I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

i should be writing my master thesis like mad. but i've got stuck and am surfing the internet instead. i've joined a new network: Twenty Something Bloggers. Typical ;-)

in my search for a suitable profile picture i stumbled over this old example of my infinite specialness that i don't seem to have posted:


my phone can take panoramic pictures and standing in the bar at the top of the guiness store house in dublin i decided to try it out. after carefully reading the instructions (really carefully! twice!!) i took the three pictures. and then declared my phone was too useless to stick them together properly. would you believe it took me about ten minutes to realise i'd taken the pictures in the wrong order...

i'm never going to be able to tell the difference between right and left.

ooh, i did post about it, i just didn't put the picture up...

so, back to describing division algorithms and drawing block diagrams :-(

Labels: dublin, i'm special, networks, pics, procrastinating, uni

so done saturday. the pictures are no longer online by the way, so no point looking for them. my favourite (most people's favourite) one was the one where i'm undertaking a microscopic investigation of the pavement (dave's description of it).

sunday... stuart was rather shocked at me being up before him ;-) (everyone was shocked at me being up at all in fact...). when we'd managed to get dia and paul up we went off to dun laoghaire (or some such, it's pronounced dun leery). Pawel had got up at the crack of dawn and gone off by himself, so tino phoned him and we were going to meet him there.

took the train and got there not long after pawel, however his description of the cafe he was having lunch in was... bad. we're not sure whether he did it on purpose to avoid us, cause he said he'd see us walking past. maybe he ducked.

we had a carvery at some pub and then went for a walk along the sea. dia kept lying down for a sleep, i was all for it too. there were a bunch of french teenagers obviously there with a school. one of them was going 'don't worry, these people don't understand french' to his friends. i laughed so hard! now tino thinks i speak french, so he's careful what he says to jean louis in front of me :-)

i really love it when people say stuff like that, it's soooo naive. swiss people often think that, with my family. one time we were on a skiing holiday. mum, dad, tim (my brother) and i were in a cable car with two swiss guys. we were just talking about random stuff, we didn't care that they could understand us. of course we knew they could understand us more or less cause they were around tim's or my age and we've both had to go through 'learning english' (or rather correcting the english teacher's english..). but one of them says to the other, quite randomly, in swiss german 'they don't even realise we can understand them'. we were all too shocked to think of a clever retort, just looked at each other... we were surprisingly successful at not bursting out laughing ;-) but you should have seen their faces when as we were getting out of the lift i turned to them and said, in the same dialect as they were speaking, 'it was you who didn't realise we could understand you...' ooh, that was hilarious :-D

when we got back from dun leery (can't e bothered to try and spell it correctly again) we all had a snooze before dinner. found a nice pub for dinner, managed to squeeze five of us round a table. Pawel turned up half way through dinner and we said we'd meet up when we were done. drank coke with dinner, and befroe dinner when we were waiting for a table. the memory was still very fresh in my mind...

oh dear, i think marion needs help, so i'll have to finish this some other time. not the final dublin post after all then...

Labels: dublin

just practising on my guitar quickly so my figertips don't go soft again...
remembered two songs i really want to learn on the guitar. mustn't forget them. heard them both on sunday night in dublin:

• stairway to heaven, some guy was playing live in the first bar we went to, he was really good


• summer of '69, that's just a fun song, it came on in the club (the viper room)

Labels: dublin

so anyway, we went round the christ church cathedral. was fun. after that we wandered onwards toward the guiness factory. the tour busses were going past quite regularly so we were able to follow them in the right direction (they go in a circle, so there aren't any going in the other direction. good thing or we'd probably have been in trouble...)

took a while but we did find st. james' gate without going wrong again. queued for at least half an hour to get in, but then we spent two and a half hours or so wandering round it so that was ok. at the end you get a pint of guinness. by this time it was three in the afternoon and we hadn't eaten since breakfast. the pint was quite horrible and i was starving :-( it took me absolutely ages to finish it. the bar was right at the top of the building and had a panoramic view of the city. so we took some panorama pictures on our phones. stuart's turned out quite well, but of course i'm to thick for that and took the segments in the wrong order so the picture looks... odd is the best word, i guess ;-)

the others took a long time to arrive and when they did finally get there dia and paul were completely knackered. so we said we'd meet in our room (it was huge, three beds, one was a double) in half an hour. tino and pawel arrived, but dia and paul were late and when they did arrive they turned up carrying cups of tea. pawel was very cross: it seems tino was in a hurry to get out to dinner and wouldn't allow him to have any tea... awww. we ushered dia and paul back upstairs to get dressed and offered pawel tea, but he refused. he'd somehow missed the window of tea time or something ;-)

had dinner at a pizza place that only had tables for two or four, so tino and pawel ended up having a romantic dinner together ;-)
having wine with dinner was my first big mistake...

here are the pics i took after dinner:





i'd rather not talk about the night, i had fun, but i got completely drunk. i blame that on the wine, on a pint of brain blasta beer (7%!!!) and the fact that i dropped my earring, pawel put it in his ear (there's a picture...) and then dia said i couldn't put it in mine without disinfecting it with alcohol. so i dropped it in my brand new pint (and was surprised when it sank straight to the bottom instead of floating down gently (this wass already after the wine and the brain blasta) so to get it back out i drank the pint rather faster than is sensible (didn't hear dia's suggestion that i pour the beer into a different glass...)

