Computer troubles = Bane of my existence.

Hello all!

Apologies for the long silence on my end, but November has been a super busy month, what with shows closing, papers to be written, presentations to be created, people coming and visiting and having subsequent adventures, etc. etc. etc....And now, to top it all off, my Wake laptop - good old pain in the ass ThinkPad laptop - is truly on its last legs, and is refusing to connect to the Internet. It has been somewhat virusy and finnicky since I got to Scotland, but now it's just being more of a nuisance than a help, so I'm being forced to use the computers in the residence hall lab and the library. Man, luckily I am getting a new one in January - if I didn't have to return this one to Wake Forest, I would gleefully take a baseball bat to it.

This means I'm not entirely sure how reliable (or frequent) my internet access will be, but I am going to do my best to keep in touch with everyone, and keep trying to post things on this blog. The next four weeks (only four! Gah! It's gone by so fast!) are going to be filled with really exciting things and adventures to be had, and so I'm going to try my best and keep up to date with blogging about them! As for the past few weeks, there will hopefully be some retroactive blog posts detailing those adventures, such as Amadeus, Remembrance Day, and Sarah coming to visit Edinburgh and the wonderful things we did then!

Love until the next blog post

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

So yesterday was my 21st birthday.

Yeah, it's weird.

To be honest though, turning 21 in a country where I've been able to drink legally for the past three years made it a little bit more low-key than if I had been in the States, where I'm sure all of my friends would have abducted me and made certain that I made very poor life decisions for the rest of the night. :-) However, this does not mean that my birthday was dull, not by any means! I had a really lovely day, and I had a lot of fun and spent the day with some really wonderful people, so I think that this birthday could be classified as a success!

Also, I'd say that my birthday haul was pretty respectable: I got a lovely card from Poppa and Joyce, and a really cute one from Lydia; I had a fantastic long Skype call with Mom, and a great email from Uncle Alan (both of whom have the same birthday - twins!) and so many of my friends and family wished me a happy birthday via Facebook - it's always wonderful to go through all of the wishes, especially when people write/record really hilarious things (*cough*TreEaston*cough*). A bunch of the girls in the residence hall and I also got together and had a nice little party that consisted of junk food (including about 8 or so Mars Bars that they got me instead of a cake, which was fantastic), alcoholic beverages, and a very amusing viewing of the Disney version of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" (SO GREAT.) Couldn't have asked for a better way to spend my birthday.

However, the best thing I got for my birthday this year.....were these:

Flowers from Quill.

Totally made my day. My room smells wonderful now. :-)


UPDATE:   AND, to make my birthday/day-after-birthday even BETTER, The Decemberists' newest album has a name, a track list, and a release date. I AM SO EXCITED YOU HAVE NO IDEA. http://www.zmemusic.com/feature/news/new-decemberists-album-announced-the-king-is-dead-512536/