Saturday 30th January

I can't believe it's the 30th already. It's like every year speeds by faster and faster. Anyhow today has started off really really well - I had a great chat with Nina, who was filling me in on all the details about Lucy's baby which arrived on Friday evening. Sounds all very traumatic, but all is well, which is a huge relief. And he's going to be called Finlay! Fabulous Scottish name there, way to go guys!
And.. yes, I can now confirm that I actually have passed Latin. The mark is up there on Websurf, which is where they put all of your recorded marks and stuff, so I'm subtly chuffed with myself. I'm never going to be any good at it, but with a little effort and so on, I can just about translate a sentence or two until I finally get to the point where I'm managing the odd passage - but who ever would have thought a woman of my age would be able to do this? Just goes to show sometimes you can really suprise yourself. It's a mute (moot?) point as to whether mentally I'm constantly saying to myself you shouldn't be able to do this really, and hence creating the 'difficulty' with it mentally so to speak, but the fact of the matter is I got there and got a passing grade. Perhaps this means that I can be a bit more confident about it, and the internal debate about whether I should or should not be able to do it will slacken off, and I will get better at it. From what I hear from my classmates, it's got really really tough this term. Or rather as I should say, semester - everything is so American these days. Why we have to have semesters I'll never know.
Anyhow, yesterday I reamed Van Gennep's Rites of Passage - fabulous book this. I remember it so well from when I was studying Anthropology. It's one of those books that you pick up and read, and then say Yes, I knew this, I just didn't have the labels for it. You know how sometimes you come across things that just feel so incredibly right that you've somehow known them all along? Anyhow Rites of Passage is one of those books. I've been reading it for my upcoming presentation on Death and Liminality for Constructing Faith. This is based upon St Augustine's On the Care to be had for the Dead, which sounds ghastly, but actually isn't.
So anyhow at some point I should really go and get dressed (ok, I've been watching Football Focus) and get myself off down to the supermarket then I can come back and do some more reading... it's a neverending circle of read this, do that, read that, do this. But that's what masters are all about I guess. It's quite a nice day out, definitely rather chilly, but most of the snow has gone -we had a light dusting of the stuff yesterday. I'm over snow. Very nice, but I'm done with it now, and I'd like a few crocus - well, that's not going to happen for a few more weeks. Remember you're in Scotland now girl.

Thursday 28th January

Tired again, but mainly because my sleep pattern is shot to hell!!! I keep being woken up by birds sounding off at the oddest of times - I think they're clustering around the lamps in the street and getting mixed up as to when they should be asleep too. Anyhow...
I've been doing the usual battle with the library, but had a fab weekend last week - had an unexpected lunch with Helen and Adam, who were escaping from the work to install a new bathroom. That was just lovely, and also the weekend was brightened by Kay joining FB, Kay being an old friend from my first time round in Glasgow.
Then it was back to trying to get the reading done for my various classes. On top of this is now the added pressure of trying to get some reading done for my dissertation proposal. Although this doesn't have to be actually written until next year, the proposal for it has to be done this term - and a presentation on that proposal done too. I've decided that I'm going to write on Miracles, but I'm not 100% decided on exactly when my miracles will be - should I go for the later Gaul period when there's a greater amount of source material available, or should I stick with my love for the antique period when frankly there are fewer accounts. I may be able to make more out of those fewer, less 'pr' orientated accounts, whereas.. I dunno. It's all very up in the air at the moment, and that's another reason why I need to do more reading. I have a presentation to get organised too, well frankly, two of them, but one is in a couple of weeks whereas the other's still a month off or so. I've been searching out and downloading images for the handout, got some lovely stuff of St Augustine of Hippo's tomb and relics at Pavia. I went to a seminar on relics too, the Exeter collection done by Professor Smith. She gave us some amazing slides of what's actually inside the reliquaries - these are the caskets and 'pouches' that the relics are stored inside. Little packets of what - dust, bones, teeth, all sorts of stuff. She made a good case for her suggestion that the old English/Anglo Saxon relic list contained suggestions of the 'ceremony' held for Edward & Edith Swansneck when they visited the Bishop, Leofric, at Exeter. It's a bit too long to go into here, but it was very interesting.
So it's basically been rush, library, rush, reading, rush, class etc for most of this week. People around me are getting sick - odd bugs popping up here there and everywhere I think is more about people not getting enough sleep/eating properly than actually being sick. It's too early in term for that, but its the right time of the year for the flu bugs to start striking! Yikes. I feel fine though, apart from being slightly tired. Maybe I'm supposed to be feeling ill from all the work? Dunno, that's a thought.
Still no work either. This is becoming distressing. When I came up here, part of the reason was I thought that I'd be able to get some part time work reasonably easily, but so far, nothing. Mind you half the reason for that is that I don't have the time to go and look!!! Maybe when summer gets here. Oh god, there's an awful thought. Ah well I'm off to bed - I can at least close my eyes and pretend that I'm dozing, and one of these days, I might actually drop off.

