You know you have amazing friends when you hear one of them tell another to look after you over the weekend, and when you hear the other later say, ‘I’ve got lots of valuable things in this car, and one of them is you’. Aww. I love Nika and Kieran.

We went to Sainsbury’s yesterday and nearly died. This is what happens when you get 13,000 people moving into a city in 48 hours. I saw all the freshers looking all cute and lost and young (although they all look older than me!) as we were wandering around the self-catered park near the uni, looking for a couple of friends who moved in yesterday. I register for uni tomorrow, and I’m seeing Sarah, who I haven’t seen all summer despite the fact that we live near to each other both in Nottingham and Manchester. Ah, the complicated life of a uni student

I wrote the above paragraphs ages ago, but never got around to completing and publishing the blog entry. I’ve had so much going on at the moment – all the uni stuff (Freshers’ Fayre, tutor appointment, registering, sorting out timetable, getitng a sports card, booking an appointment with community action, booking an appointment to get a webspace for Nika’s society [PoleSoc, for Polish people], plus information about all the societies I joined. This includes ‘Hide and Soc’, a society for childhood games, meaning we’re going to play hide and seek on campus in the dark with torches, have board game bar crawls, and play things like tag and duck duck goose ) On top of that I’ve been working, organising my room, playing lots of Gamecube, meeting up with people who I haven’t seen for a whole summer and party-planning.

We had a party last night which ended up being really fun even though only about 20-25 people turned up (for various reasons), and most of those were guys lol. I would love to say something about a bowl of Bacardi and Sugar Puffs at 3 am, but I’m sure you know what guys are like! There was a hell of a lot of clearing up to do last night and this morning/afternoon, unsurprisingly.

So, lectures start Monday and I still have to read Richard II (I’m still on the introduction). Strangely enough I found a copy of a programme for it from The Globe – apparently I saw it in 2003, but I don’t remember a thing about it lol. 

They messed up the timetables for English really badly this year. I noticed on the Internet timetable that they’d scheduled a lecture at the same time as a seminar, but they didn’t realise it until the actual day we had to sign up. Then they tried to sort it out but failed, so I have to wait until Monday to find out what’s happening. At the moment I have Fridays off and every other Wednesday off, so I hope nothing messes that up. But that isn’t the end of the story – I got a nasty email from a lecturer (addressed to all the second year students) saying that she’d emailed before (I don’t think many people got the email – I certainly didn’t) and she needed people to switch Drama groups because the classes were uneven. I’m tempted to switch, since we’re with the same guy we were last year who gave me a really shit mark at the beginning of the year that pulled my whole average down. Plus, he has a very irritating smile and he never stops smiling so it’s incredibly annoying and makes me feel quite violent lol. And in addition to that, I have no idea when one of my seminars starts. But I’m more sorted than I was (I wanted to switch modules but they weren’t sure if I could), so I’m reasonably happy.

Work is going ok – I saw another student yesterday while I was at work but didn’t get a chance to speak to her. The time I worked before that though, there was a new guy who started (maybe 40 or 50 ish?). He started talking to me, and the conversation went something like this:

Him: Hi! *shaking hands* I’m [Mr Eager], how are you?!
Me: *startled by the whole hand-shaking thing* Erm..fine thanks, you?
Mr Eager: So what’s your name?!
Me: Jenni
Mr Eager: Oh right! Are you new here?
Me: Not really, I worked here over the summer
Mr Eager: Oh right! I’m new! I’ve been working here for seven days!
Me: …

He talks in exclamation marks and is altogether tiring. I hope I don’t end up working for him. And I’m really glad I didn’t meet him when he’d been working there 43589457458939 days, or our conversation would have been a lot longer…

I actually really miss blogging, it’s such a good form of therapy for me because I love writing. Normally my driving instructor acts as my therapist (whether willingly or not), but only my first driving instructor was good at understanding (probably because he was 23). Sometimes I find myself mentally composing blogs in my head while I’m out, like the sad fool I am, but I never remember what I was thinking of typing later on (my memory is getting steadily worse and I’m rather scared/annoyed by it).

At the moment I don’t have any plans for next week other than going to uni and hopefully the appointments for the PoleSoc website and the Community Action thing, as well as dropping into the sports centre to use the gym and pay for my membership. But I’m waiting on emails from the societies I joined, plus Nika has arranged a PoleSoc ’social’, so I’ll see how it goes. I don’t think I will be working unless none of the other students they employ are free because they try to distribute work evenly and I’ve been working there over the summer whereas I don’t think anyone else has. (Gah I’m rambling). I’ve decided I’m going to schedule everything I possibly can, including work on Starshine and Blossom, which will hopefully lead to more regular updates and a less stressed Jenni.Plus I need to prioritise things so I can figure out what to drop/reduce if I have revision to do or an essay to write, for example.

