Last night, I was chatting in #larp as I have done a lot this week (since the last Symbols Event). A fiend of mine was complaining about her exams and that she was fed up with learning for them. She wanted to go and do something fun with somebody. I don't remember exactly how or why (don't have the IRC logs handy), but somebody proposed I went over to her and I ended up thinking that was a good idea.

So, after just over two hours of train and bus (Enschede Drienerlo - Hengelo - Zutphen - Arnhem - Ede-Wageningen - Wageningen) I arrived at her place in Wageningen. I spent most of the time in the train calling with an old friend and thinking about what the hell I was doing ;-)

As she promised, there was lots of tea and as expected not too much sleep (she had to get up for a presentation at university at 0900...). So, I'm pretty much broken now and on my way back to Enschede to check the finances of Pro Deo and theatre sports repetition after that. I might not fully stay awake tonight, but, it was worth it :-)

Today was a very useful day. I've done everything I wanted to do this morning, I have done nothing I wanted this afternoon and evening, but still useful stuff. But anyway, I felt like making decisions today, and the "Afstudeersteun" money I got this week (which I found out today) helped with that.

For a while now I've been wanting to buy a notebook. Since I'm never really impulsive, I've been sitting on this idea for half a year, even a year perhaps. That is, from the point that I thought: "Hmm, it might be useful to get a notebook" until the point "Now, which notebook shall I get". That point was about a month ago and after some browsing around I settled for the MSI S270. I really wanted a 12" notebook, because even at 15" notebooks are not as portable as I want them.

This fairly limited my choices: Most big notebook vendors do sell one or two 12" models, but in the € 1600 - € 2500 price range. Not my price range. The MSI notebook was nicely different. Being priced at only &euro 1100, this seemed like a nice 12" notebook. On top of that, it was the first (and only) notebook I could find housing the new AMD Turion processor. I'm an AMD fan, so even though it might not be as power efficient as the Intel's Pentium M, it comes fairly close. And it is 64bit, so yay! Now, I just have to wait 2 more weeks for the goodies to arrive...

The other decision I made tonight (after thinking about it the past month ;-p) was to drop my current IRC nick, "blathijs" and go back to using "matthijs". I have made the opposite switch a few years back because of tab-completion-collision (yes, I know that is not a word). It kinda stuck around, but I thought it was enough. But, no such luck. By now, there are two other people with the nick "matthijs" on EFNet and Undernet. So, I'm stuck with blathijs for now... Better suggestions?

Last night I've slept about 10 hours, which should be more than enough for any normal day. Around 11 this morning I woke up, together with Brenda. I felt tired and lame, she was awake and enthousiastic. After some time of lying around, me trying to wake up, she proposed to go shopping and go to the market. Though the alternative of just staying in bed, sleeping some more until Brenda would come back from town looked very attractive, I decided to get up. This took me a lot of effort, my mind wanting to get up and going to town, my body reluctant to do anything.

The rest of the day was comparably lame: I've been lying, reading, fixing some stuff in my blog, doing some (trivial) correction work and being generally tired. I hope to get some more good sleep tonight, while not getting up to late to go to Enschede tomorrow.

Anyway, I've had this year's first lesson of theatresports last night, which I suspect to be somewhat responsible for my exhaustion. We're going to do some exercises with "energies" over the next few lessons. Last night, we've been practicing with the "exhausting energy". I don't understand exactly how these energies relate to the practice of theatresports yet, but it sure was exhausting.

The exercise consisted mainly of lying on the ground, trying to make yourself feel (physically) heavy. Through focussing on your breathing and concentrating on different parts your body in turn, we triggered a "heavy" feeling. After about half an hour or so, we were asked to simply raise an arm of a leg, while not forgetting the heaviness. While staying fully focussed on my breathing and heaviness, it was actually hard to just raise my arm. It felt like it was physically heavier that normal, which is, obviously, nonsense. :-)

I credit this partly to the fact that I've been focussing on not moving for half an hour, which tends to make your muscles stiff and unprepared to move all of the sudden. I'm also pretty sure this wasn't the entire reason, probably a big part of it is mental. You're actively trying to stop yourself from moving, while trying to move at the same time. Weird. I think I could have snapped out of by dropping my focus and just get up and walk away, but that would obviously have ruined the exercise. Still need to try that some time though, see what happens...

Right, time for that good sleep ;-)

There is about a ton of stuff that needs doing this week, there is another ton of stuff I want to do this week or sometime soon and there's another that keeps distracting me, especially from the first ton.

I've spent 8 hours this week correcting homework from students in "my" ADC group. Though the work has been interesting and even fun, the last few hours were hell. I'm kinda fed up with doing stuff, I've been doing lots and lots of work and there is still more that needs doing. I probably should have done more necessary work before getting distracted by the fun work (coughInter-Actief sysadminningcough), but that just seems to be next to impossible with me.

Anyway, I've got the correction work finished now (and am looking forward to getting paid for it) but haven't spent nearly enough work on my "Ontwerproject" (Design Project) today. That means, I'll spent another hour or two coding, before going to sleep and doing more work for my ontwerpproject in the morning...

Life sucks, and then you die... ;-p