Query:

I wrote a short story a while back, a humorous bit of sort-of urban fantasy regarding a Joe Shmo who gets offered a ride when he's overburdened with groceries. His kind Samaritan turns out to be a lawyer for "Witches, fae, sidhe... had a selkie once." Some of said witches bear a bit of a grudge.

It's short, only 1500 words. For context, that's about 6 pages double spaced. Okay, it'd be minorly long for a class paper, but let's be honest. There's a lot more research, effort, and so forth that goes into writing a paper on "This paper will prove to the reader that Shakespeare's true purpose behind Ophelia's supposed insanity and subsequent suicide is..." than there is to writing a similar one on "Jane walked out to her mailbox early in the morning. The dragonflower succulent she ordered last week should be arriving shortly."

The difference is submission. It's easy for me to walk into class, stick a paper on a teacher's desk, and be done with it. Yes, I am proud of my writing often, but it's easier to surrender a paper that relies on external sources and analysis to someone who wants me to do well than it is to send something that comes purely from myself to someone who has 5 million of these stupid things by these stupid writers who think they're so cool and come on, if I read one more story about Mary S's magic sword of wonder and awesomeness I am going to hurl, by which I mean these papers in a rubbish bin, preferably on fire.

Okay, the submission readers probably don't have that attitude, but I can tell you I hovered over that "Send" button on my email for a while before I got up the guts to hit it.

Lots of people have written about their first experience submitting. To tell the truth, this isn't my first- I sent an even shorter story (a kid's story about Adele the Pirate) to a company earlier who wants an author to make stories for their... long story short, that was October, haven't heard yet. But they probably have quite a few submissions and are still looking through.

Interestingly, with that one, the story I sent was just to prove my writing chops for kids, not to be published itself. (Although I like how it turned out and I'd be interested in illustrating and publishing it myself sometime maybe.) Yet every time I think about it I get this queasiness in my stomach- What if they didn't like it? What if I haven't heard back because I did it wrong? Why haven't I heard back? Pleeease write back!

I don't know how it'll go with this one. We shall see. Mostly I'm glad I sent it, and I look forward to hearing back one way or another. If they didn't like it, well, I can send it to someone else. Maybe it'll find a home somewhere.

That's all the rambling for now. See you all around.

The Dangers of Thrift Music

Today's writing prompt: "A magic system in which the audio you play in your car will give your car superpowers."  I honestly have no idea what I'm going to write or how it'll work but here goes.

Maegan drummed her fingers on the side of the driving stick.  The interpath was jammed today - she couldn't see anywhere to go front, back, side, or even below or above.  Of course she was stuck in the center of the tube.  She leaned against the back of her pod.  So many years of commuters, so many advances, and still no one had fixed traffic jams.  Sickening.

At least this new pod was more comfortable than her old one. Maegan settled back into the chair, letting herself ignore the infuriatingly slow crawl of traffic for a moment to enjoy the plush seat.  She threw her eyes around the pod's small interior and they landed on a small bag of music chits she'd picked up out of curiosity at a second-hand shop.  "Why not?" she said with a sigh.  "Seems like a good time to see what I got."  And probably listen to them all before I get home, Maegan added internally.

The first chit, which Maegan flipped through rapidly, held upbeat pop music. Fun, but not Maegan's mood right now.  The next was full of mellow ballads.  The next, lukewarm junk.  Then Maegan put the fourth chit in.

The music started as a low thrumming that slowly got louder.  As it did, her pod seemed to resonate with the rhythm.  She felt it vibrate deep in her bones.  It swelled to a loud POP and the whole pod flashed with bright light.

When the spots faded from Maegan's eyes, she was speeding down the tube.  A sign wrapped around the outside of the tube told her she was a good 10 miles closer to home.

The Tiny is distracting me too much to finish, so here it ends. For now....

Movies Lie

So I made a short announcement earlier that I've got a Tiny here (yes, that's my usual nickname for her).  I'd just like to say that there are a lot of things movies lie about regarding pregnancy and I'm just going to mention a few.

1. Oh no, my water broke!
Yeah, that's how it happened for me. So why is this a lie? 2 reasons.  First off, I'd say 60% of pregnant people on TV start their labor with their water breaking.  It's really less than 1/4 of people, probably less, whose water breaks before labor starts.  Second, the baby's there, like, 5 minutes later.  Trust me, no.  Oh, no, no, nonono.  So my water broke at 7 in the morning and then I was on pertussis (which induces labor) all. day. All day.  Seriously, she was born at about 12:55 in the middle of the night.  And that's with them giving me as much meds as they felt was safe.  So don't trust movies about water breaking.

2. Babies are born on time.
If there's a movie with a pregnant lady, you know that baby's comin' out right at the moment of highest dramatic tension.  i.e., on its due date.  And we all know that a due date is basically just a best-guess scenario.  (Yeah, this point is a bit of a stretch, but you know it's true.)

3. "Oh, the baby's coming!"
If the woman hasn't said this roughly 20 times before in the movie, she either had better have kids already or else she really doesn't know what's going on or when the kid is coming.  First time around, you have no clue.


There are a lot more and I could be more eloquent, but I'm just going to leave it there for now.  Feel free to add in movie myths you know of.

Into a Corner

Writing Prompt: You have, with actual paint, painted yourself into an actual corner. But the paint and the corner are in a world in which there is magic, and "you painted yourself into a corner" may very well be some sort of a spell. (Prompt was a bit different on the 'cast but I wrote this before I heard the verbal version.)

I sent out a message again. "Alert, alert, Code 82.  Officer requesting assistance."  My location could be determined from the sending.  I released the waves in my hand into the aether.  Why hadn't they responded yet?

I pulled out my nozzle again and sprayed more bright red paint in front of the door.  It would only work until it was dry, so I had maybe five minutes.  As I was pulling into the room to slam the door shut, I saw one of them dart past in the background.  I'd trained against them for years, but I still couldn't suppress a shiver.  One was bad enough, but I knew there was a pack of them following me.

I could hear them just outside the door, howling in pain with their three-toned voices as they kept checking the paint to see if they could cross.  I wished again that I could actually spray them, but the spell didn't work that way.  It was protection, not offense.  And all my offensive spells were gone halfway through the day.

I knew the paint would be drying soon, so I laid down a wide swath of fresh paint in front of the door, backing towards the far end of the room.  My paint supply bottle sloshed dishearteningly - it was nearly out.  Howls of triumph echoed through the door, followed quickly by the sound of claws and clubs bashing at the door.  It was never built to stand up to that sort of abuse and was splinters inside of a minute.