Tuesday 19th January.

Well having finished one load of reading another dawns, but somehow I'm not getting down to it today. I really must get started. As it is, I've done nothing but play those stupid games on FB, which makes me think maybe it's time to de-install them. But then what would I do when I'm bored and need distraction? Part of my brain is saying - that's when you change the book you're reading to another book you need to read. Oh well.
I have also got to go shopping and the sky is looking ominous, so probably something I'd best get done quickly. A breath of fresh air, a quick blast round the supermarket, back, and open the books. Today's task is Gender, a little light library searching - ha, fine task that is. I ordered 4 or so books the other day, and by yesterday I had an email to say they were ready to be collected. So after class I go to pick them up, to discover that they had disappeared from the 'hold' shelf. Perhaps they've been re-shelved, the girl says, why don't you go and have a look? Now this is very irritating, it takes a good deal of time to go and do this, but nevertheless I haul myself up to the 10th floor (thank God for lifts) search and find nothing. Down to 6, search, find one book. Aha, this makes me think, someone is in the process of reshelving my damn reserved books. As they've done that someone has come along - the odds being that this someone is one of my fellow course members - and has sprung on the book with great glee, thinking they've found something at last, and they'll just nip off with it. By the time I got downstairs to the desk one of my poor fellow students had arrived at the check out desk with one of my hold books and had had the sad news broken to him that alas no he can't have the book, it's on reserve for someone else. So out of my four books, I've got two of them, but am still missing two, which I can only hope turn up today when the library staff start to search for them. The whole thing has been a total pain in the neck - when your 'hold' email arrives, you expect to drift casually in, present your matric card and drift casually out, clutching your books. You don't expect to spend 45 minutes searching for the bloody things, missing Lord knows how many buses home in the meantime, becoming to tired and irritated to go to the supermarket, to wake up with no bread for toast the next day... Grr. Grr indeed. No wonder I'm not inclined to open a bloody book this morning.

