Off to London I went

Well, today I had my grade 8 piano exam in London. I haven't had a more horrible experience in a long time. It didn't go particularly well, I didn't say enough for the aural - and didn't have enough time to think of and say more, I kept hesitating and he moved on to the next test -, I wasn't at all sure about the second aural test, I know I got one change right because it was very exaggerated, but the other two were pretty much guesses. I couldn't think of the right word to describe one of the changes. The sight-reading was better than it could have been in some ways, it only had 2 flats (B and E) and I had been hoping for fewer than 4. The beginning and end were ok but the middle didn't go very well. You only get half a minute to look at it, and my brain wasn't functioning very well, so I had only looked at the first line by the time I had to play it. Despite the fact that I know my scales and pieces well I still make quite a few stumbles. I only stumbled once on my scales (F# melodic minor I think) but I made a couple of mistakes in my pieces. So I'm not that happy with it really. Hopefully I still passed, that's all I was aiming for and I really hope I achieve it.

My day improved a little, on the way back Carol and I had hamburgers, apple pies and fries, I also got a free sugar donut (which Carol and I shared - it was quite nice really). And I ate the chocolate buttons that I bought on the way to the station at the beginning of my day. It's quite worrying that all my happy memories are due to food.
Actually, that's not completely true. I arrived at the station in town about 10 minutes earlier than I had planned to meet Carol, so I ended up standing outside the station for those 10 minutes and it was lovely! I was listening to music (from 'Albertine' by Brooke Fraser) and it was really windy (reminds me of home :P) and it was just really nice weather in my opinion :).

And now I'd better go, I need to leave in about 25/30 mins to go to college. I'm playing one of my exam pieces in the 'Spring Concert', plus I'm in the choir. Got to be there by 7.15pm as it starts at 7.30.

Oh yes, and I found out last week that I passed my sign language exam with full marks (as did everyone else in my class, though I was sure that only about 2 of us actually paid attention in lessons!). So that's good. Yeah. Better go...

Computer :(

My plan yesterday was to come home from the Life Course Away Day (which was fairly amazing really :D) and play the Sims 2 on the computer for a while and then go to sleep, lol. I knew I would have to do work today so I thought I'd just play games yesterday. But my computer had different plans, it suddenly crashed while I was in the middle of a game and I had to get my dad to help me sort things out, apparently it had overheated or something and it took aaages to sort it out. Dad copied the main part of my harddrive to his spare disk to make sure I didn't lose everything if it did completely die - that took about 2 hours or so -, then I had to vacuum the computer to get rid of the dust which could be clogging up the fans etc., then we managed to plug everything back in and turn it back on, and dad said I should leave it for 20 minutes to make sure it wasn't going to overheat again. So I did that, I finally went back to it and it worked! But after a while I realised that the sound wasn't working. I told dad this and he said that he thought it was because the wire was pulled and had broken, so if I swapped the speakers it would work. So I went to all the hassle of stealing the speakers from mum's computer next door (with permission from dad of course) - this was very difficult because of the way all the wires were put around the computer desk etc. - and plugging them in. It still didn't work. So then I got very frustrated, put the other speakers back in the other room (but didn't plug them all back in, which mum will probably be yelling at me for when she next wants to use it) and tried plugging in the speakers to different places on the computer. Didn't work.

Today I also tried with my little headphones. Nothing has worked so far. I am still very annoyed.
I didn't realise how important sound is to my use of the computer - the main things I do on the computer are: listen to music, watch dvds/put dvds on in the background, and go on youtube. All of these require sound. I also found that I get quite frustrated playing the Sims 2 without sounds, despite the fact that they're not completely necessary - I gave up playing last night after about 10 minutes because it was annoying me.

So I'm just hoping that I'll be able to sort it out soon. Otherwise mum is going to be yelling at me a lot for leaving all my art stuff everywhere because I'll be using the computer in the dining room to listen to music while I do my work. Plus, the downstairs computer doesn't have the DVD software, so if I want to watch them on that I'll have to install it. How annoying.

I might just see if Dad will take me shopping for a laptop, he was bugging me before to try and figure out what I want in a laptop as I'm going to get one for uni. I don't really understand all the stuff he was saying so I told him that if he wanted me to figure this out he'd have to take me shopping and show me the different things he meant on the computer, he agreed but we haven't gone yet. I also want to buy a new camera out of my savings because my current one has gone a bit haywire.

Anyway, enough technical stuff. I'm just going to go do something other than complain for a while. I apologise if you've read this post. I just needed a bit of a rant.
Tired now. Kind of tempted to go back to sleep...