December Already??

 Hello!

How is everyone?

I'm doing pretty well! I've had some ups and downs over the last few months. Which is life, really - but I'd like to think I'm doing a bit better now. 

So, yeah, the last time I wrote a blog, I was in Devon with Granny, Tessa, and Pippin. I had a good time. It was nice to see Granny and Tessa. Tessa's slowing down a lot now...visited in November, and poor Tessa's starting to moult and lose weight.

Sentimental old lady.

It has been a long time since the last blog! I kept meaning to write one, but I have been super busy - mainly with my dissertation up until September. (Which, yes, is no excuse for the last three months!)

If anybody can remember that far back, I mentioned in my last blog that I had a few big events coming up.
I decided to host meals for various friends. (It was two at a time; my kitchen was not big enough for a big crowd.) It was very fun, and we all had a good time!
Separate from the meals, I also organised a murder mystery party to celebrate the end of the academic year. That party was quite stressful to organise, particularly as it only dawned on me late in the planning process that, never mind the kitchen, my house wouldn't be big enough for all of us. I ended up renting out a room at my local church. (That is possible for non-wedding events, apparently!) I did quite enjoy the planning, though - especially as I had decided that my character would be the victim, so I went and asked a few of my friends if they'd be happy to murder me (!) The guy who ended up being the killer stated, upon being asked, that he wouldn't mind killing me (!!) Always nice to know who your friends are! (I ended up having multiple characters who were brothers so that I could do more than spend the evening pretending to be a corpse.)

The gang! Left to right, the front row is Walter Ivory, Isaiah Goldenrod, Joanna Sapphire, Alfred Canary (me!), Adeola Palatinate, and Briar Moss. Back row is Aldrich Sapphire, Michael Cinereous, Jonathan Merigold, Aoife Hickory, Cara Pine, Dr Dylan Carmine, Ada Cinerous, Ariadne Laguna, and the troublesome Jason Canary.

The murder mystery evening was really fun! Everyone had a good time - though there was considerable confusion over the timeline of the murder. (One or two people were under the impression that it happened the night before the party. It actually occurred during the party, but before the 'action' started)

One of my highlights was how utterly off-the-rails the more improv elements of the night went. By way of example, various character relationships wound up being totally different to how I'd envisioned them. For instance, two characters, called Adeola Palatinate and Ada Cinereous, were supposed to be close friends, with Adeola being concerned for Ada on account of her recent strange behaviour. Instead, upon their first interaction, Ada said, "Ew." Then, to my knowledge, the two did not interact in character again for the rest of the evening. It got to the point where Jason Canary's actor managed to actually gaslight me into changing the plot of the murder mystery! In the backstory, Canary was supposed to have committed a murder and persuaded the victim (and brother) to help cover it up; one of his goals was to persuade people that the victim committed that murder. What ended up happening was that when he told me that, I forgot all about that goal and assumed he was just taking the character in a different direction than what I'd originally planned.

We are all shocked that Jonathan is the killer. (Except me. For some reason, I look like I'm yawning.)

Another highlight was the ending summation. My (living) character was the Detective, so I got to stride around explaining all the case details. (According to Karys, who was invited, I looked like I was having a blast - which I absolutely was!) I structured the climax so that we'd all vote on who the killer was before explaining the solution. Almost everyone guessed Jonathan Merigold, who was best friends with Michael Cinereous, the secret son of the victim and half-brother of Ada Cinerous. Even Cinerous himself guessed Merigold as the killer! This meant that when I referred to Merigold and Cinerous as best friends, Merigold burst out, "Well, we're not best friends anymore!"
The conclusion, by the way, was that the victim was killed by Jonathan Merigold, sorta. The victim was on blood-thinning medication, and the victim and the murderer got into an altercation, during which the victim suffered a knock to the head. Overcome with guilt, both over attacking his son's friend and over the decades-past murder (thank you, Jason Canary!), the victim intentionally overdosed on his own medication, to protect Merigold.

Another fun thing was that, according to Karys, multiple people took the investigation in a meta direction and started discussing what sort of murder mysteries I liked to figure out which direction the plot would take—which I very much enjoyed hearing about! (For the record, I've gotten hooked on Christie, and she loves her poisons.)

Look at these cutie-pies. Love them so much.

I spent most of my summer working on my dissertation, which was long and difficult. In a weird way, I enjoyed it, though. The dissertation was 11,000 words of a story I've been working on, plus 9,000 words of a critical essay discussing the story. It certainly was fun to analyse my story! I've actually continued writing the story after finishing my dissertation, and I've been toying with the idea of including a snippet in my blog at some point. The premise of the story is that the main characters are trying to find their missing siblings in the aftermath of a terrible war, which results in them stumbling across a conspiracy to restart the war. 

However, the funny thing is that I got burned by my dissertation supervisor. The story's working title was Echoes of War, which he didn't like. When I mentioned that I got it from an Internet random title generator, he replied, "Yes, that's evident," or something similar. The new title is The Eleventh Interval, which I will concede is much better! The new title was inspired by music, of all things - a working title was Discordant Harmony (yeah...) Which got me thinking about discord and harmony as musical terms - different tones being in harmony or discordant. That, in turn, led me to discover intervals - in music, an interval is the relationship in tone between two differing notes created by the transition from one note to another. I'm not gonna go into all the music-theory details here, as that would be rather boring - but one example of an interval is the eleventh (or perfect eleventh), which is an unstable tone that invariably adds tension to otherwise-stable compositions before moving to a resolution. Which is designed to reflect how the events of the story creates tension in an otherwise stable(ish) political situation, before moving to a resolution. (It also hints that something like this has occurred before!)

