Diving into third year

I can now safely say that I do not recommend taking on too many extracurricular responsibilities in third year Biochemistry (or any other biomolecular science while you’re at it), and definitely not naïvely taking on the role of Treasurer in two societies at once; admittedly it has been a hoot, but not so much for me. Extracting money and dealing with random payments and banks for a grand total of about 150 members across the GU Karate Club and the Kelvin Ensemble can be most vexing at times and isn’t made any simpler by having cheques for both accounts. I do admit to having used the wrong cheque at one point to pay for our karate licences, nearly giving me a heart attack when I found out what I had done. The amount off deadlines with tournaments, concerts, fundraising events and coursework is excruciating; I often feel like an amateur surfer faced by a huge wave. Then again, I do think that my time-management is improving, so I’ve that going for me. I hope that I can last a while longer until the exams start in December.
 
Over this term I have had considerably better success in karate – I managed to come first in kata in the junior category of the Scottish JKA competition (on November 9th) and hope for good results in this Saturday’s SSS team competition too. I now try to attend three trainings a week, which sometimes doesn’t work out. The fourth Tuesday training I could theoretically go to is spent rehearsing for our concert with the Kelvin Ensmeble due this Sunday – we’re playing Brahms 2, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, and parts of Grieg’s Peer Gynt.
 
I have also made a huge step forward in perfecting my cooking skills. I can now make a burger worth any carnivore’s pride and can make pitiful attempts at home-baked sourdough bread. The burger is great if I do say so myself, especially with my own home-made burger sauce and good Scottish cheddar. The bread is another story altogether. It took me much longer to create the starter than I had first anticipated, altogether 2 weeks. At the start it smelled really bad, and by that I mean terrible. And now that I do finally have the starter nailed, the bread keeps trying to obey Murphy’s law no matter what recipe I follow or what tweaks I make. I always start out with a nice lovely ball of thick stretchy dough finishing the autolysis step; then I leave it to rise overnight and lo and behold, nothing at all happens. I put the bad boy in the oven on very low heat after adding more flour – just for a few hours. The tough and nicely stringy dough amazingly enough does inflate, but also liquefies, and that to such an extent that no amount of flour I surround it with saves my towel from the inevitable sticky mess. I try to bake the lump, which consistently melts into a round and low dollop. It does rise a bit and is edible, but only once have I actually managed to bake the bread so that there are no bubbles so large that they would cover a third of the inside of a slice. But as I always tell myself – next time will work for sure!