Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

Darn, Flickr will only show my most recent 200 photos, and I have 400 photos to show you all! So go look at the ones that are up there, then I'll go upload the other 200 again so you can see them instead.

Lots of photos of Croatia are now on my Flickr page (see box on right) with descriptions below some of them -- should tell a bit of the story of Carolan's Trip to Croatia.

I've been holding off blogging about my trip because I have this sort of half-baked idea that I might do a blog specifically about my trip, with lots of photos and detail and stuff. But I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Just to point out, my photos of the Summer Ball are now on Flickr. Well, thumbnails are. Flickr won't give me enough space to upload them all full size.

Oh dear, I haven't posted for so long that I had to type in the full address of my blog, it didn't just pop up as a recently visited website.

Well, May hasn't been as relaxing as I thought it would be. In fact, it's been frightfully busy. I think it was mostly all those training sessions we run for committee members -- they take an awful lot of time you know. And everyone comes up with all sorts of questions just before the summer, and they always want you to deal with their problem straight-away-on-the-spot-right-now so they can get back to being examined/revising/going home/sitting in the sun.

But now it's June, and I'm feeling full of the joys of summer because tomorrow I'm going on holidays. To Croatia. For a week. The campsite's website tells me it is currently 25 degrees there. Oh, darn: 25 degrees with thunder and lightning. Anyway I'm sure a storm will be just the thing to clear the air in preparation for my holiday.

Just in case you miss me, here are some of the places I'll be:

The campsite, Paklenica National Park, the famous Sea Organ, and Plitvice Lakes National Park.

I love Sam: this morning we both received our latest LoveFilm films. This evening we excitedly opened our films and found? Enchanted! For both of us ...

What saps we are.

How annoying: I've just found out that JP Hall (the one proper performance space in the University, which has been closed all year for renovations) is now in the care of NIECI, not Central Reservations.

I'm not sure yet what impact this is going to have on the performing societies (worst case scenario is they can't book the hall anymore or will have to pay to use it, best case is they won't notice any difference); what really annoys me is that after three years of discussions with the University on various aspects of JP Hall (problems with bookings, storage space etc), nobody thought to either consult with or inform the Students' Union about this change.

It's really quite disheartening. I think we've done a lot of work to build a strong relationship with the University, but we still end up being ignored or (perhaps worse) forgotten about. I don't think we've been ignored, actually (did they really think we wouldn't notice and wouldn't get annoyed about this?), I think it just did not occur to the decision-makers that this might impact on us somehow. How upsetting!

I'm sorry I'm not being very good at writing. To make up for it, look at this lovely video Stephen showed me:



The guy at the start is my friend Jonah from CTYI.

I had my Civil Service assessment day on Monday. It was intense. As usual, I slept very badly the night before, waking up every twenty minutes worrying I'd overslept. Eventually I got up at 6am, put on my business-like blouse and skirt, tried to overcome the nerve-induced nausea and headed for Westminster.

On my walk from the tube station to Tufton St I met another person heading the same way (you could tell because he was using the map inside the booklet they sent us), so I had a nice chat with him. That calmed me down a bit because I'd have given him about two out of ten for social skills.

Unfortunately the rest of the people were much better. They'd mostly gone to Oxford, Cambridge or Durham, and the majority already had several years' work under their belts. Out of the five people in my group, there was only one that I didn't think would get through (although the sixth person simply hadn't turned up). They tested us pretty thoroughly over eight hours (some unfortunate souls who lived near London had ten hours), although the second thing that calmed me down was that the first exercise was to come up with as many ideas as possible for increasing voter turnout. Which is something I've thought about quite a lot in the past few months.

I was expecting to hear from Fast Stream today but actually I found out yesterday: I've been offered a place. So that's exciting, but also quite scary: now I have to wait to hear which department I'll be in, where I'll be located, when I'll be starting.

And knowing I have a job when I finish has made me quite impatient and annoyed with aspects of my current job, like nobody buying tickets for the Societies Awards despite it being the best one yet, and people not reading the schedules we presented to them at Council last night before voting. I think I need to go home and read a detective story in the sun, I'm in a bad mood.

Just a quick post to tell Mum that only Saturday Andy and I were admiring the fine quality of the towels in Bangor's new super-modern Debenhams. I'm sure we can fit some towel-shopping into our weekend somehow.

Today's lead story in North West Wales?

Country lane gratings are stolen costing literally TENS of pounds.

Odd, considering they didn't even mention this one.

BBC Bangor just don't have their finger on the pulse.