A Very Good Week.

So, as I'm sure everyone has heard by now, this Sunday marks the end of A Very Good Week for me. A blow-by-blow account probably isn't required, but I'm going to give you one anyway.

I was given about 3 weeks notice on my viva and in that time I did, on average, nothing towards my viva. With this in mind I decided to go up 5 days early to prepare. So I drove up on Friday (loving the long drive btw) and had a pretty calming meeting with Paul, in which he taught me how to derive the Braggs equation for the 3rd time and generally made me feel better. Que a montage of me studying hard in various locations over the weekend, interspersed with shots of me reminding many people why they were glad I left in the first place (in particular Cameron, who isn't even in my team but who had to change his PC password once because I kept messing with his background.)

At this point I feel I should mention the awesome Scotland-themed party the newly-wed Chris and Louise threw for me on Saturday night. With the help of Dean and Lou's little sister (only mildly confusingly also named Fiona) they attacked me with all things Scottish in a hope of reminding me why Scotland is great. Well, it sort of work, in as much as I will now always remember Scotland contains awesome people like Lou, Chris, Fiona & Dean, even if the rest of the place kinda sucks. Also Chewin the Fat is amazing. End of.

So we role around to the morning of the viva. They make you sit in an office while they discuss what's going to happen, then they invite you in to sit around this massive table. They each have a copy of your report, with post-its sticking out and notes all over it, enough to make anyone panic. And then they (they by the way are my internal examiner and one of the worlds most renouned crystallographers, Prof Alex Slawin, and my external examiner Russell Howe who is probably world renouned at something) open up to page one and start asking questions. "cant you explain this in more detail?" "why did you do this?" "how does this work?"  A full 2 hours worth of questioning before they make you sit outside for the most nerve racking 5 mins of your life before inviting you back in. And the next thing you know you are being shaken by the hand and told its all over, you have passed. And with flying colours too. Best presents report he's ever read says Russell. First A-grade pass she's ever given says Alex (spot the subtle boasting from the author here). Later Alex emails to say you don't have to do corrections if you don't want, but i feel having come this far I  might as well do the job properly. So with a glass of wine on one hand and a laptop on my knees I sit on Lous sofa that night and do the most work iv done in 3 months, correcting all 100 pages in one evening.

Next day I'm sat around watching it print when the phone rings, and I'm sat on the stairs in the main stairwell when a woman from HEROtsc tells me they would like to offer me a job. I'm so excited I start jumping around the corridor. It's not until later I realise that iv just completed 4 and a half years, and £25k worth of education and I'm super excited to get a job less skillful than the one I left to go travel New Zealand in 2007. How ones world changes.

The rest of the week pass in a bit of a blur. I have to pay my £50 'graduation tax' finally (i had been putting it off in the hope I might fail and not have to pay) and I do the long drive back on Tuesday. I pick up Tim on the way, as its Jonis birthday, and we all sit up late playing poker and looking forward to a peaceful summer in which we all have crap jobs but at least no one has to worry about paying the rent.

The weekend was also rather fantastic. Went to see the Avengers on Saturday, a great film. And saw Simon Amstall live tonight curtisy of Jonis parents as his last birthday treat. Very very funny, hope he's out enjoying Nottingham tonight.

Quite sad to go back to my boring life tomorrow...

Standing on the precipice of the end..

Gosh, I can't believe its been nearly a month since my last blog. Quite a lot has happened in the month. I am currently sitting in Louise's living room (thats in Scotland) with my thesis on one side and a notepad full of scribbles on the other. This is because my Viva is tomorrow morning. (for those of you not in the academic world a Viva is a type of oral exam in which you have to defend your work to two academics who work in a similar field, but who arn't directly related to the project). I am feeling pretty nervous, it was the outcome of my last Viva that started the thought processes which ultimately lead me to give up my PhD in the first place. But I think my feeling less confident it probably a good sign, I was seriously under prepared last time and I didn't realise it. This time I'm more prepared. I'v been in Scotland for 4 days now preparing.

For Information: The Viva is 10am tomorrow morning, it will last approximately one hour and I don't know when I will be home from Scotland. If its gone well I may be required to stick around to get my thesis fully printed and bound. I'll announce it to the world when I know.

