The end of the saga of getting internet

So, what’s happened in the saga of the internet at Bodmon Cottage (as named by my housemates, I don’t quite understand...) since my last post?

TalkTalk sent another engineer round who turned up and said that he couldn’t put the phone line in as the scaffolding wasn’t down yet. This was the problem 5 weeks beforehand, and it was sorted when the landlord said we could just put the phoneline on the corner of the house next door and run it across to our, which happened 2 weeks before. The phone line was in, we had the modem, we just needed them to make the phone line work... except they couldn’t because there was no dial tone and apparently there was a fault underneath the telegraph pole that they needed to send someone else out to fix. They said someone would be round on Saturday, but they didn’t know if it would be the next Saturday coming or the Saturday that had just been. Nightmare.

I went to Devon the weekend after this happened, and decided I’d had enough so gave in and bought a wireless internet dongle to use while I was there and when I got home. Except the absolutely typical thing happened, and I got home on Sunday afternoon only for someone to come round on Monday evening and make the internet work. Slightly annoying after I’d just paid £30 for the dongle, but hey ho.

So, exactly 11 weeks after we lost internet, we got it again. I never would have imagined how much it would impact my life, through little things having to plan my life around when I could get internet so I could send emails or make sure I’d downloaded all the papers I needed for lectures. And as sad as it sounds, after I’d watched through all my DVDs and endless episodes of Monty Python and read a couple of books I started getting slightly bored of not being able to relax and browse the internet in the evenings.

But now everything’s back to normal, and I’m so glad because it makes everything so much easier, and if I’d been stuck with no internet next term would have been a nightmare!

I've got a lot more posts planned soon - I miss having the freedom of being able to post when I want so I'm going to try and make up for that!

Internetless

About 6 weeks ago, I came home after being at Steves for a few days to find that the internet in my house (which I may or may not have been borrowing from the uni building next door...) was no longer working.

I spoke to the uni IT people asking when it would be working again, and they told me it wouldn't be. Great. But other than this meaning I would have to pay for internet, I didn't really have a problem with it and thought I could sort out a connection in the house within a couple of days.

I had a look round the house looking for the phone line points and found none. So I phoned my landlord... who said there is no phone line in the house. I'm sorry, what? Was this house built in the dark ages? Who doesn't even have a phone line these days?!

But my landlord said she would sort it, and she came round a couple of days later saying she'd sorted out the phone line and the internet, and an engineer would be round in about 3 weeks to sort it out. This was a bit rubbish, considering it had already been 2 weeks without internet by this point, but I assumed it would all get sorted on that date.

The date (on Monday) came and went, with no sign of the engineer. The internet service provider told us nothing and said someone would come round the next morning.

Tuesday morning came and went too with no sign of an engineer. We phoned the service provider who fed us some bullshit about it being BT's fault, not theres, and it would be 3 to 5 working days before they even looked at our case, then up to another 2 weeks before the phone line was installed. Cue me going into a rage. This rage was made worse by a BT engineer pulling up in our driveway... but not for us, for a house at the top of the drive. Arrgghhh.

But on Wednesday, an engineer turned up to install the phone line. Slightly odd. But as some scaffolding had gone up on the building next door (on Tuesday, after the engineer was originally due to come) it would be difficult to put the phone line in directly to our house so it would have to be attached to the house next door. This shouldn't have been a problem, as our landlord owns the house next door too, but I couldn't get hold of my landlord to find out if this was ok. So I had to say bye bye to the engineer and bye bye to the prospect of getting internet again :(

I heard back from my landlord yesterday who said it was fine to put it on the house next door, but when I rang the service provider they said the earliest someone could come round is the 28th, another 2 weeks away. By that point we will have been internetless for almost 8 weeks. Bleh.

Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I lived in a shed haha.
Bring on the 28th when I can finally use the internet in bed again...

The trials of a student house

I've finally moved out of the nightmare that was my 2nd year student house. And about time too.

In the past 9 months I have discovered...

