Yesterday, Robbie and I went for a stroll.  We walked around Clondalkin Village, taking photos and chatting.  By the end of the day, we’d taken waaaay more photos than I expected.  Here’s a few that I liked the most.

I’m going to give all the photos titles.  It somehow makes the photo feel a bit more significant if it’s actually got a title.  Also, it’s fun to try to think of titles!  Feel free to tell me how bad they are.  Hover over the picture to see the title, and click the photo to go to the full-size version on Flickr.

I spent the day walking around with my camera around my neck, constantly ready to grab it and take a photo of anything interesting.  As we walked past an abandoned set of houses, I stopped to take a photo of the overgrown garden.  As I leaned down to snap the photo, this cat ran down the path and looked back towards the camera.  It’s maaad how stuff happens.

After we’d taken a couple of photos of the cat, it ran off into the bushes.  We waited in the garden for a while, to see if it would return.  It didn’t, but as we waited, I found myself looking around the garden for other photographic opportunities.  I found one in this dandelion.  You can even see some tiny water droplets on it.

This photo isn’t too special, but it’s just so feckin’ colourful!  If I worked in the greengrocers in The Mill I’d probably be dazzled from hanging around that bright tasty-looking fruit for so long.  It’s quite a nicely arranged spectacle of fruit and veg.

This is definitely the nicest looking photo I took.  These little roses were in a small seemingly abandoned plot of land between houses.  Thorns and nettles were everywhere, with just this one rose holding on, battling against the elements.  I’m betting the elements will win soon.

I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but there seems to be a lot of gulls around Clondalkin Village.  This one flew above us and landed on a lamppost, and proceeded to make quite a feckin’ din.  It was pretty much impossible not to take a picture of him, with all the noise he was making.

Something about these cans appeals to me, and I like this photo.  I just can’t work out why.  I guess it might be the sheer ridiculousness of it.  People bother to go and impale their fizzy drink cans on top of a fence when they’re finished with them?  Sounds like a fun life.

Dublin Bus are currently undergoing a big redesign of the bus network.  They’ve been marketing it to the public as some sort of “Network Upgrade”, but in reality it’s just an excuse to sell off busses, cut bus routes and save money.  The 78a is to be replaced by the 40.  I thought I’d get a picture of a 78a passing by before the route is cast into oblivion.

This one was actually taken the night before our stroll to Clondalkin Village.  I can’t really explain why I like it.  Actually, I can think of one possible reason.  Up until recently, I’ve been using cameras that can’t really handle night photography.  The camera I have now is the first camera I’ve ever had that can take photos during the night that don’t always turn out absolutely terrible.

And that, is that!  I took a lot more, but I thought I’d try keep it short enough.  Leave some comments, tell me what ye liked, didn’t like, or didn’t care about.  Thanks!

S’later!

Even after eighteen years, I can’t help but be slightly surprised when suddenly the days are a lot shorter than the nights, and even the sunniest of days is accompanied by a biting wind attempting to freeze you from the inside out.  It’ll probably be the same when spring arrives.  Wait, no.  I know it’ll be the same when spring arrives.  There’ll be a lovely warm day, and the sun will be shining.  There might even be birds singing in the trees.  At this point, I’ll cast my mind back to the last time I encountered this sort of weather.  I won’t be able to remember properly though.  It’s just how we work.

I know I’ve got WeatherShock, anyway.  Even if I did just invent it.  It’s always either dark, cold, windy, rainy or a combination of all four.  You’ve really hit the jackpot when it’s a combination of all four.  Actually, on that note, I can put up with wind, and I can put up with rain.  Usually, when the wind is blowing ridiculously hard, I’ll fend it off by attempting to perform a sort of proud stride into the wind, keeping my momentum going.  If it’s rainy, I’ll normally just duck as far into my coat as I can, and conserve whatever body heat I’ve got left underneath the layer of raindrops covering my coat.

It’s when you mix the two of them together at the same time that the problems start occurring.  If it’s windy and rainy, neither of those techniques seem to work.  You can’t do the proud stride, because it’s impossible to look proud when you’re as wet as some bog roll that someone’s drunkenly knocked into the toilet.  You can’t do the coat duck either, as the wind always manages to get underneath your coat and freeze every inch of you, no matter how well you hold out the rain.

