The Gastropoda Massacre of 2015

It's hard to describe traveling with my mom without immediately lapsing into the dreaded preface "Well this one time..." 99% of my travels with mom stories involve us being lost. In our defense, there are some things you do not have to worry about when you're perpetually lost: missing out on those exciting residential streets or hand-gesture communication with the natives, getting an American version of the city, maintaining any sort of normal meal schedule, gaining weight from the bread/cheese diet, plans. We make up for organization and timeliness in gelato and coffee, in instances of her charging ahead and me trying to figure out how I'm going to explain her untimely, foreign demise to my siblings.

Italy (2008)

I've learned a lot traveling with my mom. Brunelleschi isn't a brand of chocolate. I learned the meaning of the word "hanger" (as in hunger + anger) with her, broke every traffic law in Paris with her, and slept in some scary hostels with her.

And now she's on my island! We started things off right by me rolling down a hill in an neolithic stone circle that turned out to be covered in slugs. It was a horrifying realization that I'd just made myself a human bulldozer and single handedly mashed onto my body a dozen or so black slime bugs with the internal consistency of snot. Based on the difficultly of freeing my clothes from the squashed, sticky slug pieces, I have to say that slug goo is probably the undiscovered adhesive of the century.

Sometimes traveling with my mom looks like me trying to catch a baby sheep, and her looking like a neolithic rock model.

Later in the Bath/Wiltshire area we ran across some big rocks. Those looked heavy, and we had THE SUN the whole day, which was glorious.

We happened upon the 15something-something Magna Carta in the Salisbury Cathedral! My mother's little heart was all a'flutter at seeing it in person. I found it difficult to read.

And we found HARRY POTTER'S HOUSE, and the abbey where THREE of the movies were filmed!!!! And my mother didn't care to get in the picture with me. 

Student Lyfe

I dropped off the blogging planet for a little while during essay season. Essay season begins the end of February and ends the middle of May. It's like hunting season, but different in every single way. If I knew how to draw a Venn diagram in this blogging program to compare essay season to hunting season I would, but probably the only thing in that middle area would be the word "season". All that to say, I've turned in three beautifully crafted essays and one statstical analysis writeup, and I only cried once. Just kidding. Actually I did, but it's because I fell walking to school, and it really hurt. Turns out short cuts still aren't always the way to go. The good news is that despite the massive bruise on my hip, I managed to not spill my to-mug of coffee, and very few people were around to witness my grace. 

In recompense for the lack of blogs for the past several months, I offer instead an insider's perspective at the process of essay writing. Please be warned that the following images have not been edited, staged, or in any other way modified to facilitate my mother being anything but horrified at my state of living. 

Essays tend to begin as lengthy emails to professors. Sometimes this includes the thesis statement for the whole project. Usually it involves a somewhat vague idea I've been dreaming about for a while and several citations of past research. After settling on a topic with the professor come days or weeks of reading and reading and reading. Sometimes it's not so bad, and it looks like this: 

But when you get the mass of double sided papers together, even without the books involved, for one essay it's a little like this: 

(I put a filter on that to make it look cooler.)

After reading, the embryonic essay moves to the mirror. This is where I map out the main ideas and different authors' concepts and how they go together. It's like a glorified outline. Brace yourselves for the savage barbarism and unadorned reality that is final essays living (Sorry, Mom!):

This lasts for several days (weeks) during which I survive on peanut butter, apples, and coffee. And sometimes baked butternut squash with pesto, feta, and pomegranate seeds. Writers gotta eat. Mike and Gill Poole rescued me from this involuntary vegetarianism and fed me a proper roast dinner, and that was the best essay break ever! 

Sometimes I write note cards instead of mirror outlines for my sources. The mirror is good for more theoretical papers with confusing interrelations of terms, but if I have a large number of sources, I need notecards to keep them straight. This also allows me to color code them by topic and number them, so they're almost exactly in the order I want to use them in the essay. It looks like this:

And on nights (ok, it happened one time) that I stay up all night in the library, it looks a little like this:

And library snacks, which apparently I thought I was packing for a family of four:

And that, dear peruser of blogs, is why you've had no blog entries for two months. And now I'm off to study for my final exam that's in a week. 

Classy Days of Classlessness

I have class here three days a week. Yes, mathematicians and blog readers, that means I have four unclass (but still classy) days -- namely, Wednesday, Friday, and weekend days. When I'm not sitting in class or the library, you may be wondering what exactly it is I do here. I'm not going to tell you about last Wednesday because all I accomplished was maintaining a consistent and fairly convincing human slug impression for the whole of 24 hours. I slept for 12 hours, read in bed, and moved only when motivated by hunger to glug down sustenance and roll back under my duvet. In my defence, I was fighting a cold.

