I got tagged to do this on facebook but I thought I'd post it here as well. Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.

Your Artist: 3 Doors Down
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Tomorrow is voting day for the EU elections on the UK! Normally these elections have a relatively low turn out but I would urge all people registered to vote to go. It'll take a few minutes and polling stations are open from 7 am to 10 at night in most places! I don't care who you vote for (well I do, but I respect your right to vote for them!) just get out and vote!

Here are links to the 3 main parties European Election promises:

• Lib Dems


• Labour


• Conservatives (they appear not to have a specific site)
  

Last weekend I took a trip to Valladolid in Spain with Fiona to visit my friend Christopher. We had a lovely time :) Whilst it was raining and cold here we sat about in the hot sunshine in spain drinking far to much coffee, red wine and gin and tonic! Valladolid is very beautiful, espicially the river which Fiona and I had to walk along from out hotel to get into town. I wished there as a boat tour! We also saw the unfinished Cathedral and the Oreintal museum that had some fantastic pieces of art. We tried hot chocolate you could stand your spoon in (wait til the photographs!) and many other treats.

So here is what I did yesterday in Ottawa!

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Currently waiting in Ottawa train station. I am shocked by how completly dead it is, does nobody take the train in Canada? I mean I know it's a huge old country but Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec city - all of these places are not that far from each other by rail and I'd just expect more movement between them!

Got a long old wait, at least internet access is still free :)

So I'm in a cold rainy Ottawa and I went out to the agriculture museum. I saw the dairy farm there and I was a bit shocked by the fact that very young calves weren't with their mothers, and I read they separated them after 48 hours and then they are just kept in these pens by themselves. This and the general conditions of the animals upset me a bit and when I got back I thought I'd have a look at organic milk and see if it was better.

And yes, organic milk standards dictate that calves have to at least be kept in groups and that if possible should be fed maternally for 3 months. But then I was also reading about how the soil association was now advocating that male dairy cows should not be shot at birth. I didn't actually know that happened! I knew they killed male chicks and so I try to get free range eggs preferably from somebody in the villiage.

I always say I am a vegetarian because I don't believe in unnecessary death. Well how can I keep consuming dairy products if that's what happens?

(Please don't think I'm trying to convert any of you I'm just explaining my personal choice and the motivations behind it!)

So here's an update on the day before yesterday and yesterday.

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Today I am transfering to Ottawa by train. Didn't realise how fart outside the city the train station was though...

So yesterday I did a little tour of downtown and went to the museum of fine arts.

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Woke up at like 5 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Anyway here's the details of my third full day in Montreal.

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And now, I should do some work.

So here's days 1 and 2 in Montreal!
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The suitcase is packed, the flight socks are on and the level of nerves is set to high. I'm off to Canada :)

I'm bringing my netbook and in theory should be able to connect to the internet at the hotel. So hopefully I'll update y'all later!

I'm so amused by the sex section of my french phrasebook that includes such gems as "faster!" "harder" "easy tiger!" and "Don't worry I'll do it myself!"

I think my favourite though is the list at the end. "That was amazing!" "That was fantastic!" "That was...weird..."

Man, I forgot to print all the stuff off for my holiday and so I went to uni to do it today and the network was down! Luckily I have managed to istall my housemates printer. Have decided to take the coach down because it'll drop me off straight at T5 but takes about the same amount of time and costs about the same.

The new postal rates came into affect today. I'm annoyed because I son't mind paying 1 or 2p extra on sending first and second class post but they put the cost of sending postcards and mail within Europe up by 6p and worldwide by 4p. I do this Postcrossing thing and it's going to really put up the cost! I think Europe has gone up because so many countries are in Europe now and considering that includes Russia, you could have mail travelling a greater distance than to get to Africa or the Middle East.

Yesterday went to London and met up with Sian to see the matinee preformance of hairspray. It was fantastic, and I've been singing "Hey Mama welcome to the Sixties!" all day! I was happy because the walk on cover was playign Tracey, and I prefer her from the main actress in the role.