So what do we do?  Well, what can we do?  Looks like most of my winter will be spent drinking cups of tea, filling hot water bottles and dreading whenever I have to go outside.  Ah well.  It’s a fun life.

S’later!

This morning, I woke up on a plane.  I couldn’t remember where I was, or how I’d got there.  I was sitting on the plane, utterly confused.  I looked around.  The first thing I saw was a man lubricating himself, because of his inconvenient sandwich.  I had no idea what was going on.  When the plane touched down, there was a cab waiting for me outside the airport to take me to a hotel.  Something wasn’t quite right about anything, none of the people seemed to talk much.  The cab driver dropped me at the hotel, and he drove off without saying a word.  I stepped inside the hotel, and asked a porter to show me to my room.  He said “Mattress?” and I replied with “Cartridge!”.  He took me to the room, and in the middle of the room was a coffin. I opened the coffin, to be greeted by a school of dead sperm.  I wandered into the bathroom, and I found a merchant in there.  He offered me a pot of may.  I respectfully declined, and headed downstairs.

I hailed a taxi outside the hotel, and asked him to take me to “The Ivory“.  He refused to take me to The Ivory so I got out of the taxi and walked to the nearest bus stop.  I was waiting on a bus to take me to see Doctor Register, because my snuggle wasn’t feeling too good.  The bus arrived, and I got on.  I asked the bus driver how much the fare was, and he replied “Darling, that’ll be some Macaroni“.  I didn’t have any macaroni, so I said I’d pay him in Notified Sizzle.  He was fine with this, so I went to find myself a seat.  I sat beside a man who looked like a Hindu.  I tried to strike up a conversation, and I asked the hindu where he was going.  He said “Lagoon!“.  I was puzzled, because I didn’t think this bus was going to the lagoon.  I thought it was going to P.O. Box Greece. I said this, and he looked at me with a confused expression.  It was then that I realised he wasn’t speaking in English.  I felt rather awkward at this point, so I went and sat next to someone else.  She just looked at me and said “Death.“.  I was understandably a little scared at this point, so I promptly jumped out the back window of the bus, and landed on an injury.

I was waiting there for twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived.  Two paramedics jumped out and looked at me, and then one said “I’ll see you in two week’s time!“.  They got back in the ambulance and drove away, leaving me on the road.  Ten minutes later, someone came over to help me.  I thanked them, and gave them my only leukaemia. He ran off.  I crawled to the roadside, and looked at signs to try to work out where I was.  I eventually worked out I was foreign. In the distance I saw a retarded reckless Switzerland. I then knew that I was on the border between somewhere and Switzerland.  I limped towards the border, but when I reached it I was stopped by the Science of Twenty.  I had no idea what the Science of Twenty was, so I asked a nearby man to explain it.  He told me “Partner, Starboard Trinket!“  I realised the Science of Twenty was keeping me from returning to my home in Switzerland, and I’d left my passport in the hotel.

I returned to the bus stop, only to find a massacre of the hikers.  Despite the gruesome scene, a bus arrived a few minutes later.  The bus driver said to me “Is the meeting still on?“  I still didn’t have any macaroni so I asked him if I could pay in crumpets.  He said this was fine, but it would only get me half way.  For the full way, I should pay in octopus.  I didn’t have any octopus on me that day, but he let me on his bus anyway.  I sat next to someone who looked like a fizzy deep anarchist.  He looked me and asked me to feel his bollard.  I panicked and ran to get off the bus.  At the next stop, I leapt off the bus, and landed on a guy called Cornwall.  I apologised to Cornwall and asked where he was from, he replied with “A ditch“.  I looked around, and found I’d ended up near my hotel again.  I went in, to look for my passport.  Instead, I discovered Gambia.  I turned around, and found Cornwall following me.  He asked me to photo his paradise, in order to apply for a congested tomato.  I told him I couldn’t do that.  He looked very disappointed, and he walked away slowly.  Out on the street he looked at a herald.  I watched him walk across the street and thought “Obituary“.  Sure enough, Cornwall was hit by a car.

