Malvern isn't that bad really...

Sitting at the Rose Banks listening to Sting, drinking vodka and cloudy lemonade with Carl

mine and Carly's weekly cinema trips

Feeling like we're in a Lynchian noir film at the Lamb with ace jazz funk band Careful Jepson

Film and game nights at Rich's

Not having to pay rent/gas/electricity/internet bills

Mad nights out with the best people at the Firefly/Conservatory/Marrs bar

Walking the dog

Skater Dans Halloween gig

I want I want

To see Up. Yeah amazing, I can't wait and Bethan said it's ace. I also demonstrated super self control skills as I could have watched it in a hotel in Toronto while I was away.

My Winnipeg. I've been wanting to watch it since about forever and it's on tv tonight, yessss :D

Adventureland. I'm willing to look past the fact that Kristen 'I can't speak' Stewart is in it.

Avatar. I well love James Cameron

To finish the Wire. I'll start watching it again tomorrow-goodbye life. Actually I also need to finish Deadwood, and The Sopranos, I'm not doing well with all these ace shows.

Complete Zelda on my DS I've had it for ages. And also GTA, I keep getting caught by the police, rubbish

Move out of Malvern and live with my friends again, I love my family, but no.

Olly to win x-factor, cutest guy ever.

To hurry up and be Christmas already, or least winter. Skiing, snow, hats, gloves, scarves, mulled wine, apple crumble and custard, mince pies, TO HAVE THE FIRE ON IN THE KITCHEN, curling up with a good book, clear skies on cold days, yay winter!

A PAID library job please, I'd be such a nice librarian, honest.

A fancy dress party, I haven't been to one for ages. Good themes I would approve of include dinosaurs or animals with a shell.

Pretty much everything from Topshop/Urban Outfitters/the amazing Malvern vintage shop

A daemon. But that's nothing new.

I also remembered this fantastic picture of Louie Walsh that Hannah took last Christmas. Amazing.

Say something, say anything

CocoRosie, seeing La and Jess, wanting to be my ultra hot hairdresser, money please, brunette? free bottles of rum and vodka, Christian Bale, strictly come dancing, up, barky puppy, stop crying every time x factor is on, CARLY PEARSON, the Marrs bar, innocent vegetable pots, free music, everyones ex's everywhere, jealousy, cinema drinking, Oscar Wilde, realisation that Helen and I actually do have the same voice, Daisy, stumble stumble stumble, best friends ever.

Werid Crushes

Michael Palin as torturer Jack Lint in Brazil. I'm pretty sure Freud would have an absolute field day...



Eli Roth in Inglourious Basterds



Derren Brown



Link




Hugh Laurie as Dr House



Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body



Alright, Megan Fox isn't reeeeally a weird crush, but she's a girl.

Someone who DIDN'T make the list is Richard Madeley, I saw someone wrote into a gossip magazine confessing undying love for him, sexy was definitely mentioned. Urggggh just wrong.

Yesterday

I made: scones
Saw: (500) days of summer
Consumed: a bowl of honey nut shreddies, an olive and feta couscous salad, a wispa gold, half a bottle of wine, 2 pints of cider, a packet of mini cheddars
Met up with: Carly and Bethan at the cinema, Rich at Olivers
Got: the volunteering job at Welland library



Overall, a pretty good day.

100%

Irrevocably, ridiculously, absurdly, hopelessly, painfully, madly, obsessively...

938 likes on Vimeo can't be wrong

Owen and Lukes amazing animation:

A Record Of Life from Owen Gatley and Luke Jinks on Vimeo.

A bit ace really. I like how everyone has been asking who the music's by when it clearly says 'music by Owen Gatley' at the end, oh well.

some more lovely illustrations by Owen:

http://www.owengatley.blogspot.com/

Or lovely illustrations by Luke:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lukejinksillustration

Good work guys :)

Birthday!

I just realised, it's one month today! Yay! Exciting! I really want a new sewing box...

http://www.cathkidston.co.uk/p-13823-cath-kidston-twin-lid-sewing-basket-spray-flowers.aspx

and I also hope my Mum buys me this:

http://www.urbanoutfitters.co.uk/Fur-Trapper-Hat-With-Pom-pom/invt/5752413520520&bklist=icat,5,shop,womens,womensaccessories,what.

Best hat ever.

