Listening: U2 The Best of 1990-2000
Reading: Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Summer Term at the Chalet School

I hate people who lurk on E-Bay and only make their bid in the last few seconds so you can't possibly outbid them, even though you've been winning the thing for days. Evil bastards. I've trying to complete my Generation X collection and these fools keep outbidding me at the last second, leading to much frustration *growl*

BTW, a teenage boy told me the other day that girls don't buy comics, while I was standing in a comic shop clearly buying comics. What's wrong with teenage boys?

Listening: Hootie & the Blowfish Fairweather Johnson
Reading: Marvel Generation X

RAG Week in Cardiff = crap. RAG Week in Galway = hectic.

As you may have guessed from the above, it is RAG Week at my esteemed university, and so there has been much doing of nothing and much recovering from the night before. I have no lectures this week, so I'm allowed ;o) Thanks everyone who sent well-wishes for the self-inflicted pain of Sunday!

Listening: Sigur Ros Agoetis Byrjun
Reading: Marvel New Mutants #7

My head is killing me. I swear, I haven't had a proper hangover like this in months... I wasn't even supposed to go out yesterday! My flatmate and I went into town for an innocent lunch at this great Mexican restaurant, and then decided to go to the pub for one, which turned into many. We didn't go home until quite late that evening, armed with take-away and cranberry juice. Obviously, we couldn't be sensible and stop drinking - no. We made cocktails instead! Woohoo! *holds head in hands* Big mistake. But, hey, we watched Wayne's World 2 and Dirty Dancing - "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." Woke up this morning with very sory head. Bad Lorraine! The original plan for today was to go and watch the rugby (Ireland v Italy) in a pub, but that's gone out the window as we're all feeling a bit tender.

What's going on with Rahne Sinclair in New Mutants. What happened to her accent? Why didn't they just make up a new character rather than giving her a complete personality change? Read the final issue of Sentinal and, to be honest, I'm quite glad it's over. It was good and I did enjoy it, but I don't think I would have continued to buy it, even with their semi-cliffhanger ending. Runaways, on the other hand, I am going to continue to buy. It's one of the more interesting comics that Marvel are producing at the moment. Running with this topic - what's going on with the whole Reloaded thing? I don't get it. They're cancelling X-Treme which is probably my favourite X-title, despite it's relative mediocrity lately. But, Bishop's getting his own series, so yay!

PS, I joined the X-Men Blog Crew

Listening: Today FM
Reading: Barbara Bender & Margot Winer (Eds) Contested Landscape" Movement, Exile and Place

Yesterday was our official 'geophysical demonstration' day. This basically means that between 10am and 3 pm, we stood around in the cold watching our lecturer set up various geophysical instruments and then having a shot at using them ourselves. Anyone who has ever seen Time Team will have a vague idea of what this entails =) It was an okay day, nothing too exciting though. It's amazing how amny people stopped to gawk at us and comments ranged from 'they must be searching for ground water' to 'looks like voodoo'. Very strange!

Last night was a bit more interesting, as Emma (my flatmate) and I finally went on our long-planned beer run! We have now stocked up on beer (much of which we drank last night), vodka and archers (which we intend to make into cocktails tonight). Our student life is once again complete!

Heather's back from her trip to Madrid and has put up some great pictures in her blog, so go check it out!

Listening: The Goo Goo Dolls Gutter Flower
Reading: Alison Uttley The Country Girl

I gave my domain address to my boyfriend, who is just starting out in the big bad world of web design, so he surfed through the site and read this blog. Apparantly I am boring. He is surprised that people read what I have to say... So I would like to apologise, on behalf of my life, for my seemingly inherent crapness < / sarcasm >

I cannot bring myself to finish The Country Girl. I'm more-or-less enjoying it, but it's all a bit too descriptive, a bit too nature-y and nothing happens. At all.

Lee - I can't even figure out what your bit of text speak is supposed to say! So I can safely assure you that my lecturer did not use that particular 'word' *g*

Liss - Twee books are the best kind!

Listening: A Perfect Circle Thirteenth Step
Reading: Alison Uttley The Country Girl

My dissertation supervisor sent me an e-mail today in which she used text speak... am I the only one who finds that wrong? Lecturers should know better, surely?

Listening: Rammstein Mutter
Reading: Alison Uttley The Country Girl
Rugby: *sniff* Let's not talk about it

Another week, another computer. My lovely boyfriend presented me with a second-hand computer for Valentine's Day, so I now have internet access in my room once more - three cheers for that! I'm back up to the level of my original computer, with the addition of a much larger screen and an upgrade to Windows 2000 (outdated, I know, but I've never been beyond Windows 1998). The only problems seem to be that there are no speakers, the colour on the screen is a bit dodgy and Internet Explorer has some problems. Still, it's all good! Having the internet back is such a relief. It's strange how used to something you get and how badly you miss it once it's gone...

I read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm over the weekend on an old recommendation. Anyone read it? I really enjoyed it - shades of Anne of Green Gables. Rebecca came before Anne though, I think. Is there a sequel? The ending seemed quite abrupt and I want to know what happens to Rebecca now that she's all grown up and can support her family! I assume she marries Mr Aladdin, who seemed to develop very Mr Knightley-esque characteristics as the book went on. There is something wrong with men who are attracted to small girls and mould them into the kind of women they want them to be. Still, Mr Aladdin (and Mr Knightley) is a nice man and it wouldn't be terrible if he married Rebecca =)

Listening: Gladiator OST
Reading: Marvel Runaways #11

Apologies for the lack of recent blogging. My time has been pretty full this week, mostly because of the whole transferring all of my sites over to Cacophany, the new domain. Things have been redesigned and all sorts. How thrilling.