A rather odd feeling came over me as I ran up the stairs to my hotel room.  Suddenly, I ran into a queer.  I apologised, and ran past the queer into my hotel room.  I found my passport, and that’s when I noticed the lead of my treaty.  I ignored it, and ran outside.  I’d had too many bad experiences in cabs and busses at this point, so I decided to get a train to the border.  As I walked towards the train station I glanced up at the sky, only to see the “Senate“.  I asked a man how on earth the Senate got up there and he replied “Ritual.”.  I saw a phone booth nearby, and ran over to it.  I tried to call one of my friends to see if they could explain what was going on to me.  My friend didn’t answer, but his voicemail said “Revive your ironing!”.  I remembered I had ironing to do, that I’d left at home.  I reached the train station, only to find the price of a ticket was desolate.  I proceeded to climb on board a train, hoping I’d go unnoticed.  Suddenly, I was puzzled by a large regard to switch my subterranean frank.  I switched my subterranean frank, and the train pulled away from the station.  After a short while, the food trolley came along, but all the food had been pilfered.  I decided to pass on the food.  Suddenly the train stopped.  We’d hit a disgusting lettuce on the tracks.  I was allergic to lettuce, so I jumped off the train as quickly as I could.

Then,  I ran into five billiards!  I found this rather odd as billiards weren’t meant to be this big, but then I remembered there was a festival on today.  I struggled to remember the name of it, then it came to me.  It was the Festival of the Nasty Afternoon.  I saw the entrance to the festival, and a man was standing there.  He said to me “Welcome to the Festival of the Nasty Afternoon! The main event of the evening is Malaria.  I didn’t think this was a good main event at all.  I’d rather the main event was “Investment in rough deduction of the sandwich“.  I tried to leave the festival, but then I bumped straight into a fascinating chandelier.  I decided to follow the train tracks, and I wandered into the train tunnel.  It began to get really dark, and I remembered I had a lighter in my pocket.  I lit it, only to be greeted by an eagle.  He spoke to me of majestic Greece.  I wondered why this eagle was talking, and then I remembered I was high on mantlepiece.  I asked the eagle if he would lead me out of the tunnel.  He replied “Right.”.  I walked out the tunnel, alongside the eagle.

We reached the end of the tunnel, and I saw Switzerland in the distance.  Only between myself and Switzerland stood an army of experimental retinas.  I realised I needed to stop smoking all this conversation.  Suddenly, the eagle disappeared in a puff of grease. I turned to face down the retinas.  First, I hit a retina with my minibus, and then I took another one out with my energy.  Finally, I deployed a stunning ironmonger.  This destroyed the rest of the retinas and I was free to walk towards Switzerland.  As I crossed the border, the border guard said to me “Notorious Rift“.  I went back home, and went straight to bed.  I thought to myself “It’s been a great day.  But the thing I liked most about it was the opera!

I hope it does.

The whole reason everything has suddenly stopped is because in 1982, an ordinary passenger plane flew through some ash and all the engines in the plane failed.  The ash got inside the engines and solidified, and the engines stopped.  Without recounting the whole story, eventually they got out of the ash, the engines started again and the plane landed safely.  As soon as The Volcano erupted and the ash came towards Europe, everyone thought “Right, get the planes out of the air, they’ll all fall out of the sky if we don’t”.  At this point now (five days later) some of the airlines (Air France, KLM, Luthansa and British Airways) are getting a little annoyed at this ruling.  They’ve been sending up test flights to check if the ash is actually affecting their planes at all.  Assumably they want to find that everything is alright and planes can actually fly through ash with no problems whatsoever, so they can stop losing money.

Now you’re probably thinking “Grand, this doesn’t affect me“, but it does affect you.  This whole episode will probably have effects and repercussions that go on for quite a while, and that’s assuming all the ash has cleared by the end of the week.  A couple of struggling airlines will probably go bankrupt, and air fares in general could rise.  There’s probably going to be some food missing from the shop shelves for a while, as fresh fruit isn’t getting flown into the country.  Anything you ordered off Ebay from that guy in America won’t get here for a while (though apparently UK<->Ireland post is fine at the moment).  Apparently if anyone is outdoors and feels a sore throat/lungs, itchy eyes or a runny nose, they should get back indoors.  I’m a little worried about the animals myself, is it going to affect them?  They can’t really just go indoors.  The thing that affects me the most at the moment is that I know someone who’s supposed to be flying somewhere on Thursday, and now she might not get to go.  That’s bollocks.  I suppose the worst situation anyone can be in right now though, is to be trapped in a faraway country with no money and no means of getting home.  I hope things are worked out soon.

