Saturday, April 22, 2006

Changing names and things

When were "they" going to tell us folks on our year abroad that the name of our university has been changed from the University of Durham to Durham University? And that they've changed the crest from to make it look like clipart? I'm angry about this. Here's the old and here's the new (top left), and if the old name and crest aren't on my graduation papers I'm not going to be happy, because I applied to the University of Durham and that's where I'm studying. So there.

Apart from that, I'm off to Toronto on Wednesday. That should be fun, since last time I was there it was only for a few hours before I got on a plane to come back home. This time it's for a wedding. No, not mine (at least not that I know of), a friend of Rob's. So exploring Toronto will be fun, and since the weather's being well behaved at the moment it should be a nice trip.

I can't think of the name Toronto without thinking of a song by the Arrogant Worms which starts off by trashing Toronto (or T-dot if you're cool), and then goes on to insult every town in Ontario, and then every province in Canada except Alberta, because "Albertaaaaa... doesn't suck. But Calgary doessss." It's a great song.

In other news, why won't Gmail Chat work in FireFox? It's there, I can see it, but it won't connect... I don't want to use IE, it sucks!
 
And that's quite enough of that for now. Wow everything I find today makes me angry apparently!
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Coffee is thicker than water...

http://avatarofcunning.blogspot.com
 

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Another try... if it works there should be a pic of me snowboarding...

bah

So I can't send photos to my blog through email... and when I upload them properly I get two little squares. Hmm. If you click on the squares you do get the photos, but that's not how it was supposed to work!

--
Coffee is thicker than water...

http://avatarofcunning.blogspot.com
Just a couple of photos, because it's been a while :)

Another week!

Wow time is fast.

Anyways, happy easter to everybody (and happy patriot's day to those in the US, although it does strike me as very strange that the Americans don't celebrate Easter Monday - the day when Jesus rose from the dead, the third day after Good Friday - but instead try to make people patriotic).

And also happy birthday to my Mum!

So let's see... Rob was here this weekend again, from Wednesday night. Technically he was working on Thursday, so I went to class and he met up with his freelancer and talked about stuff and ended up with a lot of trade magazines. In the afternoon we made shortbread and watched a film called Mirrormask, which is by Neil Gaiman and is very trippy. It's like a dream but you're awake...

Friday was Good Friday, so a day off from college. It was also a nice day, so we walked downtown in the sun and did some shopping. You'd think I'd know not to go shopping with Rob by now. We ended up with a lot of blooming tea, which becomes flowers when you put hot water on it and looks very pretty (and actually tastes good too), and a fantastic pair of hand-painted jeans which have a Japanese-style lady and butterflies on them. They're awesome and I'll post a pic when I have one.

I've discovered the library. Not that it was lost, but it has free wireless internet so I can do things like post photos cos I'm not on dialup!

Can you tell I've not had coffee yet, even though it's 6pm?

Anyway, back to the weekend. I don't remember much else of what we did, it was mostly just enjoying each other's company (aww) and lots of cooking. Sunday was good though, we were invited to Fraser's place for an Easter dinner which was awesome! Raff brought ham, Niki and Fraser provided yams, pasta salad and green beans and me and Rob made pie and brought ice cream. And Easter nests, the chocolate/cornflake creations that you make in primary school and think you've done some baking :) . I'd mentioned them to Fraser and he thought I was crazy, but they went down really well. Anything with chocolate is good.

After that meal (which left everyone stuffed and ready to sleep) we went down to the Cock and Bull to watch my roommates play in their band. Rob and I didn't stay very long - we'd been drinking since two in the afternoon so by midnight it was time to leave! We went home and redyed the blue on my hair instead. Yay.

--
Coffee is thicker than water...

http://avatarofcunning.blogspot.com

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Ooops

It's been a while again. Sorry.
 
Let's see... the weekend before last Rob was here (yay) which was fun! We went to see butterflies at the Jardin Botanique, which was awesome even if it did involve lots of kids wandering around asking their parents "Ou sont les papillons?" in the greenhouse that was showing desert plants. Erm, not here. But it was a good display, and there was a very very cool caterpillar which was blue with orange spikes and was rapidly demolishing a rather large leaf. It was fascinating, at least for me as I had visions of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (best kids book ever) in my head... Rob wasn't quite as impressed after we'd stood and watched it for about twenty minutes. Silly ADD.
 
Today is my friend Danielle's birthday, so it's going to be another late one :) and this after I've promised to miss no more classes after a disastrous week last week where I simply couldn't motivate myself... so my plan is to celebrate in moderation. We all know how well that will go, especially since I always plan to be moderate on a Sunday night at the pub where my housemates play in a band... getting home at 3.30 very drunk and having to be in class five hours later is apparently my new definition of moderation. Hmm.
 
Anyways, it's time for me to go and "present" something that will lead to a conversation... my feeling is that anything has to be better than the conversation about anorexia and extreme dieting we just had.
 
More tomorrow (when Rob will arrive again too! Woot!)

--
Coffee is thicker than water...

http://avatarofcunning.blogspot.com

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Ah the joys of bureaucracy

Which may or may not be spelt correctly. It's one of those words.
 
So it appears that my plans to study in the states are scuppered (good word that). Basically, after calling a big long list of colleges in Chicago yesterday (that was a fun way to spend my morning) I found out that the immigration people have a great system, whereby if I want a student visa I need to take a full degree-type course for three years or whatever. I can't study on a tourist visa except for "incidental study" whatever that might be (the lady I was talking to didn't know either, she'd had different answers from different immigration officials), and that only gives me three months anyway. What annoys me is that if I wasn't British and didn't have a visa waiver agreement with the US then I'd have to get a visa, which could be anything up to two years. But because Britain is a friendly country, I can't stay in the States for an extra 30 days. Make sense to you? Certainly doesn't to me.
 
Anyway, enough of that. I passed my exam with 94% and my course with 93%, so now I'm in level 8... wooo... and should really get back to my lesson. Just felt like ranting (again) about the crazy US immigration system.

--
Coffee is thicker than water...

http://avatarofcunning.blogspot.com