A Little Bit Christmassy,,,

My old school was a horrible horrible place full of rich chavs with massive houses and expensive clothes and ponies.

(You might have guessed - i didn't like it)

However, my favourite person in the world went to that school (and still does), but she might be the 1 exception.

Every year they have a Christmas Market full of over-priced mince pies, expensive jewellery stalls and the occasional second-hand book.

And every year i go. I like laughing at the people i spent 7 years of my childhood with getting fatter and oranger and stupider. (again, Bethan isn't included in this).

Yesterday I went with Bethan.

(i apologise for yet another blog full of pictures)

We were drawn in by sparkly things. Look at how sparkly they are!!

Next we decided to decorate gingerbread Christmas trees.

This was Bethan's

And this was mine...

(i am NOT going to mention the fact that Bethan's looks like festive vomit)

Finally, we bought tickets for the bottle tombola. Look what i won!

I don't really know what it is... i might give it to someone for Christmas.

So, after an afternoon of Christmasness, we were feeling very christmassy indeed.
We then skipped (yes - skipped) into Bromley. It was quite a long way, and it was cold and Bethan was wearing silly shoes, so when we arrived it took us a while to recover and make sure that our lungs weren't going to explode.

We then looked at the pretty Christmas lights. Ahhh - pretty!

Then spent the evening watching Love Actually and eating ice cream.

Happy :-)

Egg

I have decided that i'm not going to be an engineer.

To be honest, i decided this years and years ago - i didn't really need to spend two days this week at the Bromley Education Development Centre doing engineering workshops and being talked at by engineers to know this. But whatever - i missed two days of school!

So, we go to this place and sit in a room... we sit, and sit, and sit. The person's car who is supposed to be talking to us, has broken down. I might have been the only person who found this funny, because the type that like engineering don't have a sense of humour. at all. ever.

You might be wondering why i was there when only 10 people from my year went, the other nine being freaks who do extra studying at lunchtime, who go to a maths club at the weekend and who ALWAYS seem to have a bad foot when it comes to PE lessons, oh and my friend Erica (but she was just there for moral support and moaned constantly - because that's what she does).

Well, i will tell you - i didn't want to go!!!! really, honestly i didn't, i am pathetic at engineering (or so i thought...) and i have got consistent 'C's and 'D's in my DT projects since year 7. The thing is, our head of year is a very very nice teacher called Miss Benson who, for some very odd reason seems to volunteer me for everything.

Anyway, where was i? oh yes, sitting in this room. Then after about an hour, this lady comes in. She is wearing what can only be described as a small dead dog, draped around her neck and she seemed genuinely cross with us for being there. After shouting at us about fire escapes for a bit, she gave us sheets of paper with tasks on and left us to get on with it.

Now, i'm going to tell the truth here - i had a lot of fun from here onwards. Our first task was to design an airbag for a car using sandwich bags, elastic bands and paper.

It didn't work but it LOOKED like it would work... and that's what people care about... right? i mean, the airbags in your car, do you KNOW that they work? They look like they would work, so you trust them, you'll probably never use them and until you actually have to, you'll go along perfectly happily putting your life into the hands of something that LOOKS like it would work.

I explained my theory to one of the proper engineer people there. He didn't get it. He just kept asking

"But what about after they've crashed and the airbag didn't work - they'll sue you". My answer was simple:

"No they won't - they'll be dead."

He told me that maybe engineering wasn't the right career choice for me. Then walked away.

Our second task was to create a little house for an egg. Not just any house - one that would protect it when it was dropped from 10 feet. To make this we had, elastic bands, those little bits of polystyrene you get in boxes, 1 piece of card, some newspaper and glue.
This is where the humourless geeks proved themselves to be rubbish at being geeks. They sat, staring blankly at eachother, occasionally saying things like "shall we make a box?".

This was when my first stroke of genius came to me.

Triangles.

Right?

So if i made a triangular based pyramid and put the egg in them padded the corners with newspaper, the egg would be held securely. Then, when we dropped it, if we could get it to land on the tip of the pyramid - the force will go through, the point, up the sides and barely touch the egg at all!

After making this, i stared at the left over material and began thinking about those multi-layered composite material thingies - you know, the ones that really fast cars are made out of?

