In Which Katherine Attempts to Speedily Recap Her Adventures of the Past Few Days and Fails Because She Simply Isn't Speedy

Well, it's regrettable but true--I'm NOT a good condenser. Ask my father. Whenever I try to tell a story around the supper table, he inevitably begins to chuckle, reminds me to stay on track, or gets mildly exasperated...because I like to tell things in detail, and if there's anything to be expanded upon, then I expand upon it, so that if I'm talking about a friend, I have to explain that I know her because of this one class, and then I have to explain how we both like the class, and partly it's because the book for the class is really quite interesting, and that in the book the narrator lives in NC, and how actually, he mentions Rocky Mount and Whiteville several times, and isn't that fantastic? One of the only things my creative writing classmates ever critiqued me negatively on was my tendency to expand into overlong sentences (see the sentence above for an example). So yes. Concise I am not.

BUT it's 1:30am here, and although I haven't got class tomorrow, I figure it would be bad to sleep in too terribly late, because I do have to read both Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland tomorrow for class on Wednesday*. Not that it's hard to read your favorite books over again, particularly when you've read one of them probably well upwards of twenty-five times in your life, but still, it takes time. And there's this blasted thing called hunger which leads to this wretched thing called food preparation which requires that I take otherwise usable moments of time to make and eat some sort of edible. SO. I realize that I've only posted about being here once, and that you all probably realize that it took me several blog posts' worth of trouble just to travel here, not to mention the things I've done since. But I also realize that if I spend time recapping now, I'll either be up all night writing a ten-page post or end up perpetually behind in blogging (which is not something I need any help with as it is).

Consequently, I plan on providing you with the serial-version, bullet-list picture of life the past five days, ok? Ok. I'm also going to try to start putting all my photos up on flickr or photobucket or something so that everyone can see them and for computer crash safety. But not tonight.

*This post was started on Tuesday. But then life happened. It is now Friday. I just keep telling myself that these things happen.

Ok. So, to start off with late Thursday night:

• After spending the day with Daddy, Mama and David stayed up with me as I finished packing. We were going to watch The Bounty Hunter, but that didn't happen.
• Instead, as they took a nap, I suddenly realized that I didn't know where my bank statement was and FREAKED. OUT.
• I woke my mother up and worried her, too. Then she found it and gave it to me and I quit worrying. (About the bank statement, I mean.)
• A bit after 3am, Mama and I headed out to Norfolk with one 49.5-lb suitcase and one 30-lb backpack. We stopped at 7-11 and got sodas and junior mints
• The entire way to the airport, I freaked out about hurricane Earl.
• I was neither excited nor particularly pleasant during this time period. Rather, I was panicky, nervous, anxious, and unhappy to be leaving my home and family when the Weather Channel kept assuring me that Earl was going to balloon into a Cat 5 and kill everyone when I was gone. (I need to remember this, which my mother sent me on Facebook today.)
• The plane left at 6:25am from Norfolk to Dallas, and got in Dallas around 8:30am.
• The first half of my layover in Dallas, I continued to panic about Earl. It sounds like overkill, but I've always had this thing about natural disasters...
• The second half, after extensive conversations with my mother and boyfriend, I calmed down and worried about my trip and whether I'd made the right decision instead.
• My plane was supposed to leave at 9:10pm, but something was wrong with one of the plane's speakers, so it was delayed.
• And delayed.
• And delayed again.
• Finally, the plane left around 10:30.
• Plane food is gross, and it's hard to sleep, but that's ok.
• I got into Heathrow around 1:30.
• Then immigration nonsense and documentation. Then luggage pickup. Then finding the coach station and failing for like FOREVER.
• Then buying a ticket--27 pounds just to get to Brighton!? That's like $50!
• Then waiting for the bus.
• Then finally getting on the bus.
• Then getting caught in traffic.
• Finally, on to Brighton. I won't lie, I had NO idea where to get off.
• So I stayed on about five too many stops, and had to figure out how to get a taxi to campus.
• Which I did manage, thank you very much.
• I'm not even going to try to describe how much my back hurt after carrying all my stuff around and sleeping on the plane, etc. But it was a lot.
• Argued with the man at the York House desk about whether or not he felt like giving me my keys.
• Won.
• At 7:30pm, finally dragged myself up the big hill and the stairs to my funny COLD little British dorm room with its pathetic bed and odd hall bathroom situation.
• Cried a lot.
• Found out that the room phone, my cell phone, and my internet wouldn't work.
• Cried a lot more.
• Finally experienced God patting my head in the form of my cell phone miraculously deciding to work so I could call my mother and blubber to her for ten minutes.
• Slept. Woke up feeling better about life.