what are everyone’s plans for summer? I think we should have some kind of a gathering, so write on here to say when you’re free. :]

I’m working weekdays at the mo as a cleaner at a school in penn, which is as fun as it sounds. howeverrr, in two weeks the school breaks up for summer so no more cleaning for soph. :] then I’ll be going up to warwick to sing at the graduation ceremonies (rosie, this means you get to hear us chamber choir lot singing the ‘warwick fanfare’ – it’s horrendous and has fake latin in it, so enjoy that!), then I’m free for a week again, then I’m going caravanning in wales with a group of uni friends, thennnn I’m free again, and thennnn I’m going to peruuuuu!

which is VERY exciting. :]

I’m going over there for a month (catching three separate planes to get there, which is the part I’m most nervous about currently :S), to do conservation work in the amazon forest. should be pretty great. :] I also get to do a little nip over to machu picchu while I’m there, which is equally exciting. so, I guess I’ll do a blog about that when I get back! I’m sure there will be lots to say and squeal about. like monkeys and parrots and pumas and things.

in the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy reading about a bazillion books for next year, and doing this online course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (ie. TEFL). I’m hoping to be able to use the qualification I get from that to go and teach abroad after uni. fingers crossed. :]

so, that’s all my news really! let’s do summery things like picnics and barbeques. discuss.

over and out x

Well today I have been working my little socks off trying to get one of my three essays done that needs to be in next week. I have just about finished – I’m quite a way over the word limit so I need to do a little bit more editing and proofreading, but apart from that I can relax on the French Literature front. Now I just have to write a 2,500 word essay on The Canterbury Tales and an unknown-word-limit essay on French and English poetry, by next Thursday. Whee.

What’s making me sliiiightly stressed out about all this is not simply the amount of other work I have to do on top of it (to give a few random examples, revising for the French translation test I have next Friday, translating 100 lines of Chaucer, various grammar exercises and scansion and versification practice), but also the crazily busy week I have ahead of me in terms of music society events. Here is a little timetable of my upcoming musicalnesses:

Sunday
11am – 2pm – Symphony Orchestra rehearsal
4pm – Symphony Orchestra concert

Monday
1pm – 2pm – Consort rehearsal
6pm – 8.30pm – Wind Orchestra rehearsal

Tuesday
7pm – 9.40pm – Symph Orch rehearsal

Wednesday
5.30pm – 6pm – Chamber Choir notices/pre-concert practice
6pm – 6.45pm – Consort carol singing
7pm – 9pm – Wind Orch and Chamber Choir concert

Thursday
1pm – Consort carol singing
5pm – 7pm – Chamber Choir rehearsal
7pm – 8.30pm – carol singing with flatmates
8.30pm – midnight – Chamber Choir cocktail bingo night

Friday
4pmish – Consort going to Northamptonshire somewhere for a concert

So all in all…wish me luck. :happy:

Edit: Oh and I forgot to say, I rang my mum up this evening to get her to open my prize-giving invitation, and it turns out I got two prizes! My first two EVER, might I add, lol. In French and Psychology. Woop. :]

Well I haven’t written a post in a little while so I thought I’d update you all on what’s going down in Warwick. Last week and the beginning of this week were pretty work-heavy; I had two essays to hand in at the beginning of this week as well as lots of reading to do for both English and French, translation work for my Middle English class, grammar and translation work for various French classes and discussion preparation for my seminars. However after a hectic weekend and a very late night of essay-writing on Monday the work is slacking off a bit in preparation for the glorious reading week which is happening next week! Basically we’re given work and reading to get on with and we don’t have any seminars or lectures to go to. Some people are going home but because I still have Orchestra and Choir rehearsals to go to and my two shifts in the library, I’ll be sticking around and just going home next Friday morning for a long weekend.

This weekend I’m heading off to Alveston, which is near Stratford-upon-Avon, with the Chamber Choir. We’re setting off on Saturday morning and rehearsing all day, then we may go to a fireworks display in the evening and on Sunday morning we have some free time to mill around in Stratford. On Sunday afternoon we have another rehearsal and then we’re performing in the evening. I’m really looking forward to it – my first proper concert at Warwick. In terms of other musical stuffs, I have a concert coming up on the 12th with the Wind Orchestra and on the 18th we’re competing in the National Concert Band Festival, which should be pretty exciting. :happy:

This blog seems to be going backwards, so let me tell you about last weekend! On Saturday I went into Leamington with my flatmates Jason, Daniel and Sophie, and we had a browse around some of the shops there. It’s about ten million times nicer than Coventry and there’s this massive park with a lake and fountains and a river with boats for hire – I shall certainly be taking John there as a sequel to our punting adventure in Cambridge. On Saturday evening we had our Halloween Ball in the Student’s Union, which was good fun. We were planning on going as the Addams Family but because of various reasons with the tickets selling out and those without tickets buying different costumes to have a party at home instead, and then more tickets being released on the website after all, we had three members of the Addams Family – me as Morticia, Mannie as Gomez and Yee Hung as Uncle Fester, and a caveman (Jason), a witch (Soph) and Zorro (Daniel). We all looked rather spiffing if I do say so myself!

