Jelly Babies and Balloon Wars
"School starts again tomorrow"--that was what, 19 days ago? I've been lax, haven't I? but I've also been busy, busy, there's so much to be done and so much more to plan for--these are times when there isn't time to do much but keep on doing, doing, doing until one falls over into bed and cannot even reminisce over the day that has just past before tiredness claims one's consciousness.
Admittedly I'm exaggerating, just a little bit, but then--
This, I warn you, will be a long post. 19 days is three weeks--or very nearly so--and with the hectic nature of these past weeks, I have many, many events to record. In fact I probably have few events to record, but I'll be going into them with my customary amount of detail, which will simply fluff them up all the more.
Thus--we begin with the first day of school, on which I had only two hours of classes because the labs and tutorials don't start until the second week of school, at least; this semester, in fact, labs only started on the third week. Very little happened that day and the next few, apart from myself and Goalkeeper constantly keeping track of each other's locations: with me being a squatter in his place at the time, we had to always know where the other person was so that whoever needed to get back to the room could do so (there was, after all, only one room key between the two of us). That first week passed quickly, and I remember there was Crusade-related activity as well--we were still surveying the freshmen and giving out foolscaps--I haven't the exact figures, but we gave away upwards of 800 items.
The first and second week were mostly characterised, in fact, by Crusade's aim to reach out to the freshmen--the first week was surveys and the second week (at least the first three weekdays) by the extra-curricular booth stuff...
Here I digress for an explanatory note. The University has many students, who have a variety of interests. These students, somehow, tend to band together, and when you have a large enough band then you call it a Club. The University officially recognises Clubs of a certain size and above, and joining these Clubs then allows you a certain amount of points that help you stay in Halls as well as looking good on your resume, depending on which Club you are in. The University, during one of the early weeks of the school year (in this year it was the second week), holds a Extra-Curricular Activity Fair (informally, the ECA Fair) for a number of days (three days this year) during which the Clubs may apply for and, if permission is gained, set up a booth to advertise their presence to the student body and hopefully gain members.
Now, the Crusade is a University-recognised Club, and so we had a booth. We also had a mascot (costume donated by one of the Crusaders), which I unfortunately never got the chance to see walking around. I'm not sure what response it got either--my classes on Monday and Tuesday are such that I wasn't able to be at the booth very much, and on Wednesday Goalkeeper took the key and rendered me unable to leave the room until the roomie returned--otherwise I'd have had to leave the place unlocked and very unsafe; thus I was terribly inactive as far as booth-manning was concerned.
On Thursday there were classes from 8.30 onwards, and by the second Thursday most of the class realised that one of our lecturers is the kind of person who knows a great deal about something, but just can't quite communicate it--in our case he knows statistics very well, but is absolutely unable to tell us why the equation takes such a form, or what the various bits mean. There's a petition already being passed around where people plead for a change of a lecturer to one who can talk in terms we can understand, though frankly I'm pessimistic about the chances of it succeeding. The faculty hasn't quite as many lecturers as it could have.
...I'm probably mixing up chronologies quite badly here. The weeks were just THAT interchangeable--well, not exactly. I simply haven't very much of a grasp on time. At any rate I do know that sometime during the the early weekdays of the second week I applied for, and received, an extra elective which I was very happy about until I looked at the lecture notes. Which, to my horror, were entirely in Comic Sans of various font sizes, and consisted of abrupt sentences ending in far too many punctuation marks--you know--things like "IS THIS SO????!!!!!" and "WHAT IS ENERGY???????????"--things that don't inspire any great confidence in the lecturer. I like my lecture notes to not leap off the page with aggressive-sounding roars. (Yesterday I attended the lecture, and found that the lecturer is able to talk for 3 hours with only a ten-minute break in between because the students get tired, and still not manage to finish the set of lecture notes because of all the side anecdotes.) I also, during--I think it was on the morning of last Thursday or Wednesday--applied to become a legal squatter in Goalkeeper's room, but it was rendered unnecessary by the email that I received last Friday afternoon that said that I'd been allocated a room.
