ktroo85's Journal

Quizzing and girl power
The oxford university quiz society has just elected its first ever female president, me. We had around 25 people turn up for squad practice and the egm and there we were worrying that we wouldn't make quorum of 14. Didn't get asked any nasty questions in hustings apart from what is the safest way to cross magdalen bridge - to which i replied on a bike or in the company of a nice young man! The committee also now conatains an equal number of male and female members which is a first, the next step is to get them to all set up ljs. Today has been a good day as i also bought the most amazing ballgown at a bargain price so am very happy, well apart from having to walk back from St John's in the pouring rain without an umbrella carrying buzzers, oh well can't win them all.

Wasps
So somehow my room seems to be spawning wasps. And yes i mean spawning, i have looked everywhere but can not see a nest. I purposely have kept the window shut so that they can't come in that way and still they appear, i'm beginning to get a bit freaked out. The other night i was in bed and felt something itching my toe only to discover half a dead wasp on the underside of my duvet and the sting sticking in my big toe. Managed to remove the sting, and the only acid thing that i had nearby was some orange squash so rubbed that on (goodness whether it actually helped but i was in pain and was only thing i could think to do). Now my toe has swollen up, so it looks like i may be mildly allergic to wasp stings which is wonderful. The story does not end there as then yesterday when i woke up in the morning and got up to make my bed i found i had been sleeping on a dead wasp all night which had not been there when i had gone to sleep. Where are these evil things spawning from? I'm now beginning to get slightly paranoid every time i hear a buzzing sound.

Apparently bar quizes make good audition pieces
Whooo! Have just been offered a part in "Look in Thy Heart and Write" at the Moser in 4th week. Sam and I had been joking about having to demonstrate our ability to project in order to read he questions since Merton bar become very noisy at our bar quiz last night. This morning I find a message from one of the people at the bar quiz offering me a part in his play.

Okay so maybe it is not completely as random as that as I kind of vaguely know him due to having done play readings with him and other people during the summer, so he has heard me read Juliet, Portia and Lady Macbeth as well as general knowledge questions. But still tis rather exciting though it does mean i shall be positively living in the Moser this term what with chorus parts in Ruddygore and Cinderella in 7th/8th weeks as well.

Housekeeping
Well I have been given my task for the rest of the vac. my mother has managed to re break her elbow five weeks after breaking it for the first time. This means that no housework has been done in this time and the house is filled with all the stuff from the three separate lives my sister and i have each been leading. Therefore my task is to clean the house and garden (which hasn't been touched in 6 months) as at some point my mother's cousins along with three young children will be coming to stay. This will be fun as it will mean 4 adults and three young children in a three bedroom house that feels big when there is just mum, mandy and me here but cramped otherwise. I have also been informed that i need to some eco and maths revision before the start of term, so any chance of earning some money has gone out the window, although to make up for this mum is sending me personal shopping for a new autumn wardrobe. Which is good as all my old clothes are falling off me. I started the housework today by removing five weeks worth of cat hair from the lounge carpet mum also left instructions to vacuum the cat as apparently she doesn't mind and it is easier than washing her which is what i shall have to do with the other one before grooming him. I'm sure dad doesn't get this much cat hair from 7 cats so why two short hairs should produce so much fluff is beyond me. Oh well on with the cleaning.

Switzerland
Right, tomorrow I depart for switzerland. I have mixed feelings about this, I'm excited as I've never been before and i know we're going to do lots of trips to castles and museums which is the sort of thing i really like, but at the same time i'm conscious that i will be looking after 4 children (although their mother will be there too) and it will be two weeks where seven of us will be living in a two bedroom flat. I also have no idea of the hours i will be working and but also what i shall do with any time off i do get. My french really isn't that great as i haven't used it since GCSE and the same applies for my german too. The first thing i have to do when i get to geneva airport is to get on a train to Nyon and then find the family, so hopefully my french will be up to buying a train ticket and listening to announcements. it will certainly be an adventure. I hope to return of course with lots of swiss chocolate, my mouth is watering at the thought of all that milka (my favourite). hopefully the children will be well behaved too, after two weeks break they might actually be pleased to see me. We shall have to wait and see, I've bought my holiday reading to do so if i get bored there is always microeconomics and game theory to look at!

Empty House
Okay this empty house this is beginning to get a little creepy, the floorboards creak so my imagination in beginning to get the better of me. also my tv room is below street level and i've had to shut the blind as people keep staring in at me.

Went to the cinema with meg and charles lat night to see Pirates. It was, well amusing to say the least, there were some bits where i actually thought I was watching a film of monkey island parts were just so over the top. But it was good none the less. Then we had a quick trip to G&Ds on the way home.