Other than that I don’t think I have anything to say. Ooh, except going back to music again (sorry for boring you but it’s the only thing I do other than work ), I’m going on tour with the Symphony Orchestra in Easter, woot! We’re going to Salzburg, how awesome is that?

I really am finished now. If you are reading this, think to yourself: hmm that looks fun, I should write a whasblog too I want to hear from you all! Now! Toodle pip ^^ xxx

It’s been a reasonably eventful week for me. This week all of our seminars and tutorials started so I’ve been a bit busier than last week when I only had three lectures. I’ve been getting involved in various musical things; as you know if you read my last blog I got into the choir last week and our first rehearsal was last Thursday. We’re singing some really great things, including a few jazzy classics: Moon River, Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head and The Pink Panther. In the rehearsal we only sang the first of those so I have yet to find out what the other two arrangements are like. My first chamber choir concert is the 4th November in a place near Stratford-upon-Avon – sadly it’s on the same day as me and John’s 3rd anniversary so I won’t be able to see him that weekend .

I’ve also joined the Wind Orchestra (woodwind and brass only) and on Monday I went to a ‘free’ rehearsal with the Symphony Orchestra (strings and wind). On Tuesday I played in my first concert with both of these ensembles, after just one rehearsal for each! It was a free concert where anyone could turn up and play, as a sort of taster for the Symphony Orchestra, which had its auditions today for people who want to go on and become members. I thought mine went really badly because I was so nervous that I mucked up pretty much every aspect of the audition, but they gave me a place anyway. They must be desperate for French Horns… But going back to the concert, it was really sweet – five of my flatmates came along to watch me play. :happy: I feel so loved.

Anyways, enough about my musical escapades. Today I had my first shift working as a Library Assistant as part of Warwick’s work scheme for income-assessed folk. I only do five hours a week and it’s split into two shifts, so today I had my three-hour shift and tomorrow morning I’m working 9.30 – 11.30am. It was ok. It’s more stimulating than envelope-stuffing (which I did for a few days at Ellen’s mum’s work the week before I came to Warwick), but I was working in this section where I was handling lots of old magazines and newspapers (all about ethnicity and racial equality, if you’re interested) and they were very dusty. Also, three hours of sorting magazines = very inky hands. Tomorrow I’m going to be working on the ‘shelving team’…do you think it’s like the A-Team?

After I got back from work four of us from the flat went into Coventry. I’ve identified where the station is, which is handy, and we also bought a few things for our flat: a toaster, a draining rack for the washing up, and…a massive set of poker chips! There’s a really cool games shop there – they had this section for giant outdoor games; playing cards about 2′x1′ in size, giant snakes and ladders, giant naughts and crosses…it was awesome.

I haven’t even started talking about my course! Sorry for the massive post, but I’m not done yet… I’m so loving my Medieval and Renaissance English Literature module; it’s the best! We’re having Middle English Language classes on Tuesday mornings, which are so much fun. We get set a few passages from ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ to translate each week and then we go through it as a class. The lectures are also great, and the seminars and everything. French is good too – I had my first oral class yesterday which wasn’t as scary as I thought it might be. It’s taken by a university student from France (who is doing much the same as I’ll probably be doing in my third year), and it’s really relaxed. The only scary aspect of French so far has been the Written Language seminar, which is taken by a very intimidating French woman. She was reading out our register in the first lesson on Monday and she’ll stop on a random person’s name and stare at them until they say something to her in French… I don’t mind speaking in French if I’m asked a question, but how do you think of something random to say when you’re just answering your name on the register?

I think that’s about all the interesting news I have. I’m glad everything seems to be going well for those of you who’ve blogged recently – as for everyone else, keep in touch! I want to know everything that’s going on in your lives!

Take care all :happy:

It was yummy. Beans for the lose, chicken for the win! Tonight we’re having a stir fry I think. :happy:

What else have I been up to? At the weekend we went to a couple of different nights out at the Union – on Saturday there was a bar tour which was supposed to have seven stops but I think we only went to about three and after that just danced the night away in the extremely packed clubbing area type thing. On Sunday they had what’s called ‘The Sunday Showcase’, which was a taster of all the fresher’s events coming up in the next two weeks. That was also packed but fun. :] Last night there was an event called ‘Top Banana’ which we didn’t go to, instead we stayed in and played some crazy card games (I have a couple of new ones to teach you all ) and then me and Sophie went to the flat next door for a bit and met some other Whitefields peeps.

What a ramble this is turning into! I have more though, so brace yourselves. Today I had my first ‘Medieval to Renaissance English Literature’ lecture which was pretty snazzy. Most of it was her telling us about how the module is structured and what we’d be doing, but we also learnt some basic historical background, and we’ve been given our first bit of homework (is it called homework at uni?). We have to translate a section of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ from Middle English into Modern English, which should be interesting…next week we have a seminar where we’ll look at our translations and possibly read them out, so I better get working on it.

I’ve also signed up to audition for the chamber choir and symphony orchestra. The chamber choir audition is tomorrow, so that’s going to be fairly nerve-wracking, especially as I have just started to develop a cold. My throat has been sore for the past two days but hopefully tomorrow it might move on to the nose area, which is less crucial for singing. Wish me luck. :happy: