whoops this month is terrifying

It is May Day, and I feel like yelling MAYDAY, MAYDAY.

...I may be slightly busy.

Viva is set, as previously stated, and my friends are doing me the huge favour of running a mock viva a week or so beforehand so I can get used to answering questions and not looking like a fool in the process. They are great, and are reading so much of my rambling, it's amazing.

I'm also doing a lunchtime recital for the Music Society, which happened sort of on a whim, but I'm hoping it'll garner some donations to the choir, and I'll get to play on a full concert grand, which is thrilling. Liszt and Debussy, a hard but familiar programme, and I'm sort of terrified, but also excited. Should be fun! Provided I don't crash and burn.

I have also landed a short research assistantship which will involve building a website and digitising the archives of an H.G. Wells journal, which is rad. I am going to be super rusty at web design, though, so it will also be a bit of an adventure. I have to get in contact with the professor I'm working with to see when I start, but it will likely be soon.

And finally, conference. I'm still not done with my paper, but it's almost there. It's been really difficult trying to pare down all of the various interconnected thoughts I have on the topic into something both coherent and succinct, and cutting and pasting from my thesis was really not helpful in that regard. Hopefully I will finish it tonight.

In sum, I am running on adrenaline and a multitasking haze for the foreseeable future. I'm super glad I took some time off before all this.

my day of judgement has been scheduled

Viva is officially on 19 May.

It is slightly too far away to commence freaking out, but it does mean that I need to finish my conference paper STAT so I can study up at my leisure. My two weeks of being completely useless are now over. How very strange this all is.

ta-daaaa!

SUBMISSION DAY POST OF HYSTERIA/JOY

I'm waiting for my thesis to finish getting printed and bound. It may take a while--three sets of 230 pages, 1.5 spacing, 12pt Garamond font, and twelve-ish illustrations, is a lot of paper.

Formatting is double-checked, grammar is triple-checked, and flaws have been agonized over and ultimately either fixed or deemed not so serious as to make everything else crumble around them. I spent a lot of last night peering at all of the things I've cut and rewritten over the past month, making sure I wasn't too overenthusiastic about the things I'd excised. A couple of times, I had been. So there was some further tweaking and replacing. I could probably tinker forever, so it's best that I stop now.

...This is weird. But also pretty great. I'm going to have several drinks after this, provided I don't fall asleep immediately. But yeah, mostly weird.

Wow.


P.S.: I also found out that I got some funding for my conference in Canada. Between my college and my department, I should get most of the costs of flights and accommodation defrayed. I shall have to start planning my paper soon. All in all, this day is shaping up pretty well.

my schedule is now filled

Sorry about the long absence, and happy new year! Stuff has happened. Things. Stuff AND things. The rundown:

Break was lovely! Great to see everyone. Inevitable travel mishaps were had. But they were outweighed by many good things, so on the whole, win!

I basically have been in a state of jetlag/stress-induced sleep madness since returning. Sleeping between 5am and noon is no longer an anomaly. As long as I get to all of my scheduled things on time, I've decided not to care.

The editing is happening. Slowly, but it is happening. I feel okay about the things I'm talking about, and deleting the things that I don't feel okay about. I might even understand the second part of Faust now. Amazing.

I got into a massive conference in Ontario. It's going to be an excursion! We will go to Niagara Falls and wine country and see some theatre and then I will present a good paper so that people in America might actually know who I am when I apply for jobs. All good things. Now I need to find funding for the plane ticket. Yikes.

I have a vague schedule for completing everything, and it involves submitting in a month, doing the viva in April-ish, writing the conference paper in May, and then hurtling back and forth between time zones to go to said conference, then home, then Prague, then commencement, then Seattle, then home again. The logistics escape me at the moment, but I'm not thinking about it until the thesis is done. So there.

Oh also, I've started learning German again as a procrastination tool. Don't ask. It's a cool system though: Duolingo basically makes learning into an online game of quizzes, and you can alternate between practicing what you already know and learning new things at your own pace. So far it actually seems to be sticking this time around, which would be a first. We'll see if I can keep it up.

I am now not allowed to say yes to any more things.

