Spring has arrived!

Since yesterday it's officially springtime! Feel like I have to drag out my summer clothes and soak up every ray of sun I can. I think it's supposed to stay sunny on the weekend, but one never knows.

In celebration of this good weather I am skipping a video editing tutorial at school (I would like to learn it, but just too exhausted from rushing through my sales assignment, which is due today. Feel very guilty about letting this opportunity slip by) and stay home instead looking out on trees in bloom. Yay! Might leave early for class and just sit outside for a bit.

Hope everyone is enjoying their springtime!

Back to school

Today, on this glorious sunny day, it's back to school for me. Or more precisely, back to school at 9.30, then running out of the lesson heading over to an interview with a packager for a Friday placement. And then potentially back to class, depending on when I get out. I'm a moron. I feel totally and completely exhausted. I survived last weeks placement fine, but then basically slept all of Saturday and didn't start my assignment till Sunday and it is due this Thursday. Didn't even get half way done. Now instead of taking it easy I swop my free Fridays for work Fridays. Let's just hope that in the long run it will improve my employability and score me a job sooner so I don't have to go mental over the summer. 

Otherwise things have been great. Temperatures are around 20 degrees Celsius. The mornings are still chilly, but then the sun is shining and temps are rising. Lovely! Might sneak out this or the next weekend to Kew Gardens with a friend. That should be lovely.

Right, I better hit the shower and start this madness!

Half way through second placement

Apologies in advance. I will be talking about a placement again. Sad but true, not much else going on in my life right now. So if you are really not interested in what I'm doing at a publisher, feel free to skip this post completely.

For everyone else, this last week I was at an academic publisher out in Basingstoke. When I accepted the placement I looked at a map and figured it wouldn't be that much further than Wimbledon (where I used to work). Took me just over an hour to get to Wimbledon, so clearly going to Basingstoke should be 1 1/2 hours tops. WRONG! Takes just over two hours door to door. Four hours commute every day. I'm beat. Stayed in bed till after 12 today. I felt so tired and just couldn't face the day. But that's all the negative there is to say about this placement!

Now to the positive. Everyone is very welcoming and wanted me to get a real experience of what it's like to work for them. My main contact Steve was very kind and showed me around the office and made introductions. He had read my CV and I mentioned that I would like to see production and rights. So he put me into production the first week and next week I will see rights. He also said that I will be working on real projects and not be used as a 'labourer'. More sweet!

So I wandered off to production to work with Matt, their main electronics guy. I basically helped out on the ebook front, which was really interesting. Got a list with 1000 backlist titles that they want to convert to ebooks and then I was let loose onto their system to chase down old pdf or any other file I could find. Matt had kindly already collected the most recent ones (200) and I found about 600 more. So we were only missing 200 at the end. He told me that those now had to be ordered up in hardcopy, scanned and then converted into PDFs. Was really relieved when I found out that I wasn't going to be the one who is going to scan them. Phew. The next task was to update their database. Basically I went through their most recent titles and added on their database lines and tickboxes that would enable them to check whether ebook files had been ordered and received. All of this doesn't sound really exciting. But I thought it was pretty cool. Plus Matt explained everything nicely and I got to ask a million gazillion questions. He was also so kind to be my interviewee for my thesis plan that I have to write up sometime soon. The last day I spend on the office ipad checking if some of their earlier titles looked ok on the ibook. Overall an amazing week. It thankfully also showed me that there is not only one publisher I could work at and have fun at, but there are plenty!

Next week I will be in rights. Not sure what I will be doing, but I was already told that they have a project for me. So it should be fun. But I'm glad it is only two weeks as the commute is horrible. I got to talk to one of the production girls who seems to be in charge of new hires. She was very excited that I want to work in production and was already starting to plan ahead on how I could fit in. That was really lovely, but I told her that I want to work in London. Darn. That might otherwise have been a brilliant opportunity to cheat myself into a job. Well, at least I'll have a good reference.

This weekend I will be working on an assignment for uni. Urgh. Hate working and studying. Really wanna get it all done and over with and go back to full-time work (never thought I would say that!). Uni is all nice, but I love those days when I can just come home from work and don't have to study or read.

Ok, back to my sales assignment. Need to manipulate figures on excel...

First Placement Finished

I finished my last week at Simon and Schuster on Friday. To be honest I did not want to leave. I wanted them to scream 'Don't go, we'll hire you!'. Of course that didn't happen. Not that the people I worked with wouldn't want to do it. But I guess they don't really have any say in who gets hired anyway.

But I left in good spirits. Everyone had something nice and encouraging to say. I left my email with a few people who promised to contact me if something came up, added Facebook friends and now follow people on twitter. So who knows what the future holds.

I'm going to start my next placement on Monday with MacMillan Publishing Solutions. That will be a whole other beast to conquer. Not too excited about the trips to Basingstoke (though it does give me lots of reading time), but I hope the experience is worth it. I guess this also means I will have to update my CV. But let's leave that till later.

I will leave you with a photo of all the manga I was given this week. I quietly enquired whether I could take a few. Sarah (who's in charge of everything to do with manga) got really excited about that, because let's face it no one had ever asked before, and started piling them up. Giving me tips which ones were good and fun. She herself does not read any, but she knows anyway for her job. After plenty of laughter, that I successfully kept quiet about my love for manga, it was decided that I should get more and was given the back catalogue to order all the ones I wanted to read. I tried to not get over-excited and limited myself to ten. They will be sent to my house. Score!