London

Yesterday I went down to London to see Yas, Tara and Louise for drinks after they finished work/BVC. It was so good to see everyone again but sad that I was only seeing them for a few hours. I stayed at Yasmines on Monday night and we stayed up late over analysing everything, reminiscing and trying to remember all the absurd drunken claims we made. GO TEAM...! On Tuesday Yas went to Law School and I went to Paddington to get my train home but there was a 3 hour wait because national rail are rubbish and cancelled loads of trains on my route. Anyway I decided to buy a zone 1 ticket and go shopping, I was just about to buy a ticket when a nice lady gave her all day travelcard so I got to travel for free, yay! I then found a beauuuutiful Marc B bag which should have been £49 but for some reason one of them was only £15 :D

I wish times a million trillion I was moving out of Malvern and moving into a house with my friends in London. My plan is to befriend Derren Brown



(for its own sake, as well as a means to end, sorry Kant!) then he'll help me win the lottery



and then I'll buy an awesome penthouse flat in Canary Wharf and everyone can all move in together :D



We could also go on mega holidays all the time with the lottery money, yeah!

Cooking

Today I applied for loads of volunteering jobs in Malvern. I probably shouldn't have applied for the one at the nature reserve down the road as it involves manual labour and I will probably be zero help to anyone, but I feel obliged to do something to help with maintaining it as I take Lib there sometimes. Hopefully someone will get back to me about the Librarian job or the one at the mental health clinic, fingers crossed.

I also ordered my old AS and A level psychology textbooks off Amazon for 1p each, bargain! I'm pretty excited to get them back as we could only cover some of the topics in the book for A level and when I had them before I didn't really have time to read the rest. Yay, knowledge! :D :D And speaking of knowledge, tonight we got to go to the pub quiz at Olivers, yeah!! However, we came joint 4th out of 6, not so yeah, but everyone else was way older and wiser so it wasn't a shameful defeat.

Other notable things that happened today include:

making me and Hel the most amazing Macaroni cheese ever ever ever, for dinner. The ratio of butter to milk to cheese was perfect yumyumyum



I was so proud I even took a photo, although it looks a bit gross. Anyway, this culinary success has made me want to actually start a proper recipe book. So starting tomorrow I'm going to add good recipes to the recipe book and refine existing ones. I shall become a domestic goddess and then I'll be super a eligible kitchen queen.

I also took Lib for a walk on the hills and the weather was lovely, what was not so lovely however, was that Libby crashed some cool indie kids picnic and they were well unimpressed with me, bad times.

Upon returning from the pub quiz I rang my best friend from uni Joe and had a nice long catch up. Sadly, this has made me well miss Joe because he lives a million miles away in Eastbourne. I really really miss hanging out together at 77 and arguing about something stupid like, which was better ethics or philosophy. And I miss when we used to meet up for pre lecture drinks and then we'd have a fun lecture and then Joe would walk me home and just end up staying round till 4 morning and the sun was up already. Hopefully some day soon someone will invent a teleportation system or work out how to apparate.

Sewing

So today I brought a dress from the best shop in Worcester, Second Hand Rose, for £6. I then got home, hemmed it, added some darts and voila!





One the downside it's too hot to wear it the moment so I'll have to wait for the weather to get a bit cooler and then I can wear it with some nice boots, a scarf and my red duffle coat :)

While I fixed the dress I listened to the new Brand New on repeat and ate millions of Marks and Spencers salt and black pepper crunchy combo mix, I challenge anyone to bring me a more amazing bag of crisps.

Ch-ch-ch-ch changes

Ok, so my old blog is pretty old terrible, so I decided it's time for an update. I decided to start with my Canada holiday as my old one also started with a holiday.

So, we left Heathrow and had a pretty uneventful flight out, I watched Star Trek (again because horrible things like 'he's just not that into you' were on) and was a little bit more in love with the super cute Russian. I also started Tender is the night, which was super super good. I really liked all the psychological stuff with Nicole, F Scott Fitzgerald is ace in general. I was sad Dick and Rosemary didn't end up happy together though but I guess a happy ending wouldn't have really suited the book plus Dick went all mad and things.

