24 January 2013

Absentee

I've been a little of an absentee blogger over the past few weeks and for this i apologise. It's been a pretty hectic time in my life. 

At the start of that period I had some pretty major coursework deadlines. Then it was the Christmas holidays where I ended up with two weeks of unexpected work which meant that I had to do things like Christmas shopping and even making some Christmas presents in the evenings where I'd planned on having four extra days to do it in, I only work four days a week Tuesday-Friday, during the holidays, and the other week was post New Years.

The interim week was actually pretty productive, although in the field of revision for January exams rather than in the field of blogging, degree comes before blog, much though I may prefer it to be the other way round. I then ended up ill for New Years, which was a bit of a drag on a night out, being unable to stay awake let alone drink.

The last week of work also saw some crammed revision and hasty packing, ending with my dad driving me back to Uni on the Sunday morning. The final week of Semester A was pretty intense for some obvious reasons, although I was rather lucky last week and only had one exam. I kind of ambled into the beginning of Semester B in a semi-exhausted state, not helped by the fact that my friend had gone into hospital the week before with some major stuff going on.

I was home for last weekend and came back to Uni on the Sunday, my choice of timing was a bad move as it saw me arrive at Cambridge just when it was identified that there was a need for some emergency engineering work in Baldock, which saw me stuck in Royston station for around 2 hours as we waited for buses to turn up, only 2 did, in the snow without shelter. When they eventually got trains going again I and around 200 others had to wait in the snow for the train to turn up 15 minutes late during which time 3 further buses arrived which we weren't allowed to get on, and once the train did arrive we still had to wait 20 minutes on the train before it started moving. Because of the emergency this train only stopped at the larger stations which saw me delayed a further 20 minutes at Stevenage, all while it was still snowing. I arrived back to my University town to be greeted by the dark, the cold and 10cm of fresh snow,  to say that was a journey I will never forget is an understatement.

That 10cm of snow has since compacted into an inch of ice on all pavements across our Uni town, with the only clear patches being on campus, this has made my daily walk to Uni both fraught and an excellent work out. I was not a happy bunny making this trip at 8.30 Monday morning.

Then yesterday I made the trip back to Cambridge to visit my friend in hospital, fortunately she's doing much better and it's estimated she'll be out towards the end of next week. But she has been very ill so it was scary times for us all. And added to this I was more than a little nervous about making the journey to Cambridge again.

Ironically in light of this post one of my New Years Resolutions was to work out and stick to some kind of posting schedule, hopefully from now on I'll be more successful.

See you all soon.

Rowen