::The Yellow Book::

An illustrated regular

About Me
name: Katrin
age: 21
location: Reykjavík, Iceland
nationality: Icelandic
msn: trinagunnars (at) hotmail (dot) com
reading: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen. Old Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney.
listening to: My iPod
watching: Buffy DVDs, How I Met Your Mother and Gossssssip Girl
likes: sleep, Pepsi Max, YAs by Meg CabotTV and my late cat, Joakim
dislikes: Techno, mathfish  

   Blogs

             + Aldís María        
 
+ Edda
  
+ Meg Cabot
  
+ Sigrun Ugla
  
+ Mummy dearest
  
+ Júlía Ara
  
+ Dísa
  
+ Hrafnkell
  
+ Þorsteinn
  
+ Hafdís
  
+ Frog Prince
  
+ Birna Kristín
  
+ Kolbrun
  
+ Erla
  
+ Gulla
             
+ Anna Margrét     +Eduardo

 

      Other links

   + My blogger.com profile
  
+ Pictures/myndir 2005
  
+ Pictures/myndir 2005-2007 (Scotland)
  
+ KatSpace
  
+ Poet Katrin
  
+ Gavin DeGraw
  
+ My Bible
  
+ Meg Cabot official website
  
+ See This Movie
  
+ He with whom I compare all persons of the opposite sex
  
+ Officially a fan
  
+ Ugla
  
  + My old high school
  
+ My old college
  
+ The Uni Choir
  
+ Uni Choir chat
  
+
  
+ The BOG
  
+ Reykjavík weather

 

   Credits

   Host- Blogger
  
Skin-Blogskins
   
Designer-Dawnwake

 

                   Old Stuff

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Thursday, January 31, 2008

So how do you like Iceland, then?

Cold enough for you?

Yes this is truly the land of ICE - as in ICE cold. I'm not sure how cold it was exactly today, but tomorrow it's supposed to be -7 °C. And the wind makes it even colder. So it feels like it's -15°C or something. I haven't experienced cold like this in AGES!
All I can say is thank god for my parka and warm tights... and thank grandma Kata for my woollen socks! :)
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 23:34:-

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Dilemma

This is it. Now I am REALLY living independently. And I feel helpless about it...

Why, you ask? Well...The main light bulb in my room is out, but I can't change it because I can't even open the lampshade - it's one of those ball ones, you know - so currently I am relying on the light over the door, bedside lamp, toilet light and fairy lights I've got around my mirror.

What am I to do??????????

QotD: Richard: "There's two kinds of people in this world, there's winners and there's losers. Okay, you know what the difference is? Winners don't give up." - Little Miss Sunshine.

->This must be a message to me: I should not give up! I am a WINNER!

Nice pic of me and mummy dearest:
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 22:21:-

Friday, January 25, 2008

Electroencephalography

Most people my age, and who have ever been my age, have found themselves pulling an all-nighter. This is usually the night before an exam, poring over the books trying to cram everything they were supposed to learn the previous semester into their heads.

I, however, have never done that. Partly because I simply cannot focus on studying at night, and partly because this is one of the things I'm not "allowed" to do, because of my epilepsy.* But it never really bothered me, as I have this funny tendency to learn stuff during the lessons - and, believe it or not, when I do the reading or homework for a class - and therefore do alright on exams without resorting to desperate measures.

Anyway. Last night I pulled an all-nighter for the first time in my life. It was hard. The reason is that I had an appointment for a "sleep" EEG at 8 AM, and in order for me to be able to actually sleep during it, I was required to stay up from midnight onwards. So I slept from 10:30 PM till midnight, then got up and wondered what I could do to pass the time... and not fall asleep! I wasn't even allowed to have any caffeine to help me stay awake - that meant no Pepsi Max. I had some Sprite Zero instead, which was alright but I don't know if it helped any. This is what I did last night:

Chatted on MSN to the only insomniac I know, listenend to songs he downloaded for me (so convenient to have Pirate friends who'll break the law for you!) - though it's a bit weird listening to Baby Got Back and Ice Ice Baby at 3:30 AM. Also surfed the internet doing absolutely nothing productive or useful. Why do that at 3 AM? The mere notion of looking at a website about the American War of Independence at 3 AM seemed simply ridiculous. So I just did nothing in particular until my computer, which is actually hinting that it needs to be looked at, decided to Stand By, all by itself!

