Beginnings

I'm really sleepy, so I'm going to bed basically right now. But, I felt like I should at least write a short entry. The picture is part of the King's Manor complex. It isn't the oldest/original building on the site (that actually holds the library and porters lodge among other things). But the Centre for Medieval Studies is headquartered in this building. I had sort of my first class today. Real classes start next week, but I went and met the professor, got what passes for a syllabus here, and had a mild heart attack at the amount of reading. If I were feeling more industrious, I'd take a picture of just what I'm supposed to read for next Thursday to show you. Also, its like a 10 person class (which, to be fair, the professor was not expecting. There's only about 6 of us registered through CMS to take it, but Medieval Lit and Medieval History folks registered later and showed up today as well) and the university's various libraries generally have about 1 copy of the books between them. Now, the professor could have put things on reserve as part of their key texts program, which keeps one copy at the library and it can only be checked out for a 4 hour period, thus allowing multiple people to use an item without one person checking it out and keeping it for weeks. But no, we're to work together and communicate to share readings. Yeah that's going to end well. I think graduate training, more than anything else, is meant to teach us how to fight to the death for rare books at the library! I did manage to track down copies of 2 books (but there's a whole lot more. A whole lot. Like, it took an entire page to write down everything we're to read for next week.) but some of the other major works for next week are already checked out. So I'm hoping that whoever has them is going to be a nice person and like me plans to read what they've checked out quickly and return it promptly so other people have a chance to read it.

In other news, I put in a Tesco order with a couple other girls to be delivered tomorrow. Hooray for groceries to my front door with little effort on my part! But online grocery shopping is kind of hard when you don't know the brands and products. For example, it took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to search for laundry detergent. You don't search for laundry detergent. Or laundry soap. A search for just "laundry" mostly turned up laundry tablet things. I wanted liquid so that I could hand wash things since 1 load of laundry costs 2 pounds to wash and another 2 pounds to dry (that's like $7!). They also do this thing here where they call fabric softener "laundry conditioner" and it is totally not clear on the bottle what laundry conditioner does. We finally figured it out, but it was just rather comical that it was that complicated to find laundry detergent.

Tonight was also the audition/interest meeting for Lords of Misrule. This semester's play is Beowulf. Several of the other new MA's and I agreed that it sounded fun but we weren't sure about the time commitment. So we "auditioned" for a small or non-speaking part and said we could help out with some of the crew stuff like sets/costumes/props. We'll see how that goes.

We're also trying to organize a trip to see Eddie Izzard's new show Stripped. He's a really funny comedian and he's doing a UK tour basically right now. There's shows about an hour away by train next Thursday and Friday and tickets aren't too bad, so we're trying to get a group together to go. I hope it works out because that would just be so much fun.

And now, as previously mentioned, I'm sleepy and going to bed. Goodnight!