17th January

I'm just taking a break from my reading - lots of stuff about Visigoths! Actually less about Goths of any variety than about the Arian controversy, which will be part of the seminar on Monday. It's all very interesting. I picked up my marked database exercise quite late on Friday, and it got a very good mark! I was dead chuffed.
Apart from the reading, I've been tidying up and doing loads of washing - you know that feeling that you're running the boiler at breakneck pace, and one more little thing will be the straw that broke the camels back. So I let the washing pile up a bit, and now I'm trying to catch up on it. I have to add that there's no possibility of my running out of clean clothes, even if I have to take to layering for a day or so!! But now I have the temptation of ultra clean jumpers for Monday which is always a secret thrill. You know the temptation of clothes that are not only clean, but were washed yesterday. Just so much more tempting than the jumper that's sitting there and has been clean for a week or so. It's the scent of the fabric conditioner I guess.
So what else have I been up to - nothing I was about to say but actually I've been running up a few new bookmarks, hoping to catch the Valentine market. I had some nice Swarovski hearts left over from before Christmas, so I've beaded them up - I've got some new glass hearts coming from America, where I buy quite a bit of my stock. These aren't crystal, but blown glass, which I'm hoping will catch a bit of attention. I only did six, but I'm going to put a few more together tomorrow, and hey presto, I will have Valentine stock. Whether it will sell or not lord only knows, but heart type bookmarks will actually sell throughout the year, so it's not a problem.
But apart from this it's been Goths and the Arian controversy all day. And alas, tomorrow must also be Goths and Arians, no doubt with a chunk of some additional secondary source material chucked in for good luck. This seminar is actually all about "Intuiting Gods", and I've yet to actually make sense of this in terms of the Arians. However - and here we go, it could well be something to do with Syncretism, which it turns out is about including symbols and facets of other religious beliefs into a newer form of religious belief. Although I've not yet finished this particular book, my guess is that some people believe this happens, and other's don't, which accounts for the title being Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism. Ulfila - a Goth bishop, not a form of plaster for walls, apparently included some facets of neo-Platonism in his theology, although I don't know much about Platonism, let alone neo-platonic thought. It's an entirely new field of knowledge every day basically and can I master enough of it not not make a fool of myself? I rather suspect that Platonism is one area where one should simply admit ignorance, although I'm pretty sure it's something to do with perfect forms now I've said that, and old Ulf was a sort of semi Arian, concerned about the substance of God (both father and son, the holy ghost didn't get a look in where Ulf was concerned.) So maybe I do know a bit more about this than I thought I did, or maybe I've already absorbed enough reading today to not make a fool of myself. What a life eh?
Just a quick ps here, you should see what the spellcheck has just made of this!!!!

Tuesday the what.. oh yes the 12th January

I'm off to bed in five minutes, so just time for a quick blog before bedtime. You'll have to excuse any spelling mistakes!
It's been a busy day, spent mostly in the library. Bitingly cold up here too, when I was walking home from the bus stop I got caught by this blast outside the house, took me about two hours to warm up from it. Most of the snow's gone for now, but I hear there's more due for tomorrow, and Jo was telling me earlier it was already falling in Wiltshire. Brr!
I found all but one book in the library for next week - I think this must be something of a record. I can't honestly say I remember this ever happening before! Anyhow I'm spending tomorrow wrapped up at home, and faithfully doing my reading. I certainly have enough of it. Ambrose of Milan I think, and I have to tackle a book called Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism. No, right now I have no idea what syncretism is, but if you're really, really lucky I might be able to tell you by tomorrow.

Monday 11th January

Back to uni today! I felt astonishingly ready for it, quite desperate to be out and about, and I have to say that Constructing Faith didn't let me down. This course has always been right up there among my number one choices of the year, and it's about the ways and networks that established the Christian faith in, by and large, Western Europe. We get a seminar every week, and it'll be quite tough work because - gulp, there's only three of us. This is way better than it could have been, at one point it was very possibly just going to be me. Although I'm not sure it would have run, if that had been the case. Marks are on an essay, and a seminar presentation. I can tell you already the odds are that my presentation and essay will be, in some way or another, on death. The seminar is topic-ed as "Death: Body, soul and liminality", and one of the big source books is van Gennep's Rites of Passage - one of my all time fave books from Anthropology. But I have to say running this a close second is a seminar on Ritual, featuring Clifford Geertz wonderful Interpretation of Cultures, which again makes my top ten anthropology texts. And again, just how could anyone resist a source list which includes a book by a P Barber, called Vampires, Burial and Death. I have to say that in my experience such thrilling titles don't often lead to what one might call riveting bed time reading, but I'm always ready to be surprised. I should point out that these seminars have a particular set text such as a letter from Ambrose of Milan, or Augustine of Hippo, which one then has to discuss in light of the secondary reading, such as Interpretation of Cultures, or the Rites of Passage. The only occasion I've ever come across a really lurid historical incident in the most theatrical interpretation of the word are the tales of the Vikings as descended to us in the Sagas. But as I said I'm always willing to be surprised.
Anyhow I have to say my participation in the introductory meeting was somewhat muted, owing to being so careless as to not check my email late enough to pick up on an email sent to inform us that the venue had changed. I made it to the initial venue in plenty of time, found it deserted with nobody there, but then thought, well I'm just down the road I'll nip into medieval history and see if there are any notices etc. Dr Roach had kindly left the door open to the Mckechnie room, and hey presto there I was in the right place, if not exactly at the spot on right time.
After all this, I went along to the Classics dept to pick up my Latin marks, but they hadn't been returned to the secretary's office having been taken to the class this morning. I'm not doing Latin this term, so I didn't go to the class, but I dare say they'll make it to me at some point, and even if not, I'll get a mark from the Websurf system. As I've said before, I'm not too frazzled by all this, as if I do by some miracle manage to pass it, it'll be by the barest minimum, and purely down to pity on the part of the examiners.
Having done all this, when I came back through town I started the annual battle of what do I get for Jo's birthday this year? It's unfortunately close to Christmas, and when we were children she used to get so upset about it that these days I always try to get something special. Hopefully she'll be very pleased with this year's effort - I shan't say what I'm getting/have got, because although I think it's unlikely she'll read this, there's always an off chance. Let's just say things are in hand. I did manage to get a particularly attractive little floral style paper bag to put it all in - I thought the colours were particularly spring like, and if you've a birthday in January, then spring is what you want. Especially after all this snow. We've a real thaw going on up here, more or less all that's left is the large patches, and the pack ice. Unfortunately I feel as if most of this is gathered within the first twenty yards of where I live - no direct sunshine, that's what it is! Needs to be broken down by foot traffic, and we don't get much of that. Ah well, perhaps I'll take the stick with me again tomorrow, although I live in fear of forgetting it once I'm past the really dangerous bits. It's supposed to get really cold and icy again tonight. Best boil the kettle for another hot water bottle then...