Entirely unrelatedly, I saw a fox for the first time in June!! I was visiting Will and Hel to celebrate Neve's 7th birthday, and Neve had a big party. (Like the murder mystery party, the party was too big for a simple house to suffice - it was held at the local school instead.)
And I saw a fox lurking by some bushes! (Sadly, though I snapped 20-odd photos, the fox seemingly could tell it was being spied on, and it ran off.)

Think it might be a pretty young fox, actually!

One of the biggest highlights of this summer was visiting Stratford-upon-Avon with Josh right at the end of the summer. We had a really great time; we went on several walking tours of Stratford, and we visited the birthplace of the Bard himself! We also watched a bona-fide Shakespeare play: The Merry Wives of Windsor, which we very much enjoyed. Falstaff was a delightfully boorish and arrogant character. As it happens, there's a Falstaff Close...well...close to my parents' house. (Josh also kindly read over my dissertation and gave feedback - somewhat of a necessary evil in our holiday, as I had a week and a half left till submission at the time!) 
In the evenings, we watched Doctor Who, both being avid fans of the show - we watched The Tenth Planet (William Hartnell's final episode; featured on this very blog) and Tomb of the Cybermen, a Patrick Troughton episode.

Me and my bro!

Smooth criminal in the stocks. (In case you're wondering, Josh played the erstwhile Canary at the party...)

On the more negative side of things, I have had to endure many computer problems recently. It started with the shift key not working...while I was writing a twenty-thousand-word essay. Then, when that was fixed, my computer started switching off when plugged in. So I spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time going to the local computer repair shop. (Upshot, the latter issue was because of some sort of glitch that happened when they were fixing the keyboard, so that was free of charge! Very lovely people, no repair shop I'd rather be customer of the month for!) It did lead to a rather interesting incident one day; I popped by to check on computer progress, but the shop was closed briefly. While I waited, I witnessed a kerfuffle involving local police. As I walked away from the shop, two other people tried to get in - in hindsight, they likely wanted to hide in the shop. Why do I say that? Because one of them, a woman, found that the door was locked, turned to the other, a guy, and shouted to ditch the coat he was wearing and run. He did run, but he did not ditch the coat; he sprinted down the road and round the corner, closely pursued by two police officers. His partner in crime did not run and spent the next 15 minutes or so pleading with the remaining officer to let her go. (She also begged a passer-by for a cigarette, which is...skewed priorities at its finest!) It was actually quite sad...according to her, she was homeless, and she was desperate to avoid going back to prison. (She and her partner did steal clothes and food, but neither is an unreasonable thing to want in the autumn/winter.) 15 minutes into the conversation, the other police officers returned with the man, who was furiously insisting that he was totally innocent. (Belied by the fact that he saw the police and ran, which I, an innocent bystander, did not do. And also his partner immediately confessed.) I didn't see how the situation ended up playing out, as I had important meetings I needed to go to. (Also didn't get that update from the shop...)

I don't have a relevant picture, so have a spaniel puddle.

I have also spent a lot of time applying for jobs. Which is fun, in a way, but it also gets very tiresome after a while. I started properly looking in June, and I still have yet to get a job. I have had several interviews, which is good practice, if nothing else. I do currently have a good five jobs I'm gonna apply for, though, and I'm reasonably positive that I'll get something eventually.

I also attended a wedding in June - such things happen when you get to my age. It was good fun, and I enjoyed celebrating my friends and their relationship. On a related note, multiple of my friends got engaged at the end of October - very, very exciting!! I'm not part of either wedding party, but I don't mind, because I still get to celebrate with my friends. (And I shall bake many, many baked goods, and I will be known as The Baker.)

Me with the wonderful young woman who helped proof-read the blog!

Good times with good friends!

This is probably one of my favourite pictures from the wedding, the sun hits us perfectly.

I have visited Granny several times since the last blog, which was lovely! I went once in the summer, towards the end of July, and again at the end of November! (And I'll be going again at the end of December...come to think of it, every time I've visited Granny this year, it's been at the end of a month!) The summer visit was very fun - one of the biggest highlights, for me, was walking up Rippon Tor with Granny and Sally (and the dogs, of course!) I always love walks on Dartmoor - it's a beautiful and scenic place.

The only lowlight was that I got a rejection email from a job I'd applied for while on holiday - but I didn't let that get me down too much.

I also enjoyed visiting in November - I got to spend lots of quality time with Sally. I very much enjoyed that - she had a health scare earlier in the year, and she spent some time in the hospital. She's recovering now, though, and she was able to join me and Granny on a walk on Dartmoor. We also watched Paddington 3 in the theatre while I was visiting; the movie was very good! (I cried. Repeatedly.)

The old ladies at the top of Rippon Tor (this does include Tessa and Pippa)

So, that's been a few of the highlights of the last few months! (Well, eight months!) It's been mostly pretty good, but there have been a few rough patches. I moved into a new house over the summer, and my new housemates are really nice, funny people. I have felt a bit lonely, as I don’t see much of my housemates, and most people are busy with work nowadays. But I’m mostly feeling pretty positive about my future – I’m confident that I’ll get a job soon, and there’s definitely a lot to look forward to over the coming months! I’m entering a new chapter in my life – and I’m getting to cheer on two of my dearest friends as they start a new chapter of their own!!

How have you guys been these last eight months? What have been some of your highlights?

Random stats

-Degrees completed: 2!!

-Words in my dissertation: 21,633 words(!!)

-Visits to Devon: 3 (soon to be 4!)

-Job applications made: Many (Seven just to the University of Reading alone!)

-Words of story written so far: 21,000 or so

-Weddings attended: 1
-Years this blog has been active for: 6
-I found this hilarious blog the other day...just try to not laugh!
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html