Just a few plums short...

Early class today, and I could not get to sleep last night. At least that's the last early class! Of course, all of my exams are early too... figures. But, in good news, my second class today was called off due to me being the only one who showed up and really not needing a review : )

So I did laundry. How terribly exciting. But at least it didn't rain. I hate doing laundry in the rain. It was really sunny and nice all day. Despite the huge ominous cloud. Figure that one out. The dryer worked today and everything. Huzzah. So, having finished this business early, I took a very long nap. And finished my five chapters for the day. The latter actually instigated the former...

Got a letter from grandma today - the first one of this term : ) In it she revealed her Scrabble secrets to me! Ahahaha!

hem.

So classes are over now, and I just have to wait for exams. Yippee. The rest of the day was spent in frivolity, which is how I intend to spend my weekend as well. It's a good life.

i have moonlight densetsu stuck in my head... and i am not surprised

So I definitely went to bed around 5 AM last night. But then I only slept until ten thirty this morning... so go figure. Last night (or very early this morning) Sophie, Phil, and I got to talking and decided we were going to go out for ice cream and shopping and such things today. Then we woke up and it was thunderstorming, so we didn't.

This morning I did a lot of lounging around because of all the rain. Got a lot of reading done in that accursed book. When the rain cleared away in the afternoon and it was brilliantly sunny, I lugged my computer out to the library and got a good bit of writing done. Unfortunately, the library was pretty packed, so I do not think i'll be doing that again until after exams.

Hmm... for having passed a lot of time I don't seem to have done much. Yet here we are at 11 o clock at night... when did that happen. Clearly I exist in the midst of a time flux.

It was a good day!

So, today's class was Oulipo. And now it is done - no more Oulipo ever. I'm ok with that - Oulipo's hard! That being said, we got our papers back today. So far that's the only class that's returned them. So, when I left class I hit a comp lab to see if the packages had arrived yet.

They had! Both of them! So I stopped at the post room first and picked up my packages, and then went to the lit office to pick up my paper, and dragged all of it back to look at.

I got a 74 on my paper. For those of you who don't know, that's a First. With bells on. The prof included comments such as "Pure genius" and "brilliant" annnnd now my head is the size of a house, but lets face it, I'm freaking awesome.

As for the packages! Contained therein were my contacts, hearing aids, scarf, a shirt, and some good wholesome American food: soup, pasta and macaroni and cheese! yay ^.^

Let's see... what else. Finished my daily 5 chapters in Life: A User's Manual. Oh I remember now - of interest to Steph (my sister) and Kai and possibly Steph (my friend), Nikolodean has announced that the new episodes of Avatar will begin July 14 th I believe. There is an awesome trailer at avatarspirit.net.... and yes, I am an enormous dork.

Further! I took video of campus! The following is a recreation of what I saw the first day, the famous bike path that stops in the middle of nowhere, and then a look at the route I would take next time I was faced with 50 pounds of luggage:

I've never posted video before so I hope it turns out all right. I promise that cut on my lip is not as bad as it looks.

So, between the package and the paper, this was just an awesome day. Oh, plus I made a stuffed pepper for dinner. yummmm. And tomorrow I can have American food.

That's all for now!

Sunshowers

This morning it was absolutely pouring rain. Luckily by the time I woke up, it was afternoon and the sun was out : ) I had lunch and then took a walk, but after about an hour the rain was back. Of course the sun was still around too. So, I read my five chapters for the day, and then actually sat down and wrote the script for the first issue of True Neutral. It felt really good to be writing again, and the script went very quickly. I hope it's ok.

Vicki and I made nachos for dinner, and we ate with Sophie and Phil, which means fun conversations were had : )

Annnd... that's actually all I did today. I know it doesn't look like much, but it took up quite a bit of time : P

Tomorrow: Oulipo. And that is all.

Say, does the evil organization give you Sundays off?

So, for myth lecture today we were back to the same professor we had in January. Of course, only four of us showed up for the lecture total, and what's more, the administration had begun dismantling the classroom: the projector screen was spread across the front tables. Professer Cardew tried to get it to come down on the wall for a while before realizing this : P

More people showed up for the 202 lecture at 10, but the lecturer did not, so we all dispersed. And now I am done with Monday classes forever! So now Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are all free until exams start. I wonder if I should be more nervous about exams... everyone else seems to be. Vicki has said she's confiscating the speaker system in the kitchen starting May 10th, when exams start for the entire university. I'm all for it. The thing's attached to a subwoofer, so the sound really carries through the walls and she shares a wall with the kitchen.

Went grocery shopping with Vicki and Lucy today. Vicki and I bought a nacho kit to share sometime. Other than that, no particularly exciting purchases. I read a bit more in Life: A User's Manual, but that book is really hard to get through. On the bright side, it's keeping me from tearing through my novels. On the down side, I'd much rather watch old episodes of Sailor Moon than read it : P

Well that's it for today. Tomorrow... who knows...

Mass, archery, and not much else

Today was a nice day - in the 60s, sunny, and raining at the same time : P

I went to Mass today, and they gave us lunch! yay! Ran into Miguel and Chiara there, as well as Annie - she's a Roman Catholic, but this is the first time she's been to Mass at the chaiplancy. So I've gone from knowing no one to knowing three people.

