Bah

I know I am so rude to completely forget to put new content on this extremely boring blog. But I’ve been busy writing other things that I didn’t feel like doing this as well.. Stupid rhetoric course, they make you write all these weird essay type things. Ok they can be useful, but fun is a completely different circumstance. So now I have to write to papers before the 28th of November.. which is two weeks from now.. Jippie. Doesn’t that make me happy. NO it doesn’t. I hate writing, especially papers. But it has to be done, so I will drag my ass to my computer, log on to the library and desperately try to find sources for all the stuff I need to write.
The current project/paper thing is about tattoos.. I now know opinions, theories and other stuff about people that I’m not sure I ever wanted to know. Ah well, I guess that is what paper writing is all about. So I’ll quit this useless piece of writing and continue in hopes of finishing my 2000 word paper before Thursday (personal deadline). *Moan moan, zeur zeur, I’m being annoying*

I’ll just give up and go to bed,

Love, Lucy

Fun stuffs

Even though this post is called Fun stuffs, I’m still going to be an annoying moaner first. So I am on the island of Texel. In my opinion a hell hole north of the rest of the world. Or at least the main land. I know no one here and I really want to go home to my friends. I don’t feel social at all, so I’m not into meeting people. Even though I’m on a campus with a bunch of people. You have your own kitchen so you don’t need to go out at all. Plus here on Texel I’m on the most south point of the island where still people live. This means that I need to bike at least 3 km and mostly it’s 6 just to do shopping. So 1 bike, 1 me, lots of shopping and, as it is an island,  a lot, lot, lot of wind. Disaster, but well, only one week more and then it’s over. The work is fun, the island is not. I’ll survive anyways.

But fun stuffs, as I’m on this island I need to find fun stuffs to do, I decided to find out how windows movie maker works. I had a lot of pictures from my boat trip, 5 weeks worth of them. I actually took a picture of the sunset, or when it was cloudy, a picture of the clouds in the direction of where the sun would set, every night. I’m sort of proud of myself now as it actually worked. I even got music under it, with some difficulties but still. I hope it’s going to work. I’m trying to make Youtube like me now, failing miserably at it now. But we’ll see later.

Yesterday I was being a very active Lucy, I biked around half the island, with a lot of wind but apart from that it was fun. I went to the beach. I love the beach, the sand, the water, the shells.. everything. Later when you are home and find sand in everything it’s a bit less but I’m starting to ignore that. I’m going to try and be creative and make a mobile (one of those dangly things which can turn) of my shells. Lately I’ve also become addicted to finish my embroiderything. I started an embroidering project of butterflies and leaves and flowers. It’s now almost finished. The problem is that I am very bad at stopping. ‘Just finish this last thread, the figure, this colour’, etc, you get it. So I’m going to bed quite late, but it is weekend so I’m allowed. It is actually fun to do. I didn’t exactly follow the picture because I messed up a few times and changed the colours sometimes. I do believe it looks very nice so that is good. It might seem like an old lady thing, but it is really a lot of fun to do, so everyone should try it.

Love, Lucy

So after the Drama

So my boattrip is over, it was so much fun. Two and a half weeks ago, since I came back. I have decided that I love boats. I wasn’t really seasick ever, but that was probably because we only got bad weather after a week of adjusting and when we left the Cork harbour it was bad too. So the people that joined there all were a bit less happy with the weather, whilst I was reasonably good and not to sick. I knew that everything would be ok even before the last dramapost. So now I’m sure that I shouldn’t worry about stuff that much. It’s just so hard to stop worrying. I’m good at worrying, someone should teach me how to stop that.

The weather on the boat wasn’t that bad actually although we had about 4 days of sun or so, if you added up the hours of the 5 weeks. The temperature was about 12-13 degrees, so that’s not really summer weather either. Apart from that, I liked it. It’s good sleeping on a boat, you get rocked to sleep so that is very nice. And the people were fun too. It was weird though, to have to get up every day before 7.30 because otherwise you would miss breakfast. I had breakfast every day for 5 weeks, and always at the same time. Never had that much routine.. ever. We had a warm lunch, so that needed some adjusting too. And it was three courses, soup, mean course and a dessert. Although I didn’t eat soup and dessert half the time it still was quite a weird thing. At night we had bread with usually a snack or some other warm dish. The cooks were quite good. Friendly too so that was nice.