Saturday 9th January

See? This is how great blog lags start. You miss a day, you miss a week, before you know where you are, a whole month goes past... but here I am, back again. Kudos to those of you who read this thing, it's hardly the world's most exciting blog!!
Anyhow, right now I'm indoors - we had more snow this morning, and the temperature out there has to be below -5. Probably more like -9! I had a minor water alarm this morning when all of a sudden the water coming out of my cold tap started showing rather nasty little brown bits - needless to say I'd ditched my very aged filter jug when I moved, and wouldn't have had any new filters to hand anyway, so I improvised with a sieve and a J-cloth. Yep, definitely bits in it. Anyhow I can't say that I've drunk any unboiled water in the last 24 hours or so, and after about half an hour it cleared up. I checked with those upstairs and downstairs and needless to say no one else had noticed anything funny, so way to go Tess, another panic started needlessly! Still maybe the other's will keep their eyes open, and if it does come back we'll have to contact the water board I guess.
Yesterday I went off into town - had to renew my bus pass before uni starts next week. You know what it's like, first day back, you're inevitably held up by something, and I'll be damned if I have to start fussing around looking for change for the bus. You don't get change from a driver in Glasgow, Bristol girls, it's full fare on the spot or you loose whatever extra you've put in their slots. Mind you, I have to say that I definitely agree with this business of referring the bus companies to the OFT, because you pay about half here for comparable distances in Bristol. And the bus passes are a huge chunk less. And yet, guess what, most of Glasgow's buses are Farcebus. If you ask them about it, they'll tell you that Bath buses are a 'different' company from those in Bristol, which accounts for why you'll pay a different price for a ticket even in Bath and your day ticket won't take you there, despite it being a shorter distance from say Brislington to Bath, than it is from Brislington to the Mall, which your day ticket takes you to quite happily. For those of you who don't remember, bus deregulation was another of Thatcher's minor triumphs - the non-FB companies who survived this have a really tough time of it, ask your friendly local ABus driver about what happened when they started running a single service from Keynsham to Bristol city centre. Not only did FB suddenly clog the route with their own buses, but they suddenly and unexpectedly reduced the fares.
Anyhow I get carried away with myself, get me started on buses and you're likely to be sitting there reading for a long long time.
I did get into town and bought the statutory chicken with my bus pass - along with - hooray, some really nice fresh veg. Nothing against my little Sumerfield, it does a really good job, but their veg & meat aren't exactly top hole. The statutory chicken has been roasted, denuded of it's flesh, and the carcass is now gently simmering away creating soup stock. Weather like this, you can't beat a good home made chicken soup.
Apart from all this, I've not done a great deal else. I'm listening to the few football matches that are still on, although Arsenal-Everton are reporting a sudden blizzard has hit the match. They're still playing, but I guess the officials will be hoping that this passes so they can get the crowd safely home. Apparently the reason for so many cancellations today is more to do with crowd issues than pitch issues. Villa were supposed to be playing at Wigan, and that was called off this morning because of local road conditions. The most dreadful news from Angola too, the Togo team bus attacked and the driver dead - more than just the single victim too by all accounts, possibly the trainer and an under-coach as well. Given Angola's past circumstances, you've got to ask yourself why that team where travelling in a single bus, and apparently without any escort.
Well I feel I've wittered on enough for a very cold Saturday, and I'm off to make myself a nice hot cup of tea. Water allowing that is!

