(no subject)

In the evening of the 18th I failed to go to Ark on the grounds of being asleep at 7:30pm. So when I woke up at 8:30am, I had managed to have 13 hours' sleep. Then I spodded for an hour, making me late for my lecture, in the traditional manner.

The Data Connection event was in the evening, so I had to have a shower beforehand; I just about managed this at 5:40pm, having spodded mightily. Then I ate food in Hall (nice food; mushrooms in creamy sauce and rice and leeks in cheese sauce) and it was suddenly 6:30pm, and I had wet hair and needed to be in town in half an hour.

I went and dried my hair and was out in plenty of time to catch the 6:45pm bus. There were some Chinese girls waiting at the stop also. They were discussing whether 'surgery' meant 'hospital' or something else, so I told them it didn't, it was smaller - 'clinic' was a word they knew, so I said it was like that. Apparently the 6pm and the 6:30pm busses had also not arrived. One of them asked me to listen to her answerphone message and tell her what surgery they were going to. 'Ashcroft' was directly before 'surgery', although there were a couple of babbled words before that, so that's what I told her. Four Citi 4 busses passed us in the other direction; four Park & Ride busses passed us into town. At about 7:05pm there was finally a bus.

I wasn't the only one who was quite so late, and the receptionist happily directed us all down to where the presentation was in progress. It was dull and told me nothing I didn't know. Donny was there, and I chatted to him for a while afterwards. And I ate too much nice hospitality food; even the Indian-looking thing was very nice if slightly spicy. Eventually I spoke to the guy who'd done work experience stuff last summer, and got the impression (he was quite drunk) that the company was very well-structured but somewhat full of boatie / frat boy types. He said he knew it was the job for him when a bunch of people came in from their lunch break having been playing rugby. The only female was the recruitment specialist, done up in nice makeup and generally not a techie; from her I learnt the company is 75% male and most of the girls are support staff, which didn't surprise me.

Somewhat before the end I made my excuses and ran off, because I was bored. Outside there were lots of marauding drunk people. I called Nicholas because I'd said I would; he was going to CTS but said he was currently outside Newnham and would meet me there, as it was almost on my way.

I think I managed to straggle into lectures on the 20th, although possibly not all of the first. I don't remember much about the day, for I had The Mother Of All Sinus Headaches. I did make it to some lectures because I remember deducing that I was way low on sodium (kept producing vast quantities of saliva) and eating my lunch at about 10am; I did do all my L&P supervision work and 'hand it in' by email; Radek volunteered to courier it over but I hadn't finished when he did offer, in fact I finished right on 5pm. I was so dead that I even left a weepy message on Nicholas' answerphone because I was desperate for some advice as to whether I should take painkillers and not be able to get to sleep early or not, and didn't trust anyone else to give me the advice. Eventually I took painkillers anyway because I could barely think, and took the wrong ones (should have taken the ones with anti-nausea in too), and they didn't really work much anyway.

Nicholas eventually showed up, and I was weepy at him (crying actually seemed to make the headache go away a bit so I did it quite a lot). He had to go off to New Graduates' Formal before Enemy, so left me his character sheet to take with me as I'd get there first (and he was dumping his stuff in my room so that it was not stolen from outside Hall). He also suggested I should play computer games if I was quite so dead, so I installed Zangband and was slightly late to Enemy.

My headache did eventually get lost, after I ate lots of jaffa cakes and chocolate and Monster Munch. I wasn't really concentrating much (causing me to mistake OOC prompting from the party for IC prodding at one point). Enemy, predictably, went on until 2am.

I thought about going to my lecture on the 21st, because I like Unix Tools for the anecdotes, but I almost fell over whilst heading for the loo at 9am and so decided it was a good idea to stay asleep. Eventually managed to crawl out of bed at about noon and spod merrily until my 3pm supervision, which went fine because although I'd made some daft mistakes due to being Dead, the subject's trivial. Also was helpful by remembering the method of removing permanent marker from drywipe boards by writing over in drywipe marker...

Then proceded to continue to be dead and spod for the rest of the day, until Cell, where we split into smaller groups and I had stuff to contribute and ate far too much pizza.

(no subject)

Friday I stayed in bed from 8am to 9am, and hence was much more alive for my lecturers; I even went to DS&A, although I kept zoning out and didn't understand much, so I'm not sure if it ws actually any use to me. I'm certainly not going to be able to answer the exam questions, but I might get the book to read in my Copious Free Time anyhow, because it's *interesting*, it's just being presented in the most incomprehensible way possible, and unfortunately in a somewhat unclear and 'uninteresting' tone.

During lectures on Friday, I was reminded that I had ECAD labs, which I'd forgotten entirely. This was rather less than ideal as I'd left some supervision work to do, and needed to clean and tidy; I did some of it in the relevant lectures, but I needed online java docs for the last question.

ECAD labs would have gone fine if I had only been able to correctly wire a breadboard. Also, firstly I didn't read the 'ticking critera' section to work out what I needed to do (which was different from the exercise text!) and then I interpreted it differently to the ticker (entirely validly, he admitted, but I still had to change my design) which meant I was very late leaving. I needed to talk to someone so went online and whined at my poor mother, and then on the way back to my poor boyfriend over the phone.

