Bring it on.

Today begins my reading week, one of the great features of the classics & ancient history academic calendar. That's right -- even though we've only had five weeks of class, they figure our brains msut be completely shattered by now, so they're giving us a week off to recoup. Which means a whole blessed week of time to work on grad school applications and begin work on essays that are due in the next month. And, because seriously, you have to goof off just a little in a free week, I'm going to York on Wednesday for the day to see York Minster and all sorts of Roman goodies. I'll have almost four hours to read on the train each way, so it's actually quite the responsible thing to do.

This week has had its ups and downs, one of the more crushing downs being the sudden, inexplicable death of my 6-month old iPod yesterday. This leaves me, the bereaved iTunes junkie, with only the Arctic Monkeys' latest album, Trisha Yearwood's Everybody Knows, and "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran accessible in my library, because my music files didn't transfer properly to my new computer before I left. Don't get me wrong, that's all solid stuff, but it's not much variety to last me till Christmas when I can restock at home. Aargh.

There's nothing like a good chaplaincy pub trip to make things better, though, and we had a couple of good ones this week. We had some delicious Banana Bread Beer ("I'll take another for breakfast!") at Wetherspoon's on Monday night, and last night we went to the famous Cori (Coronation) Tap in Clifton Village to try some of their famous strong cider. The bouncers who checked our IDs at the door were appalled by the lack of Englishness in our group, and I got called a "flatlander." I was vindicated by the second bouncer, though, who looked at Steve's ID and groaned, "Illinois? That's even worse!" Darned right!

Today is Remembrance Sunday, which has been anticipated for a couple of weeks by lots of people (and all the TV presenters) wearing red lapel-poppies to support veterans. The big memorial service at the Cenotaph in London will be later this morning, so maybe I'll go watch some of that.

Matt and I got roped into cooking dinner for CASSOC tonight, and we decided to make jacket (=baked) potatoes. What does one put in a jacket potato, you might ask? Baked beans, tuna fish and/or cheese, apparently -- not sour cream or cottage cheese or any of the normal stuff!

Well, in the spirit of reading week, I'm going to get back to Prudentius' Peristephanon, a collection of horrifically gory poems describing the deaths of early fourth-century martyrs, including one in which St. Cassian's students rip him apart with their styluses. Ugh. On a more pleasant note, here are a whole bunch of random pub pictures for your entertainment.