Saturday 22 December 2007
Cold Kitten
You know that feeling when you're camping and its cold out? You know. When you're huddled in the sleeping bag or under the blankets with someone and affection is taking a distant second to sharing body warmth under the heading of why you're huddled so close? When the side of you not facing another person is still just a bit cold despite the three layers of blankets? When you finally get fairly toasty below the blankets but then you face the choice of whether to have a very cold nose or whether to pull your head under the blankets too where it's warm but stuffy? Yeah, picturing it now? That's what our flat is like with the heater on full blast.
Wednesday 19 December 2007
Tis the Season for Panic
Aaahhh! Christmas is nearly here!!! I haven't mailed the Christmas cards yet!! They'll never make it to the States in time now! Aaahhh!!!!
*runs away, wild-eyed, out into the frosty Glaswegian morning*
*runs away, wild-eyed, out into the frosty Glaswegian morning*
Tuesday 18 December 2007
Thought for the Morning
I know that waking at quarter to eight and making it out the door at last by quarter to nine should not feel like the crack of dawn. I am, however, not a morning person at all and have been free to sleep in recently and so it does. But it is an interesting (that's one word for it anyway) fact of living in the north in winter that walking out the door at quarter to nine is, more or less, dawn (though not the-crack-of). Pink sky blurring into peach into white into pale aqua-blue. Dawn. Even at nine-thirty the horizon still glowed with the remnants of peach, though most of the sky had given in and admitted it was solidly "day."
Another interesting thing. BBC Radio has a short "thought for the day" slot in its morning programme. We have a radio alarm clock so I usually listen to this in various states of wakefulness. I must add, for context, that most Brits I know consider America to be a far more "Christian nation" than Britain, despite the supposed separation of church and state in the US. But the "thought for the day" is invariably Christian in outlook; it might be directly about Christianity or it might be a Christian take on environmental stewardship or other such issues. But it's always Christian. On Sundays they broadcast a church service--moving the chosen church location all over Britain from Sunday to Sunday, though I assume it is always Church of England (Church of Scotland probably qualifies too). It's rather nice but distinctly odd living somewhere with an official state religion (well, nice because it's my religion. But it's certainly good it's not a required thing!). Well that was my thought for the day about the thought for the day.
Another interesting thing. BBC Radio has a short "thought for the day" slot in its morning programme. We have a radio alarm clock so I usually listen to this in various states of wakefulness. I must add, for context, that most Brits I know consider America to be a far more "Christian nation" than Britain, despite the supposed separation of church and state in the US. But the "thought for the day" is invariably Christian in outlook; it might be directly about Christianity or it might be a Christian take on environmental stewardship or other such issues. But it's always Christian. On Sundays they broadcast a church service--moving the chosen church location all over Britain from Sunday to Sunday, though I assume it is always Church of England (Church of Scotland probably qualifies too). It's rather nice but distinctly odd living somewhere with an official state religion (well, nice because it's my religion. But it's certainly good it's not a required thing!). Well that was my thought for the day about the thought for the day.
Monday 17 December 2007
It's Freezing Here!
Well, the water in the gutters and on the pavement is mostly all frozen so it's officially gone from "cold" to "freezing" here.
Last night the Flat of Rats (Molly & Johanna; though Johanna was off at French class) hosted a mulled wine and poker (well, poker and whist) night that was good fun. The grand prize was a bar of chocolate but due to a failure to work out exactly how to determine who the ultimate winner was, we ended up sharing the chocolate. I lost abysmally in the practice round while the two who knew what they were doing taught us all, while Doc apparently used up all his beginner's luck that round. During the "real" round I did well enough though. I still feel absolutely no urge to risk more than chocolate, however. I was tense enough just playing with little plastic chips that weren't worth anything. The best hand I won they reckoned I could have driven them all up way higher, but I'd been keeping my bets so low till then I figured they would know something was up.