Otherwise, I had my first meeting with my dissertation tutor on Monday which was actually quite good. I'm glad that I've finally got the ball rolling, even if it's currently trundling along at a snail's pace. We talked about my general idea and she told me what I could do in that area, which was great, seeing as how I'm generally quite vague when it comes to my ideas on archaeology! I've been given some reading to do and have to write up a proposal. First I have to actually decide what it is that I propose to do, I suppose!

Last night, my flatmate and I went to a lecture advertised as 'Jane Roe - the woman who legalised abortion in the USA'. Naturally, we both thought that the lecture would be about just how it was that she managed to do legalise abortion in the US, an interesting topic as it's still illegal in Ireland. Unfortunately, the whole think was run by the Life Society so it turned out to be a pro-life, rather than a pro-choice lecture. It was very cleverly staged though. For the first 15 minutes Jane Roe (or Norma McCorvey, which is her real name) talked about why she made the decision to try to have an illegal abortion and why she agreed to go to court in an attempt to legalise abortion. And then it all changed. She started to talked about 'killing fields' rather than abortion clinics, and 'executing babies' rather than abortions. She said that the doctors who carried out abortions were only in it for the money, trying to line their own pockets. It was obvious that more than half of the audience had believed it would be a pro-choice lecture and were just as shocked and me and Mary. The question and answer section should have been an opportunity for people to air their own opinions, but it was run on apparantly 'American' lines, meaning you had to write your question down and send it up to the front where someone else decided if you could ask it. Now Mary, my housemate, is American and she said she's never been to a lecture where questions are dealt with in that manner. The only questions that Norma McCorvey answered properly were those from pro-lifers. When people challenged her ideas, she simply ignored the question and paraded a piece of sensationalism. Someone aksed her what she would say to those who weren't Christian, or who didn't believe in God, as she was obviously coming at things from a religious point of view) and she said - wait for it - that if you don't believe in the Christian god, you're just not trying hard enough... Interesting. She refused to acknowledge a question about educating women rather than taking away their choices and treated a question about the victims of rape, with disdain. The whole thing was a very carefully planned piece of propaganda and I still can't believe that I managed to sit through the whole thing without being sick.

Listening: The Revs Suck
Reading: C S Lewis The Horse and His Boy

Perpetual Metamorph, my Paige Guthrie shrine has been redesigned and moved to its new home. The layout doesn't seem to be working properly though. I have no idea why, since it worked on my computer at home. For some reason it's not accessing the css. I've tried putting the css in the actual index page, but that doesn't seem to have helped *scratches head*

On the topic of the X-Men - what are Marvel playing at these days? Just how many X-titles can they possibly produce?? I seem to remember Joe Quesada promising to cut them down when he took over - which he did by axing Generation X *sob* - but the plan's not going so well these days. Quite a lot of the X-titles are pretty good, but some are utter nonsense. What's going on with X-treme X-men? I love that book and it just seems crap lately. Plus they changed colourists a while ago and it's lost something that made it stand out. Damn you Marvel *shakes fist*

Also moved Hayseed, Golloptuous and The Possessed.

Listening:
Reading: C S Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

I was supposed to go to see my MA dissertation supervisor today, but the very lovely woman apparantly only sees students between the hours of 3 and 5.30 on Mondays. Fantastic... Very disheartened by this, so I think I'll skip my afternoon lectures to make myself feel better.

Not sure about this whole C.S. Lewis thing. He talks down to the reader every now and then. Still, enjoyable overall.

Planning to spend the weekend moving all my sites over to my new domain. I finally had some inspiration for layouts and you can check out the one for The Chalet School Journal right now. I have to warn you that the whole site is not on-line yet, which I why I haven't deactivated the old one.

Listening:
Reading: C S Lewis The Magician's Nephew

My recent lack of blogging has been due to yet another field-trip. This time we got to spent a few days in Dublin wandering from archive to archive. Uniquely enough, all of this was done on blocks of concrete and involved no muddy mountains or hills. How novel! Basically, our department decided that we needed to know how to access various sources of primary information and took us to see things like The Royal Irish Academy (why did the never drop the 'Royal' bit?), the Architecture Archives, the Sites and Monuments Record offices, etc. Half of the trip was very boring (librarians can be a bit dull, bless them) and half of it was really interesting.

We went to the National Museum: History & Archaeology, for example, where after a dead boring talk from the archivist we got taken downstairs to the crypts, where no one usually visits. The curator down there (who seemed frighted of people in general) showed us lots of the stuff the museum holds but doesn't display for various reasons. That was definitely the most interesting part of the trip. She was able to tell us a lot of the stories behind artefacts held in the museum, which is something lacking from museum displays, I think. It adds a whole new dimension to something if you know that it was accidentally found by a boy picking potatoes, as a surprising number of things have been.

Things I've recently discovered:
1. KB has finally heard about her CS book and it's probably going to be published! Three cheers for that!
2. Antonia Forest died in November last year. I'm not sure how that passed me by, but I am very saddened by the news. I think I always believed that GGBP would convince her to write a new book about the Marlows.
3. I cannot function properly anymore without a working internet connection in my bedroom.