After Mass I wandered about campus enjoying the sun. And the rain. Then it was back to the room for some reading before archery. manbeast forgot about archery today, so when I went to get him he had just started cooking dinner and he asked me to wait for him. So we were about an hour late for archery. I don't mind that so much, but I do mind that I then had to watch him eat. Remember the scene from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast doesn't know how to use a spoon? A lot like that, yeah.

Anyway, it would appear that taking a month off has completely wrecked my shot : P Hopefully next weekend will be better because I was all over the place tonight. I didn't go to Top Bar after because I was feeling a bit run down for some reason, so I just came back to the room for some more recreational reading (ie, webcomics)

And that's about all.

When have you ever seen the captain do any rowing?

Today was absolutely beautiful - perfect for wandering around Colchester. Which is what manbeast, his 16 year old brother boybeast, Laura, Mike, and I did today, so that's good.

We left University around one despite the best efforts of Mike and I to get people moving. We ate a late lunch in Colchester. It's lucky I know my way around that town already because no one else did - and manbeast and Laura have been here since September.

We ate at the Wimpy Burger, despite Mike's lobbying for something a bit classier. Cheaper won out. I'm not too impressed with the Wimpy Burger, but hey, food is food.

After lunch we went to Castle Park. Just about everything is blooming now! It's so pretty and colorful. Mike gardens so he was able to tell us what flowers were what.





These are the BIGGEST tulips I have ever seen. They are mutants. Most of the tulips are normal sized, but these are overachievers.



Castle Park has lots of pretty flower patterns. And palm trees for some reason. Wishful thinking, Britain.



This is the Roman wall behind Colchester Castle. I believe it used to be the city wall... but I'm not certain. But man when those Romans built things, they were serious about it.



Ok, here's the group! From left to right is Laura, Mike, boybeast, and manbeast. Further profiles to follow. But first!



Oh look, ducks in a pond.



Oh look, boats in a pond! We rented paddle boats : ) That's manbeast and Mike in a boat. boybeast had his own, and Laura and I shared. Quickly becoming adept at the paddle system, we then declared outselves admiral of the fleet. No one argued. Possibly because they were on the other side of the pond at the time...



We chased off the enemy fleet! ... er... that is, flock.



The admiral of the ducky pirates hides his head in shame.



Unfortunately, heavy casualties were taken in our battle with those fowl pirates (!), and Captain Mike and manbeast's boat sprang a leak! We headed for shore and leapt to safety before the two could get completely soaked.



Look, a castle. and... er, three random people.



Colchester castle actually used to have another floor on top. It got lopped off and they added a dome. Improvement? I don't think so.



Here's the old temple foundations.



There is a tree growing on the roof. I do not know why.



Ok, so here is boybeast. And, me for some reason.... they said get in the picture so I did. But really, boybeast and I did not get along. His real name is Steven. He's 16 years old. He tags along with manbeast because manbeast buys him alcohol. The only reason he was with us today was because he thought he might get a drink out of it. He smokes pretty much constantly and also actually bought some drugs off of someone at some point. He spent the whole day complaining about how he wanted to sit down and have a beer. He was actually whining about it, like a small child. "I don't waaaanna go in a castle, i want a drink!" Ugh. I won't go into detail, but by the end of the day we were all pretty much disgusted with him.



This is Admiral Laura! She's a creative writing major specializing in fantasy ^.^ We got along swimmingly. She's also the only one who managed to wear this helmet and still be able to see. Woo. Oh by the way, it's a Norman helmet, and the chain isn't part of the original design. It's just to keep people from stealing it (the other end is attached to a wall). Did I mention we're inside the castle in the museum? Because we are.



Here's manbeast. You already know all about him : P

Mike did not put on the helmet. Or rather he did, but I was not quick enough with the camera. He is far too sophisticated to be caught doing something like that on film anyway : P The story with Mike is, he and manbeast have been best friends since high school. I suspect Mike is from that upper class I keep hearing about. He is very well spoken and polite. He was somewhat appalled at the University. Turns out Essex is well known for being a party school, but he couldn't believe the things that go on around here (like... a 16 year old being able to purchase drugs, for example). I was able to wholly sympathize with him and we got on quite well. He goes to Canterbury University and invited me to come visit in June, which sounds like lots of fun. Canterbury, for the record, is not a party school >.<

We stayed in the museum until it closed around 5 and then hung around the park a bit more.



That's St. James, I believe. I could be wrong. But coming from this angle, with the gates and the old church, Colchester just looked like a really old town. We wandered about a bit more before going back to university and trying to find a place to eat. The only places open were SX Express and the SU bar. We didn't want to eat at the Express because most of us had had burgers for lunch, and we were avoiding the SU bar because we knew if we went in there boybeast would start drinking and then we'd have to deal with him. So we went back to manbeast's room and ordered Chinese, and watched this old British comedy called Fawlty Towers which, despite being a bit dated, is really funny.

The Chinese food was pretty good, but took about an hour to get there, so not something I'd be doing again. I had chicken chow mein, which I've never had before, and was pleased : P We continued watching funny British people until about midnight, and dispersed.

And now it's two AM! Gosh!