Exam Pressure

What a relief that my exam is out of the way; the revision seemed to wipe a week out of my life altogether and I still can’t stop trying to remember those stupid words. The hardest part of this course for me was learning the new language needed to support it and they wouldn’t let you take the course glossary into the exam so I seemed to spend most of my time trying to remember the words and meanings. Not words used in English but new words like, Allopatric speciation, the most parsimonious solution and symplesiomorphy. Of course, my Word dictionary doesn’t even recognise them. Two days before the exam I tried to do the specimen exam paper and nearly had a heart attack; I was nowhere near ready to take the exam. Luckily, I found out the day before that we were allowed to take an ordinary English dictionary in with me. Great, I shot straight off to Borders to find the one with the most in it. Unfortunately it was the largest dictionary there. Never mind, it was still better to take it in than not. You were not allowed to annotate it so I spent the next few hours going through the course glossary and finding the words in the dictionary and folding the corner over on that page. Not all the words were in there but enough to help enormously. The other thing we needed to remember was the geological periods and dates between them. What I ended up doing was remembering it well enough to write out at the start of the exam; timing was everything. We got in the exam and I immediately drew the geological time map with all the dates between them along with certain words and groups of words I needed to remember that were not in the dictionary. I managed to fill the back page but at least I remembered everything before even looking at the paper. This threw me into time pressure right from the start but I did manage to recover and finish the paper about 2 seconds before they stopped us; it must be the fastest 3 hours I can remember. Anyway, I feel I did quite well, as long as they can read my handwritten scribble. I hardly ever hand write anything these days.

I good drink with Claire finished the day off and I was knackered and fell asleep on the sofa. Claire got me started early the next day, catching up with all the little jobs that I couldn’t do whilst revising. All the wires tidied up around the sofa to start with and getting the glass shelves out from the side of the shower was next. All done just in time for Julia and Jack to turn up (Claire’s sister and nephew) along with Harriet on her way home from work. A few more drinks were had and then an early night ready for the big BBQ breakfast. Before we went to bed, Jack had us try a little of their bottle of chilli sauce that they had bought from Middleton hall where they have a food show at the moment. Wow, that’s the hottest chilli sauce I have ever tasted; it made my mouth go num. It took us a good 15 minutes to recover from the smallest of tastes. We are off there to get one in a minute.

I love cooking breakfast on the BBQ as I can make as much mess as I like and it doesn’t stink the house out. The cast iron griddle plate is ideal for bacon; you can’t beat Cumberland sausages cooked on the BBQ. We bought a huge pack from Costco on Friday. There is an ordinary flame for the frying pan to do the eggs and fried bread so you can cook the lot in one go. All boys love playing with fire and I enjoy cooking so it perfectly suits me. We had just finished when Harriet turned up with Coke the dog that goes mental when there are lots of new people around for him to sniff at. Dogs can smell 10,000 times better than we can and I often wonder if they can smell family relationships between people with their similar pheromones. I quickly reheated a couple of sausages and fried another egg so Harriet could also have breakfast while Claire taught Coke to beg for a bit of bacon. He’s very good at it and looks lovely when he holds his paw out. While all this was going on Jack was happy to watch the tv. Claire tried to wipe the floor down but Coke saw this as an opportunity to lick her face in the hope of a bit more begging practice.