Blog

  • Okay, maybe I just don’t get it.

    So, I got the response back from my re-written essay. ‘Still needs work on it to pass’. *sigh*.

    She’s commented that some things aren’t integrated and that it doesn’t flow well – and she still doesn’t see what changes I’ve made to my practice. I knew it didn’t flow brilliantly, it’s a first draft afterall. But the rest. The rest I don’t get. I’ve just written a very long e-mail, well, moderately long, because I just *don’t* get it.

    Perhaps having a resubmission one year from your dad’s death isn’t the greatest time to do things. But I feel alright, really, just I’m beginning to feel really fracking stupid. I know I’m not, but how can this essay be so… I dunno. It’s just.

    Argh. I want to curl up in a ball. I’m so frustrated. I thought it was fucking good the first time – but no, it wasn’t right. So I talk to her, she says ‘include this, that, etc’; so I do, now there’s what? Not enough depth? It’s not got enough of the letter q in it? “Transference isn’t integrated”. I talk about it in the reflection, then discuss it in the essay, what more integration does it need?!

    This time I thought it needed tidying but nothing that an hour with a highlighter and a red pen wouldn’t cure. But no, apparently I can’t write essays anymore.

  • Oh god, I’m drowning in bullshit

    “optimise patient flow through bottlenecks using patient templates”

  • Phobia

    I am by no means what you would call a femme. I don’t grow my nails – an I clip them short (although I do *have* nail files and have used them on occasion). I rarely wear skirts (I do though, if I’m in the mood). And I own no perfume. None. If I want to smell nice when I go out I have a shower ;-)

    I think actually, that’s just ‘cos I don’t do that kind of going out. Not for not wanting to, but for not being able to afford it.

    Anyhow, the two ways in which I do go for femme is – shaving my legs. I shave my legs. I’m pretty lazy about it, largely going to no effort at all and shaving them only if I’m going to wear a skirt, or go swimming. But I do *like* having shaven legs.

    And I also pluck my eyebrows. It’s taken me a while to get over my phobia of hair removal by plucking (it hurts! not much, but I’m not one for inflicting pain on myself) – and for a long time would only get *others* to do it. But recently I’ve managed to inflict basic maintainance plucking on myself. I like the shape :-)

    Unfortunately, they’ve got out of hand again and I can’t quite get to the stage of ‘yeah, I’ll re-shape ’em again’. So. Poot. I’ll have to go get that done. Perhaps saturday. Saturday being the intended start of ‘after I’ve finished all my essays’.

    I say that, because I should be working on the second 2000 word essay right now. I got up with every intention of doing so, but I have this other phobia. Failing. For one who scored 15% in one exam (I think it was 15 – it may have been 5) at university the first time round (I think I’ve mentioned before though, some chemists were beaten by us biochemists – so I may have done badly, but others did worse!) this may seem somewhat odd. But I do. Or more accurately I have a phobia of trying and failing.

    It’s taken me quite a while to accept that not everything I do will come out as well as I’d like it to. It took me long enough to accept that I’m not perfect (close though I am ;-) ). So having tried (granted not that hard) and failed (twice) I am finding these essays hard to tackle. The NP5 one, that wasn’t too hard to tackle – just because it was made clear by the person I spoke to at it wasn’t a bad essay. Just the wrong essay. The other assignment, that I still feel is a pass-essay, but it failed. It’s not good though, it’s clear that I was ‘a bit of a state’ when I wrote it. But I am still – in some ways – a bit of a state. I find it hard to concentrate. As we approach one year from my dad’s death I do find myself thinking about it more and more.

    And I still feel tearful. I miss my dad an awful lot – there’s so much I’d’ve shared with him. But, that’s not the way my cookie crumbled. So anyway. I need to write this essay -  but getting into that headspace is harder than I’d like. i just need to concentrate for a few hours. I’ve got sme nice reference, I think, sat here. I do think this is a lousy mdoule and that it’s not well designed – the module handbook is about as useful as a 3 year old dead haddock, and the whole teaching of the module left me completely unsure as to where it was going and how it was meant to fit into the rest of my course.