Lumiere, aka adventures in night photography

I have been felled by a head cold, which has made Marx nigh incomprehensible to me. This is very inconvenient, as I am supposed to be editing my Marx chapter at the moment. I am five pages in, and it is terrible. Both the chapter, and my efforts towards fixing it.

This is all very problematic. So I decided to ignore all that this evening, and go to Lumiere instead.

Lumiere is a big light show that has now come to Durham twice, and is pretty much a series of public art installations which play off of their architectural surrounds to look cool and maybe say something interesting. It's a big tourist attraction, and is lovely and fun. When it was here last, I was on my way back from a conference and had a very enjoyable wander about in it while discombobulated by travel and sleep-deprivation. This time, I planned ahead, put on my awesome Russian hat, and brought my camera!

Let the adventure in night photography begin:

A scale model of the sun, installed on the university's science site. It shifted and changed presumably in an accurate depiction of the sun's currents and spots. Also, there was creepy music, and a projection of an eye on the side of the library.

On the way up to the cathedral. Don't ask, I have no idea.

The cathedral was subject to a massive light show that ran through, from what I could tell, the history of the north east's religious life, from the invasions of the vikings, to the writing of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the construction of the cathedral itself. It was backed in surround sound by appropriate monastic chanting through to 18th century orchestral music. Very, very cool.

Some of the manuscript illuminations projected onto the cathedral.

Depiction of the cathedral's construction.

Inside was a more abstract installation--wires randomly gnarled and suspended between the columns, plus light projectors, made for a strange, ever-shifting lightning bug-type effect. I had a major struggle getting shots of it in the darkness.

The actual projections, versus how they presented on the wires.

In the cathedral's courtyard. Ghostly dresses!

They were fibre-optic, so they shifted colour every few seconds.

I definitely only scratched the surface of the exhibit, and there were some parts which I did see but the crowds were too annoying or the installation was too movement-oriented to be worth photographing. Still, it was great to have a look around despite it being cold and rather wet. Having been mostly inside moping, sleeping, and blowing my nose for the past three days, this was a welcome respite.

Short update!

Things that have happened:

• I had a birthday, marking my steady progress towards uncoolness and calling undergraduates 'you damn kids'. I celebrated with fireworks and sword-dancing and friends and mulled wine. It was good. If I move outside of Britain, I'm going to miss having fire and explosions on my birthday.
• I had a meeting with my supervisor. It was scary but productive. I'm working through the holidays, with an aim to submit my thesis by 1st Feb. I am feeling slightly oppressed, but maybe this will be motivating.
• My students are great this year, and have unprompted and stimulating conversations with each other so that I don't have to do all of the work. We yammered about Robinson Crusoe today, and it was super enjoyable. I hope their essays are good. 
• I had an extended solo/chamber part in choir for Batten's Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis the other day. It went okay! Hooray for composers who wrote good alto parts. 
• Nicole gave me a lovely iris plant for my birthday, which is now sitting and percolating on my bookshelf, waiting to flower in a few months. And my friend Vicky gave me this:

Greatest hat, or GREATEST HAT?

Soon, I will learn Russian and begin to recite morose poetry about the motherland in vodka bars. Brace yourselves. На здоровье!

Productivity was achieved.

I have handed in both my Carlyle chapter and my teaching portfolio in the last three days, my relief is infinite! Then I went to dinner with some choir people at Durham Castle, had lasagna and wine and felt weird about being basically the oldest person within a ten-person radius at the table (seriously, so many freshers, I AM AN OLD), and then went home and slept for a long, long time.

Next up: Marx. And then conclusion. BAM.

Also, I was super handy in the past week, as I patched up a massive hole in the wall of my room up against the window frame, which I'm pretty sure has been responsible for a draft for the past few years. I hadn't known it was there before because some old fastenings from a window blind that no longer exists was covering it up, but I was feeling procrastiductive and decided to get rid of them and voila, huge hole in the wall. So I troweled some polyfill into where all of mortar had disintegrated. Now my room will hopefully be warmer, hooray!

I am taking the weekend off, and then there will once again be many things to do. But I am not thinking about them today.

Progress is being made.