Ron declined to play, thus earning no chocolate, but he enjoyed mulled wine and sitting nearby working on his newest role-playing background (since the internet was down, he claimed there was no way to job hunt anyway, and I suppose it would be unfair to expect him to work on cover letters while the rest of us played cards. Particularly as one of the card players is also job hunting in the same field).
Between travel prices being higher than expected, and the fact that, if we left, Johanna (whose family is in Sweden) would be all alone for Christmas, I think we've finally decided to stay in Glasgow for Christmas. It was Ron's mother who suggested it, being a practical sort, and we did see her just recently. I still feel a little guilty though, since who knows when we'll next be so close to her for Christmas. At least Jacky is going down. And hopefully once we both have "real" jobs, hopping a flight to the London area, even from the US, won't be such a problem. Of course, then there's all the question of fuel use and damage to the environment...
As a tangent, since I was teaching on this topic just last year, the UK general populous (ok, as judged from BBC radio and my over-educated friends) seem far more inclined to take anthropogenic global climate change as a fact. Annoyingly (from a selfish standpoint) the British law makers (though not my friends) seem inclined to target air travel first and foremost. I, however, think that cheap airtravel tends to make people more aware of how small a world it really is, which can only be useful in trying to get people to care about environmental changes in other places as well as overall. By that token, global travel should be one of the last things hit, not the first. Of course, I am quite biased.
Last night the Flat of Rats (Molly & Johanna; though Johanna was off at French class) hosted a mulled wine and poker (well, poker and whist) night that was good fun. The grand prize was a bar of chocolate but due to a failure to work out exactly how to determine who the ultimate winner was, we ended up sharing the chocolate. I lost abysmally in the practice round while the two who knew what they were doing taught us all, while Doc apparently used up all his beginner's luck that round. During the "real" round I did well enough though. I still feel absolutely no urge to risk more than chocolate, however. I was tense enough just playing with little plastic chips that weren't worth anything. The best hand I won they reckoned I could have driven them all up way higher, but I'd been keeping my bets so low till then I figured they would know something was up.
Ron declined to play, thus earning no chocolate, but he enjoyed mulled wine and sitting nearby working on his newest role-playing background (since the internet was down, he claimed there was no way to job hunt anyway, and I suppose it would be unfair to expect him to work on cover letters while the rest of us played cards. Particularly as one of the card players is also job hunting in the same field).
Between travel prices being higher than expected, and the fact that, if we left, Johanna (whose family is in Sweden) would be all alone for Christmas, I think we've finally decided to stay in Glasgow for Christmas. It was Ron's mother who suggested it, being a practical sort, and we did see her just recently. I still feel a little guilty though, since who knows when we'll next be so close to her for Christmas. At least Jacky is going down. And hopefully once we both have "real" jobs, hopping a flight to the London area, even from the US, won't be such a problem. Of course, then there's all the question of fuel use and damage to the environment...
As a tangent, since I was teaching on this topic just last year, the UK general populous (ok, as judged from BBC radio and my over-educated friends) seem far more inclined to take anthropogenic global climate change as a fact. Annoyingly (from a selfish standpoint) the British law makers (though not my friends) seem inclined to target air travel first and foremost. I, however, think that cheap airtravel tends to make people more aware of how small a world it really is, which can only be useful in trying to get people to care about environmental changes in other places as well as overall. By that token, global travel should be one of the last things hit, not the first. Of course, I am quite biased.
Saturday 15 December 2007
Hear My Concert!
Hey guys! There is in fact a recording of O Greening Branch. The camera is on the audience but the sound is pretty good. Fast forward a ways past all the audience settling down (about 18 min. Watch for the lights dimming.) The solo starting off the second song is me!
mms://130.209.38.32/chapel/chapel_20071208.wmv
Hope you enjoy!
mms://130.209.38.32/chapel/chapel_20071208.wmv
Hope you enjoy!
