Not So Bleak After All

I'm coming up for air now before heading off to bed, after having spent several hours immured in the wonders of Dickens' use of double narrative in Bleak House. This paper is actually coming along with more coherence than last week's, which I take as a good sign. (I prefer to believe I'm making progress rather than just having a lucky week, although my writing does tend to come in fits and starts...)

I did laundry tonight, for the first time since arriving. (My flatmates will undoubtedly be grateful.) It took the company of Lisa and Bethany also going to do their laundry to motivate me...the laundry room is just so far away.

What else...? If I'm not updating about all the fantastically interesting things I'm doing and seeing, it's because I've been too busy reading and writing to do and see them. (One says, at Oxford, "I'm reading English," rather than "I'm an English major," or "I'm studying English," like we would in the States. It's for good reason.) The insides of the Bodleian reading rooms are pretty great though. It must be the air of the place, because it's not unusual for me to spend four hours or so at a time researching there--without going crazy. I can't help wondering what it will be like to go back to Calvin.

Have managed to have a bit of fun: I went with some of the Americans to the Purple Turtle, a club located in a range of cellar-like rooms which seems labyrinthine. Also went to a Burns Supper at St. Ebbe's church, where we commemorated Robert Burns' birthday by dancing Scottish jigs and eating hagas, a traditional Scottish food which involves cooking various parts of a sheep...in the sheep's stomach. (Does that seem morbid to anyone else?) And we celebrated Lisa's birthday last night and Hannah's tonight, with various cookies and snacks ("biscuits" and "nibbles," if you're British) and much clandestine baking of cakes. (I have pictures of the festivities...have been rather lazy about uploading lately.)

In other news, today Lisa was unpacking groceries in the kitchen and happened to inadvertently place a bag of frozen peas on a still-warm burner on the stove. The bag, unbeknownst to Lisa, melted. When she picked it up, some of it stayed on the burner and some was in her hand, and the two separated parts were insufficient to contain the peas...hilarity ensued. And we will be squishing thawed peas in our toes for a few days to come.