On Christmas and New Year...

So busy, saw ALL my family in one day and ALL of B's. Crazyness. This has the best Christmas I've had since I was a little girl and still believed in Father Christmas, it was brilliant. Though next year I'm refusing to be designated Christmas driver, it literally drove me mad haha!

Gem and Ruby came over to B's dad's on Boxing Day along with Cameron and we had a really good time playing The Shoot on the Playstation Move.

My Christmas dress from mummy <3. I was only meant to be getting car tax and two new dresses but mum and John surprised me with a digital camera. I didn't know what to say (except thank you obviously).

On going out with other politics students...

Not a lot of politics was talked about. The main topics were how drunk people had been on past nights out, tactical vomiting and our head of course, Janet. Still it turned out to be an amazing night and so much fun!

On being poor and making Christmas presents...

So our student loan has finally given out (we've done well considering we had to spend near £400 on textbooks between us) and we've decided to make everyone Christmas presents this year with a little help from the craft fairy (my mum).

We've made each of our closest friends a personalised keyring. Made out of bottle tops and resin, they look AMAZING. First of all we chose an image/phrase/name etc. to go inside them depending on the person the keyring was for. It took us literally HOURS in paint to make them the right size when they printed, and then several more hours trying to figure out why the printer wasn't working until we realised that it was because the USB wasn't actually plugged into the printer... Then my step-dad drilled holes in the bottle tops and B attached the key-chain thing so they can now really be clipped onto anything. After that, we hole-punched the images to make them the exact circular size for the bottle-tops with this special hole-punch my mum bought off the internet. Then we glued them in on top of card and stuck the circular resin patch over the top. Et voila! Personalised key-rings for 10 of our friends!

To be honest, we couldn't have bought better presents and our friends will know that our time and effort went in to making them, meaning that they're just that much better!

Finally, we made cards to go with them with a very festive picture of us on.

On big cats and babysitting a foster child...

So, I have been stumbling again. I came across one of the most beautiful pictures I think I've seen in a long time.

This is from the website http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/22tiEz/www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/conserving-africas-wildlife-through-photography and I would seriously recommend taking a look, the photographer really does have a gift, not that I know anything about photography but even an amateur can tell that these are something special.

I then came across this which linked in with my large cat theme, it contrasts with the mood of the previous picture so much but still conveys a similar emotion. I just thought I'd post it because I actually analysed some photographs without meaning to and I don't have a creative bone in my body!

Furthermore, it may make me sound ignorant but I learnt about tigons and ligers today! I still don't know the difference but I know they're either a male lion bred with a female tiger and vice versa and they are HUMONGOUS. I think the animals themselves are gorgeous but I'm not sure I entirely agree with interbreeding them, but I'm no expert so I can't possibly make an informed comment on it!

In other news, today is my step-dad's 50th birthday and my parents 10th wedding anniversary. I'd say I'd like to wish them both "many happy returns" but that sounds much too for the way our relationship is. I love you both and I'm looking forward to many more! This is the reason why I'm home from Manchester this weekend, babysitting my 11 year old foster sister. Yes, my parents are saints for fostering but my foster sister is a lovely little girl. Well I call her little but she's 11 going on 25 I think. This afternoon when she got back from school my 9 year old cousin came round and we baked brownies, made my step-dad birthday cards/sketches and generally had a lovely time. I wouldn't like to do it everyday though, they were wild and demanding my attention constantly, so much so I burnt my index finger on the grill pan! Great respect for my mum doing this 24/7!

On the start of Christmas...

My boyfriend and I have been bought our first very own Christmas tree. Well, this is our first very own Christmas as it were, in our own flat. Luckily, we won't be by ourselves! Plenty of sociable plans for the holidays, not all of them include getting really drunk with my friends or my Nan like last year (but most of them do).

Anyway, the Christmas tree came with no decorations so we've done our best with temporary decorations until we can hit the pound shops later in the week. We've used my centuries old fairy lights with only half the bulbs working and we made a tinfoil star each. Mine was the best (obviously), so got to go on top of the tree but B's came out looking like Patrick Starr from Spongebob Squarepants, which was pretty impressive.

I've not really had time to give my opinions on anything recently because I've had so much work to be doing. I don't think anyone would find my case study on democratic regimes interesting, nor would any of you really want me to post my essay on international agreements' effectiveness analysis.