Chestnuts and Chester and Manchester.

As you may gather from the title, it's been a very chesty week around here. In the visiting random cities and eating things way, that is, not the silicone one. And a warning to the unwary - this will be a very picture-heavy entry!

Since I'd invited the Americans to my Thanksgiving, they invited me to theirs... and I graciously took chicken duty again. You know what that means...another turn at making gravy!



(I really shouldn't be overemphasizing the gravy as much as I am - I fear being asked to recreate the magic when I return to the real world and being unable to do so!)

There were homemade pies. Carrots (which had been cooked in advance - Jean was far more well-versed in the ways of the group dinner than our previous carrot contestant), mashed potatoes, and stuffing which had some kind of chestnut content and thus its contribution to the entry title! Ate much and thanked the pilgrims for thinking of a holiday involving lots of good food. Etc.

In America-land, the passing of Thanksgiving is also the gateway to Christmas, and previous mentions of that well known December holiday that had been shushed away are now being welcomed with festive delight.

This also indicates that semester is almost over, which means LOTS and LOTS of work. I've gotten to know the interior of my tiny little dorm-room-world quite well. Just finished writing an academic book review of "The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction". Yes, every bit as riveting as it sound - there'll be lineups at Chapters. To synopsize what we've all been doing, I present Jason, one of my sci-fi colleagues, below:



The weekend was insanely busy...Saturday, a group of the international students all trekked out to Chester, which is this teeny little city about forty-five minutes away. It's all black-and-white timbered houses and has a 1000 year old cathedral.



The cathedral's gorgeous and medieval and has insanely detailed stained glass windows that are around 30 feet high and look like this:



Chester feels a bit like Oxford, but without the pompous academic sense of self-importance. (That would be the hometown of the all-powerful Jens :) )

We staggered home from Chester, tuckered out from all the town-wandering, and had an hour and a half for dinner and getting changed before heading out again to a questionably-named pub called "The Slaughterhouse" to see my friend Phil's band perform lots of aptly chosen Beatles music.



Just before we headed out, half-deafened but content:



Sunday was Manchester day, which served dual purposes in giving me a dry run before my flight home for Christmas, and also to do some holiday shopping. No photos, alas.. my camera's batteries were tired out from the preceding adventures! (I'm a little worried about the effect this program is having on me - we went to a comic shop in Manchester and they sold Star Wars Babies (kind of like Muppet Babies in the 80s) and I seriously considered buying a Baby Darth).

My paper beckons me, and so I shall bid you all a bloggy sort of farewell for the moment - may the Force be with you!

In which Jon and I bond with the locals in Liverpool.

Hello my avid little blog-fans. I have reached a new high (or low, depending on how you look at it) in my academic career and have actually fallen asleep on the book I was reading about the inner workings of the positronic brain. There's a book-shaped mark on the side of my head. Maybe the 600 pages of reading a week is getting to me... However, I have revived myself with food, tea, and the intention of some long overdue blogging.

You have stayed tuned, and as promised, I shall tell you the adventures of Jon and I on his visit!(NB: The explanation of how I acquired a long distance boyfriend from home AFTER I arrived here is a bit of a long tale and one not particularly suited to blogging...so for anyone who's thinking that you're out of the loop, it's not you, it's just a very convoluted story!)(NB II: And for those of you who were at my going away party, you've met him and just hadn't realized it!)(NBIII: And for those of you who couldn't make it, this is your punishment ;) )

Anyways, moving on. The university, as you may have picked up on earlier, is run with a startling lack of organization and a truly shocking inability to forward plan. Which is how I found out, on Thursday, that I had a week long Reading Break that began the following Tuesday. Note that it isn't university-wide,as that would be all logical and stuff, and therefore varies from program to program. And in my case from course to course, as only two of my three courses were cancelled. So I called Jon, and we scrambled around and found a flight, and he arrived Tuesday morning!

Now, bear in mind that we got together AFTER I got here, and thus hadn't been on an actual-in-real-life date. Thus, our first date began at the airport when I picked him up and lasted six days. And it was fabulous from beginning to end.

