Well, I'm now officially a graduate of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. original_jen, BA (Hons). And it was kind of cool, actually, for all the stressing. The ceremony went on for hours, but the bat-cape didn't feel silly at all - more grown-up than anything - and the hat was fine once I'd gripped it firmly to my head. I have no idea what the Vice-Chancellor said when we nodded at him, since it was all in Welsh, but it was good to watch all my friends walk across the stage and clap for them. So I'm glad I went. And I found out what my prize is - money, hurrah! Between £80 and £100 apparently :) I'll have to put it towards something worthwhile... maybe going back and doing an MA!

Hee, I got a prize! The Miss Margaret Davies Prize, no less, for being "one of the most distinguished graduates of the year in the department". No idea what the prize actually is (fingers crossed for money, though), and no idea when I get it, but hey, I got a prize! And a very nice letter from Tim Woods, the head of the English department, telling me I got one. *dances* I don't have to share this one either (well, I hope not), unlike the Classics prize I got at school...

A woman rang my house on Monday, wanting to speak to my dad. Conversation went something like as follows:

Me: He's at work.
Her: Can I have his mobile number?
Me: Can I ask what it's regarding?
Her: It's about an enquiry he made to us - I'm following up.
Me: And what company are you from?
Her: Well, due to Data Protection I can't tell you that.
Me: Well in that case, due to Data Protection I can't give you his mobile number. Bye bye.

Nice man rang up yesterday afternoon, wanting to speak to my dad, saying it was about an enquiry he'd made that they really needed to follow up on. I suspected it was the same company, and told him to ring back today at half 6.

Phone rings at half 8 this morning. The stroppy woman again.

Me: He's at work.
Her: I really need to get hold of him.
Me: Well, as I told your colleague yesterday, ring this evening about half 6. Bye bye.

So tonight, at half 7 (plainly they operate in a different time zone), the man rings, and I pass the phone to my dad. A minute later, he comes back and puts the phone down. Turns out they were one of those debt-resolution type companies, and they thought Dad had made an enquiry last Thursday about entering into an agreement to get rid of his (non-existent) debt - plainly they'd got the number wrong for someone with the same surname. But I think that has to be the best "wrong number" scenario I've had for a while! I'm kind of hoping the woman will ring again tomorrow morning, just for the satisfaction of telling her to go away for once and for all!

My degree results came in the post today, completely unexpectedly, and I got my first! Yay! The fact that it was all coursework and I already knew that doesn't detract in the slightest from having the final marks on paper and seeing it written down. The mark for my Writing Project, which was the bane of my life for months on end, is ridiculous - it said "high first" when I got it back, which was great, but kind of hard to define. The border mark for a first is 70, but 80 always seemed like an impossible mark, so how high is "high"? Turns out it means 84! 84! I'm just going to sit here and stare at the paper in stunned disbelief for a while, I think, and wonder what on earth my lecturers have been taking!

It's been raining almost solidly for over a week now, with no more than 24 hours' break at a time. When it started, the wheelbarrow in the back garden was empty - this morning, it started overflowing, we've had that much rain. And the ground's full, so things are flooding - fields, paths and roads. This is a picture of the main street in the next village to mine (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/image_galleries/flooding_june_2007_gallery.shtml?46) and our main street looks much the same, only it's chocolate brown from the mud from the fields and it's flowing like a river down the road, bubbling and fountaining over the drains, covering the pavement. Kind of cool, but only if your house is far enough away from the worst of the water and you're not out in the rain. It's cold as well - I wore a winter coat to the shops this afternoon. Where did summer go?

I'm currently applying for Teaching Assistant (TA) jobs, having changed career direction yet again. (There's got to be something out there that I want to do that I'm not overqualified for.) There are three things I have to send them: a CV, an application form, and a letter saying why I'm perfect for the job. The application form, though, is basically my CV put into their boxes. And it includes a section where I have to detail the skills and knowledge that make me perfect for the job. I keep getting a strange feeling of deja vu filling it all in. Do you think they'd noticed if I just copied and pasted bits? I could always argue that it was a result of the fact that I'm extremely good at using my time efficiently...