In non-ash-related news, I’m going to see Lostprophets and Iron Maiden.  Lostprophets is in a month’s time, and Iron Maiden is at the end of July.  It’s nice having some gigs to look forward to again, last time I went to a proper gig was Opeth last October.  Very good gig.  It has eaten into the money I have saved up though, as I just had to go to see both bands.  Lostprophets haven’t been here in about five years, so they better be worth the wait!

Last week I had my Spanish Oral L.C. exam and my Music Practical L.C. exam.  Larry Cullen knows how to stress a guy out.  We had really nice friendly examiners for both subjects, and they made me feel like I did really well.  I’m unsure how well I actually did, but I feel positive about it.  On the other hand, I’ve got my Irish Oral this Wednesday.  I know no Irish.  No Irish.  Níl.. Gaeilge?  That’s probably wrong, I’ve never understood the rules for saying “yes” and “no” in Irish.  I want to be able to speak Irish, but not yet.  I’d rather learn it in a few years, in my own time.  It’s impossible to learn anything in our Irish class, it’s full of idiots and the Irish syllabus is shite.  How about we learn to speak it before we have to learn poems and stories, yeah?  That reminds me, there was an Irish Times article I liked about how compulsion is killing the language.  I agree with it.  Here it is, if you want to read it, it’s quite short.  http://bit.ly/aBUVW2

Subject Matter played on stage for the first time in 5 months yesterday, and I was there to see it.  It was quite a horribly organised little Credit Union talent show.  Some of the acts were quite bad.  The microphones and backing tracks randomly stopped working every now and then.  Luckily nothing went wrong during Subject Matter’s set, where they played that song that starts with X but can end with any combination of letters/words, and O Nani Ama.  They broke at least three rules of the competition, so they didn’t stand a chance of winning, but they weren’t in it for winning, they just wanted to play, and they played good.  Walking home from Palmerstown wasn’t fun though, it took at least an hour.

That’s about all I’m gonna talk about today!  I really have to go off now and sweep up the piles of ash from the front steps, and do my homework.  Time to pick up my sword pen and do battle with Larry Cullen once more.

S’later!

The class descends into panic.  Every student springs up.  Three girls and two boys begin screaming piercingly.  One girl faints.  No-one notices.  Students leap over tables in an attempt to be the first out the door.  Two students collide, and collapse in front of the door.  A third student trips over them and pounds his noggin off the doorframe.  He topples onto the other two.  They create a barricade.  No-one can move them.  The door is impassable.  The hysteria grows.

The teacher idly glances at the next poem in the textbook and wonders if the class should tackle it tomorrow.

Two students pick up chairs and turn towards the windows at the back of the room.  Some of the more composed students move towards a corner and create a circle.  They start to form a battle plan.  They don’t get far.  The back windows are smashed, sending shards of glass hurtling towards the circle.  They dive out of the way.  One is injured by the glass and someone administers aid.  The chairs are thrown down as people attempt to escape through the window.

The teacher becomes faintly aware of the rising panic in the classroom, but has no visible reaction.  She decides to start the next poem today.

The scene turns gruesome.  The shrieking sounds are now accompanied by the maroon colour of blood, as students scrape themselves off the jagged glass in a frenzied attempt to squeeze out of the smashed window.  They are unsuccessful.  The window is too small, and one student becomes trapped with a leg sticking out of the window.  A handful of students attempt to calm and help the frantic mass, but to no avail.  Tables are overturned.  Textbooks and stationary lie everywhere.  Streams of blood flow around a maze of tables.  A group of students create a circle again and shout orders at each other, in an attempt to create a plan.

The teacher looks up.  The teacher begins reading the next poem.

The student trapped in the window attempts to shake himself free.  He loses his footing, drops outside, and promptly falls off the roof.  Someone faints.  Someone thinks he can break down the door.  He aims a strong kick towards the door, but misses and kicks one of the collapsed students.  The students in the shouting circle have formulated a plan.  They’re going to stack tables up until they reach the skylight.  They start picking tables up and handing them to each other.  One slips in a puddle of blood.  Three, four, five tables are stacked.  The top one slips, and falls with a crash.  The wood splits.