When we arrived we drove from the airport to the house at Fiddler lake, which was weird because I've only ever been to the house in the ski season so everything is normally covered with snow. It was well strange to see everything green and flowery etc.. Easily the best thing about the house in the summer was the lake. Clare and I went for a walk and decided to go down to see if we could get to the lake. Turns out we have a jetty thing at the bottom of our house on the lake, it was amazing, I spent as much time as possible down there reading, listening to my ipod or thinking with my feet dangling in the water. It was doubly good because it's really secluded, I wish there was somewhere like that in Malvern where I could go and get away from everyone and everything. It was good to feel alone when my family was driving me mad. I think I might have actaully gone a bit crazy if I didn't have the chance to be on my own, being constantly surrounded by people isn't something I can hack. But when I sociable it was fun to go swimming in the lake with Helen and Clare despite being times 10 scared due to my irrational water phobia.



Anyway, We went to Tremblant (where we usually ski) on the first day we were there and walked round the top and got sunburnt. The views were stunning and everyone got snap happy. After a few days chilling at the house doing not much we set off for Toronto via 1000 Islands and Kingston.

1000 Islands was ace, as the name suggests it is comprised of lots of small islands on lake Ontario. (which I didn't believe was a lake when I saw it from the CN Tower because it's ginormous and you can't see the end of it, mental!) Lots of the little islands had enough room for a cute little house, the houses looked like something out of a Miyazaki film. We got to go on a boat cruise round some of the islands and sailed into American waters much to excitement of the Japanese tourists on the boat.

The boat tour guide told us lots of good facts about the Islands including a sad story about a rich hotel maker who carved one of the islands into a heart shape (hence it's name, heart island) and built his wife an awesome fairytale castle (Boldt castle) on it for a birthday gift. But his wife died before it was finished. The rich man was apparently so heartbroken that he never returned to island and left the castle as a 'monument of his love' I felt sorry for the husband, he must have loved his wife lots :(

After 1000 Islands we drove over to Kingston which was a real 'sleepy' town/city (I'm not sure which) where nothing really happened but there was a good old fashioned steam train that was randomly in the middle of a park.



The next day we went to Toronto which was my possibly favourite destination of the holiday. It was a really nice clean city with loads of cool indie bands playing on street corners and in every hmv we walked past (I think there must have been a music festival of sorts happening while we there). We walked round the city a bit to do some sightseeing and came across lots of cool boutiques and vintage shops, then we made our way to the CN Tower which is massive! I was pretty terrified when we got the lift with the horrid glass floor bits up to the top and experienced some horrid vertigo. Once we were out of the lift it was a bit better but you could feel the tower sway when the wind blew and I felt a bit disorientated and my ears popped lots.

The tower claimed to be the tallest in the world but I think it's a lie as I'm pretty sure there's something taller in Dubai and the information sheet that told me it was the tallest was well retro so they probably hadn't bothered to update it and were hoping no one would notice. Still, the tower is an impressive 1,815 ft (I think, you should check wikipedia to be sure though) and you could see for about a million miles. We had cocktails and dinner in the restaurant but everyone was under dressed because we didn't realise it was super posh. Anyway it was good because we didn't finish dinner till about 10 so we got to see Toronto at night from high up which was good :)



After that we walked back to where we were staying and did a bit more sightseeing as the city was still really busy and loads of things were happening. The next day we travelled to Niagara falls. The falls themselves were awesome in the true sense of the word. We were lucky because the view from our hotel room had an amazing view of the falls so I stayed in the room watching all the water fall down. At half 8 spotlights light up both the Canadian and the the American falls so we watched that from our room too and then because it was a weekend there was a firework display over the falls too which was mega and I love fireworks anyway. The next day we went down to the falls and everyone got all snap happy again. I think Hel took over a hundred photos! We walked behind the Canadian falls, went in the maid of the mist boat that takes you in front of the Canadian falls (so into the horseshoe bit), walked along with the rapids and went in a crazy sky car thing over the whirlpool. We were also provided with attractive ponchos to wear for most of the time we were there so we didn't get 100% soaked, but we got wet anyway.

The rapids were probably the most brutal part of the day, the current was ridiculously strong, 'if you fall in you die' one of the workers informed us. There was loads of facts to read about the rapids and the falls which my Dad and I liked. Apparently people used to be mental years ago because loads of them attempted stupid things like getting in a barrel, screwing the lid on and going over the edge of Niagara falls in it?! So many people died doing silly things like that but a few survived and are now in a hall of fame type thing at Niagara that has lots of stories about the stunts.

Facts I found interesting were:
The Canadian falls used to erode the rock behind them at a rate of 10 feet a year but modern technology (it didn't say what) has slowed the erosion rate to 1 foot every 10 years, cool!

1/3 of the worlds water flows down the falls
A boy (Jimmy? I can't remember) fell down the Canadian falls with nothing but a life jacket on and miraculously* survived.
The first person to barrel down the falls was a school teacher who was 60 something. She also survived and said she wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

*I say miraculously as everyone at the time thought it was a proper actual miracle and thanked God and that.

I liked the falls but I had some horrible Sartrean urges to throw myself over the edge or jump into the class 6 rapids so I was actaully feeling quite weak a lot of the time and therefore quite happy to be away from all the water.

After the falls we travelled back via Ottawa. By this point I had finished Tender is the Night, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and read almost all of Kafka's metamorphosis and other stories.

Reading Fear and Loathing for a second time was definitely a wise move. It's basically about Raoul Duke (Hunter S) and his attorney (Dr Gonzo) going round Las Vegas completely twisted on mescaline and god knows what else, getting up to various shenanigans and racking up massive hotel room bills. I particularly liked the parts when Dr Gonzo was 'offering' a car full of innocent people heroin and also when he gets stuck on one of those revolving floors that you get at Alton Towers on the log flume. It makes me upset knowing that Hunter S is dead though because the book feels so alive. as characters go the attorney is one of my all time favourites, he has all the best scenes and is generally pretty damn cool. I really hope that in real life he is just as cool.

Metamorphosis was also brilliant but probably in the most different way possible. Its about Gegor, a guy who goes to work to make money for his family who wakes up one day to discover that he has been morphed into a giant cockroach insect thing. To start with I was mostly really grossed out by the description of the transformation and Gergors new insect legs made me feel horrible and weak. But as the story goes on it becomes less about the physical metamorphosis and more a study of alienation and loneliness. I would 100% recommend Metamorphosis to anyone, it's really short and took about an hour to read so even if you hate it it's not much time 'wasted'. I can see why everyone raves about Kafka, Metamorphosis really is one of the best things I've read in while.

So after I finished most of Kafka (I still have another short story to read) I decided to move onto Wuthering Heights which I worried was going to be a horrid girly romance novel, I am pleased to say that it was not. So anyway I was reading Wuthering Heights on the way back from Niagara, and after a 6 hour drive we stopped in Ottawa where we went for a boat cruise on the Ontario (I think) river. Dad informed us that he was going to be quizzing us on what we remembered from the tour guide's speech thing. Possibly this was to make sure everyone listened and didn't just sit around staring at the scenery. As a result I am now quite informed on this river (despite not being sure on the name)

interesting facts included:

There is more water in the Ontario river that there is in all of the English rivers combined.

The first Canadian prime minister was John A MacDonald in 1867

1867 was also the year the Canadian rowing club was established

The owner of the Laurier hotel decided that he wanted all the furniture for his hotel from Europe. Sadly, he got the Titanic back home so he and all his furniture are now at the bottom of the Atlantic. Legend has it he haunts the 4th floor of the Laurier.
The peace tower is the highest building in Ottawa, this is because the peace tower is the most important building in Ottawa so you aren't allowed to build anything taller than it.

After we left Ottawa we made our way back 'home' to Fiddler lake for the last two days. On the first day we decided to go back to Tremblant, but instead of getting the cable car up we walked. It was pretty much the most epic walk ever. It involved scrambling up rock faces, being way too hot because it was Canadian summer and about a million degrees, jumping and leaping over river type things, listening to Clare whine, being very very afraid of running into bears, spotting deer, climbing up tree roots, watching Clare celebrate when we were half way up because she thought it was the top, watching Clare have a huge stress because we were only half way up and being massively dehydrated because no one brought any water. 2 and a half hours and 2871 ft later and we made it to the top, or at least Helen and I did. Mum walked ahead by about ten minuets so she could buy water for Clare and bring it back down to her. Dad stayed behind with Clare and they took another half hour. By the time you get near the top you have to walk a black run and Clare had pretty much given up by then. When we got to the top she said she wished we had never come, haha. Everyone else loved it :D

We got the cable car back down and went to Clares favourite restaurant on the mountain, Caseys. Afterwards Helen and I brought matching ra-tastic 'sweat pants' which are probably the comfiest things I have ever worn ever. And then we went home.

The last day involved everyone going to the rec center to play air hockey, but by this point I had had far too much family time so I stayed down by the lake. And then we drove to the airport for an awful journey home involving zero sleep, Angles and Daemons (pretty terrrible) Clare and I being sick and Clare being a general idiot and annoying everyone.