I am nearly done with my Carlyle chapter, only one more section to re-write, and it's one of the easier ones, so I'm hoping it gets done today or tomorrow. SO. I am tentatively on schedule still. Tentatively.

In the meantime, teaching has started! It makes such a difference to have both of my classes in the afternoon--everyone (including me) is so much more awake and ready to talk. I have slightly bigger groups this year, but they seem chatty and clever, so hopefully they will do most of the work for me. We've been placed, however, in one of the classrooms that got flooded last winter, so if that happens again, we may be relocated to somewhere far-flung and inconvenient, which would be very annoying. Fingers crossed for a less rainy winter.

Choir is also up and running, and my friend Jessica and I are pushing for tour this spring to go to Prague. Less expensive than many other places, some great venues, and one of my favourite cities! I hope it happens. But then again, Brussels and Bruges would also not be a hardship. In terms of music, we've got some good repertoire going, and at long last I have encountered a choir director who doesn't mind letting the altos sing the other voice parts in the Faure Requiem when we have nothing to do. I've had a serious resentment of that piece for years now because it's so good and yet the altos get TOTALLY SHAFTED. Two full movements with about three bars of participation, it's infuriating. So I'm glad I can hang out on the tenor and bass (or soprano, depending on how my voice is doing) parts this time around. Singing in bass clef! Good times.

It is getting cooler and more damp now, and the days are noticeably shorter once more. I have unpacked my sweaters and second duvet. My tea consumption is about to double. Maybe the extra caffeine will make me more efficient...

So I guess it's likely that I'm in the correct line of work if...

...after having just finished editing a thesis chapter and sent it off, I started doing some curious Googling of an author that had cropped up tangentially in said chapter, and within an evening had assembled a 20-entry bibliography and sent an inquiry email to a periodicals service to ask about a pamphlet the author wrote, which they have buried among various other obscure volumes, because while said author's poetry has been published (recently, even!), it seems that no one has published his albeit limited prose, despite the fact that he was briefly in correspondence with Dickens, and was, from what I can gather, basically an angry, unpleasant, alcoholic, working class Glaswegian version of Blake, 'dark Satanic Mills' included. That's like, basically all of my favourite things to study in one person, how can no one have written on this dude?

In conclusion, I have lost control of my life, but I have a great topic for an article.

I am very relieved,

...as the AHRC project has now come to fruition, and it went really well! The exhibition on Lord Armstrong was launched on Tuesday and then began officially at Jesmond Dene on Thursday, and all of the participants did a fantastic job putting it together. And now I can take a deep breath and not have to worry about organising or supervising anything for a while. I hadn't realised how much low-level anxiety I'd been carrying around just worrying about whether I was forgetting something or not getting back to someone or whatever else. But now it is done! Huzzah. When I got home from the launch I slept for about 13 hours nonstop. It was good.

So now, I'm singing at Doncaster Minster this weekend to help out a friend's parish choir, which should be good fun, but other than that, it's Goethe all day, every day. It's been a long time since I worked on him, so a lot of it is reacquainting myself with my old research and then trying to adapt it to what I'm now trying to argue, which is slow going, but hopefully I'll be able to get through the whole chapter soon without too many hangups.

To be honest, my struggle at this point has been mostly getting over the fact that was really hot out this past week and all I've wanted to do is lie outside with a margarita or something and work on my tan. It's cooled down a bit this weekend, so maybe I will be more motivated. But on the whole, let's face it--my life is not hard. Plus, I have a couple short trips to look forward to--I'm going down to London in August to visit a friend and see the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, and then a couple weeks after that I'm going up to Edinburgh to meet up with a college friend and catch up. So if I can time my editing in between those things, it would be ideal. We'll see if I can manage it!

ahahaha oh god

Well, my introduction and first chapter are now finished and sent off, hopefully in a state that can be considered adequate. I can't tell myself, as towards the end I just found myself just cutting and pasting paragraphs over and over again hoping that eventually all of the pieces will fit together smoothly, until all of the words ran together and began looking like scribbles. It was around the time that I started blithely throwing around 'Foucaultian', like that's what normal people do, that I decided it was time to stop.

I'm not even writing about Foucault. What is happening to me.