I stepped back again and put down another paint strip across the room.  They slithered through the door.  Ten claws each, long black bodies, teeth that could give a Great Worvan nightmares.  Not to mention their tails.  We called them clubs, but they were worse than just bludgeoning instruments.  They glowed with the sickly purple-green light of a burning lust for savagery.

Another swatch of fresh paint on the floor.  A few steps closer to the wall.  Another advance by the menaces across the room.  We still didn't know where they came from, just that they cropped up about ten years back and started laying waste to everything.  Cities like this one, de-peopled in months from their sheer brutality and the flight of some few lucky emigrants.

I laid down paint again, and felt my back bump against the wall.  I sprayed more paint, walking sideways to the corner.  This stuff was only meant to corral them just long enough for the hunter mages to take care of them, not for a long stand like this.

I refreshed the paint before it could dry.  My tank had, what, four more applications left?  If I was lucky.  I used my few minutes of break to send another emergency signal.  Another spray.  Another signal.  Another spray.  That one was close - one had tried to put one of his front feet over my line before I could spray.

I heard a sound in the distance, a sort of thrumming whoosh.  There were two possibilities - it might be help on the way, or it could be the howlers starting their death chant.  Or, as a third choice, I was going crazy.  I let out a desperate laugh as I sprayed another layer.  I wished this paint came in some color other than blood red.  The thrum was drawing closer, but so was the pack.  I pulled out my nozzle again.  They growled at me.  I pulled the trigger.  It gave out a dying fizzle and the flow of paint stopped.

The pack let out a rumbling noise that sounded like a chuckle.  I gave an involuntary step back, but the corner behind me stopped me going anywhere.  The thrum grew louder and I heard a ripping sound as the roof of the building was wrested from its place.  The Officer Corps' carrier daemon hovered into view in the sky above me right as...

I jumped for the ladder as the pack pounced.



You can imagine the end either way you please.

Look What I Made!

I've been working on this project for a while.  It's gotten to the point that I feel like I can show it off, but I think I'll still be working on development and so forth for a while.  Check it out!

Circa late April 2014, photo taken mid-June

This is Abbie and she's cuter than your baby.  Don't take it personally, I just like my baby.  Also, since she's a big part of my life and a big part of why it's harder to write anything lately, I thought you should all know.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled life.

Writing Prompt 2

The prompt this week:"Write your character doing two things at once, both of which are plot-specific." Examples: walking and chewing bubble gum, talking and sewing.  I suppose if I want it to be plot-specific, I should take a character from one of my stories.  But which one?

"Hey, Mari," Nikolas said, jogging up to the wagon.  He had a piece of the strange purple grass of the Passage in between his teeth.

"Oh, hi, Nikolas."  Mari scooped some of the corn out of one of the grain bags in the back of the cart.  "Hm," she mused.  "How much farther did you say we had to go?"

Nikolas rolled the stem of the grass between his fingers, watching the tufty seeds on the end swirl and twine.  "It usually takes about two and a half months to get through the Passage.  Don't know but we might be able to shave some time off with this lovely lady."  He walked to the front and tickled Inga under the chin.  She rolled an eye at him, then stuck her tongue out and wrapped it around the piece of grass.

"Hey!" Nikolas protested as the cow placidly chewed on his grass stem.  He rolled his eyes back at her, then dropped back to where Mari was distributing corn kernels into the pens of frantically clucking chickens.  "Why do you ask?"

"Well," Mari said, hefting the corn bag and eyeing it skeptically, "We might run low on corn before we get there.  I think we might want to consider finding some forage for the chickens, too.  Inga obviously doesn't have a problem with the vegetation here, so it shouldn't hurt the chickens, either."

"You're the expert," Nikolas said.  Just then, the alarm call sounded from behind them.  Mari looked up at Nikolas, concerned to see his face drain of color.

"Please let that not be her..." he muttered, shaking visibly.


This is from my re-telling of The Bright Falcon, right about at the part where I'm writing right now.  I think I've got both of them doing more than one action pretty frequently.

Writing Prompt 1

I'm going to try to do writing prompts from the Writing Excuses podcast.  This week's prompt was "rewrite the ending to a story you've already written," so I'm going to ignore it.  (Far too long for a blog post.)  Instead, here's a prompt from S8.E18 - "Write a fight scene.  Bonus points if it's got four people in it.  We don't know what you'll spend those points on."

No one argued the fact - James really shouldn't have been walking his huge German Shepherd through the food court.  But then, Anya didn't need to taunt the dog, either.  And if Ted hadn't been in a bad mood, well, maybe things would have turned out differently.  But that's how things went, and so the outcome was somewhat inevitable.

"Hey," James snapped.  "What do you think you're doing?"

Anya laughed as Toby lunged against his leash at the taco she was holding.  "What, can't hold on to your dog?  He too big for your little muscles?"

James growled but ignored her.  Ted, though, couldn't stay quiet.  "Oh, shove it in a fishbowl, Anya.  You're not one to talk.  James could whip you over the moon and back."

"Could not," Anya said, leaning against the food counter.  "James is a twig with the arm strength of an anemic hamster."

James was trying to keep walking, but Toby was straining backwards, the smell of Trader Joe's taco spice tantalizing his nose.  "Leave it, Ted," he said, snapping at his dog.

"What's wrong with you, James?  You going to let her talk like that?"

"What's he going to do, mumble at me?" Anya retorted.  "You guys are just gutless jellyfish anyway."  She turned back to her food, chuckling to herself.

Splat.

There was silence.  Even Toby stopped whining.  Anya turned around slowly to glare at the two boys.  James just looked shocked.  Ted's trembling knees belied his belligerantly indignant face, both of his hands tucked behind his back.  "Who's a jellyfish now?" he said with a shrug.

Anya stared at him, jelly dripping out of her hair.  "You, my friend, just went too far."  She turned to the food line.  With one fluid movement, she turned around and whipped a spoon around at Ted.  A white blob soared through the air and splattered all over Ted's jacket.  Some of the mashed potatoes flew past and speckled James's windbreaker.

"Aw, come on, I just wanted to go home," James said.  Toby wagged his tail and started licking at the squashed spuds.

"Oh, no.  It's on now."  Ted dropped the jelly packets he'd been holding.   He stalked over to the drink machines, picked up a styrofoam cup, and started filling it.  "You know, Anya, I've always hated your sunny disposition."  He put a lid on and hurled a grenade of Sunny D at Anya.  She put her hand up to block it, sending a splash of orange liquid all over the food.

"Oh really now," Anya retorted through her teeth.  She began flinging corn at him with the mashed potato spoon.  "That's what I think of your jokes, you pea brain."

