The Frozen Hand

Hello. I am now back at university and things are going pretty well so far. This post contains various tales, most of which concern the things that have happened since my return to uni!

But before all that, I need to tell you about last week. My grandmother as well as her sister, her brother and her brother’s wife (you can work out how all those people relate to me should you wish) were in our area for the holiday. This meant I went to see her, along with my Dad. Due to distance and the fact I’m at university these days, I hadn’t actually seen my Grandmother for over two years. The last time she met me I was a completely different person!

My Grandmother asked all the expected questions such as “How is uni?” and “Do you have a girlfriend?”. Shortly after this she asked if I was gay and of course I told her no. She’s convinced someone in the family must be because it turned out my Grandfather was, though she doesn’t understand that homosexuality can’t possibly be genetic. The entire family decided I look exactly like my Great Uncle John when he was my age. Even my teeth were the same apparently, which is not something I had ever thought ran in the family! All teeth look pretty much the same don’t they?

It was actually pretty good seeing my Grandmother for the first time in so long, but being with the whole bunch of them could be quite embarrassing. Four Brummies (people from Birmingham) wandering through little villages being slightly racist must have been quite a thing to witness. It was also pretty funny how my Great Aunt kept getting the names for things wrong. She was looking out for the sandwich shop Subway which she called “Underground” (you can kind of see the logic) and was trying to get home using her “Napsav” (Satnav of course!).

So yeah, I’m back in my Dungeon in my university house. I was pretty anxious about coming back but apart from a few minutes on Monday I’ve had a pretty good time so far. My first job on arriving back was the rather unpleasant one of cleaning all the mould in my room. Being underground it’s pretty damp and this causes all sorts of problems. My second job was much more pleasant and that consisted of opening the post. Student Finance had decided to send me the same confirmation of my student loan four times for some reason known only to them. I also received a new card for giving blood. I’m now a level 2 donor as I’ve donated enough times to get a new coloured card. You get a new one for every five and my aim is to collect them all, though it will take most of my lifetime!

^{They are like Pokémon cards but slightly less cool!}

My third year at university is really hard work. I’ve got five pretty weeks of lectures followed by seven weeks teaching practice in school (no idea where yet) before Christmas. And then after Christmas it’s pretty much assignment after assignment! It’s going to be really hard work but I will certainly be ok with the academic stuff and I really hope that my teaching practice will be OK too!

Still, when you are studying primary teaching there are always fun moments to be had. In a lecture on Tuesday I was really excited when they played this video featuring Kermit the Frog:

It’s actually a pretty inspirational song. Another moment of fun came in today’s science session. We were given three balloons. One was a normal one (blown up), one was full of water and a third was full of ice. It was of course all about the different physical states. But the ice one was actually a rubber glove filled with ice so you could take the glove off and were left with a frozen hand. Put some food colouring on it and you are left with something pretty gruesome:

You literally never know what’s going to happen in one of our seminars. In our English one this afternoon for example we were all given a phonics game to explain and then it turned into speed dating. Half of the group stayed sat whilst the other half moved along the chairs and we explained our phonics games to each other. It was actually quite good because I hadn’t had much chance to talk to most people in my new group and that gave me the opportunity. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to decide which people we were attracted to though! (Disclaimer: That was a joke)

All in all life is going pretty well at the moment. My first week is over (no lectures on Fridays thank God) so it’s the weekend for me! I hope this can last for the whole year because I really don’t want to go back into the horrible depressed slump I was in around April/May kind of time. I’ve got loads of great blog posts along the way so make sure you come back soon to see what’s new. That’s all for today though, thank you for reading!