So i stuck all of these leftover bit together to make like a little puffer-coat for the pyramid.

This involved using a hot glue gun. which made me happy.

Do you know how bad burning polystyrene smells?

Anyway, so we dropped it from 4ft, then 6, then 8 then 10 and the egg survived all of them!! This meant that we won!!!

We Won!

WE WON!!!

apparently it wasn't a competition, but still... WE WON!!

So, now you are asking , why doesn't she want to be an engineer, she's obviously BRILLIANT?

Well, did you know that only 5% of all of the engineers in the world are women?

Did you know that only 15% of all the engineering students in the world are female?

AND, if the amount of female engineers keeps increasing at the rate that it is at the moment, it would take 290 years for the amount of female and male engineers to be equal?

That's not why i don't want to be one though...

I just think it would be really really boring.

Ironbridge...

"Emma, you smell."

"Oh. What do i smell of?"

"Sort of... red bull and mud and old people."

"That's a good thing - right?"

"No, definitely a bad thing - you smell like you haven't showered for three days."

"Ah! That'll be because i haven't showered for three days".

I think this conversation i had with my friend Emma earlier today sums up our trip to Ironbridge quite well.

Here's some other words that i collected in my head and pictures that i collected in my camera whilst i was on a school trip over the last couple of days:

This is our room - it was very big. but also very cold, and rather messy. Notice Nancy (on the right) eating a lot of biscuits.

"I love these biscuits! can i have one? my mum never buys them for me because i eat them all at once, but i really like them and she never buys them so i have to eat them all at once..."

"It's a vicious circle really?"

"Yes. A vicious biscuit circle full of vicious biscuits."

We discovered that it isn't possible to escape. (Nancy is wearing my shower-hat, Emma is wearing my underwear)

This is THE IRON BRIDGE. It's interesting. But not interesting enough to spend 2 hours looking at it.

More biscuit eating.



We went to a victorian village. This is my favourite poster, others prefered this one...



But i'm not that immature...



Inside a furnace - it was muddier than you'd expect it to be.



This is me and Arbraham Darby - he invented cast iron. His eyes scared me.

WH Smiths dancing. With coffee.

Just before i leave you in peace - who can beat my Friday night? I played Scrabble with 4 of my friends, 4 of my teachers and a man called Mr Khaleed (who doesn't speak english) whilst Mr Hunt (an IT teacher) played the guitar. Mr Khaleed won.

Grrrr.

Do you know what's annoying me right now?

This woman who is getting all cross about the prime minister spelling her son's name wrong.

I spell things wrongly all the time - i don't do it specifically to be offensive, i don't even think it is particularly offensive, is it?

Surely she should be grateful that he wrote her a letter anyway?

Maybe he's just not very good with his spellings?
Maybe the person who told him the person's name had really bad handwriting?
Maybe he was writing it with a Scottish accent?

Has anyone considered these things? NO.

I just think that it's annoying, she would probably have never had mentioned it if it weren't for the fact she knew that newspapers would pay her for it.

My Enlgish teacher last year spelt "Stephanie" four different ways on my school report! i didn't think she did it to be offensive to me.

My piano teacher has called me "Charlotte" for the last year, i don't find it rude, i barely even mention it anymore.

A boy called David The Knob called me "Sarah" for the whole week i was Scuba diving with him... then again, i did call him David The Knob...

*deep breath*. oh well, just so long as it's not still in the news tomorrow...

The Buddhapadipa Temple

This is about buddhism.

Sort of.

Recently, i've been writing about buddhist monks for an RS project. But, before this, we went on a school trip to the Buddhapadipa Temple in Wimbledon.

As a general rule, i like school trips. Whatever they are, they have to be better than actual school.

This trip was... interesting.

To be honest, it was ages ago... i can't remember that much about it, except that i fell over and a buddhist monk saw my knickers, then laughed.

But as i was looking for pictures to stick in my project, i found these. I thought you might like to see them.

This is the temple. It's pretty.



This is a pond. It's also pretty.




Like very small children, we were fascinated by the fact we could see our reflections in the pond.



This is a parrot.

This is Jesus. I'm not sure what he was doing there.



These are my friends, racing up some steps



Here they are again, once they reached the top of the steps.

So there you go. Another pointless blog.