The Girl in a Plaid Skirt: 09 October 2011

Friday: I went to the Mermaids opening party, and I talked to the director of As You Like It about being stage manager for the show. Unfortunately, since then and now I they got someone else to be stage manager. But do not despair! I will most likely be stage managering for this year's Fresher's Play, Medea, which is being put on by my Academic sister Mathilda and some other Mermaids friends Peter and Hamish (hay-mish). Peter and Hamish both study classics, so it's no wonder that they chose to put on Medea. I'm excited to work with them on this and to state manage again!

Saturday: St Andrews has its own Wine and Cheese society (and Sallie's even puts on its own Wine and Cheese events), but our group has come up with something better: Budget Wine and Cheese. We have our own events, and it's a lot more fun. This Budget Wine and Cheese event consisted of us gathering in my room and snacking on cheese that Amanda got from the St Andrews farmer's market (smoked garlic cheddar), fudge with walnuts that Miriam's sister made for her birthday, toffee popcorn, Charlotte's red pepper hummus and pita bread, drinking white wine from Tesco (I didn't have any), and also planning a weekend trip to the cheese farm where Amanda's cheese came from. We also watched Thelma and Louise. It was a good evening.

Sunday: The day before was Miriam's 18th birthday, but since she was up in Dundee with her family for the day, we decided to celebrate her birthday the next day. Sarah, Charlotte, Heather and I went shopping for Miriam's birthday present, and we ended up getting her a Tunnock's Caramel Wafers mug, and an owl keychain because she likes Tunnocks Caramel Wafers and always makes tea and hot chocolate, and because she has an owl pillow in her room. Then we went out to Bella Italia for Miriam's birthday, and I actually got to eat pasta for once! Yaaaay!

Monday: My first English tutorial was that morning, which went fine, but the only problem is that my Modern History lecture is right after my tutorial, so I was quite a bit late for my lecture.

Tuesday: Charlotte, Harry, Heather, Sarah, Amanda and I went to the library and were there until just about when the library closes at 2 am. Little did we know that that was not a good thing to do because...

Wednesday: morning at like 6 whatever AM, we had a fire drill. Not. Fun. Luckily for me I don't have any lectures or tutorials on Wednesdays, so I could go back to sleep, but Amanda has all of her lectures in a row from 9 until 12 so she had a rough day.

Thursday: Nothing too exciting except for the fact that I had one of the two most quintessentially British meals for lunch. I went to the bakery Gregg's because their food is cheap and I got a cheese and onion toastie (toastie = grilled cheese sandwich, basically) and a tea. I then went over to Tesco's for a bag of crisps. I loved it.

Friday: Had my other two tutorials, Social Anthropology and Modern History, and those went fine as well, and then went back out at 4 for my Social Anthropoogy lecture, which, on Fridays, is just a film. This week's film was...interesting. It's called Wild Man, and it's about these guys who have daddy issues and they all go out into the wilderness of Texas and crying/sharing/hugging circles to release their bottled up emotions about how their fathers treated them horribly and taught them to never show their emotions and blah blah blah. I could not stop laughing during this film. I knew that it wasn't supposed to be funny, but it just was.

Saturday: Mom's birthday! The Opening Ball! Lots of things going on. Before Dad left St Andrews, I gave him the present and card I got for Mom's birthday. I got her an apron that I had seen in a shop window that had "wee coloured birds" (as the shop lady had said) on it, and I got her a card with a bird (either a Kingfisher or a Kookaburra. Not sure which) on it as well. Mom likes birds, and she had told me that she wanted an apron for her birthday, so this was perfect. We left for the Opening Ball at approximately 8:30 in these claustrophobic buses and arrived in the middle of a field in who knows where. It was very confusing. For the first hour and a half or so it seemed to me that the "black tie" Opening Ball event was just people standing in a tent in the middle of a field. But then the group (Sarah, Charlotte, Harry, Heather, Amanda) and I got on the dance floor and then I started having fun. We got on the "early" bus back at 1:10 or so. It was a lot of fun, even if the beginning was misleading.