this is so scary. this amount of water reminds me of aceh, and all the tsunami affected areas. we seem to be fairly safe though - my college might be ugly, but they did build it so that we are very very unlikely to be flooded. still, the water has risen a lot, the island has disappeared and one of our punts (the only one we couldn't get out) has sunk. sigh. now a huge lake stands in front of our harbour quad, since all the land on the other side of the river has flooded. it's almost pretty, if it wasn't, again, quite scary.
anyway, my fieldwork seems to be going swimmingly. going to london three days a week (monday, tuesday and sunday) is kind of tiring, but i've already managed to get a lot of questionnaires filled out and as soon as i get my digital recorder i can get started on interviews. i'm also getting on very well with everyone in the office, even though initially i found it hard to insert myself in the pre-existing dynamic between all the people there... still, they're all lovely, and i'm spending lots of time with the workers who are at the heart of my research. it's exciting, after four years of university, to be finally able to do something that actually matters, and finding out new information, new data... even though i know it won't be easy to put it all together for my report and my thesis! before that can happen i have to learn to use SPSS anyway. i hate stats.
speaking of stats, i got the result for my exam and my second core essay, and it all went very well. even though as usual i did better in what i thought i'd done worse in (the essay, 68%), and worse in what i thought i'd done better in (the research methods exams, 66%). to be honest though, once i got the marks i was just glad it was all done!
other than that, i finished the last harry potter book - in 31 hours, during which i also managed to get a full night's sleep, go to london, get 28 questionnaires filled out, and come back from london, not bad i'd say. overall i'm pretty satisfied, even though i realised more and more as i was reading it that even though jk rowling is extremely good at constructing plots (this was one very gripping), her language really isn't amazing. there's a lot of repetition, and sometimes she seems to go too much into detail, whereas other situations that could be explained better are completely missed out on. oh well, as i said, i'm pretty happy with it anyway.
and to end it all, let me just say: i'm knackered. going into london, starting my fieldwork and thinking about it 24/7 has just tired me out. a lot. at the same time, i've been relatively productive with a lot of other things too, so i'm not too unhappy.
i do miss m though, who's off to some lab near manchester (or was it liverpool?) until thursday. sigh. see, that's the trouble with being in a symbiotic relationship. i do love it the rest of the time though, so i'm definitely not complaining. i'm madly in love and that's all that matters. :)
26 days until we move into our flat. i can't wait.