Macaroni and Rage — Tuesday 25 October to Thursday 27 October

Monday night/Tuesday morning was consumed by unexpected insomnia due to very unexpected sinus congestion (I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, and I hate falling asleep with my mouth open, so I lay there and tried to breathe through my nose for a few seconds before gasping and freaking Jessi out. This went on for at least half an hour before exhaustion finally set in.) Another potential cause of my insomnia was the fact that I had tea with sugar about an hour before trying to settle down for the night. This would not normally cause a big problem, but I usually have honey. Sugar seems to affect me quite differently from honey. Happily, I didn't have class until noon.
Class was fine. I got a dirty look from Josh the hairy, irritable southerner for working on my presentation more than three days before it was due, but I may have earned that. Worse things could have happened.
I made crepes in the evening, seeing as I had slept in so as to stay awake in class. It's a pretty good time to make crepes, since people are around and can help me dispose of them. Unfortunately, Jessi always tries to eat all of them. She suspects me of putting some kind of addictive substance in them.
We went to Asda, and while I found macaroni noodles sort of, we won't be doing American night for a while because people are busy or unable to make things in the time they have. And then we're all going to Edinburgh this weekend. With luck, next week. I bought coloured medium cheddar cheese just for this, so hopefully it lasts. I'll check the expiration date and freeze it before then if I have to.
Regarding macaroni:
Aldi and and Tesco don't have it. I suspect it's something of an american pasta. This is what I was looking for:

This is what I found (minus the "cheese").

So this is what I got.

Same basic principle (small tubular noodles with a bend or five). 

Before bed, we played a few rounds of hearts that ended up taking longer than I expected. However, I made a valiant attempt to do more of my biochemistry when I realised that I would have to do the whole report, with four graphs and several calculations, in one day.
It was all pointless. I couldn't figure out the equations we got. I eventually went to bed well after midnight.

Then there was a freaking fire drill that woke me an hour before I would have had to get up. They even timed us as we staggered out of the flat. Snarl. Cold and irate, we were allowed back in at 07:35. I turned on the heater to warm up the room a bit before I had to get up in about half an hour and learned a valuable lesson: the heater keeps Jessi up. She flops around, makes grumpy noises, and gets up to turn it down. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an "off" switch, so she tried to turn it down three times in the half hour before my alarm went off again. I was kind of too sleepy to move, but I did feel hideously guilty. I also felt that saying something would give her rage an outlet in me, so I stayed out of the way. I realised that night that she had experienced a sneaky hate spiral, and shared the hyperbole and a half post with her. Her laughter was very gratifying. The history seminar was fine; I took notes on the order of the presentation and suchlike. Then I retired to the library to try and puzzle out the calculations that were driving me insane last night. They didn't get much better.

I've almost attained A Beautiful Mind status scribbling capabilities.  Only a few steps left to full-blown schizophrenia.

There was this equation that I needed to get from the data collected to the manner of analysing it, and it had some random centimeter. I'm normally quite good at going from equation to equation, once I get warmed up and set on the right path, but this had me scribbling random exclamations and drawing arrows, crossing them out, and redrawing them. At one point, I crossed out my query of "enzyme?" before turning around and writing "enzyme yes" above that. I was going insane. I had reached that weird conjunction of rage and confusion that leads to madness.
The situation improved somewhat after I decided to just forget that the stupid random centimeter was there, since it goes away in its usual equation without affecting the answer. I hope it won't cause me to fail miserably...
Things got better after coffee, since my mood was vastly improved after an hour of drinking a white chocolate blended mocha from starbucks (it was worth the money) and thinking about something other than biochemistry (I outlined my presentation). They didn't get better after lunch, which was a fifteen minute break for a cold cheese and onion pasty and a juice box of ribena (long i and e, rye-been-a), because I switched to the uni computers to edit the graphs so I could print a nice, not-demented report. It proved easier than I was expecting, although trendlines remain the bane of my excel existence.
My calculations are ALL WRONG. Well, it's more like my data are ALL WRONG, which is true enough (*guilty cough*). I ended up attaching the full graph at the end while putting in an edited graph that makes any sense at all in the body of the report.
Finally, I finished it at 19:15, after 7 hours of work. I think it's actually my best report yet, thanks to my extensive explanations. My plans of going to Aldi for two flapjacks and an energy drink were scrapped because it was too dark to walk alone, and Aldi closes at 20:00 anyway.
I didn't get to do laundry, either, because I was too tired when I got back home ten hours after I left that morning. I need to to that Thursday evening or Friday morning, or I'll have to get new clothes in Edinburgh. While it's not an unappealing thought, I don't really have the money for that.

Thursday started off with a trip to aldi to get flapjacks and an energy drink. The weather today is nice walking weather: cool and cloudy, without noticeable rain while I've been outside.
The biochemistry lecture was much better, since the professor is an immunologist and also assumed we knew how to tie our shoes.
I printed my edinburgh ticket during the break and holed up in the library's very purple study room.

