Heh.

[chess]

Anyway, it was all fun and games (I was one of only three out of over a dozen people on the tours of city and campus to actually speak; the rooms were the same cupboard-size that Kent had (Surrey's rooms were bigger, all the rooms I've been in at Cambridge have been bigger) and most of them had no network connections) until we all met back up at the end (they split off parents and students for the tour). Not only was the room (miniscule lecture theatre, seating about two dozen) we met back up in excessively tiny, it was also nowhere near where we'd started. And it was pelting it down with rain.

We set off in entirely the wrong direction, mostly under the cover of overhangs, and subsequently realised it was the wrong direction when we hit a dead end. Then we headed out in a slightly different direction, following some other people with a yellow bag (we'd been handed a yellow carrier-bag of stuff just before we left). They led us out into a car-park, by a route I definately didn't remember. We searched around the car park for quite a while to no avail; we knew that our car was parked by a pay machine, and that there had been some cones next to it when we'd parked, but the pay machines all seemed to be the wrong way around in relation to the parking spaces, and it was generally all wrong. Abour this point was when the hailstones started falling. Need I mention that we didn't have umbrellas?

Having decided that this was most definately not the car park that we'd left the car in, we headed off back to the main campus, at which point we realised that we'd come out of entirely the wrong end of the complex. So we trudged back through the campus, thankfully mostly undercover, although we were so soaked by this stage that it barely made any difference, except for the hail which was most unfriendly when we had no cover. Indeed, we were at the wrong end of campus (it was confusing, because there were practically identical roads coming out of the ground-floor level - which was all deliveries and odd scary things, the main campus was one level above ground - on either side). The other side was much more familiar, and indeed there was the car, next to a pile of cones and opposite a pay machine. (They had been moved away from the spaces they were blocking, but not removed entirely.)

It was about this point that I discovered that my trousers were about the inverse of waterproof. Instead of keeping the water on their surface, they had actually brought the rain through them and applied it directly to my legs. The end result was that the outer surface was almost completely dry - a minute or so out of the rain and it was completely dry - but inside they were still soaking wet, and remained that way for several hours.

The journey to Bath, and also from it, was 4 hours (each). On the way home we stopped to eat at about 6, just before we got onto the M25 (it was meant to be about 5, but we foolishly decided to press on to the next M4 services and discovered that they were actually past the junction we wanted. just as we missed our turning, the traffic all slowed down dramatically). I had 'Smothered Chicken' from Little Chef (my dad said 'We want to know what it is, not how it died!'), which was actually suprisingly nice - mushrooms, bacon and chicken with melted cheese, fake vegetables that tasted mostly of water, and very nice chips (fat ones, which I don't usually like, but nice crispy ones rather than nasty soggy ones like the fat ones normally are). Then we had this odd dessert that couldn't decide whether to be a chocolate fudge cake or a cheesecake (biscuit base, diagonally split cheesecake (the stuff that's obviously made of powder, which I actually like a lot) and bad-chocolate-fudge-cake sponge (more like a chocolate brownie than sponge cake - again, I actually like it, but it's only generally made like that in fast-food-ish places), and chocolate fudge cake icing (i.e. very rich chocolate fudge sauce). And nice vanilla ice cream, because they'd run out of the nasty cheap vanilla ice cream they normally have with it. And we also had 7 warm mini donuts with hot chocolate sauce; typically, I managed to make a horrendous mess with the chocolate sauce, which was both very runny and very sticky. The meal was actually rather nice, because it was all the kind of bad food I like.


Having recently finished NaNoWriMo (yes, I finished! hehehe!) I keep obsessively word-counting everything... like this post (which I typed on my Psion). Every time I save it. It's kind of irritating. (Currently 4915 words in the whole file, although now it's a few more, and there are quite a few other things beside this post in this file.)

My train is the wrong way round. (First Class should be at the other end. But it's at the end I normally sit instead. It's only about a dozen seats, though, not even the whole carriage, so I can still sit pretty close to the front and avoid it.)

Maybe I'll start doing some more Haylar now I've finished NaNo. (Yay! Over 5000 words in this file now!)

I have a bunch of really old stuff in here (like, from September-October time - and some more recent stuff that fits the below description too). I'd kind of like people to read it, but I don't want to LJ it as-is because it doesn't reflect my current state of mind.

[Poll #79201]

Comments

[chess]

Bah, what I did was a compromise solution between LJ'ing it straight and linking to it somewhere else.

[passage.livejournal.com]

And precisely what I suggested to you on snowplains ;-).

Neil, ultimate ruler of polls created by Michelle (okay, so I have no power over the polls themselves ...).