Today the boyf and I celebrated our 3 year anniversary as the world's most fabulous couple (title inherited after the recent fall of its last holders, Brad and Jen). Three long years full of laughter (mostly at my dire sense of direction and appalling maths skills), a few tears ( mostly jealousy-related, but thankfully we are far too grown up for that now), endless cinema trips ( he buys the tickets, I buy the popcorn and Coke), several holidays (Zakynthos, camping at Dolwyddelan and Shell Island, Brussels, Malaga, Southport), an awful lot of TV-watching together time, an awful lot of dog-walking (mostly my dog because his is useless in a car), an awful lot of shopping ( I do love my automatic bag-carrier - very useful), and oh yeah - a whole lotta love.

Three years ago today in the morning I woke up knowing it was Tommo's party and that fit bloke I fancied and had been flirting with for a while was going to be there and I just HAD to get off with him.

Three years ago today in the afternoon my friend Kate and I were concocting a plan of how to get our friend Jen away from that fit bloke at the party because she also liked flirting with him and was quite frankly a bit of a pain. (Remember I was 17 at the time). And needless to say, the plan worked.

Three years ago today after school had finished I spent 3 hours in the hairdressers getting a 'fabulous' hairstyle and new colour (and so began my only recently ended life as a blonde. Although the dark colour has faded considerably. Hmph.).

Three years ago today at teatime I moaned to my mum that my fringe had been cut too short and how was I ever going to pull Tim with such a short horrible fringe.

Three years ago today this evening I arrived at the party, he arrived soon after, me and Kate executed 'the plan' and got Jen out of the way, my frantically straightened fringe clearly didn't put him off, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And now its three years on, we're still together, against a few odds in the beginning (see! I TOLD him that staying in Wales with me instead of going on that 3 month round the world trip with his best friends would be worth it in the end!) and we even live together, albeit with two other fabulous people and albeit as of no longer come Saturday when he goes back home to Wales for good. We are celebrating this fact with a bouquet of 12 red roses (from him to me), a fabulous 3 course home-cooked gourmet meal ( from him to me) and the theatre tonight to sit front row and watch 'The Odyssey' (from me to him).

I wonder where we'll be in three years from now? There's a thought.

Please pass on that sick bucket in the back.

NB- for 'today' read 'yesterday' as our anniversary was actually yesterday, the 26th, but I was too busy with all the celebrations to post.


And in other news! I am not dead. My posh sarcastic tutor did not kill me, cut me up into little pieces and hide me in his book cupboard. He was actually suprisingly helpful and made me laugh a few times with his well-timed sarcasm. Not so scary after all. I have unfortunately been very, very busy writing my surely fabulous essays. One down, two to go. By Friday. Please pray for me.

I have also bought a new hamster cage for my far too intelligent for her own good hamster, who kept escaping from her old one. Its very cool - all purple and blue plastic and lots of tubes and things. I shall post a picture when I get home. Or maybe not, as when I get home from this here library I am continuing the essay writing. We shall see.

I think, in the words of ms. mac, that is all.

How much work am I doing at the moment?! HOW I wish I'd been a little bit more organised at home. Its all getting done according to schedule though, so it should be ok.

Last night me and the boyf went to t'pub to watch a comedian. The performance was under the name of a 'Peter Kay Experience'. The bloke was actually the guy from the Amarillo video. Loads of people there thought it was very funny, but the 'experience' basically consisted of a fat northern bloke completely ripping off every show Peter Kay has done, including Phoenix Nights, and just re-telling every joke. I'm sure if I was hearing them all for the first time then I would have found it funny, but jokes that you've already heard once on telly and then a million times by everyone who's eveer watched it, are not so funny. To cut a long story short - I was not impressed. But I got drunk, so it all worked out ok in the end.

This morning I went to a local high school to get the kiddies to do some poverty-related artwork for next week's Make Poverty History art exhibition I'm helping organise as part of the uni's MPH week of action. It was heaploads of fun, and I got a fair amount of paint down me. I'm back off there later to pick up the pieces once the paint has dried. On the paintings, not on me.