Thursday 7th Jan

Well news of the day is the arrival of my new vacuum - I succumbed, much as I dislike the back story to all this - in particular the decision to move production to the far east, thus closing down the local factory in Wiltshire & throwing people out of work in an area where work is very hard to come by. Why, you may ask - because I've been wracked with guilt over it ever since I made the last click on the website I used, yep, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's given me sleepless nights, but I really do - even now it's sitting in the bedroom, feel a very strong sense of guilt. So why did I buy the damn thing?
Well, firstly because of the wretched round thing. However you cut it, whatever you think of his decisions, there's a first class engineering mind behind it, and coming from an engineering family, it's something I have a good deal of respect for. I mean come on, it's made the most revolutionary changes to vacuuming - something we all have to do, and something most of us have a sort of low level dislike of, and its dispensed with the worst parts of it - excusing the bit about getting it out, switching it on and actually doing it. Firstly the no bag bit - yay, to never have to go through the process of changing the bag! I've just vacuumed the flat, and I had to empty the cyclone thingy 3 times, which just goes to show what a good little machine this is - the amount of dust and dirt it's picked up - but, yes I know, if I'm emptying it 3 times daily I'm not going to be particularly thrilled. But this is the first time, it's a brand new machine, and I'm hoping it's picked up stuff that no other vacuum machine has made contact with. The round thing itself - well it takes a bit of getting used to. It really does glide around things and you find yourself going back and forwards out of sheer habit! It's a bit heavier and clunkier than I expected it to be, but it's footprint is quite reasonable, and I fully expect to get it into my hall closet when I've got the time to clear it out and organise a space for it.
But none of this, not one single hair that it's picked up, not a single fleck of dust excuses what happened to the original factory. This is something that neither manufacturers, nor government seem to get very much these days, that life is not about who is able to make the most money. There won't be a single occasion that I use it when I won't be thinking about that, and cursing the fact that I couldn't get some other manufacturers bagless for the same price, or the fact I can't get a "round thing" anywhere else. This thing has come - get this - with a little pamphlet giving the history of the company which doesn't tell you a great deal beyond having some flashy photo's. There should have been a thriving Wiltshire factory behind this thing, one that wasn't too far away from my family home, providing employment and boosting the local economy. I won't go in to exactly why this didn't come to be, because it's a long story, and I'm sure there probably where difficulties on both sides - but it still doesn't get round the tricky problem of the fact that life is not about who can make the most money in the shortest possible amount of time.