Wednesday 12 December 2007
Mardigirls and other Adventures
O Greening Branch
The Mardrigirls concert (or music and readings for advent, if you'd rather) went beautifully.
It was very cold--it snowed earlier in the day--and it proved tricky for me to dress in enough layers not to freeze to death and still look like I was just in concert attire of black. (One pair of dying thermal underwear, one pair of socks, one pair of too-small hose cut off above the knee, one pair of garters snitched from Ron's kilt attire, one pair of too-small black shoes purchased that day in a charity shop, one long black skirt, one long-sleeve casual knit dark gray t-shirt, one black up corset, and one nice long sleeve black blouse later....Getting the top line of the corset not to show through the blouse was the trickiest bit. For anyone curious, pulling it up a bit works far better than pulling it down or other things up.) Anyway, I wasn't freezing, although I certainly was not at any time over-warm in all that.
My solo started the second song. Which was good--I didn't have to fret through half the concert before getting there. Everyone says it went beautifully. I'll believe them. It seems like I faded out a bit at one point but maybe that just seemed like a decrescendo and crescendo that weren't in fact in the music (it was, after all, plain chant; there aren't any dynamics markings at all). Anyway, everyone seemed genuinely impressed with the solo and the performance as a whole (some of my friends admitting they had expected something far more amature...but this was amazing). So, Yay!
And it was all great fun. It's been so long since I was a part of something like that. And even then, I don't think the music was ever so tailored to all be things I liked! Not all of it was medieval and Renaissance but the rest was in more or less the same style. We had a brand new piece. We were basically the sneak preview before the world premier a few days later! He came and heard us rehearse and said it sounded amazing (and stayed for the performance too, but I didn't talk to him after that). I was also grimly pleased that when the director asked him something about a crotchet note he replied that he didn't know all this English terminology! He's American too. I've been stumbling over "crotchets" and "quavers" and the like for months now! Oh, and the "Finnish-ish" Ave Maria that I mentioned in the blog earlier as being odd because it was in Latin, not Finnish? Johanna said it did sound Finnish in style!
It was an amazing experience and I'm very glad I did it. I think, if anything, the music was more fun than choir as a teenager. It had more of a sense of a group of colleagues putting together something beautiful. My choir directors as a kid--and even some of the church choir directors I have known--have had something of the feel of beleaguered artists trying to herd cats to do their bidding and create the effect they are looking for. Well, and as I said, it was the sort of music I would have picked. All that lovely Latin and Middle English.
Now I have to go back to California before I forget it all, and teach the other kittens the ones that can be done with three voices...
Aftermath
After the concert there was mulled wine. Yummy and welcome warmth. And birthday presents (cookies which Ron kept snitching; and a journal with a pointed demand that I finish my story about the water man.) My friends and I were dispatched to the Postgrad Club to grab tables for the Madrigirls to come over after cleanup. So we did, rather effectively too. Once the Madrigirls actually arrived, Ron and the rest cleared over to a table alone leaving the four tables together we had staked out for the choir and guests that had come to town especially. I hung out with the choir for a while, before rejoining friends. We really need a separate social night when we don't all have guests, though.
Then Monday, now that I'm safely through the performance, I've come down with my second cold of the season. Yuck. Not nearly as bad as the flu last month though.
Hogwarts Updates
Well, the day after the concert was the final installment in the Harry Potter game Molly's been running. Wow. Good finish. We even ended up in the Forbidden Forest at last, and solved, well, most of the mysteries set before us.