We schlepped around Liverpool, and went to a bunch of the museums. There's a ton of them and they're all free. The Maritime museum in particular was a highlight. They're working really hard at being open minded and all-inclusive, which is how we found ourselves at Hello Sailor - A History of Gay Life in the Navy. This was just what you think it was - an entire floor devoted to stories (and pictoral evidence!) of gay life at sea, with lots of group photos of cross-dressing first mates and audio recordings of men telling their stories of love on ship. It was REALLY funny, both for how bizarre it was to begin with, and how the Navy attempted to be open-minded while calling them, in print in the display, "fruits and queers". We were both horrified but thought it was hysterical at the same time... it's the kind of dichotomy that could only exist in Britain. There was even a life sized display of a cross-dressing sailor's room, from which you could see his fluffy orange tutu peeking out from the closet. Here I am, getting a new outlook on the ocean:



And here's Jon before we went in, dangling from the anchor outside, as yet unaware of the new horizons his mind is about to embark upon:



I had already made plans to see a pantomime called The Wolves in the Walls with the other Sci Fi people, so I got an extra ticket, and it was really neat. It was about a little girl who knew there were wolves in the walls and her parents didn't believe her, much to their detriment.

We also had a truly impressive 'widest smile' competition at Eddie Rockets, the 50s diner that the Sci Fi folks hang out at.



Jon was flying out of Heathrow on Sunday, so we got up disgustingly early at 4:30am on Saturday and caught the first train to London, where we saw the Tower, went to Westminster Abbey in honour of Remembrance Day, and then saw the Producers (which is hysterically irreverent, and completely mocks Hitler...fitting for the day).

He left Sunday morning with Paddy, who showed great patience in being our chaperone for the week:



So that pretty much sums up what I've been doing and (mostly) explains the long delay in blogging. I'm now three and a half weeks to the end of semester, and am drowning in papers and reading. The other inhabitants of the Little Sorority on the Prairie are all snappy and harried-looking, so we all float around the house like dispossessed ghosts, each muttering in our own language - Robyn about Skinner and psychology, Linda about the business models seen in soccer, and me about positronic brains in robots. I'm also spending a great deal of time scampering to class - they've since changed the times and places of several of my classes, which is confusing for all three of us. Monday afternoon at 2pm has become Friday morning at 10am, which works for me but is wreaking havok with the boys, neither of whom likes to see the light of day before noon if they can help it.

Must get back to robotics - my current paper covers whether or not creating sentient robotic life forms with instructions to obey us is a modern form of slavery.

'Bye! (waving at the screen as I pick up the huge academic tome and attempt to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks)

Bad little blogger goes to Scotland!

Yes, yes, I know. I am hanging my head and contemplating the great shame of letting my blog lapse for several weeks. My only excuse is that I have been so insanely busy... this is the first weekend in a month that I'll be home, and I'm working for IELTS for 10 hours on Saturday, so it won't really count.

So we're going to warp back in time a few weeks to just before Hallowe'en, which is when I went to Scotland to visit my friend Dave. Edinburgh is a beautiful city, full of quaint little cobbled streets, plaid, and Scottish folks. The city is centered around a huge castle that sits on the edge of a cliff and looms over Edinburgh like a buzzard over a sparrow. (Not sure exactly what inspired that particular simile!) The castle is here - please note the aforementioned looming:



In honour of Hallowe'en, Dave and I spent Saturday night at a somewhat dubious-sounding bar by the name of Frankenstein. It was made up to look like the inside of a (presumably) mad scientist's lab, with lots of flashing green lights and drinks served in test tubes. And every hour, on the hour, Frankie himself would descend in a coffin from the ceiling in robotic green glory and bespeak doom upon us all. It was funny stuff. Here are some of Frankie's moments:





And here's a photo of me on my bar stool, watching him descend with impunity.



My first paper has been duly handed in, on the role of science in science fiction. Included in this literary gem were references to the Matrix, the (relatively) recent successful teleportation experiment in Australia, and ethical issues with robotics.

So that's Scotland - more to come on London and the fabulous unexpected visit from my long distance boyfriend!