Thinking of Japan

Earthquake, tsunami and now a volcano eruption. Japan just doesn't seem to be able to catch a break.

I don't think I need to repeat any of the news or pictures here. I know I don't know anyone in Japan nor have I ever set foot on any of its islands. But nonetheless all the pictures reaching us make me sick. Feel so bad for all the people affected in any way by this disaster.

I cannot seem to get myself away from the computer and keep updating my feeds. I know that's bad, but just can't help it. My bf thinks I am nuts. He mentioned that surely now I would postpone any plans I had to go visit soon. But now I want to visit even more. Crazy, no? Makes me wanna book a flight right now. 

Thinking of everyone over in Japan. Be safe.

Weekend sushi

Last weekend we made it out of the house and went to the Southbank. I forgot to post about it but I have picture proof!

 The sushi place had a fish tank right next to our table. Fresh sushi anyone?

 Edamame beans with chilli sauce.

 More fish. They were too cute.

 Southbank.

And some nice beer in the evening.

Otherwise it was a very lazy weekend and now it's back to the placement. Still enjoying that. Though today it was really quiet. The nice thing is I have access to the manuscript database. So I started reading one of their new titles. Can totally live with not having anything to do when there is a whole database to read!

One week of placement survived!

So I started my work placement on Monday. The week went by in a whirlwind. I'm interning in the sales team and had to collect a ton of sales kits. I also filed, and printed and threw out old jackets and information (that one made me a bit nervous as I threw out more than 10 big garbage bags of stuff). I also helped out the publicity team by translating a document for them. Weren't they lucky they had a German in the office!

Nothing too exciting happened in the week. I enjoyed the work though. Everyone was extremely nice. I was a bit worried about lunch time and if I had to sit all by myself. But so far I got lucky and there were always nice people in the kitchen who sat with me. Was fun to listen in to all the conversations going on.

Of course, one of the things I enjoy most are the books. The office is filled with them! So far I have been too chicken to ask whether I could take some with me. Gotta change that next week. The sales team is responsible for all of their own books but also for the books of some other publishers. My favourite one being a manga publisher. About half of all the mangas that make it to the UK will go through that office. Isn't that cool?!? I filed and printed away information on all of those coming out in the summer. I didn't get to read them, but still, I love working with them. Hoping I can sneak some freebies out of the office.

Next week one of the girls I'm working with will be on holiday. Hoping for some good work during that week then. And figured the week after I will ask whether I could sit in in some meetings and get to look at some other things too. Mainly interested in having a look at their production department and what they are doing. The whole company is working from the same floor. So I already know where they are, just have to approach them.

So far I'm really positive about this placement. Now just going to enjoy my weekend and the bliss of doing nothing...

What would you do with £350?

Send a camera to space? That's what these guys did. Amazing! I wanna send stuff to space now. Gotta get some cute things to put into a styrofoam box and off it goes!

Trip to Japanese class

I kinda felt bored taking the bus from university to my Japanese class and then from class back home. So I amused myself by taking pictures out of the windows. Not the best idea at night. Most of them are horrible, but some turned out ok. Sharing with you random pictures taking of Central London:

King's Cross Underground entrance.

Scala bar/concert venue.

Random itsu I sometimes eat dinner at before class.

Near Warren Street Station.

Again, Warren Street.

Now I'm exhausted and it's bed time. Everyone have a good night!

It's all about the hair

So bf wanted a shave this weekend. In this household it is my job to shave his head every one or two months. For some reason he trusts me not to cut him up. Which is harder than it sounds. He has an itchy scalp and scratches himself bloody. So there are a lot of old wounds that are just waiting to be cut open again by me. So far I've done well. But cutting his hair reminded me that I had some dye there. So I made him dye mine. Hate doing that by myself. In my university days I would always get one of my friends to dye mine and then dye hers in return. We had little hair dying parties at each others places. Usually invited over a couple of other friends as well and boozed it up a bit.

Anyway I had bought a new brand that was supposed to only soak in for ten minutes. I figured since I do this a lot, might be a good idea to limit exposure time. That was so not a good idea. First of all, the colourant was very liquidy and dripped all over our carpet (don't really care about that, the carpet is past it's lifetime anyway). But worst of all it started to sting really bad. I started to sneeze from the chemicals and my scalp started to burn. Not badly but I never had that before with any other colour. I guess only ten minutes exposure time means about three times the amount of chemicals then the other colourants. Was I glad when those ten minutes were finally over! Next time I will switch back to my normal colour. Yeah, and the colour didn't turn out that well either. Especially in the front where all my grey hair accumulates the colour is very uneven. Now I understand that the grey will always look a bit lighter than the rest of the hair, but this is a really big difference and the grey hair looks almost orange. I hope that will change with time. So yeah, big fail. Will fix it next months.

So the next day I figured while I'm ruining my hair I might as well go to the hairdresser. And a cheap one at that. Paid £10 for a cut. I was in and out in about 15 minutes. Despite expectations the cut looks really good!

I noticed that from the side the hair colour looks really good. Hmm, so maybe it's just the front that's ruined. Might have to start walking sideways now and not talk to people face to face. But I do love the cut. Sooo much shorter than before. Maybe a bit early as it is still cold outside. Will leave you with that. Off to the shower to try to get the orange out a bit more.