Various sorts of excellent adventures

Hello hello hello!
It has been a sad long time since I have updated, and since quite a few fun little events have past, I thought I would write some of them down.

1. The First Junior Common Room Party!
This was an excellent night of fun, held last Friday at The Vines. We had soda floats, and a construction paper clothing contest. I made a Robin Hood costume, complete with hat with feather, quiver and arrows, and a bow, all out of paper. There were so many other awesome creations, including a gnome, the pope, a river, the white witch, and many more. By the vote of the JCR, I won best over all! The prize was a fantastic Oxford calender for next year, so I can look at pictures of Oxford all through 2011 :-) After the contest we watched Singin' in the Rain, which was my first time seeing it...wow, what a great film!

Speaking of another great film, I also watched Space Odyssey: 2001 for the first time a few nights ago, and it was CRAZY, but also incredible. I kind of want to watch again soon.

2. On Wednesday, I had a rather stinky day. I got behind on my essays, and forgot to claim the crockpot so my plan for dinner for my food group was thrown for a loop. In my flusteredness (hehe, made up a word) at having to come up with something new, I forgot to go to my second long essay consultation, which was rather horrible. In Oxford, you don't just miss stuff. It's considered really rude to do that, so I was feeling horrible. I rushed around, returning library books and writing a very formal and sincere apology email to my adviser, then ran to a grocery store and grabbed some Jamaican jerk sauce to dump on my chicken and cook it as my slapdash meal. By the time I got home, I had about 25 minutes before I had to start cooking. I took that time to have a little cry, then write down a list of everything happy and good that had happened that day to keep myself from getting too discouraged. The meal turned out well, and the rest of the night was good, so God really turned that one around for me.

3. Friday I had my Shakespeare tutorial (we talked about Shakespeare's portrayal of Jews in The Merchant of Venice) and afterward, since I didn't really have anything pressing, I meandered home slowly, stopping in lots of little shops. I found so many things that would work as great Christmas presents! Then, when I got home, I had a tea party with some of the other Vinerians, and just generally lazed about. I read about 100 pages of Oliver Twist, but that was the extent of my productiveness.

4. Today, I got up later than usual and ate a chocolate muffin for breakfast. It was one of the best chocolate muffins I have ever had. I read all of Much Ado about Nothing, and some more Oliver Twist, and then after a great skype chat with Josiah, I went punting!
It was a perfect day to be on the water. The sun was going down a little, so it was glinting off the river and making everything nice and glowy, but it was also chilly. There were lots of ducks around, and one of the Vinerian girls in my boat, Bethany, found an apple floating in the water and starting feeding chunks of it to them. One duck came close enough for me to touch it on the tail! Towards the end of the trip, I decided to have a go at being the Punt-master, so I took over for a bit from Ben. It was pretty difficult, because those poles are so long, but I after a little while I started to get the hang of it a little more. When we were bringing our boat back and waiting for the others to bring theirs, we saw a guy take his lady friend out, and man, he was a PRO. He wheedled that boat around super tight turns and was using his pole like a rudder and was looking pretty professional. Then he drove into the branches of a tree, so we felt that he was human after all. We felt pretty good about ourselves for doing so well, especially since our Junior Dean, Graham(ps) said that we would have a hard time of it. (Ho ho, Graham! we showed you!)
After punting, we went to a coffee shop for little while, then me and Bethany and Zach went back to the Vines. Later, I played a great game of Settlers of Catan with Burk, Lydia, Daniel, and Zach, which included some nice Celtic background music that made it seem more peasant-y. haha.
And now I am blogging to put off doing more work. Ugh. I just need to buckle down.
Ok, over and out.
-Abby