vendredi 27 juin 2008

I've been really busy because the day before yesterday it was my sister's birthday and yesterday it was my mum's birthday and today I've had my friend Sarah over. She's french and doesn't talk much. I straightened her hair because she's wanted done for months now and it was the greasiest hair I've ever felt. You could have literally fried chips in it, I had to wash my hands after and I spent the whole time trying to stop myself from asking her when she last washed it. It was starting to turn into dreadlocks.
For Izzy's birthday we went out shopping and I think I bought more than her. I spent 20 euros on a pair of pyjamas, three tops, a pair shorts and a handbag. I think I was doing quite well until we reached the shoe shop, I spent 15 euros on a pair of shoes I just fell in love with which kind of ruined the whole "over all I'll spend less than thirty euros" thing.
My family are outside now and despite the fact that they have about thirty citronella candles around them, they are being bitten to death. I have told them that there was no way I was going to join them so I'm sitting inside listening to music and typing. Before that I was filming myself singing and playing the guitar (yes I'm that bored) and I'll put them on my blog as soon as I work out how to change things from cassette to file on the pc.
For those of you out there who are just as bored of me go on www.fonejacker.com it is hilarious!

mardi 24 juin 2008

Vocabulaire, vocabulaire...

Who, out of you people reading my blog who have probably got much better things to do, knows what "tautology" is?
I didn't until the other day when my dad told me it was saying the same thing twice using different words. As opposed to tortology which is the study of cakes.
example: free gift (a gift is necessarily free otherwise it isn't a gift)
The other thing me and my dad looked up on Wikipedia (we were bored) was paradoxes. The best one has to be:
The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false.
See if you can work that one out!

I'm really bored

It's the day before the day before the holidays. As my poppa says, the school year in France is getting shorter and shorter. It's because french teachers are not like English teachers, English teacher are full of enthusiasm and propose different ways of learning... French teachers stand in front of a class and talk at them under the impression that if they talk at them loud enough some of them may start to listen. This is not only very boring for the students but for the teachers as well who do anything to get out of it hence the amount of strikes (roughly two a week).
It's been hot today. Hotter than yesterday which was hotter than the day before that. My mum said: "it's going to be stormy today" so I trusted her blindly and went out in skinny jeans and a jacket. She was very wrong. We sat in class melting into the seats all of us fanning ourselves with whatever item fell to hand. Todays lessons were particularly interesting:
french -> hangman
maths -> puzzles
latin -> film (I'm not sure what about because I wasn't watching it)
music -> film (legend)
I have to admit I didn't learn much.
Everybody is out. I think I must be the only person in the family without much of a social life since most of my friends would rather be wading through a muddy field than out shopping in town (half an hour's drive away). I wandered about the house for a bit giving Chloe one of our dogs a quick cuddle (poor thing's just had an operation), jumping over the pile of dust in the middle of my parents bedroom floor, moving random stuff around the house so that nobody knows where it is... Eventually I sat down behind the computer and here I am.
I've phoned my Nana who is in hospital because she has just had an operation on her heel and is failing to understand a word of what the nurses are chattering on about. She had just been served a dinner that she has ordered but has no idea what it actually is.
Now I'm very bored and I'm wondering whether or not I should hide some shoes under peoples beds.

jeudi 19 juin 2008

(monkeys and cooked karate suits)

I forgot to add the embarrassment of getting changed behind a bush. The bush the girls had found to get changed behind was huge and would have hidden us from everyone's sight if only it wasn't in the middle of a path. Which ever side I went behind I was still in full view of all the tree monkeys so eventually I decided to just get on with it. It was probably one of the most embarrassing things I've ever done!

monkeys and cooked karate suits

I didn't write yesterday evening because i couldn't get the computer to let me publish it. I am now writing at half past nine and am absolutely shattered. Because of this I will try not to go on about what happened today.
It is a well known fact that I am about as happy with heights as a fish is on a bicycle. Who on earth booked me in for the karate trip to Sarlat to one of these "look at me I'm fourty feet in the air held on to a tree by a peice of rope" places. I wasn't looking forward to it especially since I would be going with a load of short people about half my age and made to live in trees (direct descendants from the ape) who would show me up.
It took over an hour to get there and sitting me in a car for over an hour with my sisters a few cm away doesn't put me in a very good mood. We got out of the car and the heat hit us. It felt like someone had just pushed us into an oven.
We got our kit on and went up the trees... I only stayed on the low stuff that I could jump down off.
The heat was unbearable, typical french weather: it's been cold and wet for the past month and then on the second day of summer, all of a sudden it's 35 degrees in the shade. At five though, I was delighted to find out that we had to change out of our summer clothes into our swelteringly hot karate suits. They are the kind of thing you could wear skiing and still be warm in.
First of all we had to do the normal stuff :
-praying to the karate god
-praying to the teacher
-praying to the other students
My dad said it was all about respect, I think some of the people in the class deserve less respect than ants (I will not say any names but those people know who they are).
Then he made us jog through the forest and I was the only idiot to fall over straight into a couple of five year olds. After that we had to kick trees, then each other.
I do feel sorry for the little girl I was kicking, I think I was a bit hard on her. But I was now boiling in a saucepan full of my own sweat which is always exactly what a teenaged girl wants to do on a sunday afternoon. After a while of practicing breaking each others arms he let us go back and do it in front of the adults (yipee!)
This was followed by a very boring meeting and the belt giving. I got a yellow and white, charlotte a yellow and white+2 barettes and isobel a yellow. This now makes me the worst in the family and to top it all off my sisters got medals for their concentration... I didn't but I think I know why, I spend the classes trying to hit him and looking at him with the most attitude I can muster.
I think over all this was a very good day and everyone enjoyed themselves immensly.

