***

This may be my last post before i clear off to Yankeeland, or it may not be. Who cares. Thanks to everybody who's hung with me over the last while, and especially for Saturday night's party. While i won't see quite a few of you guys for a while, i'll still be living it out here once everybody get's back. Let's make it a good one everybody!!

Dublin, Home to finish exams, Dublin

Down to the Aer Lingus pool at Dublin Airport on Sunday with the Ulster swim team. Somebody cancelled our bus randomly, but we carried on in cars and went to swim. After an Ulster record for our relay team & a trophy for most guys points, the team were done, and so was i. I'll still be training, but a break from competition til August will do me good. Too much pressure gets to the head.

Anyways, the gala was great in the fact that i met up again with some of the legendary Irish people that i know from them. They go by the names of Burdy, Joe, James, (another) Aoife & Lucy. Had a great time chillaxing before races, if i can do something like that before a race.

Back to school on Monday & Tuesday, to finish the exams off nicely. No more work til September. Tuesday saw some drumming and hung out with a great friend!!

Today = The Dublin Trio 2005. Now i've properly been to that city which is only 2 hours down the road. What can i say, the Guinness Brewery is a full on town (5 million pints a day), Phoenix Park is amazingly big & cool, St. Stephen's Green is one of the best city centre parks i've ever seen, that big needle monument is cool, and Grafton Street is one of the great places for busking ever. It's a new ambition for me to go there with Rory sometime to busk.....

It's also pretty big, 3 times the size of B'fast apparently. And it is a totally buzzing city. Can't describe much more of it right now. Trinity College is cool, may keep it in mind. We got the perfect day, and got nicely fried! & finding filling stations was good fun too!! And we saw quite a bit of the suburbs while Stevie got lost, but his car held up nicely. It's a tank.
It's good to have a place like Dublin only 100 miles down the road.

Also, the motorway from Dundalk - Dublin is immense. I don't know why, it just is. Never any traffic jams, and it flows like a true motorway should.

Time for 24 series 3!

TheNightMonkey

Everybody's ok now, right?? Good, cause that was scarey. Glad it's alright now though, and that life is back to normal. I apologise!!

I still have two exams left, but when i hit tuesday afternoon i'll have to make sure ending exams ain't as big an anti-climax as people have said it'll be. I'll be different i think.

There are currently two things putting me under pressure before i hit the freedom. One is of course resisting not to ditch revision for the last few days, and the other is swimming in Dublin tomorrow. Sure i'll be swimming against my three good Irish mates, but it'll wreck me!! Even so, i'll begin celebrating once i've finished that 100m freestyle race tomorrow, whether i end up feeling like throwing up or not. Then no more big pressure competitions til the Irish Nationals in August. In the past few months i've had a lot of big swimming things, so hopefully a big break from competition will help clear my mind.


So after Tuesday afternoon i don't have to do any type of schoolwork til August. What am i going to do?? Well, properly celebrate my B'day first. Take a "Road Trip", & perhaps eat that weird food called Sushi. Also, a full on night of Ownage with the Americans on Xbox live wouldn't go amiss. That's a full night as into the early hours of the morning. Coz bedtimes no longer matter. Seeing the sun rise at about 4am would be pretty cool, and i'll have to dedicate a day or two to the immenseness of "24" series 3. Then B'day party on Sat, which everybody is welcome to for some hopeful fun & chillaxing.

That's my plans up til exactly a week from now. Better get started at planning for the next week. A full on "Crazy Tuesday" at the Movie House also has to be taken into consideration. As does chillaxing with some schoolfriends, and Mr Nick, before he possibly descends his wrath into Methody, taking that school by storm. Thing is, he won't have our funfilled jazz band or crazy music department anymore. He'll just make Methody's crazy. The War of the Worlds premier is also in there somewhere.

After July the 1st i'm pretty much sorted for the next 3 weeks. SM 2005 should have it's late nights, water fights and craziness just as usual. I'm being hardcore and staying for the last night, which will probably be a late one, packing up the next day, going home to get a few hours kip, have a funnish day, going to bed, and getting up a few hours later to go get on a jet to the US, putting me back 5 hours and totally screwing up my sleep patterns. Sounds immense.

