On Wednesday I didn’t have lectures, so I sat around all morning watching daytime TV until Rob got in from Uni with his Mum. She’d brought us some nice rolls and ham and cheese so we had a huge lunch with Ballykissangel on in the background. We felt pretty well prepared for giving blood then so we went on up to the donation centre on our road. Unlike last time, I was actually able to do it, and Rob was too. *Squeamish people (that means you Becky) should skip to the next paragraph*. The nurse said that the pinprick they do on your finger to test the iron levels in your blood hurts more than the actual donation, but I beg to differ, I barely felt it! From there, it was onto the table to get down to business. I couldn’t watch what the nurse actually plugged into me, but apparently I have a good vein for donating. I can’t even look at the undersides of people’s wrists, so I thought it best to look out the window for the whole thing! It didn’t take too long though, only about 10 or 15 minutes. Just before I finished, the girl on the third bed in the room nearly passed out when she was sat up, which didn’t fill me with hope as it was her first time as well! I felt pretty ok when she got me sat up afterwards and had my biscuits and a couple of cups of tea with Rob. We stopped off at Tesco on the way home to grab a few bits for dinner and spent most of the evening sat watching Jumanji and taking it easy.

Yesterday didn’t start very well at all! When my alarm goes off, I just get straight up and I’m in the shower within a couple of minutes. I didn’t even think about the fact that standing up so quickly and then getting into a warm shower on a pint less blood than normal probably wasn’t advisable. I started feeling a bit woozy, but just put it down to being up early. But as I started on my conditioner, I felt my arms start to feel really heavy, then my vision started to go and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor of the shower. I’d never fainted before and wasn’t really sure what was going on, but managed to turn off the shower, wrap up in a towel and throw myself onto the bed with my legs up. Rob was still asleep when it happened, so he had no idea why I was soaking wet jumping into bed with him! The thud when I went down had woken him up though! It didn’t take too long to get my head back together and I managed to get my shower finished and get ready for Uni as slowly as I could. Luckily it wasn’t lectures when I got in, but meetings for Advanced Translation. I was still feeling weird, and my lower back’s bruised up, but the meetings went well! First off, we spent two hours writing a group translation, the a bit of a gap before spending another two preparing our presentation for next week. Then it was time for the lecture itself, where we were just going through another group’s translation. We managed to stand outside chatting for over an hour after that lecture and are considering taking it to the pub next week as we do it all the time!
I still wasn’t feeling great when I got in, so Rob suggested going to get pies from downstairs, which I think was a very good idea! We carried on our nights of movies with Napoleon Dynamite which Rob hadn’t seen.

This morning, I made sure I just sat upright on the bed for 5 minutes before getting up, which proved to be a good idea as I didn’t pass out! Cultural History was ok, we had to put events in the history of East Germany in order and then do group work based on The Lives of Others. We got the easy question of “How did the Stasi affect the daily life of people in the GDR?” which was pretty easy to answer. I got back fairly early and made some lunch with Rob, and then spent the afternoon watching podcasts because I’m cool. Comic Relief’s about to come back on again, so I think I should go!

I went down to get my eyes checked on Wednesday and instead of my usual optician, who went to my Uni, I had a new German guy called Stefan who was really nice. I think we may have spent more time talking about Germany than actually testing my eyes. I’d decided it was high time I got some new glasses as I’ve had mine for over 3 years now, but I didn’t have my fashion guru Jen with me. Stefan kindly offered to help me out and I got a really nice pair. I would take a photo and put it on here, but I’ve got no idea what my hair’s doing today. Here they are though – Option 2! I think that was it for the day really from what I can remember!

Thursday I went to pick up said new spectacles and then had Becky over for the afternoon. We started off at a new café in North End called Los Amigos which was pretty tasty considering how cheap it was. They did drop Becky’s panini on the floor though and had to make her a new one! We picked up a few snacks and then came back to mine to watch Good Bye Lenin! which was the last film I needed to watch for the film course. I think I understood it much better this time around, I last watched it before I’d been taught about the division of Germany and all that jazz. And I managed to finally bring Becky round to the view that Daniel Brühl is hot! I dropped Becky back to hers afterwards to have a shower while I picked up Jen from work and then went with them both to the Farmhouse pub for dinner. We were proper classy with our pole of onion rings and very much enjoyed Jen’s 10 (yes 10!) scampi. We had a quick go on the itBox before going home, tradition is tradition!