Ted picked up a tray for a shield, veggie kernels plinking off of it like rain.  He darted to the cereal bar, pried off a lid, and started pelting Anya with Cap'n Crunchberries.  She retaliated with half a pizza.  Before long, food was flying thickly through the air like a miniature tornado had plunged through a Costco back room.  James was crouched in his foxhole made of a tipped-over table, gripping Toby's collar with white knuckles.  Toby, for his part, was trying to add to the mayhem but his barks were strained against James's stranglehold on his collar.

Just then, Anya worked her way through the vegetable bar, past the gravy, and picked up a pork chop.  There was a loud snap, a blur through the air, and Anya and James both found themselves on the ground. Ted froze, his fingers in the ice chest.  Anya pushed herself up on an elbow, rubbing the back of her head.  James picked himself up, staring ahead blankly, Toby's collar dangling from his still-clenched fist.

And Toby, pork chop trophy proudly held aloft, danced to the corner to feast on the spoils of war.



I think that counts as 4.  I will spend my extra points on ice cream.

Showing Off? Who, Me?

This episode is just some of the things I've made lately that I'm prouder of.  Note: Pictures were taken on my phone so I can't guarantee quality.

So first of all, I signed up for one of those "Pay It Forward" deals on Facebook.  I tried that last year but didn't actually make anyone anything... my bad.  So this year, I told people they needed to remind me, told them I'd make stuff out of yarn, and for them to give me ideas so I didn't delay by thinking "Well, what should I make anyway?"

And then one of my friends told me she wanted me to make her one of her characters, a centaur.

I've made a few dolls before, but... wow.  I've never tried something quite so... ambitious.  So I told her I wasn't going to make it out of yarn.  But then I thought, well, why not?  I mean, all I really need to do is make a horse body - four legs and a cylinder, not so hard - and half a person, which I know there are patterns for online.

She gave me quite a description of this character and all of the stuff she carries and her personality and so forth and I had ideas of how I could put this together, but as I went through, I gave up and just did the body.  Said body description: Black Clydesdale body with white feathered feet, tan skin, purple stripes in hair and tail and purple eyes.

The body part, as I'd suspected, was not so hard.  Easiest part, in fact.  Then I started adding a body.  I wanted to give it something of a ribcage so I decreased stitching and then panicked that it was getting too small and too long and the body ended up looking really strange and bulbous.  But that was fixed later by nestling the human half into the blobby front part and making the back legs go all the way up the body to fill out the hindquarters.

Then came the tedious part - hair.  I may have been overly ambitious at this point, as I decided to tie crochet string on to give her an actual head of hair.  The tail was not so bad, but the head... that took forever.  This is where a lot of the accessories I'd thought of adding dropped off the table because I just wanted to get finished.  And for the longest time, since I was working from the bottom of the head upwards, she looked like some Chinese kung fu master with serious male pattern baldness.

But in the end, it turned out looking pretty good, I think.

The other thing I wanted to show off was the baby gym I made.  For those who weren't aware, I am in fact having a baby.  Soon.  Anytime.  Get out now please.  :)  At some point in the past little while I decided that I wanted to make a baby gym.  You know, one of those things that you put them down in to keep them entertained with little dangly toys and things to play with and excite neural functions or something.  

My original thought was to just make a rectangular-ish pad with maybe a pool noodle across the top for hanging toys.  But as I was looking up ideas online, there was someone who'd already made one (why am I not surprised?) and she said she'd tried the pool noodle thing and it didn't work.  I think it probably could, but I'd need to make adjustments.  However, it doesn't matter, because I liked her alternative solution - hula hoops.  Of course, that also necessitated a circular mat.  Which wasn't much harder.  (Credit to http://thoughtsandthimbles.blogspot.com/2012/10/frugal-baby-activity-gym-tutorial.html)

The only challenges I really ran into were:

 1) The fabric I wanted on the back wasn't big enough, so I cut it into strips and made it trim instead; 

2) By the time I was putting together 2 pieces of heavy fabric, a batting interior, and an extra strip on top to hold the batting solidly in place, my sewing machine foot was having trouble getting over everything, but I'm stubborn enough to make it work; 

3) I tried to make the loops to hold the toys on the hula hoop covers out of the heavy cover fabric which ended up being really thick and trying to sew it together caused problems of the not-sewing-together nature so I ended up hand-sewing it tighter after putting them on the hula hoops; 

4) I'd planned on using regular snaps but ended up not having any so I just got the diaper snaps she'd suggested in the first place; 

5) the exterior lining didn't quite match up on the back so I sewed around the outside in 3 different places to make sure it stayed on well; 

6) the strips of fabric I'd made had to be sewn together to make them the proper lengths; and 

7) I ran out of ideas and fabric for making toys so there are only 4 at this point, with 5 empty loops waiting to be filled.

This is the base mat, pinned together.  It was sitting on the floor like this and Bryan walks past and says "That looks unsafe for a baby - maybe you should make something with fewer pins."

Sewn together and put on - observe loop issues.

Mat and both hula hoop arches

Loops for the hula hoop cover, pre-sewing into a tube.

Okay, so I could have actually measured and made the lines straighter, but still...
I sewed the cross lines on before sewing the border on so I could get those inner bits under the outer lining.
Glad I thought of that before going forward.

The mostly finished product.

The toys I made to put on it are a little "rattle," which I made by cutting down one of the plastic tubes of sugar-free drink mixes and throwing some pinto beans in, then sewing that inside a tube of fabric; a mirror because I hear those are good for mental development and I have a few small craft mirrors, sewn into a fabric backing, which was tougher than I thought it would be; a crocheted square with bells on the corners; and a crocheted sea turtle.  They're mostly also green and white although the square and the turtle have some blue so Bryan's happy.

My Gray-Green Thumb

There are times I really want to grow plants.  It gives me this feeling of accomplishment to turn bare earth into green things even though the plants are really doing all the work and I'm just watering them.  Last year, I tried to grow a tiny garden in the small amount of yard we had.  I also put some flowers along the walk in front of our door.

...Nothing really grew.

I mean, I got a few sprouts, but that was pretty much it.

And this year, I don't have a yard.  So I decided to do something else with the space I have.  Growing things in pots!  Yay!

To that end, I started looking for good plants to grow in pots.  I have a basil plant that my friend Nicole started for me last summer ish, which is a good several inches tall now, but still hasn't been branching enough to actually provide me with all that much usable fresh basil.  Nicole and I also got a few seeds at a garden shop a while ago - I picked up some lavender and some rosemary - and those are starting in little toilet paper tubes on my kitchen counter.  So far, there's a good many sprouts in one and two or three in the other.  I wish I remembered which was which.  And that I knew when to transfer them to their bigger pot.

