In which I question my sanity.

Goooood morning!

Note the timestamp on this post. Yes, you're reading it correctly. I just got up. After 3 hours sleep. On purpose.

I'm walking my sorry ass down to Magdalen for the May Morning celebrations, and then back to Catz for the May Morning breakfast.

Why?

Because people from Oxford have done it for centuries. (They also jump off the bridge onto shopping trolleys, but I'm not insane, so I'm not doing that.)

Will I make it? Will it screw up my sleep schedule forever?

Tune in and find out...

Update, 7:10 a.m.: Survived the trek down to Magdalen. It was amazing. Now the next step is the May Morning breakfast. And the big question is: is champagne a good idea at 7:30 a.m.?

Update 2, 4:05 p.m.: Yes, champagne is a good idea at 7:30 a.m. We had an excellent time. I feel bad that I missed the Morris Dancers, but getting up to see the choir was totally worth it. Here's a short clip - you can't see them, but you get a feel for the completely amazing atmosphere.

A real post tonight, I promise

I owe y'all all sorts of real posts, including one about yesterday's trip to London with my Facebook husband, Mark. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a revelation I just had today:

For ages I couldn't figure out why blueberry muffins and such were labeled as "American-style" muffins. Then I put two and two together today. What the Brits call "muffins" are what we Yanks call...English muffins.

I've been in the UK for nearly seven months now, and it took me that long to figure this out.

How the dissertation's going

Why thank you, kind people, for rising to the occasion and pestering asking me about my dissertation. As of last night (well, really, 2:45 this morning), I passed the 2,000-word mark. The limit is 8,000-10,000 words. Woohoo!

Keep asking away!
Much love,
Me

I stay up way too late

Because I have nothing better to do (*coughcoughdissertationcoughcough*), I decided to catch up on my blogroll. While visiting Luckybuzzz, I decided to take a look at the website where she made her new rotating headlines. And it can make slogans in German! How cool is that! I've seen these in English before, but I've never had a German slogan, so I had fun playing with it. This one was my favorite:

«Kaitlin ist immer eine gute Idee.»

I better not come across any new procastinating devices anytime soon, or else I will never get this thing done. ;)

G'night!
Me

Here's something that I know will start a controversy.

American milk chocolate kicks British milk chocolate's @$$. Discuss.

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me and my lactose semi-intolerance, but I just don't like most of the dairy products here in the UK. The milk, cheese, and chocolate all taste funny to me. I bought some Easter candy here, and it was tasty, but yesterday I received my family's Easter package, which included some good ol' American chocolate. Man, was it good.

I don't know what Hershey's or Munson's or Russell Stover or Whitman's are doing differently from Cadbury or Thorton's or wherever, but I'd forgotten how awesome American chocolate really is. Even M&Ms don't taste the same here.

Who knows. Ours is probably full of horomones or chemicals that will finish us off 20 years sooner than the British stuff. You know what they say - if it's tasty, it's bad for you.

Just thought I'd share that observation with y'all.

How's the dissertation going?

I have another task for y'all.

Every time (or as often as you think of it) that you see me, email me, or talk to me, please ask me (in the language of your choice), "How's the dissertation going?"

I'm hoping this will be a motivator to get me to write on a very regular basis, so I can actually have some progress to report by the time you ask me again. If I give you a diplomatic non-answer like "It's going," then that is the secret code for "I haven't written a bloody thing since the last time you asked me that question."

So please, ask early and ask often. I won't be annoyed. You'll be doing me a favor this way. And tell your friends to do the same.

Peace out!
Me

A task for y'all out there

Do you folks (well, los estadounidenses at least) remember the wonderful Toys 'R' Us commercial with the bunnies singing "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" to Geoffrey the Giraffe?

Of course you do. How could you forget it? I bet I just got it stuck in your head right now.

Well anyway. I will be eternally grateful if anyone can provide me with a link with a clip to that commercial. It is one of my favoritest commercials of all time.

I think I still have some credits over at AdAge if I need to buy it from there, but I figured I would ask you helpful bloggy people first.

Many thanks!
Much love,
Me

My brothers at church

Sorry for such a cryptic and depressing post yesterday. Since it is almost Easter, I will entertain you with some funny stories about my brothers at church on Easter:

My brother PJ (who is 13 and autistic) is a good boy but doesn't always like to sit still and be quiet for a long time. And being Roman Catholic, our churchgoing experiences often require us to sit still and be quiet for a long time. And they are usually pretty early in the morning.

Although it makes him restless, he is actually quite entertaining. At past masses, he has done the following:

• He sings along with the choir, even if he doesn't know the song.
• When the songs are over, he claps and yells, "Woohoo! Yeah!"
• He announces loudly, "OK! That's enough of that! Let's go home!"
• Once, during Communion, the choir kept repeating the chorus of the song until everyone had gone up. After a few rounds of the chorus, he stands up and says, "OK! That's enough! We've heard this one already!"
• When it is time to pray, his prayer is, "Our Father, thank you for this delicious dinner, and to the republic for which it stands."
• And his most recent comment, that my mom told me about the last time I called: they were at mass with my grandfather and aunts and uncles, and a new priest came up to do the reading. PJ asks my mother, "Hey Mom! Is that the new pope?"

So I was thinking about this the other day, when I remembered a story about my brother Kevin (who is 18) during an Easter mass when he was little (maybe 4 or 5 at the time). We used to go to this big cathedral in Hartford for Easter, because it was bigger and fancier than our usual church, and it was where my dad served as an altar boy when he was little. Anyway, the priest is doing a reading, and he gets to a passage that ends with something like, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

My brother, upon hearing this, stands up and asks loudly, "We're all going to die tomorrow?!?!?"

So although Easter is not one of my favoritest holidays, those moments are ones that have made it pretty entertaining.

This is not the most fabulous picture of my brothers, but it was the only one I could find of the two of them together. I think this was last Christmas.

Bonus survey question: For those of you who have read my Cambridge travelogue, should I post it here for the rest of the blogosphere to read? Do you think they would appreciate it?

Discouraged

si yo no lo merezco no me hagas destino
si no me acompañas yo me hago el camino
al menos si pierdo?
lo diré bajito


Sorry, I know I owe you some posts about exciting fun things that happened recently, but I'm not really in the mood lately. And I don't really want to talk about it.

A happy ending

I really shouldn't tell you how the Cambridge trip ended before I tell you how it went in the first place, but the story had a happy ending, and I wanted to tell it to you to let you know that there are still good people in the world.

As I mentioned previously, we left Cambridge on Sunday and headed to London to watch the Varsity Football Match and Varsity Boat Race. Chung, Ralf and I went home via the tube and then by bus from London to Oxford.

When I got back to my room, I realized that my digital camera was missing. I tore my bags apart, but no camera. I had left it, and all of the 70something photos I took this weekend, on the bus.

Although there were buses running throughout the night, no one was answering the phone at the bus company. I had to wait until the next day to call them, and I was too tired and it was too late for me to walk back to the bus station.

So the next day I got up as early as I could, and I called the bus company. I described the camera to them and gave the details of my trip, and received good news: my camera had been turned in.

I mean, think about it. If it were a credit card or a cell phone, it would be easy to just shut them down and get a new one (even if you do have to pay a bit for the phone). But a digital camera is probably very attractive, and you can't replace photos that you've taken.

So anyway, I had to take a taxi out to West Nowhere to pick up my camera, but I was relieved. Thank you, kind person out there, who turned in my camera. It is nice to know that that there are still kind people out there.

Details of the rest of the trip to follow!