For some reason I’ve been getting tons of spam comments recently. I never had a problem with spam with Greymatter and Movable Type, even though I was using ridiculously unstable and outdated versions. Now I have 70+ spam comments held in moderation every couple of days. So now you have to answer a maths question in order to post a comment (good thing Windows has a calculator, right?). Hopefully that should solve the spam issue for the time being. If you have any problems with it, please email me

So we went to Blackpool the other night for my cousin’s birthday. I really enjoy the tackiness of it and just the ‘OMG look at that!’s that occur from this. It’s possibly the only place in England where you’d see two fat girls walking around shops and arcades in bikinis at 11pm in September. As we did. One thing I did notice though was the stares, which we got the instance we got to the main drag (and thus the lights and fireworks, which are the main attraction of this seaside city at this time of the year). My sister noticed it straight away and pointed it out to everyone, although my dad claimed it was because of the car (my dad drives this monstrosity, and to be fair it does attract rather a lot of stares in suburban England). But after we’d found a place to park (which took around an hour as my dad and Lara hate walking anywhere, and Lara wanted to go to the Dr. Who exhibition which was miles away from any parking space), we noticed people were still staring. Perhaps it was because they were all chavs, perhaps because we were wearing clothes, perhaps because we were 6 obviously Iranian people walking down the street, I don’t know.
(By the way, if anyone reading this is from Blackpool, I hope I haven’t offended you or your hometown or anything. I don’t mean to!).

One of the attractions of Blackpool is that you can ride by horse-driven carriage down the street. My sister was in the process of taking a photo of one of the horses when the following happened with my cousin (who is 30 odd and not a native speaker of English):

Lara: Damn, I missed the horse!
Cousin: *in a tone of complete bewilderment and excitement* Mister Horse?!
At which point we all started pissing ourselves laughing. He joined in, but we were laughing so hard we forgot he didn’t understand what was funny until about ten minutes later. So of course when we realised that we just started laughing all over again.

A similar thing happened with my second cousin who’s now learning to speak English after living with Iran. He listens to my Dad a lot (somewhat ironically, since my dad’s not a native speaker of English either) when he’s taking Pom out. So anyway, Arad told his mum to shut the front door. She did so, and then he turned to her and said ‘Good boy!’ (obviously something he’s picked up from my dad talking to Pom) lol!

I’m getting too lazy with blogging. I’ve been inspired to blog, I’ve had (some) time to blog, and I haven’t blogged. I really don’t want to start slipping again with blogging and updating. I’ve promised myself that I will do a major update and continue getting this website back on track before I go back to Nottingham. I’ve spent rather a lot of my computer time on Starshine at the moment. Yesterday I added a new theme and uploaded 10 new games for the arcade. Today I’ve been searching for a code snippet for it that doesn’t exist – grr – and I uploaded some new messenger icons. The problem is, I’m overloaded with work to do for both sites, plus I have emails, comments, questions etc. Busy as ever

Today’s debate in my world is what kind of sports centre membership I should go for at university for this year. I can pay £185/year and get everything free at whatever time, £125/year and get it free between around 8am – 3:30pm, or I can pay £45/year and pay up to £3.60 every visit, depending on what time I visit. Last year I had the £45 one, but I was really close to the gym and was living with plenty of people who wanted to go. This year, I live a long walk from the gym and with far fewer people. So if I pay for a more expensive membership, I’ll feel guilty about not using it and therefore will be pushed into going more often than I would otherwise. Plus, it would work out cheaper than paying per visit if I go more than twice a week (I’m thinking about going 2-3 times per week, plus swimming at the weekend). My third line of argument is that if I pay for it all at once, then I won’t have to put money aside for it, worry about paying it etc. But will this be like a new year’s resolution, the kind of thing where I’ll go for a couple of weeks and then won’t be bothered because it’s so far away? Hmmm.

I’m also tempted to get the £125/year one. Until about February, it gets dark really early and I won’t want to walk that distance, and therefore I will be leaving the gym before 4pm. Also, I don’t have many lectures and so I will have time to go to the gym during the day. The problem is, it’s always busier during the cheaper times *sigh* I guess I’ll have to think about it some more, maybe get a full membership for 3 months or something and see how it goes. I’ve just slobbed around all summer and I’m even more unfit now lol. I’m determined to get my life on track where uni work, driving and my body is concerned. I get the feeling that uni will be the easiest out of those, unlike for most people lol.