• that people who are meant to be adults and capable of looking after themselves can be unbelievably lazy
• that people will come up with absolutely any excuse to avoid doing housework. For example, saying "None of the washing up is mine", even though there's a knife covered in paté lying face down on the work top, and a plate on the side that's also covered in paté, when they're the only person in the house that buys it...
• that people are incapable of moving themselves 2 metres to put rubbish in the bin, so they'll just leave it on the nearest available surface
• that wiping out spilled food in the microwave apparently doesn't matter
• ...neither does wiping up spilled food from the worktop
  
• ... and neither does scrubbing the toilet (the upstairs toilet, which is already brown, was a completely different shade of brown after I first gave it a good scrubbing...)
• that no one will think to empty the bin until it is literally overflowing onto the floor (if you can't close the lid that doesn't matter and it's still acceptable)
• when people get drunk they lose all regard for other housemates who might be trying to sleep (this even extends to knocking on their door and waking them up at 4am just to tell them that ohmigawddd you're so drunkkk...)
• arguments can, and will, happen over absolutely everything
• at least one of these arguments will end in something being set on fire
• when a chicken breast is left in the fridge for long enough, it will start to liquefy
• apparently it's normal to take hour-long showers twice a day with really loud music blaring, and that the second shower of the day happens at midnight

There's probably more things that I could list, but I'd rather just forget the whole experience now and hope that next year will be a lot better!

My new house is pretty nice...


Please excuse the mess in my room, I hadn't finished unpacking when these photos were taken.
The photos of my room don't show how big it is... it's maybe one and a half times the size of my room at home, and probably about 3 times the size of my room in the last house. Definitely worth the £110 extra a month I'll be paying, and I'll definitely have a much better year now that I've got a bigger space for myself :D

Times are changing

Things that have happened in the past couple of months:

• I spent my entire Christmas holiday doing near enough non-stop revision. It was so hard and depressing, and I got to the point in the last week before exams where I really felt like I couldn't go on any more - picking up notes and books was a huge struggle, and even things like buying food and eating seemed like too big a task. But I got through it, just, and even though I completely missed the point of the question in one exam I still managed to pass and get a 2:1 or a first in all my modules. I got 70% in Biodiversity and Conservation ( a mark significantly boosted by using the example of how Australia and New Zealand keep their biodiversity high by strictly controlling animal/plant imports... which I learnt about on Nothing To Declare or some other program on Sky 3), 88% in Stats, 61% in Development and Diversity, and 60% in Functional Animal Ecology (which I was convinced I was going to fail because I couldn't keep the information in my head, I had no outside reading and I missed the point of the question. Yet I got credit for "creative use of examples", so I basically passed an exam based on the bullshit I came out with. Win.)

• Chris and I broke up. It's been a while coming I think, certainly from my point of view, as I think the distance and the fact that we lead different lives now was making everything far too difficult. I don't really know if I feel happier now, but I'm trying to pick myself up and hopefully I'm making some progress.
  

• Still battling on with the City & Guilds 7303 course. I'm doing my micro-teach (half an hour mini lesson) next week and I'm rather nervous, especially as we have to be videoed...

• I'm cramming yet more into my schedule by doing the St John PTA course. If I pass the assessment next weekend I'll get to use ambulance equipment and medical gases, yay :)

• House for next year is sorted. I'm living with Matt and Hugh, and my new room is probably at least twice the size of my current room, and it's got 2 big windows. Only a single bed mind, but it's a small price to pay for having so much extra space and I'm not really too bothered by it. It'll be nice to be able to spread my stuff out again and not constantly feel crammed in. Plus mildew's started creeping its way into my room (must've started at some point over Christmas) which is absolutely gross, and it makes the small bit of space I have even less because I have to make sure nothing's touching the front wall or it'll go mouldy :\
  

• I'm still progressing with my list of 101 things in 1001 days and I'm getting there... slowly. I'll post updates of my progress in the next couple of days.

The past 2 months don't really seem like that long when everything's written out, but it feels like they've dragged on foreverrrr. I really want it to be summer so I can get out and do things on warm days, and not have to worry about uni work!

The Catch-Up Part 3: New uni house

After months of grief and arguments and waiting, I finally moved into my new student house in mid-September.

(I tried to be clever and failed... my room is really hard to photograph so this makes it look a lot bigger than it actually is!)

The house is... tolerable. There's mildewy bits all over the place, the upstairs bathroom suite is brown (eww), and we're right on a road so I get all the street and traffic noise. It's also never clean and always noisy, but you get that in every single student house so this one doesn't really stick out.
My room is tiny so I can't have as much stuff as I would like and it's really hard to keep tidy, but smallness means cheap rent so I can deal with it. Plus I'm not finding not having all my stuff here as bad as I thought I would - hopefully this will encourage me to de-clutter when I get home haha.

