You know what you're doing once you get there, right?

Sure. I know exactly what I'm doing once I get there. I'm checking into my pre-booked hotel, following which I have a day to explore Hanoi before I go on my perfectly organised tour of Vietnam. I'm going to Sapa and Halong Bay, before returning to Hanoi, following which I'm going to Hue, then Hoi An. Then I'm flying to Ho Chi Minh City, where I'm doing a cyclo tour (no, I don't know either) before going to the Mekong Delta. From whence I return to Saigon. Along the way I'm hiking, canoeing, making a lantern, going to various museums, learning to cook, and even staying overnight with a Vietnamese family. It is very adventurous and I am excited! 

After that the plan gets a little less plan-like and a little more vague, but basically I hope to meet up with a friend from my adventures in the land of the Hamburgers and stay with her while she teaches people English. I have been promised that there is a good lake, and that I will be able to eat frogs legs. Other than that I'm not too sure there is really a plan, other than to avoid decapitation. Still, this being spontaneous and off the beaten track, shall be all the more adventurous and I get to hang out at a Vietnamese University, which should be exciting!

So you see! I have very precise and detailed plans! Aren't you excited to read all about my adventures? I know I don't have a good track record of actually blogging when life gets adventurous, but I promise you, I have good intentions! 

Counting down to my next adventure!

You guys, it's 30 days until I fly to Vietnam! I put a fancy little countdown widget over in the side bar so you can count down with me! I have been doing research into serious travelling blogs, and I believe at this stage it is customary to write a blog stating exactly what you are going to pack. I will not being doing this, partially because I'm sure you have no interest in exactly how many pairs of socks I will be taking, and partially because I honestly don't have a clue. However my research has revealed that there are three golden rules when packing:

1. Three pairs of underwear will suffice. I don't think I will be keeping to this rule; no matter how many times I read about the "Four days, Four ways" theory of underwear, it becomes no more appealing. I will wear my underwear the standard way. Not back-to-front, not inside-out, not back-to-front and inside-out. This is my final decision. I will also bring a sufficiency such that I do not spend my entire holiday washing my knickers. And before anyone even thinks of mentioning paper pants, I'd like to point out that this is so far outside the realms of things that are likely to ever happen that there's no point me shooting it down.
2. Absolutely no denim ever. I'm going to break this one too. Possibly twice; once in full length and once in short version. The only way I know to dress myself involves denim and hoodies. I don't think I can be deprived of these items for a whole month. I tried in South Africa and wound up buying myself a pair. I don't care if they dry slower than Christmas. They're coming. And besides, I am going to go live with a friend, who has a real person job. So I have to look like a real person, and preferably like I'm not going to smell like I'm on day 3 of the 4 day underwear cycle.
3. Don't bring bedding, it will be provided. Again, this one is looking like it's going to be broken... Anyone who has seen me at camp will know of my deep devotion to my silk sleeping bag liner, and the separation anxiety which occurs when I am bereft of it. I'm pretty sure it can protect me from bed bugs, knife wielding rapists, and the yeti, all at the same time. And I might bring my baby pillow too, because I love it, and it's been to South Africa, Nepal, and America three times and will get sad if it gets left behind.

So right now it's looking like I'm going to be taking everything, including the kitchen sink, I've never really been any good at packing light...

New Look Blog

Something happened to the host of my blog layout, which is sad, so I'm playing with a new one, I don't really do colours and that, as you all probably know, so if it's not working for you, it clashes, gives you a headache or whatever, let me know and I shall be changing things!

The great catch up Blog Post

Apparently I'm just going to blog every 3 months and try to fit everything in.
So here goes....
Since I last blogged I did a little of this :

I danced like this:

and this:

and this :

Maybe I shouldn't dance so much...

Anyway... I also dressed up like this:

          And like this:

In short, Mount Holyoke ate what little was left of my dignity. 

I also hung out with some fabulous people, including this wonderful lot:

All of which excitement culminated in marching in a parade dressed like this :

And the following day I went and got me one of these:

(In case you're wondering, "one of these" is a certificate saying I'd survived a year at Mount Holyoke College and a hug from the President, while wearing a ridiculous black robe and an even more ridiculous, poorly-fitting hat.)

Following which Half-Pint packed up my room while I wept into a box of Kleenex, then she drove me home to Plymouth. Where I ate and slept and read and got to see some of my amazing camp friends. The following day Half-Pint and I went shopping and hung out, and then her mum drove me to the airport. I bought and read the new book in the Hunger Games series, and then flew on my merry way home, in a fabulous seat with plenty of leg room!