    So, yeah. Anyway. I actually picked up the laptop to start writing it, so I guess I should. I’ve got the Subliminal CD on the HiFi and a 500Mhz processor in my (getting rather hot) hands – I think we can safely say it’s time to write an essay.

  • The Masochist’s Computer

    I used to use linux. I used to. I used to love it. I loved it and cuddled it and it sat on my PC being stable, effective, good. All was good. Except for one teeny tiny little thing. Installing software was like pulling teeth. Normally, being as I was a SuSE user, the software would be available as a package – but only for RedHat. Sometimes, nuts as I was I’d install these. They’d not work.

    So then I got quite good at building from source, but the process appeared to be one designed by someone with a somewhat masochistic trait. Applications would invariably require a huge list of unspecified dependancies which could only be found by building the application and waiting for the build to fail – at which point you’d track down what it had not checked it needed but actually did need, and then you’d enter some sort of mandlebrotian fractal process in which you would repeat the process of attempting to install the stuff it depended on… which needed you install stuff it depended on… which needed you to install stuff it depended on…

    You get the picture?

    But for the most part – since I never turned my PC off and so never had to endure the week-long boot time I was happy with Linux. Being as I’m not a complete idiot it remained virus free and because I was reasonably with it and kept updates up it remained obvious-route-of-external-attack free.

    But the move to university eventually forced me to give up my linuxoid ways – the university providing some stuff in Word documents that were so hideously munged that StarOffice / OpenOffice just couldn’t render them in any meaningful way. So with some substantial difficulty, and much cursing, I switched to Windows 2000, and thence to Windows XP. Don’t think for a second it was easy. It took days. Transfering data from Ext3 do NTFS is not a job which is fun. The machine had to be reinstalled afterwards, the Ext3 driver having caused much chaos – at least apparently.

    But I have now reached that painful stage of fed up with Windows again. Windows has died a death on one machine and on my laptop, well, it’s the now unsupported 98 which has never remained happy for more than a few minutes anyway. And so I find myself considering Linux. I was thinking about OSX on PC, but… well. I dunno. Maybe. On the desktop. But this laptop with it’s PIII / 500 processor isn’t really up to that. I’ve got as far as downloading Ubuntu and burning it. And suddenly had the urge to look at WINE again, and pondered the possibility of xmplay and Premier Pro on linux – which are the only applications I’ll *really* miss (to be fair, IO only really use applications that are multiplatform anyway). Well that and possibly Fwink. Clearly I am some kind of masochist.

  • Being dug

    I’m on Digg. This is slightly disconcerting – mostly because I only posted the Save-A-Nurse thing out of sheer frustration and desparation. Mind you, I’ve no objection to lots of people seeing the site (*crosses fingers and hopes her host can cope*). My website suddenly feels more public. I realise it’s hardly a popular digg thing, with 3 diggs, but hell, that’s more than I ever expected.

    I blame Nikki.

    Anyway, the application form for Glasgow is in an envelope on my desk now, waiting for me to wander to the post office on the way to work (student placement work, not real money work, to those who might be new). And then I can get back to waiting for one of the other four… (I shall apply to the others over lunch, yes…)… to offer me an interview. But then who wants a not-yet-qualified student nurse when there’s hundreds of qualified, experienced band 5 nurses out there desparate for jobs.

    As one of my student colleagues said “we’re in an enviable position, we haven’t got a job to lose” – but… this is not a good topic to think about before work. No. Positive thoughts, that’s what I need. Positive thoughts… and an omlette.

  • Lily Allen

    Damnit, this CD is very silly, the sense of humour is very childish

    # Oh jesus christ almighty
    # Do I feel alright
    # No, not slightly…
    The lyrics rhyme in that way that… well… pop music dictates they should. But she manages to get the word mortgage into a song, so deserves respect.

    That song seems to sum up my life. Heh.

    Anyway, yes. I’ve been bad. I’ve created this:

    Aye, it’s a PayPal donation thing. What’s it for… it’s for this. I don’t really expect a lot, especially given I booked myself on a holiday. I was joking about it with Nikki…and then I thought, why the hell not?

