Perhaps...

...you've noticed my abysmal posting record of late. Rest assured that those days are gone. Prior to Tuesday morning at two thirty, my time was primarily being commandeered by National Novel Writing Month, which for some idiotic reason I decided to attempt this year, despite the ridiculous amount of work I have to do and generally being overwhelmed just by being in this country. And somehow I finished! I completed, for the second time in my life, a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I now feel I have earned the title "novelist."

A lot of things happened while I was doing all this noveling. I skipped class one day to go to Jane Austen's house, and I skipped class another day because I was in Ireland with my family. Now I am done skipping class, because I have far too much work to do to be missing anything.

Unfortunately the weather does not seem to agree. We had a snow day today — my one class got cancelled. Which is fine with me, because my seven minute walk to the bus in the morning turns to fifteen (at the least) in the snow, and my twenty minute bus ride turns into forty. So not worth it for an hour of class.

So I guess I'll say some things about some things. Like.

Jane's Austen's House!

This is in a tiny village near Alton. This is the house that she spent the last good chunk of her life at, and where she wrote and published most of her stuff. I loved it. The nice thing about out-of-the-way sites like that one is that in the middle of November in the rain and cold, there are virtually no tourists. We almost had the house to ourselves. Unfortunately they do not allow photos inside, but it was worth it to go around. A lot of the stuff is really well preserved, and they have a lot of letters and things on the walls, and some really amazing stuff like her sister Cassandra's watercolors. I got a ton of nerdy stuff from the gift shop. The little village was so cute; about every third house has a legit thatched roof, and I'm sure only about a hundred people live there. Unfortunately the village pub wasn't serving.

It was definitely worth skipping class. I re-read Sense and Sensibility for my term paper in 18th Cent. Lit and I was happy to find that I understood it far better than when I read it in high school, and that I enjoyed it a lot more. I'm sure the two things are linked.

So, that was cool. I'm glad we went when we did, because it was about the last tolerably warm (i.e. not deathly cold) day that we've had.

Then, you know, my parents and brother came to visit me, which had the bittersweet affect of making me super happy the whole week but a lot more homesick after they left. But I'll come back to that and instead talk about...

Ireland!

One of my professors at TU swears that Ireland is magical, and I can see what he means. It was overcast for a lot of our visit, but one thing that really struck me was that the way the sun is, the way the light hits everything, it never quite lights it up properly. Instead it sort of bathes everything in a whiteish glow. It's most pronounced when there's mist or fog, but even on the clear days, the sunlight was never as bright as it is here or at home. It was really strange but really lovely.

I'm glad my family was happy not to spend most of our time in Dublin, because, as most people have told me, the Irish countryside is where it's at. We spent most of our time driving around, visiting castles and cliffs, and popping in to local pubs. Everyone is so friendly, too, and everyone has a dog. The perfect combination of these two features was when the woman selling admission to this ancient ruin site, who had her dogs in the ticket booth with her, let us take one of them for a walk down to the old fort. Who does that? Irish people, that's who. Then, at the Cliffs of Moher, there is a three-legged sheep dog who hangs around for all the tourists to love on him. I think what he used to do is like, lead you up this path to the top of one of the cliffs, but they stopped letting people go there because they would get blown off the cliffs by wind gusts or whatever. There are all these signs everywhere for help with depression for all the people who go there to commit suicide. They don't have those at the Grand Canyon, let me tell you. It sounds awful to say, but it was horrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Our last day we spent in Dublin, which was nice to get to see, but did not capture the imagination quite like Stockholm or Prague. We took one of those bus tours, and we were lucky to get a live instead of a recorded guide as we passed the Guinness brewery (which probably takes up like, half of Dublin). You could tell he loved talking about Guinness. I guess back when it started, it was a really good company to work for; it was the only one at the time to give paid sick days and stuff like that. You can't actually tour the proper brewery anymore, just the museum/shrine to Mr. Guinness, which is too bad. Anyway, the whole time we were around the Guinness quarter, the guy was chattering on and on about Guinness and telling us all these funny stories, and then as soon as he got to the part where he had to announce the next stop, all he said was something along the lines of, "And the next stop is the Modern Art Museum," which was followed by three minutes of dead silence. My dad an I were cracking up; it seemed so stereotypically Irish.

We saw St. Parick's cathedral, (we thought) like good Catholics, but as it turns out, St. Patrick's is actually an Anglican church, thank you Henry VIII. This really upset my mom and me. We came all the way to Ireland and didn't even manage to see a single Catholic church? Ridiculous. But it was beautiful, and really, not being Catholic doesn't diminish it in any way I guess. It's just sort of sad.

The last thing we did was, I sort of tricked my family into agreeing to go to the Dublin Writer's Museum, which after seeing Jane Austen's house, I thought was going to be really cool, but was actually sort of a bust. It was pretty informative, but not all that interesting. I thought it was going to have a lot more artifacts or manuscripts or whatever but it didn't, so much. It more just made me feel guilty about all the stuff I haven't read.

So, all of this was a lot of fun. The rest of the time, I spent going to class and sending my family off on adventures during the day and then meeting them in London in the evening. We saw a couple of shows, and then on Saturday, we did a whirlwind of tourist stuff, including Westminster Abbey, the Churchill War Rooms, and the tour of the Globe. Westminster Abbey was my favorite; poet's corner, where are buried like, all the important writers ever, was really mind-blowing. Dickens is there, and really, countless others. Outside there, on the other side of the wall sort of, I randomly found Aphra Behn. She's barely marked at all, and she's not on the audio guide or whatever, so I was really excited to find her. Her epitaph reads: "Here lies proof that wit can never be/Defence enough against mortality" which is just proof of how much of a badass she was.

Oh, also. I went to the Houses of Parliament, which is cool mostly for all the weird things they told us Parliament does. And the copy of the Magna Carta that is just chillin on one of the walls.


So. That all happened. And now I have a hot 18 days before I come back home. Having my family here has made me really really homesick. I mean, I still love London, and I would be happy to live here forever, but right now my life is in Tulsa and I woud like to get back to it. It doesn't help that I have a mountain of homework to do before I can leave. Four papers, two films, a still portrait of God-knows-who. If I finish one paper this weekend, one paper next week, one paper next weekend, and the last paper the last week, I should be okay on that score. Then as long as I can get my stuff filmed over the course of the coming week, I should be able to edit over the last week, and that should be okay. I just really do not know who to photograph for my portfolio. It has to be of a Kingston "hero." I have only lived in Kingston for three months. I don't know any heroes. So that's going to be an issue.

As long as I can get through the work, however, I am going to survive. There have been times when I really did not want to leave England at all. Those days are mostly over. I am going to miss it so much, but right now I really just want to be home. Every time I see something about Christmas in Tulsa, I just miss it more. I thought I was going to be able to switch my flight and come home a day early, but that isn't possible.

I don't think this would be so bad if it were not snowing and a complete ordeal to get anywhere. But the trains aren't running, so I can't even get into London. Oh well.

I hope to be able to post several more times before I go, and at some point I should re-evaluate my goals. Get super psyched for that!

Peace.
C