The other thing I decided to do was get some already-started plants, and these were going to be bigger.  I have, for a long time (since my mom used to get gardening catalogues a long time ago), wanted to grow a mini fruit tree.  A pomegranate or apple or orange tree would be awesome.  However, looking at the options I had on the nursery site I chose, I decided to go with a Tophat Blueberry bush.  They're bred for indoor/patio growth, and get to be about 2 ft. in any direction max.  I also decided to get a bunch of strawberry starts and grow them in the kitchen.

So I prepped everything for the time that they'd come.  I got pots from Home Depot and potting soil to go with it; I got a wire shower caddy to strap to my wire shelves in the kitchen for the purpose of holding strawberry pots; I ordered plant food and starter (from the nursery because they had a money-back deal that meant it cost about as much to add strawberry fertilizer and blueberry soil as to just get the plants) and then I waited.  (Meanwhile my nephew came over one Sunday and enjoyed playing with the big 5-gallon pot destined to hold a blueberry bush.  I wish I had pictures or video of that - it was adorable.)

Finally, about 2 weeks ago, my plants arrived!  Hooray!  I planted them in the prepared pots, put them where I thought they'd get sufficient sun, tried to water them enough, and... waited more.

This is what it looked like when it came.
Not so much anymore.

Well, this is where the gray part of my thumb comes in.  The strawberries started off promisingly, but the blueberry bush began to wilt almost immediately.  I thought, probably just shock from moving.  It'll get over it soon.  It didn't.  Well, maybe it needs more water.  Nope.  It was pretty well saturated.  So... should I stop watering it?  Maybe more light?  I'd had the windows open to give it light and the overhead light on a lot, but it just wouldn't stop wilting.  Move it outside?  Yes!  Wait, no, temperatures are freezing at night.  Meanwhile, half of the strawberries, even the ones that had been growing well, began to collapse and shrivel.  Plus the potting soil I chose seems to be the "Outdoor/Indoor if you don't mind it stinking" variety so our kitchen smells like there's something going bad.  Which makes it hard to detect if something else is going bad.

I finally moved the blueberry bush to our back room which is by far the sunniest in the house and its leaves have stopped turning brown at quite such an alarming rate, and I put a few of the worst-looking strawberries in the kitchen window in the hopes that more sun will perk them up.  But I think this apartment is also not the best one for a garden.


One day I'm going to get a house.  With a real yard.



Update 4/9:  The blueberry bush hasn't lost any more leaves, so I think it appreciates the sunnier locale. Which leaves only the question of what I'm going to do with it when I need that room?  As for the strawberries, well, I finally got sick of the flies that seemed to come with the manure-smelling potting soil (very very peeved about that stuff) and I moved them outside.  Two of the six were still green-ish when I did that, three were looking pretty terrible, and one was about 6 times as large as the others mostly because I cheated and picked up one strawberry plant from the grocery store.  But I wanted one that made me feel like not a complete plant killer.

Update 8/4:
I am a horrible plant nurturer.  I think my buying plants basically dooms them to a short, miserable life.

My Word! Rather, my startling lack thereof.

Okay, okay, I'm a horrible blogger.  It's been over a year since my last post which was way way later than when it was supposed to have been posted.  But I do think things are going to be getting interesting around here and perhaps I should post here.  If for no other reason than to have some record for myself. 

I have a few friends who have been getting on the blogwagon, as they wanted to build their audience and reach and establish themselves before publishing.  And in Julia's case, posting cool pictures of stuff she's been making.  And I keep thinking, "Yeah, that'd be cool.  I can write and sound interesting, maybe even make people want to come back for more." But then I look at this blog and realize that no, I'm pretty horrible at it.  So I'm not going to start that kind of blog until I can update this consistently. 

With that in mind, I intend to start posting here more regularly.  I'll try to put something up either weekly or monthly.  No clue what they'll be about - they may be life, they may be writing, they may be crafts, they may even be my opinions - but I intend to make them at the very least the most fascinating things you'll read online.  Absolutely.  *nodnod*

That's it for today.  Mostly this post is to say "I live!  Check back later and make sure I'm still alive!"

See you later.

Exam Week? I laugh at thee.

Okay, how's this for an exam.  Write an essay, on your own, of what you think about what you learned.  Oh, and share your artwork you've spent the last while making.

Seriously, this exam period was the easiest and lowest stress I have ever had.

On the 3rd of December I got up early and joined the group of girls and John and Chris who spent Saturday mornings playing soccer-- I had previously been too lazy to wake up on time to join.  However, I managed to get quite an adrenaline rush that time, playing soc...football in Hyde Park.

The next day would be my last at the London Center, so I started packing my stuff.  Technically, I knew I'd be back, so it wasn't the last day, but close enough.  That just basically let me leave a bit of stuff there to have lighter loads whilst traipsing across Wales.  I also practiced piano for the sake of my primary class.

Sunday was the next day (also my Dad's birthday) and a Fast Sunday.  We spent the day at church getting ready for the primary program.  After, I helped out with dinner and packed up the rest of my stuff, then we had carol singing and hot chocolate to celebrate the end of the semester and say goodbye.  People were already trailing out, and some had been gone for a while.  My time to leave came shortly after carol singing, and I found my way to a train station and hopped on a little train to Wales.

Slightly Different Buildings

The day after Canterbury saw us going to the London Temple.  Of the two, Canterbury Cathedral is larger, more ornate, older, more spiky, and I prefer the London Temple.  Even if the architecture makes it look a bit like a box with a spire.  We went in and all the people with limited-use recommends (all of us but maybe 2 of the girls and the leaders) did baptisms.  We sat in a waiting room as they were taking us in groups and sang hymns until it was our turn.  After that, we spent time wandering the grounds, which were quite nice, and some time in the visitor's center, where I watched Mr Kreuger's Christmas with Eve, our art professor's daughter. 

We all re-boarded the bus after that and returned to the London Center.  This trip may have been a bit shorter, but I very much enjoyed it.  (I actually got the pens for my aforementioned art project after returning home that day.  Incidentally, this was Dec. 1.)

Pictures pending.

The Hooly Blisful Martir For to Seke

Yes, to Canterbury I wende.  And let me tell you, it's amazing.

This was a 2-day trip for us.  We started out by going to the cathedral--but of course--which, I have to say, is the most beautiful cathedral I've seen.  Or at least my favorite.  And yes, it beats out Notre Dame and all the rest.  Even with some construction.  And the acoustics are amazing! Which made it rough when someone dropped a pipe, but otherwise it was fantastic.

The outside was pretty itself, but for me, the real beauty was inside.  The stained glass was really impressive, too; it was all painted with saints and biblical characters and kings and so forth.  

We got the tour around the whole thing.  You all know the story of Thomas a Becket, I hope.  If not, watch this movie.  Even if you have, watch this movie.  Ha, tricked you, they're completely different movies.  And the long documentary is here.  Long story short, Henry II was an idiot, who had some idiot knights who tried to gain favor, and they beat a very good man, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to death in the cathedral.  