The teacher coughs amidst a cloud of dust.  She nears the end of the poem.

A student jumps from a table.  Another shouting circle forms, and a student with a bright idea makes herself heard.  Another plan is formulated.  The tables will be stacked in a pyramidal fashion.  It has to work.  The panic in the room is reaching extreme levels now, and the floor is an obstacle course of tables, chairs, limbs, books, glass and blood.   They get to work picking up the tables.  Five, six, seven tables are stacked.  It seems stable.  The lighter students clamber up towards the skylight.  The pyramid of tables is now five tables from the ground and the skylight is near.

The teacher reaches the end of the poem.  Unsatisfied with how thoroughly she has covered it, she proceeds to read it again.

A foolish student is tempted by the promise of freedom.  He stands on the top table and jumps up, trying to hit the skylight.  He misses, and on his descent, he slips, and bounces painfully down the pyramid of tables, landing on someone elses head.  Both of them fall to the ground in agony, writhing and screaming.  The other students momentarily stop, and exchange quick glances.  They add the last two tables in the room to the construction.  A student stands on top and reaches for the skylight.  He cannot reach it.  The tables are not high enough.

The teacher continues reading.  Her desk is bolted down, so attempting to take it would be useless.

The students look around.  There is only one other object in the room that would be any use.  A tall grey metal cupboard sits in a corner.  The remaining six students argue about it for a while, and eventually agree that they have no other option but to use it.  They struggle to pick it up.  It’s locked, and full of books.  Very slowly, they lift it and pass it to each other up the stacked tables.  When it reaches the top, they place it on the top table and make it as sturdy as they can.

The teacher finishes the poem, and gets up to put some notes on the whiteboard.  Her marker pen is not where it should be.  Her awareness grows of the situation.

There is a banging coming from outside.  The students quiver, perched on desks ten feet high.  They shoot worried glances at each other, and continue their attempt to escape.  Two students hold the cupboard in place, as one climbs onto it.  He pulls the skylight window open, and breathes the fresh air of freedom.  He pulls himself up, and sits on the roof.  The hammering noise becomes louder…

The teachers hammering on the door from outside finally break in, and the unconscious students blocking the door are shunted out of the way.  Teachers flood into to the classroom, all trying to comprehend the sight before them.  There is a long, stunned silence.  Every conscious student stares at the teachers, and the teachers stare round at the students.  Even the student on the roof is looking in through the skylight in silence.  Eventually, everyone looks towards the teacher.

“It was only a fire drill.”

On Saturday afternoon I walked up to Liffey Valley with Robbie.  Got myself an 8GB USB stick which my computer dislikes very much.  So much it even gave me a bluescreen earlier when I was trying to copy something to it.  Apart from Robbie spilling his orange, it was a nice little trip.  It was good.  On Saturday night a load of us went to the Steering Wheel, a pub in Clondalkin Village.  We all went to see Eoghan’s band Mitzi Turbo for the first time.  I think it’s safe to say we all enjoyed the night.  I don’t like pubs in general though.  It was good.

On Sunday I invited Robbie and Forde (THE BLUE TEAM) over for Mario Kart, as always.  We played a 32 race tournament in which we played every race in the game (well.. we played one twice, i made a mistake, still).  TBT (Feck, we still need a new name, I totally forgot to mention it to them) emerged from the 100cc 32 race tournament as the winners.  It was good.  After they left I sorted myself out, did a little bit of homework I had to do, used Rosetta Stone to learn some Spanish for half an hour.  It was good.

Last week, as I said, was my “deciding week”.  I got my History research done, and I got a few other things done last week that needed doing.  I’d call it a success.  I doubt this week will be quite as hectic (workwise), what with St. Patrick’s Day falling slap-bang in the middle of it, but it’d still feel good to get some stuff done.  I want to reach Friday and be able to say “I’d call the last five days a success”.