No, dear pursuer of blogs, I am going to tell you about yesterday, which was sufficiently productive to merit an entry. This is what I do when I don't do anything (aka when I don't go to class):

2:00 am - Go to sleep --- I have no idea why I was up this late, but I sure hope I had a good reason.
7:15 am - Alarm clock goes off
7:20 am - Decide not to fix my hair
7:25 am - Decide not to make coffee
7:30 am - Decide not to wear make up
7:40 am - Decide to pick out clothes by thinking about them from the comfort of bed
7:45 am - Realize I need to be walking to the bus in under half an hour. Regret not being able to fix hair. Layer clothes for purposes needed throughout the day. Pack climbing shoes for workout.
8:15 am - Miss the bus. Sprint to beat it to the next stop. Bus driver isn't nearly impressed enough.
8:20 am - Put on makeup in the back of the bus. Try to look inconspicuous, nothing to see here.
9:00 am - Take society pictures with the rock climbing club. "Tight Bright" themed outfit was previously layered for ease of picture attire. Finally realize life goal of being picked for the top of the human pyramid.

9:30 am - Coffee with the rock climbing kids
10:00 am - Bus back to town to try to figure out how to use the National Health Service since the number I was "supposed to call" is a clinic 45 minutes away.
11:00 am - Admit defeat on previous endeavour. Resign myself to a doctor at the university health clinic. Mourn the unavoidable presence of college kid sick germs.
11:30 am - Bus back to campus to help the Christian Union kids get ready for "mission week" lunch.
1:00 pm - Dissertation meeting with the government department
3:00 pm - Decide I need to be more specific in my analysis and focus my dissertation topic. Consider expanding the years included in my data set so that I can use a regression model. Determine that my Starbucks cup is hitting on me in English and French. Inappropriate Starbucks, inappropriate.

3:15 pm - Think about working out. Search for student ID yields no results. Decide not to workout. 

3:30 pm - Explore Wivenhoe Park lakes with two government department friends. Discuss the dilemma that ducks, while cute, are also tasty. They may be the cutest, commonly-accepted meat source. Take jumping pictures because it's sunny and that's reason enough. Teach my friend from India the proper way to jump in jumping pictures.
4:00 pm - Bus back home and fall asleep half-on, half-off my bed still wearing my coat, scarf, and boots.
5:30 pm - Start laundry and walk to grocery store with three day pack.
7:00 pm - Walk back from grocery store. Search for black beans and quinoa was unsuccessful.
8:00 pm - Hang now-clean clothes around room/stair bannister/dining room to dry. Commence mass cooking of lunches to freeze and take to school for the next few weeks.
1:00 am - Finish cleaning kitchen and go to bed.

And that's pretty much what I do. Wednesdays are usually for cooking, laundry, and reading. Well, everyday is for reading. So much reading.

Off to do more reading.

I see the sea; the sea sees me.

Today is Friday. I wrote this entry on Tuesday. I have big plans for a blog entry on a Tuesday, but I have to start it at 7:30am, and I keep forgetting! Regardless of the continent on which I am physically located, I still don't think before coffee. Coffee, coffee coffee. Today I thought, "I'll just brush my teeth and then go downstairs and make coffee." I walked into the bathroom, closed the cabinet door, stared at the washing machine, and walked out of the bathroom and downstairs to make coffee because I couldn't remember why I was there. Maybe you can get my cool blog idea next Tuesday. 

My Turkish friend Ece and I decided we need to travel more — like as a new-term resolution. I've been on a small island for months and still haven't looked around! We also decided we need to study more, hang out with people more, job search more, cook more, and work out ever. Maybe when it's warm.

But we made our first improvement to our student-life traveling, and we organized a Saturday day trip to the coast last weekend! Clacton-on-Sea is only a 30 minute train ride from campus, so we gathered our grad school buddies and hit the road. 

I haven't been to a sunny, warm European beach ever, so that definitely wasn't the expectation. It's an entirely different beach experience than the tan, sunscreen-mandating sand experiences of weekends gone past. But it's beautiful in a sad, winter way, and after all, I love rain. The people made the trip. We raced and climbed on sea walls and ate fish and chips and drank coffee and watched "football". It was an awesome day away from political theory and library shelves.

 I LOVE THE SEA! 

Pictures with captions following:

The group on one of the breaker walls.  

Seriously. I need more sand in my life. I'm completely content next to large bodies of water.  

My friend Luis and me on the famous Clacton pier. 

Can't keep a climbing girl down!!!! I'm thankful for friends who put up with this kind of behavior. 

Luis requested we wave. He captured our varying degrees of acquiescence. 

