Engagements

 Apologies for not posting for a while - I've been held up with the following things:

Surviving The Week of Death

Cambridge WCS is getting T-shirts

While my coach was on holiday he thought it would be funny to try and break us emotionally, physically and mentally with training camp volume + still having to do jobs n that. "The day my legs broke" was the Wednesday of this week, and it was concluded by one last final day of 120' running (the only crosstraining I could still do that would get my heartrate up...) + 60' free rate erg + weights. Good times :-) It is fair to say that during this time I became emotionally dependent on Pendulum's "Immersion". If that didn't exist I would probably be sitting in the corner of a boathouse right now just staring at an ergo and rocking.

Moving House
There is enough room to swing a cat, but not for a drying rack (or my bikes!!!). It will be interesting to see just how much my new housemates hate me when they find a couple of bikes in their kitchen (along with the huge quantities of oats all over the work surfaces and milk in the fridge). That and getting up at 6 every day? Oh yes, THEY ARE GOING TO LOVE ME.

The person who designed the house was either (a) on drugs when he did it or (b) a complete bastard intent on depriving me of coffee, as this is the trek I have to do to get to the kitchen:

Sorry about the colour - I suck using the flash this evening for some reason

 I also now live sandwiched in between two bakeries (gedditt?!?!?), which means I get tortured by the smell of chelsea buns from 6 in the morning to 6 at night. I'm hoping I get used to it....

Shaving my legs
I was becoming an embarrassment to my gender and I hate doing this so much it is worth a mention. (By the way, if you would like to experience great pain, apply liberal amounts of "Veet" to both open blisters on your hands and slider bites on the back of your legs.) I would like to take a moment to apologise to the other occupants of my house whose first experience of me as a housemate is me screaming curses at the top of my voice.

I really don't get why we womenkind have decided that we must all do this. I mean, no one cares about hairy arms do they? But the slightest bit of leg stubble and it's like you just drop-kicked a kitten over a fence or something. SOCIAL OSTRACISATION. It's the same result. It really pisses me off because I hatehatehate having to remember to do it regularly and buy razors and not cut myself doing it and it's SO POINTLESS.

I would just like to point out I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS AND NEVER INTEND TO. In fact, I lack the coordination to drop-kick anything - any attempt to would almost certainly end up with me kicking myself in the face and/or falling over. Kittens are safe from me.

So they are the reasons I have not written anything for a little bit. Excuses over - on with the post!

Now sorry if you were expecting something about rowing, but this has absolutely nothing to do with boats or rivers or ergos or weights or anything like that at all. No, instead, it is due to seeing this in the paper t'other day:

Now one of my friends from first year has just got engaged, so marriage etc. was on the brain. This advert just made me so incredibly SAD. Now I knew these rings were expensive, but looking them up, some of them are ~£9000.

Nine. Thousand. Pounds.

For what is a ring of shiny metal with some carbon crystal in it. For something that I would probably leave on a train or accidentally flush down the toilet OR DROP IN THE RIVER (yes, glasses, I haven't forgotten about you jumping off my face like that...) I think that's close to the amount of money I've earned in my entire life. That's a year's wages for a college bedder. You could put a deposit on house, nearly pay off all your tuition fees or buy a brand new Empacher, blades and a Belarussian lycra and pretend to be Ekaterina Karsten for that sort of money.

OK, I lied about including nothing about rowing. As well as operating my camera, I also suck at not mentioning rowing.

It's not just the fact that these things are so eye-wateringly expensive, it's also the fact there's a goddam iphone app for chosing one. I mean, if you were paying nine grand for something, you'd have thought you could have at least been arsed to go to the bloody shop to look at the damn thing. And when does "being in love" = "spending thousands on meaningless jewelery"? Fuck you Tiffany's. Don't try to tell me what love is.

And and AND apparently the average cost of a wedding is now £20000. "Wedding! I know! We'll throw money at it! That'll make it special! ^-^ ^-^"

*Hyperventilates* I should probably get off this subject before I do myself lasting damage.

I have illustrated my feelings below, with two hypothetical men who want to marry me (I mean, there's 6 billion people in the world, so statisically there has to be someone out there. Even if I never meet them *deepdeepdarkfeardon'tgothereDON'TGOTHERE*, they must exist.)

Scenario 1

The fact that the ring was expensive would have to explained to me as I know sweet F.A. about jewelery.

 I do not see this working out well. The rest of the meal would be quite awkward for starters.

Scenario 2

We would then spend the rest of our lives together building models of siege engines. (The best I've managed so far is a 1.5 foot meccano trebuchet that fired damsons from my garden and a ballista I made after school with my Latin teacher that fired pencils. I was not a normal 15 year old girl.) And we'd blatently live in a thatched cottage with an "inventing shed" at the bottom of the garden, a model train that went round the house carrying things and a contraption that made coffee + porridge when you pulled a lever.

That, my friends, would be ACE.