And now I am killing some time before my meeting with my tutor at 3.30pm. I was supposed to see him at 2.30 but he forgot and has rescheduled. I'm a little bit scared because he's a big, posh, heavily sarcastic man and can be a little bit intimidating. I'm not in trouble or anything, that I know of anyway, I just need help with my essay, so I can't think of too many things that he could torture me about.

Oh, and I hear a new Pope has been elected. I'm not entirely sure what the point was in making such an old bloke Pope. He looks like he'll be dead before the end of the year. Are younger men not as dedicated and devout as old folk?

And I'm back in Leeds! I arrived approximately 3.45pm on Saturday afternoon and its been none stop ever since.

I could regale you with stories from The Hives gig on Saturday night which turned out to be a Terrorvision gig (no, I have never heard of them either) instead because I didn't pay proper attention to the gig schedule, but I won't (although someone did give me a fiver tips and everyone there were at least 40 years old with hair twice as long and large as mine - and that was just the men).

I could give you details of last night's Manic Street Preachers gig, but I won't (I really won't - it was dull as ditch-water).

I COULD fill you all in on the fun and frivolities that was had today in the library and Barbarians of the Dark Ages lecture, but again - no, no, no!

Because ... Jon has passed the book-baton (or something) on to me as I am 'brainy', apparently.

So here goes ...

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
After doing a bit of research, I now know what this means. Homer's Illyiad because it is a classic. Quite literally.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
This is an easy one - Wolverine from The X-Men - long before Hugh Jackman personified him. Although that certainly hasn't done the character any harm at all.

3. What are you currently reading?
I am currently reading 'Lady of Hay' by Barbara Erskine. I have read this book about a million times but I still love it. Its about a journalist who's doing an article on hypnotic regression to 'debunk' it but in the course of her research finds out she's a twelfth century baron's wife reincarnate. Its very good, with lots of twists and turns.

4. The last book you bought was?
God, I can't remember! Does a text book count? If it does it's a book on 17th Century England, but I can't remember the title.

5. The last book you read was?
'The Queen's Man' by Sharon Penman. Its a medieval murder mystery.

Noticing a pattern in my reading yet?

6. Five books you would take to a desert island?
Five?! Hmm ...

'Lady of Hay' again because its so good.
'North and South' by Mrs Gaskell.
'Scar Tissue', Anthony Kiedis' autobiography.
'Here be Dragons' by Sharon Penman.
'The Warlord Chronicles' by Bernard Cornwell. It is 3 books but they're a trilogy so I'm counting them as one.

7. Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?
I'm going to pass this stick (I knew it was something like that) on to -

- Ys
- Curly

Because ... I can't think of a proper reason so I'll say because they're Welsh, and if that's not a good enough reason then I don't know what is.

And after doing all that I've just realised I've already done it on the comments of someone else's blog. Ah well!

This is how my days have been spent this past week (on average) -

8.00am - alarm wakes me up
8.10am - mum comes in my room and wakes me up again.
8.30am - decide to get out of bed and have a shower, get dressed, do hair, etc.
9.00am - make breakfast.
9.00-10.30am - eat breakfast while watching TV. This week, The Bill on ukGold followed by Andes to Amazon on ukDocumentary.
10.30-11.30am - catch up on blogs, celebrity news, etc. on the net.
11.30-1.30pm - do some work on essays.
1.30pm - make lunch.
1.40pm - settle down with lunch to watch Neighbours.
2.05-6.00pm - work on essays, with a little bit of net surfing, tag-board chatting, tea-drinking, chocolate-eating and knitting sprinkled in between for variety.
6.00pm - watch Home and Away.
6.30pm - have tea.
7.00pm - watch Emmerdale.
7.30pm - watch Eastenders/Coronation Street.
8.00pm - work on essays (this was substituted for watching telly on Wednesday and Thursday because of The Bill, which was very good this week).
9.00pm - watch Footballer's Wives, Supernanny, etc. while doing a spot of knitting with a cup of tea.
10.00pm - work on essays (Desperate Housewives was taped on Wednesday).
12.00am - go to bed with a cup of tea and a book - 'Lady of Hay' by Barbara Erskine.
12.30am - go to sleep.

