M. Willis Monroe

I went up to Peter’s for the weekend. Left Saturday afternoon and ran into Ed as well so we took the Oxford tube together. Got to Peter’s and had a nice dinner then we drove over to the Concert/Dance. This year wasn’t as hot as last year, but one of the acts was quite good. Also I wished the caller for the dance had gone through some of the dances more than once, as they were quite difficult, but either way it was a nice evening.

Came back Sunday afternoon on a variety of buses that got caught in a variety of traffic. The Oxford tube advertises free WiFi on their buses but I was unable to connect… I’ll try and work on it more next time.

Anna and I stayed at SOAS this evening till the library closed and then headed south. We walked through Soho and the west end and ended up at Piccidily Circus were we went to a nice Italian restaurant for dinner and then walked back up to Holburn and got the tube home.

I’m extremely tired and have a lot of class tomorrow.

Peter and I recycling various cans and bottles from our house at Downhills Park just a mere five minutes walk from our house.

Spent this morning baking and writing up the pub quiz for tonight.

I just opened up a savings account with HSBC. I’m well on my way to eventually buying a house in central London.

I haven’t written for a while now. I’ve been quite ill with an upper respiratory infection. I went to the doctors and was prescribed some anti-biotics which costs me all of £6.50 and the doctor’s was free. That’s the beauty of socialized health care. If I return to the states for any extended period this is going to be one of my chief concerns.

Today I went to a lecture on the “Theoretical framework of the Neo-Assyrian Administration” which was really interesting. These lectures at SOAS as great so many Assyriologists come that the discussions afterwards are always very enlightening.

I was reading planet gnome as I do and came across a link to this e-mail on compiz development. It all sounds very exciting in particular XCB the replacement for Xlib. It almost makes me want to get into hacking on X but that’s quite a feat, considering I barely even know rudimentary C.

My applications for various schools are all complete and I just printed out the application for SOAS scholarships. Now I just need to send them all off. I really just want to goto SOAS next year, but I figure I should apply to other places as well, plus it’d be pretty cool to get into Oxford. I’ve also had some interesting thoughts on my dissertation in particular one article I found that talks about a year name of Apil-Sin.

mu a-pil-30 ú-ga-li-bu
“The year Apil-Sin shaved”

We never seen representations of the Assyrian king without a beard, yet at times he did shave. So for what reason did he shave, the author (based on another article) seems to think it had to do with initiation. I’ve found many other references to shaving for mourning and punishment. So hopefully these can all be collated into a grand beard reference. “sadece zaman biliyor” (only time knows).

I have an appointment on Monday to goto the Reading Room in the BM and work on a tablet. I’m really excited it’ll be first time going by myself and working with the texts. I’ve been looking through and finding potential tablets to do work for my dissertation on, so hopefully I can go and read those in the future as well.

A package of photos came in the mail yesterday, ones I had ordered to be printed off Flickr. They’re quite nice. I printed large versions of these two photos. I might put them up on my wall. I also just printed out a bunch of smaller photos that I wanted copies of. It’s really nice to get digital photos printed and actually have the physical object in your hand, plus for some reason the photos always look better.

I got next to no sleep on Thursday night so Friday was a chore. But I managed really well actually, I just did all my work without breaks and drank lots of tea at school. And on top of that I think my translations in class were actually pretty spot on. Oh and I got a call from Georgia last night that Rob was in town for a day, (we all dug at Megiddo this past season) so we met up for drinks and had a good time.