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)