see a mysterious small box on my bedside unit. Curious as to what it could be, I got up to investigate, and did the Dance of Joy when I realised it was my Gundam 00 figures that I'd ordered way back when I ordered Saiyu's birthday present back in like, April \o/ Mum had said she wouldn't post them up to me as postage would be too expensive, meaning I completely forgot about them. UNTIL FRIDAY MORNING. I then spent the next 15 minutes assembling them, which was trickier then I thought it would be, BUT SO WORTH IT. They're so cute sdfghjkl
My excitement from this discovery left me wide awake, so I finally decided it was time to get up. I then spent the day unpacking all my stuff and putting it in its correct places, and just generally making my room 'mine' again. Since going to uni it had become more of a hotel room for me so I thought moving back into it would be problematic, but thankfully I found homes for all of my stuff. I do enjoy rearranging my room ^^ I also decided to clean the house (I also enjoy cleaning, although I'm not entirely sure why) so I hoovered, cleaned the kitchen and cleaned the bathroom. Mother dearest didn't even notice >: Granted she had gone out Friday night for a leaving do with her work mates and returned a tad merry.
Saturday was a bit non-eventful, compared to its surrounding days. Me and mum got up, went to the shop to get our packed lunch items for Sunday, then went round to my aunts. I ended up playing a strange That's So Raven trivia game with my 8 year old cousin, and was most impressed when I got answers correct seeing as I've never watched that show :3 ...I forget what else we did that day, other than watch Die Hard 4.0 (love that film) and Doctor Who, much to my disgust.
Sunday was the busiest day; it was our trip to the Somme. You can read what I got up to as well as see the pictures I took here (it's too long to include in this entry). Despite an early start and busy day, I had a brilliant time. I hope the guy that arranged it all does similar trips in the future, but to some of the other battlefields.
Then on Monday I travelled back up North (sorry, back to the Midlands) by coach. As Saiyu mentioned in her latest blog entry, there was a bit of a problem with the coach in that it didn't quite make it to its destination. No, it decided to break down half an hour outside the city. When the bus driver informed us that we would have to wait half an hour for an engineer to come and fix it, I thought to myself, no worries; I can listen to my music. Two minutes later my mp3 player dies. >: N-no worries, I can text people and demand sympathy for my plight! A couple of text messages later and my phone beeps at me - the battery was also dead. AGH. Somehow I survived and eventually got to where I was meant to be, only an hour later then the original arrival time!
So yes, epic weekend was epic. So much for it only being a short explanation of what I did though...heh.
Tomorrow is my last full day in my university accomodation flat. I don't feel overly sad about that just yet seeing as I have already been home; last Thursday my mum came and picked me up, taking practically all my stuff home with me, so I could go home for the long weekend (and that's a pretty epic tale too, but more on that story later). I am currently living out of a suitcase, with just a tin of spaghetti, two slices of bread and a lone pear to tide me over during the day tomorrow. Oh and of course I made sure to keep my laptop here, else I probably would have been driven to despair by boredom.
I thought I would be fine, as long as I had internet connection, but even that is giving me beef. For some reason it keeps trying to disconnect me, and believe me it is not at all fun to have to reconnect every two seconds when all I'm trying to do is check my emails, reply to someone's comment or read manga. Oh yes, I was quite happily reading a chapter of Ouran High School Host Club when all of a sudden I was kicked offline. Even restarting my usually trusty laptop didn't help the matter, onemanga just refuse to load up. But never fear, Saiyu to the rescue! Her first plan of reading it on a different website didn't work, so onto Plan B. 50 screencaps sent over msn later and I finally got to read the chapter. Was it worth the hassle? HELLS YEAH. asdfghj there was epic lulz with the twins, Honey being ridiculously cute, Tamaki being a loveable spaz, and Mori being his usual dotty self. Er. That is, he didn't say anything, just dotted a lot, not that he went dotty randomly. :3
So yes, despite my internet playing up, I have survived my last week here. To be honest the only reason I returned after my weekend at home was on the off chance that I would receive an email informing me that my two assignments were finally ready to collect, but as no such email has been forthcoming and tomorrow is the last day of term anyway, I don't think it will be happening. Which is a bit annoying as it means I came back up here for no reason, but what can ya do. It did at least allow for another epic pizza adventure with Saiyu, although we ventured from our usual Pizza Hut route to try the wonderous and unknown Zizzi's. It was really very exciting.
And now for my epic weekend in a nutshell, because it's getting late and I want to sleep, plus this post is already pretty long so I probably shouldn't write too much more.
Like I said, mutti picked me up Thursday night. 10pm Thursday night, to be precise. Why was she so late? Because she had an appointment in London earlier that day which majorly over-ran, meaning she was late up to collect me too. By the time we'd packed up the car with all my stuff, it was nearly 11pm. The trip back home takes a minimum of 3 1/2 hours, so I figured I would just sleep on the journey. BUT NO. Mum was all "I'm tired too, so you have to keep me awake :3" Greeaat. So not only did I not get home til 2:30am, but I also talked pretty much non-stop for over three hours. A++. And by the time we'd unpacked everything from the car, it was gone 3am, joy!
