Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everybody. Or should I say, Happy All Hollows Eve. As I'm sure all of you know, the GA-FLA game is tomorrow. Here's something to keep to busy till tomorrow afternoon. Go Dawgs!

Is it seriously snowing already?

It's been a while. But it's also been a solid weekend. For one, on Friday I briefly met Emma Watson, who plays Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter Movies. Apparently she's from Oxford. We were at a bar downtown and someone said something like "that girl looks like Emma Watson". Eerily similar in fact, seeing as she actually was Emma Watson. We didn't talk long, but it was still cool to meet someone famous. Now that I think about it, there are lots of famous people in England and not a whole lot of space for them to spread out in. You'd think they'd be everywhere.

Saturday was dominated by the UGA-LSU game. I was of course very pumped that UGA won, but on the other hand I expected it. The thing I couldn't get over was how all the LSU fans were gone by the end of the game. I always thought that LSU fans were the craziest in the SEC, which is really saying something. So I was duly impressed that the dawgs played well enough to empty Death Valley before the end of the 4th quarter. The offense looked good, which means that I'm going to go ahead and call the UGA-Florida game next week for UGA. You're not going to lose many games by scoring more than 50 points. Of course Florida can put some points on the board too. At the very least it should be a very exciting game, doubly so considering the winner will likely play Bama for the SEC championship later in the season. All I can say is Go Dawgs! And that Tim Tebow is wierd (I mean that in a good way! I like the guy).

Following a successful Frisbee practice on Sunday, a group of us began planning a trip to Scotland for the coming weekend. At the moment its not very well planned and I'll have to miss a Ultimate game, but if we do go it will finally be some of the travel I've been wanting to do. It's gonna be cold there. But hey, it's cold here too. As a matter of fact its snowing right now. I doubt it will stick, but still; snow? In October? Fortunately I am prepared. I finally found a sweater vest I like. It's navy and dorky, exactly what I wanted.

Perhaps because of cabin fever resulting from the inclement weather (or because we don't have Halo 3 here), a few of my housemates and I have started a rather unique game. We're calling it a slap bet. Last night, each of the four people playing split into pairs and flipped a coin. The winner of the coin toss gets the enviable prize of getting to smack the loser at any time 3 times before the end of the trip. In a uncharacteristic display of luck, I won both my tosses, meaning that Eric and Rob are both destined for some slaps. I've already used two on Eric (once in botched videotaped ambush and once after cycling back from dinner in the snow) so I owe him one more and Rob three. Now to bide my time till they forget about it...

With travel planned for this weekend and a growing weariness of staying up late the night before a paper is due, I'm finally determined to get ahead of my work this week. I've said it before, but this time I'm serious.

Tomorrow is a bit of a special occasion. Some members of the Georgia state assembly are coming to the house to see what exactly we did with all that money they gave the program (we've already hid our plasma screen TV). They get here tomorrow afternoon, so we've been instructed to clean our rooms and dress nice. There's going to be a catered reception, so I'm excited about getting a night off dining hall food.

That is all.

First Rowing Practice

It's 10:30 am and I've already been up for 4.5 hours. It's amazing how much time there is in a day when you don't sleep in till 11. The reason I've been up so long is that today was the first on water practice we've had for rowing. It was interesting, to say the least. We had planned to assemble at Keble at 6:40 and then ride down to the boathouse together. However, at 6:50 there were only 5 of us plus a cox'n and a coach. While the cox went to rouse additional rowers, the rest of us made the relativly brief ride down St.Giles and Cornmarket streets to the Christ Church Meadow, where most of the college boathouses are. It's not quite the Schuykill's boathouse row, but with 30 some colleges sharing the river the boathouses were numerous, to say the least. Unlike most colleges, Keble actually has their own boat bay, which was quite nice. The boats inside weren't new, but at least they weren't wooden. Apparently the really nice boats are up the river a ways at Keble's "training base" at Godstow. I'm not sure, but I think the 1st eight races a new looking M2.