Decided to stay in and wash and tidy, then sat and spodded until tea instead (only about half an hour) due to being miserable. Sent an email to my parents telling them not to come, I was too grumpy. Got food and talked to people, which cheered me up, and informed Jack that there was an Edith in town. He wanted to go along so I decided that I'd go too. We got to the Castle just in time; the party was leaving because the place was too full. We wandered down to a restaurant but Ewan declared he didn't want to sit around watching people eat and Jack and I decided we didn't either as we'd also already eaten. So we trailed off back to Ewan's house.

Outside the house, Ewan hissed at a cat, which leapt out of the way onto a wall. It was a very pretty cat so I stayed around to pet it; it was also very docile and gave every impression of not being quite sure how it had came to be on this wall and how it could possibly get down. After a while Ewan wandered back out and said he was going to close the door, so I wandered in; unfortunately he wouldn't let me kidnap the cat, which had also happily let me pick it up, so I let it go.

There was lots of narging about RPGs, and some nice dried sausages, and eventually there was a Katy who needed to be fed pizza. The rest of the party showed back up, just about fitting in the room, and the fangirls insisted that we watched 'But I'm A Cheerleader', which is fluff about lesbians, or rather about (characatures?). And there were muffins and Turkish Delight.

Then it was about midnight and Requiem, Jack and I trailed back to Churchill. We stood around outside the corridor for a while chatting and occasionally humiliating drunk people, and eventually disbanded sleep-wards.

When I got back to my room I found all kinds of frantic messages trying to get in touch with me, so despite it being 1am I called my mother and reassured her that I was feeling a lot better now.

I'm sure I did *something* on Saturday. Um. Oh, yes, my parents showed up. I woke up actually quite early, eventually managed to drag myself into a shower, and was all clean and fresh for meeting my parents in the plodge (we'd decided just to leave my room well alone). I'd forgotten to have breakfast so we went off in search of lunch rather quickly; walked down Castle Hill / Bridge Street from the Shire Hall carpark, considered Prezzo, Cafe Uno (which had no tables) and Cafe Rouge, and finally ended up at the Galleria, which was expensive but also actually really good (once I found something which wouldn't kill me, which was quite difficult).

After that, it was raining; we walked up as far as Kettles Yard, but then me and Julia sheltered while Paul went and got the car. Back at Churchill, we went down to the art exhibition in Wolfson which had been the original reason for inviting them over (it also turned to have been my mother's birthday, which I only knew when she told me when I first suggested it). The lady who'd done the paintings (there were paintings and sculptures) was actually milling around there, and so my parents chatted to her for a bit. The sculptures were satisfyingly weird.

Eventually we finished and said our goodbyes, and I went off back to my room to spod a bit before Poohsoc. I made myself slightly late spodding, and there was no really good place to sit (perched on end of bed which was a bit out of the main circle). Stole Jack's chair eventually, but wasn't really very awake. Trailed back to Chu and attempted to Hall but had forgotten my card so ran off and failed to eat in my room (I'd had biscuits and cake so wasn't really hungry).

Meant to go to church, to the extent that I put my coat on and got out of the door, but decided I was too tired to live and should just go to sleep. Read some of my Bible notes instead; they were all about being honest and not worrying what other people thought of you, hence the last LJ-post. Then I sat and put down some of the stuff I'd been thinking of on the way back from Poohsoc re a coherant mythology for my NaNoNovel (which I so shall have no time to write, but never mind). Then I failed to go to sleep because I needed to fix the mess that the last update had caused with my fonts, and get a better version of FireFox which didn't have fun crash bugs.

Finally went to sleep about 1:30am, after reading the catalogue from the Good Book Company who my Bible notes come from.

Sunday, I actually woke up at about 9am, and irritatingly failed to get back to sleep, so I tried to spod, but the CUDN was down. So I played computer games instead until about 1pm, at which point I went 'eek, should tidy my room' and spent an hour tidying about half of my room, before having to do damage-limitation just before 2 to make it habitable for roleplayers. Phoned a couple of people (including the wrong Alison) to see if they were actually showing up despite my inability to email people, and was assured they were, so sat around until they arrived.

D&D didn't go too badly considering we were missing Douglas and Matthew, although we did somewhat run out of steam before the end (and I made one wrong decision because I thought Tony was getting too much airtime which made things die off a bit towards the end). Alison is apparently writing it up for the wiki, so there should be a report there soon; suffice to say there were exploding dragons and drow plots and pixies. Lots of pixies.

After I managed to shoo the D&Ders out, there was a massive Hall queue, and I suddenly realised I hadn't handed in my supervision work, or indeed finished the last question. So I went back to my room and finished that first, which unfortunately meant that by the time I got back to Hall there was no actual food left, nor any friendly people. I had the misfortune of discovering Hall's interesting definition of Spring Rolls; instead of nice carrots, beansprouts, mushrooms and a Chinese-ish sauce, they fill them mostly with sweetcorn, red pepper and peas, and some kind of ugly green goop which had definite similarity to both mushy peas and vomit. Even the mushroom soup had gone a bit flavourless, helped by some idiot leaving the lid off the tureen. However, as I'd eaten one nutrigrain bar and a banana all day, I was starving, and ate everything except as much goop as I could scrape off. (There were some poor excuses for beansprouts embedded in the goop, to attempt to justify the name, but they were rather limp and pathetic examples.)

Managed to get to sleep about 11, which didn't make me any more awake at 8am this morning; was about ten minutes late for L&P. Lectures were generally comprehensible but unfortunately exciting-looking ECAD latest-research lecture was dull enough to write all this in.