All the ducks are swimming in the water.

There always seem to be a lot of ducks around to photograph...

 

These two seem to be debating whether to jump in or not... And sure enough, jst as I put the camera away and started walking off the male did jump in. Darnit!

And I feel the way that every child should.

In the past few days I've realised how beautiful the campus is. Typical, isn't it - I've been a student here for pretty much exactly a year and now that I've finished I see it's beauty. Actually, there's probably something quite obvious about that...

I love how the tree just ends a couple of decimetres (or so?) above the water. It makes me want to go down there. Don't worry, I won't - there's bad bad algae blooming in the water.

Duckie!

I tried to catch the amazing green on his head but failed. It was the exact colour of my prom dress in year 9. In case you were interested!

Going to Nottingham tomorrow, got a few meetings. Quite excited!

I've always relied on the kindness of strangers.

The other day I was waiting for the bus up to uni. It was one of those crisp, amazingly sunny September mornings. This man kept looking over at me. I didn't think much of it, but after a while he was just staring... So I looked back at him, you know the way you do when you really just want to say 'what the hell are you staring at?!'

He came over, and said 'I'm sorry - you have a bee on your head'

Eek! Instinct tells me to run squeaking away from bees. Or freeze. I froze.

He said 'Can I.. do you mind if I touch your head?'

I said of course not. He proceeded to waft it from one side of my head, over across the top and near my ear on the other side, and then give it a little slap so it fell to the floor. He then said 'it's there, can you see it? I'm really sorry, I don't like killing living things.' I said that's fine, and we concluded that it was probably too cold for the bee to start flying around any time soon.

It strikes me how you can jump to conclusions about people like that. He was only trying to stop me getting stung by this bee, and I'd already started to conclude he was a weirdo, and wondering why on earth he kept looking at me.

I don't like judging on first glance. But I know I do it. I'm not the worst kind though; I'm open to having my mind changed radically.

I'm actually not sure if it was a bee or a wasp. Either way - I didn't like it sitting on my head. And I would've liked getting stung even less. So thank you, nice man.


I wanted to share this photo I took on campus that same morning. Lovely, I thought.

It's a lonely, lonely night.

Well, not really. I've been in the lab a large number of hours today and am getting quite a bit done. Was hoping to get a draft finished today but might not happen. Finishing the chapters on AR/SR and disfluencies tonight though. Tomorrow is all about the voice quality and conclusion. And other fun bits.

Don't worry - all of these bits I'm doing are virtually done. VQ needs a lot more work but it's all starting to look hand-inable. Not writing anything from scratch now, lol.

I've also done all the fun bits like abstract, acknowledgements...

It's all coming together. And I'm so damn hungry. But don't think anything is open on this end of campus still, still Summer hols really... Oh well. Mike'll have to make me something.

Took some photos of the sunset through lab window - it was really pretty but the photos look so depressing. I guess after being here this long you start seeing past the ugliness of most of the buildings... Will upload the photos later when I get home.

Over and out.