Titanic

Yesterday evening was the concert. It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I completely messed up my song by stopping half way through. I thank the other players because they were the only thing that stopped me from looking like an idiot, they were just as bad as me if not worse. That wasn't the good part. After me and Ellie were in charge of pouring the drinks and we encountered some minor problems:
1) There wasn't enough drink
2) There weren't enough glasses
Ciaran came to the aid of us damsels in distress by bumping into us and running around panicking. Once we had finished with the drinks we had a rugby match. Four boys against ten girls, guess who won! ...The boys. This was made even worse by the fact that the boys were Ciaran (12), Ben (13), Alexander (8) and Harvey Jay (6). Thank god they only made a joke of it!
This morning I got up on time. Yes for the first time in a couple of weeks I started the day on time so why did it all go so wrong? I had my usual breakfast and then decided to straighten my hair thinking "no rush I've got loads of time!". I have to leave for the bus at 7:50, I finished straightening my hair at 7:40. I looked at my watch and realised i wasn't even dressed. I quickly stuffed some clothes into my sports bag and left wearing my broken, tattered, dog eaten shoes. In other words I looked like i had just had a fight with a hedge...the hedge had won.
I was asleep in technology and because i hadn't finished my "clock" stayed in the class room the whole way through the science physique lesson. After that we had sport, my worst nightmare: as an end of year treat we were doing kayaking (sorry i don't know how to spell it)
I borrowed several peoples clothes (this mornings rush) and realised only five of the sixteen girls were actually doing it including me. Mathilde, Alison, Amanda and Cecile. We slowly apprached the lake which was looking particularly uninviting with a large amount of leeches floating on the surface. We got into the kayaks and set off. It wasn't long before Jordan was out so he dragged his kayak back and took of his life jacket. He then set off to tip everyone off their boats with the help of Damien and Simon. Mathilde was tipped out of her boat and then jordan headed towards me. I can barely steer a bike let alone a boat (never ever get in a car with my driving, last time I nearly hit a tree) so I span round in circles for a bit panicking while Jordan climbed onto the front of my boat in a position rather like horizontal tree hugging and started to rock it. I panicked even more and managed to capsize the boat my self by throwing myself overboard. Jordan ended up next to me under water so i used his head to push myself up to the surface. Once he had swum off to go and get Benjamin out of his boat I started the long journey back to the edge while avoiding all leeches slugs and to my surprise snakes in the water.
This meant that later on when i came out to eat my hair was soaking after my shower. Anyone who has seen me with wet hair knopws why I spend such a long time with hair straighteners in the morning. Why don't schools have straighteners? I begged several people for hair bands and eventually borrowed one off Kirsten. It didn't make me look much better though because my hair is so short any ponytails i do look more like the tail of one who has had a terrible accident involving getting it's tail stuck in the door. Simon thought it was really funny and spent the rest of the day picking on me: "like your new hair style" "you've got a hair sticking out just there".

mercredi 18 juin 2008

aaaargh! Who is that? That can't be me.

This morning I was late. This wasn't particularly unusual since I hadn't set my alarm, I never set my alarm because I once read when I was much younger that if you concentrate the night before, on the time you have to wake up your brain wakes you up at that time. It's a load of rubbish so I recycled it, now I tell my mum that I don't need the alarm set because my brain wakes me up naturally on time, really it's an excuse to stay in bed until she comes up with the dogs.
Sometimes I regret ever letting her have dogs, those times often occur in the morning when I wake up to find one of them whacking me repeatedly over the nose with it's tail and by doing this wafting towards me the smell of it's early morning productions.
Of course this put me in a wonderful mood and I got up to eat my chocolatine. The word chocolatine makes it sound really posh, it's really one of those greasy things you get in packets from the supermarket but if I had it my way I wouldn't be eating anything for breakfast. At least it's something even if it is probably made out of cardboard but it has just enough sugar in it to get me out of the comfy spot on the sofa where I make my nest every morning.
I go all the way back upstairs where I try on countless items of clothing. It's not that I don't have nice clothes or that I'm particularly fussy about what I wear it's just that everything looks good in my drawers but as soon as I put it on it doesn't. I have absolutely no shape all and all clothes just hang off me as if someone had tied them to a pole. Most people complain about being fat and their trousers too tight well imagine if even your belt hasn't got a hole small enough for you.
And my hair! I sometimes think it would be easier to just shave it off and wear wigs instead because my hair undergoes twenty minutes of straightening every morning and even then it still looks like I've just been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Of course all of this makes me about attractive to boys as a toilet brush, in fact, thinking about it, it makes me look like one too. I often wonder why I make an effort in the morning then I remember that I do it so as not to scare little children and feel a wave of happiness wash over me that I think of other people like that. Then I look in the mirror again.