Obnoxious Happiness, Adorable Puffling

I've spent the last week and a half promising "I'll update my blog tomorrow," in true procrastinator style. It was on my to-do list and everything. And then life happened. It happened quite a lot. I suspect that none of you has spent the last fortnight staring wild-eyed at my blog and hitting Ctrl+R with ever-weakening fingers, but just in case, here is a picture of the most adorable and adorably named thing in the world, to buy your forgiveness.

IT'S A MOTHERFLIPPING PUFFLING. LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT THE PUFFLING. (Source)

And now, here's some of the life that keeps happening. I have to confess that I'm pretty obnoxiously happy right now.

A ha ha ha! We laugh at things!

As you may have gathered from my last post, the snow made me catatonic with joy.

Being 2D in the SNOW!

Being obnoxiously happy in the SNOOOOOW!

And then Emily came to visit me, and I got super excited and spent the whole week frantically showing her my life. "LOOK LOOK LOOK! This is my city! This is my restaurant! This is my university! This is my lake! These are my friends! This is my Minster! This is my library! This is my greengrocer! This is my market! Do you love everything? I LOVE EVERYTHING."

Because I do. (Obviously not around exam time, but the rest of the time.)

This is my snow! This is my Norman church! This is my friend!

We got dressed up and spent Saturday evening at a geeky cocktail party, where we hung out with people even geekier than us, played Star Trek and Doctor Who drinking games (I have now learned that the rules of drinking games can be summarised "If anything happens, DRINK."), and drank interesting things. Like fruit juice. And also, not fruit juice.

SOPA and Firefox.

We built a tiny snowperson.

The tiniest snowperson.

And discovered a perplexing playground, where half the things were cunningly disguised normal playground things, and half were totally incomprehensible.

I have no idea what any of these things do. Are these convex slides? Why would anyone design a convex slide?

And since it was the Viking Festival, we spent some time doing Viking things, like arts and crafts. What? It can't all be pillaging and plundering. Sometimes, you just have to weave a fish.

Being industrious, Vikingly.

Having been industrious, Vikingly. I made a Darwin fish!

When we got tired of being Vikings (we didn't enter the best beard competition because we didn't have time to grow impressive enough facial hair), we went to the museum to play some Look Like This Guy, and also because we care about knowledge and stuff. I, for one, learned about pufflings (new favourite word), picked a favourite Viking (Ivar the Boneless), and looked at some Latin inscriptions with a very serious and learned expression on my face.

Have you seen my dog? I think he went that way.

Being industrious, Romanly.

Reading upside-down Latin inscriptions. But it turns out I'm no better at Latin upside-down than right way up.

Looking like this Old Testament prophet.

I'm almost a Moa!

"I think we should call it your grave!"

But after all our touristing in the city, we thirsted for adventure, so one morning we followed the path past the perplexing playground and out into the wilderness, which, this being England, wasn't all that far away (or, for that matter, very wild). We picked a theme for our quest, deciding to rescue a friend from ritual sacrifice by a spirit from a painting (it's a long story), which involved the usual trips in and out of Faerie, escaping from fantasy creatures, and lots of stops for snack breaks. We like picnicking almost as much as we like knowledge and stuff.

A trail? A warning? A threat?

Beware the allure of the enchanted well!

Leaping the treacherous river.

(I feel like I should mention that we forgot about the quest at some stage. Possibly the stage at which it started raining and we realised we were three miles from home and had run out of picnic food.)

It's a testament to our friendship that I dragged myself out of bed at 6am after a very late night to take Emily to the station on Saturday morning, and that we're still friends after I had to wait half an hour in the cold to catch a bus back to campus afterwards.

You're welcome, Emilia.

At least we're better friends to each other than to the imaginary and probably also deceased Anne, whom we abandoned to the mercies of the evil painting the minute we were out of raisins. It's probably lucky we were never invited on the quest to destroy the One Ring, all things considered. Not only would we have outbreakfasted the hobbits, but I have a strong suspicion my Elvish wouldn't be much better than my Latin. No matter which way up it was.