On the plus side, I do have a lovely view over the River Fal estuary, so I can sit on my bed with my laptop and look out at the boats.

(the other side of the view from my window... not quite so pretty haha)

I've only been back a little over 2 weeks, and in that time tensions within the house have been gradually building up. Now all 6 of us are back in the house though things have been building up even further, and today it all kicked off and at one point I had a door slammed in my face when I asked for help to take the recycling to the nearest collection point because we missed the collection from the house last week (it's collected fortnightly) and we'd got to the point where it was overflowing.
Hopefully we'll all at least manage to at least be civil to each other, because another 9 months of this will drive me insane...

Om nom nom

The St John pizza eating contest today was quite a success. 10 people took part, and we raised £65.20 (which goes 10% of the way to clearing our £600-odd debt... I only found out it was this much today, I'd previously believed it was only £100-odd. We've got a LOT of fundraising to do). Probably not the best message for first aiders to give out ("Come and frantically stuff your face with pizza until you puke, woo!"), but £2 for a large pizza is a bargain most students won't pass up, and we managed to get some much needed funds for our unit in the process.
It was so funny, and at the same time rather disgusting, watching the different ways people were coming up with to cram the pizza into their faces. Folding it up like a sandwich, stacking slices on top of each other, washing it down with water (without much chewing, eww), dipping it in water
first...
The fastest time was about 4 minutes and 10 seconds I think, and the longest was about 15 minutes and I think a couple of people still failed to finish. One guy looked like he was going to be sick, he was all shaky and pale sat there with a sick bowl in front of him. Lovely.

ETA: I got the role of Treasurer in our SJA unit! All the other newly elected committee members are shadowing the person who is currently doing their role, which is what I would be doing under normal circumstances, but I've been thrown in at the deep end and have taken over straight away as the treasurer before me has left uni. Eep! It doesn't look like as mammoth and complicated a task as I thought it did, but it's still going to take a bit of time to get my head round it. Even so, I'm looking forward to it and it should be good fun.

Anyway, on to a more pleasant topic...

Next year's house is sorted... I hope. I say "I hope" because people could still change their minds, but hopefully that won't happen and we'll just be able to get on with it.
After very nearly 2 weeks of "discussions" and bad feeling we've all managed to come to an agreement. I've also decided that unless next year is amazing I'll be living by myself or with fewer and different people next year, as we don't seem to work well as a group and I don't want the stresses we've already had over this house to interfere with my final year work.

In other news, I'm crocheting myself some wrist warmers using this pattern. I'm very new to crochet, but these are turning out pretty nicely. I somehow managed to lose a few stitches at one end of the first one so its a bit lop sided, but when I sew it into a tube to finish it hopefully it won't be too noticeable. Pictures will be posted upon completion!

My first attempt at embroidery

Ta-daaa! *is pleased with self*

I think it turned out pretty well, considering I've never tried anything like this before. I used what I think are pretty basic stitches so it was relatively easy, and the pattern was made up of nice straight lines so I didn't have to worry about detail work.

Stitches I used:

• cherry stem: couching
• cherry: backstitch for the outline, satin stitch to fill it in
• outline of the frosting: stem stitch for the top and 'scalloping chain' (as it's called in the Sublime Stitching book) or 'lazy daisy' stitch for the bottom (I'm not sure which it's actually called, can't seem to find the right answer with my limited knowledge at the moment. Anyone with more experience care to enlighten me?)
• sprinkles: French knots
• case: split stitch

I've found some pretty cool patterns for birds, so I might do a couple to use as decorations in my room next year.

Speaking of next year's house, we've got our second look round tomorrow. It clashes with yet another thing on my timetable - the St John meeting tomorrow evening. It's kinda important that I go, because it's the committee elections and I'm running for Treasurer (I know I'm the only person running, but still...), and we may possibly miss radio training for the UCAS fair duty on Wednesday. Arghhh, there's always something getting in the way of this house stuff. I just want contracts to be signed and for us to move in so that it's all sorted. But before that we have to decide who's having which room, which isn't going to end well...

Wish me luck, I think I'm going to need it!