More metal
On Monday 5th of April it was my 19th birthday, and on the Tuesday I met up with Daniel in order to make a joint effort at getting metal put in our faces. We went to Absolution, of course, and I specifically requested Timm, being happy with his previous work on my tragus and lobe. Daniel went first to get his nose septum pierced, and then hallucinated about birds because he doesn't like anyone touching his face. He survived, however, and held my hand as Timm stuck two needles through my lower lip and gave me a snakebite. It hurt a lot, and I was very nervous so the entire experience was adrenalin-filled, which I greatly enjoyed.
It has been almost two weeks since that enjoyable day (I ate nachos from Java straight after getting the piercing and it was an interesting experience) and my lip is almost back to its normal size. Things seem to be going well; very little pain, not much trouble with being hit in the face, no problems with eating. I am happy with the decision I made.
To continue…
This year, getting to Eastercamp was so much easier than in previous years. We simply turned up at Lincoln Highschool, got yelled at by Marie for a bit as she tried to sort us all out, hopped on the buses and then got registered and banded (green for leaders, orange for kids, clear for volunteers, red for staff) on the way to Spencer Park. On arriving there, we just had to collect our stuff and go straight to our campsite. So much easier than the several hour long line we had to wait in last year!
I don't believe the Thursday night was too eventful; I can't really remember anything huge from then. It went well, though, and I started straight into learning everyone's name (at LBY) and tried to find the campsites of other people I knew. Pretty much everyone was in bed by 12:30am camp time (11:30pm real time) and then Friday started.
We had a touch competition on the Friday, which Lincoln participated in but did not even get through to the semi-finals. The rules were 'two girls, only one leader' and at one point we had only one female youth, so I had to play wearing my hoodie so no one could see I was a leader. All good fun. The weather was wonderful and most people were wandering around wearing t-shirts and shorts -- including me, which was surprising. LBY had so much space this year that we had the room to put a volleyball net up and we spent a lot of time playing volleyball; sometimes Every Nation, who were situated just across the road, came over to play with us. At the Big Top Meeting, I looked after Laura and Justin Duckworth spoke about some stuff; all I can remember is a story about an annoying young boy he was a leader for when he was seventeen whose birthday he went to and that he was the only guest at. After that, Lucy and I went to the Groove Room and danced a bit. I volunteered to stay up later on Friday night to make sure everyone went to their tents and went to sleep, which was a very easy job except that I had to ask some guys from two other churches to stop talking because they were disturbing our girls.
On the Friday night I spent most of the Big Top Meeting with Laura because she had seen an ex-boyfriend and was very worked up about it. Danielle Strickland, the speaker, made an analogy using a dream she had about being bitten by a big, fat, venomous spider and then lying down and becoming paralysed while tiny little spiders came to devour her body while she could do nothing about it; she used that story to illustrate how sin makes us powerless to overcome the tiny little spiders eating us alive. At the end of the talk she asked those who wanted to wake up and squash those spiders to stand. Laura stood, so afterwards I prayed with her and then we chatted and read the Bible and I asked her to make some commitments about a problem she had and we will come back to it in a few days.
On Saturday it was nice and sunny again and we played in the soccer competition -- again, not making it through to the semi-finals. We did have fun, though.
Easter Camp 2010
Well, I wasn't really excited about EC this year, because I couldn't see what I was going to get out of it, and I knew it was going to be hard work being one of only five female leaders (not counting Marie or camp parents) amongst thirty two female youth. There were nine male leaders (not counting camp parents or Jonny) and thirty three male youth. My feelings were less selfish than they sound here; I still looked forward to it, but I wasn't excited like the youth were.
It turns out that their excitement was well deserved. EC10 was the best Eastercamp, and the best Easter, and the best birthday I've ever had, all rolled into one intense weekend. Intense may be used a lot in this blog post, because it is one of the best words I can think of to describe the entire thing -- and part of the reason I'm finding it so hard to write this now that it's over and I'm exhausted!
I may have to finish this later, or in another post. I realise it's not even started, but my eyes are starting to hurt!
PHP, MySQL, Flash…o.o
One of the problems with my Web Design course is that because it's only a year long, everything is completely jam-packed in and the learning curve is really steep. This is mostly okay for me, because I pick stuff up quickly and have experience with HTML/CSS and programming languages, but that has not stopped learning PHP being difficult. Especially since I procrastinated with my Flash assignment and spent my time working on that instead of learning PHP in class, and have since then had to figure out our work by myself.
Oh well, it's what I get for putting off my assignment!
In town with the statues
Last night was Earth Hour 2010, and to participate in that I went to town with Emily, Becky and Phil (Emily's boyfriend) at about seven to grab some food and then go watch a concert in the Square...only there was no concert. I still don't know if that was Emily's fault or the Council's fault. We walked to Victoria Square and made fun of Emily for being afraid of ducks, and then went back to the Square; Phil and I had a long discussion about being raped by the statues, who all come to life during Earth Hour if the lights in town turn off. They didn't turn off.
