So for Halloween, I dressed up as someone with swine flu, haha. I figured it wouldn’t offend anyone where I live, as we weren’t badly affected, so I went ahead and bought a Mexican sombrero and poncho on eBay. There was a moustache with it, but it was lame and fell off after something like 20 minutes. My incredible fake mask was covering it anyway, so the full plan failed. Anyway, here’s a pic of me before going to a friend’s party:

Go on, laugh, everyone else did xD

I got a new phone yesterday, to finally replace the prehistoric mess I had before! Don’t get me wrong—I liked my old phone, but the limits of its abilities were to send texts and make calls. Apart from that, the only internet it could manage was the Orange homepage, until it decided the pressure was too much and called it a day.

So now I have a navy coloured Nokia E63, the same phone as one of my friends Alice, who badly needs to blog. I pay £15 a month, and for that I get 75 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet access and free 3-to-3 calls (the network). Pretty good! I barely make calls, I prefer to text, so the 75 minutes is fine.

Although, to quote my dad: “Don’t forget that 75 mins isn’t long and they will take your eyes out after that.”
True, but bear in mind the longest phone call I’ve ever made is about 1 hour 45 minutes, which was incredible for me. On average I spend about 3 minutes per phone call, which is about once a week, so I should be fine.

Here’s a tip to save minutes, or money if you’re on a pay and go plan—when you want to call someone, wait for them to pick up, and then start talking really excitedly like you have to tell them something, but then hang up halfway through. They ring you back (unless they are stingy with their money or just don’t care) and it costs you nothing! :D
Unless, for some reason, you’re abroad, in which case you’re daft for making calls anyway because it costs you about £40 a second.

You might have noticed in my sidebar (I doubt it) that I got accepted for work experience! It’s at a small local webdesign company, which I didn’t even know existed until someone said they got accepted there on Facebook. So now me and someone else I know (yay :P) are going to the same place in March working on a joint project. He’s doing the design and graphics part of it, while I’m developing it and coding it all up, hurrah. I was starting to panic about a week ago because most of my friends had found somewhere but I was stuck. Now it’s all good, phew :)

Anyway, I hope you had a fun Halloween—what did you dress up as?

I had comments to return on my last blog. Yes, really. o_O

I found the most amazing Doc Martens online the other day. They’re bright white, with black laces, and selling for less than £10 on eBay. I’m guessing there’s going to be a ton more bids on them though, they’re pretty much brand new. I’ve decided I’m in desperate need of some proper knee-high Doc boots, though, in bright pink or something. I’m not really a pink person, but how awesome would they look with some black leggings and a long white shirt?

I was at my dad’s house the other day, flicking through his stash of old Viz comics. If you didn’t already know, they’re British comic strips that are supposed to be popular because of their sarcastic, racist and sexual jokes. (Before you quit reading, I’m not promoting black comedy or anything, don’t worry.) I didn’t think they were very funny, to be honest—some of the jokes were kind of funny, but the rest seemed like they were trying too hard.

On the front cover of one of them, there was a quote in the corner, saying “the biggest pile of shite you’ll ever read.”

I agreed.

Anyway, my dad was saying that in a lot of the hospital-related jokes, there were always cartoons of people sitting in a line in the waiting room in the background, with pans jammed on their heads and pencils in their ears and things like that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in a hospital with an eraser wedged in their nostrils—not that I make a habit of sitting in A & E—but I was wondering why any sane illustrator, if they exist, would come up with the poor kids in the background.
One of them must have seen some 5 year old boy sitting with a sand-covered bucket over his ears, and thought “Hey, there’s money in this!” because I’ve never seen anyone with car tyres round their necks, railings locked over their shoulders or their foot stuck in the wheel of a bike. Have you?

