Sorry
I'm really really sorry that I didn't update today, I really wanted to, but it's so late already that I must go to bed now. I'll try to write something tomorrow. I'm fine, I did an exam last night and today I made my first all-knotted-twine-rosary (instead of going to the library to study)
Talk to you soon!
Yesterday, Today, GW, SL
Here’s a short update from me. Yesterday I worked and nothing too special happened. I did get myself a great take-out dinner. I was in the train and I suddenly thought that I could get this dinner. It’s a Surinam meal called ‘roti’. It’s not that expensive where I bought it, so that’s why I went and got it. I was really happy with it. I ate my dinner while I watched the ‘Spongebob Squarepants Movie’. That felt really good.
Today I went to church in the morning. I thought it was going to be really quiet, but it wasn’t that bad. The priest of the Spanish part of our church did the sermon today, and it was really good. Today was Ascension Day, at least here in the Netherlands it was. The priest talked about Jesus having been on Earth to experience what it was like to be human and to experience that all. I never really realized that until now.
This afternoon I studied some of my grammar. I didn’t do enough, but I did something at least. Tonight I played Guild Wars. I am now lvl 7 and I entered the Post-searing part. That means that I left the tutorial areas. I only don’t really know what to do now. After that I played some Second Life. I found the Library and I visited some churches. And now I have to hurry to go to bed, because I have to work again tomorrow.
No Housewife, No Student
Today wasn’t really that productive. I figured out two things: I don’t want to be a housewife and I don’t want to be a student. The main problem is that I am a little of both, and I am a working woman as well.
My Pilates class didn’t go through this morning, because my teacher had to do another lesson at the same hour as my class whose teacher was ill. I was invited to go to that class, which was a sort of Steps/Aerobics class, but I didn’t want to go to that class, so I stayed at home in bed. Not that I was really rested, because I woke up at 6 am, when I had to go to the toilet, I woke up at 7 am, because Martijn had to leave for work, I woke up at 8 am when the phone rang that my class was cancelled, I woke up at 10 am when my alarm clock went off and I finally woke up and got out of bed at 11 am.
I spent most of the afternoon on editing my essay. I added all the quotes and I changed some parts of the text where the sentences were strange or they just didn’t make sense. Then I took a shower, I cleaned the shower and I went to do my groceries. I got all the groceries fine, except for the chicken. Now, this is really bad, but I always buy the chicken which is already cut in pieces, because I really hate having to cut the chicken myself. But now, they didn’t have that, so I had to cut it myself. That is something I despise. When I got home, I made a bread so that Martijn will also have bread tomorrow and after that I washed the dishes, something else I despise. Then Martijn got home from work, so that the food wasn’t ready when he came home as I had planned. Then I made the dinner and I burnt stuff and it just all went wrong. I didn’t even really like the dinner I had made, since it was a new recipe I tried, but it was OK.
Then after dinner, and after watching Law and Order, I got back to my essay. I still had to make it in MLA style. I got really frustrated and even cried because I was so fed up with everything. Martijn has an exam tomorrow, and he was just lying in bed, watching television, and all he had done today was read through his books in the train. I just wish my study would be like that and that I could be relaxed about it. Finally I finished my essay, with the help of Martijn. I just hope so much that it’ll be a 6 so that I won’t have to do the entire course again. But I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for that. And tomorrow, there’s work as always.
Pastry, Results, Exams
Yup, I lived through today. I wasn’t too sure I would, not when I finished updating my blog and when I went to bed, I got really nauseous. I eventually fell asleep, but I was still feeling bad when I woke up. I did go to work, because this usually goes away after a while, and it did. I even had some pastry at work because it’s my boss’ birthday today. I don’t even know how old he got. Somewhere round 68 or 69 I guess.
I got an e-mail from my teacher with the grades of my presentation about Chomsky and of an essay I wrote. For the presentation I got a 7 (out of 10) and for the essay I got a 5.75 (out of 10). And no, I’m not really pleased with that. It means my average is pretty low and this means that I’ll have to do well on my Vocab/Grammar test. I hope that’s going to work out all right, since the test is next Monday.
I’m gonna be really happy when it’s all over in 2.5 weeks and I won’t have to think of any exams for the next few weeks thereafter. I’ll just have to work hard the next week now.
