Last Lap

Last night was Choriel's first choir concert. Now for the win! As seventh week draws to an end and I begin the eighth and final week of the Michaelmas term, I've been finding it harder and harder to do work. They time it so perfectly in that you're given so much work that you literally couldn't keep going another week. This means by eighth week, you're almost out of your depth. Then you go home and teach yourself everything you'd derived yourself beforehand in the homework or been showed by a tutor. As far as I'm aware, most students learn little during the actual lectures. Still, this probably isn't the best use of my time during lectures:

This morning, I woke up and found myself tired despite my good night's sleep, and found myself feeling so lazy that I just couldn't get myself to do any work. What's more, I had no other food in the room, so I began snacking terribly on the dessert components to the candy turkeys my loving mom brought me. It was terrible.

Then 12:45 came, and I had what the English refer to as "macaroni and cheese" today at our weekly "everything left over from the week" Saturday lunch, which is almost as tasty as Friday lunch, but for all you American readership, you agree with me wholeheartedly when I proclaim this phony to be "not macaroni and cheese." Macaroni and cheese shouldn't have character!!

God gave us a beautiful morning, though, which I enjoyed profusely. It was nice not to have to wear a jacket all the time, and you could see the sun. I decided to go jogging to get out of my funk, but some friends of mine were headed to Christ Church's meadows, and as I hadn't yet been, I accompanied them on a walk.

Christ Church, despite being the Slytherin House of the University of Oxford, really does have a gorgeous meadow (again, for England). It's got a river and all. The whole thing was so picturesque, in fact, that the entire walk was spent with me hopping around taking pictures from every imaginable position and having my buddies pose in strategically gorgeous locations. They humored me, bless them. I got some truly amazing shots, and felt really fired up for the first time in awhile. I took over 200 shots, but here are a few of my favorite things:

Profile picture? I think yes.

We found the most perfect bit of land jutting out
into the river in just the right spot.

I assure you, Oxford's not usually this picturesque
this time of the year.  Only in pictures.

I saw the tree and was like, "Ooh!! You're perfect, Tree!"

The ducks started coming toward me SECONDS
before I took the picture. Fantastic! 

Future wife, I'm adding this to the list of romantic spots
for future reference. And yes, of course it's an actual list.

That was the first tree I'd seen in Oxford that
looked really Autumn-y.

When I got back to my suite, I was finally energized and motivated, and did some Probability (wow, I won't have probability ever again...). Then I had "High Tea" with my mom, sisters, uncle, and one of my sister's old friends, who is currently doing a semester abroad in Scotland and came down to visit her this weekend. 

For those of you who still don't know, I don't use names in my blog, as I illustrated before famously in the post that described Awesome Belch's visit, so I won't use my sister's friend's name here. However, I feel comfortable using the pseudonym "Foreign Tea." Ms. Tea got a picture in the exact same spot as Mr. Belch did in front of Oriel Hall, decorated for Chrstmas:

I said good-bye to my family members, but it wasn't that tearful with the knowledge that we'll all be back home together in just two weeks time now. I then showed Foreign to her guest room at Oriel College, gave her a tour of Oriel, attempted (unsuccessfully) to give her a tour of the nearby Christ Church college, where they filmed some of the Harry Potter films and where Lewis Carol taught (that porter was MEAN; I walked up, about to ask if we could get in at that hour since I was a student, and before I even came close, he pointed a figure at us and motioned for us to BEGONE!), returned her to her room and bid her farewell and good haggis-eating, and worked on Probability for several hours. 

I feel confident now, despite the persistence of hard work over time, knowing that God will always strengthen me when I need His strength. Thanks to Him, I'm back on track and ready for Functional Programming, then Analysis, then Linear Algebra, then cleaning out my room (ugh), then the plane flight back home.

This post is brought to you by

  John Khouri, Doodler Dude