It’s been a long time coming, I know …

I’m having a hard time getting my words to come out right for my thesis, so I figured I might as well try my hand here. At least the critics are nicer! (Actually, the critics of my thesis are pretty nice as well, except for me, myself; I find myself hating nearly every word I put down lately.) Anyway, I just got a good and thorough pep talk from one of my classmates, and now I’m feeling better than I was a couple of hours ago. Now just to hold on to that feeling until tomorrow morning …

In the meantime, I’ll give a little recap of how we spent our time in England (I could let it suffice to say that there were plenty of pints involved, but that’s probably less fun for you all than it was for me).

Anyway, we got to Northampton last Sunday evening and checked in to our hotel before heading out for dinner (and pints). Due to a near-to-last-minute problem with our original hotel, we ended up at Travelodge, which was adequate, but certainly no more. I think we were all a bit disheartened by the lack of free wi-fi and the atrocious sugar-bomb-in-a-box that passed for breakfast. We gamely soldiered on, however, and had a good morning of workshop activity with English researchers and Ph.D. students. The afternoon we spent visiting a couple of churches and the Sessions House. My favorite was easily St. Peter’s Church, built in the 1100s. It’s an indescribably lovely little building.

The rest of the day we were back doing workshop-type stuff, and after a late dinner we retired just before midnight. We were up early again the next morning for an excursion to Canons Ashby House. The house itself was magnificent, and it was made all the more appealing by an extremely engaging tour guide.

We returned to Northampton after lunch and set our minds back on our work. The workshop wrapped up at 5pm, and we were on our own for the rest of the evening. One classmate and I did a tiny bit of shopping at Tesco then hit KFC for dinner before meeting up with everybody else for, you guessed it, pints. It was a fun evening, with just enough tension and discomfort mixed in to keep things interesting.

After far too little sleep, we set off on our journey home early-ish Wednesday morning, and I got home just around seven that evening. It took me way too long to catch up on sleep and get my head back into the thesis game, but other than that I have no complaints. You may well have complaints about the lack of pictures in this post, but I promise I’ll rectify that situation in the next couple of days. Be forewarned, though, that I didn’t take nearly as many as I probably should have.