The 2 weeks following that will hopefully be great. Follow that i don't have a clue of what i'm going to do until the Irish Nationals. Currently i am getting hold of cool looking photos of B'fast for Nialls slide show, to show the Americans that all of us don't live in Castles/Huts and drive crap vehicles. As for leprechauns, i'm not even going to try and prove that they don't exist. My "Irish charm" needs to get me some free stuff. (:

While doing this i've been continuously listening to "Got Me Under Pressure" by ZZ Top, which is such an immense song. It's full on Texan Rock, and it rules. And their beards are super-cool. I've said it many times, but their music kicks ass. This must've been one of my longest posts i've ever done! If you've read down this far...! Now that i don't do English anymore i'm not supposed to write long essays....but until next time....

P.S. - I just realised that that ZZ Top song is so relevant to the early parts of this post!! Woohoo!!

17p14 17 14 16) 14h17p14

I'm going to copy Anne, who also has her b'day today :P. Currently:

• I've done 21 exams

• I've got 2 left

• I've completed 9 subjects

• I've got 2 subjects left to complete

• By the time i'm done, on the 21st June, i'll have spent about 35 hours doing exams

So, when they end, i'm free and i should be aiming to use it. I might use some of that time to watch the sun rise at about 4.30am. Crazy me.

I've said this before, but i'm going to say it again. Kirk Hammett is one of the greatest guitarists on the face of this planet. I've seen him rip it up live. Woohoo.....

Score.....

Score Number 1: Y'day i got a new phone. With gd quality camera & bluetooth. For £52.50. Which is a complete bargain. Now i have bluetooth to tease and annoy people within 10m of me (if i want to), and a camera to take as many pictures of Stevie as he has of me. No really, he has enough of me to dedicate a wall of his room to, and that is one huge breach indeed.

Score Number 2: Had another swimming gala today, and managed to prove to myself that i can still swim even though i haven't been training. Without bragging, i came 2nd for 100m freestyle (in open age groups), and did it in 54.87. I've only hit 54 once before, that time was down in Limerick in February, when i was at the height of training. So yea. Id have to make the point though that swimming would suck if you had no team mates.

A big juicy proteinous steak is waiting for me on the BBQ, so i'm going to go gobble it up.

Let's get Political........

Right, let's make it clear that i don't have much against America.

I have loads against the US government though, mainly because they are so reluctant to co-operate with the rest of this planet. Especially this year. "Make Poverty History", was supposed to aim to cancel third world debt i thought??? If i'm wrong correct me. As the days go by now it's looking more and more watered down.

Tony Blair still seems to be strong and with it, which is fine, but it is the American government which is tearing this whole thing down. They constantly refuse to pull their weigh in fear that it'll harm their own country. They refuse to donate for a vaccination programme. They refuse to give 0.7% of their national income to Africa each year. At the minute all they are doing is donating tiny sums of money, in otherwords, they ain't doing much to help because their politicians are too damn concerned for their own welfare. Selfish comes to mind.

Then there's global warming. Our friend Bush won't keep his side of the Kyoto agreement becuase he's scared it'll damage the US economy. Instead of making an effort to prevent global warming, America instead is choosing to take the approach to deal with the consequences. That translates as putting billions more into stopping cities such as New York and LA from flooding if sea levels rise. Or paying for storm damage if storms really do get worse.

I'm not saying that will happen though. But it is worth investing in alternate energies. Even if pollution didn't contribute to global warming, it'd still be nice to have a cleaner buzzing planet then a dirty one. But anyways, i'm sounding like a Greenpeace person now, so i'll stop. Do note however that i'm not against fossil fuels or anything like that. I think things like Oil Rigs rule.

One fact: America produces 21% of daily Carbon Dioxide emissions, but has only 4% of the world's people.

They need to start pulling their weight!!

judet klomar; eftut sezar

Interesting things that happened today:

I did my second R.E. paper, made up an entire section on Capital Punishment which was fun.

Went home, made myself a lovely chicken & cheese bageutte for lunch.

Dossed about then did some work.

Then Mark came round with his big funky hard drive so i could "borrow" quite a few songs of it for my own listening. Cheers Mark, it's appreciated, and i'm glad ur car didn't roll into another incoming car :P

Now i'm about to hit the pit and get a good 8 hours sleep for once. 8 hours is the daily recommended average for us, which i hardly ever keep. (That's both good and bad)


Anyways, the "One Word Story" rebellion on the message board is going nicely. I didn't even mean to start it, i just wanted to kill that crappy thread that for some reason i started. But now it's better than that. Keep rebelling against the spammer everybody.....