Dad was off on Friday so Grandma and Granddad came down for a Tootsies breakfast with us. Yum Yum Yum. You can’t fault a Tootsies breakfast. We left Grandma and Granddad in Gunwharf to go and do the weekly shop for Mum in Commercial Road. Now, considering me and Dad are crap maths and should not be allowed control of anyone else’s money, we didn’t do too bad. I think I only got one thing wrong and Dad couldn’t find another, but Mum seemed pleased with our work! Dad had to run out again to get his hair cut when we got home, so I waited for Grandma and Granddad to get back before driving down to the doctors’ to get Jen’s prescriptions. I think I spent the evening with Mum and Dad watching The Wire and writing most of my film essay.

I was up really early for me on Saturday as I was going to Horsham with Becky so she could get a couple of her songs recorded. Jen had to meet Nick in town early before they went to the Isle of Wight for their anniversary, so I scavved a lift with Dad and then he drove me and Becky to the station, I love my Daddy! We got the train up to Horsham with no fuss, reading Heat! We went out the wrong exit at the station to start with but once we tried the other side, we found Bradley’s car with no problems and he drove us back to his. As Becky had only met him online, I tried to remember the route in case we needed to make a quick getaway as we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere! It was fine though, he and his wife were lovely! They live in a flat in a big converted mansion opposite a deer park and he has a home studio where he got Becky’s vocals down for her and showed her some backing tracks he’d made for her too. It wasn’t something I normally do, so I found it pretty interesting. I also found out while we were there that Nick had proposed to Jen and she’d said yes. How very exciting! It won’t be for a good few years yet, but we’re very happy for them!

On Sunday I spent most of the day finishing the film essay and an abstract. I went down to see my Nan in the afternoon for a bit of a catchup before I had to come back up to Brumland. The train was uneventful, definitely better than the bloody coach!

Yesterday it was back to Uni and my dissertation lecture. We were told about how to guide the reader through the text, thrilling as always. I then had an hour’s gap before helping out my friend Hannah in second year with her Discourse Analysis coursework. You have to record a 30-60 minute conversation in German and then analyse it, so she had me, a lecturer, Birgit (a new intern studying teaching I think), another second year and Vikki (our friend in first year) talk about the Stasi for a bit. We ended up comparing them to the “your neighbour’s claiming benefits illegally” adverts, which might not have been exactly where she’d intended it to go! I managed to nip home quickly after that before the film lecture. That dragged a bit! It ran over by 20 minutes again which was more than a bit annoying, there needed to be another lecture I think. I had a splitting headache when I got in, so after we’d had a quick dinner, I curled up on the sofa, watched Friends and 90210 and went to bed! I’m hardcore. Oh yeah, I got the last of my results back from last term! I got 72 for Interpreting, 58 for Cultural History, 59 for Yiddish and despite thinking I would fail Translation Theory, I go 68! I’m averaging about 64 at the moment which is good enough for me!

And this morning! I had double Lang Skills as usual, firstly on editorials and then on grammar. Not exactly thrilling! We had a couple of hours gap then, so we went to the computer room where I got on with some Advanced Translation homework and sat on Facebook for a while. Lastly we had LSP where we had a lecturer from Leipzig Uni come in and talk us through a translation he’d done of a text on cell replacement therapy and Parkinson’s Disease which I actually enjoyed. I’m so much more comfortable in the technology side of translation. I still had my headache this evening though so I’ve done bugger all. I found Ballykissangel on ITV3 though which cheered me up! I used to watch it religiously when I was about 9 or 10 and now it’s back!

I think that’s it. I haven’t taken any paracetamol for this headache as we’re supposed to be giving blood tomorrow and I’m not sure on the rules for it. I will ask though! Wish me luck!

Last Thursday I think I faffed around at the flat all morning, ignoring the fact that I had to pack. Oooh, I did do a bit of homework before my lecture. As per usual, it was going through our homework from the previous week, this time it was about witches and as our group finished first, me and Claire drew a devil and a witch complete with cauldron, cat and broom on our OHT. I got back fairly quickly and did most of my packing after tea.

