Oh look! Its another blog entry! That didn't come weeks after the last one! This is promising...
I haven't mentioned my new bedroom. It was actually completed some time ago now. Its very nice, as promised its bigger than my last one, its got a bed, drawer, etc. One thing it hasn't got is a desk, which I'd quite like for my laptop. I'm still using my laptop in the lounge, which is usually fine, sitting on the sofa with my brothers and my dad around maybe watching TV can be better than being isolated in a bedroom like I used to be, but sometimes a bit of privacy helps. And that's another thing my bedroom doesn't really have. Neither of my brothers have bedrooms, still, and so they're sleeping in the attic, still. The way to get to the attic is a small wooden stairway. Which is in my bedroom. Also, the entrance to the attic is a square hatch without a door, so I can hear most things that go on in there and they can hear almost anything that goes on in my bedroom. So yeah.
My dads currently working on my brothers bedroom, putting the carpet down.
The Saga Continues...
Hopefully it'll be over by Christmas...
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So now I'm in college. Yay. No more uniform, a more relaxed environment, and only doing the lessons I want to. Yay. Getting up at half six to leave at half seven to arrive for quarter to nine. Woop.
Two immediate impressions I got from the place, 1; Cadbury college is The Cool College for Attractive People. Generally less on the cool side, but some of the teachers are rather fantastic to be taught by. The sheer number of students who are Barbie Doll botox beautiful is staggering. That may be a slight exaggeration, but I wouldn't put it past them that they only allow you to enroll if you're at least reasonably attractive. 2; Cadbury college is The Cramped College for Sardines. 'Nuff said.
I enjoyed my first week(ish) there. My tutor period is on Tuesdays and our tutor is an English teacher slightly off her rocker in a completely good way, so I'm glad about that. I also met a brilliant girl called Laura. I would describe her in more detail (in a totally non-creepy way) but I don't think I need to say anything more than that she works Saturdays as a paintballing supervisor (type thing) and that she once accidentally got high with her mum at a music festival. I think I'm going to enjoy my time at Cadders.
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"Here's to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you could know, wo wo wo," - Simon & Garfunkel, 'Mrs Robinson'
Saturday, 11 September 2010
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
The Challenge
Ah... Hi there... haven't seen you in a while... Me? Avoiding you? Never! ...I've just been... occupied... Cheating? On you? Never! ...I've been busy... No, really.
Well sort of busy.
Not busy working on any personal projects I may have started. I probably would have been, but then this thing simply called The Challenge pops up.
For the first two weeks of the holiday, I get into a panic, because I know I've applied, but haven't been sent any information regarding when I'm actually meant to meet up to be coached off to Wales.
Eventually, I get the information and having met up with my group and team mentors, we're all coached off to Wales.
The Challenge consists of three weeks, taking place from July to September (the last week is staggered throughout three days in August and four weekends, either Saturdays or Sundays in September). The first week is the personal challenge (read in dramatic announcers voice, like that bloke off The X Factor and E4) in which we were all booted off to a residential place in Wales to embark on an adventure course-type-thing.
This consisted in us undertaking a number of physical challenges which, from the eyes of a mostly indoorsy type teenager, or in fact any teenager, could only be considered as gruelling. For example, the very first thing we did when we arrived, apart from making our beds, was to jog up to the beech and run, fully clothed into the freezing ocean. This is fondly referred to as a 'jog & dip'. I have to admit though, I did rather enjoy it. I know! I make up words as well!
I did rather enjoy doing the rest of the challenges set as well. I enjoyed canoeing with a couple of people I'd never met before, though less so hitting a moored boat and capsizing due to a steering mishap. I enjoyed the two day exhibition up the side of Kadir Igris (second highest mountain in Wales I'll have you know, excuse me, my monocle's slipping, there we are) and camping next to a lake and enjoying simply the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen, watching as its golden-orange rays wash out over the landscape just below us. It made the fact I had to climb the mountain practically wearing a tent all the more worthwhile. I also enjoyed rock climbing, on a proper rick face, none of that pansy 'climbing wall' stuff, until I realised having got about half way up that I wasn't getting any further because I couldn't get my foot in the right position to provide me with any purchase to push myself upwards, which was quite disheartening and odd, because everyone else managed it.
