Plan For The Week

This week is going to be spent tying up loose ends, so to speak. Getting my hair cut and (more importantly) thinned. Going to the chiropractor. Cashing in a prescription. Seeing the one or two friends who are still about. Playing the Kegelstatt Trio (and no doubt discovering just how out of practice I am!). Sorting out a mound of clarinet music, not to mention a large pile of receipts. Getting to the rag market if I have time after trying to finish my final garment for the summer.

Going through the Choral Soc treasury folder and printing off the auditions rota – weird to think that I am no longer the scared, overwhelmed, flu-ridden fresher, but the one to be showing people in and assessing their singing/ sight-reading skills!*

Emails, urgh. I’ve reached my storage limit on the university server and despite my best efforts at rationalising as I go along, my inbox is in a complete mess. Does your place send out tens of the damn things every day as well? Yeh, thought so. I think that takes priority over my laptop’s hard-drive, also long in need of rationalisation – that will have to wait for another year, probably.

Sorting out my third-year module choices, preferably before I have to start attending the lectures. This isn’t actually as crucial as it sounds – provided I haven’t missed anything, I can still change my mind up to October 31st or thereabouts, so it’s perfectly possible to hedge my bets and attend too many modules with a view to getting a better idea of what each involves. But it’d still be nice to be able to attack things with certainty. Maybe even doing some preliminary reading for the modules that I am certain on, although in all honesty that probably won’t happen, not least because I don’t have any of the books.

Packing. ParcelForce proofing and organising and delivering. Defending the number of clothes that I want to take up North, yes really! Repacking. Spending the last couple of nights in a room that looks too tidy and bare to be mine. Navigating the train journey from hell due to big engineering works on the line between Chesterfield and Sheffield.

Saying goodbye to Birmingham for ten weeks. Going from home (where hardly anyone has any concept of my university life) to university (where hardly anyone has any concept of my home life). Playing hunt-the-fellow-Midlander, a game that never gets old because success rates are so occasional and surprising. Meeting hordes of new people, and having to remember to be sociable.

Being with too-long-separated-from friends and housemates. Going back home :-)

x

*We’ll give them a grade. The range goes from A : “You’re a soprano and we’ve got too many sopranos but wow, you’re amazing, and there’s no way we’re not going to take you!” to E : “You’re a tenor, every choir in the country is desperate for tenors, but absolutely no way”

Boredom

Please let term start sooner than 8th October?

That is all.

AdDressing Matters

It took two tester garments, nine alterations to the original pattern, and probably about 1½ metres of fabric in the end. It took over our front room (to varying degrees) for weeks, yet at times kept me from losing my sanity all together. It taught me how to sew an invisible zip, how to set in sleeves, and that reading the pattern envelope before you begin is always a plan – it wasn’t until I’d hand-sewn the final hem that the ‘Plus Size’ label caught my eye! Which would explain several things, not least why the size 12 was so, erm, generous in places. Oops.

I give you my new dress!

The neckline isn't that wonky - that's clearly just me!

Look! It's long enough to do this!

The side view

Back with (not so) invisible zip

It will probably get worn with tights and a cardi – but then the intention was always to make something warm for cold days up North! It is warm as well, being wool-based fabric, and there’s plenty of room for a slip/ cami underneath. The only thing that I need to do now is mend the small hole I cut while finishing the very last seam (dammit!)

(Photography enthusiasts, you are also viewing my first experimentations with Photoshop! Ah, the life of an unemployed student on holiday…)

Pattern: Burda 7972

Perfection

Perfection.

It’s about every apple been green, shiny, and bruise-free.

It’s about every voice being recorded in every studio with just the right conditions and enhanced with just the right technology so that it sounds clear, full, and natural, balancing out its accompanying instruments to create the optimum album – every time.

It’s about the ball dropping into the pocket with geometric precision.

It’s about not settling for ‘good enough’ in a relationship, because the dream guy is just around the corner.

It’s about every leading film actress being tall, thin, beautiful, glossy, attractive.

It’s about the email being sent now, the paper being crisp white.

It’s about achieving the average, the norm, the expected, the unattainable to all but the few.

It’s about discarding the blemished apples, the thin voices and the old microphone. It’s about the failure of the ball that was one degree too wide, the dissolving of the relationship because he didn’t hold the door that one time or sounded a bit distracted on the phone. It’s about the actress with the long nose and ageing skin being derided as ugly and unsuitable for the role. It’s about the job being lost because the email was sent a minute late due to a nose bleed, the application being rejected because the photocopier had only been supplied with yellow paper that day.