So I made a new layout, which I actually really like! I spent a lot of time on it after the last super-basic layout I had up. I set up some stuff in one of the shelves of my bookcase—I blu-tacked a magazine clipping of No Doubt to the back, and piled up some stuff around that. There’s still a couple of things I need to fix, like the colour of the links in the footer, but it’s not a super emergency so I’ll go to sleep instead :D

No Doubt did an acoustic set at the Bridge School Benefit concert last night, along with other artists like Gavin Rossdale, Chris Martin from Coldplay and a few others, and they’re due to perform again tonight. If you don’t know what the Bridge School Benefit is, it’s an annual charity concert where bands customarily perform without any electric instruments or amps—I would have killed to have gone, but as it’s in California it was kind of out of the question. I managed to get some audio from a friend who went, though, and there’s a great HQ video on nodoubt.com of their song Magic’s In The Make-up. I’m rooting for some different songs tonight!
Which bands would you have liked to see at the show?

I know this is a super boring blog, sorry! It’s half term, it’s past 11 at night—I don’t have to think straight. I really should start on some of the homework we’ve been set before my brain goes into complete shutdown, though, especially as there’s a modular maths GCSE on Friday 13^th November—anyone else my age in the UK will have one too, lucky us!

So what have I been doing this past month and a half? Apart from wasting time reading Stephen King novels and listening to No Doubt, I’ve been trying to sort out some work experience in my area. I really hope I get accepted to the place I’ve applied to… it would be so much fun and interesting!!

Has anyone read Great Expectations? We’re reading it in English at the minute, and in my opinion they should rename it to “Mediocre Expectations” or something worse, because it’s not all that gripping. We’re writing an essay on it about one of the minor characters, and let me tell you something—there is nothing to say. I’ll end up repeating myself a thousand times, and I’ll get an F grade rather than the A—A* average I used to get, haha :D

Apart from Dickens and what he got up to, I went to the orthodontist’s yesterday, after waiting literally about a year for an appointment, and apparently I am borderline for a brace. I’ve always hated my teeth, and I could do with a brace, but according to the bloke who stared down my gob, it’s optional for me. He said my teeth look average to him (compliments are FLYING) but if I wanted to get a brace to fix them, it would mean having 4 teeth out, a fixed brace for 18 months and a year’s wait. I have literally no mouth pain tolerance, so I’m freaking out slightly.
So, decisions, decisions. What do you think I should do?

(that is, if anyone is still actually online. I’ve been away from my website for so long, CYB3RW4R could have broken out, wiping you all out, and I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.)

Paramore’s upcoming album “Brand New Eyes” is part of the blog title too—I can’t wait for it to come out; I think it’s some time this month, along with Muse’s new album “The Resistance”. I’m going to have no money this month, with buying them and trying to cover my walls in No Doubt/Gwen Stefani clippings. eBay has some good offers, but some of them are way too expensive. I mean, come on—someone’s selling something like 15-20 shoddy clippings for £13, without postage! Anyway, if anyone has any magazines featuring ND or Gwen (actually, any ND merchandise) that you wouldn’t miss, let me know—I know it’s the saddest thing in the world, but I have a reputation to upkeep!

Oh, and before I forget—I promised I would plug Tricia. She’s starting a small webhost and she has some great, inexpensive plans on there, so check it out if you’re looking for a domain! (Of course if you don’t want to pay for hosting, you could always get a subdomain hosted by me!)

I don’t really know why I haven’t been blogging for the whole of the summer holidays, and even a couple of weeks before that; I just wasn’t interested, and I would rather be doing something else. A lot has happened while I’ve been away, I think I’ve changed a lot too—in some ways for better, others maybe not.

• I’ve stopped biting my nails—I don’t even get an impulse any more.
• I got my early entry GCSE Spanish results yesterday—I got an A!
• I know who my real friends are.
• I’ve started caring less about how I feel and more about how I look.
• I think I’ve heard Gwen Stefani’s voice more than anyone else’s the past month.