Anyway, I start in on Goethe possibly tomorrow, more probably Tuesday. Hopefully it will take less time, and not require a new chapter to spring up out of nowhere. Once is probably already too much for that.

Onwards and upwards

So that whole overbooking myself like a boss thing is still going on, as should be readily apparent given that I haven't updated in an age. List format once again becomes my last resort. So!

THINGS THAT HAVE GOTTEN DONE:

1. My last chapter. It still needs a lot of work, but it exists.
2. Classes! I had a couple of really lovely last sessions with my Novel students this term, going through some exam questions, answering queries about what to expect, and it was very productive. I should probably start modelling all of my class plans after the one I devised for this last one, it worked really well.
3. Marking. I have done all the marking. And was very pleased on the whole! Everyone got better at writing and expressing themselves. I was very proud. Of course, I've also been recruited to do exam marking, so at the end of May I am going to be swamped with nearly fifty scribbly panicked exam scripts. Oy. At least I'm getting paid. 
4. My lecture! It was written in full, and delivered in full with accompanying powerpoint. Hopefully it was helpful to people. I thought it turned out all right in the end. Good to know that I am in fact capable of interpreting poetry, albeit not very creatively. My voice was very tired by the end--an hour is a long time to talk.
5. I presented the material for my reading group this month. We looked at Leavis and a Humphrey Jennings war propaganda film, and it was a lot of fun! I learned a lot from hearing other people's perspectives on Leavis especially--much food for thought for editing said last chapter.

THINGS THAT ARE IMMINENT:

1. My editing plan. I'm making a list of all the major things that need to happen to all of my chapters to make them not suck. I am currently halfway through, and intend to finish the rest tomorrow. It is already about four pages in long hand. Ughhhh. 
2. DULTA starts tomorrow. But guess what? The cold snap has ended! It has been lovely and warm, and I have been wearing dresses all week. My mood has been accordingly far lighter, it's pretty amazing. So I won't have to be grumpy about having to walk two and a half miles to the other side of town at nine in the morning every Friday. Or rather, I will be grumpy, but not as grumpy as I would have been in the winter.
3. I have a completion review coming up, wherein I apparently report upon how I'm getting on with my work, whether it will be done on time, and possibly decide on a title? I'm currently dithering on that front. But in any case, that's happening. Which is scary in and of itself. I'm trying not to think about it. 
4. The public engagement project, which is ongoing and taking up quite a bit of my time. Trying to get so many people in academia and heritage and archive sites together in the same place at the same time is exhausting. On the other hand, though, we have a website, where you can check out what we're doing. It should be really good, once it all comes together! But oh man, it's a lot of work. Work which involves talking to people, which I am the worst at. 

So yeah, this whole busy-ness thing isn't really letting up. And probably won't until, uh, July? At which point I will just be editing. Editing forever. 

At least it's sunny out. 

:D?

Overbooking myself LIKE A BOSS.

I am taking on more things because if I have lots of things to do then more of them will get done more efficiently. Logic!

This week, I am finishing my chapter, come hell or high water, despite the fact that I spent the entirety of yesterday on a footnote, because I am the worst. To be fair, it was a very complicated footnote that provides lots of background information and sources, but still. A footnote. Jeez. But now that I've done that, I can move on from all of the contextual stuff I've been building and actually get to the things I'm trying to say.

It will be helpful if I can remember what those things are.

Other things on my plate: I've gotten a place on the DULTA program for Easter term, which is the university's learning and teaching award class. It's recognised nationally and will make me accredited to teach, which is pretty essential, as things go. It means I will be trekking across town every Friday, which I won't mind so long as this cold snap ceases before then. Grr. Coldest March in fifty years, apparently. GRR.

I'm also now giving a lecture...on Romanticism! The English department offers a Saturday in April for postgrads to lecture to the undergrads, so that the undergrads can use it for revision, and the postgrads get a chance to practice giving a full-length talk. There was no Victorian module this year, though, so I was restricted to proposing something either about the novels I teach or Romanticism, and for variety's sake (and the fact that all of my ideas for lectures on the novel were terrible) I chose the latter. So after I finish my chapter, I have to write a few thousand words on Prometheus and Shelley. Luckily, I have a friend who is an expert on Shelley, and the professor who teaches the module has offered to meet with me if I'm having trouble, so I have brains to pick at my disposal.