It is interesting, but I think Hetty Cowell is one of the most complex characters I have played. I always try to make complicated real-feeling characters, but 11 (well, 12 now) year old Hetty puts shame to most of them. From the very beginning the Sorting Hat had trouble placing her. It considered everything except Hufflepuff. Finally placed in Slytherin, she was wishing she was in Ravenclaw by the end of the second week. Even Gryffindore wouldn't be all that bad. She went so far as to ask Dumbledore if there was any chance of transferring houses, but he turned her down. Did I mention it was 1940-41? Well, but the end of the adventure, the only people in Slytherin still speaking to her are Edgar Sullins (another player character that Hetty does not at all trust, with good reason) and, wait for it, Tom Riddle. Oh, our GM fights dirty. Hetty has absolutely no reason to distrust soft-spoken Tom, so she's even been helping him with a "side project" of his. Meanwhile, by the end of the year, cowardly Hetty has managed to find herself swearing an Unbreakable Vow to protect an adventurous Ravenclaw while they're at Hogwarts (I really don't see how she's now going to survive Hogwarts). She's already given up a last swallow of Filix Filicitas to help Artemis rather than herself. Meanwhile Hetty is rather jeaulous of said Ravenclaw (Artemis) and her close friendship with the half-goblin she swore the Vow to (Flitwick, but not the one who will become a professor). Her own best friend is a Griffendore whose been disowned by his all-Slytherin family, but he occasionally falls back into bad habits and can be a bit mean while also distrusting her Slytherin smooth-talking ways. Oh the mess. With all the conflicting pulls, it really is rather uncertain what Hetty will do from one moment to the next. However, I think she may be the only player character to have gone the entire school year without a detention.
We've decided to all take turns GMing a year. Molly will take over one of the NPCs from our year, and will GM 7th year if we make it that far. I really doubt we will unless the subsequent years go much faster. Ron's got 2nd year and I've got 3rd. Third Year will be especially tricky since that's when the Chamber of Secrets will open and one PC is friends with Moaning Myrtle and two others are friends with Hagrid, so keeping them from solving that mystery will be tricky indeed. However, it will be useful having that be my year to GM since Hetty would be best placed to find out what Tom is up to, but will conveniently be an uninquisitive npc that year, more interested in acing all her classes than solving mysteries (and thank goodness the person she has to protect is "pureblood"!)
The Mardrigirls concert (or music and readings for advent, if you'd rather) went beautifully.
It was very cold--it snowed earlier in the day--and it proved tricky for me to dress in enough layers not to freeze to death and still look like I was just in concert attire of black. (One pair of dying thermal underwear, one pair of socks, one pair of too-small hose cut off above the knee, one pair of garters snitched from Ron's kilt attire, one pair of too-small black shoes purchased that day in a charity shop, one long black skirt, one long-sleeve casual knit dark gray t-shirt, one black up corset, and one nice long sleeve black blouse later....Getting the top line of the corset not to show through the blouse was the trickiest bit. For anyone curious, pulling it up a bit works far better than pulling it down or other things up.) Anyway, I wasn't freezing, although I certainly was not at any time over-warm in all that.
My solo started the second song. Which was good--I didn't have to fret through half the concert before getting there. Everyone says it went beautifully. I'll believe them. It seems like I faded out a bit at one point but maybe that just seemed like a decrescendo and crescendo that weren't in fact in the music (it was, after all, plain chant; there aren't any dynamics markings at all). Anyway, everyone seemed genuinely impressed with the solo and the performance as a whole (some of my friends admitting they had expected something far more amature...but this was amazing). So, Yay!
And it was all great fun. It's been so long since I was a part of something like that. And even then, I don't think the music was ever so tailored to all be things I liked! Not all of it was medieval and Renaissance but the rest was in more or less the same style. We had a brand new piece. We were basically the sneak preview before the world premier a few days later! He came and heard us rehearse and said it sounded amazing (and stayed for the performance too, but I didn't talk to him after that). I was also grimly pleased that when the director asked him something about a crotchet note he replied that he didn't know all this English terminology! He's American too. I've been stumbling over "crotchets" and "quavers" and the like for months now! Oh, and the "Finnish-ish" Ave Maria that I mentioned in the blog earlier as being odd because it was in Latin, not Finnish? Johanna said it did sound Finnish in style!
