M. Willis Monroe

Santacon midway through the evening.

Santacon was Saturday, once again it was a blast. This time around I got Jon, Chris, and Rory to come along. I’m pretty sure they enjoyed it. It’s hard to not like Santacon.

Santas singing on Nelson’s column.

The audience that came to watch us.

We went again to Trafalgar square and sang to the tourists, this year there seemed to be both more santas and more tourists watching. It’s really quite amazing.

Other then that I’ve just been relaxing. Saw Narnia with Gillian last night, it was nice but didn’t seem to have much substance. Today we’re going out Christmas shopping on Oxford street! She’s got a big list, I’m going to do it by the seat of my pants.

Oh yeah you can find the rest of my Santacon photos on flickr here, enjoy.

Life has been busy recently. This week due to school work and finicial matters I’ve been incredibly stressed, more stressed then I think I’ve ever been before. As uncomfortable as I felt I think I did the best I’ve done on my academic work before. It’s the first time I felt this need to continually refine what I was working on till I was perfectly happy with it.

I just finished two essays for Karen Wright’s archaeology class, total of 3500 words. One was on the Uruk expansion into Mesopotamia and the Egyptian expansion in the Levant in the Early Bronze age, the other essay was a write up of a talk I gave in the British museum coupled with a critique of the display cases involved.

Saturday is Santacon!

I went to an amazing talk Monday night detailing, through recovered tablets from one particular house in Sippar, the learning of cuneiform by a young Babylonian. Really cool stuff, in particular one tablet that had clearly been squeezed by a small hand in frustration.

This was a busy weekend. Nia came by on friday and we went out to Indian Veg to celebrate Chris’ birthday with a bunch of old friends. Then on saturday we went to a protest against global warming and marched with that banner, which I thought was rather clever in a bad sort of way.

Nia left this morning for Wales to go stay with her dad for a while. Gillian came over for dinner and we watched Garden State which was really good. Now I’m really exhausted after this long weekend.