In other news there are now 2 French guys living in my house. They are exchange students and they are staying with us for 2 months (until July 5th). So far they have mostly just been very quiet and keep themselves to themselves. We keep trying to encourage them to hang out with us, but they don't seem particularly interested. This does have the advantage that I sometimes forget they are even here, although it feels a little odd.

On the job hunting front, things have slowed down a little in the last few weeks, what with the Viva and all I'v had to focus elsewhere. A company running a call centre called HeroTSC have left me hanging for nearly a month now, which is driving me mad. They keep saying they are processing my application, and that I passed the interview but they are gathering data. Ugh, frustrating as hell. I also I have properly registered with a recruitment agency who specialise in getting jobs for graduates in sales, so we shall wait and see what comes of that.

And thats everything thats going on in my life right now. I promise to keep anyone who cares up to date via facebook. and I PROMISE, PROMISE when I get a job, posting it on facebook will be the first thing I do, so for gods sake, stop asking!!!

An Initial Response

Tonight I went to see the Hunger Games in the cinema, and it has left me feeling quite confused, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Before I went in I had heard it was a good film, and I thought I would probably love it, although I was curious to see how they handled such a serious subject matter for a teen audience. For those who don't know the film is about a teenage girl who is forced to take part in a state-run TV competition which involves being thrown into the jungle to fight to the death against 23 of her peers. It is based on a novel aimed at teenagers and the target audience is similar to Twlight.

I came out of the film feeling quite confused, and now I have had 2 hours to think about it, I'm not sure I liked it. I certainly didn't like the main character, if you could call her that. The writers didn't seem to think she needed a consistent character. Thanks to that she had no continuous traits I could identify with and so have any empathy or sympathy for her. She was acted well though, I will say that.

On that note you can say all the acting was pretty good, the sound track worked well, it was shot nicely, the contrasting colours and lighting effects between the city & the districts work well to emphasis the different areas etc etc. It was overall a well made film which should have been a generally enjoyable experience.

However, it had one fatal flaw that it could never get over - the subject matter was too dark for the style of film. The subject is about young children being forced to kill each other by their government but the target audience is 14 year old girls. Because of this the whole issue had to be lightened up and skirted round, and it left me not sure what type of film I was supposed to be watching. It just didn't work.

I might be wrong, certainly the critics and the box office figures would tell you I'm wrong. But this film is the first in a trilogy and it left me with no desire to see the next 2 films and that definitely wasn't the film makes intention.

A message of defiance

Lest week was a bad week. I was turned down for a total of 7 jobs in 5 days, and it did not feel good. One of them I was turned down for failing a test, one for not having "the right personality", but mostly because "There was no problem with you at all, there was just a better candidate". Not only is this the most frustrating sentence in the world, it doesn't actually help in the slightest. Why were they a better candidate? What can I do to be that better candidate and how long till I'm the best candidate left on the market?!?

So it turns out unemployment is really hard. Job hunting is totally soul destroying, and last week I fell into a bit of a slump. I basically spent two days on the sofa watching bad american TV, and I ate my body mass in ice cream. Luckily I have Joni and Beth to help me, and I have to admit if Beth and Ruby hadn't come down to visit last Thursday I think Joni would have come home to find me a drunken mess on the sofa.

I have to admit I have a new sympathy for the 'dole dossers' and rioters of last summer (never thought I would be saying that). When you have no hope of getting a job; when you discover that all that time and money you put into education is actually making it much harder for you to get a job; when you find 4 years of higher education later and you can't even get your old job back again; well, you begin to see how a person could take to the streets in anger.

But I will not let it beat me. This week I am up, I am bright eyed and ready for action. I have written my list of things to do this week, some of which are job hunt, but some of which are other things too. I have bought scales so I can focus on me, instead of the rest of the world.

I will get through this, with or without a job.

An awesome Birthday Treat

I know its a few days early, but today I got my awesome birthday trip to London.

It started early, with an 8am train. Sat in first class, it was very posh! Lol. We made sure to get our moneys worth of free tea, juice, biscuits and water. And there was a very nice conductor who didnt even ask for our rail cards which was handy as Jonis is expired (something he negelected to tell me when I booked the tickets).

