I'm off to England tomorrow to pick up the new kitten. My mother and I are flying to Bristol in the morning and then renting a car to drive to our hotel, which is near where the cat breeder lives.( Read more... ) Wish us the best of luck because we're going to really need it! Have a great weekend, all of you!

I have a soft spot for Galaxy Quest because it doesn't take itself too seriously. Plus it has Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman ;D Other than that probably the old Star Wars films, but Galaxy Quest came to mind first.

Bea sleeping on my sister's lap. The scarf around her neck is not some cruel accessory but a way of stopping her from scratching her stitches. She likes it if you put your legs up so that she has more room to stretch - spoiled cat!

I hate to kill the mood and report bad news, but I need to get it off my chest. ( Read more... )

Happy birthday to abble4b aka Cate - the only livejournaler I've met - but if she's anything to go by then you must all be really, really nice! Have a great one, Cate! I'm not great with graphics, but I know that you wanted to see my pictures of that pirate festival, so here are the best ones! I hope you can go next year seeing as it's usually on during your October holidays and that it's less than half an hour away from where your parents live ;P

You Can View All of My Photographs here;
http://s200.photobucket.com/albums/aa110/ali-babble/La%20Ciotat%201720/?albumview=slideshow

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Sorry guys, I've been away. My computer broke - my hard disk is destroyed. I'm having a new one sent to me. I don't know how it happened - I'm not THAT bad with computers, they can just be touchy, I suppose. Unfortunately I've probably lost everything on my computer. Memory, photos, writing - everything. I haven't lost all hope but the prospects don't look good. So without a laptop don't expect to be seeing me much online. I'm so bored living in a small room without TV or a laptop or anything - and it's raining. But I'm still doing fine in spite of that. I'm drawing and painting for the first time in a long time, so I guess that's a plus!

Hope you're all doing a bit better than me!

I'm so glad that Exit the King is doing so well. Not that I'm surprised!

And happy birthday Penny (guess it's already the 4th there) - not that she'll see this anyway.

And I'm so sorry to see that your student's condition has worsened, Cate. Life is tough, especially when it's tragically short. I guess all we can do is pray for a miracle. ;(

Just a short little entry (well, by my standards!) because it's the Irish national holiday - St Patrick's Day.( Read more... )


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I'm in a hurry, but I'm in such a good mood today. For once I am completely happy with how an awards show went!( Read more... )

Richard Ayoade.

I guess a reporter got there first; http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/tvtoday/2008/11/who-could-be-who-3-richard-ayoade/
But here are my reasons;

# Because he's a brilliant actor, even if he's too modest to admit it.
# He's got charisma on screen. He perfectly steals the show in every episode he's in in the IT Crowd despite a good cast (except maybe for the scenes with Matt Berry but he's a scenery-chewer, not that it's a bad thing in a comedy).
# Because he's still relatively young but not as young as the 26-year-old. Plus he can play older as evidenced in the character of Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and it's spin-off show, Man to Man with Dean Learner.
# He has a really cool, distinctive voice. Some critics describe it as an 'old man's voice - I wouldn't go that far but it would certainly add to the believability that he's over 900 years old.
# He's handsome, and that seems to be a criteria for casting Doctor Who nowadays, doesn't it? That was a big part of David Tennant's success, anyway.
# Because he's evidently intelligent, (having co-written and directed a TV show, as well as directing various music videos) as is the character if The Doctor.

It would never happen, because Ayoade would probably never accept the role anyway - he probably wouldn't stand all the fuss and attention, but mostly it would use up too much of his time and so his other talents would be wasted.
Plus he's under contract for Channel 4, so the BBC wouldn't be able to snatch him up. For now. But one can always hope!

Anyway, I'm willing to give this Matt Smith, eyebrows or not, a chance. Anyway, who had heard of David Tennant before he got the gig? Honestly, I'm just relieved that it wasn't Russell Tovey as the show's creator, Russell T. Davies, suggested because he would've been all wrong. Plus that would've been just lazy casting as he was already in an episode, as was Freema Agyeman before she was reincarnated as Martha Jones and she was The Doctor's worst companion to date...

Failing that the aforementioned Matt Berry would also do a good job but maybe the novelty would wear off after a while. He'd probably want to sing in every episode!

