I changed the blog back to this layout because the other one was screwing with it. Its still a bit screwed up though. I'm gonna sort it out some time and possibly start hosting it on another site (with all past posts being there still).

Nothing much happened over the holidays so i didn't post anything then. We went on a little caravan holiday but came home a day early cause there was nothing else to do really.

I got the results of that english test back and not many people passed it but i was one of the few who did. I also passed this science one (about half the class did) and i've also done my oral presentation on a beautiful mind for english. I think the rehearsal was better than the real thing cause i done a few things wrong like forgot to advance slide then forgot the name of a character and forgot the name of another film and said the wrong name for the director and forgot what movies he directed and OH MY GOD I'M A FAILURE!! Lol, just joking. But yeah, I *THINK* it came out alright.

I started a new youtube channel so check it out! http://www.youtube.com/gottabeandrew

Ok, I arrived at college to find out that today was the day for the literacy test which we were gonna do on the computers and some people were doing it in the morning but a lot of us had to stay behind after the end of college to do it then and this included me.

So we did and it was supposed to take an hour max but we had technical problems (they'd given everyone the same password which didn't work by accident) and so we had to wait for ages for it to begin (30-45 minutes i'd say) and then we done the test and they let us go when we had completed our tests so i left at 4.45 (usual ending time is 3.30).

So anyway, i got on the bus which arrived 10 minutes after I did and got home at about 5.50 (usual time is 4.30) and during this entire time, i forgot to phone home to tell them i'd be late home so they were all wondering where i was and my mam was worried at work and didn't know what could've happened lol. I had my phone but i had it on vibrate and didn't feel it but then turned it off without really paying attention to the screen. So yeah, that was that.

In Psychology, we had another fire drill and 2 funny things happened:

1. I was first back in and just as the lift was reaching the ground floor, this guy said "Stand back to let people out of the lift." He was completely serious. We had been evacuated for 5-10 minutes and had been banned from using the lift on the way down (Temple, who was on crutches still, was made to walk on his crutches down 9 flights of stairs so absolutely nobody was allowed the lift i don't think).

2. When we got back, my Psychology teacher said "You know, i have to escort you all out if theres a fire drill and then wait and make sure that everyones left the room and then i leave the room myself and lock the door behind me. But don't expect that in a real fire. If theres a real fire, watch this fat lass run!" LOL, was just so funny.

Side-note: Why do they make them lock the door behing them? Theres only 1 hallway per floor and lots of classrooms meaning that the chances are, the fire will be in a classroom. So if theres a real fire, how are the fire brigade gonna put the fire out in a room when some idiot has just locked the god-damned door? Hmm, does this make sense to anyone?

On Saturday I went to the theatre for the first time in years because my mam and her friend were gonna go but her friends husband had a stroke so i got to fill her place.

The play was good and had no talking at all in it. They done it well though. It was basically about this hunky guy going into a town in the 1700's or 1800's or something and causing quite a disruption by getting it on with the men and women and then having them all fall in love with him and then he murdered someone and then someone murdered him. So yeah, worth the trip!

Today i was on the bus and he was taking somebodys ticket when the lights went out and the engine stopped so he started it again. Then he was going along and all the lights went off then he pulled the bus over to the side and got off, phoned somebody, checked the engine bit then got on the bus and went "right, ladies and gentlemen." (the oldest person there must have been 17 at the most) "the bus has broken down so you will all have to get off and wait for the next one."

The next bus was due in 1 hours time and my i usually arrived dot on time for my lessons so i got a refund, got my dad who had the day off to come and pick me up and take me to college.

In english, i presented an oral presentation i had made on the film a beautiful mind. The slides i made for it looked really good and if you recognise the theme they have, tell me through email or msn or something because i would love to know if anybody did. Anyway, this is one of the slides, isn't it great:



In other news, my dad was gonna give me his ipod for the trip to and from college because he has another one and i said it was too chunky (its an original one) so my brother gets that one and i'm getting my brothers which is an iPod nano which apparently contains less songs but its definately worth it since theres only about 10 i listen to anyway. So yay, free iPod nano. I think this is only a temporary arrangement though lol.

This blog post is gonna cover 3 things:

1. The new blog look.
2. Things that happened in the last year that i didn't post about but will now.
3. A conversation between me and the bus driver today.


We'll go in that order so first up is the new blog look.

I hope you all like it. This is the 4th makeover its had but first time its not a default style (or a default one with a custom background, like the last one). I think its a nice improvement and i chose 3 and then done a vote with 11 people for which one to choose and this one got 8 votes so this is the one that got put on.