The stretch of river we rowed on is somewhat confusingly named the Isis, even though outside the city the river is the Thames. It's about as wide as the hooch at SA's boathouse, and I would guess it's about 1.5k of rowable water from the locks at the south side to the bridge at the north. With 30ish colleges trying to share the same small stretch of water, it was very crowded, even this morning, and the general lack of boat handling skills on the part of the novice crews made for quite a few bumps and locked oars. Because of my height, or lack thereof, Julien (the coach for the day and captain of the team) put me in 2 seat. For some reason, I had it in my head that everybody was going to intuitively pick up the stroke more or less instantly and we'd be cruising the river all eight on the feather by the end of practice, blades barely skimming the water and taking the occasional power ten. This was, of course, not the case. We spent most of practice rowing by fours, finally making it up to full slide by the end of the morning. I'm not discouraged, since we made a lot of improvement over the course of practice. I got corrected for leaning away from my rigger at the finish. In my defense, the boat was rigged extremely low and the stern four weren't balancing the boat quite level. Plus there are some comparatively good rowers that have the same bad habit while racing (looking at you, 3 seat). Other than that it was a pretty successful outing.

Over the next few week I hope to move into the stern pair, but I won't be that bummed if that doesn't happen. We're only going to race once before I leave, at the Christ Church regatta close to the end of term. The format is different then anything I've experienced; its head to head racing in a double elimination bracket over the course of a week. With luck we'll get a good draw and advance through the rounds. We should have the personnel, seeing as some of the guys are pretty big. I just want to be in the top 8, and that should be doable. Practice today was a good start, and if nothing else it was nice to see the sun come up over the Thames/Isis and get back on the water. Now I've got 5 hours to wait until my tutorial. Amazing how much time there is when you get up early...

A paper forged on the anvil of caffeine

I may have slightly miscalculated how long my latest paper was going to take. I thought I would be up all night, but I'm effectively finished now and it's only 2:40! Unfortunately, I've consumed enough coffee that I may be awake (and twitching) for some time yet. And so, why not take a moment to blog? The weekend in review:

Friday- My psych tutorial was very relaxed. We turned in our notes, then discussed any questions we had for the rest of the hour. Much less stressful than my philosophy tutorial, but at the same time it places a lot of pressure on us to make sure we understand the reading. At least the assigned papers are shorter and fewer

Saturday- There was supposed to be a rowing practice on Saturday morning, but it got canceled. I was disappointed that we wouldn't get out in a boat this weekend, but not that bummed to miss the 6:30 wake up that practice would require. Further than that, I actually can't remember what I did all day...

Sunday- Got up late, went to Frisbee practice. Again "practice" pretty much means 15 minutes of instruction and drills followed by 2 hours of playing Frisbee. Altogether not a bad arrangement, especially since we're getting noticeably better at executing the stack offense. Our coach promised that our modest grasp of the concept would serve us well in competition: "If we can actually get good at clearing out of the open side, we're going to be far ahead of any other college team". I bough some cleats to enhance my game. They're Umbro's and they're cheap; I can feel the tops of the spikes through the sole of the shoe, creating the uniquely unpleasant sensation of running atop six rolls of quarters. But now I can turn on a dime, so I'll just wear an extra pair of socks for padding and get over it. We should be scrimmaging against another college team before the end of the month. I can only hope that I get one of the awesome Keble Ultimate jerseys before I leave. After practice, I took a really long nap.

Monday-All in all a fairly crappy day. First, I misplaced my keys sometime Sunday night. Since I need a key to go through just about every door in the house, this was a wee bit of an inconvenience. I looked everywhere I could think of, but just couldn't find them. Fortunately, in my infinite wisdom I kept a spare key to my bike lock and so at least I didn't have to walk to my meals. Second, the books I needed were checked out of the Keble library. Third, it was raining all day, and actually raining hard rather than the drizzle we've been getting. Fourth, and worst, I just could not keep my eyes open all day. Every time I wasn't standing up, I dozed off. I got 9 hours of sleep the night before, but I fell asleep reading for about an hour this morning, then felt compelled to take a 3 hour nap this afternoon. I don't know if I'm getting sick or something, but I'm feeling very fatigued. Fortunately, all these problems had solutions: 1. My keys were in Eric's nightstand, I don't know how they got there but at least I found them after dinner 2. I borrowed the books in question from Rose who had checked them out last week 3. I put on my jacket and got over it 4. Coffee! I feel much better now that I've got my paper for tomorrow done and am in possession of my keyring. However, I feel the caffeine starting to wear off, so I think I'll take the opportunity to retire before I fall asleep at this table.