Think I may nip down to london tomorrow as my mum is getting desperate for me to sort out my room (it's piled with fridges, microwaves, cooking appliances and duvets). Also it means I can see alex for a bit and grab my copy of TMOV for script reading on wednesday. then I just have to find something to amuse myself with for the rest of the week rather than just sitting in front of the TV all day.

Well I passed my prelims, and got to celebrate by having the family disappear off to France for two weeks leaving me to house sit. I'm allowed parties (well dinner parties) and can have friends over for a drink in the garden. Now if only there were more people still around in oxford!
Also managed to speak to my father for the first time in about three weeks he seemed slightly confused that i'd rung him on his mobile until he then remembered that he had given me no contact details for his new house, something that I might actually need.
Must remember to send parcel to my sister in the states today, she needed something to help with mossie bites so I got her the clicker thing that we were using at the last wyrdies party to send electric shocks to remove the itch. Also this thing that sucks out the poision to remove the itch, although i need to warn her to be careful as i tried in out on a bite i had near my eyebrow and the itch has gone alright but i have been left with what looks like a love bite just above my eye!

It's Too Darn Hot!
So I've been back in Oxford working for about a week now. The boys are lovely most of the time although the youngest is prone to the occasional screaming fit but you can tell he's just putting it on because when he sees it isn't working he tries to pull a cute face that rivals even mine. They have sports day tomorrow and i've been told i have to run in the mother's race, i don't think they realise just how bad at sports I am. So overall the work is good, I basically get the boys up in the morning and then test them on their spellings before they go to school, their mother takes the three oldest to school and nursery and I stay behind and play with the baby. Then I have the day free to do as I please until I pick the oldest two up from school at 3.30 and walk back through university parks to their house in jericho. The youngest boy goes to nursery by st annes and to get there you hav to walk right by where we were rehearsing for Wyrd Sisters. Their mother did mention that she had seen people rehearsing outside earlier in the term! Anyway i then cook dinner and do bedtime stories before finishing once the boys are in bed, so anytime between 7.15 and 8pm depending on how tired they are.

There are still a few of people around so I i've met up with anna to go out celebrating her results. she was most surprised to see me turn up on the bike I've now acquired and decided i will attempt to ride. Although she did still walk me home as she didn't trust me cycling under the influence of alcohol!

Even Sandpaper Doesn't Work!
So I went went back to my old school on Wednesday to give a talk about doing E&M at Oxford and uni life in general. As a thank you present I got given a bottle of Wycombe Abbey's finest champagne and since it was Alex's birthday today we decided to open it (I'm not a total skinflint I did get her other presents as well). Well first of all I hadn't realised how shaken the bottle had become so when Alex's mother opened it the cork flew into the next door garden and Alex and i were covered in about a quarter of a bottle of champagne. Unfortunately i had wrapped her presents in tissue paper and this was now soaked and was dying the table pink, so alex and I cleaned up the tissue paper and then discovered that our hands were covered in hot pink blotches. Alex's mother fetched us some white spirit to clean our hands with, but the dye wouldn't come off. At this point I turned to Alex and started joking that we'd be on to sandpaper and cheese graters next, when her mother leapt up and actually fetched us some sandpaper. Yes, I spent this afternoon sandpapering my hands to remove the pink dye from them, i have never laughed so hard (photos to follow as soon as I can get internet on my laptop again). In fact that still didn't get rid of all the dye, so yes i can now say from experience even sandpaper doesn't work!

Two Down, One To Go
Managed to survive two thirds of my prelims today, just management left tomorrow. Papers were slightly odd today. all the maths questions seemed to have one ridiculously easy part and then one stupidly hard part and some of the stuff I swear wasn't on the syllabus I just remember doing it for further maths A level. Hopefully this is a good sign as it means i was able to answer questions that other people couldn't. Not sure about economics though, there were an awful lot of questions on topics that we hadn't covered at all in tutes and were told we needn't worry about them. Now just need to get through management, I think I can remember which authors go with which topic and won't try and quote a strategy author in a marketing essay like i did in my collection. Only trouble is i can remember who goes where just not what they actually said. I shall cry as well if there are no business history questions but lots of accountancy ones tomorrow and it is a real pain that my dream technology question came up last year.

If I get through that then I have quiz squad dinner to look forward to and then the centuroan in the evening. Although if we aren't starting the centurion till 10pm then i might have time to do some weakest drink before hand but perhaps that isn't the best idea if i want to beat certain people in the drinking contest. So roll on 12.30 tomorrow when I shall be free to do as I please - although perhaps packing the mess that is currently my room would be a good start!

Procrastination is fun!
So yesterday I met the family I'm going to be working for over the summer and had a lot of fun. I'm basically babysitting in the afternoon/evening for the next couple of days to get to know the boys better. Basically it's a great way to be a small child again, after spending the whole of yesterday revising I then got to spend two hours running about playing with foam swords and playing star wars games! I can't quite believe I'm getting paid to do this. the boys were so well behaved that I had no trouble bathing them all and then reading a bedtime story and tucking them up so I think that this summer should be really good fun and the job is going to suit me really well.