With a few variations here and there, this has pretty much been my life from Monday to yesterday of this week. I may stress that I am not this boring and reclusive all the time. However, despite my best intentions, the essays I have had 4 weeks to do have been more or less left to this week to do in their entirety (and I'm still going back to Leeds tomorrow with work still to do). This has also coincided with all my friends going back to their respective universities already this week, and the boyfriend being back in Leeds.

When I get back to Leeds I will be working in the union on Saturday and Sunday nights ( The Hives and Manic Street Preachers gigs, if anyone's interested), which I am looking forward to. But after that it will be 2 weeks of essay-finishing and exam preperation, nicely coinciding with the Make Poverty History week of action which I'm involved in and still have loads of work to do for.

I'm looking forward to getting back to Leeds now, as I always do towards the end of a holiday. After you've been out in a city there are only so many times you can go to the same local over-priced club without getting a bit bored. It will also be nice to swear whenever I want without fear of being told off by my mum and dad. Not to mention seeing the boyfriend again from whom I have been departed for 2 weeks now (feels like yeeeeears!). But I am not looking forward to all the work. True, I have been doing work here (sort of) but because of my, shall we say, lax attitude to it in the earlier part of the holiday I am going back to uni with looming deadlines and not as much done as I would have liked, hence the monotony of this past week.

You can tell how fried my brain is now. I've just re-read all this and not only is it slightly devoid of a point, it is also slightly repetitive, but I simply cannot be bothered to start again.

On a slightly more upbeat note, this week there is something else I have been doing with some regularity - listening to the Top Gun soundtrack on my MP3 player! I have to say that my favourite song is 'Playing with the Boys' (calm down Jon) by Kenny Loggins, not least because of the memories it stirs up from the unforgetable volleyball scene.



Mmmmmmm!!

Cast your eyes over this -



Admitedly, it doesn't look too shiny in this picture, but trust me, it positively gleams in real life. Alas, I have suffered for my labours. I woke up this morning with sore, stiff wrists and lower arms from T-Cutting and waxing it. Twice, in the case of the roof and bonnet because they looked crappy the first time.

I am currently recovering from a mild case of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Last night I was attacked by a beast in my bedroom. No, unfortunately Hugh Jackman did not pay me a visit. It was something else large, hairy and unnervingly sinister - a bloody ginormous spider! At approximately midnight, while I was sat on the floor fiddling on the laptop, it ran over my leg, across the room and under my desk. I stifled a scream as everyone else in the house was asleep. Unfortunately, this also meant I was unable to get my dad to rescue me from the monster and had to go to bed knowing it was still in my room and there was a possibility that it could crawl over me in the night.

I had several nightmares about the spider during the night. Several, because I must have woken up about 50 times, in a cold sweat, swiping at my hair that was tickling my face and impersonating spider legs.

This morning before I started doing any work I got on my knees and checked under my desk and prodded my bags and papers lying abround it, because that was where I was going to be sitting all day. I couldn't find the horrible thing and mum said it probably wasn't even in the house anymore anyway, so I got down to some work and forgot about it.

About two hours later I was going to go and speak to mum, who was in her room, but I was cold, so I picked up my hoody, which had been on my wicker chair all night. As I started walking across the landing and started pulling my hoody on I - God, I'm shuddering just at the memory - came face to face with IT. It had crawled up my chair (see! It could have SO easily crawled up my bed in the night instead!) and settled down to sleep in the hood of my hoody.