I'd planned to get up at about 10am Friday morning so I didn't sleep the day away. 10am arrives, alarm clock goes off, Laney thinks "f*** that, I'm still tired @___@" and continues to doze. About half an hour later I was just thinking that I really ought to get up, when I happened to look across my room and see a mysterious small box on my bedside unit. Curious as to what it could be, I got up to investigate, and did the Dance of Joy when I realised it was my Gundam 00 figures that I'd ordered way back when I ordered Saiyu's birthday present back in like, April \o/ Mum had said she wouldn't post them up to me as postage would be too expensive, meaning I completely forgot about them. UNTIL FRIDAY MORNING. I then spent the next 15 minutes assembling them, which was trickier then I thought it would be, BUT SO WORTH IT. They're so cute sdfghjkl
My excitement from this discovery left me wide awake, so I finally decided it was time to get up. I then spent the day unpacking all my stuff and putting it in its correct places, and just generally making my room 'mine' again. Since going to uni it had become more of a hotel room for me so I thought moving back into it would be problematic, but thankfully I found homes for all of my stuff. I do enjoy rearranging my room ^^ I also decided to clean the house (I also enjoy cleaning, although I'm not entirely sure why) so I hoovered, cleaned the kitchen and cleaned the bathroom. Mother dearest didn't even notice >: Granted she had gone out Friday night for a leaving do with her work mates and returned a tad merry.
Saturday was a bit non-eventful, compared to its surrounding days. Me and mum got up, went to the shop to get our packed lunch items for Sunday, then went round to my aunts. I ended up playing a strange That's So Raven trivia game with my 8 year old cousin, and was most impressed when I got answers correct seeing as I've never watched that show :3 ...I forget what else we did that day, other than watch Die Hard 4.0 (love that film) and Doctor Who, much to my disgust.
Sunday was the busiest day; it was our trip to the Somme. You can read what I got up to as well as see the pictures I took here (it's too long to include in this entry). Despite an early start and busy day, I had a brilliant time. I hope the guy that arranged it all does similar trips in the future, but to some of the other battlefields.
Then on Monday I travelled back up North (sorry, back to the Midlands) by coach. As Saiyu mentioned in her latest blog entry, there was a bit of a problem with the coach in that it didn't quite make it to its destination. No, it decided to break down half an hour outside the city. When the bus driver informed us that we would have to wait half an hour for an engineer to come and fix it, I thought to myself, no worries; I can listen to my music. Two minutes later my mp3 player dies. >: N-no worries, I can text people and demand sympathy for my plight! A couple of text messages later and my phone beeps at me - the battery was also dead. AGH. Somehow I survived and eventually got to where I was meant to be, only an hour later then the original arrival time!
So yes, epic weekend was epic. So much for it only being a short explanation of what I did though...heh.
Monday 2 June 2008
A reversed case of dude looks like a lady?
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Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com | ||||||||||||||||
| You scored as Either You brain is neither specifically male, nor female in the way you perceive your surroundings. As bad as this may sound to some, it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, but it might.
|
I am currently a walking perfume advert. Why, you might ask? Well. I convinced Saiyu to coming shopping with me today (I don't like going into town on my own as it gets so busy and it makes me uncomfortable). I only needed to get a couple of bits ready for a party tomorrow night, but we added going to good ol' Maccy D's for lunch to our plans, just because we both decided we fancied burgers (on a side note, she found it amusing that my burger was a 'special request', ie had no mayo on it. I can't imagine why~). Little did I know that this seemingly simple shopping trip would turn into an attempt to make me more feminine.
Upon seeing a perfume shop on our journey, Saiyu got quite excited and requested that we check it out. Not really caring either way, I agreed, and we proceeded to look at bottles of perfume for several minutes. Or rather, Saiyu inspected them to see what she might like and I looked at and was amused by the funny shaped bottles. A conversation following this resulted in me revealing that I rarely wear perfume, a fact which Saiyu found shocking.
So once we'd finished my shopping we browsed the perfume section of Debenhams, spraying the test perfumes to try and find one I liked. Hands, wrists, all up both our arms, jackets and small pieces of paper were sprayed (we found a lot of perfumes...) When my opinion on the majority was "*shrug* eh, it's alright..." however, Saiyu started to question my gender. Of course, physically I am female, but apparently mentally I am male? I hate clothes shopping as it bores me so much, I got bored looking at make up, and the only opinion people get out of me regarding clothes they want to buy is "it's alright".
Saiyu even went so far as to comment that I was like her dad in that respect (to which I was somewhat miffed, seeing as we have previously had a conversation about her being like my mum. Messed up family is messed up?)
Reminds me of Tamaki and Kyouya, of Ouran fame...although I'm sure even Tamaki has more opinions on what's a good perfume/what clothes look nice etc.
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