So much purple!

The second part of the lecture felt a bit long, but that might just be because I suddenly had a spurt of creative energy that could not be acted upon. Hence this blog as soon as I got out of class. I was going to eat my second flapjack, but I happened to look for the nutrition information. One of these delicious little bars has "457 kcal" (so 457 calories as reported by US companies. In fact, the calorie is such a tiny measure that kilocalories was quickly adopted as the standard for food, but the k in front turns people off of perfectly healthy food, so the FDA allows companies to report nutritional information in the form of "cal" instead of "kcal").

I decided to maybe save the flapjack for later and also look up less excessive recipes. 

Lab was irritating.

You recall that lab report that took me 7 hours and considerable frustration on wednesday?

It's due next week, and this week was spent in learning how to do the graphs for the report.

Yep. So I spent two and a half hours in lab rehashing the stuff that I'd already taught myself to do. I'm really, really good at Michaelis-Menten and Lineweaver-Burk plots now, though. Also, I was doing them right. Bam. No centimeter was ever mentioned by the lab instructor.

My frustration at rehashing was not helped by the fact that the lab instructor was the lady who talks to us like we're kindergarteners. Granted, she's better at explaining things than the impossible little frenchman, but she pauses in weird places. Her emphasis habits really grate on the nerves after about ten minutes of uninterrupted talking, and she lectured for forty minutes. She says Lineweaver (which I heard at least once as "linweaver" and therefore adopted that pronunciation) as "linear-weaver" and it drove me insane. My tic started acting up, which usually leads to RAGE. I powered through on the fact that I saved all my work to a USB stick and can refine my report based on the new instructions we got.

Things got better when I got home and had, like, five pieces of toast to try and use up my bread before we leave for the weekend. I did my laundry, and then got sucked into "a quick game of hearts." 

Five hours later, we finally finished the sixth or seventh game.

I shot the moon. Twice. This has never happened to me before, and I've only seen it done twice. It's a caveat of hearts — if one person gets all 26 points (13 hearts plus the queen of spades), then they get 0 points for the round while everyone else gets 26 points each. It's hard to do, because you need really bad cards that don't give you away right at the beginning. Both times I've done it were unintentional.

I felt like a champion... until everyone ganged up on me the next round and I ended up with 25 points while everyone else except one person got 0. Ouch.

I'll be in Edinburgh until monday afternoon, so I won't be responding to any texts, emails, or comments. I could take my computer, but I doubt that I'll have internet and it's not worth the risk of having my computer nicked from the hostel room, because I'm not carrying this thing all over edinburgh for three days. No. I will take my camera, extra batteries, and a notebook so that I can make good blog posts when I get back.

Wednesday 28 September to Sunday 2 October

I'm sorry for neglecting the blog. To make up for it, I'll do a thing on Clanny House and my flatmates (a special edition, as it were), and maybe something on classes, courses, modules, and school structures over here.
On Wednesday (which Adam says "WED-n'sday", with the d in it, instead of "WENZday", like I say it), I had the seminar for my history module at 10 AM. I picked Diseases and Medicine for my presentation; I'm looking forward learning about the history of medicine. I thought about Witchcraft and Witch Hunts or Natural Philosophy (i.e., early science, like Newton), but those were at the end of the list and more likely to fill up, at least the witch one. As it stands, I'm working alone and have a few weeks to prepare. I'll get to see a few presentations before I have to do mine, so that's good. I'm looking forward to what I'll learn in the class, if not the actual process of learning it.
I'm also not looking forward to the annoying feminist in the lecture. She's the sort that gives the rest of us a bad name ("us" here meaning women in general, quite frankly). She got mad at someone for saying that, based on the burial records we were examining, men were more important than women in the Early Modern period (1500s to 1700s, roughly). It was a patriarchal society, honey. She's evidently a history major, which basically means that she either wants to teach or go into a traditionally male-dominated field, so I understand her feelings (as someone planning to go into a traditionally male-dominated field, even if my Whitworth classes are kind of full of females), but honestly! Gah.
I got my slippers, which I love:

I also went to the museum and winter gardens, although I didn't get pictures of the gardens.

Supported by lots and lots of museums and companies and stuff.

Impressive building. Also, the intersections here would inspire terrible things in Andrew's road map.

Dr. William Clanny, who invented safety lamps for miners. I suspect that he's the namesake of Clanny House, but I could be mistaken.