First thing we did was head over the British Design Museum to see the Design Awards 2012 exhibition. Some of it was very cool, some of it was super practical, and some of it was really rubbish. There were a couple of chairs in particular which were just uncomfortable, which is like the last thing you want from a chair. I was particularly impressed with the re-design of the back of an ambulance and the wind-powered land mine clearing device. Both brilliant pieces of design. I really want to know if any of them will ever actually get used, to save lives and change the world. Seems like a good idea to me.

From there we headed back towards the tube, on the hunt for lunch before heading to the Royal Academy. The weather we beautiful for March, and we stumbled across these sort of pop-up BBQ stalls down an alley, next to a cathedral. The locals clearly knew where to find them because each stall had long queues but we managed to get food within 10 mins or so. I had a huge burger with all the trimmings for £5, a price not to be sniff at on the south bank!

Next we headed to the Royal Academy to see the new David Hockney exhibition. A I have to say I did feel fairly smug after walking through the gates and seeing the huge queue of people snakeing around the whole courtyard, and realising we could march to the front because I bought our tickets online months ago. We picked up the tickets with half an hour before we could go in so we popped back to a patisserie on the main road where I had a massive ice cream sunday. And it was soooo good!

Shame I can't say the same about the art. For all the hype, I found it rather boring actually. The first few galleries we quite good, and I did like his paintings. We were greeted by 4 huge canvases each with the same view of 3 trees and a field, each in a different season. I liked them a lot actually, the colours were bright, the subject was simple but distinctive. The problem was he went on to repeat this same-view-different-seasons idea through another 9 gallery spaces, a total of around (and this is not an exaggeration) 60 paintings and prints. What started off fun and dramatic just got boring.

And there was more to it than just the plain repatition. There was a distinct lack of any message or drive to the work. There was no story being told, the work didn't make you see the world in a different way, it didn't make you revaluate your opinions or even teach you something new. They were just pretty pictures for the sake of being pretty, and that's not my kind of art.

Despite this we left the gallery feeling fairly happy. I was glad to have seen such a high profile show (although I won't be heading for any with quite so many people any time soon!). We walked back to Piccadilly and bought 2 fairly expensive tickets to see a play we knew practically nothing about called The Ladykillers. A comedy apparently.

After dinner at Pizza Express (complete with free bottle of Proseco as its ny birthday) we headed to the theater, bought a program, sat down to read it and quickly discovered why it was so expensive....

The lead was played by actual Peter Capaldi. An actual famous person. Even more. There were only 6 actors in it, and i recognised at least 5 of them from tv. Most of them from Doctor Who. The only one I didn't was the woman. Beyond this it was also an amazing play. Genuinely laugh out loud from start to finish, a very intelligent plot and a really amazing set which was all revolve-y and stuff.

So all in all a fantastic day out. Back on the train and heading home super late. Won't be back in bed till about 3am, but I'm not feeling too bad. I think I will feel it tomorrow however! We shall just have to wait and see if I'm getting too old for days that busy!

The First Morning

Waking up for the first time in our new home. Oddly, it pretty much feels like home already. It's stuffed full of our stuff already. Tim says he is coming to stay tomorrow, but I don't know where as currently everything we own that isn't specifically 'kitchen' is piled in the spare room! Best get on with unpacking today. I'm so happy to be moving, I'm even excited about unpacking. Yesterday when trying to sort the kitchen I kept finding stuff I forgot we owned. It was like Christmas - you never know what the next box will contain!

Yesterday was total chaos (as any good move should be). It started with a strange indecent of banging in the loft of Jonis parents place, so us running to my parents at 4am in an attempt to get a good nights sleep. It was a little late for that by then. Going back in the morning we discovered a massive rat, so Joni threw poisen at him and we left.

So much stuff!!

