March 18th

March 16th

Work today was interesting. Everyone there was going through and cleaning out the various work spaces, and I just kind of felt like I was in the way. They really didn’t have anything for me to do with that, and I really couldn’t sit at my desk and work, so it was little awkward. What I did do was proof read the one of the quarterly journals that PAN puts out. This one was called Pesticides News and its just kind of a general publication about the big things that are going on with their work. This is the one where any articles that come from the Cotton section go into too. This issue is supposed to go out in March, and if you’ll look at your calendar, is getting pretty close to being out of time. I probably spent 5 hours going through all of that to look for typos and formatting errors and things like that. That was a nice change of pace.

Over lunch I called Fedex about my computer because I had gotten a packet of information that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I called the contact number and got that all sorted out. I even asked Damien if I could head home a little early this afternoon so I could get the papers faxed in and then hopefully get my computer in on Monday or Tuesday. So I got back from that and hurried around trying to get everything in order and then ran over to Foundation House to get it sent. I didn’t get it to my contact before she had left for the day already though, so I guess I’l just have to wait a little longer.

After that I stopped by Metrogate and then went home to make some dinner. I was going to a bunch of roasted vegetables, but that turned out to be a bit of a problem. Apparently, something had happened to out oven, so only the broil setting worked. So I “cooked” my food in there for about half an hour, before I tried one of the ovens downstairs. They have two, and I apparently picked the one that didn’t work right. It took me almost 2 hours to cook these things from start to finish. The rest of the night I just talked to people on the flat. There weren’t a whole lot of people around for some reason, so it was a pretty quite night.


March 17th

I got up this morning and got my run in and then headed out to go to Oxford. There were four of us going today and we went by train. I fell asleep almost as soon as we got going and I was out the entire time. That was a nice nap I have to say. We had to go and tour one of the colleges for one of the class requirements, so we set about finding one of those. Every single one we went to was closed and we couldn’t figure out why. At some point though, someone remembered that it was a holiday, so that’s probably why all the tours were off. From there we went out and found Iffley road track. I’m guessing that you won’t be familiar with this place, but its pretty special. This is the track that Roger Bannister first broke the four minute mile. There wasn’t much to see there really, but I’m still glad we went. We had a lot of time left now since we didn’t tour a college, so we wandered around. We came across a little canal that was renting boats and thought that that would be a good way to spend some time so we got one of those. I said I could row because I’ve done it before. I thought it wouldn’t be that big of deal, but I was quickly proven wrong. The water was really high and the current was really strong because they had had a lot of rain recently. That and the oars were continually pooping out of the oar locks made steering kind of difficult. As one of the people put it, it wasn’t so much that we went around the canal, but when from side to side on it. Oh well, it was a lot of fun.

We headed out to lunch at a pub after that. It was another one of these really well hidden places that you had to take a couple of alleys to get down, but it was a really nice place. They had all sorts of signs up about famous people that had been there, or famous things that had gone on in the premises. It was pretty cool. From there, we made an Epic quest to go forth and find the grave JRR Tolkein who was buried in a village that was right next to Oxford. We had to walk about three miles out of town. We came to a point where we had to turn and went left. We walked for about 2 miles or so before we realized we had gone the wrong way. It actually wasn’t that bad though because we passed over a really pretty canal and marshlands. It was really nice.

We got things straightened out and we were on our way. We made it there and it was interesting to see. I liked it. I have to say I felt kind of weird taking pictures of the grave. People had left all sorts of little trinkets on it too. Things like little dolls or even rings and a Silmarillion. We headed back on about four mile walk to the train station. I think we ended up walking 12 or 13 miles today. When we got back to the station, I found out that my ticket was gone. I had that and receipt in my back pocket and they just weren’t there. I though maybe that someone had picked my pocket, but I had my bad on almost the entire time I was there, and that would have had to been moved to get to it. It must have just fallen out. I had to pay almost £20 to get a ticket back for that night, which was not fun.

I did some homework and slept on the ride back which was a lot longer than the trip there because this train made a lot more stops. We didn’t end up getting back to the flat until almost 8 and I got around to making something to eat. I spent the rest of the night hanging out with people on the flat and having a good time.