Backblog

And then suddenly three months went by without any updates. Oops. Which means that I now have an enormous backlog of adventures to relate. I don't think I'm going to manage to remember all the way back to March, but the recent past should be alright. So here we go, going in approximate reverse chronological disorder...

Last Saturday, JH and I went to see AF's choir in concert. It was nicely done, although we both had our thoughts about the singing skills of the girl with ringlets. AF also introduced us to his new boy. I say introduced; really AF just vaguely waved in the general direction and we had to wait until the boy introduced himself. He seems nice enough, but because the choir insisted on going to some odd pub miles away, we ended the night with a cup of tea at home and didn't get to meet him properly. As an aside, I was mildly annoyed by the gay militantism in the choir. Is there really a need to re-write all the lyrics? Especially those of negro spirituals from the abolition struggle? Oh, and claiming HIV as a gay disease, I thought the whole idea was to try to convince Bush that it isn't?

Moving on... On Friday I was extremely unmotivated, so I ended up going into town. I didn't buy any clothes because H&M decided not to have a sale on, but I did buy a 10-DVD set of Tintin cartoons for £20. Childhood memories. Although of course in my childhood Tintin didn't speak with an American accent. Still, have been enjoying some of the movies (there's 21 in all) already, but am trying not to watch too many of them too soon.

Friday's non-motivationality was directly related to Thursday, when I decided to try to work on the Evil Reviewer's comments on my taboo-language article. I need to relate it more to recent literature on language death. Great. I did a nice search, found nothing in the past ten years on language death apart from some monographs along the lines of 'Look at all the different ways language behaves. If we let languages die, we'll lose all of it which will greatly hamper the study of linguistics'. Agreed and all, but incredibly irrelevant to my article. As a result, within ten minutes of starting the editing I had crumpled up the piece of paper and physically chucked it against the wall, and sent AM an e-mail saying I was thinking of telling the editor to sod off with his effing journal. Still waiting for the masterplan to bypass the Evil Reviewer and get my article published...

All of last week was celebration week, really. On Monday, CH passed her viva and we had drinks in the Pear Tree. On Wednesday, RRV passed her viva, which was celebrated in style on Thursday with a mini-banquet and a concert by RRV's trio -- two flutes and piano, well impressed as well by TK's piano skills! -- in St Cecilia's Hall. And on Friday we celebrated AR's distinction in her MSc by drinks in the Pear Tree followed by Chinese buffet at Waverley.

The Saturday before that AF asked whether I wanted to go to Treefest with him. We ran into TB at the bus stop, and later also found some Shambles walking about. And later WB said he was coming too, so it was a big group. Treefest is a nice idea: see what things you can do with wood (especially the handicraftsmen were nice, although whether making wooden cubes from a tree with a chainsaw is a craft is another question) and make sure we treat our forests and our environment nicely. Too bad it was infested with tree-hugging hippies. Yuck! I wash my hands off them!

Walked home with WB and decided to try out the wooden spatula he bought at Treefest (for £3, but then again, it did come with the guarantee that this was the most fantastic spatula ever, and once you use it, you will never use another spatula again). So we had a stirfry, the spatula worked okay, and spent the rest of the evening pottering about in WB's room which turns out to double as a music studio. Some nepotist promotion: see some of the tracks at www.barras.ws (esp. 'Jane' and the Buddy Holly cover are nice), which incidentally weren't recorded in his room but in our office!