Also, marking has to happen sometime in there. Boo!

As for what happens after the end of the academic year--I've just marked up my calendar with weeks in which I will be doing concentrated editing of each of my chapters, with week breaks in between, and if I stick to it, I will have a completed draft by the end of September.

On the other hand, however, my calendar now looks angry and red.

...I don't know whether this has been a helpful exercise. I might have to counteract it with some comic books.

Stuff and Things

So I've decided to give myself a proper challenge in my quest to learn Chopin preludes and after fiddling about with a few short and sweet ones (nos. 3, 11, and 13) I have decided to learn #24, and it is going to be fun and also terrible, because oh god giant intervals and cascading chromatic thirds. I am finding that pieces that are 5 pages or less are really suiting me right now, because it means I can do really close work on a few measures quite a lot without getting impatient and wanting to just know the whole thing all at once. Just right for my practice habits, which basically happen whenever I have something on the stove, or the kettle is on, or I am frustrated with whatever else I am working on.

I definitely got a little obsessed today though, and spent a good few hours hashing out the first page or so of #24 in between yelling at the piano, and at my hands, and at various performers on YouTube who made it look easy (I'm looking at you, Pollini. Grr.). But like I said, it's fun! I haven't gone for something properly melodramatic in a while. It's a great piece for showing off. I'm determined to make it work. Whether it actually does, will of course remain to be seen.

In other news, I have been felled by a head cold this past week, which has made working on my chapter (and almost everything else) nigh impossible because the sentences I string together tend not to make too much sense when my entire skull feels stuffed full of cotton wool. This was highly inconvenient, as it was the last week of term, which mean that I had a great many things to do, and many of them were left until the very last minute as a result. All of the truly time-sensitive ones did get done, in between frequent naps, but as I am now on the mend, I must get cracking on everything that's left over. At least I will have the library at my disposal now that all the undergrads have gone home for the holidays.

It must be said that I am really enjoying learning stuff about F.R. Leavis for my last chapter because he was crotchety and frustrating and histrionic, and apparently I like that in authors I study who are now dead (see also: Carlyle). No doubt I would find him endlessly aggravating in real life, but on the page and safely in the past, fascinating and hilarious! Truly, he had all the subtlety of Fox News, it's pretty funny.

That's all the news for now; we've had utterly ridiculous weather that can't decide between snowstorms and sunny clear skies, often switching off between the two every half hour, and it is at best aggravating. I demand spring to spring, on the double. Maybe then I'd be more inclined to bring my work out to the library every day.

My feet will never be cold again!

I have acquired giant woolly fuzzy slipper booties that make me look like a wayward yeti. They are comical, but they are also incredibly warm, so no regrets!

I'm currently at work on my last chapter, having gotten leave from my supervisor to just go ahead and work from my finished outline. It's going all right so far, though I still have to do a bit more reading to flesh out the whole thing; mostly I'm just having trouble psychologically accepting that it is in fact the last chapter. Obviously I'll still have lots more to do after it's done, but still--last chapter! Weird.

In other news, this past weekend I participated in a research forum which was created to encourage collaboration between the hill colleges, aka the colleges that aren't in the centre of Durham, including the one I technically belong to, St. Aidan's. It was a fun day; the poster I made was given an honourable mention, there was free food and drink, and I got to listen to a bunch of talks from people in all sorts of different disciplines, everything from organometallic chemistry to Khachaturian. I still don't understand a thing about the former, sadly, but as a result of the latter, I'm back on my Soviet composer kick.

This has inevitably led to a new playlist in my iTunes entitled, "In Soviet Russia, Music Plays You," because I'm hilarious.

Lastly, I have the week off from teaching, so I'm using it to do my aforementioned extra reading, and also to toodle around on the piano a bit. I've decided to learn some more Chopin preludes to work a bit on my technique. Should be fun!

Back to the grindstone, and other things

As the title implies, I have been busy getting back into the rhythm of things after a delightful few weeks back home. I will try to remember what exactly it is I've been doing.

