Here's a funny one

Someone is stealing my Helen Sivey. http://www.squidoo.com/Timetraveler A few scrolls down the page you will see this photo. I have no idea why they're done this; at least it links to my flickr as is (mostly) appropriate to the CC-license. It's not even mine, Ollie took the photo and when I took the old phone back I uploaded a few of his photos. The ownership of the image is very confusing. I've been playing with exposures and stuff. It's amazing the effects you can get with a digital camera that would be avoided on film because it seemed 'wasteful', but now it's clever and interesting.

Cocktails and kitties

Ahahaha! I like video editing. It's stupid and I'm bad at it but it's satisfying to force decent audio onto a shitty video.

Busy time, even without the extra pressures of school for a few weeks... Last Wednesday was Ollie's birthday, then Thursday was mine and Saturday featured a Cocktail Party. Cue trip to Makro with Ollie and Shaun-san, WOO! Gallons of mixers and lots of crisps later, we were ready for the party - well, expect that for any Cocktail Party run by someone who hasn't just won the lottery one must rely on the kindness of strangers. No, on the reliability of friends, which is even worse! Andrew was tasked with bringing Bailey's. This was easy for him because he usually turns up to any party with a bottle of Bailey's, sits and drinks it and then leaves when it's finished. He had borrowed some money from Ollie a few days previously, and one condition he was given was that he HAD TO come to the party. So, of course, out comes some excuse about unexpected familial bonding and voila! No Andrew. He will, I assure you, pay for this. I had a ten-to-ten panic when I realised that Helen Beauchamp, whose birthday it was on Saturday and who had been asked to bring some white rum, has not yet materialised and if this continued then I wouldn't be able to make any Long Island Iced Teas! This would have destroyed me. My main reason for a Cocktail Party is to convince people to bring me the right ingredients for a LIIT and having spent three hours mixing a variety of nameless yet scrumptious cocktails for people I was very much ready for one. Cue Shaun-san and a trip to Peckhams for rum and Bailey's, which turned into a Triple Sec run, as the Birthday Girl finally arrived and I decided that it was too late in the evening to be serving Bailey's without causing a queue of vomiters. And finally I had my cocktail of choice. Well, a few of them. Then I got bored and spent the rest of the evening tidying. Am I a party girl or what? Did I mention the loverley camera Ollie gave me for my birthday? Heh heh heh. I'm totally chuffed to bits - although now feeling somewhat inadequate in the gift department - and my friends are starting to feel hounded like a Princess. As are the flora and fauna of Edinburgh. And my computer is beginning to creap under the anticipated weight of thousands of nine-megapixel photos, which come in at 2.5 to 4.5 MEGABYTES. Flickr has never been so slow to upload to... I am now planning to make trading cards of everyone. I think this could be a nasty and torturous excuse for even more photos. :D

Money really doesn't buy happiness?

Edinburgh's local bus company, Lothian Buses, is one of the major frustrations of my life. The british obsession with weather - understandable when you think about how miserable and unpredictable it is - can be matched by the Edinbourgeois need to rant about the buses. Guess why, then? In spite of this, the company keep being awarded titles like Best Bus Company in Britain. Nobody ever understands why, and it makes us wonder just how bad other services must be!

As well as the stream of awards they keep sticking on the side of the buses, there is often a recruitment sign on the back, currently telling us that the average salary for a bus driver is £24,000pa. Since this is, rarely for anything outside London it seems, actually in the region of the UK Average, you'd think these drivers might be quite happy. And of course you would be wrong. Most drivers of Lothian Buses are grumpy, obstructive, and generally elicit the same range of responses as the weather.

How is it, then, that employees of Starbucks, who will be getting half of that wage while dashing about in a hot, confined space while suffering a barrage of Stupid Customers (no, I'm not implying that there is any other kind) and knowing all the time that they are a part of an EVIL giant corporation can be so consistently cheery!? Lothian Buses driver: pots o' cash, sit down all day, miserable barstewards. Starbucks barrista: half the cash, busy and stressed, ALWAYS HAPPY AND HELPFUL. I'm consistently amazed by the Starbuckers, as no other coffee emporium seems able to get their staff to smile more than fleetingly. Are the drugging the coffee? Who knows, but i want some.

London? no, No, NO!!!

I have Londonphobia. There was a time when just looking at a London phone number made me nervous. I'm mostly over it now, but I've been tagging and geotagging my Flickr and came to a small chunk in central London. I had managed to find the right places (I think) in Bordeaux but as I zoomed into London all I could think was "No," and next thing I had closed the tab. So it's clearly not completely gone.

Flattering conversations

Man: You could be a ballerina. Helen Sivey: Really? Man: Yeah, well, you haven't got the build but you've got small breasts.

Eugh exams

Well, after thirteen years of not being examined, except by doctors, it's started again. It was only a Mock exam for Literature, but still. Ouch in my head and ouch in my fingers.

We knew that there would be questions on Jane Eyre and Othello and also something on the character of Blanche DuBois and an unseen poem. I had decided in advance that I would avoid the classics so was pleased by the choice of unseen poem...

...Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Sorry, I had to go and Do Stuff for a while there... ...See, this is why it's bad being interrupted in mid-blog. You completely lose your flow. Anyway, I then had to go to a church to sing with the choir for the purpose of recording tracks for our new CD. Of course, the equipment wasn't behaving so Helen stressed a few months off her life before running back to the Music Department to get alternatives. Eventually we got going and apparently it went as well as was expected. Hurrah. Next recording date is in April... Ollie recently started working on a piece for strung quartet and choir, inspired by the Russian deity Poludnitsa. He wrote the second movement to start with, just for the strings, and then rearranged it for string orchestra. On Wednesday afternoon he was having it played (and recorded, I think) in a competition, along with three other pieces, by a string orchestra, voted on by the orchestra and judged by some... judges? Not long after this, the votes came back - the judges had placed him second of four and the players had voted his piece the best! They'll now be taking it on tour with them! Fab. You can hear the string quartet version of the piece on MySpace, on a page I had to set up for the purpose. I was shocked by how thoroughly disorganised MySpace is, when it comes to doing things with music.

Don't know why...

...There's no storm up in the sky Sunny weather, Since my man and I are together Keeps sunning all the time I'm really quite upset. All this talk of storms and apocalyptic weather, and all we have is a sunny day with a few clouds. It's dry and even quite warm! Spoils the song, really.

Value for Chocolate

I seem to find myself in arguments on the subject of Easter Eggs this year. First Jenny was black affronted and rendered near speechless by my purchasing of and then eating of an egg, pre-Easter. Which I punished her for by force feeding most of it to her while she was driving. Just, you know, to ensure she's going to Hell or whatever.

I was then debating the price of chocolate eggs with my mother. She said that they were a terrible ripoff and i was quick to point out that, actually, they're not bad usually and anyway it's about the shape and the thinness.

So, of course, when I next found myself near a pile of eggs in Tesco I paused for longer than it usually takes to decide which to buy (and I'm rather indecisive) and did some sums.

My egg of choice on this occasion was a 185g Flake egg, for 99p. This size of egg comes with two bars of chocolate and an egg which fits comfortably into my hand. Just. To buy two bars of Flake would usually put you back around 90p-£1 so the egg, which is approximately 100g or curvaceous joy, is effectively free! And on top of that you get a bundle of packaging - Yum.

Last year, post-Easter, Tesco had six-packs of Creme Eggs reduced to 10p each. The previous year we stocked up on 100g bags of Mini Eggs, reduced to 10p each. It's almost as if Tesco have captured the floppy-eared pascale Santa and are using it to produce avalanches of chocolate which, to them, is effectively free.

In conclusion, buy the 99p Easter Eggs because they're the best value chocolate EVA. And go to supermarkets on Easter Monday.

八 - Whassat then?

Just to clarify: 1. ichi 一

2. ni ニ

3. san 三

4. yon 四

5. go 五

6. roku 六

7. nana 七

8. hachi 八

9. ku 九

10. juu 十

Counting the little pictures

Stephen: What comes after Seven?

Me: Um, Eight?

Stephen: Yes, but in terms of little pictures?

I think being back at Tesco has drained poor Stephen's vitality so much that he has forgotten words like Kanji. Either that or having to learn tons of them has sent him into a self-inflicted spiral of amnesia.

The Colour of Informatics

The new University of Edinburgh Informatics building in the former Crichton Square car park is nearing completion! This section has a bunch of different, brightly coloured, spirals. Possibly staircases? I think the finished product will be good.

Andrew's comedy life

Andrew likes to do things for kicks that most people would baulk at the very thought of. And so he spends endless hours scouring the interweb for people who are similarly twisted. These are the people your mother warned you about, although most of them are so timid outside the dungeon that they'd never dream of doing these things without written permission...

So today Andrew found some local 19year old (apparently!) on t'internet, who announced that he would pop up to Andrew's "office" imminently. This threw the poor chap into a tizzy because he doesn't really Do Coffee with people, especially not people he's scouted for dirty sticky fisty encounters. Black Medicine is where he spends most of his free time, and people he's Meeting usually provide a venue, whether it be hotel room, dungeon or suitable stainproofed boudoir.

This tied in with reports of a be-mohawked homosexual sighted in BM by Ollie. When I arrived Andrew was, for some reason, concerned that the mohawkee might be the 19year old. Of course when this person happened to turn up it transpired that he is a friend of Martha's and NOT 19.

It was mightily amusing.

This was, of course, at the point where I had skipped out of Maths early to do my Japanese homework. I had done all I could in the classroom so I felt fully justified, and it marks the exciting event of me actually doing my Japanese homework for the first time! Not that it takes more than about 2 minutes...

In other, surreal, news I got my Jane Eyre essy back and it had been a roaring success! God only knows how - I was convinced that I had entirely failed to answer the question. In the end the only criticisms were that I hadn't noted page numbers and had been occasionaly distracted by plot. Unnecessarily. I love the fact that plot takes a back seat in these situations - no sorry, I HATE that. Plot is what I want in a novel and if it's captivating enough then character development and writing style can F*** Off if need be.

This is why I avoid Literature whenever possible. Streetcar is SO much better, even five pages in. And Jean Brodie is amusing! I will, if I can, be disowning Brontë and Shakespeare henceforth.

UPDATE: When opening Flickr I discovered this greeting: I'm pretty much speechless. Is Lolcat now a recognised language!?

It's hard to photograph snow with a phone camera

It's still winter, btw.