Ok, now onto things which've happened in the past year. Both of these happened at school.

The first one i didn't tell you about because i didn't want my mam to see at the time (you never know! she could probably find the blog if she wanted to) but if she reads it now its ok since i've left school and this was a while back.

In the middle of year 11, i went on the middle school (we have a 3 tier system: first school, middle school and high school) website during ict and found that it was really crap so I wrote an email to the middle school saying something like "why is this so rubbish?". I forgot about it but then the next day i was taken out of geography and talked to by 2 teachers about it and they said that there'd be no point apologising to them since i hadn't done anything to them and so i would have to go to the middle school to apologise. So i got in one of their cars with both of them and we went over a mile down the road to the middle school and i seen all my old teachers and said hi and then gave my apologies and then seen more teachers and said hi and really it was quite a fun experience.

The second story i didn't post because i was at school when it happened and if the school found the blog somehow, i didn't want to be questioned about it cause i didn't want a fuss made.

Last year, i had a cover teacher for a lesson and broke her pen (if you look back through the blog, i think i told you about this). So then the head of that department who i didn't even know (Mr Lanel - there you go. Named and shamed. ;-) ) dragged me into his office at lunchtime and put his face about 10-15cm from mine and shouted in my face things like "YOURE NOBODY!" and "YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING!". I wonder if they're allowed to say that.

So anyway, back to today and a conversation i had with the busdriver. For the 90% of my blog viewers who aren't geordies, i've put the translation of what he said in brackets beside what he actually said. This happened on the way home from college once everyone else had got off.

Driver: Where do you wanna gerrof at? (where do you want to get off at?)
Me: Half way up castlefiends.
Driver: Reet, well am just ganna have a tab then. (right, well i'm just going to smoke a cigarette then.)
Me: Ok then.
Driver *lights up cigarrete*: Do yer smoke? (do you smoke?)
Me: No.
Driver: Divvint start. (don't start smoking).
Me *politely laughs*: I won't.
Driver: Yer knaa, divint tell anyone aboot this like. (dont tell anyone about this by the way).
Me: Oh, i won't. (and yes, i do realise the irony that by posting this i am telling lots of people)

I don't think i'll continue boring everyone to death with countless busdriver and train conductor stories from now on, i just thought it was interesting. It is illegal, isn't it? Somebody refresh my memory on this please. Thanks!

But anyway, the guy let me off at the bottom of my street and he put his cigarrete out the window when he wasn't smoking it so no smoke came near me.

Woo, lots to update on.

I have started getting the bus to college following the train incident so now no more trains and their evil conductors. No more will i associate the phrase "Morning!" (short for "good morning") with 30-50 year old men in suits at 8am on a train.

Anyway, the bus is fine and i have a lot less far to walk. To catch the bus in the morning, i now only have to walk half as far as i did for thet rain. On the way home, it drops me off at the bottom of the street. When i get to college, it drops me off on the road right outside the college. So yeah, thats a lot better.

Last thursday (8 days ago) we went to mcdonalds in newcastle at lunch time and then I left my bag there so i spent most of physics going there, getting my bag and coming back.

On monday I came home ill after 1 lesson cause i had stomach ache. Also, 1 of my friends (Hi Paul!) fell down the stairs at college last week cause there was something wrong with his knee and every 3 weeks or so it had apparently been giving way (dunno why i didn't mention this) and he had been to the hospital and stuff. So on monday, some random person who he didn't even know kicked his leg when he was on his crutches and so he was in pain and went home and has been back and forwards to the hospital since then.

On Thursday i missed the bus but wasn't much of a problem cause i caught the next one.

Our physics teacher is crap. She really is. She really has no clue what shes talking about or anything, she just confuses everyone and doesn't speak sense. Heres a little quote..

After going through this question on the board, she realised she was doing it wrong and changed it, then realised she was doing it wrong so changed it again, then again and then a 4th time. So one of those times, this happened:

Rohini (our teachers name - sounds like a stage name, doesn't it?): So you have 10 rows and 10 columns..
Toby (another friend - Hi Toby!): 11 columns.
Rohini: No no, there are 10 columns.
Toby: No, theres 11.
Rohini: 10 columns.
Toby: But i just counted them though and tehres 11.
Rohini: 1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8..9..10..11. Ok, so there are 11 columns.
Me: Owned.

And finally, one more little story - Sean (Hi Sean!) is teaching me how to solve a rubix cube over msn.

So yeah, thats a brief overview of my week (missing out minor things such as being home alone, tv shows and yahoo answers).

