back to the grindstone

I have now been back at university for two days. I thought I would be looking forward to it after my loooong holiday... but no, I can't say I do, really. It's certainly quite interesting starting a new topic and everything, but definitely not so much as in first year because this year it'll be Harder. Groan. Now I am up to 200-level courses. The good thing is, essays are now 2500 words instead of 1500--I always found it so hard cutting a thousand odd words off my essays, it felt like I was killing my baby. But I suppose we'll have more content to cover for these ones so it's not really a bonus at all. This semester I am doing: ENGL220 Creative Writing--Short Fiction; HIST274 a Russian history one from the start to the end of the Soviet Union; and LING206 Syntactic Theory. Next semester I will be doing: HIST239 War and Society 1900-1945; ENGL215 Seventeenth Century King and Country; and LING207 Phonetics and Phonology.

There was a barbecue for the first night of Navs tonight, which was nice. I no longer feel like a newbie, which is also very nice.

Dad has been away for the past week. My niece Lydia got baptised on Sunday, in Dunedin, and he drove down, having a holiday on the way in places like Tekapo and Naseby, and did some pretty amazing drives, from the sounds of it. While he was away, my aunty Rita, his sister-in-law, died (I didn't know her very well), and he came back on Sunday night and flew off on Monday morning for the funeral in Palmerston North. He's getting back tomorrow. I don't like being alone like this for too long. For one thing, all the vegetables in the garden grow and I'm stuck with fifteen courgettes (zucchinis), three ice cream cartons of tomatoes, and masses of runner beans, unable to eat them because I've had such a busy week and have been out for all mealtimes! For another, it gets kind of lonely and I miss him.

This photo is one of the ones I took that time I went up the hill to take photos a few weeks ago. It is of Lyttleton Harbour; well, about half of it.