My 21st birthday

A couple of months ago (yeah, that's how far behind I am with blogging!) I turned 21.
I didn't go all out like a lot of people do for their 21sts,  I decided to just have a quiet day then og out for a meal with some friends in the evening.

A few photos from the day...

 

A really sweet hamper that arrived in the post from my mum, containing a bottle of rosé, some chocolates and a delicious chocolate cake.

The cake from my hamper which I may or may not have eaten all by myself...

Balloooooons in the restaurant.

Tasty food. I took this with the 'food' setting on my new camera that I got for my birthday. I didn't even know cameras had food settings, you can even change the colour tone of the picture depending on the tone of your food haha.

More cake.

Even more cake. Om nom nom.

I had a really good day, and it was nice to be able to relax and not worry about having to do all the million and one other things I've had to do since I got back to uni in mid-August.

My main present was a nice fancy camera with a good zoom - when I went to Cyprus I was disappointed that the camera I had at the time didn't have a big enough zoom to take pictures of the animals that were further away, so a camera got added to the top of my wish list so I can get some amazing pictures on my upcoming trip to South Africa!

It's strange thinking I'm 21 now and "in my twenties", and there's officially no way I can get away with being classed as a child for anything any more :(. I definitely don't feel like a proper "grown up" yet though!

My first craft fair!

Last weekend I did my very first craft fair!

The Market House in St Austell was hosting the MAKE Christmas Fair, and I had a table which I shared with my friend Lizzy. Even though we shared it was pretty expensive (£15 for each of us) so I was really worried that I wouldn’t sell anything and I would’ve just wasted a load of money.

Before the fair I got busy making lots of bits and pieces to sell – I ended up taking necklaces, earrings, coasters and bowls made from recycled magazines, rings, covered notebooks, a reversible tote bag and lavender bag.

Steve came up with me and helped me set up. I was really glad I had an extra pair of strong hands to help me carry my stuff! :P. He stayed for the first hour or so but then I think he got a bit bored and felt out of place being the only young guy in amongst a bunch of women haha.

The day started off pretty slowly – a steady stream of people were coming in and most of them looked at my stuff, but most of them just carried on walking past, not really looking interested at all. A few people stopped at my stall long enough to have a closer look, and I got quite a few compliments on my necklaces, but no one looked like they were going to buy anything. Lizzy made the first 2 sales, both before 1pm (the halfway point of the fair), and I was feeling slightly disheartened at this point as obviously no one thought my stuff was good enough to buy.

A couple of young girls came over and looked at my stuff for quite a while, then disappeared, then came back and asked how much a necklace was before disappearing again. As the hall was freezing I decided to nip out and grab a hot chocolate, and by the time I came back I had made a sale! Trust me to miss my first ever sale haha. But I was really pleased, and felt that the day’s target had been met.

The next target became selling 2 items, which I did just half an hour later when someone came and bought a set of 4 of my coasters, bringing the day’s total to £12.50. So the next target became covering the cost of the table...

Later on that afternoon I sold an individual coaster, bringing me to £14.50, just 50p short of my target! Luckily I managed to sell a bowl and a ring before the end of the fair, bringing my grand total to £21. So not only did I sell something and cover the cost of my table, I even managed to make a profit. Mega chuffed right there.

Some photos from the day:

I had a really good day (obviously made a lot better by the fact I made a profit haha) and definitely want to do another fair. Maybe not the same one if the price stayed the same, but I’d definitely do another cheaper one. It’s also spurred me on to take the plunge and become self employed so I can open an Etsy shop and start selling properly, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a long time but have felt completely daunted by. If anyone reads this... do you think I should go for it? And the question I’ve been stuck on for a long time... what should I call my shop?

(Also as I didn't sell loads I have a lot of this stuff left over, so if you see anything you'd like to buy then let me know :P)

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...

An unexpected gift

About 3 weeks ago I applied to take part in a cetacean research project up in Scotland. I applied for one of five grants of £1,000 towards the costs of taking part in the project from a company that owns the magazine New Scientist, and New Scientist advertised the grants. If I had been successful, I would have gone up to a little village near Aberdeen for a week in mid-September to take part in an ongoing research and rescue project on the whales and dolphins that live in the area. If I had been successful I would’ve heard at the end of August, but I heard nothing so (although I was disappointed) I forgot about it. Until now...

Something dropped through the letterbox on Monday morning, so I wandered downstairs to see what it was. I had been expecting something from my mum, but this was a thick jiffy bag with a book inside. I hadn’t ordered a book, so had a slight panic that I’d accidentally spent yet more money buying something I didn’t need (and I definitely didn’t need it if I’d forgotten all about it...). But I got a really nice surprise when I opened the envelope and pulled out a little note on New Scientist headed paper along with the book. So the disappointment of not getting a place on the project was made up by getting a nice new book and knowing that I was good enough to be shortlisted, and it was very kind of New Scientist to send me something even though I wasn’t successful.