Friday was a very long day. I had my lecture at 9 on the German terrorist group of the late 70s, the RAF. It was quite interesting actually, anyone want to watch the Baader Meinhof Komplex with me? I finished off my packing when I got home while Rob made us a nice soupy lunch we ate whilst watching Planet Earth. I didn’t have long then until my coach for what I thought would be a five and a quarter hour journey which for £8.50 I didn’t think was that bad. It was all good until just after Oxford. We then were sat at a standstill for an hour and a half due to an overturned car and I couldn’t get the internet on my phone to entertain myself on Facebook. Luckily I’m nerdy enough to have loaded it up with podcasts which although nearly draining my battery made it just about bearable. My Twitter feed shows all the fun things that did happen on the journey though when I did get signal! I eventually got in at 9pm and sat watching TV with Mum, Jen and Dad for the evening.

Saturday me, Dad and Mum went and picked up my Nan and went for lunch at Tootsie’s in Gunwharf for lunch which was lovely but took about 20 years to get because it was so busy. Dad then dropped us off at my Nan’s and drove off to Poole to watch the rugby with his friends from his school days. Me and Mum went into town to do some shopping including a digital photo frame we then spent the entire evening loading up with photos to go in Dad’s office. We watched No Reservations as well which was predictable, but ok!

On Sunday, the gang and Jen’s boyfriend Nick went up to see Anna at Uni in Kingston. It’s well proper posh there! I’m all about slightly rough, dirty areas and Kingston was the complete opposite, it even had cycle lanes for crying out loud! Me, Jen and Nick went off shopping while the others got coffee and we met up for “drunch” or “linner” at about half 3 at Strada. Sea bass is gooood! It was a bit of a stroll back to Anna’s accommodation but it probably helped all our dinners go down! I think I sat online while Jen and Mum caught up on TV when we got home.

Yesterday was errand/driving again day. I woke up to a nice list of things to do with my day from Dad, Mum and Jen and after I’d book an appointment at the opticians’, I got in my car and headed out to Homebase to buy a replacement mug for the one Mum had dropped, then out to North End to get three watch batteries replaced and buy mushrooms and milk, then to the doctors’ to drop off a repeat prescription for Jen. Lots of driving! It’s come back really well and I only had one bit of parking where I actually said “Fail” to myself! I rang up Becky while I was out and arranged to meet up for an hour before she had to go to work. We had a nice, but brief catchup and then I headed home to try to choreograph dinner with Jen and Nick. It just about worked! I think the evening was just watching Mistresses and other stuff off Sky+.

And today! It was really boring actually, I’ve done nothing but watch TV! Opticians’ tomorrow though, excitement!

Back to Thursday I guess then. In the morning, Kayleigh messaged me on Facebook to see if I wanted to go and give blood with her in the afternoon before our lecture. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and this was the perfect opportunity. We got our forms filled in but were told it was quite a wait and we had to go to our lecture within an hour, but we decided to wait. Kayleigh got called in to the assessment room fairly quickly and I asked another bunch of students if I could jump ahead of them, so I got called in. The nurse did my assessment and it all seemed to go well until I said that I got put on new asthma medication 2 weeks before, which after a quick discussion with the head nurse meant that I couldn’t give blood! Apparently they want me to be on it for a month before they can take any, how weird is that? Kayleigh got to do it though, and after a slight rush to uni we were only a few minutes late. All we were doing was going over our homework on the Cologne translation anyway. We hung around after the lecture for ages, which was probably a very good idea as Kayleigh ended up nearly passing out! I didn’t realise it can hit you that long after donating, but it turns out it’s fairly common! She was alright after a while though and we took her to get some coke and chocolate! The evening was much less eventful!

Friday I had my Cultural History lecture on the student revolts of 1968 – thrilling – before meeting Rob to go back to his house. On the way we stopped at a Chinese buffet for lunch which was pretty good except for one thing. I picked up something in batter that said “chicken and leek” on the label, but when I chopped it open at the table, it was really squidgy. I thought it just mean that the chicken and leek were mushed up together, so I ate some of it. It had a really weird taste though, I wasn’t sure what was wrong! I eventually realised that it was a banana fritter! Idiot! After that, we called in at giant Sainsbury’s and bought a huge amount of stuff. We don’t get much in the city centre, so we had to make up for it! It was so heavy though! We then got on another bus to a stop near Rob’s and went to a shop full of random crap for a new net washing bag and a jug and then had to walk from there as the road was being dug up. It took forever as we had such heavy bags! We then spent the rest of the day at Rob’s where I managed to get the majority of the film essay done.