And thus endeth the adventure in the Land of the Free.

Onwards to new things!

Oh hello there!

I'm terrible at blogging, so I am going to summarise the last couple of months in pictures and captions:

Firstly, it was my birthday, on my birthday I did not leave my building, because there was an ice storm, and the first snow day at Mount Holyoke for approximately 800 years. So instead I made my friends come to me. There are no nice pictures of this, however a couple of days later, when the weather had sufficiently calmed down to venture into the big bad world, I had a party of sorts and it was lovely. Here is a pictorial representation of this gathering:

We played taboo and I wore a hat shaped like a birthday cake :

Then I joined Frisbee. This was fun because I got to run around a lot and be part of a team. Shortly after joining Frisbee I played in a tournament, this resulted in a trip to a real life American ER. I felt like I might be on an episode of Grey's anatomy. Here is a picture of the out come of this adventure:

Also in February it was Valentines day, I got a whole bunch of Valentines, and this excited me, as I had never received one before. Here is a picture of some of them:

Another thing that happened was the Drag Ball, which supports people whose parents cut them off financially when they find out they're gay, we all dressed up in Drag. Here is a picture of my friends and I dressed as men:

Over Spring break, the Frisbee team went to Georgia, we drove all the way there. It took us 17 hours. I was not built to be in a car for 17 hours. We stopped off in DC. Here is a picture of me and my car-mates by the Lincoln memorial:

While we were in Georgia we played some Frisbee. This is the only evidence I have of ever having set foot on a Frisbee field. I am the one on the far right looking the wrong way. Excellent.

Here is a picture of our entire Frisbee team, or at least, those of us who went to Georgia, as you can tell, Georgia was pretty and sunny and we had the most excellent time ever.

Since Spring Break I have been hard at work doing academic type things. Part of this process is Study Parties. This is a strange Mount Holyoke thing I think. At study parties one hardly ever actually studies. Instead one gets conned into climbing into (and subsequently being locked into) cupboards under sinks:

And drawing pictures of the study party-ers on the black board in the room in which said study party is being held:

So that, in brief, is what I have been up to. Hopefully now I am up to date, I will keep up to date. That is, as always, the plan!

J-Term Adventures.

Other than moving furniture around my room, I did actually do interesting things over J-Term. These mainly involved snow orientated activities, such as sledging and snow fights and walking on lakes (I have still to try out the ice-rink on the lake because I'm not to sure how it's going to work without the wall to keep me upright, but I think I shall find someone who is good at ice-skating to help me out. It's funny because I used to be fairly proficient at ice-skating, but somehow I have lost much of my prowess in the interim period, but I digress...) The two other exciting things I did over J-Term were going to Magic Wings, and also on fantastical second-hand shopping expeditions. 

Second-hand clothes are magical things, because they are so much cheaper than regular clothes and because you feel like you are doing your bit to save the environment but also find a cure for cancer/help homeless people/feed people or whatever charity it is that you are supporting through buying said items of clothing. This combination of factors leads me to buy a lot more clothes than I would usually buy. Also there is a really nice shop in Northampton which sells second-hand designer and brand clothing. It is almost as bad as the Oxfam book shop in Guildford. I have yet to enter and leave without buying something. The main problem is that they put the retail price in the label so you feel like you're getting a good deal. It's mean. So over J-Term I acquired: one knitted jumper dress, one knitted body-warmer/vest/thingy-with-a-hood and the warmest lumberjack-style flannel plaid shirt you've ever seen in your life. I feel ever so Mount Holyoke when I wear it. 

The other adventure was much more legitimately adventurous than charity shopping. A friend from my Old English class took me on an excitable adventure to a butterfly conservatory named 'Magic Wings' where we wallowed in the amazing warmth, and took pictures of butterflies and the like. There were also birds, and reptiley type things, although the latter were kept in tanks and cages. We even saw a pac-man toad. I will put some of the pictures I took in here somewhere. I took hundreds but a lot of them were pretty blurry because I haven't quite figured out how to change the settings such that I can take pictures of moving objects, I'm sure I should change the aperture or something, but I need to read about it, and I currently don't really have the time. We also went to Yankee Candle Village. Which was a pretty bizarre experience. It's the biggest candle shop I've ever been in. Also, Santa and Mrs Claus live there, and there's a count down to Christmas, and there's a room where it snows every four minutes, lots of fake snow, and there's more candles than you can shake a stick at. Not that I know why you would want to shake a stick at candles ever. Still.

Productive Day is Productive.