We have grown so used to the idea of perfection. If we work hard enough, if we invest the money, if we refuse to let anything get in our way then we can achieve anything! The world is ours to conquer! So long as we aren’t the ones composting the bad apples, that is.

Status

Lucy misses somebody like crazy and wants nothing more than to talk to him. But she can’t. Or she can, technically, but she can’t at the same time, and I don’t know and why do these things have to get so complicated?

Lucy doesn’t know why she’s writing about this here, ‘cos it’s not like he’ll read it anyway.

Back to Basics

For those of you who don’t know, I have a back problem. It’s a relatively mild back problem, ’tis true, but it’s also a long-term back problem that doesn’t look set to go away any time in the near future. Some days I’m in constant pain from it. Some days I barely feel it at all, but I’m always, always conscious of it as a deciding factor in what I do or don’t do.

Gentle walking helps it. Long car journeys are painful, and I can’t go for longer than an hour at a time without a stretching and walking break. I cope in exams due to qualifying for the ‘physical needs special room’ where you get a stretching time allowance, but lectures can be another thing again*. Theatres and cinemas suck because you can’t even get up in the middle of a performance and the seats are generally horrendously unsupportive even with the aid of the faithful Irma.

I like supportive shoes, adjustable height objects in general, and stairs with an odd number of steps. I dislike most of the British bus network, having to duck to see round a corner in the Corsa that I drive, and stairs with an even number of steps.

But most of all I like Pilates. It’s not something I’d heard of before particularly (other than something which rich gym fanatics did down south), but it was recommended to me a year or so ago and after attending term-time Saturday morning classes with the Yoga Society, I simply haven’t looked back! It is a form of stretching, basically, which centres on balance and core stability. It is very controlled, breathing is important, and the real aim is to improve your overall flexibility – and it is undeniably true that while I always feel most supple just after a session, my whole posture has been transformed over the past year.

Like any exercise, however, you get out of shape if you don’t keep it up. I’ve been feeling pretty achy of late which is probably due to the cumulative effect of a tense, wet, house-bound summer**, so when a family friend mentioned that she had started attending classes at one of the local leisure centres, I figured that I might as well go along and see what it was like. And while I have my doubts about the finer points of the instruction – I would much rather go back to the Durham instructor who has, sadly, now moved away – I am sitting here feeling like something of a new person! Which isn’t bad for an hour’s stretching and £4.90 :-)

x

*, and after I clashed with the Health and Safety rules of the Maths Dept last year over the issue, something that I need to work out for the coming two years…

**, and a four-and-a-half-hour drive back from Derbyshire the other day. That is a ridiculous amount of time given the distance.

Rain Delays

I’m one of these people who gets really affected by what’s going on outside. I have to go out in the day – I simply can’t cope if I don’t – and the more walking I do the better but it’s not just that. Sunlight lifts me up enormously while dark skies and rain send me crashing down. A fresh wind will make me glad to be alive while oppressive heat or thick air make me lethargic. I prefer cold-and-dry over warm-and-wet, which is why going to university in the north-east was a plan after living in the West Midlands!

‘Natural light’, too, is not listed as one of my interests on Facebook for nothing. Even if it’s not sunny as such, I will choose daylight over artificial lighting any time and I come out of lecture theatres and the like craving it. It’s a tremendous mood booster, ’tis true, but I have the additional incentive that my eyes go completely crazy without enough. University holidays are normally when they recuperate from the barrage of lecture-lighting and notes and screens, but this holiday they’ve simply got worse and it scares me that I might become permanently dependent on lenses (in whatever form) ahead of time, especially as the lenses only go part way towards correcting the problem.

I guess everyone’s the same to an extent, but I do think that it hits some people worse than others. If you spend all day, every day in front of a computer anyway then what’s different? If you don’t walk to the shops, or enjoy spending time outside then a bit of rain doesn’t change anything. If you have a nocturnal waking-sleeping pattern then you can’t even tell whether it’s been a low sun index that day! I’m certain that I don’t have SAD or anything, but that hasn’t stopped me Googling the lamps of late (and before any prospective medics tell me, yes I’m sure that they are a bit of a gimmick, but I’ve just been feeling a bit desperate…!), or having whimsical notions of packing a bag, getting a train to the airport, and jumping on the next available flight to somewhere with a bit of sun!

Roll on autumn, eh?

x

I was having this conversation with a housemate some time back, about how my mood often seems to reflect the weather. He replied, very assuredly, that he was the other way round and that the weather generally reflected his mood. We have him to blame, then, for all the rain ;-)

x

It is true that I would have been in a pretty grim mood over the last weeks and months whatever. The rain hasn’t helped, sure, but it has not been a good summer in the slightest – why blogging has not been where it’s at. Normal service to be resumed shortly?