This might be nothing to someone who lives in a country where it snows, but to me, living in Ireland where all it does is rain but not snow (on the off chance that it ever does it melts as soon as it hits the ground) it's a big deal. I have an exam this afternoon, but whatever. This is great!( Read more... )

So, if you had to do a 20 minute presentation on anything from French culture, be it a film, a personality, an author, a director anything really although it has to be serious, what would you do it on? Bear in mind that my partner for this project is Chinese so she'd have to be into it too. Plus, there are loads of other people in my class, and we're not the first to do the presentation so it can't be anything obvious that somebody else would do.

I'm in a hotel near Dublin Airport. Flying out to France at 7am tomorrow so have to get up at about 4. Still haven't had dinner. Been travelling all day. I'm all alone in this huge hotel and completely disorientated. I'd better eat and try to get some sleep. Don't expect to hear much from me for at least 3 weeks. Doesn't mean that I've forgotten you guys, it's just that the university and accommodation I'm staying in does not have internet, so I'll have to use more costly means. Hope you've been having and continue to have a good August and September. Talk to you guys soon..hopefully. I'll miss my internet chats! (And my real family and cat, of course).

I'm really sorry that I've been away. I don't have a clue what I've been missing. I've been very busy with work and preparing things for France. I'm leaving on the 2nd of September.

My cat, Bea's, persistent ear problems lead to antibiotics then ear drops, then flushing out of her ear under anesthetic in February, then removal of a growth/pollip with another short operation, then more ear drops and antibiotics, and then finally 2 weeks ago (Mon 28) Bea had surgery to completely remove her ear canal because it was so infected and causing her a lot of pain. She's doing okay now, I guess. She's not perfect, as she is now obviously deaf in one ear, but cats adapt so amazingly quickly that you'd hardly notice. Except for the fact that she is (well was, it's grown back a bit) bald on one side of her face. Funny how I go see The Dark Knight, and then 4 days later I have a 'two-face' for a cat! Except that she's still my sweet little Bea, and isn't some comic book villain. [Oh, and, Susan, I haven't forgotten that I said I'd post my review of the Dark Knight, even though you've almost certainly seen it by now and the hype's died down a bit)]. Anyway, I'll fill you in a little more when I have more time.

I'm going off with my sister to see Muse play in Dublin tomorrow. I actually don't know their music too well, but I've never been to a large concert, and I don't want to wait until I'm at that age where younger people raise their eyebrows at you for being too old to be at a concert.You know what I mean. I like the band, I just don't know the words to a lot of their songs. I really don't think anyone will notice, though. Annoyingly one of my sister's friends has pulled out of going to the concert, so we have to pay extra money for accommodation because there will be 3 people paying for 2 rooms instead of 4. It's incredibly frustrating because if she'd told us a day or 2 ago we could've cancelled our hotel bookings and booked a 3-bed room and saved money. Now we have to spend more.
Anyway, wish me luck! Hope that the weather is all right. There were floods on Saturday in Dublin, so hopefully it won't rain! Catch you later!

Still working at the petrol station. The guy I had to cover for a few types has officially disappeared off the radar so I seriously doubt he'll be coming back to wrk. Which means that they still need me. Which is a gift and a curse considering that the job isn't muuch fun, but it does get me some cash so beggers can't be choosers, right?

Anyway, I got a laptop! Yay! ( Read more... )

P.S. I got a lovely text message from Cate (aka apple4b) telling me that she was having a lovely time on the beach on her holidays. Thanks for the message, Cate! Hope it's still going well!

Sunday was *supposed* to be my day off. Except at 2pm I got an urgent phone call from work saying that they needed me to cover for somebody who called in sick. So from 3-10 I was working on tills with nobody to back me up. Oh, and only 15 minutes break - I'm not sure if that's legal, I'll have to check. I could've said I had something on, but I have a feeling that they won't be needing me any more at the end of the week. I was only supposed to be covering for people on holidays. I hoped that they might have a few hours here and there. But yesterday I met the new girl (yup, even newer than me, so I'm supposed to be the responsible one, even though I've only worked maybe 3 or 4 days more than her) so I'm pretty certain that after this week I won't be going back. Sigh.

