Whoo!

So, I returned from the Peak District on Tuesday after a pretty hard few days. It was cut short and we had to miss the 7 or so extra kilometres we would have walked on the last day due to a problem, but otherwise, we walked about 55km over 4 days. My feet survived – just – arriving home patched up with plasters. Fortunately the blisters were minimal, but my tongue still hasn’t recovered! o.O It must have been the dangerous culinary concoction we whipped up on the final night. A mixture of chocolate powder, butterscotch powder, powered milk, water, mixed nuts, chocolate nuts, jaffa cakes, strawberry laces, popping candy, Fudge bar, Double Decker bar and a cube of jelly! Okay, so it nearly made me sick, but it was always eating the meals at boiling temperature that was the worst thing. I blame Keiron for always gobbling down the food we shared so quickly, making me follow suit and consequently injuring myself. Tut. :P

I’ve been sorting out my stuff with GAP since I’ve been back as well. I’ve confirmed my place on the Japan programme, so all I’m waiting for now is my passport renewal before I can send the deposit cheque off. I had to book an £89 premium service this coming Friday to get it done in time, which means going to London. And heck, I thought, I may as well make a day of it, so I imagine Dave and I might be travelling up to Oriental City one last time and also flitting around London from store to store to seek out any hidden anime paradises. I hope we get to see Ho-chan again! (The little Chihuahua dog in Adanami Shobo). But the store is usually only open on Saturdays and Sundays, so we’ll have to see.

On Thursday I went down to Chatham to sort out paying my mum back for lending me the money for Japan. I had lunch with Heather briefly after calling into Halfords about 1.00pm, which conveniently coincided with her lunch break Then I went to see Miss Kushida at her new home (her mother is also staying with her at the moment) to get her to sign my Duke of Edinburgh’s Award book and talk about the Japan trip, my GAP year and the Children’s University volunteer work I’m doing tomorrow by helping her out teaching Japanese. On a random note, I bought some blueberry-flavoured, yoghurt-coated raisins from Holland and Barrett, which were interesting ^_^.

*****

Yesterday I finally held my birthday get-together (only about 3 months late, but who cares :P). We set up for the barbeque after I returned from work where they’d decided to upgrade all the till units, so now I have to re-learn them. I was put in the bakery yesterday anyway, so it made a nice change, but it’s real torture with all the fresh bread and cakes around you and not being allowed to eat a crumb ;_;. Simon, Lianne, Chris, Jenni, Wai-sun, Rob, Dave and Heather all came round at various points and we had dinner and talked for a while. Simon deicded he would delegate himself the task of being the garden ranger; armed with a trusty flyswatter, he hit pretty much everything that moved, and Chris, a lot of time :P. We had a great fruit salad and ice cream for dessert ^^. Afterwards (before Simon was due to leave early to go and pack, ready to leave for Greece), we roasted marshmallows on the barbeque and sculpted several creations out of the bizarre ‘fluff’ stuff Jenni brought with her. It’s kinda like melted marshmallow in a jar, so combined with the whole ones, that would be mallow mark 2 or something I guess ^^;. Wai-sun made a snow-mallow-man at one point, just before Simon and I decided to have a fencing duel with sticky marshmallow sticks. You can probably guess what happened, but I have to hope for no cleaning bill ^_^; hehe.

We went inside and played the classic ‘Skull and Crossbones’ board game after Dave and Chris were bored of having ‘boil in a bag cheese slice’ competitions on the hot grill :P. Maybe it’s wrong for me to like this game so much and I got way too into it towards the end, but I think it has all the elements of a great board game. Heather and I ended up being the only two dying on the island at the end of the game (and after such a great stare-out she gave with Captain Skull too ^^;), whereas Lianne got out in the last 5 seconds because I was feeling generous and swapped her the necessary keycards. I’ll shut up on this area now, as I imagine most people won’t have a clue what I’m on about, and I couldn’t find a link quickly on Google to a picture of the game. We watched a few episodes from Blackadder Series 2 and Fawlty Towers as the evening drew to a close, before finishing with Beetlejuice and heading to bed.

Heather, Dave and Lianne left early this morning so the rest of us went for a walk around the estuary at the end of ‘Halstow Creek’ (as it’s named on the map). Saw lots of blackberries ripening, which I might go and pick with my sister at some point perhaps, and everyone was amazed and astounded (note the sarcasm) by all the broken pottery on the ‘beach’. It was a nice end to the events anyway ^_^. We had lunch and tidied up back at the house, discovering that Dave had left his pants at the bottom of the sleeping bag, as he left earlier in his Maplins uniform.

I haven’t done much else for the rest of the day, other than waste time on the Internet and sorting out my e-mail inbox. I should go to bed, considering I have to go to school (argh! ~ again??) tomorrow. It always seems to draw me back in; even when I was on study leave I found it preferable to go to school to study as opposed to stay at home. Will I ever leave? o.O;;

Rough tadpole count: 4
Froglet count 0
Froglets released 2
Development: I released froglet number 2 today! We also put a ramp in the pond so they can climb out a little more easily. I hope the remaining 4 all develop and can be released, as I don’t think the first little froglet made it :(.
Other observations: I also added another strand of pondweed as frog and fish food supplies were running low.