Saturday was fun! We cleaned up the flat in the morning as my family was coming up to see the indoor athletics and once we heard that they were in Birmingham we went out to meet them at their hotel, grabbing lunch from Gregg’s on the way. It turned out we weren’t having Anna to stay with us after all as Nick was too tired form getting back from New York to come. Once they came up from the car park, we headed straight on over to the NIA as we were running a bit late. It was only once we’d got in and bought drinks that my Dad found out we had VIP status, so we got to go down with our paper cups of coke to schmooze with athletes and eat free food! Yay! We had really good seats as well, right near the finish line! It was a really good meet actually, we didn’t see any world records, but Kate Dennison broke the British record in the pole fault, and Mo Farah broke the 3000m British record in the final event of the day. We went back to the VIP area for more free food after it was over and Anna kept jumping on famous athletes and interviewing them for her Uni work! We called in at the hotel on the way back into town and tried to find a restaurant that would take 8 people that late in the day. We eventually got Café Rouge, but by that time it didn’t make sense for Rob’s parents to come in, so it was just my family and him. It was great fun though and I get to see them again on Friday when I go home for my very first reading week!

Sunday was just a regular day of work I think, finishing my film essay and all the other homework I’d left for the weekend. I also had a hissy at the internet because I couldn’t book a cheap train ticket! It put me in a horrible mood for the rest of the day!

On Monday I had a meeting with my dissertation supervisor about how much “progress” I’m making. I didn’t even try and cover the fact that I’d done nothing on it so far, which is just as well because she then took half an hour to basically make me an essay plan with the few bits of knowledge I already had. Yay! I have a title too! I think I got back in the bad mood in the afternoon though and just did nothing. I do that every so often, something puts me in a bad mood and I’m shitty at everyone for days.

Yesterday I had Lang Skills firstly preparing the translation of a letter to the editor from English to German and then a mock exam translating about climate change from German to English. It made my brain hurt! I managed to get home in time to have some lunch before going back in for LSP though, not that I should have bothered hurrying. I was about 15 minutes early and found Kayleigh, Kayleigh, Maija, Ffion and Claire in the computer room and chatted to them a bit until the fire alarm started going off. You could tell it was just final years in the room, because everyone carried on working for ages until we went to go to our lecture and it changed from a beep….beep…..beep alarm to beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep, which apparently means “get out”, so we did! It took us over 20 minutes to get in, by which time our lecturer had nearly given up on us! We did our presentations though and then I got bored doing actual work and sat on Facebook for the rest of the lecture.

And today! Not much has happened really. Rob’s mum took us to Urban Pie for lunch, which was delicious, and then we went phone shopping with her for a bit before coming back here for a cup of tea. I’ve done bugger all this afternoon though! We played Little Big Planet for a while with a kid with “94″ in his screen name which made me feel old!

Two more lectures and it’s home time!

Monday was one of those days, my lecture was cancelled as we’re having individual consultations for our topics. I think I just spent most of the day lazing about, maybe catching up on some work. I did some ironing though and managed to burn my fingers by swinging my hand back onto the iron by accident. I’m thick …….and just spelt “thick” as “think”.

Yesterday was a bright and early start for Lang Skills. First off we were going through our translations into German and trying to make a perfect one in groups. It seems that that’s all we do at the moment, both into German and into English. It’s as boring for me to do as it is for you to read, I’m sure. From there we went to the “into English” part of Lang Skills to go through each other’s homework. Fun. I nipped to Sainsbury’s on the way back to grab a few things and just had enough time to get some lunch before heading back out for LSP Translation. That’s a lecture I can get on board with. With my lecturer’s help, I managed to start finding some German reviews of HDTVs online and start making some initial judgments about the differences between German and English reviews. When I got back I started actually collecting some English texts for my corpus around making a tasty tasty risotto. Yay!