The whole point if the week though, was to build confidence in yourself and meet all these new people who you were sharing experiences with to build social skills, and leadership skills, and to prepare you for the second week of The Challenge (Dun dun).
Oh, and the food at that place was lacklustre at best.
The second week was the team challenge. This consisted of the four different teams in the group going somewhere, meeting people, and making something inspired by the place they went and the people they met. It took place in some residential flats in Birmingham.
Our group visited a daycare centre at a church for old people, some of whom suffered from dementia. We (politely) asked them questions, they told us stories, we wrote down what they said.
They day after we spent the day in a rather dingy old building (sometimes used by actors from the REP theatre to rehearse, and currently being used because the REP theatre is being refurbished, from what I understand) with a director from the REP who played a couple of drama games with us and then directed us on how to turn what we had written down of the old peoples words into a monologue, which we did in four small groups, one person being nominated to perform in each. I was nominated for my group.
(The way people were put into groups was to have them list the top three available 'subjects' they would mostly be interested in. The were four groups, Sport, Enterprise, Media and Performance. Most people only ended up with their second or third choice. Since our group was Performance, or 'Team Delicious' as we'd dubbed ourselves, oh god, it was seen fit that we should perform on the presentation 'festival' on Thursday of week two. Likewise, Media would be doing a film, Sport something sport related, etc.)
We then performed our monologues to the old people at the daycare centre. They weren't amused. In fact, many of them didn't have a clue what was going on, the poor souls. Naturally, me being a bassy voiced teenager, not a word of mine was heard. Except the ones about America, which sent one person into a monologue of his own about how he had been to America, and how everything there was bigger. This prompted several more life stories to be told, which were actually vaguely pleasant and quite fascinating to hear.
On the Thursday the Director Person (whose name I forget, he was a fantastic bloke, though) took our four individual monologues and put them into a piece of drama, a sort of narration rather than a narrative, about memories and how stories live on even as the people who tell them don't. It could have been a steaming pile of pretentious, sentimental crap, but it didn't. It worked really well, got good responses at the 'festival', and all to the credit of Mr Director Person Man, who put it all together within a space of a few hours in time for the 'festival' in the evening. Oh, and to the wonderful people who performed in it as well, of course.
The evenings were spent at this residential areas bar, where we could just generally mingle with all the other people. The bar itself was only open to soft drinks, neither shaken nor stirred, they came in cans. A lot of our evening time was used up by a challenge or game one of the mentors would set up for each evening. Often, they sucked, but the Tribal Wars was fun. We all used girls make up as war paint and everything.
The personal challenge challenged us all mentally, it put us completely out of our comfort zones so we could achieve something we never even thought we would be doing, never mind could be doing. Another way in which we were challenged was to share flats with three other people and a mentor, where we had to share flat-keeping duties amongst ourselves such as cooking, cleaning, making lunch, etc. (Tip from my flatmate: When making something with rice, such as a curry, add a spoonful of butter to the rice as it boils. It makes the rice come out all, well, buttery and creamy. Just do it. Do it now.) And all of this was more preparation still for the third week, the real challenge. ohgodohgod.
The real challenge was staggered; the first half of the challenge would take place over three days from the following Monday to Wednesday. Rather than staying somewhere else, we were allowed home between challenge-doing, which was considerate. We would convene at Lordswood Girls school from ten 'till five, where we had to come up with our own pitch for an event that we could hold in September relating to what we'd already done on week two. Our pitch would then be presented in front of three 'dragons', ala Dragon's Den, who were three doing-well business men from Birmingham. Whether the pitch was any good or not, they would then grant us one hundred pounds to do it with. Because our team planned so well and because we're so hardcore, we only asked for seventy five pounds, 'cos it's all we needed. Yeah baby.
