General busy-ness

I’ve been stupidly busy the last few weeks, so here is just a quickly hacked together update of what I’ve got up to.

MA stuff

Last week I got told the results of my mid-semester Latin test, which ended up battering my confidence to pieces when I found out that I’d only got 34%. I was thinking of the possibility of doing a Ph.D in Ancient History after my MA, but now I don’t think I tick any of the right boxes and the prospect of getting funding looks a bit bleak. 🙁 I’m now in a new group that is going over the material because we’re ahead of the elementary group, so perhaps I’ll feel a bit more upbeat once I’ve been doing that for a couple of weeks. Today’s lesson ended on an amusing note as Tom could tell when I’d translated the sentence in my head by my amused chuckling—the Latin being si feminae uis credere, insanus es, “if you want to trust/believe a woman, you are mad” :).

Other things

In other news over the past month (very briefly) I have:

• Lead the Warped Halloween Pub Crawl again, this time as the Brigadier from the classic Doctor Who series, with varying degrees of success and culminating in randomness in Fab and the need to protect completely sober people on the way home as they were viciously attacked by evil paving slabs.
• Gone to London and ended up stewarding the climate chaos march, closing two roads and beefing up the security (on request from the professional paid security firm) between the 20,000+ strong crowd(!) and the bands in Trafalger Square. Saw Jennie B (sorry I didn’t have time to chat much, was knackered after seven hours of being on my feet) and Nathan (who hasn’t seen me since college and was therefore rather surprised to see me marshalling such an event—I can’t go anywhere without bumping into people I know!) as well as meeting lots of other random people.
• Given a presentation on climate change as Friends of the Earth/for the Co-op in Sheffield, pretty much off the top of my head as I was only asked to go down about six hours before I was due to be on.
• Helped run a postgraduate conference at the University.
• Been on a panel session organised by the Green Party as the Friends of the Earth representative.
• Written two newsletter articles, a book review and been strongly encouraged to submit a paper for an upcoming postgraduate conference.
• Organised the Manchester FoE AGM, which I’m now starting to panic about and crossing my fingers that everything will go to plan.
• Been sidelined in aikido whilst other people practised for the competition, but in many ways helping new people is much more rewarding than trying to get to 5th ku, even if the latter option does mean that I get a coloured belt.
• Had to turn down a couple of offers of work because I’m so busy, but it’s good that people still want to pay me to work as a freelancer for them and it bodes well for when I finally leave academia (I’m sure I’ll do this at some point) and go out into the real world.

Oh and it looks as if, on the recommendation of several people in the group, that I’ll be standing to be one of the co-ordinators (the people who run Manchester Friends of the Earth) at the AGM in a couple of weeks. So I may officially be a tree-hugging lefty before the year is out. 😉