Thursday consisted entirely of Analytical Biochemistry. I inadvertently skipped two hours of lecture, thinking that the two slots on the schedule were two sections for the lecture, just like there were three lab sections. No. The lecture goes from 9-11 AM, then from 12-2 PM. Happily, my lecturer (also french. What is up with this?) was understanding of my study abroad issues, and emailed me the slides for the lecture. After the lecture, I had a short break before lab, which consisted entirely of review calculations.
I was surrounded by algebraic idiots. The lecturer wants us to put down formulas for every mathematic calculation we do (like M1V1=M2V2 for mass and volume problems, that sort of thing). While this is not my style, I'm willing to adapt in order to keep my grades up. No one could understand how to do this. Granted, I tend to put my formulas on at the end of the problem, but it's not impossible for me to use them at the beginning.
We spent ten minutes doing one problem on the board because the guy doing it couldn't figure out the formulas.
Then came the pièce de résistance. On one problem, which was admittedly complex, we finally worked it down to two unknowns and two equations (fairly ideal, for those of you without much math background). We were algebra-ing away, solving for unknowns and rewriting equations like professionals, when one kid asked where "the other A went".
Real quick: A+A is equivalent, in math terms, to 2A. It is also equivalent to A(1+1).
This kid could not understand this concept, which is one of the more basic . I don't know how he ever passed the british version of high school. I actually turned around and looked at him in disbelief at one point.
I got through class without killing anyone, so congratulate me.
Friday was much better. I don't have any classes friday, so Jessi and I went to the beach on what was probably going to be one of the last warm days of our little indian summer. Finally, I almost had to go buy summer clothes. I found some sea glass and cool shells, and we managed to avoid getting splashed until we were standing at the steps to leave the beach and a huge wave came up and splashed us. Go figure.
Josie got a goldfish, who has been enthusiastically adopted by the whole flat. She named him Bob, just Bob with no surname, but Flo decided to call him Bob Diddy. It stuck, and Bob is now Bob Diddyfish on facebook. We're all friends with him.
Saturday was to be my laundry day. I forgot about my towels, though, so Sunday will be my laundry day as well if I can get the laundry room code to work. We also had italian night, which ended up being entirely vegetarian (such nice flatmates!) and also delicious. Josie helped Jessi make cannelloni, which was good if a bit undercooked; Conor made risotto; and Adam made bruschetta. I supplied tiramisu ice cream and cleaned up before and after.
Sunday was a lazy day. I still have to do laundry, but I'm working on postcards (FYI, I haven't been to the places on them. I bought them while stuck in heathrow airport terminal 5 for half a day). It's the first properly rainy day since I've been here, and Josie's caught a cold that I blame on the weather shift from hot and a little humid to cold and rainy. It's a great day to curl up with tea and a book.
I worked out the laundry code! First, I had the wrong code. It's C2370X. Second, I was turning the knob the wrong way and not pulling on the door handle itself. Laundry room accomplished.
Oh, my plant is doing great. It has, like, four new blossoms and it takes so much water that it has to be healthy.

And while I was taking pictures, I noticed something odd about my curtains.

Gasp! Three colours on one curtain! I never knew that mine were black on the outside...

Same for the other curtain.

Kinder Egg and Bowling — Saturday 24 September

The most exciting thing that happened to me this morning was sleeping.
The most exciting thing before 14:00 was opening up my Kinder Egg.
Photos!

The Egg itself. Actually just half the egg, because I was so excited that I had eaten half of the other half before I remembered that I wanted pictures.

See? Exciting! It glows!

Aww. Doesn't actually glow. But it still looks delicious.

That yellow thing was inside. That's where the toys go!

Er. Wadded up paper was not quite the toys I was expecting.

Instructions – I appear to have scored a balloon/ball thing.

After unfolding the larger wad of red paper, I inflated a...
Well...
Fish.
Thing.

I think the idea is to bat it around.

Now I have a weird little paper balloon that I can't do anything with. It would go up on my ceiling if it was less shoddy.
I also did laundry in the little laundry room all the way across Clanny, next to reception. There are three parking lots inside Clanny, which is like a gated community with no pool. Block 1 is in the farthest parking lot from reception, which is in block 11. Also, there is a code to get into the laundry room, which I suppose is useful for keeping out malicious laundry thieves like students who don't have the code. I now have the code, happily. I also have clean, if damp, laundry. It's still across Clanny in the dryer.
We're going "ten-pin bowling" this afternoon, and I kind of hope that it's pretty much the same as bowling in the Tri Cities. Apparently there are other kinds of bowling; who knew?
Unfortunately, I can't get the code to work. I'll have to try it out again sometime when there's no one around.
Bowling was fun. It was exactly like bowling in the Tri Cities. We played three games, and I only lost miserably on the last one. I blame my fingernail, which was busy being ripped off by the holes in the bowling balls.
Here's how it ended up:

The nail is gone! 

I have provided my other thumbnail as contrast:

That's how much nail I had before bowling.

 I would count today as a success. We had mexican night afterwards, and I need to get ahold of some better beans for next time. Pintos smashed up and heated with a bit of salt do not do the trick. Maybe black beans, with some salt and red spices...