Weeks Four, Five and Six - Recap

These last weeks were equal parts awesome and stressful.  So...basically, every week of my life.  The Palaeography professors have been throwing a lot at us, making me a very panicked note taker.    Old English and Old Norse are awesome, as always (The Old English translation is taking me longer than expected though).  Age of Vikings was good, but I've developed a tendency to run out of coffee that day so I fall asleep for like 2 minutes (also I kinda sorta had a presentation while I was sick as a dog.  It was not fun.).  LATIN is...well, it's LATIN. What else can I say about it that I haven't already said? 

Intro to Art History was cool though.  We were getting a lecture on stained glass construction and symbology in the friggin' YORK MINSTER.  It was too cool.  There was a choir practice that started about 20 mins after lecture started so the prof had to compete with the choir, who were doing an epic 'sanctus domine' rendition worthy of a movie trailer.  Understandably I was amused, even if it made it hard to listen to the prof.  

Dear Headless Statues in York Minster, I still don't get you.  Sincerely, Me.

However, Intro to Art history is over and Reading the Bayeux Tapestry has begun.  It's not been BAD by any stretch of the imagination, but it began with a required presentation and that sort of sucked.

The notable non class stuff has been the following:

Week 4: Halloween Party - Party prep initially, in my case, mainly consisted of chatting with flatmates as they worked on constructing their costumes and digging through my iTunes for additions to the music for the night.  Then several flatmates and I got bored and decorated the SHIT out of the place in three hours.  It looked awesome.  I didn't have my camera on me though, so I had to snag some of my roomies pictures of the place off of facebook for this.

After that I intended to go to a recreation of a veneration mass one of my flatmates was helping to put together, but I got the sense that I was still needed for set up and so didn't go.  Ended up just being superfluous for a few hours and regretted staying home.

After that I went, changed into my costume (I be a pirate, arrr.  My costume is to the right.) and screwed around with my flatmates until the guests started arriving.  We had something like 70+ people here, so things got cramped really fast.  Also, our booze mix was pretty strong so people we getting pretty knackered within the hour.  The music was alright for the first bit, and I hung out with a couple of really cool PhD students.  However, I seem to have this limit on how long I can be social before I start wanting to be by myself and I hit that about 3 and a half hours in, and retreated back to the annex. I then got on Skype and watched Cutthroat Island with a friend (which I've written an article on that will go up on Media Masochists Anonymous soon).

LARP -  My mission was last, so I was monstering the first two.  In the first one, I was a thug involved in drug smuggling that got killed pretty quickly and then I ran to the end of the thing to play a second thug who finished the trade off and went into a bar.  Second mission I was a zombie, which was five shades of awesome.  My mission (killing Dragonkin) was...less successful that I would have liked, but I survived.  The week after involved defending the fort of Hollow Tree and it was awesome, but basically a continuation of the previous week's mission. Unfortunately, I got really sick the following week and haven't been back since.  Hopefully I'll make it this Sunday though.

 I have no pictures from the LARP or my D&D group, so enjoy another picture of the Halloween Party!

D&D - I've been part of a Skype D&D group pretty much since I got here (maybe a little before), but a few weeks ago myself, a flatmate and three other people from the Sci Fi and Fantasy society put together a 3.5 edition campaign.  We're keeping it pretty basic (a huge disappointment to me because I like playing monster characters like the Mind Flayers, Bugbears and Minotaurs) and round robin-ing the DMing duties.  As of this Monday I've been DMing and...to be honest, I've done a lot worse.  I'm pretty rusty at running a campaign, but it's a lot of fun and given our group has quite a few newbies in it, I think that's ultimately what matters.

Grocery Shopping - This is something that just sort of scrapes my scabbard, but this blog is dedicated to my thoughts (read: whiny nitpicks) so I'll go ahead and ask, what is with the proportions here?  I mean you go out to eat and you spend 3 pounds to get a HUGE sandwich, but I get two measly chicken breasts at the supermarket?  The hell, guys?  I mean, yes buying stuff at Trader Joe's probably was pricier in the long run, but when I got chicken I got a ginormous bag o' chicken breasts that lasted me a couple of months.  I'm not asking for that much food, but I'd like to go grocery shopping every other week and not have to make another midweek run to the Sainsbury's for anything other than milk, thank you very much.

To be fair though, everything I've gotten frozen here has been flat out amazing.  Their frozen pizza, garlic bread and prepared meals are awesome.  It's not much of a trade off, but it definitely helps.

Illness - Before I wrap this up, I should probably address why this article is waaaaay late.  Aside from the usual classwork interfering with my writing time business, because that's old hat by now to anyone who has ever read anything I write.  About the Tuesday after the Halloween party, I caught a cold.  This was not really a problem, aside from semi killing my ability to focus, until last Wednesday when I got really ill.  Like 'oh-god-everything-aches-I'm-probably-running-a-fever-please-let-me-go-home-I'm-clearly-miserable' sort of ill.  I recovered considerably after a good night's rest, but I was still running at about 48% for the rest of the week.  Hell, even after a weekend of doing nothing but sleeping and hiding in my room as a self-imposed quarantine I'm still only at about 87%.  Still, that's a pretty quick recovery and I'm grateful for that if nothing else.

So there is my much delayed article, next time....I will probably rant about classwork some more among other things.