Day = made.

Izzy and Steve's weekend away

Instead of buying Steve a present for his birthday back in May, I promised I would pay for a nice weekend away somewhere for us both. We decided to go on Saturday 27th and Sunday 29th August, which was probably a bit silly as the bank holiday weekend probably made everything more expensive, but it was my first weekend of freedom after exams and I desperately needed to get away and unwind, so we just decided to go for it.

I let Steve plan the whole thing, so I had no idea where we were going until we got there. All I knew is that we were getting a bus, then another bus, then another bus, then a boat, then walking about 8 miles. So that could mean we were going absolutely anywhere...

We made an early 7.45am start on Saturday morning, stopping off at Tesco for some breakfast then walking round to the Moor to get on our first bus of the day, which I found out at that point was taking us to Truro.

About 45 minutes later we arrived in Truro and hopped on our next bus to St Austell.
When we got to St Austell about 45 minutes later, we had a 40ish minute wait for our next bus, so we wandered down into the town and had a look around. As I somehow always manage to do, I spied some craft shops that I’ll have to go back and visit sometime soon haha. Our next bus was only a short 10 minutes or so, and it was to take us round to Mevagissey. The views along the road out across St Austell Bay were really pretty, but by the time I managed to get the camera out and turn it on we’d gone past the clear views so all I managed to get was a photo of some bushes haha.

We had time for a quick wander through Mevagissey before walking down to the harbour to get the boat, which was going to take us round to Fowey (which I’ve now learned is pronounced “Foy”, not “Fow-ey” as I’ve always pronounced it, and how the spelling of it makes it look like it should be pronounced!).

The boat ride was lovely and smooth (which I was really glad of as I end up feeling really queasy on bumpy boats), and we got some lovely views on our 40 minute journey.
When we arrived in Fowey we had a quick look round then stopped for tasty crab sandwiches in a cute little café. After another little wander round while we digested our lunch, we headed out of town and along the coast path to start the walking section of our journey.
Although the sun we’d had earlier in the day disappeared it still stayed pretty warm, and it was actually quite busy along the coast path. The first half of the walk was a lot of up and down hills, so being as unfit as I am I got worn out pretty quickly, but once we got to Par the rest of the walk was pretty much flat and went pretty quickly.
At one point “nature called” so I went round a corner into what I thought was a deserted field, as you do, and it was just my luck that as I was half way through an old man walked slowly over the hill towards me. It was clearly obvious what I was doing, but I couldn’t exactly stand up and try to pretend that I was doing something else. Major cringe. What then made matters worse was the fact that the man then decided to stop and talk to Steve, so I had to just stand around in the field waiting until he’d gone. I didn’t feel so bad when the man eventually left and Steve told me that the man had only started talking to him because he’d accidentally said “Hello sexy” to the man thinking it was me coming out of the field :p

At about 5.30pm we arrived at our hotel in Carlyon Bay. It was really posh, and there we were with messy hair, sweaty from the walk and slightly muddy. We looked just a tad out of place, the people at reception looked as if they’d never had walkers turn up at their hotel before haha. We checked in, and when we made our reservation for dinner the receptionist said she’d make sure we got a seat by the window. Talk about service! Haha.
Our room was amazing. Lovely big bed, massive TV on the wall, comfy sofa, big fancy bathroom, and our own balcony with chairs and sun loungers. We realised later on that we must’ve been given the wedding suite (which would explain the seat by the window at dinner), and our suspicions were added to by the fact that all the hotel staff who served us seemed to know which room we were in even if we’d never seen them before haha. We reckon they thought that either we’d just got engaged or Steve was going to propose to me :p.
After having showers and getting changed into non-walking clothes we headed down for dinner. I forgot to take photos of my food, but I had a trio of smoked fish (which I think were haddock, trout and salmon) to start, chicken with spring onion mash, root vegetable pureé and green beans with butter and pepper for my main, and lemon tart for dessert. I was so full afterwards, but it was all so delicious and really well presented.
In the morning I had a tasty full English, then we set out to make our way home via a stop in Charlestown. Charlestown is quite small, but it was packed with people. We round the Shipwreck and Heritage Centre, which had lots of interesting information and artefacts from shipwrecks, then a random section about natural gas in the middle which was slightly odd. We had fun being kinds and playing on the remote control boats though haha.
Afterwards we went on board the tall ship docked in the harbour which has been used as a set for lots of films and TV programs including Mansfield Park, the new Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, Doctor Who and loads more.
There was a slightly random comedy sketch going on next to the ship with a bunch of people dressed up as pirates acting out an execution. I don’t know if there was really a point to it, but if there was neither of us got it, and the acting was quite bad and the costumes were a bit rubbish.