When I got back to college I bumped into the end of the Quiz Soc on punts outing (well all three people who'd turned up)and we went to the bar. I had intended to leave my room just to get a couple of cans of pepsi, but ended up drinking around half a bottle of pimms and not getting back to my room until I was too tired and couldn't be bothered to do any more maths questions. I shall not be making the same mistake tonight since the exams are in a matter of days.

Revision sucks
Economics text books really shouldn't try to be witty. I can just about deal with using Shakespearean character names when giving examples (eg what do Othello's and Iago's labour supply curves look like?) But this is taking it too far: When talking about changes in income first the text book quotes John Steinbeck say "When people are broke, the first thing they give up are books" okay so far fine, but then the textbook introduces a consumer named Roth (is this even a real name?)Roth consumes two types of goods, books and grapes (can you see where this is going?) Yep next line reads "The grapes of Roth ..." Clearly some economics editor thought they were being terribly amusing and clever when writing this. Although maybe I'm just not being appreciative of their attempts to enlighten my revision experience.

Picnic and Swimming
So yesterday we had a wyrdies picnic, which basically involved Claire and I buying ridiculous amounts of food and alcohol and then us all sitting in christchurch master's garden trying to consume it all. There was also some pratchett reading of course which developed into fencing matches with plastic butterknives. Sadly Anna proved to be a little too vicious and I know have some large cuts on my arms where she caught me. I also introduced everyone to the delights of the bootlace game, a dormfeast favourite from school.

Then today Anna and I taught Claire how to swim. We went to the open air pool just down the road from christchurch, it was heated which made things easier. We made very good teachers as Claire learnt in just under half an hour and we progressed from her saying that she would put her face underwater to her deciding that swimming underwater was the best bit. Ths meant we could then move on to the ducking stage, or rather Anna and I ducked Claire, then Calire and I ducked Anna but neither of them could duck me, I do have some strength. It was so much fun to go swimming, I hadn't been in well over a year because I could swim when I was in India. If only we didn't all have exams between now and the end of term then we could have all gone again.

We have also now fixed a date for our centurion match. We've decided the best thing will be tuesday of 9th when all our exams are over and Claire has kindly offered to umpire and pick up the pieces afterwards. I just hope my mother doesn't turn up to early on the wednesday as I really don't want to have to pack until after my exams. (Well actually I'm just lazy and can never be bothered with packing until the last minute). Now I must stop procrastinating by spending time with the wyrdies and actually revise, well until tuesday night when we're all going to Narnia and the Intrusion together!

Procrastination
I had such good plans to work this weekend but that didn't quite work out. It started with Chris turning up on Saturday morning to collect his bag which he had left in my room since thursday. He then dragged me down to a birthday picnic for one of his other friends in christchurch meadows. I thought he was taking me so he had someone else to talk too but actually it turns out he was encouraging me to be sociable which shows what a lovely and thoughtful person he is (happy now chris?). Everyone was really friendly so that was great and we spent most of the afternoon trying to throw Chris in the river,although we were unsuccessful he apparently did fall in on sunday because he was showing off while punting, so he did get the soaking he deserved.

On Sunday I was the support team for Anna while she ran in the Race For Life, this involved doing an aerobics warmup in University Parks with Anna and Rob before the race and then taking photos of her as she crossed the finish line in an amazing time. Next year she said all of us girls should run although she did suggest a wheelbarrow for Claire and I to be pushed in when our breathing stops us from running. Although given a year's warning I might actually be able to get in shape, I can vaguely remember that at junior school I could run the 1500m in around 8 minutes although that was nearly ten years ago. Anyway managed to end up in the pub with Wyrd Sisters people at which point I realised that I really wasn't going to get any serious revision done. On the otherhand I now have this week free and I keep telling myself I will work harder than I have ever worked before and will not get distracted, well not much.

Recovered
Well last night was good, I hoped the others enjoyed themselves. I managed to removed about £20 quid from my meal card too which was good, still need to get rid of more, so guys if you want more food you know where to come. We then did some Pratchett reading and discovered some serious hidden talent and had a lot of laughs as well as alcohol. I proved I can down things and also re-reminded myself why drinking red wine is not good for me. On the other hand it can't have been too bad for me as I did manage to do some of my work at one in the morning despite promising everyone I would go straight to bed. If the weather holds I might go punting this afternoon, although knowing m luck it will be raining by the time I get out of class in which case I shall have to revise instead!