So the work isn't what really annoyed me. It's what I missed because of it. Geoffrey's birthday - again. I missed it last year and promised myself I wouldn't this year. AND I didn't get to watch the Wimbledon Mens' final (Nadal v Federer), which I was so looking forward to. My Dad said he'd tape it on Sky+ (Tivo/recorder), but he messed it up. At the start of the match we had no signal because of terrible rain, so it couldn't record. And he never checked that it was properly recording when the match came back on. He watched the whole match and didn't notice ONCE that it had not recorded. I got to see a whole 1 minute of ads which recorded under the heading of "Wimbledon 2008", how annoying is that? I hadn't been able to watch a single good match during the tournament, and then I miss, what I was told was, an amazing tennis match. I know it's just a tennis match, but I'm not that into sports, and the sports I'm into are only shown on TV a few times a year, so it is a bit dispiriting.

I am exhausted. First day at work today - I've got a part time job for a few weeks working the tills at the petrol station I mentioned in my last post. Sounds easy enough, but it wasn't! Sure, if you can scan the item and the person has cash it's fine. But if someone wants to pay by credit card, or has an account for the petrol, or wants a lottery ticket (there are so many different types that I wasn't even aware of), or wants cigarettes (there are so many kinds, and they're all behind glass so you have to press these tiny buttons, but I don't know any cigarette brands so it takes me ages to find them) - it's all a huge pile of pressure. And you have to constantly look out the window in case somebody drives off without paying for petrol (somebody did today, and I think they all secretly blamed me, even though there was another experienced person there who should have also been keeping an eye out). And there's the pastries and certain deli items which don't have bar codes so you have to enter these codes into the cash register - but I don't know any because there's no actual list and the cashiers just seem to magically know them off the top of their heads. Grr. This is hard.

I actually think I did okay for my first day, but I won't be able to use the whole "it's my first day" excuse tomorrow so people won't be quite so forgiving.

Tomorrow I go back for 4 hours. 2 members of staff are on holiday next week so I think that they basically expect me to be a pro by then. Yikes! Wish me luck!

Because I have a LOT to learn.

I don't normally pay attention to talent shows, but I have to share this clip from last night's episode of Britain's Got Talent. The dog is called Gin, and his trainer is only 15 years old. She must have spent hours training her dog to "dance" like that!


They didn't get the highest number of votes, but they still made it into the final because the judges picked them as the runners up. Best of luck to them for this Saturday's final!

Sorry if I haven't been posting much lately. Just posting a link to my new video of my cats! I've never tried making a video before (I don't really have the equipment - I can only make videos from footage recorded unto a video camera), but I now have even more respect for those who have made several because it takes AGES to edit such tiny clips! Also, I didn't actually have much footage of them, so I pretty much used all my good clips at the start! It's only 2 minutes long, so if you have time check it out.

I've never been the intended victim of a cruel April Fool's joke - but my Mum has. Three years ago my Belgian grandmother rang saying that she was in Dublin airport and was coming to our house because she'd decided to visit us. The house (especially the spare bedroom) was a total mess. We - my mother and I - freaked out. That is, until 20 minutes later when she rang and said it was a joke. She had us totally fooled! We were so relieved when we found out the truth!

I'm not celebrating it. I know, an actual Irish person (not someone who's great grandparent was Irish) who doesn't care about her national holiday. Truth be told I've got piles of work to do for college this week (my last week before the Easter break - yay!). I'm on my break, and my affection-hungry cat is on my lap distracting me. Besides, Irish Paddy's Day celebrations are rubbish. They have awful parades with marching bands, people in dull costumes, and a few crude floats. You're packed in like sardines on the city center streets to try and get a look at one. They're okay if you're a child, but I'm a little old for parades. They're much more fun if you're in them. They showed the Dublin parade on TV - I'm sure you get a better view in your sitting room. I'm sure that there are actually much better celebrations abroad. In New York, for example.

Also the pubs are all packed. And not in a good way. Lots of parents dragging their bored children in.

Nope, I'll probably celebrate instead on Wednesday, after my tests and essays are all finished. That'll be something worth celebrating!

Oscars! I always get a bit excited around Oscars, I don't know why! Anyway, I'm too lazy to come up with my own speech, but I did come across a sort of 'fill in the blanks', satirical speech generator yesterday so I'll post what it produced for me; ( Read more... )