(no subject)

I just walked in after a long, not very nice day. And, parcel! From Leigh! I can only presume my mother signed for it, but no-one's home and I've spent the most entertaining few minutes rummaging through polystyrene bugs and going, "Squee!"

As far as I can tell, nothing got lost in transit. I have a CD and tracklist, a paper bag of photos (one printed on the wrong side!), two small chocolate bars (that do not look like, but taste like, Milky Ways), a birthday card (hee!), a letter, and a bag of Starburst Joosters, for which we blame tobiascharity, and the flavours are different. I find this extraordinary. According to the packet, the flavours are strawberry, orange, lemon, apple, cherry and grape. Cherry and grape?

I'm happy. I'm very happy. I'm going to have to eat the sweets very slowly, and I've propped the birthday card up on my computer table. Leigh, thank you. This is such a lovely surprise, and just what I needed. As for your parcel, Pedar says sending it from here is just a stupid, stupid idea, but he'll be in North Carolina on September 24th and will post it from there.

Yes, that has cheered me right up. My day was short but rather strange; I got in, sat down and Rola appeared. She handed me a bag of balloons, said, "Sarah," and disappeared.

I correctly interpreted this as, "Iona, it's Sarah's birthday, and perhaps you could arrange to have these balloons inflated before ten past nine?"

"Arrange for" because I can't, myself, blow up balloons. Instead, I went down to the library and got the Lower Sixth library committee doing it. Pedar would have approved, he's all about the delegation. They blew up balloons and put them in the binbag while Fidan went to find Mrs Colvin. She managed it in the end, and returned in triumph with the keys to the lab.

While the committee ate chocolate cake - provided by Mrs Barry - we lugged the bags up to the lab and festooned it with balloons. I think I'm doing my job well when people will blow up thirty-five balloons without explanation nor a moment's notice. We were just in time for Sarah to walk in, herself wrapped up in "Happy birthday!" banners, and say, blissfully, "Balloons!"

She's the eldest in the class, naturally, and she was a little peeved because last year she didn't get this kind of birthday celebration. It's true that we'd only been a class for a week then, and besides the tradition only really began with my depression-fuelled seventeenth birthday, and that was last January. Quite by accident, thirty-five was the right number of balloons - eighteen for this year, and seventeen for last.

Balloons aside, it wasn't a good lesson. I am genuinely struggling with inorganic Chemistry, made a fine mess of rates and am doing the same for equilibria. I keep asking the same question twelve times because I don't understand, I don't, and am not, contrary to popular belief, intentionally trying to be obtuse. I'm just teh proverbial suck, and made nervously frantic scribbles all over the nice clean library rota.

Afterwards, I met Miranda in the library and she told me something rather disturbing about couches, which I won't go into, then Mr Evans started telling me non-PC Norman Tebbit jokes. Why I spend so much time down there, I don't know. Maybe I'm hoping that if I spend enough time in the library, someone will ask me to save the world.

And that was that, really. There was a fire alarm, just like every other fire drill I've ever known - people shifting from foot to foot in the chill, and other people shouting but never loud enough to be heard - and I went out for lunch, but it all ends in mentoring. Three mentors is enough to kill me, and despite the fact I can, I don't take Wednesday afternoons for my own time. Instead, I signed up for First Aid.

Urgh.

The parcel, though - best thing that could have happened. And now, I may just go to bed.