It has been quite cold since I've gotten back to Durham, and we even got a fair amount of snow over the past week or so, which was very lovely until it all turned to sheets of ice that took up a good quarter of my route into town, making travel somewhat hazardous. Luckily, the majority of it melted today, so I can start wearing things other than boots again. I like being able to walk places without running the risk of going arse over teakettle.

I am sucking it up and buying some itty-bitty bookshelves for my bedroom because I lack shelf space (and just space in general) so I'm compromising by getting shelves that are super shallow and will fit behind my bed against the wall. This has the dual benefit of giving me more places to put books and also getting my bed farther away from the wall that has a tendency to grow mould. Hopefully this will work. Hopefully I will have enough handyman skills to assemble the things by myself. It will be an IKEA adventure!

I've now had both of my novel groups and my combined honours class start up again, and I'm definitely noticing that I'm getting more comfortable leading groups and thinking of good leading questions to ask while going with the flow of conversation. I'm also particularly glad, I think, for the one-on-one meetings I have with my English students at the end of the previous term, as that seems to go a long way towards making my students feel comfortable with me as well. I don't have the luxury of doing the same with the CH group, and I'm bracing myself for the next CH session in a couple weeks time, as that will be all about genocide and various thinkers' reaction to the Holocaust, which will obviously be difficult for everyone including me. I'm thinking I'm going to take a full weekend to read up and prepare.

On my own work, I'm currently assembling a detailed outline for my last chapter, which will diverge from the previous models of my chapters and use a particular critic--F.R. Leavis--as a framework to look at the combined legacies of my central authors. I have high hopes that this will really make the rest of my material gel, though some of the connections between him and Shelley, for example, are going to be somewhat at a remove, seeing as Frankenstein didn't really get any critical reception from anyone until very late in his career. I'm still figuring that part out.

I'm also writing out a less detailed outline for my whole thesis, with an aim towards marking off what specific things I have yet to add and how transitions between chapters are going to happen. This is both more intimidating and more exciting, as I'm stumbling across various points of synergy that I hadn't before considered, which is great but of course requires more writing. My to-do list will probably grow exponentially for a while. But at least it's full of fairly concrete things, like, "You should definitely finally get around to reading that extra book" and "actually go through and make sure all of your spelling is British".

There are other things going on as well, like choir and the AHRC grant getting started, but that can wait for another time. In short, lots of things are happening, but I like being busy.

Life update, and a castle!

I have been terribly remiss with updates, so for the sake of expediency this one shall be in bullet form, at least for part of the way.

• Trip home was lovely, wonderful to see those who I was able to see, sad to miss those I didn't, but Christmas will come soon enough! My tickets are booked, I'll be in the States for three weeks over the holidays, hurrah!
• I was struck down by food poisoning last weekend, and thus managed to miss both a singing lesson and a class, which was most unfortunate. Basically, when the price of a sandwich is too good to be true, it probably is. Lesson learned.
• I had a long and very intensive meeting with my advisor last week which was both productive and terrifying--in sum, I have a great deal more work to do before my thesis is truly up to snuff, but I have a clearer sense of what precisely that work entails, so all hope is not lost. 
• I'm now looking around for a topic for my last chapter, and I'm leaning towards looking at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a sort of framework for looking at the development of public reception of technology, both the good and the bad, and seeing if some of those pesky mythological narratives are coming through beyond the bounds of Marx and company. I have to do more reading before I can decide that it's a productive route, but I have high hopes. 
• The next couple of weeks will be very busy because I am teaching my usual classes plus filling in for one more, and there is a fair amount of choir happening because we're ramping up towards the advent procession that we do every year in the cathedral, which was really lovely last time, so I'm looking forward to it. Also, right after that I'm grading essays madly and having even more choir things to do, so basically it's all going to be one big run-up until the end of term, at which point I will be very glad indeed to take a breather, I imagine. 
• So that's that!

