After a great deal of mucking about — from both the hospital and the baby herself — Carl and Susie are finally parents. Bethan Ruth, born yesterday at 12.44pm weighing 6lbs 9oz and looking incredibly cute. I was glad to hear that even after all the uncertainty and changes-of-plan in the last few days, Bethan was delivered naturally, allowing Susie to avoid having her abdomen cut open.
I’m sure they’ll really appreciate me for that little comment.
Congratulations Carl and Susie!
My blogging’s been terribly lax this year. I did intend to post regular updates during NaNoWriMo, but that’s over now and I blogged about twice during the course of the month — during which I didn’t say anything at all interesting. This is unfortunate, and not a state of affairs that I intended. So far each year the effort required to do NaNoWriMo has been different, and has affected me in different ways, but this might be because I’ve been in a different situation for each of those three years. Next year I suspect that it will probably be different again.
The story’s not up simply because my story markup to HTML conversion programme is still broken. At such time as I fix it, I’ll post this year’s Nanovel. However, it’s a bit choppy, needs serious editing, is full of mistakes, changes from first to third person very abruptly for no readily apparent reason (other than that it wasn’t working) and doesn’t actually finish either.
I’ve already started work on my next story. As yet untitled, it’s a distillation of some of the plot from this year’s Nanovel into a new fantasy setting with new characters. I’m feeling very confident about it, so bits of that might appear here from time to time as well. In fact, bits of that probably will.
I’m even drawing a map.
Although it might be tempting for some of you to think that I’ve been lost in a temporal anomoly for the last week, it’s really just because I haven’t got around to writing anything yet. And that’s got a lot to do with not knowing what to say.
Living where I’m living is okay, but I still don’t like halls. Doors banging, people skateboarding outside as I type this, drunken shouting and clamouring — even Postgraduate students aren’t above this sort of thing. Thankfully my flatmates are nice, but one room is still unoccupied and I live in constant apprehension of the fire alarms going off in the middle of the night. That’s unreasonable, I know, but it’s there.
The PhD thing, however, looks like it’s going to be great. Lots to do, and I will attempt to post more often about what’s going on as I’m trying out two new societies this week: Latin & Ballroom and Mussoc. Mussoc is the music society, they’re rather large and I’m going along to their early music group so I can play my recorder (badly). They also teach the viol, which could be interesting to have a go with…
Well, time for a relocation. I just got off the phone to Accomodation Services (wonderfully helpful, although the poor woman sounded a bit stressed. Judging by the time it took me to get through to them, she’s got good reason to and it’s not even half past ten yet) who confirmed my accomodation is all sorted.
So I’m moving to Nottingham tomorrow as planned. Whew. That’s a relief. Time to pack some clothes.
Online-ness will be erratic for a while until I can get the network point in my room activated, so I might be even quieter and more boring than usual for a while. Not that you’ll notice…
A lot has been going on which I needed to think about, and I’m not sure I can coherently say anything on here about some of it. The big thing of course is Hurricane Katrina, and its effects on the USA. I don’t know how to write about what I feel when I see the footage from New Orleans. Despair, hope, worry, joy, fear, relief… this and more, varying as reports have come in, both during the storm and after it. Mostly now I’m feeling relief, because it doesn’t look like it’s necessarily going to be as bad as was initially feared. It’s still bad of course, but the city’s probably not going to end up a stinking wasteland.
Although that really does remain to be seen. They’re still talking about a forced total evacuation, so we’ll see. Some are kicking up a fuss about the police confiscating guns from the citizens so they can’t resist the evacuation — personally, I don’t think they should have them in the first place so I’m really not bothered about that. I am not particularly pleased with the way the whole affair has been handled, but there’s really nothing for me to do — other than rant about it occasionally from an uninformed perspective, and give frequent thanks that I don’t have to move to America. Britain has its flaws — plenty of them — but on the whole it works out pretty well at the moment.
I have of course been preparing to go back to Nottingham to start my PhD. Sort of scary really — I’ve done this all before, to the same University, but it’s been two years and I’m really completely unprepared for the necessary organisation to get this all sorted. Oh well, it’ll come together at some point — no doubt not to Mum’s satisfaction, but I’m not very good at that lately. We do need to get out of each other’s hair, and this should sort it quite nicely. Were I not going to Uni, I’d be looking to move out I think. That’s no secret — I’ve told Mum that myself.
Just life, really. Things will get more interesting once I get back to Nottingham — although I’ve been doing some things which could turn out rather interesting. I’m just not going to talk about them right now.
Doesn’t that add a nice aura of mystery to the whole affair?
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