In other news, I bought hair dye on impulse (it was on sale). This means I will be dying my hair black again...cause I've paid for it and now I've got to use it! I sort of wish I'd taken a moment to consider the other colours though.

I'm trying to decide whether getting a netbook (a device I only really discovered last week) or not. I was saying how I would quite like a laptop so that I could go do small bits of work in cafes if I wanted to, and access internet when I am away from home, and then I discovered that you could do that with a netbook and it'd cost alot less.

But still, need to decide if it'd be a worthwhile investment or not! Has anyone got one?

On Friday I did something completly against my own beliefs. I told somebody I wasn't voting in the SU elections because I felt they didn't really care about postgraduates. This is true, but that's beside the point. I shouldn't be complaining that they don't care about postgrads, I should have bothered to look up the candidates who actualyl had policies that would help us out and voted for them! When people tell me they aren't going to vote in a general election because all the parties are the same or something similar I normally go nuts and tell them that with a little research on issues they could probably find a party that suited them, and if they don't vote they don't have a right to complain about anything.

So for the next year I can't complain about the student union :p If I wern't incredibly busy I maybe I should actually run for something, I assume I'd have to get myself onto the PGSA comittee for next year and then I might have a chance at postgrad rep on the actual council. Mind I wouldn't be just a puppet, I'd probably make the vice chancellor's and pro-vice chancellor's lives hell until they did something or fired me. Afterall, I love being cheeky to figures of authority.

Sian and I spent Thursday and Friday in London and had a very lovely time. The hotel we were staying in was rubbish (holes in the sheets, no proper shower, tiny bathroom, peeling wallpaper ect), but then it was cheap and only 2 minutes from the theatre where we went to see Wicked. Which rocked, I really enjoyed it :). The guy playing Fiyero (Oliver Tompsett) looked so much like Nathan Fillion it was really quite distracting. I didn't notice it til the second half when he donned tight pants as part of his captain's uniform! The show got a standing ovation actually.

That's the second musical I've seen, next I want to see Hairspray!

The next day we went over to the Natural History Museum, primarily to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. Sian also wanted to see the Darwin exhibition. I loved the wildlife photographer of the year exhibit, so many of the images were just breathtaking from an artistic point of view and then you read about the effort that went into taking them and I just thought I could never have that kind of patience!

I went up to the mineral section and basically just found a bunch of minerals I now want pretty pretty shiney necklaces and earrings made of! In fact I'm bidding on malachite ones on ebay right now..

Met Chris for dinner at Pizza Express, and now I am going to force him company come and give a talk at Sutton Bonington Graduate Centre!

Lucie and I spent a hilarious hour trying to put my exercise bike together. She did figure out how the two tension cables were supposed to connect, which is where I had given up. There were these two foam covers for the handle bar that didn't really fit but Lucie was determined to get them on so ended up lubricating the handlebars with baby oil. Except then we got all oilly and couldn't get a grip. And then what we'd managed to get on was pretty much stuck on so I just cut it off.

Eventually we got it all together and discovered...it still didn't work properly. There is no resistance, indicating that the tension cable must have come undone after we put it all together. We gave up went to Tesco and consumed Cadbury's creme eggs. Believe you me we burnt enough calories atempting to assemble the thing!

With all the snow, I wasn't able to get out and go for a run. So I bought a cheap exercise bike off tesco direct. It said assembly was required but I sort of thought the thing would mostly just slot together.

OMG it has totally defeated me and is lying in pieces by my mirror. There are only unclear diagrams to go by. There is this bit where I have to connect to tension cables and it is physically impossible to do by myself, the spring is really strong and awkward abd there are not words to describe the IMPOSSIBILITY. Lucie has gone to Prague so no help there.

Luckily I text rolleson who has volenteered to come over Saturday to help me complete it. Which is good because otherwise several members of Tesco would turn up murdered with various parts of a disassembled exercise bike.