Pineapple-Flavoured Bubblegum

Yesterday, it rained. A good, strong, melancholic British rain. Today, the sun burst up like a bubble of pineapple-flavoured gum and seems to have gotten stuck all over my window. I suppose the man in the moon will have to come and clean it off tonight, but for now, it's stuck for GOOD.

Today we have our last lecture of our integral course, something on the Middle Ages and the Church and Heresy. That should be interesting ...

And agenda for the weekend: Study, Sleep, Study, repeat. We have our integral exam a week from today, and I'm gonna ace it if it kills me! *cross fingers!*

After that, it's Dante, Austen, and Romance. Of the Rose. Y'know, the medieval kind ...

AND induction into the all-exclusive, uber elite club of the century: the BODLEIAN.

*geeky moment*

Silence in the Library!

Blenheim Palace

Yesterday afternoon, a few of us decided to take our own mini field trip to Blenheim Palace, home of the 11th Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and birthplace of England's most famous prime minister: Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill.

You can read about his life in detail, whether online or in a book, but here are a few facts:

Churchill was born 30 November 1874, two months prematurely. He graduated from Sandhurst after failing his exams not once, not twice, but three times ... ! He served in Bombay and India, then during the First World War as First Lord of the Admiralty. He served two terms as Prime Minister, painted (very well!) as a hobby, smoked Havana cigars, was made an honorary Citizen of the United States, and was related to Diana, Princess of Wales (nee Spencer).

Unfortunately for us, we were unable to photograph the inside of the palace, but if you visit the website, you should be able to find some pictures:

http://www.blenheimpalace.com/

We were, however, able to visit and photograph the extensive gardens, to our great content! The estate is over 1200 acres, containing many gardens, fountains, wooded areas, a hedge maze, rose gardens, and a butterfly house! Here are some fun shots of these areas. Enjoy!

The Blog

To all my dear readers:

Many, many thanks for reading! To my great astonishment, my blogger stats page shows over 1,000 page hits since the end of August! I am amazed; I had begun this blog as a convenient way of keeping a handful of family and friends up-to-date with my adventures, and it seems that it's reached a lot more people than expected! A fabulous and frightening proof of the incredible powers of the internet!

... unless all the hits were from one person, a thousand times over ... hmmm, highly suspicious.

Anyway, updates soon!

Word of the Week! #2

APHAERESIS

1) leaving off the beginning of a word, used often by poets and hillbillies
- example: 'coon for racoon, 'nuf for enough, 'gain for again, 'mongst for amongst

2) extracting part of the blood from a sample and using it for something and putting the rest back in. Not sure what that's used for, but probably good to know.

FYI!

Windsor!

Today, we had our last - but most emphatically not least - field trip: Windsor Castle. The entire trip was absoulutely fabulous; the castle, home to Her Majesty the Queen, was beautiful, inside and out; unfortunately, for privacy reasons, we were not allowed to take photos of the inside, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with googling them, if there are any! However, I don't think I missed a single angle from outside; here's a couple, so enjoy!

The gardens were beautiful, even this late in the season; the guards amused us with their stoicism. Inside, we saw the most detail-oriented dollhouse I have ever seen, enough to make even Playmobil grow green with envy (if ever possible!).

The St. George cathedral, located within the castle walls, presented another fine specimen of medieval architecture.

Having completed the tour, we all broke for lunch and then went along our merry ways to explore the town itself. A friend and I took a journey down the river Thames - not by boat, but along the shore - to gaze upon the fowl there. Did you know: all the swans in England are owned by the Queen?

After deliberating over ice cream, not once, not twice, but three times (and coming away empty-handed each time), we took ourselves off down High Street (NB: it seems that every largish town in England boasts a High (i.e. "Main") Street, a Queen Street, a Market Street, and a St.-Somebody-or-Other Street, or some combination thereof) towards Eton College (no worries, to those concerned that we were depriving ourselves of edible enjoyment. We eventually settled quite contentedly for tea and scones).

