Ugh. Crap, I thought the ballroom social was last week, not this week, and ended up skipping an actual lesson. Phoey. (As for why I want to skip the social...sorry, not much for pub-crawling. That requires walking, and I'm lazy, especially when I'd just be walking around town and getting water everywhere 'cause I'm a cheap teetotaler. Only so much water you can drink in one night.) My conception of what date it is has gone right out the window.
I signed up for a bunch of activities with the idea of how much free time I had at Kenyon in mind, but I forgot to factor in the mandatory travelling practically every weekend and the ensuing work catch-up. Haven't been to Sci-Fi Society in three weeks, ballroom in a week and a half...the only thing I'm consistently going to is choir, and I even have to skip that this week, 'cause we'll be in London on Thursday. It's a good thing I came with friends, 'cause I have practically no opportunity to make them here, at least if I want to even attempt to keep up with work.
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St. Ives pictures are numerous, and I have numerous things to do very soon, so I think I'll wait on that and just give a narrative for now...not that there's much to tell. St. Ives was pretty (rather like Gulf Shores gone very, very quaint), and it was warm, and it was sunny, and generally nice. We did a lot of walking/exploring, went to a museum, and had Cornish pasties (one was fabulous, one was terrible). Ellen got mugged by a seagull while we were eating dinner by the beach. I got some yummy fudge and a postcard with cats on it, one if which looks remarkably like the orange trashcan cat I found and petted on...Saturday, I think. Aw, sweet kitty. So, yes, the whole thing was generally relaxing and pleasant.
The trip there and back, ont he other hand... The trip there wasn't too bad. There were massive storms all over Cornwall and Devon last week, and still some damage on the tracks from them. So the track between Exeter and Newton Abbott was shut down, requiring us to take a bus there. We got on a train and made the rest of the journey uneventfully, arriving about an hour after we planned. We went on an awesome bridge over Plymouth Bay that was massive and long and steel and just very cool. There was a bit on the part from St. Erth to St. Ives where the train sort of ran beside the ocean...not quite, 'cause there was always some vegetation between us and the sea, but it was pretty anyway. We got some good views of that famous lighthouse that Virginia Woolfe wrote about
The trip back, though... Well, we were originally going to get on a train at 2:30. Showed up, train was cancelled. They promised a bus to St. Austell at 3:30. Wait, wait...no bus. Called the national train number. Promised a bus at 4. Never showed up. (We were waiting outside in the cold this entire time, by the way.) Finally, at 5 PM, the train company sent us taxis for the hour-long ride to St. Austell. (This was thanks to a British woman who spent, like, hours on the phone berating everyone she could, until they finally realized we seriously didn't want to be stuck in St. Erth forever.) Got to St. Austell, and they'd held the 5:40 train for us (it was about 6 PM then). They upgrade us to first class, too, which was a nice gesture (and meant free hot chocolate!), and we got back to Exeter at 8, about 2.5 hours after we were supposed to. I think we went around the bay where the River Exe empties into the ocean on the way back, but we couldn't really see it. We saw that there was a large body of water right beside the train, but that was about it. Hopefully next time we get out that way, we'll take a train back during the day and get to see it, 'cause it looked cool.
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So. That annotated bibliography. Argh. Doesn't Matz know that whenever I use secondary source quotes, I just use created ellipses to make them support my thesis, and summarizing the articles or books means that my sham is revealed? Honestly.
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