And so I moved into my new room on Monday night, with Goalkeeper's help, after spending Monday morning paying for the new room and Monday afternoon obtaining the keys to it and finding out where the nearest road was (it turns out the nearest road is right beside) so that the taxi would know where to go to make me expend the least effort in shifting things. Thus I have been living in my new room, with the new roommate, since Monday night; I quite like this new room, as it's one of the older Halls and thus has more floor space. The newer Halls have less. The roommate's another quiet, neat-and-tidy type--why do I tend to end up with neat, quiet, health-conscious, studious people? they make me feel so guilty all the time--and so far we haven't exchanged much more information than that we're both male and that he doesn't mind me switching off the light on his side of the room when I want to sleep. So far he also regularly sleeps later than I, and wakes later--I keep getting woken up by passing traffic, though so far I've managed to regularly get 8 hours' sleep (on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at any rate).
And today is Saturday; it's 7.30pm at the time of typing. I've spent most of the day going between various Facebook games and my statistics notes (I'm almost at the point of giving up trying to understand 'em and just plugging in formulae for use whenever needed), which makes today unusually productive. I should probably go for dinner soon, too.
A couple days before was Thursday, which was fun--it was Student Union Day, which means classes got cancelled between 10.30am and 2.30pm; Crusade took that time to organise a bit of board games time and also provide an opportunity for the Crusaders to sit around watching each other become competitive. I played Munchkin, which is actually quite fun; it does, however, require a bit of knowledge to play, and I didn't have any--so I lost quite badly. All the same it was fun. And after the event was officially ended, several of us didn't have any classes to go to, so we stayed back to help clean up the rooms we'd rented for that (there are function rooms all over the University for Club events) and began bashing on each other with balloons. It's a mercy the room doors weren't transparent, because I suspect if the people outside could look in, we'd never be allowed to rent those rooms again. And then we continued playing card games--myself and a few others, of which one was Herr Robson--Munchkin was followed by Monopoly Deal (which is like UNO, except Monopoly-themed) and then the actual Monopoly (which I lost due to not having houses, though I did own half the board's worth of properties). We took a break for dinner, then returned to Munchkin; we only finished playing everything around 10.45pm, which means I'd effectively spent nearly 12 hours on dice and card and inane laughter. It was, however, very much fun.
...I shall go to dinner.
Admittedly I'm exaggerating, just a little bit, but then--
This, I warn you, will be a long post. 19 days is three weeks--or very nearly so--and with the hectic nature of these past weeks, I have many, many events to record. In fact I probably have few events to record, but I'll be going into them with my customary amount of detail, which will simply fluff them up all the more.
Thus--we begin with the first day of school, on which I had only two hours of classes because the labs and tutorials don't start until the second week of school, at least; this semester, in fact, labs only started on the third week. Very little happened that day and the next few, apart from myself and Goalkeeper constantly keeping track of each other's locations: with me being a squatter in his place at the time, we had to always know where the other person was so that whoever needed to get back to the room could do so (there was, after all, only one room key between the two of us). That first week passed quickly, and I remember there was Crusade-related activity as well--we were still surveying the freshmen and giving out foolscaps--I haven't the exact figures, but we gave away upwards of 800 items.
The first and second week were mostly characterised, in fact, by Crusade's aim to reach out to the freshmen--the first week was surveys and the second week (at least the first three weekdays) by the extra-curricular booth stuff...
Here I digress for an explanatory note. The University has many students, who have a variety of interests. These students, somehow, tend to band together, and when you have a large enough band then you call it a Club. The University officially recognises Clubs of a certain size and above, and joining these Clubs then allows you a certain amount of points that help you stay in Halls as well as looking good on your resume, depending on which Club you are in. The University, during one of the early weeks of the school year (in this year it was the second week), holds a Extra-Curricular Activity Fair (informally, the ECA Fair) for a number of days (three days this year) during which the Clubs may apply for and, if permission is gained, set up a booth to advertise their presence to the student body and hopefully gain members.