Potatoes!

I am getting so tired of eating potatoes. It may be insensitive of British culture to bash their cuisine, but this is getting ridiculous. I have consumed potatoes in virtually every meal I've eaten here. Yesterday alone, I had five different types: hash browns, french fries, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, and potato soup. I like a tuber just as much as the next guy but seriously, enough with the potatoes.

Feels good to get that off my chest. Other than eating prodigious quantities of a certain starchy vegetable, I've be busy this week. My first tutorial on Tuesday went fairly well. It's going to take some getting used to taking a philosophy class, seeing as we didn't do that great on the whole making-a-coherent-and-logically-valid-argument thing, but hopefully that will come with time. My next Tute (as the lingo goes) is tomorrow when I head down to the Psych building. This class doesn't seem like the workload is going to be quite so backbreaking. Even so, I feel pretty cool walking around with a textbook titled "Cognitive Neuroscience". Makes people think I'm studying to be a brain surgeon or something.

We've got a rowing meeting at 6.15, before our next potato dose. We'll be discussing safety, which means that we'll probably be getting out in a boat soon. The boathouse is quite a long way from the house, but as always I've got my trusty bike. My next Frisbee practice is on Sunday.

Besides reading about brains, a fair portion of the last few days have been spent trying to get things in order for my return to the states in December. I've been trying to work out a place to live, and after a great number of wheedling emails I managed to annoy my advisers into giving me the classes I want next semester. My schedule is exactly what I wanted; class from noon to 3pm solid every day. Also, today I submitted my application for an internship next summer. Hopefully I'll get through to the first round of interviews, which should take place in the next few weeks. Not exactly sure how I'm going to interview from here, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. As for now I need to get back to work, since its only a few hours until potato time. [not Bye! because this isn't a xenga!]

Busy Weekend

It has indeed been a busy couple of days. I suppose that won't really change very much from here on out, but this week has been especially dense since we've had a week's worth of work to do in 3 days. I still found some time for sports stuff though

Saturday was Frisbee day. We met up with the other freshers that had signed up and returning members of the team at about 1. Practice pretty much consisted of playing ultimate for about 2 hours, which is to say that practice was a bunch of fun. I was concerned that the returners would be insanely good, but I fit in pretty well as far as skill level goes.The level of competition was just a hair above Myers League, with the addition of stall counts and a stack offense. Plus there were lots of beginners. If I'm feeling particularly brave, I might go out for the University wide team, which is a little more competitive. Once I get used to actually having a plan instead of just running around, I think I'll be alright. The next practice is scheduled for this weekend. If nothing else, I'm determined to make the team to get the awesome Keble Ultimate jersey. It has a cow on it. Nice.

The running around on Saturday made my legs surprisingly sore, which did not bode well for my erg (rowing machine) test on Sunday. Rowing practice took place in the Keble gym, which is a room in the basement that is, to put it charitably, of decidedly modest size. But it does have four new model D's and a big mirror to watch yourself erg in. Why you would want to watch yourself erg is beyond me. That's like putting a mirror next to The Rack so you can watch yourself get taller. We novices took turns, 4 at a time, getting a brief crash course in erging technique from a few returning team members. I was very impressed at how student-run practice was (that goes for Frisbee too). Everything from recruiting to coaching so far has been other students, and they've been very patient and friendly about all of it. At least I thought so until they made me pull a 1k erg test.