After a bite of lunch we got on a bus back to St Austell (which was only a couple of miles up the road, all of our travelling the day before had taken us in a big circle!), then got a train back to Falmouth.

I had such a lovely weekend, and it was a nice reward after the stress of exams. I think I could easily get used to staying in posh hotels, but sadly my budget won’t allow it :P

The time that giving blood went wrong

Back at the end of June before I moved into my new student house I decided slightly impulsively to go and give blood. I'd already decided to wait until I'd come home to do it, but I was in town and saw the blood vans outside the church and thought "Hey, why not go and give now?"

Lesson 1: never do any vaguely medical things involving yourself and sharp objects on a whim.

So I went in, got my appointment, then went down to Tesco to get something to eat and drink.
I went back up 10 minutes before my appointment to fill out the form, and didn't have to wait very long before I was called over to go and have my finger prick test. I thought I had been all clever by already checking that I was still able to donate after having glandular fever in May, but my pleased-with-myself feeling didn't last very long, as the conversation with the nurse checking my form went something like this:

Nurse: "Have you been ill recently?"
Me: "I had glandular fever at the beginning of May, but I got better within a week *still feeling pleased with self*"
Nurse: "Did you take any medication or antibiotics while you were ill?"
Me: "Oh... um, yeah"
Nurse: "Ok, I'll just change this 'No' to a 'Yes' then"
Me: "Oh, ok... *pleased-with-self feeling fading slightly*"
Nurse: And have you been abroad within the last 6 months?"
Me: "No... ah actually I went to Cyprus for a week in April, a couple of weeks before I got ill..."
Nurse: "Right, I'll need to change another answer on your form then. Wait there while I go and check this is ok."
Me: *pleased-with-self feeling entirely gone, replaced with complete-idiot-who-can't-read-a-form-and-can't-remember-what-happened-2-months-ago feeling*

Lesson 2: Even if you think you've read the form, read it again. And again. And probably once more for good measure.

Lesson 3: Don't try and be clever.

Luckily all was ok, and my trip to Cyprus and course of antibiotics weren't likely to make my blood kill people, so I had my finger prick test done and went to wait for a free bed. I didn't have to wait long for a bed either, so compared to how long I waited for the whole thing last time I felt like this was my lucky day.

Lesson 4: Don't let short wait times fool you into thinking luck is on your side.

I hopped up on the bed and put my arm on the arm support thing, had my arm cleaned by the nurse (who was the guy who from the same town as me who did my finger prick test last time). He put the tourniquet round my arm and then tapped about on it a bit trying to find a vein. And he kept tapping. And tapping. And tapping. I did start to wonder why he was tapping to much, but I just kinda thought "Meh, whatever" and let my mind wander and let him get on with it.

Lesson 5: Too much tapping = bad.

Lesson 6: PAY ATTENTION.

Eventually he decided to go for it with the needle. I winced a bit and he asked (with, looking back on it, a slightly worried tone to his voice) if it hurt more than usual, but as I'd only done it once before and the needle is a bigger than the needle used for a vaccination or a blood test, I just passed it off as me not being used to it and thought the pain would stop in a second... but it didn't. The "sharp scratch" carried on, and seemed to be getting worse. Then he said "It's doing weird things" and started calling other, more senior, nurses over to look, then lifting up the dressing covering my elbow to show them, but lifting the dressing from the side that wasn't facing me so I couldn't see what was going on. They were looking a bit worried too, so this was when I started to panic. The needle had to come out, and I didn't really want to ask what he'd done but it was obviously not good. He was applying quite a lot of pressure to my arm, and I was trying to stop my mind from venturing into ridiculous "OMG CATASTOPHIC BLEEDING FROM MY VEINSSSSSS!" type scenarios as I got over the panic...
I was then given options to give up on this donation entirely, get a different nurse to put the next needle in in my other arm, or let him try again. Being the fool that I am for not wanting to offend people, I said it was fine for him to try again.

Lesson 7: If someone has already damaged you once, don't let them have a second attempt.

This time everything went as it should, and my donation time was a whole 2 minutes quicker than my last one (this one was 5 minutes 30ish seconds, the last one was 7 minutes and 20ish seconds). I got my keyring (woo!) saying what blood group I am, and a nice, reassuring, "it might look horrific and hurt you quite a bit but IT'S ALL OK pleasedon'tsueus" leaflet on bruising. I was told not to take my plasters off for 6 hours and not to do any heavy lifting for a day (Lesson 8: If you have to move house in a couple of days, don't risk giving blood in case both your arms are put out-of-action for lifting stuff). Then I waddled over to the refreshments table trying to carry my stuff with my two punctured arms that now refused to bend at the elbow because of the whopping great plasters (and I was too scared to bend them anyway in case of MOAR BLEEDING). I nommed my free biscuits and orange squash and made a hasty exit.