First Aid Weekend, Past Week, Guild Wars, Today
Yes, I’m still alive and I’m behind my computer. I did survive my First-Aid weekend. The weekend wasn’t even that spectacular. I was a bit disappointed when I found out that most of the time I was just sitting, just hanging around the First-Aid tent a bit. We didn’t have any great casualties, which is a good thing of course, but all I’ve done is clean some wounds and put on some band-aids, like 3 times. For the rest I’ve been watching how the others handled the wounds, like some blisters and the removals of some ticks. I’ve also walked around, always together with someone else, when there was a big fight going on. I was at a LARP event, Life Action Role Playing, called Moots I. So as you probably have seen on the pictures, everyone was dressed up in a way they liked it and they had to fight each other or the monsters. The monsters were played by a special group of people to keep the story going and just to create some fun. Do not ask me what this main story was, because I have no idea. I only know that they usually live on the planet Vortex, but this weekend they had gone to another planet by means of a warpstone, but I don’t even know the name of the planet. The camping on my own bit of the weekend went OK as well. I put on the tent, with the help of some others, and everything went fine. The food was really great in the weekend; that was well taken care off by the organization of the event. I’m not sure whether I want to do this again. I didn’t like the other First-Aiders that much. They were nice and friendly and all, but I don’t have a lot in common with them, and they won’t become my best friends. I’d like to have Martijn around next time and I’d like to have more to do, even reading my book would be fine. I didn’t want to do that this time, because I didn’t want to do anything strange so that the others would find me strange.
This week I didn’t feel too good all week. It wasn’t until today that I felt a little like my old self again. I have been feeling weak all week, I’ve slept some extra hours almost every day and I was feeling nauseous now and then. No, I’m not pregnant; I was just a bit under the weather. Today I didn’t sleep any extra, and I got out of bed early to go to church, so I’ve had a long day, and I’m a bit tired, but I feel OK.
Last Tuesday I bought a new game, as I was inspired by the role-playing I had seen over the weekend. I bought the game ‘Guild Wars’. A couple of years ago I have played Everquest for about a year, but I did not want to play that again, because then I would have to pay a monthly fee. The great thing about GW is that there is no monthly fee and there are some other in-game advantages as well. You get your own copy of any explorable area you play in, so that there is less lag and people are not able to steal your loot. You do get to meet other people in towns and cities. I’m still very much a newbie and trying to figure out how the game works, but I really like it so far.
Today I finished my big essay on ‘Clarissa’ and I finished the assignment I had to do on the ‘Corpus Linguistics’ workshop of Philology. That was a lot of work together, so I’m really happy that it’s done. Now I only have to finish the details of the essay and study for my exams.
I’ll try and update more often this week, I hope I’ll be feeling better and I’ll talk to you soon.
Past Weekend
I'm going to postpone the complete story of last weekend till tomorrow or the day after, but I did post my pictures to the Flickr account. Some were meant for the 12 of 12 series, that's why there's one of me in bed and one of my alarm clock, but the rest were taken over the course of the weekend. And yes, I'm the one in the yellow coat with the hat on doing the dishes while the grand end battle is going on in the back. Take a look for yourself:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charda/Here are some other pictures made by someone else of last weekend:
http://catjasphotos.fotopic.net/
Last Lecture, Machine, Camping
Today was my last lecture of this semester, and probably the last lecture by this teacher. The lecture was about ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ which I had read completely, so I enjoyed this class because I could follow what they were talking about. The teacher also showed some example exam. That looked pretty hard, as I had expected.
Yesterday at work our printing machine broke down. Apparently the hard disk crashed and couldn’t function properly anymore. The mechanic fixed it today, so we could get back to printing at about 1 o’clock, but then I had to print everything that couldn’t be printed yesterday and I was very busy. I printed all that I had to in time, so that was good.
Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow I’m going to camp and pretend to know everything of First Aid. At the moment I’m not as nervous as I have been, but I’m not relaxed either. My boyfriend and I packed my bag together. I think I have everything, except for the last things that need to be added tomorrow. I’m very curious what it’ll be like and what’ll happen this weekend. I am going to make my 12 of 12, but I won’t be able to post them until Sunday or Monday. (If you don’t know what 12 of 12 is, please check my post on the 12th or 13th of April). Please think of me and I’ll let you know how it was.
Language Lab Exam, Corpus Linguistics, Pilates
Tonight I had my Language Lab exam. It went pretty OK actually. I didn’t really think of my r-deletion, which is a standard feature of RP, but I talked fluently in my discussion topic, and that’s important as well. We had this list of words which we had to pronounce correctly, maybe 200 words or something, and we were asked 20, but I knew them all, so I think that went well as well. It now depends on how they attend to the precise pronunciation of all the features, such as the r-deletion and the voicing of consonants, which I usually don’t do when it should be done. I wasn’t as nervous as I was last semester. Now I’ll just have to wait for my grade.