All in all there were 21 people, including me from Cork to Texel, from Texel to Cork there were 22 I think. Crew and scientists. I usually was sieving boxcores, piles of mud or sand from the seafloor. Found a lot of strange animals and other things that I didn’t really expect to begin with. But it was fun and interesting so now I don’t really have any regrets anymore.

I’m working on the island now, that’s also reasonably fun. The work is fine, the island sucks. I don’t like islands where you have to bike a lot to find food. The appartment also has cockroaches so that’s not to nice either, but apart from that it has everything you need so that’s quite good.

Anyway work tomorrow, hope to have a nice week of holiday in 2 weeks, looking forward to it.

Love, Lucy

Aaaah

Just ignore me.

Oh help, oh help. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m so scared. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go away from home, leave everyone I know and spend 5! weeks with people I’ve never heard of and have never seen before. Oh Help! Damn why the hell did I sign up for this. I feel so stupid now. I wish I had more time to spend with friends. (This negative mood is probably induced by listening to not the right music at the moment, it’s really nice but if you’re not in a very happy mood it sort of induces extra negativity. Yes I am stupid). Eating carrots and listing to “It was you” by 12 Stones. No I don’t do cohesive anymore.
Stupid boat! Stupid Sea! Stupid Corals!
I know everything is going to be fine and I’ll have fun and stuff but that’s not there yet. First I need to get there. Meet the people. Understand what I’ll do. Get the hang of it.
It is handy of course as it will be an extra course and good for my courage maybe and I’ll learn stuff. And once I get there I am probably even going to like it. But I’m not there yet, someday I’ll look back at all my stupid thoughts and habits around this time and think that it wasn’t as bad (I hope) and I’ll feel sorry for my past self. If it’s over. The whole point, it is not over yet.
Ah well, it helps writing sometimes. For some unknown reason it helps now, I’ve lost the feelings a bit more. I do wish I had some people with me, some things I think I will miss. Mostly people though. I’ll miss them. New people, new things, possibilities, potential friendships etc. (Desperately trying to see light at the end of my own self-excavated tunnel). Wish me luck.

Love, Lucy

End of Semester.. again

Time flies when you get older. I’m pretty sure that that is the case. Since a few years I’ve always got the feeling that time in my head goes much slower than time in the real world. I don’t know why that is but it can be really annoying. For instance usually around the Christmas holidays I still think we are somewhere in the autumn even though it is very cold at that time of year. So now I’ve actually already got summer holidays, if someone could tell me why, I would be very happy. Anyways, although I ‘know’ that it is May it still feels like March or something for me. So my inner clock is way of, and I need to know how to fix that. I used to be sort of on time in like primary school however that’s a long time ago. So now I’m really behind. It also doesn’t help that the people I talk to over the internet all don’t have holidays yet. Ah well they will have eventually so that’ll be allright then.

Now I’ve finished my second semester at a real University. I’m proud of myself, especially when you see my GPA (happy happy). Last semester I got a B-, B and 2 A’s that gives a GPA of 3.425 or something (anyways that’s quite high if you ask me). However this semester went really well.. aparently I’m definetly a Science person as I only had science courses this semester and my grades were 2 A’s for Ecology and Maths (surpise for me) and 2 A+ for Lab course and Earth System Science. So I’m really happy because I’ve got a GPA of 4 for this semester, averaging a 3.7125 That’s like an A- giving me happiness. Yesh I get my happiness from good grades it’s very bad I know but that’s how I work sorry..

I need to do some stuff, say sleep. For some unknown reason I felt like cleaning tonight, from 1 o’clock on, which is not really the time I should be cleaning I guess. Ah well nothing to do about it now. I did it, I have myself a clean bathroom, now the rest of my room. We’ll see tomorrow about that. I’m going to enjoy my holiday I hope.

Love, Lucy

Second Semester

We are well into the semester already, almost a quarter is gone. Time flies, that’s for sure. But it is not that bad, I quite like the new semester. I’ve got the subject Earth Sciences, which is up till now my favourite, not only because we talk learn about the Earth and the stars and moon and other galactic stuff, also because the teacher is great. He’s enthusiastic, it’s amazing. And of course I tend to like the Earth, and especially stars and planets. The first class I learned exactly what I always wanted to know, although I did not know what that precisely was before that lecture. Now I do know, the origin of stars and how they come to explode and form new stars and planets and other bodies in the universe.