Next problem involved the near murder (I still hear that in Scottish every time - mur-dur) of an estate agent. So we all, dad included, sat down in the estate agents office and she says she will start by taking the deposit and first months rent in cash. IN CASH!! That's £1200 in cash no one had bothered to tell us we needed. And she wasn't giving us the keys till we got it. This is because, unlike every single shop on the highstreet, Your Move don't have chip&pin machines so they can't take instant payments. They have to write all your bank details down and fax them to head office to be processed!! Honest to god that woman is only alive right now because NatWest are not a bunch of incompetent fools, unlike Your Move. So we got the cash, we signed a million bits of paper work and then we got the keys!

New keys.

So, a quick meeting with the new landlord then we were off to fetch the van. Only I left the keys at Jonis parents. But no bother, we got a car load from there (forgetting the tool box, which will become important later) and then split up so I could drive the van and Joni could take the car back to the new house.

Almost forgot to pack the Joni.

So this van. We were borrowing it from my would-be employers. And it was a bit of a wreck. Some Twat has stole half the exhaust so it sounds like a tractor and because it is owned by 2 men who .... Well let's just say there is never any fuel in there vehicles. At all. So i had to brave the Saturday traffic in the monster van to get diesel. But i got lunch and a bottle of bubbly too so all was ok.

All of this ment we didn't get the van to my parents till midday and we had to be back home by 1pm to wait for the virgin man. So we filled it with as much as we could and off we went. Unloaded the first lot and sat for lunch in our new conservatory, because we couldn't get the sofa any further into the house. We managed it later by taking the legs off.

Putting the table together before we can have lunch.

After lunch we realized I couldn't start putting furniture together till Joni went back for the toolkit (i said it would be important) so Joni went off for another load from his parents and i mostly just wondered around the house looking at it! Bizzarly, Joni could only find half our wardrobe at his parents, so we need to find the rest of that today.

Dad and Joni fighting a mattress upstairs. 

While Joni was off with the van again the virgin man showed up and (minus a tiny hiccup) we had the internet up and running in half an hour. I have to say I'm impressed. It's the first time iv ever moved somewhere and had the internet up and running the same day. And we accourding to speedtest.net we are actually getting 20mg download speeds. Happy.

Richard putting together a table with added help of wine. 

So there we are. Moved in-ish. Richard came round and helped us to put together some furniture, and to eat pizza and get slightly drunk. Today we need to fetch yet more stuff from both houses and put up yet more furniture. And buy a cutlery tray. Funny the things you realise you don't own.

A review of 2012 so far

I haven't blogged in while, mainly due to my life becoming too complicated to get into, but now that it has finally straightened out I can talk really about what i have been up to in 2012.

Two weeks ago I started properly job hunting. It's very dull. But, iv applied for 15 jobs, had 2 preliminary interviews and only 1 rejection, which I think is quite good really. Got to keep up the looking. I'm also volunteering at Occasions Catering still, learning to be a sales woman. That's quite good fun, going to meetings and networking. I have business cards now, how cool am i? Lol. I figure the longer I'm working there, the more experience I will have, the quicker I will find a paying job.

Big News! Joni & I finally have sorted our new house! Woo hoo! I get me stuff back soon! And the cat. It's just a rental for now, since the financial sector thinks we are 'unstable' but its prefect. Can not wait to move in, its going to be so good. We move on the 17th, and housewarming is on the 24th . All my loyal readership are invited!

Last Wednesday we managed to hit our Target for going to the Broadway once a month (just) by going to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Went with Joni and Richard Fear (promised I would make him famous by mentioning him on the blog). This film has got some bad reviews, and I would be the first to agree it is not high art. The plot is easy and fairly predictable but it is by far one of the funniest films I have seen in a very long time. I was doing that laughing-embarrassingly-loud thing in the cinema, which i haven't done since The Hangover. An apsolutly brilliant film.

Also seen, at home, this week - Cars 2 and Attack the Block. Also both brilliantly funny films, in different ways. Attack the Block is particularly well done.

Finally, in other news, we have found out this week that our Granny is coming back to the UK. Very excited about getting to see her again, apparently Thiland isn't for her. Currently the whole family is pitching in for the very stressful task of finding a home for an 87 year old woman with nothing to her name but a suitcase full of clothes, but once that is delt with it will be great to have her back. I am sensing a trip to Kates house in New Deer coming up, as it has some of grannys stuff in it. That's if I ever get around to having a viva.....