Long time no see

I've been so dreadfully naughty. Carmen is right - not updating for such a long, long time. At the beginning it's just because one doesn't have that much to say, and then when there is one doesn't have the time and in the end there are too many things to say to write a single post

So here I am - less than two weeks before leaving for Scotland. February is mid-term at uni, and the subject I'm lecturing in has come to an end, so here I am with a pile of essays to correct. Oh dear. There are some amusing bits, like a student reporting "vulgarities" in Lord Tennyson's "The War", you know:

Let your Reforms for a moment go,
Look to your butts and make good aims.
Better a rotten borough or so,
Than a rotten fleet or a city of flames!
Form! form! Riflemen form!
Ready, be ready to meet the storm!
Riflemen, riflemen, riflemen form!

So I wonder how my student pictures looking to your *insert appropriate vulgar term* while making good aim. I was tempted to draw a huge ROTFL smilie, but then I just wrote - "Check in a dictionary" or something to that effect. Now I'm correcting another essay which states that the rhyme is "perfect" for almost every poem in the collection. Whatever perfect is? A sonnet? An iambic tetrameter? These are, of course, just the amusing bits. Then there are those pasting straight from their bibliography, gosh, how can they think I will not find it odd when a first year with dubious grammar and basic vocabulary writes "The kind of aesthetic connection that the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life"? And this is one of the simplest bits I've marked as "suspicious". Now mistakes are ok, but I just can't stand people not doing their own work. Tut tut. They are lucky I'm a softie, as my colleague told me, don't wear your Sister of Charity habit!

In any case, yes I've been baaaad, but I promise to write my bit every now and then. I should post on that DD/Kozena concert - have a piccie and all! Then about our trip to Barcelona, Christmas, my ordeals with the new subject, and my second initiation (I can't remember anything from my first, so it still is an act of initiation, is it not?) in knitting (just a scarf with the Gryffindor colours, heh). Thanks Lauri for teaching clumsy me!

It's a Mozart anniversary, btw. Started one of these serial collections but just bought one cd as I have most of those anyway. Not getting into much new in that front (I went to the Liceo in Barcelona last December!) - I'm drawing from my instrumental music collection for my corrections (vocal music is bad for concentration in my case - I end up listening to music rather than working!) Alejandro gave me a Toscanini live recording of some miscellaneous Baroque a couple of years back for my birthday, and it's working wonders now. It's light and easy, and cheers me up as I wield my red pen in my judicious hand, lol. Or so it better be for the sake of my students and their perfect rhyme!

And I haven't even checked Inuyasha for more than a month! Then as I like my posts with a piccie, I'm going to post a piccie of a game I'm often playing now. I've inherited a Motorola MPX200 from Sis (it's not in me to spend my scanty means in fancy phones), and it's made me such a happy woman. I mean, it's got its own tiny Windows platform and all. Cute, isn't it? But the Java games, mp3 tones and ebook reader are what make me the happiest. Now I love waiting for the bus! And you can just get your themes from your pc - I found a great one of that "Wacky Wheels" cartoon. In any case, the game is Worms World Party - and I know most of you know me as a pacifist, and I am, but this game is so crazy, I just love the worms turning kamikazes and throwing sheep-shaped bombs and shouting "Yes Sir!" in those shrill voices. And there's also "You'll regret this!" or my fav "Are you nuts?" (that's when I hit my own worm, which I often do - I'm so bad at the game). Another one in the peacful line I love is Toki Tori. It's a very addictive puzzle with the cutest of birds as protagonist. See piccie below.





Back to work now!