I threw it on the floor and screamed my head off. Mum came running, thinking I was being attacked, which as far as I was concerned I was, and I just jumped up and down and pointed at my jumper on the floor. After getting a bit off sense out of me, mum poked around at the jumper, keeping it at arm's length, and discovered my attacker. My mum is just as terrified of spiders as me, if not more so. However, she picked up the hoody - again at arm's length - and carried it very slowly downstairs. She said later that she got a rush of adrenaline which gave her the courage to do so that must have been caused by the need to protect her baby. The same kind that allows mothers to lift cars off their trapped children and such, I expect. It moved and I screamed and mum told me not to becasue it'd hear me and crawl up her arm. I opened the front door and she threw it onto the porch. It didn't move, so we started kicking the hoody to get it off. It then turned, and ran toward the house. We ran straight in, slammed the door, locked it and then stood staring at the floor, waiting for it to crawl in under the door. Fortunately it decided that it preferred sunbathing on the wall instead of eating alive two defenceless women, which was where it stayed for a good while before disappearing off. To start a whole new reign of terror somewhere else, no doubt. It took me a good while to control my breathing and mum was visibly pale. But I think, with a bit of time and patience from friends and loved-ones, we shall eventually get over the trauma.

I did try to get a picture of it when it was on the wall to demonstrate its monstrous size and ferocity, but unfortunately I couldn't get quite close enough for the picture to not be blurry - i.e within 10 metres of it. You shall just have to take my word for it.

*Welsh scenery-type photos alert*

Yesterday I went to Bodnant Gardens with my mum. I know everyone's dying to see what its like there, so I took the liberty of stopping off at every strategically-placed bench to take a photo of the beautiful sights I could see, just for this here blog (and, also, for me cos I love it there).

The Welsh Tourist Board should pay me commission.



My favourite view in Bodnant - looking out towards Snowdonia.




Looking down at the River Hiraeth-something (can't remember the last bit) which runs through The Dell - what the river and its banks are known as.




The river!




See, I think this shot could easily be mistaken for somewhere tropical. Like Thailand maybe?




Oh, I do like this shot. How much am I practically a professional photographer?




The lovely hall. The Queen Mother stayed there once.




Last one - honest! I had to put this one up because I thought it was so thoughtful of Mother Nature to have a bush flower exactly the same colour as my blog.


In other news, today I polished my car. It is now so clean and shiny I could use my new hairdryer to dry my hair in front of it in the style of a big mirror with wheels. I shall photo-blog it tomorrow just because I am so proud of all my (4 hours) of hard work, and also because I have only just thought of doing it and its too dark now to take a picture.

My computer is broke again so until Daddy-Dearest (official title) fixes it for me I can no longer sit on the floor at the end of my bed, laptop on knee, telly in front of me, cuppa on one side and mound of chocolate eggs on the other. Instead I am having to fight my sister for the house computer when I can, and do other things with my time. Like essay-writing, for example. It is a rather large pain in the arse. On the bright side, though, my knitting is coming along a treat, with my fingers spared up to do things other than type.

I have not done much that is blog-worthy since my last post, but thought I had better post anyway in case certain other bloggers I have been pestering for updates hurl abuse my way for being a hypocrite. And we don't want that. No.

Yesterday my hairdryer broke. Seeing as how I have horrendous hair at the best of times, this really was a catastrophe. The only thing that could have been worse was if my straighteners would have broken, but that doesn't bare thinking about. So I went out and bought myself a new one. It is so fantastic and so high-power that I simply had to go and wash my hair just so I could dry it again. That was my highlight of yesterday. Although Ken and Deidre's wedding was good too. I did feel sorry for poor old Ray, though.

Today I went shopping with Mummy so she could spend her birthday money (Happy Birthday Mummy!) and I could buy a new top and accessories for going out to Broadway tonight. Not because its the sort of place where you have to wear something new everytime you go there. Oh no. Far from it. But because my best friend with whom I shall be going out is the most annoyingly beautiful, stick-thin, clothes' horse you can imagine who never wears the same thing twice. Unfortunately (or fortunately - for HER, anyway) she has enough money to shop places other than New Look. So the pressure to look fantastic is amazing. I am confident I may just pull it off tonight, but we shall see. Not like its a competition or anything.

