Save Up All The Days...

Right now: Kimbra - 'Two weeks/Head Over Heels'

Since yesterday, I've been mucking around on 'Picnik', a photo-editing site. When I first used it, you used to have to pay to use the premium features. However, the site is now closing down and moving to Google (surprise, surprise) and for a limited time, they have made their premium features free to use by all! The site is only available to be used till the 19th April before it closes though. Here are two of the results of my mucking around!

Blood in the Boardroom

Right now: Gotye - 'Learnalilgivinanlovin'

'The Apprentice' is now back for its eighth series and therefore, I have decided that I am going to become a dedicated and avid follower of the show. I must confess bloggers, that I have never watched a full series of 'The Apprentice', a felony I am most ashamed of, especially due to the fact that I am a business student. I watch this programme and often ask myself why the heck I am doing this degree when I don't think I would last five minutes sitting in front of Lord Sugar. I'd probably just implode and begin spraying blood out of every orifice in fear (and with that lovely little image in my head, I shall move on...)

Get those bloodstains off the back wall of my office, NOW!

Please note the following blog contains spoilers if you have not yet managed to watch the episode yet.

So, firstly, the all important 'Who is going to be the project manager on the first task?' scenario. I'm going to be honest and I say that I would not be volunteering. Therefore, I think that if you do volunteer for the dreaded task, you should be immediately exempt from a sacking for sheer courage and bravery. As for my opinion on the project managers, I really like Gabrielle. She seems like a motivator and someone you could easily approach, a quality I quite admire. She didn't seem ruthless or embittered either. However, she was quite confident to put herself forward for the task and therefore, she should have been more aware of the fact that her leadership was being scrutinised.

As for the bloke, I can't even remember his name. That's bad. But he didn't impress me, he just seems like your average, run of the mill, young entrepreneur with a lot to prove. However, he did seem well-liked and respected by MOST of his team, the exception being Stephen, a salesman who had a lot to preach and criticise about, yet he didn't exactly volunteer for the role.

In the end, the boys won, which I was surprised and saddened about. I'm not being sexist or biased here but the girl's design at the end of the day was fresh and quirky, I probably would have bought the tote bag myself, I liked the design that much. The boy's design was SHIT. Absolutely SHIT. Yet, their target market was tourists, which in London, is a pretty good market. They also had quite solid figures as well, which is key to everything, from knowing how much raw materials to buy to coming up with a realistic selling price (although £15 for a small teddy bear? If anyone bought it at that price they deserve nothing less than to be culled for stupidity). The girl's simply focuses too much on design and if they had had more time, they could have worried about margins later but it was the first task and they didn't spend enough time getting their figures straight.

So Gabrielle, the project manager decides to take Katie, who is playing the 'if I don't talk, he won't notice me' game and Bilyana, a bolshy bulgarian whose egomaniac confidence is a sight truly to be beheld. My thoughts throughout the whole ten minutes in the Boardroom was that Gabrielle was probably going to go, even though I liked her the most, if not, Katie would get it and that Alan Sugar would keep Bilyana in, even if for pure entertainment value. However, as it seemed more and more likely that Katie was getting the proverbial 'chop', Bilyana opened her mouth and did not stop talking, panicking and using the fact she was a head girl to try and tug at the heartstrings of Alan Sugar. Then she was fired. Pure and simple.

At first I was ecstatic, Gabrielle was still in and Katie's game had paid off. But although I had found Bilyana irritating as hell, when she appeared on the spin off show, 'You're fired' with Dara O Brain, she came across really well and I kind of felt bad for her. But hey ho, onto the next episode.

One more thing...

I served a woman on the checkouts and her face reminded me of this character from Family Guy. Don't judge me.

The closest to Heaven I'll ever be...

When I first began my degree path in 2010 (which seems so long ago now), the thought of going to study abroad for a semester was a distant place in the future. But it's funny how things creep up on you so quickly and the time has now arrived.

So, without further ado, I am pleased to announce the first milestone of my twenties: I'm off to study in Montreal, Canada for four months in January, next year (providing that the world survives the impending apocalypse on the 21st December 2012, naturally). The very fact that I am going to Canada is almost too exciting to bear but to actually live there, properly, is incredible. Fair enough, it is not the most exotic place in the world but it is a very interesting country. 