It was an amazing experience and I'm very glad I did it. I think, if anything, the music was more fun than choir as a teenager. It had more of a sense of a group of colleagues putting together something beautiful. My choir directors as a kid--and even some of the church choir directors I have known--have had something of the feel of beleaguered artists trying to herd cats to do their bidding and create the effect they are looking for. Well, and as I said, it was the sort of music I would have picked. All that lovely Latin and Middle English.
Now I have to go back to California before I forget it all, and teach the other kittens the ones that can be done with three voices...
Aftermath
After the concert there was mulled wine. Yummy and welcome warmth. And birthday presents (cookies which Ron kept snitching; and a journal with a pointed demand that I finish my story about the water man.) My friends and I were dispatched to the Postgrad Club to grab tables for the Madrigirls to come over after cleanup. So we did, rather effectively too. Once the Madrigirls actually arrived, Ron and the rest cleared over to a table alone leaving the four tables together we had staked out for the choir and guests that had come to town especially. I hung out with the choir for a while, before rejoining friends. We really need a separate social night when we don't all have guests, though.
Then Monday, now that I'm safely through the performance, I've come down with my second cold of the season. Yuck. Not nearly as bad as the flu last month though.
Hogwarts Updates
Well, the day after the concert was the final installment in the Harry Potter game Molly's been running. Wow. Good finish. We even ended up in the Forbidden Forest at last, and solved, well, most of the mysteries set before us.
It is interesting, but I think Hetty Cowell is one of the most complex characters I have played. I always try to make complicated real-feeling characters, but 11 (well, 12 now) year old Hetty puts shame to most of them. From the very beginning the Sorting Hat had trouble placing her. It considered everything except Hufflepuff. Finally placed in Slytherin, she was wishing she was in Ravenclaw by the end of the second week. Even Gryffindore wouldn't be all that bad. She went so far as to ask Dumbledore if there was any chance of transferring houses, but he turned her down. Did I mention it was 1940-41? Well, but the end of the adventure, the only people in Slytherin still speaking to her are Edgar Sullins (another player character that Hetty does not at all trust, with good reason) and, wait for it, Tom Riddle. Oh, our GM fights dirty. Hetty has absolutely no reason to distrust soft-spoken Tom, so she's even been helping him with a "side project" of his. Meanwhile, by the end of the year, cowardly Hetty has managed to find herself swearing an Unbreakable Vow to protect an adventurous Ravenclaw while they're at Hogwarts (I really don't see how she's now going to survive Hogwarts). She's already given up a last swallow of Filix Filicitas to help Artemis rather than herself. Meanwhile Hetty is rather jeaulous of said Ravenclaw (Artemis) and her close friendship with the half-goblin she swore the Vow to (Flitwick, but not the one who will become a professor). Her own best friend is a Griffendore whose been disowned by his all-Slytherin family, but he occasionally falls back into bad habits and can be a bit mean while also distrusting her Slytherin smooth-talking ways. Oh the mess. With all the conflicting pulls, it really is rather uncertain what Hetty will do from one moment to the next. However, I think she may be the only player character to have gone the entire school year without a detention.
We've decided to all take turns GMing a year. Molly will take over one of the NPCs from our year, and will GM 7th year if we make it that far. I really doubt we will unless the subsequent years go much faster. Ron's got 2nd year and I've got 3rd. Third Year will be especially tricky since that's when the Chamber of Secrets will open and one PC is friends with Moaning Myrtle and two others are friends with Hagrid, so keeping them from solving that mystery will be tricky indeed. However, it will be useful having that be my year to GM since Hetty would be best placed to find out what Tom is up to, but will conveniently be an uninquisitive npc that year, more interested in acing all her classes than solving mysteries (and thank goodness the person she has to protect is "pureblood"!)