stuart took a lot of pictures of me on the way home (i was plastered, totally legless) and he put them all online. his wonderful office mates serrie and darren have been showing them to everyone. so i got to work this morning and there was some guy i'd never seen before standing outside smoking. he says to me 'i know you, you're on the internet'. i'm confused what??? so he says 'there are pictures of you on the internet'... oh no!!! even this random guy has seen the picture of me face down on the pavement? eeek!

but everyone was impressed with the story of how i beat paul at arm wrestling three times before he managed to get me once after i'd beaten stuart once as well, then been beaten by stuart and tino had almost broken my wrist. but it makes paul feel better that he did beat me in the end... :-) serrie's taking great joy in pointing out to him that he was beaten three times by a girl..
all this was sometime after the brain busta, cause i don't arm wrestle unless i'm drunk. when i'm sober i know better than to challenge fragile male egos... (although i really expected to lose to paul, and instead stuart was a lot harder to beat than you would guess from looking at him...)

here are the pics i took at the pub, some of them are quite blurred but i'll put them on anyway.

this is tino


a blurry weird picture of stuart


this one could be stuart or paul, it's a little bit difficult to tell...


cute one of dia and paul


stuart and tino playing with phones/cameras


paul taking a picture


dia and stuart looking at some picture on the camera, looks like it's funny



well that's it for tonight. i'll try to post the rest tomorrow when i'm babysitting.

Labels: drinking, dublin

that was a great weekend!! which is a good thing, because i am going to get soo much stick at work for saturday night... but it was worth it... :-)

saturday stuart and i went exploring (the others didn't arrive till around six). we got a day pass for the tour busses and went round the city. the weather was absolutely beautiful once we were on the bus. before it was horrible, we had to dry the seats before we sat down.

we decided to get off the bus at st. patricks cathedral have a look round that and the walk to the guinness storehouse and do the tour there. but when we got to the cathedral it was closed for a graduation ceremony :-( so off we went towards the guinness factory. or so we thought... luckily for us the tour bus passed us on its way back (it goes round a loop by st patricks) and drove away in the opposite direction to where we were going...

we worked out that the bus had it right (doh!) and turned round. christ church cathedral was on the way to the guinness factory so we stopped and had a look round in there. my favourite bit was the cat and the rat:





Too tired to carry on now, going to bed. Short version: i got completely wasted on saturday, horribly embarrassing stuff, but nothing actually awful (except vomiting on some poor unsuspecting girl...), beat paul and stuart at arm wrestling, had great time on sunday, managed not to get drunk in the evening (or during the day...). dia got drunk, really hurt her leg :-(
monday was ok, saw some stuff...

Labels: drinking, dublin

hurray!!! this time tomorrow i'll be in dublin!! yeay!!!

have just extracted the balloons from inside the papier mache 'pinatas' for tom's birthday party tomorrow. surprisingly they didn't collapse (although marion's did seem to be going, but it held up in the end). so now they're drying out inside over night (we only did them tuesday evening, so they aren't completely dry, marion had the kids paint them with wallpaper paint to make them colourful and more solid)

just spent almost two hours putting new music on my phone cause i'm bored with the old stuff. david has convinced me that pink floyd aren't horrible. my dad's been trying for years. why does he only ever play horrible noise by them? strange. never knew they also did nice music (apart from the wall cause even i know that...)

haven't packed yet. not very cunning, i know. just couldn't be bothered. got some new jeans :-) packing's easier with new clothes :-) and i've finally coloured my hair again. that's been over due for months. i meant to do it before coming to the uk cause my roots were showing and that was a month and a half ago! i haven't seen this much of my natural hair colour for years... but it's gone now :-)

my fingers hardly hurt at all now when i play the guitar (i use the term 'play' very loosely). except for the chord f. that is just a nightmare, it's torture! but i'm getting there, i can actually make it sound good (without any horrible twanging because i'm not holding the string down properly) it just takes me a couple of minutes to get there ;-)

but i should go and pack now so i can go to work early tomorrow. haha, that's probably a little optimistic, oh well...

Labels: dublin, shopping

yeay!!! going to dublin in four days!!! woohoo!!! :-D

we went for another walk at lunch time. followed the purple path today. i cleverly decided it wasn't going to rain (because i felt it was nice without the rain, so of course it wouldn't rain...) and left my rain coat at my desk. half way round it started pouring down :-( we got quite wet...

saw a funny sign about it being 'not nice and dangerous to hit golf balls in this park' or something. of course stuart took a picture, it'll appear on his blog at some point.

it seems i missed a great night out on saturday. stuart can't even remember half the stuff he did, but he texted me about them, so i can remind him ;-)

stuart took some funny pictures (of course he can't remember taking them). this is my new boss paul :-)




for the rest of the photos look here

my fingers are killing me! they've been bright red all day from practising last night, and now i've had another go... but my index finger is sabotaging me: it started to peel before i even started developing calluses... nasty finger, it's out to ruin my guitar playing. from now on i'm going to blame my very bad playing on the fact that my index finger is sabotaging me.. :-D

Labels: dublin

I'm off to Dublin in October with some guys from work. A bit worried that I won't be able to keep up on the drinking front. In fact there's no way I'll be able to keep up: I've never got drunk two nights in a row, never mind spent a whole weekend from Friday night to Monday (!) doing nothing much other than drinking... I'm gonna die!!! Oh well, it's a fun way to go :-)

The funniest thing is that there's only the two of us going on Friday night, the rest aren't coming till Saturday, there was a bit of a mixup... and Stuart's getting loads of stick from his guys about the two of us going off to Dublin together :-))

Labels: drinking, dublin