the accidental girl

What is the cost of a masters' thesis done in 6 months...?

a) 1 stone gain in weight
b) inexplicable bad skin when it's generally clear
c) headaches
d) a newly developed aversion to marmite
e) all of the above

For those of you who answered e) well done, give yourselves a pat on the back! So yeah, here I am, a shadow of my former self, well, a rather solid shadow but one nonetheless.. thankfully I'm 118 pages of bound nonsense on engineering applications in conservation lighter, and after a month of strict 6.5 day working weeks and 6 hour limited sleeps, I'm finally free!!
So I tried to celebrate this by going out drinking and hopefulyl lose a bit of the knowledge I'd acquired but the demons of alcohol weren't having any of it. 6 pints down, 2 double vodka diet cokes and some bizarre cointreau concoction and I still wasn't even hazy. I certainly become more vocal- deciding to pick a fight on a coursemate about feminism and then conspiracy theorists being the voice of reason and also a brief round on a federation of Europe, but not drunk.

Very disappointing.

But, as I say, I've handed in. Now all I have left are two exams- one on 20th century engineers and architecture and one on fire methods. Exciting! Then!! I'm a GRADUATE.
Only the hallowed may utter this word and live to take on a job though. Maybe I'll fail just so that I can graduate next year and be employable.

65 Questions You've Maybe Never Been Asked

1. What is the first thing you wash in the shower?
with the advent of shower shine, I no longer have to worry about washing it much

2. What color is your favorite hoodie?
turquoise

3. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
evidently

4. Do you plan outfits?
not enough is probably the best answer

5. How are you feeling RIGHT now?
very sleepy and slightly headachey.

6. Whats the closest thing to you that's red?
my lamp, innit.

7. Tell me about the last dream you remember having?
someone stealing the salad I'd just bought thus putting paid to my plans to diet

8. Did you meet anybody new today?
er, not really. Although I'm meeting a nigerian couch surfer this evening. He's staying for 2 weeks.

9. What are you craving right now?
hmm..mostly garlic chicken (lebanese style) but it's negotiable

10. Do you floss?
usualyl daily

11. What comes to mind when I say cabbage?
bacon and mustard

12. Are you emotional?
not enough

13. Have you ever counted to 1,000?
no, I prefer to spend my time differently

14. Bite into your ice cream or just lick it?
lick

15. Do you like your hair?
yeah s'alright

16. Do you like yourself?
yeah m'alright

17. Would you go out to eat with George W. Bush?
to feed on the cadavers of the anti-democwacies..

18. What are you listening to right now?
Air- all I need. Old skool!

19. Are/were your parents strict?
Yeah, I guess they're stricter than the majority of parents

20. Would you go sky diving?
I would LOVE to go

21. Do you like cottage cheese?
it doesn't like me

22. Have you ever met a celebrity?
Goldie (LOLz) and Alexander mcCall Smith of course! and a few people but I'm not really interested in them

23. Do you rent movies often?
i used to now I have no time to breathe let alone watch movies

24. Is there anything sparkly in the room you're in?
not really, do CDs count?

25. How many countries have you visited?
17: UK, Ireland, France, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Croatia, Bosnia, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Ghana erm.. that's it.

26. Have you made a prank phone call?
Yes.

27. Ever been on a train?
i fucking love trains

28. Brown or white eggs?
both

29. Do you have a cell-phone?
..or a mobile, yes

30. Do you use chapstick?
yup

31. Do you own a gun?
no

32. Can you use chopsticks?
yes, am an expert

33. Who are you going to be with tonight?
myself

34. Are you too forgiving?
it depends

35. Ever been in love?
Yes

36. What is your best friend(s) doing tomorrow?
Two of them are probably working, and the rest are revising if they're being good.

37. Ever have cream puffs?
never

38. Last time you cried?
ah, months ago.. unless you count moistness from films.

39. What was the last question you asked?
Is he staying long?

40. Favorite time of the year?
autumn

41. Do you have any tattoos?
No

42. Are you sarcastic?
Yes

43. Have you ever seen The Butterfly Effect?
Yes

44. Ever walked into a wall?
Probably

45. Favorite color?
dark red, cobalt, certain yellows and greens

46. Have you ever slapped someone?
not in seriousness

47. Is your hair curly?
when its humid

48. What was the last CD you bought?
YEARS ago.

49. Do looks matter?
to a certain degree. As long as they're not repulsive. Although for sexual attraction, yeah, the visual is a must.