Thursday 6 December 2007
Random Thought for the Day
You know it's time to do laundry when...you decide that having one sock that it black with purple kittens and one sock that is off-white is fine to wear out the door, since you have little choice.
Wednesday 5 December 2007
Published!
The QM's WiFi has not been working well lately so I'm falling back into coffee shop habits. Mmm, coffee. Actually, this place doesn't even serve plain coffee: espresso drinks only. Yum. It's a bad habit though. I don't think, however, they would be very pleased with me staying all day like I did in my Atlanta haunts.
Going back to the topic of the QM though, I have news. I've been published in their magazine QMunicate. Yes, that's right....
I AM IN PRINT!!!
Alright, alright, so it was co-authored and Molly actually deserves the lion's share of the credit. But it was fun writing together and fun seeing my name in print. It was just an article about GUGS. They only gave us one day's notice since they needed to fill a slot opened up by a flaky no-show. (Boy do I remember those!) So Molly hacked something out and I went through and poked, prodded, added, subtracted and then she went through again and then I went through again and then we threw up our hands and declared it good enough and out it went. The other gamers thought it was good, but we've still got no idea what non-gamers would think of it.
Gaming itself is very exciting this week. I am, more or less, in three games: Harry Potter which will have its final session this Sunday. My 11-year-old Slytherin, Hetty Cowell has been facing many moral dilemmas and frightening situations but hopefully will come out ok in the end. MI8, which is action-horror-spy stuff, is getting quite tense at present (ah! they're hunting us down! They know who we are!). And then there's a Black Jewels rpg on Witchfire (online) where Kharian Danza is being swept up into all sorts of adventures...and swept into the arms of a handsome young man (who's really lucky she doesn't put a knife through his ribs; she is an assassin after all. She seems pleased though. I know she's my character but I really didn't know what she would do till it happened.)
I don't know what, if anything, I'll do on my birthday. The British tradition of going out and getting pissed with friends would not be a good idea given my concert the next day. Maybe we'll go see The Golden Compass. Or maybe I'll spend a quiet night with Ron. Don't know. But I am looking forward to Saturday. La la la! And then we can party afterwards.
Going back to the topic of the QM though, I have news. I've been published in their magazine QMunicate. Yes, that's right....
I AM IN PRINT!!!
Alright, alright, so it was co-authored and Molly actually deserves the lion's share of the credit. But it was fun writing together and fun seeing my name in print. It was just an article about GUGS. They only gave us one day's notice since they needed to fill a slot opened up by a flaky no-show. (Boy do I remember those!) So Molly hacked something out and I went through and poked, prodded, added, subtracted and then she went through again and then I went through again and then we threw up our hands and declared it good enough and out it went. The other gamers thought it was good, but we've still got no idea what non-gamers would think of it.
Gaming itself is very exciting this week. I am, more or less, in three games: Harry Potter which will have its final session this Sunday. My 11-year-old Slytherin, Hetty Cowell has been facing many moral dilemmas and frightening situations but hopefully will come out ok in the end. MI8, which is action-horror-spy stuff, is getting quite tense at present (ah! they're hunting us down! They know who we are!). And then there's a Black Jewels rpg on Witchfire (online) where Kharian Danza is being swept up into all sorts of adventures...and swept into the arms of a handsome young man (who's really lucky she doesn't put a knife through his ribs; she is an assassin after all. She seems pleased though. I know she's my character but I really didn't know what she would do till it happened.)
I don't know what, if anything, I'll do on my birthday. The British tradition of going out and getting pissed with friends would not be a good idea given my concert the next day. Maybe we'll go see The Golden Compass. Or maybe I'll spend a quiet night with Ron. Don't know. But I am looking forward to Saturday. La la la! And then we can party afterwards.
Tuesday 4 December 2007
Recent Attempts and other Updates
My most recent attempts to be diurnal are meeting with mixed success.
My most recent attempts to be diligent and productive are meeting with even less success. I have, however, been making progress on the world building necessary to forge onwards with my writing.