At last, the weather's good enough for gardening! Dad and I have a new tree - an acer - to replace the evil ornamental rhubarb thing that came with the house, and it's beautiful. All leafy and lovely. (Which I appreciate describes many trees, but I feel the alliteration adds something.) Next weekend's job (and no doubt it'll rain now) will be to find some generic bedding plants and put them everywhere there's bare soil. Well, after we've attacked the weeds and actually created some bare soil, anyway. And it will hopefully start to look something like a garden again.

In other news, I have work (after a fashion) to occupy a percentage of my time for the next three weeks. It's only working for my mother's husband again, and only three hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon, but hey, it's something to tide me over until someone gives me a proper job. As long as I don't eat the peanuts they give me all at once...

Ah, it's Big Brother season again. (For those people living in a nuclear bunker or a foreign country lucky enough to have thus far escaped the plague, Big Brother is a "reality" TV show where they lock a group of desperate people with clashing personalities in a house, film them 24-7, and then let the public evict them one by one until someone "wins".) My thoughts on the whole debacle in previous years have generally been along the lines of "not my cup of tea; mostly harmless waste of time", but I was thoroughly disturbed by something in the paper yesterday. Apparently one of the contestants on the Australian version of BB hasn't been told that her father died last week. The producers have decided not to tell her. I'm sorry, that's not trying to make good television (whether BB could ever be classed as "good" TV is another debate), it's just plain wrong. I hope that when she gets out of the house and finds out, she sues them for every last penny she can screw out of them and hits them where it most hurts - in their bottomless, money-grabbing pockets...

I don't live in my flat any more. I left my keys on the kitchen table and shut the door. It's kind of a weird feeling...

I'm back in Aber - surprise! Surprise to me as well, actually, since I didn't intend to be back here till tomorrow, and had booked train tickets according to said intention, but then there was frantic texting due to last-minute boy-stupidity (see strandedinaber's entry) and much angst-ing (which is a word now if it wasn't before) and now I'm here a day before I was going to be. But I am here. Despite the fact that it took me ten minutes to get the ticket machine thingy at Nottingham station (which ironically is called a FastTicket machine) to give me my tickets this morning. (It's a good job I'm habitually half an hour early.) It kept refusing my debit card, but then accepted it, only to refuse it again when I asked it for the next set of tickets. Ridiculous thing. The fact that buying two tickets (Nottingham to Birmingham, then Birmingham to Aber separately) is cheaper than buying one Nottingham-Aber ticket is also ridiculous. But I'm back in Aber, and 'tis good. Am not staying at the flat, because it'd be all empty and weird, but still. I'll hopefully get to see everybody in the next 5 days, and I can pick up my Writing Project and my last essay, both of which have apparently been marked. 'Tis much better than sitting round at home alternately twiddling my thumbs and applying for jobs I'm overqualified to do that no one wants to give me...

Hurrah, for I have finally found a doctor who'll just give me the drugs that work and not whittle about my blood pressure! She took the reading 4 times (I think she may have bruised my arm) and decided that since it was steadily going down, there probably wasn't a lot wrong with it. Which is what I've told all the other doctors who've then deliberated a bit and decided not to believe me. Gah. New doctor is nice. She's not the one I'm registered with, unfortunately, but my registered doctor is also extremely nice. I went to see him last September when I was actually ill, and he gave me magic tablets and told me I had a fever that I hadn't noticed till he told me about it. So it seems like the doctors here may have actually gone to medical school at some point. There are good points to being home! Though I do have to pay for prescriptions here. Grr.