There is one problem though, we have to do a presentation soon, I really hope it’s going to work out because it is about gravity and viscosity I think, so I hope it will be fun and interesting. You never know of course. Everyone has to do a presentation, about 20-30 minutes each, and you get the stuff that they say in the presentations back on the exam, which of course happens to be on my birthday, yay.. not. But up till now, not all the presentations were as good as I hoped them to be, some were a little bit way to fast and some were very monotone, giving you the impression that sleep is way and way better than stay awake.

I’ve also got something called labcourse, it’s a course in which you go the lab (once every two weeks which is good because now I’ve still got one Wednesday in two weeks of, instead of none), the lab is far away so that’s not that nice either and then you do experiments. Our last one totally went wrong, eventually we got out that Red Bull had like around 18 ppm in it, instead of 320, so that was not very good.. but still we managed to not break a machine, I’m happy about that. The only fun thing about labcourse is that you can walk around in a labcoat, I hate experiments, those awfull ‘I like to suffocate you so let’s just slide over your nose and block it’- glasses and chemicals in general, but the labcoats I love. They’ve got pockets everywhere and are white, although me and white usually are a bad combination because I tend to make everything white I get my hands on dirty, and they are long and sleevy and I don’t know, I just like m.

Math isn’t even a bad as I thought it would be, up till now, I get everything, which is kind of amazing for me. And for some reason I still spend way less time on homework as everybody else, and I don’t know how I do that. I’m not doing math all the time like my friend was last semester and I can do a lot of other things, maybe I’ve just chosen the right courses, again. Anyways, let’s see if this semester goes as well as the last one.

Love, Lucy

Last weeks

The new year has arrived, as most people have noticed, maybe except for when you live in a very very far away cave where you cannot spot any fireworks exploding around you. I did notice them however, damnet stupid things, I really do not like them. I don’t like fire and I don’t like bangs.. guess what fireworks mostly is!
Therefore I’ve never really like to celebrate new year, it’s nice to watch as long as you cannot hear the bangs. But as I’m by now almost grown up, it is seen as very immature to cower behind a window and not really being inclined to go outside, even if you got shoved out the door. I do it though, I am now able to go outside around midnight and watch the fireworks, I do now mostly stand behind cars and such and big trees. I don’t know why but for some reason I still think that trees can sort of protect me from the bangs. Which of course is quite unnecessary but that is what I believe and I’m afraid that that idea won’t go away to soon.
Oh, I hate people who start lighting fireworks at the moment it’s allowed and not stop until it’s not allowed anymore. Which means that they can do it for say 16! hours in the Netherlands. My brothers are that kind of people, I always thoroughly hate them after New Year because the whole day before I keep on jumping up because a bang startled me.
So we got home the day before the last day of the year, on Saturday. We went to the Czech Republic to ski (in my case snowboard). Because of some strange new rule there are no longer any borderchecks. I’ve always thought that those were really unnecessary because the people always look in your passport, and look at it for a long long time, I always wondered what they could see in my passport. If they were perhaps looking for the word criminal written across it or something. Anyways this year they weren’t doing that, so we were extremely happy because that always took a very long time, very very long. So now the journey took a seriously smaller amount of time than before.
Anyways so we eventually arrived at our hotel, we could see the skilift working so we were all really happy, because there was a concern that there might not be enough snow to ski at all. Anyways we went into the hotel, the same one as the year before. It’s Czech so the radiators only have 1 option, extremely hot so you could hardly breathe in the rooms without the windows open. After some hassle to get settled in we found out that I had the biggest room, I of course didn’t mind that but the odd thing was that my parents who are with the two of them had a smaller room than me by myself.
Anyways we were quite early there so I thought, ok let’s go of that hill one time. However because my real gloves were still somewhere in my bag I decided to put on some quite useless gloves, so I got up the lift, the first bit actually went quite good, however I found out that my gloves suck at not leaking through so I decided that I would not rest halfway through the end bit of the slope, the bit were, if your snowboard has it’s right foot forward as mine has, you have to be on the toe-side of the snowboard meaning very heavy on the leg muscles. I came down and was sooo tired, it was amazing but I was able to get down so I was happy about that. The rest of the week also went quite good, first real day I fell causing a nice bruise on my hip but no real accidents any further. The last 2 days the slopes were ice and very crowded so that was not as fun.
Saturday we drove home, we left at half past 8 and arrived home around 6 o’clock, the fastest drive home ever!
Monday was old year, we went to a family in my old village, we made dinner together and played some games and then it was 12 o’clock. So the fireworks started, damn you fireworks! Seriously one hour of fireworks and my nerves are totally overloaded, I jump with every bang and there are a lot there so that was less fun. But well anyways, I know it’s a bit late now but:

HAVE A GREAT 2008 (it rhymes so I had to put it in)

Love, Lucy

Free!