I’ve been such a shitty affiliate, and I actually am sorry for that, even when I’m not so sorry for not blogging. There are other blogs to keep you entertained, and I’m sure nobody particularly misses my weekly jumble of words.
Anyway, I won’t make any promises for how often I’m going to update, or when I’ll change the layout. There’s no point—I probably won’t keep them, and what’s the point in doing it if I feel like it’s a chore to blog? I’ll enjoy it more when I can write in my own time, when I feel motivated and when I actually have something to say.

[edit 30.08.09] I’ve added some visitor content, for a change. There’s a mix of things there—stocks, tutorials, photography—there’s not a lot at the minute, but I’ll add more soon. [/edit]

In our tent, there were separate “bedrooms” which attached to hooks inside the main tent, but we hadn’t put them up yet because… actually, I’m not sure why we didn’t. We just had our bags, sleeping bags, jackets, clothes, snacks, cameras, iPods and magazines strewn across the groundsheet and some grass inside the tent. Anyway, at about 8pm, we were outside on the track, playing aeroplanes out of boredom. (By the way, aeroplanes involves you basically holding out your arms like a plane and running around crazily.) The sun had been covered up by some threatening looking grey clouds, and it had been forecast to rain anyway, but it just didn’t occur to us to go and sort out our stuff. As we were swooping around like 5 year olds, it suddenly started pouring down with rain within a matter of seconds, so we ran as fast as we could back to our tent, trying (and failing) to dodge the guy-ropes of other tents. My hair was soaking wet, and I wasn’t impressed—I’d spent ages straightening it into sanity that morning, and as my hair is naturally thick, wavy and generally spazzed up, I looked like a fool.
It was complete chaos after that. Nobody could find their own stuff, sleeping bags were confused and on top of that there were about a million spiders inside our tent. They weren’t big; you could just flick them away, but they did complicate putting shoes on. After about 15 minutes of frantically pinning up bedrooms and sorting out our stuff, we finally got everything out of the torrential rain, by which time the pizzas we’d ordered arrived. We’d split the cost, so I was sharing a 14″ pepperoni with two other people… both of whom were outside wearing waterproof coats and umbrellas, having been made to finish their rota time. I looked like some sort of fast food addict, sitting with this huge fatty pizza in front of me.

The definite highlight of the relay, though, was the fact that some teachers from my school were there. Apparently not as many as last year, which was swarming with them, but there were a couple, including half of my teams’ Spanish and music teachers. At about midnight, we were all outside bored, so we decided to try and annoy the teachers a bit. There were some bales of hay outside the main entertainment spot off the track, so a group of 5 or 6 of us lifted it up and put it directly in front of the teachers’ tent door. We ran off in fits, hoping they hadn’t seen us through the little window in their tent.

About twenty minutes later, one of the teachers opened the door to see a huge hay bale in front of her. She just stood there for a bit, not really knowing what to say, then with the help of the Spanish teacher she moved it away from her tent. We were crouched behind another tent, silently bursting, and arguing with some disembodied voice inside a tent: “Touch the tent again and we’ll get your children!” We replied, “We have none, fool!” To which she said “Go make some!” Hahahaha.

Anyway, the teachers found out it was us this morning, and they said it was really funny but we should expect to get extra homework this week, teehee. I laughed because they don’t teach me, but she cut me off by telling me she was good friends with my Spanish teacher, so I’m wondering what she might say tomorrow during Spanish.

Wow, super long blog. Hope I didn’t bore you too much!

Please click here for Georgina, there’s only a few days left!

You’ll probably be surprised to see I used my coded layout as my own new layout. Well, the whole plan to have coded layouts fell through. I decided that I don’t really find it easy to come up with new themes, so I decided to save the one layout I already had on display for myself. Instead, I added some tutorials—even though I only have 5 at the minute in 3 categories, I’ll add more as soon as possible. I have a Spanish project and my identity piece for art to finish off this week, so I might not be able to add much but I’ll do my best.

I was forced by the olds to go to a barbecue today at my auntie’s house. It was pouring down down with rain last night at about midnight—I got up and I could see it illuminated by the lamppost outside—and again at about 5, apparently, so our original plan to go to this big park nearby where I live was scuppered. Instead, at about 1, I was sat outside with some sort of rancid “sausage” on my plate. I swear—this was no normal sausage. It was burnt to charcoal on the outside, and when I cut into it (because I don’t trust my uncle’s cooking) it was still pink inside.