50. Could you ever forgive a cheater?
It really depends.

51. Is your phone bill sky high?
yeah, am cancelling my contract. Vodafone are thieving poobrains.

52. Do you like your life right now?
Well, end of uni, just handed in my thesis (YAY) so yeah, pretty damn good.

53. Do you sleep with the TV on?
No

54. Can you handle the truth?
Yes, exclusively

55. Do you have good vision?
ha, no

56. Do you hate or dislike more than 3 people?
probably

57. How often do you talk on the phone?
every other day?

58. The last person you held hands with?
Raaarrr! The Lion.

59. What are you wearing?
Um jeans and a jumper..

60.What is your favorite animal?
I like: Tigers, giraffes, sausage dogs, turtles, cats and I think chinchillas are cute

61. Where was your profile picture taken?
in berlin

62. Can you hula hoop?
nah

63. Do you have a job?
Full time loafer. No no, I'm a student still but hoping to get a job, please?

64. What was the most recent thing you bought?
a loaf of bread and some cashews

65. Have you ever crawled through a window?
yeah, it's a frequent pasttime.

Monkey took a personality test for a PhD student at uni here who wanted to see what sort of students make up engineering. I am an "Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Judge" apparently this makes up for 4% of the engineering students and 5 % of the english students (the researcher's previous model).

"I don't care to sit by the window on an airplane. If I can't control it, why look?"
ENTJs have a natural tendency to marshal and direct. This may be expressed with the charm and finesse of a world leader or with the insensitivity of a cult leader. The ENTJ requires little encouragement to make a plan. One ENTJ put it this way... "I make these little plans that really don't have any importance to anyone else, and then feel compelled to carry them out." While "compelled" may not describe ENTJs as a group, nevertheless the bent to plan creatively and to make those plans reality is a common theme for NJ types.

ENTJs are often "larger than life" in describing their projects or proposals. This ability may be expressed as salesmanship, story-telling facility or stand-up comedy. In combination with the natural propensity for filibuster, our hero can make it very difficult for the customer to decline. ENTJs are decisive. They see what needs to be done, and frequently assign roles to their fellows. Few other types can equal their ability to remain resolute in conflict, sending the valiant (and often leading the charge) into the mouth of hell. When challenged, the ENTJ may by reflex become argumentative. Alternatively (s)he may unleash an icy gaze that serves notice: the ENTJ is not one to be trifled with.

No no, I've not died. I've locked myself in the bowels of the university computer labs until my thesis is finished. I've limited my internet time to 2 checks of facebook a day (a pathetically huge reduction from my usual constant attachment) and emails 3 times so no time for blogging.

Just thought I'd share this with you! Monkey love!!

Thesis progress: my supervisor loves me. Now I know why, my partner, unbeknown to me, has done nearly nothing- nothing actually valid for an engineering thesis- and in contrast, monkeypie has done a tonne!! Her requests to "just pass along this and that to me" this and that being calculations I'd spent a morning doing, structural research I'd spent a week preparing, that sketchup drawing I spent some of my christmas holiday evenings doing and all the other little extras I've been careful to catalogue from my own good preparation and compiling over the last 6 months. I don't want it to be an issue as we're friends but I've put in more hours and thought than she evidently has and I'd hate to resent her for feeling like I'm buoying her through what should be her proof that she's a master's level student.

This is why you don't work on things like this with friends. Two of my friends who worked together on a water treatment thesis last year fell out because of it. It rips you apart kids!!
Anyway, I'll check back in in a week, once I'm a 50% closer to being a graduan!! WAYHEY!

Oh, in other news: i'm going to turkey with Lion, things are going very well!! A lot of the preliminary behaviour has been checked and he's exceeding expectations in many many ways.
That's a story for next time... back to work.