Of course the whole thing with the 'dragons' was pointless as we were all going to get our money anyway otherwise there would be no more challenge and the whole thing would have come to nothing. Except for boosted confidence, improved leadership skills and better skillz in general. But the whole point of week three is so we can apply our skillz wot we learn'd, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to 'graduate' and we'd all... um... combust. Or something.
Mind you, without the whole 'dragons' thing the whole planning thing would have been so boring and tedious that we'd all have much rather chosen combustion.
So the second part of the real challenge, referred to as the ongoing real challenge, takes place over four Saturdays, voted for because we don't like Sundays, in September. The last Saturday in September is our graduation, which, according to the website, involves us all being handed certificates and having our hands shaken by Boris Johnson, which will be ni - well - interesting.
You don't really want to know our plan, by the way. It's a slightly lame excuse for a community event that will be held at another old peoples daycare centre where both old and young people and people of all ages in between will be invited to partake in such activities as karaoke, a raffle, buying home made cakes, EXTREME STORYTELLING, and stuff. I'll bet you stopped reading at 'karaoke', but started reading again at 'EXTREME STORYTELLING'. Anyhow, it'll be like a primary school summer fair with grandparents.
Its goal would be to bring different generations of the community together. But we can't even do that now, because the care home its actually being held at is too small and doesn't have the facilities needed to accommodate anyone other than the people it already accommodates. So it'll just be an event for the old people there. However, I would much rather not combust, and will work with the frankly amazing people I've met of The Challenge to see it done, with all the enthusiasm I can muster (strikes a heroic pose).
Currently, I'm waiting to embark on the fifth day of the ongoing actual real real reel challenge. We've visited the old peoples home already and its a very pleasant place, most of the people living there are very pleasant as well. We'll be going back there this coming Saturday to hand out personal invitations for the event, even though they're the only ones coming and they're there anyway.
I did go on a camping trip for a week in Cumbria who works at a cafe there. A little place called Keswick is where we stayed. It's town centre was built entirely for tourists, it being filled with outdoors and camping shops, restaurants, pubs and tiny little museums which take no longer than half an hour to look through. We went up there, me my brothers and my dad, to see my cousin who worked in a small pleasant cafe that overlooked the lake, surrounded by rather pretty hills and mountains. My cousin herself was staying in a pretty little shack that was being invaded by Japanese knot weeds. We enjoyed her company and we enjoyed walking along side the lake and up to the top of a hill, and we generally enjoyed most things for the week until rain happened on the last day and soaked everything to death.
Realising that this blog is now roughly the length of a short story, I was going to save that last paragraph for another blog. But it was only one bloody paragraph, I couldn't leave the poor sod on its own.
So now the summer holidays are over, my brothers are back to school, my dad's back to work, and I'm off on my first year at college. Ooh! Relative excitement!
-
"If we could look at all our obstacles in life as a series of challenges..." - Alex Day
Well sort of busy.
Not busy working on any personal projects I may have started. I probably would have been, but then this thing simply called The Challenge pops up.
For the first two weeks of the holiday, I get into a panic, because I know I've applied, but haven't been sent any information regarding when I'm actually meant to meet up to be coached off to Wales.
Eventually, I get the information and having met up with my group and team mentors, we're all coached off to Wales.
The Challenge consists of three weeks, taking place from July to September (the last week is staggered throughout three days in August and four weekends, either Saturdays or Sundays in September). The first week is the personal challenge (read in dramatic announcers voice, like that bloke off The X Factor and E4) in which we were all booted off to a residential place in Wales to embark on an adventure course-type-thing.
