Finally reaching the weekend

Phew! What a week! So, it's been day after day of assessment this week and I've watched a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of very creative first year presentations. It's been great fun but by Friday afternoon I was drinking Diet Coke and eating a packet of Skips in an attempt to get some energy back in my body! Just the marking to go now... As well as assessments D and I have played a couple of games of squash and we've had nightly battles on our baseball game for the PS3. Unfortunately D has won everything this week - meh!

And today we awoke bright and early at 5.20 (on a Saturday!?) to go through to beautiful Oxford for the day. Lovely D drove and we enjoyed our usual mixture of tunes on the way. I was attending a day conference at Corpus Christi college. It was the yearly meeting of the Christian Literary Studies Group which contains some pretty big names. Wore my black jumper/plaid skirt combo as a safe, smart bet. The conference was very interesting. Most attendees were working on religion and literature so I was a bit of a black sheep. But the papers were interesting and I had some good conversations. I even got to speak to an Oxford professor whose work I have admired from afar for a little while now. He was very gracious and we had a good chat as he grappled with an errant egg sandwich at lunchtime. It always makes me feel better when I see someone with such a wonderful reputation battling with a filled roll like us mere mortals. Oxford was lovely as always and D had a good day wandering about. Once I've collated all my notes I'll post a few thoughts about the day.

So, I'm looking forward to a very peaceful Sunday of reading, snoozing and cleaning up a bit. In a terrifying fit of organisation D has been buying Christmas presents and they are at present strewn across our lounge floor. The sheets need changing, the kitchen needs a wipe and upstairs needs a deep clean before the arrival of the parents two days after we get back from the States.

We have just a week and two days to go before heading off to Seattle and we're looking forward to our American journey. I'll fill you in on all our plans for this trip later in the week. As usual D has an illustrated itinery!

CSW