Jamie turned up and we chugged back to her place to hang out at her flat (as it was cold outside). On the way to her flat, we passed by I-100, who were outside a dark room chatting. They saw Jamie's fox-ear hat and called down to us. We made small-talk and then Jamie asked for an invitation to hang out, which was granted. We spent the end of Earth Hour in a small, candle-lit flat with Canterbury University students who were drinking, listening to music and playing guitar. I met a girl from Colorado who was going to be studying for eight years to do physiotherapy.
We went back to Jamie's flat and after a while of them drinking champagne and fluffing about, we left. Emily found a shopping trolley and so Phil pushed me to my car in the trolley. We then went to town and went to various bars, meeting up with Mike fairly soon. In KFC, we met Adam who is Mike's sober and not druggified friend and who is pretty awesome and weird. Mike thinks that he, out of all his friends, would suit me best.
All in all, it was a good night, with some exceptions. Jamie lost her phone in The Rockpool, which greatly upset her. Nobody but me would make any decisions on what to do, so I made decisions and then the others whined about them; in retrospect although they were at fault for doing so, I could've worked much harder to go to places that suited everyone, or as close as I could get. We lost Mike and Phil on the way to The Rockpool for the second time, and then Jamie got extremely upset because a very drunk and persistent guy hit on her while I was finding Mike. I ended up saying that I refused to take anyone to/from town, but I know that I will do so - we will perhaps have to discuss our town times more so that we have plans for future.
A few random things: AJ (Phil's friend who played pool with us in Rockpool) said my hair was hot; some guy walking down the street said my hair was hot; quite a few women said my hair was cool; the Concrete Club bouncer recognised me yet again, and the music in there was really good; I went to Yakamoti or whatever the club in Sol Square is where you dance on the huge window-sill; the others did not drink much at all, so they were not difficult to manage and they said they had fun; I talked to completely random people!; I met Phil, and was very comfortable with him; still liking Mike a lot, I think he's a lot of fun and we're very compatible as friends; I was much, much more comfortable with being more weird than I have been for years, and it was quite freeing; I was not immodest, although I do feel that my night could have better served Jesus than it did, especially in my conduct towards my friends; I saw Liz (my hairdresser) in Rockpool!; I was positive almost the entire night, and that night was 10 hours long.
All in all, it was a good night and I don't feel too nervous about how my friends think of me. I do wonder why I even worry about what they think of me; do I think they are such bad friends they would give me up if I acted badly? Is this a valid concern?
Late update
After my last blog post, I wrote only two handwritten pages of my novel in the entire Monday to Friday week. It was probably around five hundred words, so although I didn't fall behind, I did fall behind the schedule I was wanting to keep to in order to allow me a little breathing time before exams and then my holiday.
After realising on Saturday morning that I was in serious trouble, I managed to get around 1300 words. My problem was that I'd run into a huge gap in my plot - the old stuff just wasn't going to cut it based on what I now knew about the characters. Fortunately, I had the ability to just fluff my way through a couple of ideas I'd had, and by Monday night I hit 50k.
Hoorah!
My story is not finished, but it's highly that my blog entries are xD
Second place!
I'm sure my blog is really boring; just updates on my word count! It's 11pm here and I really can't make myself think of anything more exciting than the fact that I have hit 40k - 40,627 words to be precise, and am now in second place for word count in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In the past two days (just Saturday and Sunday) I have written 12,618 words. I've also gone to the A & P show cleanup from 8am till 10.30am, been to a friend's 18th party that ended up last from 7pm till 2am because of the after-effects of looking after the best friend long after I actually left the party, went to church this morning from 10am till 12pm, going shopping with another friend due to needing time to talk to me from 2pm till 4.30pm and then church again from 6pm till 8.30pm. Somewhere in that mess, I wrote 12k.
I love being busy!
Also, this is completely a blog for me to blow my own trumpet. I am soaring on the wings of delighted shock that I am managing this much, and I want to preserve this effort!
New record
I was very excited about getting 1800 words in one hour; during Business Applications yesterday I went to x205, sat myself down and had two consecutive word wars with Rosalieart with her doing homework and I writing on Write or Die. I managed 1645 words in half an hour and ended up getting 2974 words in an hour. I still need over 2k words to get back into fifth place for Christchurch, but I'm at 28009 right now which is pretty good.
None for Thursday
It's 12:09am as I write this, and if I get up to write this morning it makes less than five hours sleep for an eight to six day of classes. I think I'll sleep in that extra hour and get plenty of writing done tomorrow on Show Day.
I did get some writing done this evening, unlike this morning and yesterday, and I am quite happy that I can actually daydream about my world! The detail is excruciatingly bare, but I'll get there. That's the great thing about being an author - I get to add whatever details I want, whenever I want.
On another note, it seems that my NaNo is not getting in the way of my schoolwork at all. On the contrary I think it's actually helping me do homework, because I'm motivated a lot of the time and I'm aware that NaNo is taking a lot of time so I'm getting onto my work a lot faster than I normally would. These next few weeks are going to be extremely tense as I struggle to balance assignments, exams and study for more exams with the most difficult week of NaNo and then actually plotting rather than just puttering about, so we'll see how I do 
Getting faster
So, 10k in five days is pretty good, right? I thought so too. Until I reached 20k three days later. That's over 6600 thousand words a day! I'm on a friggin' roll and I'm loving it. I don't care that some people have already reached 50k+. This is awesome!
Time to get off so my back doesn't hurt too much.