And today! It’s been slightly weird day today. There were lots of sirens going off just as I finished getting dressed and when I finally got round to looking outside, there were tonnes of police cars and vans in the street outside and the police had just started cordoning off the building. We found out later in the day from Rob’s mum that somebody had fallen/jumped from our building onto the second floor outside communal area. You can read the story here, but Rob found out from the concierge and other residents later that it’s not entirely correct. Apparently the man checked into the hotel in the top floor last night and there’s no way you can just fall from the balconies up there, so he almost certainly jumped. It’s shaken up the residents of our building pretty badly.

Aside from that, I haven’t done much today. I’ve watched this week’s movie for the film course. It was really depressing and ended with the main character jumping out of a window to kill herself – how appropriate. Rob bought a sexy-fine Netbook though and I want it. It’s all blue and shiny and pretty and it comes in pink too! I never used to like pink, what’s happening to me????

Anyway, on that weird note, I’m off!

Wednesday I think I actually did nothing all day long. I may have ironed. Oh! Me and Rob made a lentil bake for dinner, which wasn’t as icky as I’d expected. I’d never had lentils before and they were actually pretty nice! Like baked beans but without tomato sauce!

Thursday was much the same (minus the ironing) until Uni at 4! I had Advanced Translation and all we did was go through the translations we’d done of a hairdryer manual. After the lecture I chatted to Kayleigh and Kayleigh for a while before eventually heading home for dinner. I still didn’t do any work and probably just spent the evening watching podcasts.

Friday I was up bright and shiny early for Cultural History. That lecture has become so much better this term. We were doing the 1950s and did things like watch clips of films and a general knowledge quiz which we lost miserably. We also had to listen to a routine by a German comedian of the time whose name escapes me and figure out how his jokes worked. I don’t really get why, but I was the only person who got some of them! It wasn’t that hard, it was a load of wordplay. I did get one that was Cologne specific though! Sometimes my Year Abroad comes in useful.

After that, I went to Boots to get an appointment with the nurse for a checkup on my asthma and then headed on home. Me and Rob went out slightly early for it and went and got an apple turnover and a piece shortbread at the M&S Café and had a look round at the Valentine’s Day food. When I actually got to the doctor’s though, it was literally a 2 minute affair, I just had to do a peak flow and that was it! Oh well! It meant lots more sitting around doing nothing all evening though. We did go to Tesco’s for stuff for dinner and ended up coming back with fried breakfast stuff which led to our Valentine’s Day breakfast being this:

Yum yum yum! After we’d eaten all that, we went to the market to get some stuff for dinner and some zips for the Sackboy toys my Nan’s making us. We got a big chunk of salmon, some prawns and lots of vegetables pretty reasonably and snuck off to M&S in the afternoon to get some finishing touches like ice cream and salad. We both managed to get a bit of work done before it was time to start cooking. We made prawn cocktail for starters with lots of salad, and for the main course we had the salmon cooked in wine, lemon juice, butter, onions, garlic and mushrooms, and then roasted courgette, pepper and more onion and garlic and then some asparagus! It was deeeelicious and looked like this:

We let that settle for a bit before snuggling up in front of the first Futurama movie “Bender’s Big Score” with a big tub of Rocky Road ice cream we accidentally finished. Woops! All in all, a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

This morning I was woken up at 8.30 by someone hoovering the hall outside again. It makes me so mad!! I just want to sleep! I ended up spending ages online before eventually rolling out of bed. We were feeling too lazy to make any lunch so we grabbed meal deals from Boots. We really need to stop buying lunch out again! I’ve done lots of work today though, including a bit of translating about Cologne which made me Cologne-sick. I do miss it there! I also wrote a “Letter to the Editor” and had a look around for HDTV reviews, as you do.

Guess there was more to write about than I thought. Day off Uni tomorrow though! YAY!

Yesterday my only lecture was the Diplomarbeit dissertation one. We just had to present back what we thought about the dissertations from the year before which we’d been given. We’d thought ours wasn’t great as it barely analysed anything, but we thought that the language was pretty good. It turned out that they’d actually written a load of really slangy terms in there that we hadn’t picked up on. It turned out it got a 2:1 though, and the lecturer said that really good language can pull up poor analysis and vice versa. Better start analysing then!