Wish I'd gotten my own picture of this, but I didn't.  There are four swords here for the four knights, because the light is carefully done here.  I believe the intent was to keep it more simple and elegant.  Of course, Canterbury was a holy place before this, and the seat of the Archbishop of the entire Church of England. 

They also had a very pretty creche out front.  Everywhere was starting to look like Christmas.

After this, we went walking around the city.  There was an open-air market (unfortunately just closing down) with some fascinating books and gizmos and toys and so forth.  We also found a beautiful old ruined castle.  It was a bit smaller than some of the others I'd seen, but still nice.  What there was of it, anyway.

We also ended up in thrift stores and I believe that's where I got a few old books, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Twelfth Night, and a book of Norse legends.  (They were 2 for 1, so I got all four for a pound twenty.)  I also noticed this on the way out of town:

Also, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four that day made me feel like the Thought Police were going to get me for just looking at the thing.  I was almost looking over my shoulder, expecting them to pop out of nowhere.

Anyway, we went to the Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral that night.  I think I'd learned to like it better, or at least to appreciate it more.  The first Evensong we went to threw me off because it was so different, but now, listening to the songs and feeling the spirit they're given in was really very nice.  Different still, yes, but not so much strange.

A Few Projects and a Bit of Christmas

This covers the 28th and 29th of November.  Our last religion class was on the 28th.  I really enjoyed that class--our teacher was engaging and enthusiastic about the subject, which was itself fascinating.  Most of our grade for that class was a project of something about the history of the LDS church in England or the UK.
For my project, I decided to use some skills learned previously and translate some hymns into Welsh.  If I recall correctly, they were Mae Ysbryd Duw, Prynwyr Israel, and Si Gallwch Fynd y Golob.  Or, for the non-Cymraeg, The Spirit of God, Redeemer of Israel, and If You Could Hie to Kolob.  To translate these, I used a mix of a list of rhyming Welsh words, a dictionary, a lexicon, my knowledge of Welsh, and Google Translate.  Before anyone gets off on me, I want to tell you something about that list of rhyming Welsh words.  It was a list, and there were Welsh words, and there was nothing else.  So what I'd normally do is translate a line how I wanted it, in rhythm, take a list of the words that rhymed, stick the whole thing in Google Translate, see if I could find a word that rhymed and made sense, check it with the dictionary, and put that in rhythm.  If I couldn't find anything, I re-did the verse.  It may seem time-consuming but it was really exciting.  For my class presentation, I sang my translation of The Spirit of God.

     Mae Ysbryd Duw'n llosgi fel tan cadarn dros y byd
     Y dyddiau diwethab yn dod yn llachar
     Y brudia o hen yn caelu dychwelyd
     Ac angelion yn dod i ymweld ar ddaear

     Mae'r Duw yn ymestyn doethineb seintau
     Adfer eu barnwyr a phob un mor ar y dechrau
     Y ddaear yn derbyn gogoniant Duw a phwerau
     Y llen dros ei dechrau godi gwarchae

Cytgan:
     Canu a gweddi gyda byddinoedd y Nefoedd
     Hosanna, Hosanna, i Dduw a'r Oen
     Gadewch i ni ogoniant i'r rhai ar uchel
     O hyn ymlaen yn ac am byth amen a amen

Roughly translated, that's:
The Spirit of God burns like a fire over the earth
The last days become bright
The divinity of before has returned
And angels are coming to visit the earth

The wisdom of God is extended to the saints
Restoring their judges and all as at first
The earth receives the glory of God and its powers
The curtain over the earth no longer besieges it

Chorus:
Sing and shout with the armies of Heaven
Hosanna, Hosanna to God and the Lam
Let us give glory to those on high
From now and on forever amen and amen

Oh, and quick not-at-all-complete guide:  u=e, f=v, y=u (not always but just run with it), dd=soft th, like father, and ll=*blowing spit on you*

I was proud of that.  Don't take my Welsh grammar as 100%, but I think it's pretty good.  Also, the chorus was easy because it doesn't rhyme.  The hardest part was "The veil o'er the earth is beginning to burst."

Well, enough of that.  My other project was making negative space, I've mentioned it before.  I put five boxes on a large sheet of paper, in an arrangement approximating this > shape, and on the 29th, I walked with it strapped to a huge board, along with my pencils, to the Museum of Natural History, or whichever way those words were, but it's awesome and I'd go back in a heartbeat, to sketch a skeleton.  After wandering, I decided on a related-to-a-mammoth skeleton, because it had big bones, cool spaces, and most importantly, places I could rest my board and still see it.  This did require standing most of the time.  I ended up vaguely relating the body parts to their general positions on the actual skeleton (ribs in the middle, hip on the end, head in front) and took each box from a slightly different position (I did the head looking down from above) and amused myself watching the elementary school kids run all over the place.  In case you're wondering, kids are indeed the same everywhere, even if a few of the kids I saw were dressed positively nattily.

When I got it home, I eventually inked it all in with a brief hiatus to get more pens, and I liked how it turned out.  It happened that another girl did a negative-space fossil, but hers was an entire brontosaurus.  I liked mine, though, because it was different and inked in the background rather than pencilled, so the lines and negative space were sharper.  The hard part with that was delineating the boxes, as I decided not to draw lines around them, and walking through Hyde Park with a huge board in the wind.

Anyway, on to the Christmas!  And by on, I mean back, because it happened between the one project and the other on the evening of the 28th.  We all found our way to St. Paul's to watch an advent program, which was very interesting.  Not too much Christmas music, and much like the Evensongs.  But I'll get to more of that later.  I say not Christmas, but that's because it's not my experience of Christmas.  (As I sit here listening to Mannheim Steamroller holiday music which wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a Church of England/Catholic advent.)  It was focused aroud Christ, as Christmas should be, but not the birth, which I'd assume would be at a later Advent.  It started with the Old Testament, I believe.  I remember something about Adam and Eve.  This has a lot to do with the fact that I was sketching something like that in my program.  It was a lot bigger than an Evensong, actually.  They had a huge procession that made its way slowly down the aisle.  By slowly, I mean they moved forward a bit, stopped to speak and sing, moved forward while speaking and singing, stopped again to do the same...you get the idea.  It really was beautiful; not something I'd do every day, but the ceremony of the whole thing was very impressive.  Lots of smoke and incense and candles and old formal garb and so forth.  Although I did allow myself a little laugh at the "The House of the Lord shall be built upon the tops of the mountains" bit.  Overall a very pleasant evening.