    Spread the word…

  • Muuuusick

    So, I’ve mostly been listening to Rochelle-music for the last few days, at least while at home. My usual Radio 1 type listening habits haven’t changed. And Jo Whiley played this cheery sounding song by Lilly Allen (yeah, annoying myspace page) called LDN (here’s the video which I’ve not managed to suck down onto my computer, annoyingly).
    Anyhow, it’s one of those fun things where the music’s desparately cheery but the song’s actually… not. Knowing it was out as a vinyl single I looked for it (it’s just that kind of music) – and… found out it was a limited edition of 500 that sold out within 4 hours… One copy is on e-bay at the moment for… 50 quid. That’s a bit more than I was intending to pay. Anyway so, I’m nabbing  her album, see if it grabs me the way that music does sometimes.

    I got home today and there was a big pile of post – and I looked at it, lying face down on the floor and tried not to get my hopes up. I thought ‘I won’t expect there to be an interview doojit there, but it’d be nice if there was’. There wasn’t. *sighs*. It would be nice to at least get to interview in one or two of the posts I’ve applied for. Or any really. It’s starting to do my self confidence not-a-lot-of-good, in the way that job hunting does.

    Ah well. Another day, another form. Wish me luck. Lots of it. Good luck. Ideally lorries filled with good luck turning up and deposting fresh gooey loads of good luck all over my car and my front garden. Perhaps filling the bath with it, so I could bathe in good luck…

  • I’d never claim to deal well with heat…

    But this is taking the piss:

    40.1 degrees c in the back room

    That’s our back room. In the sun.

    This is my ‘office’, or the room of melting Kates:

    33.7 degrees C in the office

    Dear god it’s hot here. Far to hot. Look, even Aroha is wilting.

    I should be working, but trying to get my brain even remotely into gear is like trying to pour treacle out of a fine bore tube. I’ve actually had a pretty good day – I think – I’ve been in charge of the bay again; and actually done a fair job of running things. Of course, I got to hand over and I didn’t know how high someone’s high potassium is (silly Kate); and there’s a couple of people who’s histories are a bit messy on the hand over sheet – and I fluffed’em a bit. But hey, I’m not yet registered. And if I don’t get these assignments written I won’t be.

    Please, please make it less hot.

    I actually had something intelligent to say when I left work; oh, aye, I was going to wave people’s noses at this – which I’m studiously not going to comment on – except to suggest that you might then want to go here.

    *sighs*

    Still, incidentally, looking for a job. Should anyone need a nurse I’m your girl.

  • That gosh-darned I’m right attitude.

    I just had the best exchange on Freecycle. I’ve been on Freecycle quite a while now, and I decided my CED player and it’s disks should go. I need to declutter, this is part of the process.

    So I offered it, and I got back:

    “I think your’re using the wrong freecycle?”

    From one of the members. It went on to explain that s/he was in the USA and clearly, I was in the UK. 10 points for observation, 0 points for checking which group you’d joined *before* telling someone else they’re in the wrong place.

    I did wonder if they were joking but the “How do I get out of this group” message I just got tells me they’re not.

    *sigh*

    People.

  • I am too hot.

    And not in a sexy / good way. Oh no. This is hot as in *oh dear lord I’m melting* hot.

    I’ve spent the weekend working at my mum’s house, taking down shelves and packing up the last remnants of my bedroom (3 bigish boxes, most of which can be freecycled; anyone want a Super 8 Movie Camera?).

    Or Acorn User? Lots of Acorn User? I’ve just had the distressing realisation that the two BBC Micro systems I’ve been keeping ‘complete’ are virtually worthless anyway, so might as well be freecycled. Well, I need the Master, because I want to use it and the Music 5000 to retrieve my hard-programmed music from when I was a kid. But the rest of it, it should *go*. Teletext adaptors, RAM expansions. All of it may as well go. So I’m thinking that the BBC Magazines can just go now.

    At any rate, another knackering weekend – ‘s nice to see my mum, and hopefully the grand tidy of my old bedroom will help the house sell. I think, though, it may just need more clearing out. Possibly even slapping lots of stuff in storage. We’ll see though.