not.in.paris

The amount of time I spend online depresses me.

It seems like my life alternates between ‘internet’ and ‘not internet’. Get up, go online. Do something else. Back online. Do something else. Back on line. Do something else. Back online…

I started using a firefox addon called MeeTimer a while ago, which monitors the time you spend online. It also has a function to deter you, by blocking tabs, blocking links…in fact, it works pretty well. According to MeeTimer, though, it’s only saved me 27 minutes so far.

MeeTimer has logged 75  hours of my internet activity. On average, I spend 1h 45min online every day. That’s 25min on ungrouped sites (i.e. sites I don’t normally visited and so haven’t allocated a specific group), 7min on communication (which comprises of gmail, which I use for email, and meebo, which I use for instant messaging), 20min on longhaircommunity, which is fast becoming an addiction of mine, 47min on livewire (eek!), which is clearly already an addiction of mine, 5min on miscellaneous sites (wordpress, postsecret, the library, bookmooch) and 4min on music sites (deezer and chilirec).

I keep trying to cut down, but seriously, I don’t know how much is normal (or reasonable) to spend online. Almost two hours a day is too much, but how much should I be aiming for? I know that most of the time clocked up is from livewire, so perhaps I should cut down on that. Thing is, though, that because I’m a moderator, I really should sign in every day, and it normally takes me about 20min just to clear my mail and topics and quotes and the mod forum and the modmenu. Perhaps I should try and cut down on that, or maybe do only that for a few days and not make any extra posts or whatever to try and bring the amount of time down. Whatever I decide to do, it’s pretty clear to me that something needs to change.

2nd prosecution lawyer very clear and feisty. She will make a good lawyer.

^^^ That’s me!

I’m taking part in the National Magistrates Mock Trial Competition, in which we have to pretend to be a magistrates’ court and act out a trial. As I said, I’m 2nd prosecution lawyer. Our school qualified for the regional final, but someone quit and so I stepped in to take their place. That meant that everyone else had done the competition before, but I hadn’t.

The regional final was on Saturday, in Southampton. It went pretty well: fortunately, both teams we were against made pretty huge mistakes (obviously biasing their examination-in-chief by saying things like ‘how responsible of you’ and trying to re-examine, which isn’t allowed in the competition), so that made us look pretty good.

Anyway…we won!

That means we get to go to the national final (!) on the 21st of next month in Leeds. We get the Friday off school to travel up by train and then stay the night. Then we’ll do the competition on the Saturday and come back down after.

I can’t wait!

I’ve got the blues.

Everything seems so pointless right now. I’ve been to school every day this week and have yet to succeed in learning anything. I’ve stayed late every night and I haven’t really enjoyed any of the things I’ve been to. To which I’ve been.

We’ve had tests that count for jack shit and we don’t even get the results. When we don’t have tests, other people do, so we haven’t even had any lessons.

Insert your own profanity here because I can’t be bothered to make up the remainder of the post. Here’s a pretty picture instead:

Summer has come. It’s hot. I wake up early in the mornings because the sun is streaming through the window, which is now left open at night because it’s so hot. I’m wearing a skirt. I don’t bother taking my jumper to school.

SATs week last week. Boring as hell. I think I did well on them. The only papers where I feel I didn’t do so well are the science ones, and I still think I did okay. I don’t particularly care.

We have CATs this week. Had one this morning (missed IT and PE! hooray!) and I have the other half on Wednesday. There’s absolutely no point to them. Seriously, how can they possibly need any more tests to predict our grades? They already have 3 years’ of work, plus all the tests we’ve done in those years, and our year 7 CATs, and our SATs. If they haven’t got a decent idea how we’re going to do by now, then they must be effing stupid.

I went to photography today and messed around a bit with a photo of the piano I use in my lessons. I think it came out pretty well: I took the photo by putting the camera at the side of the keyboard on a timer and then putting my hands on the keys, then made it greyscale and fiddled with the sharpness and blurring. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Well, I had a mediocre weekend.

Friday, I went out to dinner with Spanish club. It was pretty cool. We went to La Tasca. There were 8 of us in total, including Miss, and she deserves to be included because it wasn’t like going out to dinner with a teacher at all. We chatted and ate Spanish food and put our hands through the candles on the tables. All good clean fun.

Saturday, I went to gym. Turned out that Gemma (one of the coaches) had seen me at La Tasca. Small world, eh? I did some more flicks. I did them the week before with only Jodie helping, but I’ve gone back to two coaches because I find it easier to have support on each side. Still, I’m getting there!

Sunday, we had my grandma over to celebrate her birthday. It isn’t her birthday ’till Saturday, but she’s going to France tomorrow to visit my uncle so we celebrated early.

Yesterday I did sod all.

Now it’s SATs week. We had all the maths papers today, which were all ridiculously easy, though I did find one mistake just as they told us to close our papers, which annoyed me. Ah well. It’s only one mark, and I’m certain I got most of the others.