As it was explained to us, the test was more "just to see how it feels at full pressure". Well I can personally attest, it feels a lot like pain. My tentative goal was to finish in 3:30, which would be about the same speed I would aim for in a beginning-of-the-season-after-sitting-on-my-butt-all-winter-eating-cookies kind of test back in the day. Of course, back in the day the distance was twice as far. My final time was 3:32. Yeah Matt, I know I know, but it's been three years and we can't all get recruited by Harvard. Cut me some slack. While I might not quite have a shot at The Boat Race, I was pleased that I at least got close to my goal. I'm not sure what the varsity rowers thought; my technique was rusty enough that I didn't have to try really hard to appear to be new. In the last 200 meters or so, I actually felt it more in my arms than in the lungs. Once I get over the muscle stiffness, perhaps I'll do some push ups or something. In any case, I couldn't go to the optional rowing tank session today since I have work to do for my first tutorial tomorrow.

This weekend I had to read an awful lot of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English political philosopher who holds a less than optimistic view about human nature. I finished most of the reading, but I'm actually writing this post mostly to avoid starting on my essay. I'm turning it in during class tomorrow, but it could be worse. Rose, my classmate, actually has to read hers aloud to the don and me. It's my turn for that next week. No pressure, but I want to make a good impression and represent my family, school, state, and country well. Now that I put it that way, I really must go write my essay. Wish me luck.

Oops, almost forgot. Desert at hall tonight was spotted dick. Many jokes were made. Delicious.

Freshers Fair

I've just returned to the house from our first formal hall dinner, freshers fair, and my meeting with my philosophy don. It's been quite a day. Dinner tonight was rather spectacular. For one, this is the first time we've had a chance to wear our robes. "Robes" however is a bit of a grand misnomer. As non-scholarship undergraduates, we wear "commoner's robes". They're black, about as long as a suit jacket, and sleeveless except for narrow streamer-like vestigial sleeves. As one moves up the ranks accumulating additional degrees and honors, your robe gets longer and sleeved. The next level up is for scholarship students (they're a little longer but still above the knee), grad students (longer still), and Doctorate holders (long and sleeved, like graduation gowns). Academic positions get additional accessories. For example, Dr. Archer once was provost of the University, which meant he got an ermine lined hood. The best gown goes to the chancellor, who needs a team of assistants to carry his train. Long story short, we ate dinner wearing glorified black vests. It was a step in the Harry Potter direction, but not quite there. Before dinner was served all the dons filed in in a bit of a procession to the high table on a dais and somebody read a prayer in Latin. We also got a soup course for the first time, which was nice.

After dinner there was a brief reception for UGA students, then it was next door to the Freshers fair. Anyone that's ever seen the Tate Plaza during activities fairs will know what it looked like. Each club and team had a table and was endeavouring to attract the attention and membership of the passers by. I signed up for the crew and ultimate frisbee mailing lists. We'll see if I have time for both, or either for that matter. Both assured me that it wasn't too much of a time commitment, but right now I don't really know how much time my tutorials are going to require. Speaking of, I met Dr. Peter King today, who will be teaching my political philosophy class.

Dr. King works at Pembroke College on the south side of the city. Seeing as the house is on the north side, it's a bit of a commute. Good thing I have a bike. We briefly discussed objectives for the term, and he assigned a paper due in our first class on Tuesday. He was very friendly, and the workload seems formidable but manageable. Before I worry about that though I have to finish my last paper for Dr. Archer. I got the last one back earlier this week. I got an A-, not a surprise since I didn't think this one was as strong as the last. That just means that I have to do well on this next one. I'm going to write it about witchcraft. And so, now I must go read about witches...