My efforts to finish recovering from my flu/cold have plateaued. Hopefully I will not have a cough at my choral performance this Saturday. I am looking forward to it (the singing, not the coughing). I am practicing my wee titchy solo at random moments throughout the day, every day. I've also been faithfully plugging the performance, quite a feat for me since I'm usually too shy. But I mentioned it to a few people at church, told my whole weekend role playing group, announced it at International Cafe, and plan to announce it at GUGS tonight.
Ron and I's attempts to make any sort of definitive decisions about far flung future times such as oh say January are still meeting with dismal failure. As stated earlier, there is progress with his immigration proceedings. But not much.
Our attempts at a job search are meeting with mixed success in the applying part (and dismal failure in the getting a job part, but if that had happened there wouldn't be a job search any more, now would there?). Ron's applied for a number (all right, a fairly small number...sigh) of UK jobs. He is still volunteering at his old lab to keep his experience fresh but this of course takes time away from job hunting. This week's focus should be applying for US jobs though.
Recent attempts to deal with the usual theological crises that arise whenever I'm in Scotland are not going well. I miss BREAK@8. I miss BPC. I miss churches that light advent candles. I understand Sandyford Church's reasoning in not following an ecumenical calendar but you'd think they could make an exception for Christmas!
My most recent attempts to be diligent and productive are meeting with even less success. I have, however, been making progress on the world building necessary to forge onwards with my writing.
My efforts to finish recovering from my flu/cold have plateaued. Hopefully I will not have a cough at my choral performance this Saturday. I am looking forward to it (the singing, not the coughing). I am practicing my wee titchy solo at random moments throughout the day, every day. I've also been faithfully plugging the performance, quite a feat for me since I'm usually too shy. But I mentioned it to a few people at church, told my whole weekend role playing group, announced it at International Cafe, and plan to announce it at GUGS tonight.
Ron and I's attempts to make any sort of definitive decisions about far flung future times such as oh say January are still meeting with dismal failure. As stated earlier, there is progress with his immigration proceedings. But not much.
Our attempts at a job search are meeting with mixed success in the applying part (and dismal failure in the getting a job part, but if that had happened there wouldn't be a job search any more, now would there?). Ron's applied for a number (all right, a fairly small number...sigh) of UK jobs. He is still volunteering at his old lab to keep his experience fresh but this of course takes time away from job hunting. This week's focus should be applying for US jobs though.
Recent attempts to deal with the usual theological crises that arise whenever I'm in Scotland are not going well. I miss BREAK@8. I miss BPC. I miss churches that light advent candles. I understand Sandyford Church's reasoning in not following an ecumenical calendar but you'd think they could make an exception for Christmas!
Monday 3 December 2007
Dundee
We went up to Dundee this past weekend for Jacky's graduation. Not that we actually got to the graduation. And for once out lateness was not our fault. The train ride should have been and hour and 18 min. Rather than take the train that would have only given us an hour's leeway we took the one before that giving us a whole two hours to spare (and the train station is only 5 min walk from the building where the graduation was taking place.) This meant getting up at 6:30am, but we managed it. We got to the train station with time to spare even.
Then a train broke down outside of Perth.
To cut a long (and boring) story short it took FIVE HOURS!!! to get to Dundee.
We did, however, make it in time to get the formal pictures taken with Ron in his kilt (yay!) and Jacky in her PhD robes. And we stuck around to party and celebrate. Hurray for Jacky! She even had her picture on the front page of the paper! That was very cool.
Then a train broke down outside of Perth.
To cut a long (and boring) story short it took FIVE HOURS!!! to get to Dundee.
We did, however, make it in time to get the formal pictures taken with Ron in his kilt (yay!) and Jacky in her PhD robes. And we stuck around to party and celebrate. Hurray for Jacky! She even had her picture on the front page of the paper! That was very cool.
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