Bleurgh. >_<

So basically today I ate half of the one sausage that didn’t look like it was thriving with food poisoning bacteria, and some salted peanuts. Actually—that’s a lie, I also had a muffin to ward off starvation and/or rickets. I drank something like 17 litres of water, though, because even though this morning it was cloudy and not really all that warm, it became super hot about 3pm, meaning I had to take off my jacket (!). I think the only things that saved me from calling it a day and sneaking off home was my iPod and the near-constant texts from Jennifer, the subjects of which went from drunk adults to future weddings with our music teacher.

I think it was one of those “you had to be there” moments.

Offline, I was shocked when I heard last night about the death of Michael Jackson. He was only 50 when he died (from a heart attack) and people are saying it’s because of his history of ill health, and added stress of his upcoming concerts. Even though they probably did contribute, I think the main cause was his excessive plastic surgery. He must have done one hell of a lot of damage to his body, which couldn’t be reversed, and was essentially pointless. There’s a lot of speculation about how much surgery he had, and why he had it in the first place, so I can’t really say much about it, but I don’t understand why you’d want to do that to yourself. I can understand surgery if it’s necessary, or maybe if you’ve been pulled down all your life for something that isn’t your fault but really bothers you, but plastic surgery done just because you think your chest would look better a few sizes bigger, because you want a smaller nose or because you’ve eaten too many takeaways and want to reduce some fat from around your thighs, is just plain ridiculous. It’s expensive, unnecessary and usually looks bad in later life—just take a look at all the rich celebrities who’ve had Botox and it’s been botched up or their faces have grown out of it.
You could compare it to an art lesson—if you paint something and make a mistake, you can try to paint over it, but it will most likely go wrong. If you try to correct that, it will just make it worse, and the pattern continues. Maybe I’m wrong about this being the case with MJ—I’ve heard stories from diehard fans that claim he had a disease that paled his skin, or there was an explosion backstage at one of his concerts which resulted in him having to have surgery. I was never a fan of MJ, and obviously I’m sad for him and his family, but there’s not much doubt that he must have shortened his life considerably because of the stress he’s unnecessarily put his body through.

On a higher note, I got tagged by Amy! I’ve seen this on several sites, and I bet you will have too so I’m sorry if you’re bored of it. I’ve been wanting to do it for ages, anyway, but I wanted to be tagged to do it rather than just doing it for the crack. Anyway, the rules are:

• Write your NAME, WEBSITE NAME, and @TWITTER USERNAME
• Don’t number this one, just write it under 1! (http://yoursiteurlhere)
• Righty (right-handed), Lefty (left-handed), or Both
• Birthday (you can put the year, but you don’t have to!)
• Your favourite colour
• Write out the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
• Tag 5 people in this form: Name and Site url

I tag Alice, Ben, Gillian, Julia and Sarah. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, and if you haven’t been tagged but want to have a go, go ahead!

Other news… me and my friend Jennifer entered a random draw to go to the live recording of the 100^th episode of Answer Me This in London! (For those not in the know, ie. all of you, it’s an amazing podcast run by Helen Zaltzman, Ollie Mann and Martin the Sound Man. Google if you’re interested!) There’s 50 pairs of tickets and it’s only open to people in their Facebook fanclub (which is about 2500 strong, including Jennifer and me) so the chances of us winning are extremely small, but we live in hope :) It would take quite a while to drive down there, as we live in the North East, but since we probably won’t win anyway there’s not much to worry about. My parents haven’t exactly agreed to the idea 100%, but if we win the tickets it will be hard to say no. Anyway, wish us luck!

