long time no see

... well, not really, but it does seem like a very long time since I graced this blog with my presence... like a week, perhaps?

My week has been - interesting. Monday and Tuesday were absolutely frantic - I was basically only at home to sleep. At the start of the semester I thought perhaps I'd enjoy this timetable, with no early morning lectures and some evening ones; I have fast become velly velly sick of it. Tuesdays I am at uni from 10am to 5pm, go straight to Music at 5:30, from that go straight to Navs (Christian group) at 7:15, don't get home till 11:30ish. I feel slightly under pressure too, having been given the job of co-leading our church's youth group this year. The guy who's leading it with me is very enthusiastic about it, which is great, but it makes me worried about how much time I am meant to put into it.

Wednesday-Friday, by comparison, are very lazy, but I'm still recovering from Monday and Tuesday so I spend basically the whole week being totally exhausted. Next weekend I am going to Hanmer Springs with my Navs small group which I should be very excited about but I have a feeling it means I will have absolutely no rest from this Monday until next Wednesday.

Sorry to spend all this time complaining. It really isn't that interesting. Good things that have happened this week:
- I got to play volleyball at youth group last night. I hardly ever get to play my favourite sport so I had such a great time.
- I read The Da Vinci Code and realised that as well as being historically wacky it's very badly written; yippee! I was expecting it to be at least amazingly written, Harry-Potter-style - but no. Next time when someone treats the novel as if it's the gospel truth I will have actually read it and know what I'm talking about!
- On Thursday night my sister Viv rang up as it was her birthday and we had a really good, long talk. Yay!
- On Thursday the light began to dawn midst the darkness of Linguistics class. I am beginning to understand.
- On Tuesday night I got home from Navs and lay in bed with the electric blanket on, eating a chocolate bar and reading the first chapter of a Georgette Heyer novel. Heaven...
- On a similar note, today was an absolutely lovely crisp autumn Saturday after a Friday of pouring rain and I went for a stroll and had a flat white at the local cafe while reading another Georgette Heyer novel.
So there you have it, I have actually had a very good week if I just take the trouble to think about it.

Photos: university campus. I didn't do a very job of capturing how pretty it is at the moment, but trust me, it's lovely at university in autumn. The buildings are really ugly, having been built in the 60s or so when the uni moved from the central city to Ilam, and designed by someone who adored square blocks of concrete. But the grounds are lovely.