This consisted in us undertaking a number of physical challenges which, from the eyes of a mostly indoorsy type teenager, or in fact any teenager, could only be considered as gruelling. For example, the very first thing we did when we arrived, apart from making our beds, was to jog up to the beech and run, fully clothed into the freezing ocean. This is fondly referred to as a 'jog & dip'. I have to admit though, I did rather enjoy it. I know! I make up words as well!
I did rather enjoy doing the rest of the challenges set as well. I enjoyed canoeing with a couple of people I'd never met before, though less so hitting a moored boat and capsizing due to a steering mishap. I enjoyed the two day exhibition up the side of Kadir Igris (second highest mountain in Wales I'll have you know, excuse me, my monocle's slipping, there we are) and camping next to a lake and enjoying simply the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen, watching as its golden-orange rays wash out over the landscape just below us. It made the fact I had to climb the mountain practically wearing a tent all the more worthwhile. I also enjoyed rock climbing, on a proper rick face, none of that pansy 'climbing wall' stuff, until I realised having got about half way up that I wasn't getting any further because I couldn't get my foot in the right position to provide me with any purchase to push myself upwards, which was quite disheartening and odd, because everyone else managed it.
The whole point if the week though, was to build confidence in yourself and meet all these new people who you were sharing experiences with to build social skills, and leadership skills, and to prepare you for the second week of The Challenge (Dun dun).
Oh, and the food at that place was lacklustre at best.
The second week was the team challenge. This consisted of the four different teams in the group going somewhere, meeting people, and making something inspired by the place they went and the people they met. It took place in some residential flats in Birmingham.
Our group visited a daycare centre at a church for old people, some of whom suffered from dementia. We (politely) asked them questions, they told us stories, we wrote down what they said.
They day after we spent the day in a rather dingy old building (sometimes used by actors from the REP theatre to rehearse, and currently being used because the REP theatre is being refurbished, from what I understand) with a director from the REP who played a couple of drama games with us and then directed us on how to turn what we had written down of the old peoples words into a monologue, which we did in four small groups, one person being nominated to perform in each. I was nominated for my group.
(The way people were put into groups was to have them list the top three available 'subjects' they would mostly be interested in. The were four groups, Sport, Enterprise, Media and Performance. Most people only ended up with their second or third choice. Since our group was Performance, or 'Team Delicious' as we'd dubbed ourselves, oh god, it was seen fit that we should perform on the presentation 'festival' on Thursday of week two. Likewise, Media would be doing a film, Sport something sport related, etc.)
We then performed our monologues to the old people at the daycare centre. They weren't amused. In fact, many of them didn't have a clue what was going on, the poor souls. Naturally, me being a bassy voiced teenager, not a word of mine was heard. Except the ones about America, which sent one person into a monologue of his own about how he had been to America, and how everything there was bigger. This prompted several more life stories to be told, which were actually vaguely pleasant and quite fascinating to hear.
On the Thursday the Director Person (whose name I forget, he was a fantastic bloke, though) took our four individual monologues and put them into a piece of drama, a sort of narration rather than a narrative, about memories and how stories live on even as the people who tell them don't. It could have been a steaming pile of pretentious, sentimental crap, but it didn't. It worked really well, got good responses at the 'festival', and all to the credit of Mr Director Person Man, who put it all together within a space of a few hours in time for the 'festival' in the evening. Oh, and to the wonderful people who performed in it as well, of course.
The evenings were spent at this residential areas bar, where we could just generally mingle with all the other people. The bar itself was only open to soft drinks, neither shaken nor stirred, they came in cans. A lot of our evening time was used up by a challenge or game one of the mentors would set up for each evening. Often, they sucked, but the Tribal Wars was fun. We all used girls make up as war paint and everything.