I might as well give up and join the stupid “Lose a dress size for summer” diet plan. I’m pretty much sticking to it without meaning to—well, maybe not the third balanced meal part, as I bring a sandwich, drink, fruit and chocolate bar lunch to school.
Or the exercise part, because I don’t do sports, just the odd crazy dance and a LOT of walking every day—not just because of walking to the bus stop, but because of the sheer size of my school.

We got a new school building a few months ago, because the old one was crumbling away and was pretty grotty. Don’t get me wrong—the new one’s amazing, in fact when we first moved into it the majority of people said it was clinical. But you have to walk for about a mile to get to your next class! The corridors are honestly about half the length of my street, and there’s one main corridor on each floor, with classrooms going off either side. There are three floors, too. So think about it: you have a music lesson on the ground floor, on the north side of the building. You then have an English lesson, on the second floor on the south side of the building. Unless you’re some sort of marathon runner with the ability to push hundreds of slow-walking students to one side, it takes you a good half hour to get there.

Aside from the self-subsisting planet that my school is, I decided to add a new section to the portfolio section: book reviews! Not too exciting, I know, but I didn’t think there was very much on there and I think as I read more books than I watch movies, they’ll be easier to write and eventually build up. So far I have The Carbon Diaries 2015by Saci Lloyd, which was a great book. Read the review here.
Which reminds me—after about a year of anticipation, I finally preordered The Carbon Diaries 2017 on Amazon! Can’t wait for it to get here… according to Amazon, it shouldn’t take more than three months. What are they using to deliver—a skateboard?!

Did anyone watch the final of The Apprentice on Sunday night? I thought it was quite good—for those of you who didn’t see it, or if it’s not aired where you live, the two finalists had to get back together with their old teammates who had been fired and design their own box of chocolates. There was quite a lot to do—they had to design the packaging, decide on flavourings, and create an advertising campaign. One of the teams came up with some apparently great tasting chocolates, but their original name was “Intimate” and the box looked like a box of tampons. They eventually went for a French romantic name, “Choc D’Amour”. I personally thought their product was better than the other teams (who’s flavourings included strawberry and basil, and orange and coriander!) but Alan Sugar clearly thought differently overall. Who did you want to win?

Anyway, I have so much to do—first I need to have tea, as I still haven’t eaten anything since lunch and it’s 8pm, and then I need to really get to work on my art project. We’ve now been given a deadline—Thursday—and I haven’t even added any colour yet! Eek!

I’m so sorry that I haven’t been online for weeks now! There was a server change at RigRag that caused my site to go down, and I tried to log into my old account to backup my files—no such luck. I was so bummed that I’d have to use my really old back ups from rogued.info, and I just had no motivation. Anyway, a few days ago I decided that I missed blogging and got my new account on the new server. Luckily I had a layout premade, except for the CSS, so I uploaded it and edited the CSS around it. I think it turned out okay, I hope you like it. I haven’t got any content up yet, not even the domain pages, but I’ll try to get them up soon, and in the meantime you can email me if you need anything desperately [inward laughing]—sophie[at]myfacade.org.

On the plus side offline, exams are all over, and we haven’t been getting much homework lately because our teachers are writing end of year reports and are too lazy to do their jobs properly. That’s fine with me, though, it gives me more time to work on my identity work in art. It’s quite irritating, as it’s an A2 piece of paper that I have to fill with drawings about me. The composition on my first attempt was terrible, so I started again and hopefully this one will work.

No Doubt are currently touring the USA with their reunion tour, and there are some tickets going on sale tomorrow for a show in Las Vegas, with Panic at the Disco, and I so badly want to go. The show itself is in August, so theoretically I could go, and the tickets are $91, which is expensive for a concert anyway, but I don’t know how I’m going to get there. Obviously I would take a plane, but I’m guessing my parents won’t be too thrilled about my going to Nevada just for a concert. I wonder how much plane tickets from the UK are to America?

*googles flights to Vegas*

Unbelievable. The cheapest flights that I can get for August 5^th-8^th are £1782.60. And that is just for one person. I had no idea flying was that expensive.

Maybe I’ll just wait till they come to England.