Freshers week

This week is Freshers (Freshmen) week here in Oxford, also known as 0th (pronounced "naught") week. The weeks of term are numbered sequentially, so next week will be 1st week, then 2nd, etc. Last week was -1st week. For my money, I'd prefer "the second week in October", but like a lot of things here this is the way things have been done for a while, and tradition trumps practicality. Anyway, the point of this being freshers week means that this is the week all the freshmen move into the dorms at Keble and there are a lot of social activities for them. Last night, for example, was freshers night at the Keble pub. We were able to talk the bartender into agreeing that we were essentially freshmen, this being our first semester at Oxford and all. Thursday is our first formal hall dinner (i.e. wearing our academic gowns), followed by a reception and then "freshers fair", where various student organizations try and recruit members for the term. I'm planning on talking to the Rowing team and maybe the Ultimate team as well.

I've done a little research, and Keble's first 8 has historically usually had an Olympian or, more impressively around here, a Blue in it. Blue means member of Oxford's crew in The Boat Race, for which an Olympic medal is essentially a prerequisite. Needless to say, I may go ahead and tell them I'm a novice and surprise them with my intuitive knowledge of erging technique. I am woefully, embarrassingly out of condition for rowing, but since I've at least done it before I hope I'll have a leg up on some of the freshers. As an added bonus, the lower boats sometimes race in themed costumes, so that might be fun. Ultimate is a good back-up plan, as it doesn't require quite as much pain as crew. I'm not the best frisbee player in the world (Adam can attest to this), but I can throw a little and I'm not sure how much the sport has caught on here. It might be fun, or it might be me scurrying around the ankles of giants. Lots of the guys here are pretty tall.

In academic news, I've finally heard from one of my tutorial dons. We're meeting Thursday to talk about objectives for the term. Actual classes start next week, also on Thursdays. The reading list he sent me is pretty intense, but at least I'll have an entire week between meetings. Still waiting to hear from my psych teacher. With any luck, he'll/she'll want to have tutorial on Wednesdays or Thursdays, which would leave 5 day weekends to travel on. That would be pretty lucky. I've been trying to get in touch with the advisers back at UGA to get cleared to register for classes next semester. After looking at my graduation requirements, I was surprised to discover that if everything goes according to plan I can finish my Poli Sci degree this spring and then I'll only have two Psych courses to take during all of senior year. Since I don't want to graduate early, that leaves 18 hours to fill (I have to take at least 12 a semester to get HOPE and, more importantly, football tickets). Perhaps I'll add a minor; history would do because I already have some upper division history classes and would only need 4 more for a minor. As you can see, I need to talk to an advisor.

For those of you interested in the weather, it's still raining.

Well it's time to get back to reading. If I finish this last paper before the end of this week, I'll be in good shape.

It's finally English weather

Remember all those times I mentioned how good the weather has been? Well, yeah, that's apparently over now. It's been drizzling steadily since about Wednesday, and the temperature has dropped too (although not quite as much as I sometimes think. Still haven't gotten used to that whole Celsius thing). In a way I actually like the weather now, since it's exactly what I was expecting before I left. I wish that I had another, more dressy jacket than my Northface. The one I have is plenty warm and more watertight than the Hoover era Justice department (is that analogy too much of a stretch?), but it looks a little weird with khakis. Even so, I'm pretty well equipped. Amazing considering the somewhat last minuting packing that went on. One article of clothing I'm on the lookout for is a v-neck sweater vest. My rational is as follows: Sweater vest in Athens=lame. Sweater vest in Oxford=scholarly and fashionable. Really it's a very practical garment and now that I'm consistently wearing my Sperrys, looking like a preppy d-bag is no longer an obstacle.

Moving along into what is only a marginally more interesting subject, I'm enjoying my seminars. They're more reading than I'm used to (and I certainly don't have the heaviest reading load) but its manageable and it beats sitting through lectures everyday. I turned in my second paper for Archer's class on Friday. This one was about the causes of the English civil war, and I afraid it probably wasn't as good as the last one. I'm determined to get a head start on the last one due this week, since I'll likely have to write more papers for my first tutorial next week. My other seminar, Common Law, has been a little less work but at least as interesting. Unlike 17th Century English history, the law stuff might even come in handy later in my academic career.

Went out to the Purple Turtle again last night. God forgive me. But no Macarena this time, so that's something. Till next time.