I was really hungry t’other night when I was coming back from college, but my money was feeling a bit stretched. I checked out the ‘specials’ section in our local supermarket, Budgens, and to my delight discovered a pack of mince for £1, and rocket for £1.09. Added to this was some wholemeal pitta-breads (£1.29) and I had a meal ready to go.

At home I seasoned the mince with some salt and pepper, as well as a vegetable Oxo cube, then took a wooden spoon to it in a bowl and mashed it into a rough ball. After this I shaped little burgers (I managed to make 5) and put these under the grill. If I had wanted to, I could have fried them, but the kitchen tends to smell after that as we don’t have an extractor fan.

While they grilled (I like them quite well-done, so it took a while) I toasted the pitta-bread (which I had cut in half) and stuffed it with rocket leaves. I had way too much rocket, but I gave some to Jeremy, who is the house foodbin. When the meat was done, in it went, et voila! Dinner, with all the main food groups, in less than 15 minutes. And it fed me twice, for ~£3.

Student living at its finest (and cheapest).

In my ranty blog of yesterday, I ended with a promise of a concert, scones and blowing up capacitors. Here goes:

Capacitors: For some reason best known to himself, Ashton turned up into college yesterday with a ‘Snappy Snaps’ bag with 11 used disposable cameras in it, from which he was extracting the capacitors. In order to get the capacitors out, however, he first had to discharge them; apparently the shock could cause some serious damage. With few further questions, Evgeniy and Jason took to helping him. The videos say it all.

Ev really reminds me of a lost little puppy in this last one. Physics fun at its best.

Concert: Last night was ICSO‘s winter concert, advertised by a lovely centrefold in Felix.

Eight members of ICSO making a desperate plea for audience. It worked - the Hall was packed!

They played Elgar’s Cockaigne, the Hoffmeister Viola Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. The Rach was my favourite piece; the audience obviously thought so too, my hands were pretty sore at the end of clapping! Next concert this term will be Medics Choir, which is…tonight! If you want to go along, it’s in St Stephens Church at 8…

ICSO taking a final bow.

Scones: I never got to show everyone my wonderful scone ‘skillz’ - so this morning I made some. I then got side-tracked and made meringues as well.

Best breakfast ever.

There is a video to follow, I just have to sort out the audio cos you can’t hear what I’m saying. I might just subtitle it, cos the other option is making another video (or learning how to edit sound…naaaah). It took half an hour and we had a wonderful fresh cooked breakfast.

The meringues took a long time, because that’s just how it goes! Recipe to follow.

If anyone ever actually tries out my recipes, please let me know, cos then I’ll know I’m not just doing it for my own sake!

So I’m going to slip into another Imperial student’s favourite pasttime. Complaining about how much work we have. Normally I try not to do this, but I feel it gives everyone a healthy perspective on what my life is like – it’s not all about cooking!

So, we are doing design studies. This is a group project, I’m sure I’ve introduced it before. I’ve been labouring under the illusion that the final report is 8000 words long. Well, I’ve found out it is – 8000 words each. How is that healthy?! I have to get the intro written by next Thursday, 1000 words of trouble. I don’t know anything about knee diseases, that stuff I presented at the presentation to surgeons was pot luck! I can’t write A THOUSAND WORDS!!

Also due by next Thursday: a lab report about X-Ray diffraction and Thermal Analysis. This is just plain annoying – we did XRD last year, and by some stroke of luck the TA technique that we did in the lab is one that I also happened to have done last year as part of my case study. So I’ve already written reports about both of these. I don’t want to do it again!

Finally, literature review. We get given a title and have to research it. Mine is about nanomedicines; the materials aspects are fine, but the medicine stuff not so much. I took a book out of the library about “Drug Delivery” the other day. I didn’t even know there was an issue with drug delivery, let alone a whole section of the library dedicated to the engineering of it! Stupid, stupid work.

Add to that the massive amount of lecture notes I have yet to write up, and you may wonder why I’m writing this blog and not working. I can’t really tell you; I don’t know.

Finally a complaint about the Media. Imperial College publishes Reporter, a magazine that comes out every three weeks giving an overview of ‘life on the inside’. They feature an excerpt from these Student Blogs every issue. This week, to my delight, mine was the blog featured. But, I’m the only one who knows it, cos they typed out that it was Naser! I’m now doing a very good impression of angry Naser - maybe they were a bit right when they confused us.

I’ve spent a while trying to figure this out – I even worked out that if you take my real name (Coranda) and reverse Naser’s name so it becomes Resan, they could have mistaken me for CoResanda. [I found this mistake during a lecture in which I became so lost and confused that there was no point following it because I couldn't understand anything. I decided to do something constructive instead, like work out how the other bloggers could possibly be mistaken for me. Coresanda was the best I got, however.]

Back to the point – I don’t understand. If I pin it on my wall people are going to think I lied, cos it’s not my name on it. This makes me sad. In fact, so sad that I’m going to go to the library cafe and buy myself a forbidden muffin, with DOUBLE chocolate. Take that, allergies.

This has been an entirely pointless post, and I forgot my camera cable so I can’t upload any pictures. If you come back over the weekend you’ll find a blog about a concert, more scones, and discharging capacitors explosively for fun.