Tuesday.. the day I'll be going to one of my closest friend's mum's funeral. She passed away last Monday and it still hasn't really sunk in. She took me in for christmas when my parents went to australia and made me feel like part of the family, gave me gifts so that I'd feel included and hugs so that I felt loved.

A lovely, kind and generous woman who is already sorely missed. Her daughter is only 22, too young to lose one's mother..

Then, in contrast to this wonderful woman's life, cut short by cancer is the grotesquely over publicised downfall of a racist reality tv star. However much my friend tried to get away from the reminder that her mum was seriously ill, clues were emblazoned across all newspapers, tv channels and magazines. The impersonality of vicarious grief..

I want to tell her I know how destabilising it is to your very core to lose your mother. How I imagine she must feel like she's lost her anchor but I don't know how to reach out and I'm scared I'll make my usual verbal faux pas and use comfort like a blunt weapon.

I want her to know that I imagined it was my mother and how the imagined pain almost crushed my heart..
I know that however accurately imagined, it'll never rival what she feels but I just want her to know I'm willing to take some of the pain for her.

Queue the first rejection letter.. and from the people I really wanted to work for too:
AKT
The perfect synthesis between art and engineering. *sigh*
They did say they'd keep me on file as they liked my CV and cover letter. And I did say I'd be prepared to start in 2010..

I'm expecting a similar reply from the other specialist engineering firms such as Buro Happold.. looks like I'll have to settle for plain old engineering or even unemployment! Joy!

Oh my God.. I'm totally trapped in the wrong body..

Is it wrong that I'm now addicted to Extreme Fishing III on channel 5? I watched it over the weekend (a repeat, I gather) where the lucky viewer witnessed Robson Greene fish for Sable fish and nearly get swept out to sea and compete against a Canadian in some sort of line fishing thing.. Anyway, I take it that the footage has been heavily edited to fit into a nice 30 minute viewing time, but it's so exciting!! And I enjoyed seeing what all the fish actually look like.
Monday saw King Salmon fishing- they're beautiful fish!! I was a bit concerned when the head fisherman chap bonked the fish over the head with a metal pole (to kill it? or stun it?) but the fish carried on gulping...
THEN! Our intrepid Geordie went to Alaska to catch Pike (apparently delicious) by ice-fishing.. I never knew fishing was so exciting, I'm totally glued to this infernal programme now..

Instructions:
Look at the list and put those you have read in bold and italicise the ones you own but haven't read yet (note, not just own and will never read ).

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
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare read a lot of Shakespeare but not all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
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’s 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 Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
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

56/100 got some catching up to do!!

Rrrrrright!!

It's that time of year! Rather, it's over that time of year but I'm finally getting around to applying for paltry graduate jobs. All my friends who graduated from engineering last year tell me they work only 9-3 and for that, they're mostly sitting around drinking tea and reading bbc news/professional publications because there's simply no work.

Nevermind, I shall break through this barrier with me AMAZING NEW CV! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I will take over the world of engineering one company at a time...

*hopes positive thinking works*

On a serious note, the lady at the careers centre assured me I have a great cv, full of experience, skills etc.. I just wasn't presenting it in its best way. So I re-did it under her guidance and it looks all flash and neat now. I'm to go back next week with cover letters for the companies I want to work for and we'll go through them too.

The only problem being that in order to ride out the recession, I thought I'd go to Cyprus for 6 months to work over there. Is it cheeky to ask to start a graduate job in January 2010?

Six names you go by
MonkeyPie
Panda
Spazzaway
Cap'n Malco
MissChief
Erm..

Three things you are wearing right now
Sweaty t-shirt
Sweaty tracksuit bottoms
Sweaty Socks

Two things you want very badly at the moment
To be a graduate
To remember how great it feels to be healthy

Two things you did last night
Went to bed early
Made brownies

Three favorite beverages
Tea- any
Diet Coke
A really good red wine

Two things you ate today
Brownies
Museli

Two people you last talked to on the phone
Wrong number
My thesis partner

Two things you are going to do tomorrow
Play in the workshop
Beat Lion at chess

Two things you are not good at
Getting jobs
Singing