Anya

Christmas is finally over, I lasted a total of 68 hours in Cavan. 68 extremely long hours, most of which I passed playing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Glenda's PS2. Marc's plan might be working.

The party was a rip-roaring success, Marc will have picture on the net at some stage, but behind a password obviously, in case anyone wants to go into politics at some stage.

Photos from Nina's party are on the internet.

The End.

Congratulations to Marc, for being offered a job at the company of his dreams. Congratulations to Shona, who just finished her Leaving Cert (she's going to be an interior designer when she grows up).

I like walking home up Capel Street. Sofa's & Sofa's makes me chuckle. (In my head there is Old Mr. Sofa and his prodigal son, Mr. Sofa who ran off to join the Merchant Marines and came back to run the family business after 10 years sailing the high seas). This is mightily strange, usually I want to go around with an oversize magic marker correcting signs. I also like the pine furniture shop that has the princess dressing table in the window.

Work, work, work, work, work.

In an effort to make my life more interesting, I've signed up for pilates and wine tasting, both starting next week. The pilates will come in useful for the mini marathon training, for stretching and easing muscles and such like... The wine tasting, well, it's dinner and a few drinks every week :) What more could you ask for?

Incidentally, I'm running (vaguely accurate, more like a jog) the mini marathon in aid of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Thanks to everyone who has already sponsored me, and to anyone who hasn't and would like to, please let me know! All funds greatly appreciated.

...to congratulate Aine Kirk on getting ENGAGED!!!!!

Which File Extension are You?

What an activity-filled weekend that was.

On Friday myself and Marc did his brother a favour and manned (womanned?) the box office for Ticketlord at the Hard Working Class Heroes festival in Temple Bar, and in return got many free wrsitbands. So a crowd of us went to the TBMC, via the Pav, the Long Stone, and a Xilinx party in the Mercantile. Funs. We saw Pony Club, who were apalling, and The Chalets, who were great. Then we went home quite drunk (well, I was, anyway).

On Saturday I went out to Marc's and we walked over to Dundrum. Myself, Sean and Marc got a tour of Edgespace Towers (tm) which are amazingly gorgeous. Then after some dessert (preceded by dinner) we headed back into town to Meeting House Square where the mystery openair movie was showing. It was Jean de Fleurette and was ever so good. Even better was the short shown before it, the winner of the Stella Artois Short Film Award, called "Yu Ming is Ainm Dom".

Then on Sunday I helped Sean move house (it's not a proper week unless he moves somewhere) then we all ended up at the Frames, again in Meeting House Square, that night. They were good.

Now I must return to 24, Season 2. All in a row.

Hello.

I have a job. I start on Monday. I work for a big evil corporation but I don't really mind as I'm in it for hte money.

I am going to buy red shoes. Anyone up for a dinner party, perhaps next Thursday before heading down to Annie's for hte weekend?

I spent a long weekend at home which is in the midst of a GAA frenzy. Everyone was desperately trying to get tickets for the match on Saturday - 3 Ulster teams are playing so tickets are like gold dust around the border. Mam and Dad managed to get tickets in the end though as my cousin's on the team and had a spare pair. All weekend I had to listed to my sister argue with my mother about how embarassing it is to have a parent walking around with a green and white headband on.
::rolleyes::
Then I had to sit and listen for hours while the last match was discussed, play by play.
::ROLLEYES::

In a week and a bit I will be off to London. Hopefully I will have moved house before then. We saw a place on Capel Street last night which was good but it was up the top end, and just off the main street so it was a bit dodgy. Other places were almost right, but not quite. We're about to start today's hunt now. Fingers crossed!

I forgot to blog about Oxegen. We went on Sunday only, so we missed lots. It rained sporadically until about 7 when it POURED down for about 15 minutes. Then Tim Wheeler set his guitar on fire and that made everything ok again so the sun come out :D
Muse were good, if a bit same-y. They were exactly the same as the last time I saw them, 3 years ago.
We were being a bit mainstream so we stuck around the main stage for most of the day. Faithless were excellent, as were the Black Eyed Peas, surprisingly.
There was very little mud, though I imagine the campsite was different.
As it got dark we headed over to the ticket stage to see Basement Jaxx. The layout of the stages was TERRIBLE, with a narrow little passage between the 2 halves of the site. This made places very hard to find. This annoyed me. The dance stage appeared to be in a giant building.
The ticket stage had concrete in front of it which was good. We got bored halfway through basement jaxx and went back to catch the end of the Darkness. Wow. They certainly put on a show. It was quite amazing.
Marc was not at oxegen as he was off sick from work, but if he has been there, these are the pictures he would have taken:
http://www.killerrobot.net/albums/oxegen/

I finished in Cornmarket yesterday. We had a garlickey lunch and then went back to the office for an hour where I finished training and turned in 2 projects at speed. I got a pretty purple necklace and a bonus for my trouble, then we all went and got mightily drunk in the Front Lounge. It turns out I'm not the only one who hates the new girl (she has Heidi plaits and is fat - we are superficial. also she squeals on people). I am mildly hungover but the dulcid tones of Johnny Logan are helping soothe my wearied head.