We also had a workshop of Philology regarding Corpus Linguistics. A corpus is a body of texts, a collection of texts from a certain period or concerning a specific language and in these texts you can research words. You can look at how many times they occur, or in what instances, or spoken by a man or a woman. I thought it was pretty interesting, though some of my classmates thought it was pretty boring. I even checked my own website to see which words occurred most often, and on nr. 1 was the word ‘I’. And no, that’s not a good thing, I know, buy hey, this website is about me and my life, so well.
I also had Pilates this morning. It went pretty OK. We were only there with the 3 of us and that was nice. I was even able to sit up straight with my legs stretched. I was really proud of that and the teacher said that my back is better than it was better. It’s not so round anymore. Tomorrow I’ll have to work. I hope my colleague’s back from his vacation. I heard that there was a lot of trouble with the printing machine today, so I hope things will be all right tomorrow. We’ll see.
Sorry I didn’t update the last couple of days. I was either too tired or I just didn’t want to write anything. I don’t even remember when the last time was that I wrote. Last Tuesday I submitted my portfolio. It wasn’t great, but it was complete and I hope it’ll be sufficient. Last Thursday I had my Literature presentation, which was a small disaster. I had prepared well and I had read all the literature and I had tried my best. But when I heard the other presentations of my classmates, I didn’t feel so sure anymore. I went up and I did my presentation and it went fairly well. Before class I had been reading through one of the scholarly articles and I discovered a mistake in my presentation, so I adjusted that while presenting and that was OK. After all the presentations the teacher came to each of us for a personal evaluation, and he told me that he had expected more of me and that I could have done better. That’s so great to hear when it’s done (not really
). I did get a 7 (out of 10) so that’s at least sufficient, but I am really disappointed with myself and I should’ve done better. I also don’t really know where I went wrong.
Last Friday, my boyfriend and I went to the beach. It is really nice weather here in the Netherlands right now, so it was good to be outside. We didn’t stay very long. We went to Scheveningen, we walked there a bit and we ate a McFlurry
This weekend we didn’t do too much. Last Saturday I was really tired, so I slept for an extra hour in the afternoon. Actually, I had fallen asleep on Friday night as well, while I was trying to read ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’. This week I really need to finish this book, but I think I’m gonna succeed. Only 65 pages to go. Yesterday, on Sunday, I finished my essay. I really didn’t know what to write about and I didn’t have any research, so I chose a fairly easy topic where I had to compare 3 pairs of words and their etymologies: female-male, spinster-bachelor and woman-man. I think the essay is pretty crappy, but I’ll read through it tomorrow, and tomorrow evening is peer-review, so I have to time to improve it yet.
Sunday morning I went to a different church this time, this church is really close to my house, like 5 minutes walking. It was really nice actually. It was very quiet, I mean not a lot of people there, but the people were younger. Lots of them weren’t native Dutch people, but that’s what made it nice and what made the atmosphere really relaxed. I might go to this church more often, although not this Sunday, since I will have my First Aid weekend then. I am so nervous about it. At least I know who my partner is going to be, and that’s someone who’s really experienced, so that’s of some comfort to me. I’m so nervous about going camping on my own in a new tent, while I’ve never done that before. Well, we’ll see how that goes.
Tomorrow I have Pilates class, I need to finish my essay and do some other homework and at night I have my Pronunciation exam. I’m not too nervous about it. I think I’ll be fine and I’ll practise some more tomorrow afternoon. Wish me luck!
Portfolio Finished, Work, Tomorrow
Wow, I just finished my portfolio. Actually, I still need to adjust 2 things, but that’ll be like 2 minutes work. So, basically it’s ready. I’m relieved that it’s done, but I’m unhappy when I think of all the work that I haven’t done yet. I haven’t done anything about my presentation today. I haven’t studied at all for the Vocab Quiz. I knew that was not going to happen, but it would have been nice.
I did get my ‘How to’ books today. I’m really happy. They were just there; I don’t even have to go to the post office to go get them. I can’t wait to read them. I wish I had some more time.
Today at work was really busy. When I started to work, the owner arrived. She had worked last Friday and the shop was one big mess. When we started to work this morning, it was really busy, and ten things had to be done at the same time, and nothing went right. I was really relieved when my colleague showed up and the owner left and I could get back to my own pace and the peace and quiet returned a bit.
I have to do lots of homework tomorrow. Let’s not make the goals to difficult to reach, let’s say that I want to finish my presentation for next Thursday. I hope that at least that will succeed.
With an Accent from Holland