It's like a mini New York!

If I'm completely honest with myself, I am so surprised I got allocated Canada. After the hoo-hah in January, when my exams had went so badly, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to drop down to Business BA. Normally, I am of the frame of mind that things will turn out alright in the end but not this time. I actually began celebrating the fact that short-term, my finances would be brilliant but in the long-term, my career prospects would have taken a serious dent. 

Then BOOM! I find out I have passed all my exams (maybe Marketing was a marginal pass but who cares?) and International Business is back on the cards. I can honestly say that those exams frightened the bejesus out of me and I intend to study hard for the next lot. At this point, I think that if I had been allocated Ireland, I would have been quite happy. The opportunity to go anywhere would have been fantastic.

However, in hindsight, Canada is a far better allocation that Ireland. For those who do not understand where all this negativity about Ireland is coming from, in my course, it is a well-known fact that being allocated Ireland is a bit of embarrassment. With the chance of going to study in places like Australia, USA and other cool countries, getting an allocation to a place where the ferry is like half an hour would be a genuinely gutting thing. I mean imagine asking where your pal is going for exchange and they say Brisbane, Australia and you reply with Cork, Ireland. Somehow, it just doesn't inspire the same grandeur.

Anyway, I digress. Canada will be amazing and I was literally leaping for joy. However, as I spoke to other people in my course and they knew who they were going with, somewhere, deep inside of me, I knew something wasn't quite right. So I emailed the co-ordinator, Shelia (who is proving to be as useful as bottomless teacup) and she stated that currently, it was just me going to Montreal. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. That burst the proverbial bubble quite significantly. I had a wee mental breakdown but I won't go into that.

The more I think about it, the less worried I become about the potential of going by myself. Although, in saying that, I'll probably be shitting it when it's a week to go. However, I have two saving graces. The first saving grace is my cousin Michael who lives in Montreal. Although whenever I saw him at my auntie's conversation proved to be slightly difficult, I think I could make it work if I had to. My second saving grace is Fraser, who is over there right now doing his exchange, doing everything I will be doing. It will be nice to have a friend who's been there and done it and he's offered his help (which will be getting heavily utilised).

So all in all, future-wise, I am relatively positive. If only I could get some darn money saved up.

Also, I forgot to mention the one negative of Canada. In January and March, the temperatures do not tend to rise above freezing. For a girl who detests snow with a passion, the hope of escaping a winter without snow is sadly not going to be realised for a few years to come. I'll just have to dress up as an eskimo, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Clearly, it is that cold, her teeth have fallen out...

I think I'm all Canada'd out now. I feel like I'm annoying people by talking about incessantly so at least here, I have somewhere to stand on my soapbox and rant and rave!

I Want To Settle Down...

Hello! For those who have followed me before, I have decided to start afresh and create a whole new blog entity. For those who haven't read any of my previous 'work', Welcome! The set-up is pretty simple. I write banal, trivial blogs on this space and you, lucky reader, have the pleasure of reading them. (If you are offended by sarcasm, peacefully click away from this space now).

I have started again for a number of reasons. The first, most important reason is that sadly, I am getting tired of my pseudonym 'Bluemonkeyape'. It's not that I dislike the name, I think it will forever be associated with me. But I hate typing it into google and it shows all my profiles and stuff. Especially after the incident last year when some of my work was published in the local paper. I have never blogged to achieve fame or a large reader base. As pathetic as it sounds, I just like a place where I can put my thoughts for people to read if they are interested without feeling like I'm bombarding people on Facebook etc.

The second reason is that I just find my old space unstimulating and too 'teenage-like'. I know I have literally just turned twenty but I feel like I didn't do enough in my teenage years or I missed out on a lot of normal teenage stuff so I intend to make up for lost time in my twenties. And what better way to document it than to open a new blog?

So that's my story. If you wish to read my previous blog entitled 'Paper Bags and Plastic Hearts'; you can access it at:

http://bluemonkeyape-student.blogspot.co.uk