Now I'm kinda floating, everything is up in the air again. I have a week off then I'm temping. But there are a number of financial services jobs that I'm going in on Monday to talk about. I'm still wavering between temp and permanent cos I'm going to London for a while in August and I don't wanna get tied down.

The French market in Smithfield is crap, it doesn't have half the stuff the Jervis Street one usually has. I am lethargic because of french carbohydrates.

There are rumours that H&M have acquired 4 stores in Ireland. Is there nowhere sacred?

Hurrah, Marc's coming home the weekend of Oxegen so now he's coming too :) Paul and James also have tickets. I'm looking forward to it now. Anyone else fancy a day out? We're going on Sunday, which means missing The Killers.

Yesterday I got my exam results. That's BA (Mod) to you.

Yesterday I also handed in a month's notice on my job. Now I have the motivation to get a proper, well-paid job. Me being me, I'm wavering again, and thinking of heading to London after all. I'm not sure I have the guts for it though.

Dexter's Laboratory is the best cartoon in the world and is full of many important life messages. "The thing which is happening is not the thing which should be happening".

So, I am finished college and now I am in the real world. My first week in the real world was spent in Portugal, which is not at all like the real world. Warning: this is a long long blog.

I left for Portugal last Thursday. The flight left Dublin at 9.15 which was real early, but not as early as it should have been as the flight was changed from its 6.00 original time. I was in the airport real early which was a good thing, as the girl behind the desk was stumped by the fact that my booking reference was written down not typed and printed out (me being
me, i'd left the printout in the netsoc room). This confused her between 6.45am and 6.55 am. Then I went to get a coffee and went to the gate (C25) which then changed to A9. This was quite annoying as the C gates are nice and new and the coffee is good while the A gates are boring.

Just as we were about to board the flight some Gardai and airport police appeared and handcuffed an English guy sitting near me. He was led away with his girlfriend following. The rest of his family stayed and boarded the plane. It was very strange as they all seemed to be expecting it and although the rest of his family were a little upset they got on the plane and went on holiday. Everyone in the lounge was pretending not to look. It was a very bizarre start to the holiday.

So the flight went fine, it was a budgetair charter so there were lots of skanky holidaymakers on it with loud children who were allowed to run up and down the plane. I wished I had some string with me to make collars.

We landed jsut about on time, but it took some time to get through security and passport control because the Portugese authorities were being extra attentive as many English and Russian football fans were flying in (apparantly they're the ones to watch). But I got through eventually, my bag was the first out and I went to meet Marc and his parents.

Wow it was hot. We went back to the rental car and proceeded to get quite lost on the way to the villa. We ended up in the mountains with Marc getting more and more annoyed (and me more and more amused). He is apparantly not used to his parents driving around in circles for fun, while my parents do it all the time. You learn patience like this.

Eventually we were heading in the right direction. From Faro we went to Almanil and then down to Quinta do Lago. On the way through Almancil everything looked kinda dry and hot, very yellow. When we got to Quinta though, it changed completely. Everything was lush and green and very expensive looking. We passed through Quinta do Lago and down to the Four Seasons Fairways which is where Marc's family's villa is. The villa is GORGEOUS. I has my own room which is the size of the marketing department in Cornmarket. I had my own bathroom too with a shower room. There is a pool at the front and a terrace at the back leading onto a huge expanse of green overlooking one of the fairways golf courses (of which there are 2). We had
some lunch on the terrace and then headed to the BEACH.

The first day we went to Maria's beach (so called because there is a restaurant called Maria's near where we parked the car). It was real hot, so we stayed under the parasols. Later on we jumped in the pool at the villa. In my head I can swim, and I have the NSC badges sown onto my old swimsuit to prove it, but it appears I have forgotton exactly how to. It's not like riding a bike. So I practised a lot all week. At the beginning of the week I had problems breathing under water (in that I was constantly trying to). By the end of the week I was able to dive down and pick up Marc's boarding card from the bottom!

On the first night we went for pizza. The next night we went to the restaurant whose name I cannot remember but it was by the lake. There was a tank of crayfish near our table which was most amusing. Some of them were fighting, and one really clever one seemed to be staging a breakout attempt. He would push another one to the edge of the tank and then climb up on it to reach the top of the water. Hitting the roof didn't deter him and he just kept trying again while all the other crayfish watched although the lobsters did not seem amused.

On Saturday Marc's parents played golf. We went up to the clubhouse to get their car and went into Quinto shopping centre. We got some stuff for a bbq that evening then later on after lunch we all went to the beach. The weather was perfect, nicely hot but with enough of a breeze to stop us dying. Then in the evening we decided we would need more food for the bbq so we did a running attack on the Apalonia supermarket. We had a lovely dinner with the O'Connors in the villa and then myself and Marc went up to the clubhouse for some drinks.