Religion and Music

I'd been to an awful lot of Catholic/Church of England churches this trip, but our Religion Professor had asked us to go to a different church while we were in London.  It was really for extra credit, but I was curious, so on the 26th, Nicole and I struck out for John Wesley's Methodist chapel.  Here is a photo of him:

His parish is my campus, being from BYU.  (Due to picture quality/size, you may not be able to see that underneath the photo, it says The World is my Parish.) The basement of this place had a lot of information on the founding of the Methodist church and a video; John Wesley started the church, but his brother and a group of friends started the idea.  They were called Methodists because they lived according to a rather strict "method" of life that was, as far as I could see, very faith-filled and service-based. The chapel had preserved the original chapel, as seen below.

 Incidentally, this is where some of the first LDS missionaries taught, until they baptized so many people the preachers decided they were at risk of losing their congregations and kicked them out.  I thought the window on the ceiling was pretty, too, and here that is.

 We also saw his grave in the back, which has several other people in it, too.

 After that, Nicole and I both decided we wanted to head out a little further and visit another location of interest.

 Quite frankly, I feel bad for anyone who lives near there.  This was the end of November, not exactly prime tourism season, and the cars still had to wait five minutes per car with all the people crossing the road there.  And standing in the middle of the road.  So we just leaned over and got our pictures when the traffic was low on that road.

We also saw the Beatles' Abbey Road studio, which has graffiti all over the wall that probably added an inch of thickness to the concrete.  And they had lots of security.  It was quite a lot of fun, though.

I also worked on my final project for art--it involved drawing something from a few different points of view, and I'd finally found a good pattern for arranging it after seeing a picture in the museum at Oxford whose underlying structure was something like this <. It was a picture of Gabriel on the point fighting a dragon representing Satan, while on the other side were representations of heaven and hell, and the picture divided going up or down.  I decided to structure mine like this >, with five boxes coming to a point.

Essay Essay

As promised, the essay I read in class.  Just to warn you, it's random and wandering, and you may have seen it on my alternate FB page.  It's unrevised, and if you read/understand it, you'll probably understand why.

You know what? Essays are starting to annoy me. I start writing something, I feel like I have a good idea going, and suddenly everything I was writing feels cheap. Senseless, pointless, tawdry drivel spat onto a page with no clear direction, no point, and not really worth all that much. I tried to write something deep and personal and found myself circling so much that after going a long way, I'd only managed to penetrate a layer or two, such being the nature of spirals. I tried to go with a direct approach and ran into a hard wall that sent me staggering backwards, banner torn and troops gone, after just the initial charge. I tried to write out something of my thoughts on home, and where did that go? I had a page down and felt like I was a paragraph away from being out of things to say. Maybe it's me; maybe I have trouble sharing anything. That's it, I'm just a selfish person. You can't have my memories, you aren't allowed to see my feelings or my thoughts. Stay away, they're mine.

But it's not like I'm the Giver. If I put my memories on a page, they're not going to disappear. I don't need to worry about it. For example, if I tell you about the Halloween when my mom, as usual, had us split up the spoils of the night so we could all get an equal amount and make sure we had treats that we liked, and to make sure we didn't eat it all at once so she could mete out candy to us on a slower basis—it worked, we managed to still have candy throughout the year as she did this—and then she split the piles that were left after we took all that would fit in our little candy tubs into chocolate, chewy candy, and hard candy, then the chocolate pile mysteriously disappeared...along with my dad, and we pursued him to his room where he'd locked himself in his closet until we finally managed to dig him out, scour the closet, and eventually found a box marked “Radioactive! Poison! Explosive! Keep out!” in words and symbols containing—you guessed it—all our chocolate, that memory is still mine. Sharing that memory hasn't cheapened it, much less dissolved it from my mind.

What do I share? I don't share much. Sarah noted the other day “You realize ninety percent of the things she says are jokes, right?” as I'd told someone very seriously, as is my custom, some nonsense thing about their food at dinner. It's true, I joke constantly. It's my way of getting along with people, of relating to them, of making, having, keeping friends. I feel rather proud of myself when someone believes my occasionally-well-constructed ridiculous stories. Like when I was on track and the girl next to me was speculating on where wind comes from. I knew it had something to do with pressure and if I'd thought much I could have brought it to mind, but I wasn't a weather student, I was in AP Biology. So I drew on that store of knowledge and told her it was created by the trees. They create energy from the sun but with so many receptors and creators there's an awful lot of ATP and it's hard to store energy—trees don't grow fat—so they send out chemical signals which trees use to communicate, which is completely true for alerting neighboring trees to the presence of diseases and warning them to build up resistance, so they all begin shaking their branches to release that extra energy. And that's where the wind comes from. She looked at me astonished. “Really?” “Yep.” “I thought it was low-pressure systems or something like that.” “No, it's all the trees.” “Oh. … Really?” “No, I'm lying.” Another start from her, and then we both cracked up. It's not about the fooling people, it's not about feeling smart or feeling some sense of superiority, I just like the jolt of going against convention even when I fully intend on following it. Ask me to pass the butter, say, and 4 of 5 times I'll probably look at you like you're stupid and say no even as I reach for the butter dish. Or pat, as the case may be. But it's not like that's sharing a part of me. I don't try to get people to like me by offering part of my soul, you could say, but by trying to make them laugh. I hate seeing people sad, I'd much rather see them smile and I like to make them smile.

But like I said, I don't offer my soul, and if I don't like seeing other people crying, I hate hate hate hate crying myself. Multiply that by factor (I feel a hole in the pit of my stomach seeing other people cry)/(I don't like seeing other people crying) if you want to get an accurate measure of how I feel on the subject.. I think that's how it goes mathematically to cancel out the lesser amount on the bottom. (And now my mathematician friend will say I'm letting my own inner mathematician show and I might not let him ever see this because I know there's a bit of mathematician in there hiding but I'm not about to admit that to him.) See, crying for me feels like not a healthy release of emotion that you need to let out, like people say it is. If it's in public, it calls others' attention to you whether in an “Oh, that's disgusting, keep it to yourself” way or a “You poor girl, come here and let me make it feel better” way. If I'm going to get sympathy or attention, it'd blasted well better not be regulated by my personal tear flow. It turns it into a call for attention and also a positive reinforcement for a negative action, in my opinion. Even worse is if someone responds with pity or condescension. Do not do that to me. It won't make me feel better; it won't make me feel anything but angry at you. My mother is the only one whose job it is to mother me, and she trusts my independence, so don't you even think about trying. It's degrading, it's demeaning, and I loathe it. And crying in public feels like I'm sending out this “Pity the child! She's just an ickle little wee thing who needs your mothering!” Crying in private is no good either. It makes me feel like a miserable ball of soggy wetness and it's not like anything is going to feel better after; if anything, it compounds the problem, whatever it may be, and adds the problem of a stuffy nose, burning eyes, and other physical discomforts that accompany crying. There is no “good cry.”

