One of Those Days

It's cold.

This cold.

Apparently my laptop feels the same way I do, because my desktop weather forecast has got stuck on -1, while Googling "York weather" tells me that by now, it's actually all the way up to 4 (with a whopping high of 10 by 4pm! Exciting times!). At least the sun's shining. Now I can stop staring intently at the kitchen wall for hours every day.

Yesterday was One of Those Days. By which I mean One of Those Days When Things Go Comically Wrong Apparently to Give Me Things to Blog About.

So somehow, my phone decided that yesterday was Tuesday again. I don't know why, and I genuinely have no idea how, because I don't think I could have managed to change the date settings in my sleep. What this meant was that the alarm I'd very conscientiously set for Wednesday morning didn't go off. So I woke up and lay in bed for a while in that fuzzy just-woken-up haze where you remember that you didn't actually meet the love of your life, but on the plus side, nor did you brush out your dreads and meet the Queen while wearing your pyjamas, and then at last decided to check the time.

O HAI THAR, panic.

My lecture was at 9.15. And it was very definitely 9.40. So after staring desperately at the time on my phone and checking my watch just in case, I leapt out of bed and tried to remember how to get dressed, because my brain was in no condition to perform such complicated tasks. Then I confused matters further by looking at the date on my phone. And obviously, my phone told me it was Tuesday. Still in a state of just-woke-up mixed with total panic, I paused. If it was Tuesday, I wasn't late. But I was pretty sure it wasn't Tuesday. So I ran to Henrik's room to ask what day it was. But he was off somewhere being diligent, so I was left to figure it out for myself. When I could prod my brain sufficiently into action, I managed to reason that, since the the day before had been Tuesday, it probably wasn't Tuesday again, which meant that, [insert profanity of choice here], I was very definitely very very late. [Insert much more profanity of choice here.]

There was no time to get dressed, so I swapped pyjama pants for real ones, threw some things that looked vaguely course-appropriate into my bag, and ran for it. But, funny story, I couldn't remember how to get to the venue, and my campus map had chosen that precise moment to go into hiding. HA HA HA. So my heroic attempt to run across campus in a state of semi-habille was frequently interrupted by the need to stop and check sign boards. At last, I dashed into the building - only to realise that the room numbers were arranged according to some mysterious system I had no hope of understanding on my own, and so I had to queue at reception to ask where the room was. I was eventually given directions, and I ran the last bit so that at least it would be clear I'd been running.

To make things that much better, it was my first forensics lecture. Winning. At. EVERYTHING.

I spent the rest of the day in a state of disorientation which was not aided by the "reminder" about the department colloquium that afternoon, in inverted commas because I'd seen the first email about it but totally ignored the contents, so obviously I had no idea that it was happening. It's lucky I have my classmates to remind me (and to applaud for me when I showed up for the colloquium in the afternoon fully dressed and on time).

Henrik is now under strict instructions to wake me up in the mornings if I haven't surfaced by 8.30.

I managed to salvage the day a bit by going to the bank (I'm starting to think I should just move in there) and then going grocery shopping. There's something about coming home with a great big bag of fruit and veg from the farmers' market and good peanut butter and vegan cheese from the local health food store that makes it hard for a day to be totally awful.

I'm trying to be adventurous in my vegetable buying, and so this week, I purchased a swede. I don't know what to do with it. I asked the million-year-old man who served me at the market, but he gave me a weird look and said "It's a vegetable. You eat it," like I might be a little slow, so I decided to Google it.

Emily has threatened to unfriend me if I mash it.

I thought about asking on Facebook, but I know my friends too well to think that asking for inventive things to do with a swede will get me anything other than suggestive comments about Scandinavians.

And as you may have gathered from the above photo, I've decorated my hair. Because no matter how grey the weather gets, I still have brightly-coloured hair which I can decorate with even-more-brightly-coloured things, and that makes me happy. (Plans to decorate me for Christmas are already in place.)

Variegated yarn FTW.

Whee!

In other news, my bruise from having blood taken is looking pretty impressive, my pinboard is looking a little less sad thanks to some postcards my mum sent me and a few things I discovered I'd brought with me or picked up on my travels, and Henrik and I somehow acquired two new mugs.

The mugs just appeared next to our sink one day. One we recognised as the one which had been balancing on top of the doorbell outside the building for several days (our cleaner has since reclaimed it), but the other one is a total mystery. Could it be a gift from the ukelele player? Is it from behind one of the mysterious doors? Wherever it's from, Mystery Mug is at least bigger than any of the ones we bought when we moved in, so it's now my favourite tea mug. Of course, since it might be from another world, there's always the risk that it's cursed, or comes with some kind of magical obligation, but now I have a cup that holds more than three sips of tea! Totally worth it.