(St Rebecca of Wheat Ridge and the Venerable Mimi, at Fountains Abbey, Yorks.)

Formative essays are once again creeping up on me, so clearly it's time for another blog post! 'You're still alive?' you ask. Yes, yes I am, you smarty pants. I wish I could say that I've been doing loads of interesting things in the last few weeks, but I cannot lie. You all saw that massive reading list of mine. But! In the weeks before, I got up to plenty of things!

1. I went to London with my friend Mimi, where we spent a few excellent days hitting up museums, ice skating at the Tower of London, drinking wine and playing gin. It was tons of fun! We successfully navigated around a part of the city I'm not overly familiar with, saw the Sherlock Holmes museum, came up with a theory that if a Pizza Express is around, it must be accompanied by a Pret a Manger and a Starbucks, and just generally had a good time. After our ice skating escapade, I managed to fall and seriously bruise/injure my tailbone, which made for a painful rest of the winter break, which was a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm, but Mimi was a saint dealing with my need for comfy chairs and inability to bend over.

2. I went to Harry's sister's for Christmas, which was excellent! Lucy was amazing in the kitchen and I think I ate as much in 5 days as I have in the last month! We also went down to Lewes, which led to *more* eating. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It was really great to see Beth and Harry, and Lucy and Ed, and hopefully I'll get a chance to see them again this summer. I also now have an invitation to Cornwall in April, and I might just have to go...

3. On New Year's day, my best friend from university came to visit me! It was excellent. Sam is my homeboy! But since we're both on break, we didn't do a whole lot. We played cards, hit the pubs, made excellent pizza, and talked up a storm. Seriously, we did not shut up for almost two weeks straight.

Here is a picture of us together:

It is one of two pictures of us together in existence, but we have known each other for five years now. Dang, it does not seem nearly that long! On this day, we went to Fountains Abbey, which is a ruined abbey about 2 hours west of York. It was beautiful in the morning, so we walked about 4 miles to the abbey from Ripon, and by the time we got there, it had clouded over. I loved the abbey so much in the grey that I became a member of the National Trust so that I can go back and see it in the summer, which I'm assured is a much prettier view.

(I'd also like to point out that, in this picture, you can see just how tall Sam is. The third member of our trio, Jake, is even taller. And we used to go hiking together. What was I thinking??)

And then Sam left, and I jumped straight back into school. This term seems a lot harder than last, so I'm really buckling down and trying to study as much as possible. I also have to come up with a dissertation proposal soon, so I've done a lot of thinking and planning, and I'm meeting with my advisor on Monday to hammer out what I might do.

So there you go!

Oopha. It's been a month since I last updated! Granted, I was on break for that last month, so I've been out and about and entertaining guests, and not writing blog posts, it seems.

Right now I am up to my eyeballs in reading. I had to buy a different planner because my old one didn't have enough room to put all of my reading down. Here is an example:


Yeah, that's all one day of reading. Granted, this week I only have class one day, so it's all shoved on to one page, but it is a lot of hours in front of the computer.

Well, not all in front of the computer. Today my friends and I are off to the York Railway Museum. We all obsessively watch The Big Bang Theory, and Sheldon, a character in the show, really loves trains. So we are dressing as characters of the show, going to the train museum and have prepared 3 random facts to share throughout the day, because Sheldon is a fount of useless information.

I love my friends.

Well, the end of the first term has come and gone. It was remarkably fast, but overall I feel really, really good about it. I got some really good feedback about my essay for my cultural heritage management class, and going into the summative essays I felt very confident that I could rock them.
I don't know if I've explained before, but the archaeology department does grading and feedback in a very different manner from American universities. Around week 4, you turn in a formative essay, which is 'graded' and returned with lots of feedback, and you meet with your professors (or tutors as they're sometimes called), to talk about what you did right, what you did wrong, and what you need to change to do better on the summative essay. Formative essays, though, don't actually count toward your final grade. It's just practice. Which is nice, especially when you are coming to a whole new field as I am. The thing about good writing is knowing your audience, and what they're looking for. History writing and archaeology writing are actually two very different beasts. A lot of the conventions found in archaeology writing I would consider lazy writing in history, but it's really all about what you're used to seeing. So as you can imagine, there was a bit of a ... learning curve when it came to my essay for buildings archaeology. But now that I've got the conventions down, I think I'll do much better on my summative essay.

Which is the whole point, of course. Our summative essays count for 10% of our master's grade, which can seem intimidating, but to be honest, I didn't even think about it. If you get caught up in worrying about grades and making every single word perfect, you'll never write anything. So I just sit down to write the best essay I can, don't really worry about grades at all, and focus instead on what the class is about and how I can best exemplify that in my writing. (And it's worked pretty well, so far.)

So yesterday, essays were due at 12, and we hit the pubs at 12:30. It was really nice to see everyone not totally stressed out by school, and to chat and catch up with people you had assumed were missing or dead. We didn't end up leaving the pub until at 7, and we made our way to Constantine House where we mulled some wine and popped in A Muppet Christmas Carol. It was utterly lovely.

Tomorrow, my floormate Mimi and I are going down to London for about 5 days, where we will be touristy and ridiculous and I cannot wait. The most exciting part is that we're going to St. Paul's for evensong (at 3:15...explain that one to me) and then! then! We're going to Stick and Bowl for Chinese that I've been dying for since I left this wondrous land almost 3 years ago now. (And yes, I double checked to make sure they still exist. They do.) After Chinese we're going to pop into the pub where I spend an inordinate amount of time as a young, fresh faced undergrad living in a world not my own. It will be nice to go back.

I probably won't have a chance to update before the holidays begin, so let me just take a second to wish you all a very merry, happy, peaceful non-denominational winter holiday! Even though I'm so far away from you all, I think of you constantly, and am very blessed to have you in my life.
xoxox