Check this out.  http://bit.ly/akRwJu The Ordnance Survey website’s map of Ireland.  I’m sure everyone’s gone onto Google Maps/Google Earth before and had a look around, it’s quite fun to do.  But what’s really fun to check out on the OSI website is the retro maps.  If you click “ORTHO 1995″ on the sidebar, it changes the view to satellite photos of 15 years ago.  The amount of fields just 15 years ago that are now housing estates is huge.  The most astounding thing though, is the complete lack of Liffey Valley.  Nothing there but a huge field.  I can’t exactly remember where I found this, I think it was a post on boards.ie.  Either way, it’s very interesting.

I began reading Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell last week.  Either last Tuesday or last Wednesday.  I enjoyed it so much I’d read over half of it by Thursday.  I haven’t finished it yet, so I’m unsure how to even start describing it, but I’d say it’s probably one of the best books ever written.  Unless the ending’s shite.  I’m going to assume the ending won’t be shite though.  It’s been sitting under another book all weekend to keep it nice and flat, as someone mentioned last week that the book was a bit mangled from being in my schoolbag all week.  I can’t wait to finish it.  It’ll be in tip-top shape when you get it back Paul.  Don’t worry.

You may have noticed that even though I said I didn’t want this blog to be a diary of things I did, I still mentioned everything I did this weekend.  I explicitly made the descriptions of everything I did as short as possible to stop them being the main focus of the blog.  I hope I’ve been successful in doing that!  Tell me what you think of this bitta writin’ below.  Also, if I can have another blog posted by Friday, I’ll try and mount my schedule again.  Two blogs a week?  Insanity.  And much tougher than it sounds.

S’later!

There’s a few reasons for these feelings.  One of the biggest ones is that I have to do my history research project this week.  If I don’t put some focus into it and get it sorted by the time Friday comes around, I might as well kiss that 20% goodbye.  I think it’s 20%, anyway.  Another reason is all the approaching deadlines, and all the things that need to be done.  I’ve got to send lots of forms off to HEAR and TAP by the end of the month.  I’m going to have to send off for my Garda ID soon so I can have a constant ID with me incase I get the urge to do things that require me to be over 18.  There’s also oral exams coming up, and practical exams in Music.  All in all, there’s lots of stuff I need to be doing, and I’m going to have to focus fire on one thing at a time if I’m ever going to get it all done.

I’m getting serious with this Mario Kart thing.  Every time Robbie comes over we improve our Mario Kart driving skills a little more.  He’s been over three Sundays in a row now, it’s becoming a weekly routine!  Forde wasn’t available to join us for a drive yesterday, which was a pity because then it would have been a blue team meetup.  Hmm, we can’t just be “The Blue Team”.  We need a name.  I’ll have to think about this.  Anyway, Forde was busy studying for a German Mock Oral, or a GMO for short.  I heard that it went well.  I am happy.  Any more recruits for “The Blue Team: New Name Pending”?  We have an open spot.  Of course, you’ll need to be available for regular training.  It’s rigorous work playing Mario Kart.

I never spoke of the difference between what I predicted I would get in my tests (after I took the test) and what I actually got in my tests.  For the most part, my predictions of how well I did were quite accurate.  Here’s a nice little list.

• English [HL] – predicted result 67%, actual result 75%, difference +8%
• Maths [OL] – predicted result 79%, actual result 83%, difference +4%
• Irish [OL] – predicted result 33%, actual result 40%, difference +7%
• Geography [HL] – predicted result 47%, actual result 50%, difference +3%
• History [HL] – predicted result 54%, actual result 52%, difference -2%
• Spanish [OL] – predicted result 70%, actual result 65%, difference -5%
• Music [HL] – predicted result 42%, actual result 45%, difference +3%

A couple of things I should point out about the above list.. there’s no way I’ll pass the real Irish exam.  Our exam was a little dumbed down, so apparently I did well enough to pass.  It also did not have an oral or aural element.  The History and Geography exams obviously don’t take the research/field studies into account.  I predicted my Spanish result after we did our aural test but before we did our oral.  My Spanish result without the oral element was 74%, resulting in a +4% difference at the time of prediction.  The music result is based on the aural and composing papers, with no practical.  I got the average of the differences, and in general, I did 2.5% better than I thought I did!  SCORE!