Wooot! *Jumps up and down and performs other happy activities*

It’s over, I’m free for the rest of this year. No more Methods & Statistics, no more General Biology for a while, no more English for Academic Purposes and no more Great Literary Works. I don’t need to see her anymore, no more literature! That’s so awesome! I’m a bit frustrated with the fact that for both the tests for literature I got an A+ and still ended up getting a B as average. That is because I apparently write really suckey essays. I did know that my essays were not that good, but to say that I did everything wrong.. well that is just not true. I had some nice arguments but well she didn’t like em so I got a C-. I’m almost over it, I got a B in the end so that is still a nice passing grade right?

I actually finished like Tuesday already, that was when I did not have any lessons anymore, all I needed to do was finish my very odd beans and wheat assignment. Draw beans that in my case only were very good at getting moldy and not very good at growing actual plants. So eventually I needed to use pictures another girl in the class sent everyone because most people were unable to grow those stupid beans. Anyways, it’s over now, I handed them in yesterday on the way to the train to go home.

I needed to go home because we are celebrating ‘Sinterklaas’ today. Sinterklaas being sort of a weird earlier Christmas. It’s fun though, and usually celebrated on 5 december, but as I was getting nearer to testweek, and needed to do a lot of work still we postponed it to today. We also do ’surprises’, I don’t really know how to translate it so I’ll just use that word. Anyways, with surprises everyone gets a piece of paper with the name of one of the other people written on it, it is random so no one knows who the others got. This year I got one of my brothers, he is always saying that he is taller than I am, but he’s not actually. So I made him a really big pants, if he puts it on he can inconspicuously put stilts under it and seem a lot taller. He is probably going to hate me for it but I do not care.

So tonight surprises and then I’ll see what happens, maybe I will go somewhere fun next week or something. Anyways, after that I’m going to go on holiday, the only problem is that we do not yet know whether or not there will be enough snow.. I of course totally hope so because otherwise I cannot snowboard and my dream will fall apart (or some other dramatic sentence).

Going to finish my surprise, that will be fun, stuff it full with newspaper and stuff like that. Everyone, have a nice holiday or test week or whatever. Have Fun!

Love, Lucy

End of term

So the end of term is nearing, one week and my holiday begins. But before that I need to finish a couple of things: Write an essay for biology about a topic I have yet to choose. Study for the biology exam. Study for the literature exam. Finish my log of bean and wheat plants growing, the bean plants that have yet to survive (got pictures though). Finish my English Portfolio, damn probably lost half the stuff that’s supposed to be in there. Finish my English speech, finish my stats speech. Start on the third reflection for English about a third skill (??).

And you know what. I don’t feel like doing any of it. I’ve got better things to do! I need to hang around with my friends, do stupid things that have got nothing to do with school. Stand in the rain talking to people, tell someone something. I don’t know why but because its almost holiday I don’t feel like doing anything, I’d rather just wait for the holiday to begin and just don’t care about what happens to my grades and stuff like that, I’ll probably pass all my courses even without doing those things. But I won’t not do them, because I’ve got me a really sucky conscience thing. It keeps on telling me things like: you need to finish this. You need to do that. I cannot except it if you do not hand in that assignment on time. If you fail to do that speech good I don’t know what is going to happen to you but it won’t be nice. I have never been able to not go to class. My stupid conscience made me ask the teacher if I could go home, when there were five and a half hours to spend before the second class started, and it wasn’t even a useful subject. It was PE for crying out loud.
Having such a conscience sucks, (ok, sometimes it is handy but most of the time grrr) and I’ve had it all along. I’m thinking of ways to just like turn it of, but that hasn’t been possible yet.

I do hear from more people that they really do not feel like doing any homework, so thank Sot (Something, I’m totally out of the whole God thing, I don’t like him, I chose Something, he’s way cooler) I’m not the only one. But still I feel like I really need to do something and I’m just not doing anything. By now I should be practising my English speech and my Stats speech, but no, I’m writing on my useless blog. But well holidays are coming up, that is my excuse.