Weds 6th January

Oh dear, as I type this I'm slowly feeling more and more as if I'm incubating a very nasty cold. I think tonight's the night for an early night, complete with Lemsip. As it is I've been dosing myself with echinacea since about 9 o'clock last night. Ah well, come snow, come colds.
I've actually just been feeding the birds. I've put out a small plastic dish of water on the bedroom windowsill, and scattered a bit of bread with chopped grapes, melted honey and a dash of olive oil. I've got a packet of bacon out of the deep freeze and I'll cook that tonight so that I can add it to the mix for tomorrow - they'll love bits of rind, and I know somewhere I've got a packet of salad seeds, I'll have to hunt that out. All the nuts I've got in the house are salted, so they're no good for the birdies at all. I've actually seen a tiny little tit of some variety out on the hunt, and a couple of robins around, so there's clearly a big demand locally for that bit extra to get them through this cold spell. Next time I go to the shop, I shall remember to get a packet of lard, and then I'll put together a bit of the old Blue Peter bird cake. They do so love that stuff.
It's extremely cold and the snow and ice hang on. However today on the tv we have the spectacle of the South of England coping with 10 - 18 inches of it, which arrived overnight and constitutes a total emergency. I suppose when the most snow you usually see is a heavy frost, this is a bit on the special side. And just to throw a little political speculation into the mix, Hoon & whatsername have launched some sort of lets see if we can destabilise the Labour Party even further. Just what you need before an election, and I'll bet Cameron's cackling away like a witch from M*cB*th. And incidentally, by the by, what's all this about recognising marriage within the tax system? You know, you just know, that this is some means that they will find to ensure that whatever benefit they will produce from this will be included in the working partners' pay packet. And 9 times out of 10, that means into the man's pay packet. Now that's a truly Conservative act.

Last night I watched a documentary on the Amanda Knox business. Got to say this was interesting, but somewhat hard to actually figure as such; most crimes have a form of internal logic to them that sort of tells you what happened. People behave in certain ways, the patterns of their internal psychology - and of course, I've never met this woman, nor, I think, anyone particularly like her. But nevertheless, some of the described behaviours attributed to her appear to be very odd indeed, and as such, indicate that all is not as straightforward as might appear. It's also very difficult to figure out what is actually real about this case - the press appear to have done a real number on her. The one thing that really stands out about this though is the extent to which the victim of this has disappeared from view; Meredith Kerchner has become the invisible woman in all this. All one can be really sure of is that a young woman met a particularly awful death in a foreign country where she should have been safe; Italy is not the land of the outer darknesses. It might be 'different', but she should have been safe. I feel that she's been badly let down by the justice system over there, because it appears to have colluded with the images that the press has been busy creating of this young American woman, to create a sort of super salacious spectacular, where everyone gets to be a 'star' and the end result - the punishment of the truly guilty - has been sidelined in a rather grubby way. I'm not saying that I believe that Knox is innocent, I suppose what I'm actually saying is that I don't know, and given that they had this big trial, etc etc, you should have more confidence in the produced result of all that than I actually do. I think there are enough questions left over at the end of it to bring the verdict into doubt. Which is really sad for Italy, but then you have to question whether one ever feels really comfortable with any other justice system other than the one you've grown up with? Is there something 'other' about even a country as physically close to us as Italy, a fellow EU country, one where you or I could decide to go and live at a moments' notice? Has Knox become a lesson in the philosophy of otherness? There is so much about this that fascinates, that appeals to the hidden gossip inside us all, the modern obsession with celebrity - it's a parable for our times. I have a deep urge to say that there's a great book waiting to be written about this, in fact is probably being written as we read this, one that might even speak to us all about the culture within which we live - and I find that slightly disturbing. After all at the very root of this is a dead girl; one dead girl and one imprisoned, one a true victim, and one usurping the victim. What does it say about me that I watched this, that I too was gripped, and fascinated? That I find myself writing about Knox when I want to express solidarity with the child that died? In all of that programme, despite stating clearly that Kerchner had been subsumed by the trial of Knox, I learnt nothing more about her, about why she had chosen to go to Italy and study there, I learnt nothing more about who she was as a person. We learnt nothing about the grieving of the family, although we did get Knox's parents making brief statements about how sorry they were for them, how awful this death had been. I suppose that at least they did manage to include this, but the omission of more information about Kerchner, the very missing-ness at the centre of all this, if it had been filled, might have provided more answers than we presently have.

