The Search For El Dorado

Since the 15th of January, my wardrobe has come to consist primarily of stripes, blue and red. I think it's some kind of subconscious patriotism... Oma would be proud!

I like picnics!

A word of warning, it's time for another "day in the life of" facebook photo album so my camera will be joining me for lectures and frees tomorrow! Took me a while, but today I remembered how much I enjoy pretty pictures and taking them even if it takes some time to get what I want. Thank you Jamie's fancy camera!

Ahh... Pompeii!

Also since the 15th of January, incessant smile-a-thon. Especially apparent when I walk into maths everyday and smile and laugh and joke and smile some more. I have NO idea why, but it's amusing although I'm getting fed up of whatever my normal laugh has started to morph into. I sound like a pig about to be slaughtered.

Speaking of pigs, Beppe has had some issues with them and their flus. So I stuck my nose up, and my nose being the way it is, I spent some time discreetly getting it back to normal. Pigs remind me of lisps. Lisps remind me of... students on buses. "Eksersisses for HHHHome-work" (work pronounced like fork) and the "HHHHe-mail" that is to be sent to some lecturer.

Training has been good so far, and the projected lactic acid build up didn't happen so we're going to turn our training up a notch. The half-marathon is in three weeks! Three weeks for us - me especially - to become capable of 21.7 km in less than four hours. This, my friends, is a challenge! (Since when do I speak like that?) Anyway, hopefully we'll make it. In fact I'm pretty sure we will even if we didn't train, but to be honest I enjoy training! It's stress-relieving and makes me feel good. A quick google search and my suspicions are correct - endorphins. I (lessthanthree) endorphins!

I know what to do with my hair! It's been some time since I last brutalised it, so you must have been expecting something. :P

Finally, dear bloggers,

Please blog more often. I enjoy reading what you people have to say even if I don't necessarily agree or comment regularly. Blogs were much more active this time last year, the summer slow-down seems to have dragged on.

That, or I'm the only one who doesn't have a life :')

This is home, I'm finally where I belong

good evening (:

I was looking through all my old certificates today and figured that I should have continued with all the extra-curriculars when I could have. I was one grade away from a gymnastics certificate! And quite close to having internationally recognised certificates in Ballet, Modern Jazz and Musical Theatre... Procrastination will be the death of me. I'm now to wildly unfit to pick them up again without having to entirely rebuild my stamina and technique.

Speaking of being unfit, tomorrow Elaine, Marie Claire and I start training for the half-marathon. I'm ready to die of exhaustion and lactic acid build up.

I've started to re-read Northanger Abbey. I can't remember the story that well and I'm in quite an Austen mood so it suits me better than Mansfield Park or Pride and Prejudice. Speaking of Austen, I think I'll try find Persuasion tomorrow. I'd like to able to say I've read - and enjoyed - all her books!

I just remembered a Wednesday last year, when Val and I spent an afternoon sitting on her sofa and writing... That was one of the most productive yet stress-relieving afternoons I have spent so far.

I keep thinking tomorrow is Thursday.

Because of a form I'm in the process of filling in, I've been thinking about The Future a lot recently. I have to write my plans for the future in the form and while I'm at it, I'd like it to be:

a) what my plans really are

b) realistic

c) final

Unfortunately, c) is largely out of the question, and a) and b) are irreconcilable. I wish Malta was like America or England or any large country in this case. To be able to apply at many Universities, each with the most amazing and perfectly suited courses for you, then be accepted at one (or more) and get the opportunity to be independent(ish). Live somewhere new. Make more friends.

Life here is not all bad, I'm just craving new opportunities...

books books books! (oh, and I'm 18 now)

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog/fb note so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them :D


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

27/100 I think that's quite a fair amount. I've read a couple of the abridged versions of some that I didn't make bold, so I guess that counts for something too...

Then there's the film versions, and wikipedia entries... Oh, and books I started but was too young to get into, like Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Goodness, I'm such a nerd.

On the seventeenth day...

There is hardly a thing that could make me happier than I currently am (:

James John Michael (Taylor)

Remember when my blogs were about something other than what I've been doing? Pfft I'm disappointed with myself! ha! I've spent so much time these past two years reading about interesting things, learning about all sorts of things from mental_floss like the history of circus freaks (yesterday), that by now I should have something really insightful to say! But alas, I have not. My writing has also become limited to school essays, which does not give as much satisfaction as proper writing. I miss it, although I tried a couple of haikus last week and that was amusing, if highly amateur.

Oh, by the by, thanks to that interesting article about circus freaks in america between 1880 and 1920, I have finally discovered what is wrong with my nose, but I can't do anything about it except fail to qualify as a human blockhead, which I guess isn't too bad a place to be.

I started listening to the Veronicas this week. I'm impressed. At first, all their songs sound similar and excessively loud and shouty [yay for inventing words! Shakespeare did it ;) ] and then I listened to them properly and realised that some of their songs are insanely shallow and pointless, but some are insightful and lyrically beautiful. I've also had a bit of a Michael Buble week this week. His voice is amazing and technically better than John Mayer's, but they're both great at what they do so I can't really say who is better overall since their styles are so different. Oh, James Morrison... unique squared!

You guys would probably know that I'm more of a walk and talk / chill and chat person, but because my friends think they're cool we're shaking things up a bit and going to pv tomorrow for my birthday weekend. For some highly odd reason, I'm looking forward to it! I think that satisfies my random thing quota for tomorrow...

Wednesday:

forgot O:)

Thursday:

Busy Bee in the morning for Banoffee Pie and tea with Sara, Karla and Simon.

Friday:

Ice cream in the rain and Sliema in the afternoon, Val is coming over soon to watch a film (:

The ice cream makes up for wednesday methinks!

Right, I'm off to find more interesting topics to write about next time.

P.S. Why does the rain in Malta stink?