On a different note, I've been thinking that the memory-erasing thing in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind really wasn't such a bad idea. They should be able to do that - not with gadgets and stuff, but maybe with behaviour therapy or something, just to remove all the associations. That way you wouldn't forget, you just wouldn't be reminded constantly. It'd be nice if they could do that. (And if you haven't seen the film and/or have no idea what I'm talking about, it doesn't matter. But it's a good film, and you should see it!)

Anyway, I'm alive. Not having anything to do (someone give me a job, please!) is pretty boring, so updates might be infrequent for a while. I'm also trying to cut down on typing in order to take up knitting again and still be able to write. I check my e-mails most days, though, so if you leave me comments I'll get them, and might even reply, you never know!

Yesterday was pretty much the best last day I could have asked for, aside from the fact that a few people were missing from it. I went out for lunch with Charlie and Becky and Gareth, then spent the better part of the rest of the day at Amy's, eating chocolate brownies and drinking wine and watching The Magnificent Seven. And then the better part of the night still at Amy's, marvelling at the marvellousness of You-Tube. But today it's over, and I have to go home. So strange to think that I only have a few hours left of living here. I'll miss it - and the people I know here - like crazy. But I'll be back. I'll definitely be back, time after time until Aber falls into the sea :)

It is done! Done, done, done, done, done! *dances*

By which I mean, of course, that I've just finished the last essay of my undergraduate career, and am a teeny tiny bit excited by the prospect of not having to write another one for a very long time :) It may even be the best essay of my undergraduate career. Not in terms of answering the question (in that respect, it's the worst), but stylistically-speaking (it ends on a quote and everything!). It's been a pain in the neck to write, though. I may have to start a movement to kill all writers that don't reference properly - it's all very well telling me that the poem you've quoted is on page 356 of a book I don't have, but where are the line numbers? If you don't tell me it's lines 100-150, then I have to go all the way to the library, find the book, find page 356, then count all the way down the lines to work it out for myself. Gah. It's not that I'm lazy - if I have to put in the line numbers, why don't they?

But yes. Done! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I have written exactly 311 words of my 3000 word essay - the introduction. Possibly the longest introduction I've ever written, but that's not the point. The words culture or cultural appear in this introduction 10 times. The words Wales or Welsh appear 14 times. I multiplied it up. If those words appear with the same frequency throughout the essay, which they probably will, since the essay's about poetry that talks about the loss of Welsh culture, then culture/cultural will make up 100 or so words of the 3000, and Wales/Welsh will be 140 words. That's 240 words of the essay. Which is nearly 10 percent. I'm still not entirely sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I am sure that I should get on with writing the essay, since you could only get roughly 10 percent of the gist of the argument from the introduction, and it's the other 90 percent that earns the marks...

Yep, I'm bored of essaying and have no idea what the other 90 percent of the argument is going to be. Time to give my elbows a break from typing and watch episodes of The West Wing, methinks...

The Mormons are stalking me. And one of them has extremely attractive blue eyes...

Ooh, sunshine! I'm back from home (croydonjohn, I waved at you from the train on the way past Aberdyfi), and Aberystwyth seems to be experiencing some kind of heatwave, which makes a pleasant change! It also gives me a different excuse to eat ice cream, since I can now eat solid food again, which pleases me enormously - apparently the reason I couldn't open my mouth last week was because the area around the new tooth was infected (yep, nice), but it went away on its own, which is a good sign. I have to go back to the dentist in a couple of weeks to have x-rays taken, but the likelihood is I won't have to have the tooth taken out. Though the dentist did say she might want to "trim it a bit"... according to my mother, who used to be a dentist, that's not painful at all, but it sounds like it might involve sharp things far too near my mouth, so hopefully I can get away without them doing that!

On the work front, I'm rapidly running out of time to write this essay. It's due in a week today, and all the books I've read so far say exactly the same thing. This would be good, except what they say is basically paraphrasing the poet's autobiography, and useful as that is as a source, being written by him makes it just a tad biased. But no one seems willing to offer an analysis of his work that differs from his own! I know that sounds silly - the poet ought to know what he's talking about - but it's just so subjective, and you only get one point of view. Stupid literary critics. I'm greatly looking forward to being able to read books purely for pleasure again!

