Under the Weather

I said I was going to write this about a fortnight ago, but I never got around to it. So I might as well fill you in on the illness that I had.
It all started on the second Wednesday of term.
I wasn’t feeling great when I got up, but I had hoppers’ voice in my mind saying: “It’s not that bad, you can still go to school”. What I had at that time was a minor headache and a nagging cough. My first lesson was computing, and as it went on I started feeling worse. The headache started throbbing, and I started getting the occasional dizzy spell. On Wednesday I also do some volunteering in the town library, so I had to go there as well, during the hour I was there, I stared getting hot and cold flushed and my energy simply left me; I felt dead. There was also the complication that today we were going to PC world to check prices for dales computer (which he never got, someone bought a laptop for him instead, and they didn’t wait for Win 7), when we got to PC world, I was given some Paracetamol by my Mum, who had driven us there. They helped to a degree; it dulled the headache, made the dizzy spells more infrequent, and generally reduced my suffering.
When we got home, I was shattered, and so slept for about 2 hours.
I was kept off school for obvious reasons, and we investigated the possibility of the illness being swine flu. The online questionnaire said I qualified for the Tamiflu drug, so I sent mum to go get it. They had the reverse effect. Thursday was the day my mum went out, so my little brother was left with instructions on what to do if I got worse, they weren’t needed as at about 9pm I started feeling worse and upon recognising the early warning signs (I had thrown up, showing that the Tamiflu had hit my system) I phoned mum to get her home. I had started feeling cold, so had wrapped my self up with everything I could get my hands on: A full set of clothes, jumper, fleece, dressing gown, and duvet. On getting home she found me in bed, wrapped up and shivering, and immediately got me out of all the things I’d wrapped my self in, then took my temperature: 38.5 Degrees C.
The next day, the Tamiflu took a trip to the sewers, via the toilet.
In order to find out what was actually wrong with me, I was taken to CueDoc, and was given 10 days worth of the amoxicillin anti-biotic, as the doctor suspected that I had a chest infection, he also said that he wouldn’t trust Tamiflu at all, and we did well to send it on the porcelain journey.
After taking the anti-biotic for a week, the only symptom I had left was some catarrh and a cough. This lead us to believe that the illness I actually had was bronchitis, and as it was past its infectious state, I could go back to school.
So to anyone who still thinks I had swine flu, get rid of those stupid delusions.

The Final Year

The last part of my holiday consisted of a camping holiday with dad (where my DS game case proved its worth after the car ran over it, while keeping the games inside relatively unscathed) and a trip to Staffordshire university, after which it was the annual ritual of getting all summer work done within the last week.

When school started, there was an unexpected surprise, Mrs McArdle had returned to trinity, and she was attached to my form. She was my form tutor from Y7 to Y10 but left to further her career elsewhere. I also found that I’d lost an hour off of all my lessons except systems, leaving me with 2 days where I have only one lesson, one of which is at the end of the day, meaning I have to stay in school all day doing nothing until last period.

The only bit of summer work I had was research for systems, I’d already done the practical bit of that before i went on the expedition but i still had to write it up, problem was that my printer gave up while printing it, so i was left in the lurch; my solution was to printing it during my free period in the morning, otherwise, Mr Birch would have another excuse to bitch at me. When i presented it to Mr Birch in lesson, I expected him to have his criticisms, like a lack of analysis or conclusions in my work, that’s fair enough, it’s in the mark scheme, but when he said it was “too text heavy” I couldn’t believe it; it was like stepping back into GCSE ICT. Where in the mark scheme does it say that the research can’t have too much text?

This year has to have a silver lining. Wait, it does, it’s the last year, and there’s the ball at the end of it.

The Great British summer

The first part of my summer was busy and wet to say the least; the reality was that i didn’t get to relax properly for a fortnight after we broke up, and during that time it didn’t just rain, it pissed down.

This didn’t help the first activity of the holiday, the Duke of Edinburgh expedition. 4 days of bad weather, tiring physical exertion and the torture of being around a combined force of David Gopsil and Ian Dodd. The first day we were forced to change our route due to high winds, on the second day we got the same treatment but with a side order of rain and we couldn’t avoid it this time as we had to go into it to get to that night’s camp. The third day was better but the wind wasn’t with us at all so sailing was out of the question, although we did have a good campfire that night. the final day was a slow relaxed paddle as we found ourselves being an hour ahead of time, but we weren’t complaining as we didn’t have to paddle like the clappers and we got off a bit earlier.

The second event of the holiday for me (and Marie from my D of E group) was a UCLAN summer school, which was supposed to give a taste of university life, but what it actually consisted of was a 3 days of activities and workshops that really didn’t have much to do with uni at all. It wasn’t that bad though, the activities and workshops were great, and me and Marie made some new friends while there, one of which came to Carlisle at a later point in the holidays.

well that's it for the first half of the holidays.

One big update

It’s been ages since I've written to this blog so the following entries are basically what has happened since my last entry just before the exams

A Life With Less Maths, That’s My Futurama

I’ve finally done it! As of today I no longer have any formal maths lessons, due to the fact I had my last maths A-Level exams today I’m able to get rid of maths from my timetable altogether, so now I have a negotiated absence set for every Tuesday morning, 3 hours free on Friday morning, and the ability to go home at lunch on Wednesday. I say “formal lessons” only because I might have to attend some of the next Y12’s lessons to brush up on the bits I’m useless at, but that’s only if my exam results aren’t up to par.

Recently, my mum got a Sky subscription, so I’ve been able to watch more of the TV that I wasn’t able to watch much of on Freeview, namely The Crystal maze reruns, Robot wars (which has sadly left bravo 2, hopefully not for long) and some others. The main program that I’m watching more of is Futurama (yes, I prefer it to The Simpsons, although I’ll still watch that), I’d liked what I’d seen of it on CH4 but never got into a routine of watching it, or was simply not awake to watch it, now I’m watching it on Sky1 at 6 pm every night; because of this I’ve become a bit of a fan, and I’ve spent the last 4 hours customizing my PC with a desktop wallpaper (which wasn’t of the best visual quality, so I spent about an hour fixing it) and system sounds (the searching for and editing of which took 3 hours). I still haven’t got around to making icons yet, although I have a few from themes I downloaded while looking for sounds that might do the job.