Of course, maybe all that is to cover my distaste for “offering my soul,” as I put it. Why don't I? I don't think it was a choice originally; I liked letting other people know how I felt when I was little. Of course, since that was generally happy unless upset by a skinned knee or a black eye from running into my brother going around a corner at top speed, that was decently easy. But as I got older and people grew more complex and everything got ridiculously complicated, even talking, I found that every time I tried to share my emotions, they got jumbled up, misunderstood, brushed aside, or just didn't come out, so I tried less. This is basically the reason you're reading this essay and not my attempt to figure myself out. This is all essentially just surface stuff. I will openly and freely say that I hate crying. I'll tell people I've built myself a shell and if they want to try to break it, good luck, they'd better have a wealth of diamond-tipped cutting tools at their disposal and not mind breaking several in the process. I've put lots of time and energy into it, and when I really put time and energy into something, it turns out well, I don't care what it is.

All of this whole mess, bundled up into a tangled, knotty, irregular lump of randomity with one of those “Hi, my name is...” stuck on, tattered and looking like it's spent the better part of a year in the bottom of a not-so-neat 5^th grader's backpack, with my name on it in bold but quick calligraphy, is what tries to unravel a little bit, just one piece of chenille stick from the mass, to turn into a personal essay and maybe that's why it's so hard. So it's easier to dab a bit of ink on the surface and roll it over the page, coming up with something simple but strange and twisted like this essay, giving you a surface imprint of who this “Elizabeth” is, something that you might not even recognize when you see the rest of it, like a simple amateur sketch that just looks like “Generic Individual” rather than “This One Specifically.” Because trying to dig out the thoughts on that one specific topic, that one particular thing that I wanted to express, leads into a mass, wanders off, gets lost, and leaves me either on a completely different thread or having hopelessly lost the original entirely, or just jabs me into a thumbtack that's been lying in wait to make me beat a hasty, completely undignified retreat. So it never gets to the paper, or if it does, I look at the paper, glance around hastily and suspiciously, then slowly suck that paper into the mass that is me, hiding it in the recesses where you'd have to dig around quite a bit to find it.

So I don't write personal essays; why don't I just write other essays, thoughts on life and so forth? Stuff like climbing mountains and praying. Why don't I stick with that? The problem with all of this is there's this sense of guilt or obligation roaming around me rather freely, and when this annoying posse peers out and sees personal essays by everyone else showing something deep and special to them, an exploration like I have found myself incapable of, it scatters and rushes to my brain and my fingers, all over, saying “Look at that! Why can't you do that? Come on, fingers, get a move on. Hash that soul out on paper. Look here, brain, you're in a personal essay class. What were you writing? Do you think that qualifies as personal? No good. Redo!” And once they start, it's hard to get them to stop, but the rest of me rebels so strongly at giving out that person of me that I end up never being able to produce anything that begins to be personal but only after much anguish and suffering. Okay, I exaggerate, but the end result is my essays just tend to peter out. Even like this one is doing...right about now.

(Incidentally, the "mathematician friend" I mentioned was Bryan, who read this before I remembered that was in there, and started teasing me about it immediately.)

What am I thankful for? Oh, *that's* a tough one.

In case you're wondering about timetable, the day in Oxford was November 22.  Which made the next day the 23rd, which I spent on projects and making Christmas postcards for family.  The next day, though, we had no classes, due to some random American holiday we decided we'd celebrate. Something about there being a lot of Americans in the center or something like that.

No, really, Thanksgiving was great.  I did kind of miss the fact that I didn't get to go to my family's houses because that is kind of the point of Thanksgiving.  Instead, I called home and talked to as many family members as I could.  There was an awful lot of baking and cooking going on downstairs in the kitchen, and before too long,  by which I mean 2:00, we had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast going on.  There were probably at least 5 turkeys, a tray or two of stuffing per table, potatoes, sweet potatoes, salad, rolls--everything you'd want for a Thanksgiving dinner but on a grand scale.  Or a 30-person scale.  I think we had at least a dozen pies after.  I kind of missed out on several of those, due to being really full for a good several hours.  That evening, we had a party  upstairs celebrating the fact that we were now officially in Christmas season.  We watched Nightmare Before Christmas, about half of The Hogfather, and Tangled.  All well-respected Christmas traditions, right?  (Hey, sitting around on the floor with your friends, everyone wrapped up in blankets--that's a good Christmas feeling.)

The day after that was also short, as we had an art show set up on the back stairs and in the art studio, complete with little hors d'oeuvres.  There are some extremely talented artists in this program.  I have to admit, my favorite was probably Madeline's cave--she had built it with foam around Christmas lights with little mirrors hanging inside of it, and it looked positively magical.  I told her, and still stand by the idea, that I could live in a place like that (preferably made of something firmer than foam).  Still, though, the other ones were amazing.  About halfway through the scheduled time, we went to the classroom and had some readings.  There were some fun essays, some really amusing or very serious stories, and my essay.  I wasn't planning on reading any, but John asked me to so I did.  I'll post it next.  Put some more work into my projects for art. It was a good few days.

For your viewing pleasure: Some external photos of the London Center.  I actually took them the day after this, but I thought I'd give you some pictures anyway.

Just Another College Town

We spent the day after Stratford in Oxford.  We'd stayed at hostels overnight; the one I was in was very comfortable.  The guy who ran it was very kind and enormously excited to make us a full English breakfast, because he was very proud of his cooking.  He got our table a pot of hot chocolate and lots and lots of toast while breakfasts were cooking.  Have I described these breakfasts before?  You've got toast, eggs, bacon (fried ham), sausage (this was the best I'd had in that it tasted the least like cardboard), and juice...and fried mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, and if you really wanted it, blood pudding.  I never had that last one.  But the rest of it was really quite good and very filling.

Anyway, we went on to Oxford from there and all unloaded at one end and walked up the streets to their museum.  Unlike Cambridge, we'd already let them know exactly what was happening and they didn't have a problem with us coming in en masse.  The museum was beautiful--I'll have to post some of my sketchbook from the trip sometime.  I spent a good several hours there sketching and so forth, and then we had wander time until Evensong.  I know a lot of people went on the "Harry Potter" tour to their assembly hall or something which was used as Hogwart's great hall.  You know, with the candles.  I didn't want to spend the money, though, and was more interested in seeing what an English college town looked like.  I ended up wandering around a lot on my own and discovered that, aside from the fact that the houses are a lot closer together, their shopping district is far larger than Provo, they have cobbled streets rather than paved, and the whole city gets into the decorating for Christmas spirit, it felt familiar.