Sunday was mostly spent on the beach (not Maria's beach, the other one with a very long walkway!) and we had lunch in Gigi's which is an openair fish restaurant just on the beach. Myself and Marc had fillet steak and it was gorgeous. Then we went swimming in the sea. The water was nicely warm all week and the waves were quite strong. By the end of the week I was loving it, in spite of Marc's attempts to drown me at times :D Maybe it was because I was tickling him too much. That evening myself and Marc went up to the clubhouse to watch the England match but there was a crap atmosphere so we went back down to the house and watched it there on our own. It was mega exciting at the end.

On Monday and Tuesday Marc's parents were in Spain but Marc had a car of his own so we did a little exploring. We went to the lake and went out on a pedalo (ouch on the thighs) and we spent a lot of time in the big pool in the country club where I almost drowned on numerous occasions. There is a guy in the country club called Antonio who has been there for years and runs all the kids events. This has the effect of keeping the younger kids out of the way, and this is a GOOD THING. Not that I hate kids. I just hate loud kids. Antonio wears MASSIVE sunglasses that cover his eyes and all the surrounding area, like something froma Back to the Future movie.

On Monday night we went to the best Chinese in the world, just the two of us. We had a table outside and the sun was just setting. We ate dim sum and shared main courses and it was the nicest chinese food i've ever eaten (sense a theme of excellent food at all?). The wine we had gotton in the supermarket earlier was minging though so we threw it out when we got home. We are bad at choosing wine, though we have increased our vocabularies!

Then on Tuesday morning we went back to the lake where Marc took a sailing lesson on a cat and I got a tan and read "The daVinci Code". We lunched at the poolhouse and that evening when his parents got back we went to Senor Frango's (Mr. Chicken in Portugese) with the Copelands. They had the best chicken piri-piri and prawns in the world. Marc had warned me that Senor
Frangos would be alittle tacky, but apparantly they have recently done it up. It was lovely inside and had mad metal chickens all over the place. There was still the giant "Mr. Chicken" sign outside though which was the ultimate in tack. As we were leaving some English people came in and made prats of themselves, changing tables and demanding wine. All the waiting staff were hovering around them and one guy looked really familiar. He was a very tall black guy with a shaved head, and he was sucking on a soother. As we left we realised it was Stan Collymore. He was still a prat though.

At this stage I felt like I had been introduced to half of Dublin 4 :D

On the last night we all went to a very posh French restaurant. WOW. I can't say anything else.

Now I am home, back to reality with a bump.

ooh, look, i AM FINISHED TEH COLLEGE (!)

I had the fear briefly this afternoon when we got a mail telling us results are out very soon. Then I promptly lost it again. I'm so far past caring at this stage it's scary. Tomorrow's exam, like all the others, should be fine, in theory. However like all the others they will probably try and make it as long as humanly possible - more blisters from writing, yey :)

Wednesday's exam went fine, though I answered 3 DOM questions and 2 Mondred questions, I had expected it to be the other way round. Still the encryption question was an absolute gift, ATM and MPLS came up along with a nice waffley question about the evolution of telecommunications. Mondred's queueing theory question was fine, and I tried the SSM/SA/HST question too.

Tomorrow I suspect I will be answering 3 database questions and "attempting" 2 of the conceptual mathematics ones. Still, have a nice dinner to look forward to afterwards :) AND a lie-in on Saturday morning. The luxury of it all.

I feel I shoult update. Otherwise people will keep annoying me.

Today was a good day. I had a good chat with Prionsias de Rossa who was canvassing in Christchurch this morning. He knows quite a bit about software patents. And I have just had a lovely dinner from M&S which had _4_ types of vegetable in it. Quite a shock to the system.

However I have spent all day revising Donal O Mahony's half of the course for the exam tomorrow, which is much larger than it first appears. This is a BAD THING. So now I need to cover queueing theory, central server model and simulation this evening. The waffley stuff will go in in the morning.

Oh, for some motivation. The fear has deserted me.

Huzzah!

Exam #2 also over. Didn't set the world alight, but I did ok. Glad to have it over with, now more than a week until the next. The sun is out, and I'm tempted to go shopping for my holiday. Cannot, as I am poorer than I have ever been in my life. Such is 4th year :)

On Friday night everyone (and i mean everyone) headed over to Grainne's where we watched the High Life and ate much food including a strawberry swiss roll which she made herself. Then me and James were surprised by Mark's arrival home from London, though apparantly everyone else knew. If I'd known I'd have brushed my hair :) He's heading back today though and I doubt I'll see him cos I have so much work to do. He's the first to fly the coup but it looks like he won't be the last. Annie has accepted the Kalido (kal-I-do, not kal-ee-do which commands more respect) so that's 2 of them in London for the forseeable future. For the moment though everyone else is staying relatively put which is good.

I finish on the 4th, Marc is coming home that weekend and we're heading to Cavan on the Saturday. Gonna miss Ger's party :( But my parents will disown me if I don't go to the family dinner, especially since I'm going to Portugal (hurrah) on the following Thursday.

Now it is sunny so I must go sun myself (in the sun). Did I mention it's sunny?