Bleargh

Shame on me for quarterly posts, but I will try to stop the backslide.

It's been frantic. The second project was frantic in an "I'm a retard with Excel" kind of way but the third one has just been plain frantic in a "Yes, please waste an hour of my life telling me what I already know/you're clearly just as confused as I am" kind of way.

After working on a couple of kickass projects, this one feels like a really bad hangover that just won't go away. The workload has been poorly estimated all around in terms of timing and basic execution, and actuaries are anal, and it's been extended three whole days. I almost cried when I knew.

Over the past month, I've realised that a single espresso doesn't do it anymore, but a double shot at 4pm will crush me the next day.

On the bright side, I know what not to do when I'm finally let loose with a first year of my own and what industry I will never touch with a ten-foot pole. Even brighter still, we're leaving for Tignes in 12 days. I've had three months to practice saying it so I don't completely embarrass myself.

I'm having Oreos for dinner, courtesy of Tom and Nat.

Also, I love the random fact generator - I could sit and refresh it all day, but my html-genius of a sister couldn't get it to fit in my sidebar, which would've been much cooler. Ahem. Cheryl, you know what you have to do. This morning her factorizer read "The first draft of the Lord of the Rings featured Cheryl instead of Frodo Baggins. It was five pages long. Cheryl round-housed Sauron's ass half way through the first chapter." Totally made my day. I really need rescuing.

Bad juju

Weng has bad bus juju: The bus will speed away just as we're coming up to the bus stop no matter how fast we run.

Cheryl has even worse bus juju: The bus never comes.

I have bad baking juju: My oatmeal cookies come out of the oven fused into a single sheet of biscuit, and my fairy cakes look like this.

Like a peach

I've finally gone paintballing and I've got a story. I hope to finally go clubbing at some point too, and I'm sure that'll be another entertaining story, but for another time.

Paintballing is basically a good excuse to shoot things at your friends. It involves little yellow balls of paint that squish deceptively easily underfoot, but when fired out of a pneumatic gun, cause so much pain that when I was dealt my first stinging shot on the shoulder blade, I actually froze midstride, which earned me two more bruises. Paint ball guns are phenomenally inaccurate, that's the only way you actually hit someone - sheer luck - and you can be pulling away on the trigger as someone charges you from 20ft away and watch in vain as the little balls veer to the left and right.

I've got a couple of visible bruises I can wear fairly proudly, and I'm sure I would've had at least two or more had I not been shot in the head twice by vagrant paint pellets. I'm sporting a spectacular bump, but my hair's in the way, so it's not as dramatic. Here's a summary of my bruising:

1. Left quad x 1
2. Inner thigh x 2
3. Left arm x 1
4. Right shoulder blade x 1
5. Skull x 2

It's probably going to hurt more tomorrow when the adrenaline and post-paintball half pint wears off.