We went on into the cathedral for Evensong.  We'd had seats reserved for us on one side that were reasonably comfortable--high-backed chairs with arms, padding on the seats, and a little stool.  It was directly across from where the choir was and the whole lot was mostly lit by candles.  The choir filed in later; they all wore the traditional choir robes and they were mostly young boys.  The two preachers were in darker robes, and they sat at one end of the aisle with us and the choir facing each other on either side.  The whole program was written out, with all the words the speakers said and instructions for those of us listening.  The music was beautiful, but it was a very different type of worship than I'm accustomed to.  I spent a lot of the time feeling slightly out-of-place and wondering what I was supposed to do, but the music was beautiful.

(Sorry, no pictures today.)

Home of the Bard

For reference for the rest of this entry:  http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/home.html

So I left off about at Anne Hathaway's house, right?  Well, after that, we went to the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford where a famous author is buried.  Bet you can't guess who that is.

And from the outside:

And our professor's daughter inside with the dress-up clothes being put on her.  She was kind of a favorite.  Can't guess why...so many girls and one small child...

Next, we walked down the road a little ways more and ended up in Stratford.  We went to the place where his house used to be when he was writing his plays.  He's so creative--he called it New Place.  It was a big house, beautiful gardens, practically a mansion by Stratford standards, and now looks approximately like a hole in the ground.  Why?  Because when he died, some other people inherited it, and because Shakespeare was famous, they got tourists.  And they didn't like tourists.  So they decided it would be a brilliant idea to destroy the house.  And cut down the tree given to Shakespeare by King James.  Because they're smart like that.  So they're digging out the area to see the foundations, might even be restoring it at some point, which would be cool.  They did have several displays there about the various plays and a bit on Shakespeare's life in the house next door.  I'd say if you're ever there, worth a visit.  The gardens are pretty incredible.  There were hedges everywhere, little almost-maze-like flower beds, and an arbor that had apples growing over it.  I still want some sort of arbor that I can walk through and pick fruit as it hangs over my head.  Brilliant gardening.

The house hole and gardens

Okay, very small portion thereof.

After that, we went along to find his birthplace.  Now that was interesting.  I believe it is the actual house.  You come up to it on one side down a street lined with shops--one of them is only kind of a knock-off of the Leaky Cauldron, called Magic Alley which was definitely not referencing Diagon Alley nor was the sign out front a rip-off of anything Potter-esque.  And across the street was a restaurant called the Food of Love.  Can't guess where that name possibly came from.

Anyway...so we found the birthplace in a large visitor's center.  Big.  Can't miss it.  Walked in, told them our group, and we were ushered into an intro thing.  And by ushered in, I mean she pointed, a door opened, and we were on our own on a guided tour through an automated path with videos of "So, this dude called Shakespeare...heard of him?"  When one video ended, a door would open on the opposite side and we'd walk into another room where another video awaited us.  Finally we walked down a hall of fame banner walk of all the famous people who had ever been in a Shakespeare play (including David Tennant because who doesn't like him? Especially in the UK?) and finally we went to the house.

The house was very nice.  It looked like this from the side we came out on:

You'll notice it's getting towards evening.  (Although technically this was after we came out.) Long and busy day and it wasn't over yet.  The tour started in the front room where they had an enormous bed to show off how awesome they were that they could afford such expensive furniture...but of course they didn't sleep on it; far too expensive.  We also saw his father's glove-making shop (there were some cool soft rabbit skin gloves with a slit for riding or doing a Vulcan salute).  As it happens, his father did rather well for himself as he was a glove maker, the mayor, and either black market salesman or smuggler.  One way or another, illicit dealings on the side.

We went through the rest of the house and I had a long talk with one guide in the children's bedroom (toys everywhere) about tourism and writing and books and literature.  Very important things.  I wish I could remember more detail of the conversation, but that's what I get for waiting 7 months to write about it.

We were coming to the close of the day and a few of us wandered around the town for a while looking at the shops before going to a good ol' English pub for dinner--heavy wooden tables, sign out front, and everything.  We got our food and the guy asked what we wanted to drink--"Water, please."  And he gave us this look that I was rather getting used to of "...you're in a pub and you want what?"

We then went to the Shakespeare statue.  I'd give you pictures but my camera doesn't work well in the dark.  He was surrounded by Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and so on.  This was for a short time.  We trotted on down the road to the Swan Theatre to watch Measure for Measure by the RSC.  The duke was a very good actor, as was Isabella, and they did have fun putting on their play but...well... Certain parts of it were rather disturbing and our professor was kind of upset that he'd brought his teenage boys to see it.  Little too much black leather and such.  I also found a shirt I like....

A wizard is never late. But then, I'm no wizard.

What are you talking about?  I've definitely been here the whole time, keeping you updated.  And said updates have definitely been in a timely fashion.  I don't know what you're thinking, but stop laughing at me.

Anyway, so...after that last time, what did I get up to?  Ah, there were fun things, I assure you.  For example, the day after, we were invited downstairs to the Magalhaes' for a ward activity for the Portugese ward.  Then again, it ended up being a singles ward activity, as the only people there were young singles.  Which was odd, because I had been getting used to being in a family ward.  But not so weird, I guess, since I was in a large group of single ladies.  And Chris.  Anyway, the party was fun--they had delicious food (Really great beans and rice, awesome desserts, and I think there were chips or something.  Hey, it was a while ago, give me a break!) (I mean...I'm on top of this...yeah...)  So we ate, we danced (some), and generally enjoyed ourselves.

The next day was Saturday; I went in the morning to a book signing.  I kind of found it amusing that I was going to a book signing for a professor from BYU (Brandon Sanderson), but I wanted to read his new book.  I was 1/3 of the way through by the time I got there, too...Hey, when I start reading his books, I find myself rather...sucked in.  They're hard to put down.  Speaking of which, you should all read his books.

The next day, I was giving a talk in Sacrament Meeting, as was one of the other girls in our ward group.  I'd based mine on President Uchtdorf's talk from the October General Conference.  That morning, the printer was fussy, the tube threw us off because part of the route had closed, I almost fell on my face on the way out of the tube station, the bus was late and didn't come until sacrament meeting was half over and we finally got to church with 15 minutes left of the meeting and the bishopric was almost visibly sweating.  The other speaker must have been going for 30 minutes by that time, but we both got 5 minutes for our talks and I tried to make sure I kept it short so we finished on time.  It was a good experience, though, even with all of the trouble.

The next day...oh, the next day!  Hopped on a bus in the morning and drove over to a wonderful little town on the river Avon where they apparently forded Strats, whatever those may be..  It was a cool day and we got off at Anne Hathaway's house.  It was actually a rather large house for the time, as her father was quite well-off.  I especially liked the clockwork spit-turning mechanism.