Kat's blog

December 2008

As it's now January I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year. Hopefully you've all had relaxing breaks and are ready for work again.

My "holiday" hasn't been very relaxing. I've got a load of coursework due in at the start of the month and work to catch up with for my final year project. I can't believe it's due in in just 3 months. I need to borrow hours from somewhere! It's all made a bit harder for me at the moment because I've injured my wrist. Not a recent, sensible injury like slipping on the ice, no I fell up the stairs (yes, up and I assure you I was perfectly sober at the time too - that's what I get for running to brag about getting 100% in Guitar Hero) in April and I'm still waiting for the Dr's to work out how to fix me (and find out what exactly is wrong). All this typing is causing me a lot of pain so here's hoping it's fixed soon!

It's not making me stop playing with some of my new "toys" I got for Christmas though (thank you friends and family!). Some of the most exciting were a tripod for my camera (it's a little Gorillapod so it can cling to door handles and railings and things - very cool!) and a new Nikon D60 camera (a lovely little SLR)! I've only had it in my hands a few days so far so I'm not all that great at using it yet (OK, I'm rather bad!) but once I work out all the buttons, how to manual focus, set the aperture and all the fancy stuff I'll be (to quote sister and friend) "more intolerable then usual" when we're out Geocaching. I'm a bit of a gadget geek so I'm sure I'll get it all worked out soon enough.

I really need to make time for more Geocaching too. A bit more on the Geocaching, been out a few times over the holiday and found a few of the really annoying caches nearby which have been bugging me. I also have a trackable tag now which I need to activate. I'll explain that a bit more for the non-cachers. When you're Geocaching you can attach a little tag to an item of your choice and "set it free" in a cache for others to discover and move on to help it achieve a mission of your choice. I was debating about attaching mine to something Guiding related and sending it to meet Guide/Scout groups but I haven't decided yet and we were on about doing that as a group of Rangers anyway.

See, I haven't forgotten the Rangers! We have seen each other this month and had a chocolate log decorating contest. All the logs came out brilliant (with mountains of chocolate and vanilla frosting, ready to roll icing, icing sugar, food colouring, chocolate sprinkles, mini marshmallows and who knows what else how could they not?) and in the end it was actually the least Christmassy one which won so well done to "Bob" with her cute little bunny. We also had the Scout and Guide Ball this month which is the highlight of the SS calendar! All members of Scouting and Guiding between the ages of 14 - 25 in the area are invited and we have a big party with a meal and dancing. Present this year were "Dougie", "Bob", "Heather", "Nicki", "Elle", "Claire", "Daphne" and myself (and about 110 others but we'll not count them). "Daphne" was late because she'd been at work so we made sure we saved her popping candy (it was really funny watching the younger Rangers who'd never had any before eat it) and made sure Santa left her a present. It was great catching up with some other friends who I hadn't seen for a long time as well and I even got a song played for me (Ruby by Kaiser Chiefs).

As for the Guides, they had their Christmas party as well. The wrist being so bad it was in a sling got me off food duty (hurrah! I'm not so good at party food so it may have ended up burnt) and onto music stopping duty for all the games which is where if I'm honest, I usually like to be anyway. It was incredibly creepy though when all the Guides launched into "Hallelujah". As a none X-Factor watcher I didn't know it was about to be released so I was quite stunned when they all began singing in a very creepy way. I'll stick with any of the other versions!

Oh, and thanks to all the other units around the country who sent the Guides and Rangers cards, I know we all enjoyed seeing them (and comparing with our dreadful attempts).

Hope everyone has a great new year. We'll all be busy with the Centenary things starting.