The personal challenge challenged us all mentally, it put us completely out of our comfort zones so we could achieve something we never even thought we would be doing, never mind could be doing. Another way in which we were challenged was to share flats with three other people and a mentor, where we had to share flat-keeping duties amongst ourselves such as cooking, cleaning, making lunch, etc. (Tip from my flatmate: When making something with rice, such as a curry, add a spoonful of butter to the rice as it boils. It makes the rice come out all, well, buttery and creamy. Just do it. Do it now.) And all of this was more preparation still for the third week, the real challenge. ohgodohgod.
The real challenge was staggered; the first half of the challenge would take place over three days from the following Monday to Wednesday. Rather than staying somewhere else, we were allowed home between challenge-doing, which was considerate. We would convene at Lordswood Girls school from ten 'till five, where we had to come up with our own pitch for an event that we could hold in September relating to what we'd already done on week two. Our pitch would then be presented in front of three 'dragons', ala Dragon's Den, who were three doing-well business men from Birmingham. Whether the pitch was any good or not, they would then grant us one hundred pounds to do it with. Because our team planned so well and because we're so hardcore, we only asked for seventy five pounds, 'cos it's all we needed. Yeah baby.
Of course the whole thing with the 'dragons' was pointless as we were all going to get our money anyway otherwise there would be no more challenge and the whole thing would have come to nothing. Except for boosted confidence, improved leadership skills and better skillz in general. But the whole point of week three is so we can apply our skillz wot we learn'd, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to 'graduate' and we'd all... um... combust. Or something.
Mind you, without the whole 'dragons' thing the whole planning thing would have been so boring and tedious that we'd all have much rather chosen combustion.
So the second part of the real challenge, referred to as the ongoing real challenge, takes place over four Saturdays, voted for because we don't like Sundays, in September. The last Saturday in September is our graduation, which, according to the website, involves us all being handed certificates and having our hands shaken by Boris Johnson, which will be ni - well - interesting.
You don't really want to know our plan, by the way. It's a slightly lame excuse for a community event that will be held at another old peoples daycare centre where both old and young people and people of all ages in between will be invited to partake in such activities as karaoke, a raffle, buying home made cakes, EXTREME STORYTELLING, and stuff. I'll bet you stopped reading at 'karaoke', but started reading again at 'EXTREME STORYTELLING'. Anyhow, it'll be like a primary school summer fair with grandparents.
Its goal would be to bring different generations of the community together. But we can't even do that now, because the care home its actually being held at is too small and doesn't have the facilities needed to accommodate anyone other than the people it already accommodates. So it'll just be an event for the old people there. However, I would much rather not combust, and will work with the frankly amazing people I've met of The Challenge to see it done, with all the enthusiasm I can muster (strikes a heroic pose).
Currently, I'm waiting to embark on the fifth day of the ongoing actual real real reel challenge. We've visited the old peoples home already and its a very pleasant place, most of the people living there are very pleasant as well. We'll be going back there this coming Saturday to hand out personal invitations for the event, even though they're the only ones coming and they're there anyway.
I did go on a camping trip for a week in Cumbria who works at a cafe there. A little place called Keswick is where we stayed. It's town centre was built entirely for tourists, it being filled with outdoors and camping shops, restaurants, pubs and tiny little museums which take no longer than half an hour to look through. We went up there, me my brothers and my dad, to see my cousin who worked in a small pleasant cafe that overlooked the lake, surrounded by rather pretty hills and mountains. My cousin herself was staying in a pretty little shack that was being invaded by Japanese knot weeds. We enjoyed her company and we enjoyed walking along side the lake and up to the top of a hill, and we generally enjoyed most things for the week until rain happened on the last day and soaked everything to death.
Realising that this blog is now roughly the length of a short story, I was going to save that last paragraph for another blog. But it was only one bloody paragraph, I couldn't leave the poor sod on its own.
So now the summer holidays are over, my brothers are back to school, my dad's back to work, and I'm off on my first year at college. Ooh! Relative excitement!
-
"If we could look at all our obstacles in life as a series of challenges..." - Alex Day
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