On a more picturesque and relaxed note, however, my flatmate had some friends from uni up to visit this weekend, and I got to tag along today on a day trip they were making. We headed up north to Craster, which is a seaside village about forty miles up from Newcastle that is home to the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, a very melancholy and lovely heap of rocks indeed. This was a perfect opportunity for me to give this whole taking-pictures-with-a-fancy-camera thing a go, and hopefully I had some success? The lighting was not ideal, as it was overcast and we're far enough into winter that the sun is very low and it starts getting dark around 3:30. Nevertheless, with some photoshop adjustments a couple of these might be passable. Though now that I've messed around with them, the coloration is very inconsistent. Bear with me:

The town of Craster. Dear parents: You may want to add this to your list of ideal retirement spots. Whoops, totally under-did the contrast.

The castle, which is many fields farther from town than this indicates. In between is prime sheep-grazing and dog-walking territory.

A better indicator of distance.

The shore along the North Sea. It was very Byronic.

It was about 2:30 when this picture was taken. WELCOME TO THE NORTH. IT IS VERY DARK HERE.

Inside the castle. I really like ruined architecture.

From one of the upper floors, or what's left of it. Check out the awesome lichen!

Oh wait, with this camera I can actually photograph the lichen! LICHEN. This is actually an accurate depiction of the colour--a right proper saffron.

One more washed-out look.

How gorgeous is that? Ah, to have friends of friends with cars. Otherwise, I'd never get to the heritage sites that are around here. 

The new year, it is afoot

Back from the countryside for good this time, and it is back to the grindstone. I am finalising all of my schedules and things and filling up my calendar with them, and the result is a very cluttered calendar indeed. Manageable, but a far cry from the summer, at least.

It is officially Freshers Week, which means that classes haven't started or anything, but there are lots of activities and things that new students can mill around and sign up for. The only way this effects me is that today a lot of Taylor Swift was being blared from a laptop in the hallway outside the study room while the rugby team tried to recruit new members, and as a result I now have 'We're never ever getting back together' stuck in my head on loop, which is not appreciated. Also, the centre of town is about 4x more crowded than before, which is kind of nice, with the exception of lots of people trying to hand me flyers about things.

In other news, I have finally made a dent into my chapter progress to the point where the end is maybe in sight, though I doubt I'll be happy with the finished product until I have yet another go at it some time in the next year. As long as I can get all the necessary arguments and information down for now, elegance aside, I'll be happy. Maybe even by the end of this week! Fingers crossed. I am going to a party on Saturday, so if it can be done by then, that would be ace.

For some reason, my room looks a lot neater than usual. I suspect it's due to my finally getting around to returning about ten books to the library that I've had for months on end, cluttering up my desk and shelves. Also, I put all of my summer dresses away, because it is definitely autumn now, it is cold, it is time to bring out the jackets and boots. Brr.

Lastly, I have found scarlet lipstick that a) looks good and b) stays on all day and it is making me extremely happy. I am one step closer to being retro-cool! Maybe.

It rained hard enough to set off a car alarm. And, you know, flood Newcastle.

It has rained torrentially and dramatically this past week, which was only made acceptable by the fact that I was basically married to my laptop the entire time, hashing out a draft of my Frankenstein chapter. The good news is, though, that both the chapter, and the rainstorms, appear to be done now! I say 'appear' only because the sky continues to look somewhat ominous, but it's been doing that all day, and it's been most pleasant anyway. Crossed fingers that it clears completely, at least for a few days. The chapter on the other hand is definitely done, at least until I need to edit it. But that won't be for a while.

In other good news, Durham's confirmed that they're giving NENC the whole £500 for our 'Moving Towards Science' Symposium, so we are now firmly in the green for funding that, and can offer free registration and travel bursaries besides. Very exciting! We've released a call for papers, so hopefully we'll hear from a good number of people with interesting paper proposals.

Now my only priorities before I head back to Rome are a job application for the combined honours course, and a short article on Marx which I'm going to workshop through one of Durham's training courses, which will serve as the beginning of a paper I'm going to present at NENC's speaker series in August. It'll be a good way of getting back into the rhythm of Marx, because I think that's the chapter that I'm going to begin really overhauling this summer so that it fits properly with my Faust and Frankenstein chapters.

Also, I'm getting a haircut tomorrow. I think I'm going to go fairly short, because I seem to only get haircuts about twice a year nowadays, and at the moment it's overly heavy and needing to be braided and stuff, and that's annoying. I'll post pictures after the fact! Unless it's hideous, but hopefully it won't be.