So, you might have noticed the enormous snowstorm threatening to hit most of the eastern United States. Four inches or so overnight, with a foot and a half predicted for tomorrow. I really, really love my snow boots, I've said this before and I'm saying it again but oh my feet, they're warm. Of course, the university is dead macho, right ( Read more... )

I am chatting idly with the South African Siren; she's telling me about the weather, and how she plans to be in NYC next week, and sends her love to Shim. She is sitting on a deckchair on a patio in Cape Town, in a swimming costume (it's forty degrees, and summer); and I am on the Edinburgh-London train at four in the afternoon, speeding past snow- ( Read more... )

I keep writing scraps of things to post and then not posting them. Notes and queries:

1. It is now about ten days until I go home. I am still two exams and one 5000-word paper short of actually departing the country. I am also (probably) nursing the beginnings of a bad cold which is all my own fault, but, ouch. ( guess what I can't sleep )

So I had a truly dreadful week, but it ended well and I am happy. I got a solid ten hours' sleep last night, woke up to a beautiful autumn day - oh, beautiful; a solid dome of blue, horizon to horizon, trees blushed and gold, a hectic brilliance to everything - and went to the Tompkins County library booksale and bought seven novels for twenty-one ( Read more... )

Summer's here. It's twenty-seven degrees in Oxford, I am wearing my favourite light-as-air skirt and my favourite little top, there are no clouds in the sky. shimgray and I went for a lovely walk down by the Isis, and stopped in a picturesque pub just before Iffley Lock and drank cider, and lemonade with ginger, and watched the pleasure craft and geese ( Read more... )

Well, that was a truly bizarre evening. hathy_col and I left the centre of Preston at 10pm. The idea was for us to take half an hour getting into Ormskirk, where rather than subject Colleen and her car to the rural roads, I'd get on a train home, which would be laborious (it goes round the houses) but warm and safe for all of us ( Read more... )

Mostly, today has been Novemberish. Notes and queries ( Read more... )

Urgh. I am dreading the 9am start tomorrow more than, well, just about anything. One might say, then, go to bed, but being the sort of person who doesn't sleep at night means, hey, you get wound up about not sleeping at night, and then you don't sleep at night. Sigh ( Read more... )

In times of stress, I tend to... make a mess.

Today is my fourth day of school, and ( this is what my floor looks like )

As a number of people have asked: I'm all right, really. The night before last it wasn't so much that I couldn't sleep as I couldn't sit still; I wandered around the house feeling really rather insane, and then, at five o'clock in the morning, thought clearly, hell with this, and when it got light, started making arrangements to make the journey ( Read more... )