So then I tried to read Give Me Liberty! An American History, while listening to some crazy night-playlist of techno music on Rás 2. As you might understand, it was REALLY hard to stay awake doing that. By 5:30 AM I was so bored that I actually painted my nails - clear, of course - and whaddya know, it dried without me making it all messy by touching something. After my nails had dried I smeared my feet with that wonderful Lush foot lotion Emily gave me for my birthday last year, and I continued reading.

This is how boring it is to stay awake all night.
When I got to the hospital, I talked to a (relatively) nice old(ish) lady who, after a bit of paperwork, told me to sit down in a chair and started to smear spots of my scalp with this really sticky and disgusting cream-thingie. I should mention that this was not the first EEG I've had; I had a couple back in '99 and '02 or '03, I think. Back then I had really long hair, and that sticky cream is seriously hard to get out. It annoyed me then, and it annoyed me now. I conversationally mentioned that - that it's hard to get the cream out of the hair - but the lady took it almost as a personal offense! She was all "no it's not! This is easy to get out!" I asked "Oh, has it been developed or...?" and she and the other, younger lady who was in the room as well saod that oh no, this was the same cream as was used back in '99. I decided to just leave it; this was apparently a matter of some importance to them. But then they started talking about how they did actually have new, better cream. But they were saving that for the children, which I thought was fair enough; kids usually don't have much patience for washing their hair numerous times. But then the ladies proceded to discuss among themselves how they realised now, as they were smearing my head, how much better the other cream was!

OK, I get that there were kids who deserved to have this better cream more than me. But did they REALLY have to actually TALK about it, WHILE they were putting the worse one IN MY HAIR??? They should reassess their bedside manners...
Anyway. The elder lady, who was still stiff in her countenance towards me, attatched the 23 electrodes to my scalp and I lay down on a rather uncomfortable bench, the type your GP has, with the paper roll on it. The pillow was hard. And she put electrodes on my wrists as well, so I really couldn't move my hands a lot. So basically what I had to do was this: lie there underneath two heavy-but-not-so-warm hospital blankets, in a kinda uncomfortable position, pretty much unable to move, and fall asleep, while the lady sat at a big computer at the foot of the bed and looked at whatever the electrodes were telling the knowitall compy about my brain. Apparently I kept falling asleep and waking up again and again. I don't really remember what I dreamt about, but I recall something about Sean Connery...

After 30 minutes or so (I think) the lady told me to wake up, which I hated her for because I was knackered and just wanted to sleep till I could sleep no more, and told me to do stuff like open my eyes and close them again, take deep, rapid breaths for THREE minutes; harder than it sounds! And then she put a light above my head so that it shone right into my eyes. She then made it flash really fast, told me to keep my eyes closed and then open them! That was literally painful - I had to do this several times, and by the end I was only able to create a tiny snake-like slit when trying to open my eyes.

After this was all finished, the lady washed my hair and gave me a good scalp-massage, which made me like her a bit better. But I was right, though; it IS hard to get the cream out of the hair. Luckily I had predicted the situation and brought my own hairbrush and elastic; they actually did not have a hairbrush there!

I took a taxi back to Griffill - charged it to the company as my boss had told me I could do - because I was needed at work now. If I hadn't come, my 7-month-pregnant boss would have been alone in the shop till 12:30, when another girl was supposed to arrive. So I was to stay there for 2 1/2 hours, and then go home and sleep. But the girl was late. I was seriously annoyed. She didn't arrive until 13:45. I was pleasant in a rude way to her. Normally I quite like her, she's very chatty like yours truly, only more, but today I was seriously annoyed at her. Good for the health, I am sure. Or not.

I was home and in bed at 14:30, and slept till 18:45. It was weird to go to sleep while it was bright and wake up when it had got dark. I didn't have a very good dream, so within 20-30 minutes of waking up I went through a serious emotional rollercoaster. Not gonna go into detail here.
Well, that's about it, I should think. Nothing more to tell. Thanks for bothering to read all of this! (If you didn't just scroll down to the end, that is...)
Signed,


Yours Truly.




p.s. That drawing is not by me - I found it on Google Images. But it depicts basically what an EEG is!


*Story of my life in brief, for those who don't know about this: In September 1999, when I was 12, I had my first epileptic seizure. I didn't have another one until more than two years later, in January 2002, the year I was to turn 15. I was then diagnosed with epilepsy (you have to have two or more seizures to be diagnosed; more people than you'd think have one seizure in their lifetime, usually due to stressful situations) and put on medication, which I have been on ever since. Thankfully I didn't get seizures very often, usually with months between, and twice with more than a year's interval. In that way I was lucky; some people have seizures monthly or even weekly. I feel sorry for those people.