After that I went up to the computer room to get mine and Rich’s joint homework out of the way. He’d been at the physio in the morning so I was waiting for a bit, but Claire’s group was in there as well so I chatted to them and made a start on blending our two translations into one. It wasn’t too hard actually and once Rich arrived we were able to get it done really quickly which meant I could go home and watch daytime TV all day.

I think that actually was it for yesterday, I’m spending ridiculous amounts of time online at the moment! Becky’s got me into the Fashion Wars game on Facebook now!

This morning the first Lang Skills lecture was cancelled so I didn’t start til 11 – Cue Jeremy Kyle with breakfast! He finishes at the exact time I have to leave! In the other Lang Skills lecture, we had to compare our translations we’d done jointly. The annoying thing was that the texts each group had translated separately were part of one big text. This meant that what we’d written in our part had to follow on smoothly to the next one. There were a couple of problems as where we’d been summarising the texts into English, we’d missed out bits the next group had assumed we’d include. We did manage to get it sorted out though by playing around with the wording to gain more space. I guess I should mention that we had 600 characters to translate 1500 character texts!

After we’d got that done, I met up with Rob and grabbed a Subway and went for a chilly walk around campus between lectures. Then it was time for LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) Translation. I think I’ve thrown the lecturer a bit by saying I want to work on texts reviewing HDTVs for my project! Fun Fun Fun!

And that’s it! I’ve done bugger all this afternoon aside from forget half the stuff I was meant to get at Sainsbury’s and starting the Planet Earth boxset Jen got me for Christmas. Best part of two days off now though!

Wednesday I was up bright and early on my day off to go to the doctor’s. It wasn’t bad actually, much quicker than I expected. I don’t know whether it’s worrying that I’m learning more about my asthma nearly 22 years in, but I guess they just didn’t think I needed to know some of the stuff when I was a kid and it hasn’t really played up enough for me to actually get it checked out in years. It turned out that there’s 5 stages of asthma control and the cold had knocked me from my decade long stage 2 into stage 3. That meant that the preventer and reliever inhalers I’ve been taking for years weren’t strong enough to cope with my cold (how ridiculous, I wasn’t that ill!) and so I’ve been given another inhaler to take with them that’s a mixture of preventer and reliever. And it’s orange!

Unfortunately, when I went to pick it up at Boot’s, they didn’t have any! I had to go over to the Bullring branch then, who luckily had it. I think that was about as exciting as it got that day. Just checked my Twitter feed to see what I did and apparently I was watching the German film Wie Feuer und Flamme for the film course. Only two left of those bad boys now, one of them being Good Bye Lenin, which literally every German student has seen, including me.

Thursday I spent all morning doing the ironing in my pajamas like the cool kid I am! It took me about two hours, but I’d been letting it pile up for ages! I don’t actually mind ironing as household chores go, it beats hoovering hands down because you can watch TV while you do it.

In the afternoon/evening I had Advanced Translation which was trying to write one translation in a group of four or five. Our group worked pretty well together actually and we got a really good translation out of it. When I got home, I scanned in every group’s OHT of their work and sent it round to everyone before getting on with some work.

Friday I was up bright and shiny early for Cultural History where Team Chaos was created. We had to split into groups to do different tasks about a poem and we had to translate the poem. We ended up in a really silly mood that was probably inappropriate considering the poem was written by a guy in a concentration camp at the end of WW2! Our lecturer kept calling us the Chaosmannschaft and it’s stuck!

In the afternoon I think I had a nap after watching about 6 episodes of Futurama. We got to the last ever episode and fell asleep! We’ve ended up watching it today though. In the evening after I’d woken up a bit, Rob’s friend Tom and his girlfriend Odele came over and we went to Wetherspoons. Unfortunately it was freezing and we picked the pub with no doors in the corner of a mini shopping centre! We could see our breath! Had a great time though!

At some point in the evening we’d been talking about TGI Friday in Solihull, so on Saturday me and Rob decided to go! It was only about 15 minutes on the train and it was great to be somewhere different for once. It’s the first time I think me and Rob have ever spent that long just wandering around shops. Our meal at TGI’s was awesome too! Deeelish! We were knackered by the time we got home though!