I suddenly realised that J-term finishes the day after tomorrow, classes start, and I am entirely unprepared for this impending happening. It is looming, big and dark, very much like a very loomy thing. So this morning I had to bite the bullet and get on with preparing for the arrival of actual work and actual things to do. I was fairly successful in my uber productive day of productivity; I have topped up my one-card so I can do laundry, I have met with the director of Orchestra, I have ordered the books I need for my first two weeks of classes, I have set up an amazon student account, I have purchased a sketch book, I have marked all the bowings in for the first violins. Not bad for a day's work, and I still have the entire evening to get more done. Being productive is fairly satisfying. 

I spent a great deal of time marking the bowings and fingerings in on music today, it takes much longer than I had anticipated, and since it's all marked in in pencil, you can't always see everything, and suddenly 5 copies in you realise you've missed a slur or something and you have to go back and change everything. Luckily thanks to the months I spent working at the Howard, I am very accustomed to performing repetitive and mind-numbing tasks, and actually this is a little more stimulating than hours of laminating. I also discovered that it when exposed to a special brand of peppy pop music it is possible to keep fairly up-beat while doing this. Perky-pop of the minute was Miley Cyrus. So there I was, in the library, before class starts, in my new enormous lumberjack shirt, rocking out to Miley Cyrus, and scribbling all over a huge pile of music. It was then that I decided I needed a cool transplant. And that Miley needs to learn how to master the key-change. 

I am unsure why I have not previously discovered the Amazon Student account. I was alerted to its existence by a friend. Transpires, with an Amazon student account you get free two-day delivery. On everything. It's jolly fantastic! Which was pretty lucky, since classes start in two days, And my books should arrive in two days. See what I did there! I feel a little more prepared for classes now. I have bought the books for my Modern British Novel class, and my French class. There aren't any posted for my Medieval Lit class thus far, which is a little disconcerting, but hey ho! The only book my Creative Writing professor seems concerned that we get is a very particular Sketch Book, which had to be a very specific size and have a special kind of binding and certain number of pages. I went to the bookshop to purchase this magical, mythical Sketch Book. I'm more than a little concerned by this. I really am last in the artistically inclined camp. When God was passing out artistic talent, I was looking the other way. Hopefully use of The Sketch Book will be limited to cutting and sticking. I am very proficient in cutting and sticking. 

The productivity of my day is made somewhat more impressive when one considers the complete lack of  gainful activity which has been completed within the last month. Which has been so close to zero as to be almost entirely indiscernible. Also the fact that it is actually ARCTIC out there. For once in my life I am not exaggerating even a little tiny bit. It's in single figures. IN. FAHRENHEIT. Inhaling makes me cough. My lungs are rejecting the oxygen. It's that cold. And that's during the day. The other night it was -9. STILL. IN. FAHRENHEIT. That's -23 degrees Celsius guys. The high-schools in South Hadley were closed today, it was so cold! I'm going to turn into an icicle. Talking of icicles, there are some pretty spectacular icicles around actually. They're huge and lethal looking. I fear for my life every time I walk into a building. On the bright side they are also pretty beautiful. I think New England might be built for this kind of weather, all the little wooden houses, with the white trimming covered in snow and ice, it's pretty much picturesque. 

The prevailing weather conditions are proving the time for the somewhat outdated heating system in my building to show its worth. It has been almost unbearably hot in my room. To the extent that I've kept my window open pretty much since I moved in. The heating has turny dial, but I'm pretty much convinced that this is nothing more than a placebo dial, and not a very good one at that. From my experimentation the only thing that changes as you turn the dial is the amount of noise that emits from the heater. Apparently all the noise is made by steam. This is hard to believe, I am of the opinion that it is more likely a gremlin which lives inside the pipes. With a spanner (a wrench for all you American folks). A loud bashy spanner. Nevertheless the excessive efficiency of my heater is proving rather helpful because despite the fact that there is currently ice on the inside of the window, it is pleasantly toasty in my room. 

In other news two of my friends have broken their feet. Sadly they both broke the right foot. I think it would have been somewhat marvellous had they broken a left and a right one so I could have mix and matched friend feet. Or something like that. One of them is legitimately in pain, the other has been walking around on the broken foot for several months and very very bad at not walking on it cast and all now purple casty-ness has been applied. Clearly with all the ice and snow, now is not really the best time to be crutching around campus. So I get to go on fun crutching adventures to the Dining Hall and look like a massive fatty while I help myself to two plates of food. It's all fun and games. 

Oh and guys! it's my birthday next Wednesday! Just as an FYI!