I’m going to go snowboarding in the second week of holiday. I’m so looking forward to it, I love snowboarding, I’m not good at it, but it is so much fun! And in the end of the holiday I get to go to the Umbilical Brothers in the local theatre, that should be so much fun, a friend of mine is coming too. In the middle there is a dentist appointment, that is a bit less Jippie! but well, I’ll survive that one too.

So now I’m going to kick my bum into studying again, wish me luck!

Love, Lucy 

Stats

Ever thought of something that was so scary and boring that you would rather run away then face it another time. If found me that object, it’s called Methods & Statistics I. If you are not interested in a rant about a silly and in my opinion useless subject: Look away now.

 Anyways, stats is the subject I’ve been working on for, well a long time now. We first needed to come up with a project. Like what we would want to spend the next 7 or 8 weeks of our semester on. So me and 4 others decided that it maybe would be nice to investigate the correlation between newspapers and intelligence. Then we discovered that measuring intelligence is not that easy so we skipped that one, of to idea nr 2.

Oeh lets do newspapers and age, to see if older people read newspapers with a higher quality or something. So that was approved, then we had to think of another variable (cursed word!), that eventually became education level. Yeah, we were stupid enough to believe that that would actually become reasonably interesting, dumb us.

We made a nice research proposal, boring thing that took forever. Handed it in, it seemed not to be that bad, then we had a discussion in class about it. It got slaughtered, we did this wrong and that wrong and how were we planning on doing this and all that kind of crap. But well we had to do something so better start quickly, so we devised a way of sampling. Sampling is a word that had now lost all niceness to me. Because with sampling we had picked 20 streets which we had to do each. In every street, scattered across my town we had to randomly select (which ended up being: oeh there is a breakfast plate on the table, maybe someone’s home, and not random at all) and then give a questionnaire to.

Ow, that questionnaire also was a disaster, it took forever to put together and it although it did the trick was not sophisticated at all. We had to do a whole bunch of different things to make it work, we had a gazilion drafts before the final one and that one actually had a spelling mistake in it, we later found out.

But well, so we were getting samples, meaning, in bitter cold, to bike around the town trying to find people kind enough to fill in our stupid questionnaire, it was cold, cold, cold, boring and a little bit more cold, and it took 4! hours to finally get 30 people.. (from the 40) so we eventually decided that that just took to long, the next day (we were cold we had to go home and do it again the next day) we decided to well not bike all the way to some far away place but just take 2 in the streets that we needed to do that were bicyclable (yes that’s not a word but I don’t care, I’m ranting remember). We now had our 10 remaining people in less then an hour, very happy about that.

So we had the samples, now we needed a Theory section, about a hundred drafts later we also needed a Method section, that’s my bit. It is not that bad to write a method section it just is not very nice to do, it’s just plain ol’ boring. It took some time though and by now I’m at the fourth draft or something, we have to hand in a draft of the final research project thing tomorrow. So that needed to be done as well.

But fore we could hand in a draft version, we needed to check the quality of the newspapers that came out of our samples. Which means that we had to check 3/4/5 newspapers on things like, does it have an astrology column and how many comic strip-pictures does it have in it, those were the easy one’s. Then we had to measure the newspaper, and measure all the photo’s and advertisements, (in square centimeters) to see whether or not it had a large amount of pictures or advertisements. That took forever, it took me like five hours to do 3. I mean, that’s too long, it was boring and we probably did it wrong anyways as the Metro, some suckey free train newspaper, ended up being ’slightly above average’ whilst it actually is quite a suckey newspaper.

So but that’s done for now, I only need to focus on getting myself a topic for my biology essay, rewriting my English essay, reading a few chapters for biology, writing some forum entries for English, reading a 100 page story for literature, make a 8-10 minute speech for English and hoping that my literature essay will turn out to be worth more than a C+

That was the rant, sorry just had to write some stuff about stats (stats can be written backwards and then it still spells stats, so now we call in palindroomvak (meaning palindrome subject), pd is short for that. I’m beginning to hate words like: correlation, data, sample, interviewer bias, questionnaire, spss (some programme that hates people), method, theory and stuff like that. But if everything goes ok, I can finish this subject in like 2 weeks or something and if I pass it, which will probably happen as I had quite high scores for my exams, I don’t have to do M&SI anymore. So let’s hope that’ll work.

Love, Lucy