I need a haircut.

Apparently my hair loves England. I swear, it's grown about two inches in the past three weeks. It's ridiculous.

I had a meeting with my advisor on Friday, which was quite successful, I think. The 2000 words of dissertation I had written were basically a lot of beginnings, so most of the criticism he had for the work was along the lines of, 'This needs greater specificity, but obviously you're going to do that later because you haven't finished this section yet,' so as it stands I think I'm in fairly good shape. I indicated that hopefully I'll finish the first main section in a month or so, which he seemed more than happy with. It'll also give me something to present at the MA conference, so hooray. This does mean, however, that I really need to finish reading Carlyle, and he is very hard to pull apart. One of the things I like about the Victorian era was how blended political thought was with poetry and science and everything else, but it also makes for very difficult reading at times, especially with authors like him. But anyway, at least on the other hand I've already read through Hard Times, which is hardly a slog, so I'm halfway done in that sense.

I also got left to my own devices this week at the language program, which was a little dicey as the guy running the program basically dumped a huge pile of worksheets in front of me and said, 'Look through these and do some of them! It'll be great!' and I had to teach myself what was going on with them at the same time as I was foisting them on the students, which was really awkward. Worksheets, while useful for the basics, are better as homework it seems, but even then it can be hard to explain (and me to actually figure out!) what precisely the directions are to them. Eventually one of the Polish guys, whose English was a bit better than the others', suggested we just read articles and discuss them while going over vocabulary and such, which worked a lot better for all involved once I was actually able to track down some articles to work with. So for next time, which will be in a couple of weeks, I'll be finding some readings to do instead of worksheets.

Lastly, Erin and I might try to do a quick day trip on Tuesday out to East Riddlesdale Hall, which is an estate in Keighley. It looks pretty and easy to go through, and there's a ruined abbey nearby that looks absolutely gorgeous, so if I can figure out travel to it, we can put our National Trust subscriptions to good use. We shall see!