I’ve been downloading lots of applications (apps) for my Nokia E63 phone recently.  When I say “lots”, I mean “anything that’s free in the Ovi Store that isn’t shite“, and stuff that’s free in the Ovi Store and not shite is in VERY short supply.  I downloaded the Skype app, thinking “Ooh, I’ll be able to make Skype calls from my phone, it’ll be cool!“  Sadly it wasn’t cool.  It worked fine, but then when I got into a call, the quality was terrible and the call dropped after about 20 seconds.  I don’t know whether to blame the app or my phone.  I downloaded YouTube’s own mobile app, so I can finally watch YouTube videos on my phone properly.  Before, I had to put up with RealPlayer telling me it had no network connection just because it was lazy.  I also downloaded eBuddy, though that wasn’t really my choice.  I tried to update the Nokia Chat app, which I used to use to connect to MSN on my phone.  When I tried to open it again, it gave me an “Unhandled Exception” error.  Tried everything to get it to work again, but to no avail.  Thanks, Nokia.  I also downloaded a few lesser programs, like Fring, but I don’t enjoy them enough to bother talking about them.

I’m trying to keep away from making these blogs just a diary of things I did recently.  I want you to be reading this to find out what goes on inside my head, not to find out what I was doing on Saturday evening.  We’ve got Twitter for that!  In related news, if you want to know what I was doing on Saturday evening, Twitter’s sitting over there in the doobledoo.  Leave me a comment, take a stroll inside my head, everyone is welcome!

S’later!

I’m still heavily considering the purchase of items with the money I’ve saved up.  You all know by now that one thing I really want to buy is a DSLR camera, but that’s a huge purchase, and not something anyone just dives into.  The camera I have my eye on at the moment is the Canon EOS 500D.  It’s €720 in Argos though, so I’m too scared to just go out and buy it.  I spend ten minutes pondering whether I’m going to buy a bar of chocolate or not, so deciding on something this big is likely to take weeks, if not months.

Last week I didn’t do very well on my Spanish mock oral exam.  It’s a pity, because I do like the Spanish language.  Me gusta el idioma español.  I’m going to have to try to improve my Spanish-speaking skills.  It’s all very well learning some words and sentences, but when it comes to actually having to converse in Spanish, I panic and think really slowly about what I have to say.  I shall be good at Spanish eventually.

I played lots of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mario Kart Wii with Forde and Robbie yesterday.  We enjoyed meeting up to relax, chill and play Mario games so much that we plan to do it again as soon as we possibly can.  I think one of the things that makes both games so much fun is the fact that we play both games in teams, so we’re always shouting advice and discussing things with each other, as opposed to shouting insults and trying to intimidate each other.  “GO BLUE TEAM”

Recently, I read about a very stimulating thing to do at lunchtime.  Apparently, you have a drink of coffee, then you have a nap for a little while.  The caffeine takes about half an hour to kick in, so the energy from the nap plus the buzz from the caffeine equal a SUPER ENERGY BOOST!  I don’t know how well it works, but it sure sounds like a good idea.  I’m not sure how Ste would feel about me going for a sleep in his bed at lunchtime though.  Plus I don’t really like coffee.

I had grand ideas of a Sunday/Thursday schedule that were fine until I found I had so much to write about that I couldn’t quite write about it all and I ended up writing about none of it.  I’m just going to make my blogs random until I find my stride again, I think.  I will eventually blog about what happened at Dara O’Briain, and my 18th Birthday, but not for a while.  Suffice to say, I had a great time, and I’d like to thank everyone that came to my birthday.  I’ll post it as a sort of historical blog, when I do post it.   I’d also like to welcome Forde to the land of blogging, you can find his link  in the doobledoo right here: “http://forderr.wordpress.com/“.  I’m sure I’m not the only one hoping he makes many more blog posts for us to savour.

I’d like to thank ye for reading, and I’d like to hear you commenting on my blog.  What will the headlines be tomorrow in the paper?  Hopefully, it’ll be along the lines of:

“DANNY BLOG SIGNALS TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO FORM”

I’m not that lucky.  It’ll probably be more like this.

“DANNY BLOGS ONCE AGAIN, COLLECTIVE GROAN MEASURES 2.7 ON THE RICHTER SCALE”

Personally, I’m hoping for the former.  And I’ve also put a link to Forde’s blog in the doobledoo.  Enjoy!

S’later!