Feb 24th

Feb 21st

This is my tow class day, so I got up and got ready for that. The first class of the day was Ethno and it was a lot of fun. We started off finishing up about Jack the Ripper and then we moved on to these London gangster called the Kray twins. They were born and raised in the same part of London as the Ripper murders and went on to pretty much control the city. Justin told us a story to prove this point. One of the twins was openly homosexual. A man who worked with the Twin’s gang and another rival had a falling out with the Twins. One night he came into the restaurant the brothers owned where they were celebrating with their family. He walked up to Ronnie, the Twin in question, and called him a fag in front of his family. He was not to pleased about this and said that he was going to kill him in the middle of this crowded restaurant. A little while later, a member of the gang saw this man at a pub and told Ronnie about it. Ronnie drove there in his big green Jaguar, told his driver to wait and walked in. This guy saw Ronnie from the other side of the bar as Ronnie was pulling out a gun. He told Ronnie there was no way he would do it, and Ronnie shot in right there and left. By the time the police showed up, the bar was empty and the bar maid claimed she was downstairs changing a keg. He got away with it. These guys had amazing connections. They were good friends with members of the House of Lords and the Royal family. Ronnie was even good friends with Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, who interestingly enough was having an affair with Mic Jager at the time. Really cool history.
After that I came back to the flat to get ready to go to a play called the War Next Door. The theatre complex itself was really cool. It had a bar, a restaurant, a cinema, and the theatre all in one building. The theatre itself was pretty industrial and Spartan. It was a nice change. The play itself wasn’t all that great. I had a hard time getting into it and a couple of the characters just weren’t that convincing. It wasn’t terrible and I’m not sad that I saw it, but I don’t think I would go out of my way to see it. I got back from that and spent a couple of hours watching the movie Troy and playing some cards before going to bed.

Feb 22nd

On my way to work this morning I stopped off at Leicester Square to see if I could get tickets for a show called History Boys. None of the places there had any and the theatre didn’t open up until after I had to go to work, so I got the number and made my way there. Work today was more of what I had been doing from the day before. I spent a lot more time working on the database and then some time getting articles for the cotton reader ready. I have to type the last few in by hand since we don’t have the original documents anymore, we only have the hard copies. That kept me busy for the entire pretty much. At lunch I called the theatre about tickets, and all they had left were ones for about £50, so I think we can go back another time. I think of we order them a week or so in advance we would be fine, but the day of or before isn’t going to work so well. I spent the afternoon getting as much done as I could. I managed to get a long ways on a lot of the little projects that I was working on, so that made me feel really good. That was especially nice because I spent a good chunk of the morning cutting out a sample pamphlet for a presentation one of the people is going to in Washington.
I got back from work and stopped by Tesco to get something for dinner. I didn’t have any thing I could really make for the night since I thought I was going to be eating out. I just picked up some spring rolls, made some rice and called it good. The people I had been planning on going to the play with decided that they would go to a pub tonight, since they were leaving in the morning for various destinations. We went back to the Black Friars and spent a couple of hours there and ordered some more of their delicious cheesy fries. A really good night.
By the time we got back, it was starting to get pretty late. A lot of people had left already or there flights were early in the morning so they were packing or in bed already. I stayed up for a while writing in my journal and the called it a night.

Feb 23rd

This was a really mellow day.

Work today was more of the same from early this week. I had about eight projects at the beginning of the week to get done, and I was about 80% finished with all of them. I just had the finishing touches to put on them so that’s what I did today. It was really nice to actually be able to mark things off as done. Up to this point, I was having to skip around to get stuff done so often that I never really finished what I started. I would work on it, go to something else, then something else. Now that I’ve actually got some things done, it should get a lot easier. One of the problems I had been having was that I was forgetting little things about what I was doing. The Reader is a real issue with this. Since there are so many little formatting things to do, having to keep going away and coming back to it means that I have to relearn everything over again. I would forget what size the headers were supposed to be or how I should format this or that. Now that I’m past that, it should go a lot faster.
I really didn’t do much when I got back. I had some dinner and watched some TV for a while. I also did a ton of dishes. Everyone was kind enough to leave all there dishes in a big pile before they left. Real cool. I worked my way through the pile so that the people left would actually have some plates to use. It really sucks because its only a couple of people who never wash their stuff, but it really piles up. People also don’t do their dishes right away if they just have a cup and then they forget about it. One of the guys actually put a sign up that said “For Lent, how about we all do our own dishes.” I thought it was very nice. Apparently, the guy who never does his dishes didn’t agree and tore it down the same night. At some point I’m going to put a couple more up before everyone gets back. It will be interesting to see how long they last.
I did go down to flat 4 and watch some TV with a couple of people who were left. We watched a show about a special forces group called the Unit. It was pretty good. I didn’t have any reason to go to bed since I didn’t have anything going on the next day, but I didn’t have any reason to stay up and I ended up sleeping.