The other day there was this old conductor on the train (so keep in mind the possibility of this being ageism although i'm not completely saying it was) and he refused to let me have the £3.80 ticket which i should have had and instead was trying to charge me with a £4.50 one. I knew i was right so argued back (why should i pay 70p extra? it may just be 70p but if this happened for 10 days that would add up to £7 and then 100 days would be £70 so its a lot of money, really).

It took him about 10 minutes, in which time some people had got on at 1 stop and got off at the next without paying so they lost quite a bit of money from this foolish man. Finally, he wouldn't back down so the man opposite me (i was sitting at a table seat) offered to pay the extra 70p but i didn't think this would be fair on him really so i just paid the man the money.

Today on the train, however, the man was asking for tickets and i had worked out that on a packed train, the way they knew who had got on was body language and mostly relied on people reaching for money or something when they looked at them or when they came close. So, i decided to do a little psycological experiment of my own - i completely blanked the conductor to see what would happen.

And it worked! He walked straight past and i got on the train for free. This is now whats known as the Andrew pass. :-)

Me and Toby (one of my new friends) went venturing into newcastle and to KFC today during lunch. We were standing in the line waiting to be served and i heard this guy behind me telling his friend how he was in a holiday villa near the one madeline got kidnapped from (either that or he lived near her, couldn't quite make it out) and he said he'd been questioned by the police. Oooh, interesting.

So we had English and ICT, both which weren't particularly interesting, and then we had Psycology. In Psycology, we got homework to write 500 words on what we expect to do in the next 5 years so i thought i might share it with you here (apparently the teachers sometimes search for a line out of stuff you hand in on google to make sure you havn't just copied and pasted it from somewhere so if you do it and you find this blog then HI MISS!! Give me an A please..:

How I plan to spend the next 5 years

In my GCSEs I got a C in maths and Business Studies, the rest were all D’s apart from 1 E which was in English Literature.

My schools 6th form said I couldn’t do A-levels and they wouldn’t let me do re-sits there. They would only let me do a 1 year B-tech course in Retail which would have been the equivalent of 4 Cs and then I could go into 6th form the following year and do my A-levels. I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in the Retail course though and since it leaded to no real qualifications and I knew that a B-tech in retail might not go as far as 5 GCSEs in English language, English literature, Psychology, ICT and Physics, I made the decision not to go to 6th form and to go to college instead.

After spending a year re-sitting my GCSE’s, I will decide whether to spend the following year either at my schools 6th form or college, depending on how I feel about college at the end of the year and if I would want to go back. Either way, at the end of this year, I will go on to do my A-levels.

Since I don’t know which courses will overlap with each other in terms of time and which I will be then qualified to do, I don’t know exactly which courses I will take but they will probably be made up of a selection of these options:

• Business Studies
• Psychology
• Film Studies
• ICT
• Some other media course

Doing those for 2 years will end 3 years into the future from now on. After I have finished that i have to make another decision – do I want to go to university or not? While the answer will probably be yes, I’m not completely sure. I don’t know anything about the available courses that you can do in university so I don’t know what I would be doing there but I would imagine it to be similar to the course list for A-level.

If I don’t end up going to university at the end of my A-levels, I will open a business. That is my main plan for life. I don’t know what type of business or what it would do at the minute but there’s at least 3 years until I would have to decide so I have plenty of time. I am interested in business and the aspects involved with running a business and take an interest in it. I also take an interest in learning about the lives of famous businessmen such as Steve Jobs who owns Pixar and Apple (who make iPods and Macs).

If I decide not to go down the business route then I will do some sort of behind the scenes work on movies and TV.

College has went fine so far (apart from a few train problems which are probably too boring to go in to).

On Thursday, i wore my "I pwn n00bs" tshirt. 2 people mentioned it at college, a few people kinda stared at it so i think they understood and then i was getting off the train on the way home and theres a guy in his 20's.

guy in his 20's: Nice tshirt.
me: thanks
guy in his 20's: I have an uber micro one, myself.
me: oh, so you're a pure pwnage fan then.
guy: yeah, whats the latest episode like? i havn't had a chance to see it yet.
me: good.

So then we got off the train and went our seperate ways. :D

I dunno if i mentioned it before but i dont have college on a friday so yay!

Psycology is good aswell and is my favorite lesson so far. All lessons are also ok so far.

Today we went to North East to see the QE2 which is apparently a really really big ship. We waited out in the cold for 1 and a half hours until deciding to leave when we heard that it was too windy to bring it up the river and they're gonna try again in half an hour.