I have met the winter, and it is mine.

The above blog entry subject is an adjusted quote from Oliver Hazard Perry. It's basically how I feel about snow camping. With a fluffy jacket, several layers of fleece, a hot water bottle, a dry tent, wool socks, a mummy sleeping bag, mittens, hot herbal tea, and a number of relative strangers to cuddle between, winter camping is mine! 

The climbing club people all met up Friday afternoon, and by 9pm, our van crunched into the icy gravel of the Peak District camp site. Yes, it was a little ominous that there was blowing, swirling snow on the highway, but it all settled into 2.5 feet deep drifts. We donned our "head torches" and set up tents on the powder next to a river. I was assured that the snow would act as an insulating layer between me and the ground. 

The next morning we packed up our lunches and "kit" (British for an individual's gear) and crash pads and rope, and we hiked up to the crags though knee-deep powder. Nothing to make you feel out of shape like sweating in -2c degree weather. We definitely needed snowshoes. 

The view was spectacular! It is a white ocean gridded with stone wall fences and skeleton trees. The powder was so deep that even humans' hiking, driving, living couldn't disrupt its perfect whiteness

I'd love to lie and said I did 10 climbs, each more difficult than the one before. But I didn't. I did two climbs, and that's all. And there's not any photographic evidence because my photographer friend was belaying me! But this is where we climbed, and you can see the ropes as proof of our climbing prowess. 

And this is me sitting on a bouldering crash pad drinking tea. 

And this is me at least wearing a harness and drinking more tea while I take pics of someone else climbing. 

There are two problems with cold weather climbing: toes and fingers. I have to go down to bare feet to wear my climbing shoes, and my fingers freeze numb in seconds of holding onto icy rock. Isabella and I walked around on top of the face to warm up and look adorable, but as far as climbing goes, it was more of a camping/hiking trip than a get-sore-from-lots-of-climbing trip. 

Saturday night we went to a pub and were all warm and almost asleep on the way back to camp at a mere 11pm. Sunday the bus slid off the tread paths and got stuck in a drift on the side of the the road, so we used tent stakes and pots to dig out, and then my dream car old Land Rover came and pulled us out. People are so friendly here! But that took hours, so we ate and started back to uni. without bouldering. On the way home we had a lovely and very appropriate sing-along to Disney's Frozen, and the other students took turns making the van a moving broadcast of the top 40 pop chart. And I'm over here with an cinnamon Americano and a highlighter like "readers gonna read."

 

It was a hilarious weekend all in all. I'm ok with winter camping! Yeah, beach camping is still my preference, but as long as I have people to sleep between (or an electric blanket) and a nearly infinite amount of hot peppermint tea, it's too pretty to stay inside.

Until I am an Eskimo...

... I'll have to layer clothes until my arms are basically immobile. Despite the unfortunate event at the end of my last camping trip with the climbing club, I decided to give it another try. Yes, it's winter. Yes, there are 2.5 feet of snow on the ground in the Peak District, but, as a personal challenge and experiment to try winter camping, I took my climbing outside for the weekend. 

Friday I packed for winter camping. And by "packed" I mean I put all of my clothes on at one time and whatever was left I put in my backpack. This, dear reader, is how to survive England January camping.

Layer 1: Black fleece leggings and top. Thus the "basest" of the base layers is soft. 

Layer 2: More fleece leggings and an insulated underlayer top. 

Layer 3: Adding outer layers. Regular leggings and a flannel. 

Layer 4: Final touches. Fleece, hat, boyfriend jeans, and hiking boots. 

Then I'm just a fluffy coat and gloves away from bundled! I have a sweater and another undershirt in my bag (along with enough food for a family of four,  homemade rolls, and an emergency blanket). Ah, the preparation to sufficiently be one with nature. Nature better appreciate this and feel very special. 

Blogger fail

I am willing to admit that I'm not a brilliant blogger. I like doing it, I take pictures for it, and I usually have it on my "to do" list, but when grad school assignments are due, blogging is the first thing to go. My social life is sacrificed after that, and a balanced diet quickly follows in demise. Finally my sleep is slaughtered on the alter of academic achievement, and I turn into a beast of a human -- sleep-deprived and half-sick, basically noncomunicative, subsisting on Hobnobs (cookies) and developing an unhealthy attachment to my French press.

All that to say: I've been on Christmas vacation for two (three?) weeks, and I'm still two assignment short. So you're still not getting a real blog entry. BUT I wrote an article for the school newspaper back in late October, so here's the link to that. It's on page 23. http://issuu.com/therabbitessex/docs/issuu_160

And being a better blogger is my fourth New Year's resoluion -- right after drinking at least as much water as I do coffee. Happy 2015!