Oh, and strandedinaber, I may just have bought the box set of all 7 seasons of West Wing on DVD... absolutely not a rash and unwise thing to do with my leftover student loan, right?

It's essays that do it, I'm telling you. The last essay screwed up my elbows, and the very thought of this essay has caused one of my wisdom teeth to come through sideways and dig into my cheek, which hurts quite a bit, and somewhat restricts my ability to move my jaw. So I'm on the porridge-and-soup diet till Monday, when I'm off to the dentist. It does have the bonus of meaning I have to go home for the weekend, though (easier to do that than to try and find a dentist in Aber). Hopefully it'll be quickly fixable and I can come back and do the essay. The prospect of having to stay at home without the resources to do the essay for a week while they do painful things to me really doesn't appeal. Though it does give me a really good excuse to eat ice cream... chocolate ice cream is particularly good for teeth :)

Oh God. I've finished my Writing Project. I mean, actually finished it. Done. No more. Can't change it kind of finished it. (Well, I could change it, but I don't need to.) Why is this scary? Rational brain - I know it's good, and it's only 30 credits: it's not like it counts for half a year's work or anything. Except it is half a year's work. And it's only (ha, only!) 36 pages (and 3 of those are the bibliography - eep), and surely there should be more to show for it than that? It's a strange feeling - I've hated doing it, I've battled with it since October, I've wanted it to be over for months... and yet now it is over, I don't want it to be. Far too momentous for my liking. It feels like university can end now. And I've been waiting impatiently for that, too. I guess you really do have to be careful what you wish for...

On the plus side, I can now take the 20 or so books off the kitchen table, where I've been working, and actually have space to cook!

Despite the lack of books, I appear to have done all but 600 words of the commentary, hurrah! And I still have... well, most of my points to make. It really is impossible to write 2000 words of commentary about 3000 words of poetry and say everything that needs saying. And it's amusing me that writing 1000 words of commentary has taken me a day, with much procrastination and elbow-restage, whereas writing 1000 words of poetry took me more than a week (at its quickest; 3 months at its slowest, depending on which 1000 words you count), with cheating and using old stuff when I ran out of ideas. It's ridiculous, whichever way you look at it. And speaking of ridiculous, there's still the fun of the annotated bibliography to go. I'm really looking forward to this being over and handed in on Monday. Then I can legitimately write the West Wing fanfic that decided to take over my brain last night (blame strandedinaber for addicting me to it and Amy for persuading me to get Season 7 out of the library and re-watch it). Well, that and do my last essay. Unfortunately, the problem with looking up your marks on the Cascade system to work out what you might get for your degree, and realising that you'd have to get halfway to failing the last two assignments to not get a first (I really don't know how that happened) is that you tend to develop a rather laissez-faire attitude to work...

Hm, I'm tired now, but I've had a lovely day. (Not doing any work, but that's another matter entirely!) I went for a walk along the prom in the sunshine this morning, spent most of the day with Amy talking about not a lot in particular (which necessitated tea and cake, as always), and went swimming this evening. All thoroughly good ways to waste time. Though I think I might have done a little bit too much swimming - I nearly fell over when I got out of the pool, and it took a while for my "land legs" to come back!

Must do work tomorrow though (despite the lack of helpful books... bah), before the visit day in the afternoon. Last visit day ever... it's kind of sad! I'll miss taking people round and telling them just how much I love this place. It seems we get through to some of them, as well - I got an e-mail at the weekend from a girl I showed round a few weeks ago saying she'd put Aber down as her first choice, which made me happy. Makes up for all the ones that grunt (or worse, look completely blank) when you ask them things. No more visit days kind of makes leaving here real, though. My dad's booked a hotel for graduation. The little voice in the back of my head has resurfaced:

So why not stay?