Ah, Eton. This prestigious "college" is not an American idea of "college," or even an Oxford idea of "college," but rather a French idea of "college," or high-school. We were curious to see Eton, maybe some ancient architecture, maybe a rugby game in a faraway field ... did someone say culture shock? We paused our walk momentarily to step into a nick-nack shop, only to be confronted by half-a-dozen teenage boys in tails. Coattails. Vest, tie, collars, trousers, and coattails. Immensely impressed, we quickly ducked out to continue our promenade ... and soon found the entire area swarming with uniformly-clad peers (not the noble kind, the social equal; though I daresay enough of their percentage would have been aristocratic enough for the term to be so used). After discovering that the college buildings were none of them open to satisfy public curiosity, we sauntered back up the hill towards the castle, where we eventually found a little tea shop and sat down to rest our feet.

I would have taken pictures of the uniform, had I not felt that would have been slightly inconsiderate and disconcerting to the young gentlemen. You can probably google up some images of "Eton uniform" and see for yourselves ... FYI, some notable Old Etonians include George Orwell, Bertie Wooster, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Hugh Laurie, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Bear Grylls, Captain James Hook, Captain Arthur Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey - not to mention the royal princes William and Harry.

After tea, we made our way back to the bus, for an hour-long trip home of eavesdropping on fellow students discussing health care and the second amendment. I could only think to myself what a pain it would be to have to wear an Eton collar, all day long ...

You Know You've Had Too Much to Read When ...

A little bit of Lewis and Lewis and Lorris and Lewis goes a long way.

Enjoy.


How is it that, in lines so pat
These geniuses describe
A chair, a pen, a big fat hen,
A mouse or dastardly bribe,

A wishing well, a sleeping rose,
Two crumpets, cup of tea -
All sorts of things, like chess-piece kings -
With such simplicity?

They know, you see, just how to turn
The key into the lock;
It wiggles ‘round, with hollow sound,
Until it goes “click! Clock!”

The old clock shrieks, and then it cries,
“Oh, no! Not there! Don’t go!”
But Scribbl’r grins; with slipp’ry fins
He glides and giggles low.

And there he peeks and sees the jewels
Imagination hides:
Pictures, Words, a landscape bright;
They all sit there inside.

But Scribbl’r, ah! Now Scribbl’r fights
To pull these jewels away;
He wants them, oh! He needs them out;
He wants them out to play.

But Doubt and Shame and Reason too,
They sternly shake their heads;
“You’ve better, more important things
- Like HOMEWORK - to do instead.”

And Scribbl’r pouts, and Scribbl’r stomps,
And shakes his little fist;
What can he do but sit and sigh?
Le pauvre! Qu’il est si triste!

And Scribbl’r turns to leave the room;
He drops the key behind;
But Hope comes out, wipes off the pout
And smiles soft and kind.

“No worries, now! My Scribbl’r dear,
Just wait a while and see;
You’ll grow up soon; just take your time;
Relax; come ‘long with me.”

And Scribbl’r grins; he knows it’s true
That soon enough, one day
Experience and Common Sense
Will let him come and play.

Until that time, he works, he waits;
He watches others who
Already know what they’re about
And let him practice, too.

And someday soon will Scribbl’r spring
From Immaturity’s chains;
Imagination’s room will swing
Its doors wide open: BANG!

And there he’ll see the jewels again:
Rhythm, Sound, and Sight;
He’ll take them up, and shape them up
All to Hope’s great delight.

And there it is that Scribbl’r does
What only Scribbl’r can:
That is, craft tales and poetry
For happiness of man.

And Scribbl’r gives to all the world
The work of his two hands
But now,especially, you'll see,
To Bug, who understands.

FYE #3

Between "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Snow Queen," Jacob Grimm seems to have dabbled in linguistics. Look up "Grimm's Law," and if you can get past the three parts of the chain shift in the Proto-Indo-European stops and fricatives, go out and treat yourself to an ice cream cone!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law