Tuesday 5th January

In the spirit of blogging more regularly, here we go...! Woke up to find that it had snowed again overnight - one of these days I really must just get dressed, grab a camera and go, but frankly it's now almost 3pm, and it's minus 6 out there. I'm just back from a trip to the post office, and yay, they've gritted the pavements! Yesterday felt as if I was taking my life in my hand going over the road to the shop, but today the roads feel a bit more secure. I'm back at uni on the 11th, but thankfully not till a bit later on in the day, even so it feels just a bit hmm.
Shot to the Post Office as I said, yes well, when am I not in a post office somewhere, but today was very nice as I was collecting as well as posting! Got a delayed Xmas present from Abbs, very nice. A really nice card with it too, I look at that and I think lord my cards were lousy this year. I got them from the Heart Foundation, and when I looked at the selection, I got the one's I thought were nicest, but when I see what other people are sending I'm afraid I think they were very poor. For some reason I look at the design now and I think they were just old style. Next year I shall have to put more effort and energy into choosing my cards, and go elsewhere to find a better choice. Either that, or make some of my own. I did this a few years ago, from an assortment of family photographs, cutting out and making a collage, found some card stock with matching envelopes and using a handmade paper as a mount for the photos. It's not that difficult to do - and if I rushed out and took a nice snowy photo, it'd be most appropriate. However I don't think a snowed in Dennistoun is quite whats called for in a Christmas card!!

Monday 4th January 2010!

Lord look at this - October since I last blogged. And there was me promising Oh I'll blog regularly when I move to Glasgow, I'll keep everyone up to date - well, ok, that's assuming anyone wants to be kept up to date!! I hate this, but yep, my new years resolution is blog as regularly as I can.
I will admit part of the problem was being so snowed under with uni work that blogging fell very low down the list of priorities. When deadlines suddenly aren't looming anymore, but are like, next week, Oh God, 3 days, 2 days - you get the point. But I have a lot to be thankful for, as one of my friends from down South (down sarf Jane!) told me by text not so long ago that she's got an exam on her first session back. Now that's cruel. I know she'll do well, but my God that's cruel. Next time someone up here tells me our university organise things badly I'm going to tell them about that and see the look of 'gulp' cross their face.
So whilst I haven't been blogging what have I been doing? I put together a database on Early Christian Womens Vita's and Martyrologies - I can't say it's particularly brilliant, but 9 times out of 10 it does work. Ok, 7 out of 10 times. I wrote a report on how I did it. I did a number of translations of short Latin passages, and a short class exam. Enough to know I'm never going to be very good at Latin, but that I can make a general sort of sense of it.
My sister and her husband visited just before Christmas, and one of my brother's visited over Christmas. The snow made everything very chaotic - but everyone made it here and back in one piece, which was brilliant. I was amazed by how many Christmas cards I got. I still have them up, and the tree - although it's been denuded of about 97% of the decs because I got fed up with the bits falling off the tree. Yes, the tree is plastic, but balls kept falling off and then I'd tread on them as I opened and/or closed the curtains, so I've returned them to their box where they live. Toad is still up there, but he can sit still for a while and keep me on the good side of the old superstition about not taking down Xmas decs till 12th night.
The snow is still with us. I went to the shop this afternoon, and to my great irritation I found someone's been chucking around huge quantities of grit and presumably salt on Alexandra Parade, whereas we haven't seen a sniff of it down my end of the drive since what, Tuesday before Christmas? The little crossroad between ourselves and Armadale is like a skating rink, and I dread to think what it was like for those poor souls heading off to work this morning. The temperature has been apalling - we've had it go as low as -17, but tonight we've only being promised -9. It is extemely cold, too cold to sit up and read at night when the heatings off. At that point you need to do the old bug under the rug routine with a hot water bottle. I've never been so glad that I chose to go and buy a nice furry throw to supplement my bedding this year. It's wonderful. As I type this now, my fingers are going all cold! My computer's at the far end of the living room near the window without a radiator nearby, so it gets a bit chilly up this end at night.
What else did I do today apart from take my life in my hands getting to the shop? Not that much actually, although I do keep promising myself a trip into town. I have a stack of library books that I really ought to be reading, so that's really got to be top of the list for tomorrow. Hear that tone of steely resolution in my words as I type! I will tackle that reading!!!