Sorry About the Wait

Well to be more exact the wait i could do little about, having had no access to the internet over the past few weeks, so i'm not sorry about the wait that much. However i am sorry for the fact that despite having so much free time, in which incidentally i found myself bored with little to do and able to write posts on my laptop, and having post ideas to write but inevitably i could not even bring myself to even write a title. Not a single word was written, giving a horrible words written to games of solitaire played (and i don't even really like solitaire, it annoys me that it's so much down to luck).

So really the title of this post should in fact be "Sorry for being too lazy and unmotivated to even try to write anything in the oodles of free time i've had" but that is way to long winded and self deprecating. Also i'd like to think that in between the pointless games of solitaire i actually did some useful things, well useful in comparison to said games of solitaire. 

Firstly i underwent a mini renaissance of literature, having read 8 times the amount of books in the past 2 weeks than i've read on my kindle since getting it, and also 8 times the amount of books that i've read in pretty much the past two years. Yes i read a whole 8 books, which sounds impressive until you realise that in the past 2 years i had only read 1 book cover to cover, though in my defense i've read a lot of Sherlock Holmes aswell, it's just that the book is quite large. And as my friend's have already asked those 8 books weren't Mr.Men, i couldn't find my Mr.Men books otherwise the count would have been much greater. In fact the kindle has inspired me to read some classics (and some hitchhiker's, but they're essentially classics), so now i've added the likes of Frankenstein, treasure island and Dracula to my repoirtoire.

And the cultural enlightenment didn't stop there, well it did to some extent but i'll get to that, for right outside my cabin was an art gallery and in St.Petersburg i went to the Hermitage where i saw some works by the likes of Da Vinci, Rafael, Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo and many more. However as mentioned before i'm not sure whether to count that as enlightenment, but all i did in the end was along the lines of: "oo that looks nice, i like the colours in it" or "why on earth is that painting worth that much? i wouldn't buy it". But i blame that more on my ineptitude of the artistic lexicon, whenever i look at art i tend to mumble something that makes perfect sense in my head, but little sense out of it and so i think maybe with a bit of training i might be able to translate my thoughts to artistic comments (otherwise known as utter made-up waffle).

So yeah that's pretty much what i've been doing for the past 2 weeks, that and eating dishes i've never heard off. Oh of course there was also all the actually visiting different cities, that was probably the most important part, and i'm thinking of writing a bit of a vvb style guidebook of the various places i've visited (and when i say vvb style i of course mean, pretty much useless and highly opinionated and so should not be used as any kind of guide). Then on top of that, having a week of sitting at home doing nothing is giving so much to write about (so much more than 2 weeks of visiting exciting cities and different cultures). Which means that in my head i've currently got a few posts brewing which should arrive on the internet at some point in the next few weeks, which is sort of my way of apology for the past weeks.

Let me take this time then to say hope you're having a good holiday and if you're not then stop moping around and make it a gudden'. That's what i've tried to do and it's working so far, with the price to pay of... well... price really, i'm having a great time, it's just the scraping around to find cash to pay for the food and transport of the holidays i paid for that is the problem. But as the saying goes, it's better to scrimp and enjoy yourself, than save and have a miserable time (and in case you haven't heard of that saying there is a very good reason, that being that i've just made it up.) 

Have a froody summer!

My Cubic Dream

So it's new years eve, the last day of 2011, a weird and wonderful year that saw many incredible events occur and much to talk about. However i shall not be talking about any of that "important" stuff, instead i would prefer to talk about the events of the past week and when i say events i really mean two that were the accumulation of  the week. 

The first is my new (not so shiny because it has more of a dull finish) gadget which i received on Christmas morn, a Kindle! Now i must confess i'm not very big on the whole reading malarkey, i have a few favourite authors and i rarely differ from these. The unfortunate problem is that most these authors became my favourites when i was young and so have little interest for me now. However every year without fail i will inevitably be given waterstone gift vouchers, which has lead to me having a pile of several books all of which i've got part way through before my computer tempted me back.

So considering this inherent, not disliking but more of can'tbebotheredness, when it comes to reading, you might be wondering why on earth i was left a kindle under the Christmas tree. Well it turns out that this lack of reading does not stem from reading itself but from the medium of the book, as as soon as (3 'as's is correct, so don't come and tell me otherwise) the book is put onto a gadget with a screen and wifi, reading is so much more enjoyable.

I suppose that it might also be down to the fact that all the great classics are free in ebook format and other books are just as cheap with prices around £1, appealing to my frugal (yes frugal, not cheapskate) nature. Also let's face it the Kindle is just awesome, especially when you discover that you can send pdfs and documents to it via email and it plays music and has an internet browser and minesweeper and this weird game where you have to get 5 crosses in a row, i mean that is the definition of awesome. All this means that for most of next year i will be probably be immersed in my Kindle and probably my new found favourite "The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes" (which cost just 86p!), (well when i'm not watching The Complete James Bond Collection, which i got for just £22, and the reason i now love the boxing day sales)

The next event that occurred started when my cousins came to visit for Christmas. One of them is a massive minecraft fan and wanted to play it all the time, and so being a kind cousin (and because then i could continue reading Sherlock) i let him wallow away the hours playing minecraft on my computer. Now being the curious mind that i am i decided when he had left to see what all the fuss about minecraft was about. Needless to say a few hours later and i found myself building a fort on top of waterfall. Then a few hours later i was at the digging a mine in the search of gold and diamond. Then a few hours after that i was constructing a skyscraper that was taller than all the mountains. 

As you might have guessed, i enjoyed playing minecraft, hence the title for this post, and as it suggests it has pretty much taken up most of my spare time in the past few days. However since i am fully aware that in a few weeks i will be sat in an exam hall staring at a piece of paper with some nasty looking equations on it, I've realised that my time might be better spent doing some of this thing called revision. This has led me to the conclusion that in the new year i shall not spend anytime playing minecraft, and any other game until at least the end of the January exams.

So that is how i shall be spending the first few weeks of 2012. Well hopefully anyway. And as it turns out it might be easier than i originally thought as the minecraft my cousin downloaded has stopped working and to download another i would have to buy the game, which i'm not going to do (remember frugal not cheapskate). So here's to a Happy New Year, let's hope it's just as eventful as 2011 and that this time next year i will be struggling to fit everything i want to write into a single post rather than blabbering on about some words on a screen and a game filled with cubes.