Now, the Crusade is a University-recognised Club, and so we had a booth. We also had a mascot (costume donated by one of the Crusaders), which I unfortunately never got the chance to see walking around. I'm not sure what response it got either--my classes on Monday and Tuesday are such that I wasn't able to be at the booth very much, and on Wednesday Goalkeeper took the key and rendered me unable to leave the room until the roomie returned--otherwise I'd have had to leave the place unlocked and very unsafe; thus I was terribly inactive as far as booth-manning was concerned.
On Thursday there were classes from 8.30 onwards, and by the second Thursday most of the class realised that one of our lecturers is the kind of person who knows a great deal about something, but just can't quite communicate it--in our case he knows statistics very well, but is absolutely unable to tell us why the equation takes such a form, or what the various bits mean. There's a petition already being passed around where people plead for a change of a lecturer to one who can talk in terms we can understand, though frankly I'm pessimistic about the chances of it succeeding. The faculty hasn't quite as many lecturers as it could have.
...I'm probably mixing up chronologies quite badly here. The weeks were just THAT interchangeable--well, not exactly. I simply haven't very much of a grasp on time. At any rate I do know that sometime during the the early weekdays of the second week I applied for, and received, an extra elective which I was very happy about until I looked at the lecture notes. Which, to my horror, were entirely in Comic Sans of various font sizes, and consisted of abrupt sentences ending in far too many punctuation marks--you know--things like "IS THIS SO????!!!!!" and "WHAT IS ENERGY???????????"--things that don't inspire any great confidence in the lecturer. I like my lecture notes to not leap off the page with aggressive-sounding roars. (Yesterday I attended the lecture, and found that the lecturer is able to talk for 3 hours with only a ten-minute break in between because the students get tired, and still not manage to finish the set of lecture notes because of all the side anecdotes.) I also, during--I think it was on the morning of last Thursday or Wednesday--applied to become a legal squatter in Goalkeeper's room, but it was rendered unnecessary by the email that I received last Friday afternoon that said that I'd been allocated a room.
And so I moved into my new room on Monday night, with Goalkeeper's help, after spending Monday morning paying for the new room and Monday afternoon obtaining the keys to it and finding out where the nearest road was (it turns out the nearest road is right beside) so that the taxi would know where to go to make me expend the least effort in shifting things. Thus I have been living in my new room, with the new roommate, since Monday night; I quite like this new room, as it's one of the older Halls and thus has more floor space. The newer Halls have less. The roommate's another quiet, neat-and-tidy type--why do I tend to end up with neat, quiet, health-conscious, studious people? they make me feel so guilty all the time--and so far we haven't exchanged much more information than that we're both male and that he doesn't mind me switching off the light on his side of the room when I want to sleep. So far he also regularly sleeps later than I, and wakes later--I keep getting woken up by passing traffic, though so far I've managed to regularly get 8 hours' sleep (on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at any rate).
And today is Saturday; it's 7.30pm at the time of typing. I've spent most of the day going between various Facebook games and my statistics notes (I'm almost at the point of giving up trying to understand 'em and just plugging in formulae for use whenever needed), which makes today unusually productive. I should probably go for dinner soon, too.
A couple days before was Thursday, which was fun--it was Student Union Day, which means classes got cancelled between 10.30am and 2.30pm; Crusade took that time to organise a bit of board games time and also provide an opportunity for the Crusaders to sit around watching each other become competitive. I played Munchkin, which is actually quite fun; it does, however, require a bit of knowledge to play, and I didn't have any--so I lost quite badly. All the same it was fun. And after the event was officially ended, several of us didn't have any classes to go to, so we stayed back to help clean up the rooms we'd rented for that (there are function rooms all over the University for Club events) and began bashing on each other with balloons. It's a mercy the room doors weren't transparent, because I suspect if the people outside could look in, we'd never be allowed to rent those rooms again. And then we continued playing card games--myself and a few others, of which one was Herr Robson--Munchkin was followed by Monopoly Deal (which is like UNO, except Monopoly-themed) and then the actual Monopoly (which I lost due to not having houses, though I did own half the board's worth of properties). We took a break for dinner, then returned to Munchkin; we only finished playing everything around 10.45pm, which means I'd effectively spent nearly 12 hours on dice and card and inane laughter. It was, however, very much fun.
...I shall go to dinner.
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