And today! I got up at about 11 after spending 2 hours on the internet while Rob was asleep. Once we were both up, we had some lunch and went downstairs to have a look at netbooks. Rob’s considering selling his MacBook and wants to get one. I want one for no reason at all now! But I have no need for one, so if I say I want one, slap me or something!

That’s it! I’ve spent today just writing a film essay and procrastinating online! Great nerdy fun!

I got up at the normal time this morning, but got ready a bit quicker so I could drop in at the doctor’s on the way to Uni to make an appointment. I asked for an appointment with a doctor at some point during the day, but as they’re so short-staffed at the moment, they couldn’t offer me anything until Monday! Once I’d mentioned that it was to do with my asthma, they were really helpful and managed to get me an appointment with the nurse specialising in asthma right then and there! After listening to my chest and taking peak-flows and stuff, she came to the conclusion that I need to go back tomorrow. Apparently I’m borderline being put on steroids which doesn’t sound good, my asthma hasn’t been that bad since I was really little. Oh well, I shall find out tomorrow at 10!

I had just enough time to grab a sausage roll from Gregg’s before heading in to Uni and although it was only lukewarm, it was delicious. I had double Lang Skills when I got in, the first of which was translating a book review from English into German which was actually pretty hard, especially when we had no dictionaries. Then it was abstracting, so summarising a German text into English within a set number of words. Only this time we have to do it within a set number of characters, and where the names in the text are so long, and we weren’t on computers, it was ridiculously difficult!

I went to Sainsbury’s on the way to grab a few things and when I finally got to the front of the checkout queue, the till stopped working and I ended up at the back of the next queue. It’s these little things that really spoil your day isn’t it? I got out in the end though and was back home just in time to make my lunch and eat it before scarpering back off to Uni along the slippery, icy roads.

We had a special lecture in LSP Translation today. A lecturer from the University of Bologna was over to give a talk tomorrow and was persuaded to teach us all about how to gather texts to build a corpus and then got us searching different corpora. It was actually pretty good fun! It’s far more tech and computer-based, so it’s way more up my alley than all the crazy theory stuff we were doing last term.

When Rob got home, we went back out to Sainsbury’s to do our proper weekly shop, but couldn’t get a few things so I took the bags home while he went to Tesco to get the last little bits. The problem was, we can both get into the building on our own, but there’s only one front door key…and guess who had it. It wasn’t too bad though, I was just sat at our front door for about 15 minutes listening to Sim Neighbour and his pals. They were watching Top Gear at one point from what I remember.

That’s pretty much it I guess. We made a very yummy curry for dinner and I’ve managed to finish my translation and two abstracts I had for homework. Hope the doctor’s goes ok tomorrow!

Yesterday me and Rob got up pretty late, but once we were eventually up, dressed and presentable, we headed out to buy Sunday lunch things from M&S and Sainsbury’s. After Dane had arrived and we’d chatted for a bit, I don’t think we’d realised what time it was and we didn’t end up eating lunch until about 4! Oh well, it was lovely whatever!

After “lunch”, me and Rob did lots of work while Dane played on Mario Kart and the Wii Fit before he went home. I managed to get a lot done actually, a first draft of a translation, revision of a different translation and lots of reading. I really wasn’t feeling up to it in the week, but I’m glad it’s done now!

This morning we woke up to a blanket of snow in Birmingham! YAY! I was about to put a picture on here off Rob’s Facebook, but for some reason the album is claiming to be empty. Oh well! I looked like a right idiot on my way to uni though, I kept kicking up the snow and trudging through it even when there was clear path I could have walked on instead. I’m still excited by snow ok! Ooh, Rob’s fixed Facebook!

Where was I? Oh, once I got to uni it was just a lecture on the dissertation again, this time it was about how to write introductions and what you should include in them. Quick question: Why weren’t we taught this sort of thing in first year before we started writing essays?

I shuffled off home after that, made myself some lunch and watched Jeremy Kyle all afternoon! I’ve also managed to read a dissertation from last year for homework, I’m pretty sure it would have been half as long if it had stuck to the point!

Right, off to find the doctor’s phone number, you’d think it would be online somewhere?