Anyway. It has now been 2 years, 5 months and one week since my last seizure. Yes, I remember the exact date; even the exact time! It was on August 17th 2005, just after noon. How do I remember this? Well, this was my first day of high school in Edinburgh. I had a seizure in front of my entire Higher German class (sidenote: I found out more than a year later, when I actually started asking people who were in my class what it had been like, that Ms Malcolm, the legendary German teacher, actually jumped over her desk when she realised what was happening to me!). I heard later that this story spread out and people had heard of me but didn't know who I was, where I came from, or the exact details of the story. Just that some new girl had an epileptic fit in school. How nice...


Well. As it has been so long since I've had a seizure, I might soon be able to decrease my medication dosages, until I'm entirely off the meds. That'd be nice. This is the reason my neurologist wanted me to have a "sleep" EEG.
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 19:58:-

Sunday, January 20, 2008

My corridor smells like fish

It's so expensive having friends from all over the world. Because naturally I want to visit them all... at the same time, preferably. But in order to be able to afford that, I need to work every free minute, especially during holidays. Which, incidentally, is the most convenient time to travel.
Dammit, I wish I didn't bond with people so easily.
QotD: (in honour of my American Literature course) "-but what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tounge?" - from Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Irving
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 14:23:-

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Seriously...

... I have not seen snow like this since I was a kid.
Incredible.
SO glad I've got my Wellies!
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 23:02:-

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

One more thing. I stumbled upon and brand new blogger, an anonymous one... who calls himself Frog Prince. He seems quite promising, so I recommend you keep an eye on that blog. Very profound and deep and thoughtful and all that shit.
No really, it's just a student jotting down his thoughts and stuff in a funny way. In any case, take a look!
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 23:34:-

So how about that Britney...?

Long time no post! Sorry about that. I'd use it as an excuse that I've just been really busy, but... wait, I actually HAVE been really busy! As you might know (if you read my last post, at least) I spent New Year's in Edinburgh - and a few days before and after. I was there for 10 days, to be exact. I came home late on Sunday night, 6th January, and the next morning I went straight to work. And I worked the whole week, including Saturday, because uni didn't start until yesterday, and I needed to earn the money I spent in Edinburgh. Yep - all the money I did not spend from July 3rd to December 27th, 2007, I spent during those ten days.

To prevent misunderstanding: for those 6 months I only spent money on bare necessities like rent, food, and the occasional night out. Or in. And of course Christmas presents, but they don't count. That is, I did not buy any DVDs, music, or clothes (except for ONE top on sale last summer, a shirt for my choir uniform and a dress - the last two I bought at the Red Cross thrift shop so it was beyond cheap.). So all the money I could have spent on those things, I spent at the January sales in Edinburgh. And lets face it: my wardrobe REALLY needed to be updated a bit. I unfortunately did not manage to find any jeans or trousers. I did, however, find "sensible" shoes, in the form of rose-patterned Wellies! I can now go about my day, walking in the canyon-deep snow that has been falling heavily the past few days (and will continue until Saturday) without my feet actually getting soaking wet. This is a totally new experience for me, as the winter shoes that I've bought in November/December the last few years usually end up all holey within a couple of weeks. Ergo wetness of feet.
There isn't really a lot to say about my trip to Edinburgh. I'm not gonna go into every single little detail, because odds are nobody is going to find it interesting - except maybe yours truly.
I stayed at my friend Sophie's, who has the most adorable übermother ever, a really nice stepdad and hilarious grandads! Not to mention that she herself is quite witty. Alina, my German best friend, stayed there as well, but she only stayed for a week. It just goes to show how nice Anne and Brian are, that they had no problem housing and feeding two friends of their daughter's for 7-10 days! They definitely made our stay a comfortable one.
What I did in Edinburgh was basically just shopping and meeting people. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to meet everyone I wanted to, but c'est la vie and I will be going back some other time! It was especially good to see Alina again. I missed her a lot, more than any of the others I have to say (and that's really saying something!!!). So yeah. In short, it was good being back in Scotland.
Now the holidays are over, uni's started again and so real life resumes. I'm both happy and a bit bummed. It was nice, not having to think about anything.
And oh, I just want to brag that my average grade for semester 1 is 8.79. Yay!
QotD: Buffy: "Okay, everyone look at me like I'm in a bunny suit because that's how stupid I feel like saying this." - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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-: Trina illustrated her blog at 20:42:-

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