the accidental girl

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?