Later that evening, out of curiosity I ran my fingers over the plaster on my left arm (the failed one) and oh my god it hurt. I hadn't expected it to be anywhere near that painful from just a light touch, but oh how wrong I was. My curiosity then went into overdrive wondering what horrors awaited me when I took the plaster off.
When I woke up the next morning, I couldn't wait until I had a shower to soften the plaster before taking it off, so I faced the pain (those plasters are surprisingly painful to take off, they stick like superglue) and was met with this...
I was genuinely shocked at how big and dark red it was, as I was expecting the sort of bruise you get when you bang into something, not a pool of blood under my skin that was raised enough that I could feel it if I ran my finger over it. My other arm was also bruised too (although it was the kind of small, normal looking bruise I was expecting) (see Lesson 7 again. He obviously is not very good at this as he managed to fail twice in a row, so don't let him near your arm again).
The original bruise/blood blister on my right arm kept spreading, meaning the bruise got bigger and bigger until it was about the size of the bottom of a pint glass...

After about 2 weeks of arm pain and being very self conscious of the massive bruises making me look like a druggy, I still had these lingering reminders...

Although this wasn't the best experience of giving blood, it's still not enough to prevent me from donating again. The failure rate is really low, and there's always a chance that for someone their donation will go wrong, and I was just unlucky because it happened to be me. If everyone decided not to donate because of the fear of "what if it's my donation goes wrong?", there would be no blood stocks and no blood available to those who need transfusions to stay alive. The three weeks of weakening pain and slight annoyance at the appearance of the bruises that this gave me are nothing compared to someone's life that could be lost if the blood they needed wasn't there (not to mention the impact it would have on the people close to the person who unfortunately passed away). There's always a need for blood, and there's always a call for donors to make sure the necessary stocks are maintained, so I'll definitely be going to donate again once my 16-week gap between donations is up.

For anyone reading this who hasn't donated (recently or ever), I urge to you go and donate. There are regular sessions all over the country so you don't have to travel miles or wait forever for a session, and it's such a satisfying feeling to know you've potentially saved someone's life :)

It's decided!

I've had itchy feet for a while and am desperate to go travelling, and I'd pretty much decided that once I've graduated I'm going to go on a really long holiday so I can get out and see the world. The only problem I've had this far though is deciding where to go.
Earlier I text Steve to ask him if he would like to be my travel buddy (which, thankfully, he said yes to. I wasn't really liking the prospect of going alone!), and he suggested "somewhere in Europe". I instantly took a like to this idea, but thought... why go to one place in Europe when we can get a train pass and go to lots of places in Europe!

Image from here

And so the year of obsessive planning, idea-gathering and money-saving begins! I'm ridiculously excited about this trip now, and it's going to be the perfect way to celebrate finishing education!

Recent crafting

The final of The Apprentice is tonight, and the Big Cross Stitch is nowhere near finished. Ooops. I think I got as far as week 3 or 4, then my crafting time all but disappeared, and what little crafting time I did have I filled by making stuff for the recent Owl Swap over on Craftster.

Here's what I made for my partner:

A hand-carved owl stamp:

A little lavender bag with a cross stitch owl design on the front:
A covered hardback sketchbook with a ribbon page marker:
And the item I'm most proud of, knitted owl fingerless gloves:These took me forever: first I had to find a yarn in the right weight that didn't contain any animal fibres as my partner is allergic to them (which was a lot harder than it sounds, I thought it would be easy to find a cotton or even an acrylic yarn, but I hunted high and low before I found this one!), then I knitted one glove on the size kneedles suggested in the pattern only to find it was really small (I know, I should've knitted a swatch to check gauge first but I always skip this part...), then I had problems with the DPNs creating ladders up the palm of the glove. But I managed it, and they turned out really well :). And I even managed to teach myself how to cable with very few problems, woo :D

The Big Cross Stitch is still in my to-do list, but unfortunately it looks like it'll have to wait until exams are over as I'm going to be really busy for the next month doing near enough non-stop revision. Once exams are over though I've got a vague idea buzzing around in my head of hopping on a train and going somewhere "up North" for a weekend, partly so I can make a start on crossing off the "visit 5 places north of London" task on my list, partly because I'm fed up of being unable to do things that I want to do because one thing or another gets in the way, and partly because I want to get out and see the world, and what better place to start than with the little island that I've lived on for almost 21 years and hardly seen any of. So I should have plenty of stitching time of the train to wherever I end up going, but it's still going to take me a very long time to complete it as it takes a lot longer than I thought!

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