*nervous laughter*

Last night I ventured onto the official site for the new Fantastic 4 film, and I for one am awaiting it with eager anticipation. I'm not a comic geek or anything, but I do like it when a new one comes out. Its true, there are some crap comic book films, although I'm not naming any names COUGH *Daredevil* COUGH. However, on the whole they usually do provide an enjoyable cinema experience. X-Men and X2 are my particular favourites, although for the life of me I can't think why.



*swoon*

Anyway, I'm particularly interested in The Fantastic Four because of Mr Fantastic himself, Ioan Gruffudd. As long as it doesn't bomb then this may finally be the big time for my favourite Welsh actor. Although, again, the exact reason why I like him so much, apart from being Welsh, obviously, completely escapes me.



*swoon again*


Here, as threatened, is an update on my kitting progress.



See - its about 3 foot long now, I think.




And here I am modelling my handiwork. This photo is the result of an hour and a half of photographing in an attempt to get a picture which actually demonstrates the full length of the scarf, surely the whole point of the photo, and in which I do not look fat. This is the best of a very large bunch - over 200 photos, I think. A shout out of thanks is due to my very patient sister, the photographer for the day.

Just a quick post because I really should be doing the reading for my bloody Victorian England essay. I have decided to knock WS! off of the 'My Official New Favourite Blog of the Moment!' spot, as it really has had enough time as my fave now and any longer would just be greedy . So now, due to its continuous interest in 'Spederline' (i.e. Britney and family) and keeping me up to date on the very important situation that is the state of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe's marriage, Pink is the New Blog is 'My Official New Favourite Blog of the Moment!'

(Laura kids herself that anyone actually cares ...)

That is all for now.

Back to the reading ...

PS - the knitting is going well - my hot pink scarf can now get all the way round my neck. Only 3 more feet of rows to go. At this rate it will be finished just in time for June. Great.

On Friday I went to Alton Towers! It was a very good, if not very long, day (we had to get up at 6.30am to leave at 7.30am!) and we went on that new ride, the worst named ride ever:-


Despite the crap name, its still the best ride. 0-60mph in 0.25 seconds. VERY fast.


I'm very glum at the moment (even though I am watching Hugh Jackman in X-Men 2 right now) because the boyf departed for Leeds this evening and I'm not going to see him for nearly two weeks until I make my return back oop north. So to cheer myself up I'm going to post some lovely pictures I took when I went for a walk with my lovely dog yesterday afternoon to my most favourite place in the world (it really is - I want my ashes scattered there when I die, to the tune of Scar Tissue by the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Very originally known locally as 'The View', its usually very beautiful and offers views of the whole wide world (nearly), but as it was late afternoon it was unfortunately very hazy. But still, it was a very lovely walk. So, as I am entering into that time when I am running out of money to do interesting things to blog about, I shall continue what I started last week with the beach pictures and show you some more lovely, if not slightly misty, Welsh scenery-related pictures.



Here is the lane me and Bryn walked up to get to The View. Not too misty yet, but we weren't very high up at this point.



This is the view that greeted me as soon as I walked over the hill. The glistening rainbow type-thing is the River Conwy going out to the sea. Conwy castle is a tiny dark speck there somewhere too.



Here's Bryn posing on the top of the hill. He loves having his picture taken.



The view of the lovely A55 (it is there - honest) and a little bit of Mochdre.



Another one of my 'arty' shots - just as the sun came through the clouds.

Thats it! Well, it isn't really. I took about 40 pictures, but looking over them again its just 40 pictures of the same thing, each from a slightly different angle.

Ooh, tomorrow, when my camera batteries have re-charged, I might show you all a picture of how my knitting is progressing! Or maybe not.