Feeling better
Well I didn't make it onto UC but there is always next year. Consoled myself by going out and buying wrapping paper to decorate my poster board with. Cutting out paper flowers is a therapeutic pastime and one that I highly recommend and now my poster board matches my duvet and rug so I'm happy. (It's the simple things that really matter). Went and had tea with Alex and took her some jaffa cakes to make up for all the ones I seem to eat everytime I go visit. I've missed our gossips we only seem to have seen each other in five minute bursts this term, it was much easier when we living on the same corridor at school or at least doing the same subject (We realised just how long we've known each other too which is a little scary, spending seven years at boarding school together means that you really do get to know someone well). I've finally persuaded her to do some drama after the usual "but I'm no good at it" conversation. Now I just have to find something I want to audition for and drag her along too. Right off to track down some chocolate, I really need some right now.

Finally got some work done
Well I managed to get up early enough this morning to actually get my economics done before the deadline. It's the last bit of tute work I actually have to hand in for macro, apart from the revision session next week, so I hope I've done better than last week as I would like my tutor to believe I do actually work, he was giving my talons rather suspicious looks in last week's tute and I couldn't really explain why my nails had grown suddenly and were painted a hideous red colour as E&M students aren't supposed to do drama. Still haven't heard back from Granada, i'm not sure whether we'll make it or not. We need to be in the top 5/6 Oxford teams out of 26 and I just don't know what the competition is like. If we do get on it will be another distraction before exams, but I know I'll be bitterly disappointed if we don't although there's always next year and since I'm going to be picking the team again I'll definitely have one more shot at it.

Just remembered that I should have sent my sister a good luck card as her A Levels start this week (not that she needs it I thinks she only needs Cs and Ds this year to get As overall). I'm missing her quite a bit as i'm probably not going to see her now until September as she goes to the States as soon as her exams are over. At least she will have more time to visit when she is on her gap year and if she applies to Oxford then even better.

Pratchett play reading thing is officially happening next week, Jenni and I now just have to work out how to get hold of enough scripts and I have to hope every fits in my room, I'm sure they will though I'm pretty sure we've had more than fifteen people in Laura's room for tea break before so we should be fine with that many in mine. May have to tidy it a bit first!

Where have I been this term?
You start realising how little time you've been spending in college when you notice that it is over halfway through term and you've only spent about £10 worth of meal credits, which means I have about £90 worth to get through by the end of term as they don't allow us to roll them over into next year. So anyone who wants to come eat at Hilda's let me know as I'm more than happy to find a way to get rid of my credits. We only have formal hall once a week, but the food isn't bad the rest of the time. Although if you are male you may have to deal with being stared at, but you can always sample the delights of Hilda's bar afterwards.
The film last night was well interesting. I think it works much better as a novel as too much of the plot exposition is just cheesy when done on film and Anna and I were giggling a lot of the way through (though didn't help her whispering appropriate Wyrd Sister's lines into my ear either). Also must remember that how ever nice look and feel when I wear them in my room wearing 3inch heels make me stupidly tall and are also very difficult to walk in after a while. So thank you boys for escorting me home once again. I promise that I will choose more sensible footwear tomorrow. (Honestly so much for never seeing the cast again at the moment it appears that we are meeting every other day!) I also have aquired some Pratchett scripts so now we can put the Pratchett play reading society into action we just need to aquire a time, venue and some alcohol and all will be sorted!

Will I ever wake up?
Well having wondered if we were going to stay in touch I managed to bump into or meet up with five cast members yesterday afternoon and also didn't get to many strange looks when carrying the scythe back to Hilda's although there were a few comments when we carried it into G&Ds. I slept from 5.30pm yesterday right through to 9.30am this morning, which shows how tired I was, still feeling a bit sleepy though. Went up to Tescos to stock up my fridge and got caught what seemed like torrential rain on the way back (I really need to get hold of an umbrella). At least it probably washed away what ever remained of the hairspray that I hadn't got out the day before. My hair is feeling so nice and soft now, even if it is looking mad and frizzy still, it definately needs to be cut. I shall try and make it to the cinema tonight with other cast members as I'm not quite in the mood for quizzing although I'm aware that I haven't been to squad practice pretty much all term and if I get on UC then I'm going to need all the practice i can get. Fingers crossed for a phone call from Granada this week saying we've got on and not an email saying we've been rejected. Right back to sleep or possibly I may consider looking at this week's maths assignment if I can even find it on the internet.

Sleepy First Entry
Well, here I am it took till the end of the show, but I finally have a LJ. I'm now sitting in my room rembering just how sleepy red wine makes me and why I don't normally drink it. To be fair yesterday was a really long day what with the quizzing in the morning and then two shows followed by the cast party. Lots of fun but now left feeling slightly not quite sure what I'm supposed to do with mysealf. Probably go out and audition for another show, or actually do some work which might be the sensible option. Hope the cast is going to stay in touch as I'm really going to miss them, it will be really strange not seeing each other every day like we have done for the last four weeks.

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