so the dissertation is handed in, it ended up being titled something along the lines of 'public awareness... the DFID.... ', not sure really it was all a bit of a blur, got it in just 40 minutes before the deadline, i always feel so ashamed crawling into the office at such a time, but you dont get any bonus points for handing it in early.

so now i have 4 glorious weeks off. i know i have to find some full time work but i refuse to think about that today. also on the refuse to think about list: where we will live in the summer, where we will live next year, is it goin to be a 2:1 or a 2:2, will steve be happy being stuck in a classroom 5 days a week instead of diggin in the great outdoors, should we just pack our bags and run away to mexico.

but its nearly may, the promised month when everyone returns to the UK. that will be nice. its great to hear of people enjoying their travels but sometimes its nice to have friends home.

and spent last week avoiding dissertation work by catching up with all the old boys from the pub. they never fail to entertain me and provide me with wasted afternoons of not a lot.

one of them has just got out of hospital after a bit of a breakdown, it was so sad to see him sick and then he disappeared for a few months, but now he is back and well and allowed to see his daughter again and has sold his house so has some money. he deserves it.

the gardeners and brickies were grateful of a couple of rainy afternoons, never met such a group of men so allergic to rain. but their spirits are higher on those days than on a sunny one so its always nice.

and then there is a real gooden who is wasting his days until he joins the army in a few weeks. cant help but thinking what a terrible mistake he is making. he is so gifted in so many ways, the kind of person everyone wants to be around. but thanks to many years of being beaten down by the swansea mentality, he wont believe it, so the army it is (although a lovely dealer who is taking me under his wing as the granddaughter he never had has promised me an interactive globe if i can talk him out of it so we'll see).

so things are good and im going to get on with reading a nice trashy novel whilst i have no uni pressures. cant be bad.

let them eat cake

i made some cakes this evening. thought i might be nice to have for afters. so had one, took a couple in to lisa who is beavering away at her dissertation, away from all distration in the bedroom, even took one up to frodo upstairs as i had borrowed his sieve. so i come back into the room and what do i find: one empty plate and one guilty looking dog, licking the crumbs from around her mouth. hope they make her sick (except if she is i'll probably have to clean it up- like i had to at 4.30 this morning when she started scratching at the door, but thats a whole other story)

family trees

it's a cold monday night, the dog is asleep and lisa is away in manchester. so after making myself a nice beef rogan josh curry (pretty much from scratch-i did use curry paste though-who has the time to collect all those spices from india these days) so yeah after making a curry i sat down to dabble in more family tree stuff on the net.......and struck gold.

for those who haven't delved into your family tree i have to tell you that it really does suck you in. mine has gone in busts of activity. i started by asking my mum and then my great auntie about family stuff. it struck me that every christmas we sat around talking about .. stuff but i had never really asked seroisly about great grandparents and others and actually written things down. you always think you can do it another time but then it turns out to be too late. My auntie lucy who i had managed to talk to died last year.

so yeah first i went to london and search through all the census stuff.pretty cool. then i had a breakthrough on genes connected.co.uk when i stumbled upon a guy who i shared a great great grandad with -3rd or 4th cousin stuff. then today i was searching through some message boards when i recognised some names from my tree which filled quite a few gaps. it was funny because i had got half the story from my auntie and my mum, A great great grandmother who might have come from london turned out to be the same Martha Kezia Long from kensington (kezia-great name hey). What is really interesting is that you start to see the originof names that have been passed down through the famly. it's such a buzz when you get to add solid facts and dates to question marks on the tree.

hmm maybe i should look at my lessons for tomorrow.

doggy days

woof ruff woof woof grrr. woof woof grrr. ruff ruuff ruff ruff.

band of the week: Love

there seems to be a fair amount of musical discussions in our little corner of blogland of late- trying to find new avenues of musical styles. there nothing quite like those first few weeks when you hear something new and you just play it over and over again and you want to ask everybody whether they have heard them. or alternatively you want to keep them all to yourself so they are yours alone. well after reading jonny's last post and looking the pandora website that deirdre suggested (quite a cool little site by the way) i thought i would throw my own musically flavoured tuppence in. enter the band of the week post. i think i have pestered enough people with strange bands now (yes i mean Gorky's Zygotic Mynci- hey i even got some of you to the gigs) that i should share some more for, what it's worth.

so first off- LOVE. this band means ireland and digging to me. both my trotskyist 60 year old housemate Stu and my hippy at heart mate gary were really into them while i was working over there a couple of years back. Stu had actually worn out 3 or 4 copies of Four Sail on vinyl and cd by this time and was thrilled when i found it for sale (no pun intended) in tower records on grafton street. the next weekend he went and bought 4 copies of the cd for his future listening pleasure. the opener to four sail, a song called August was his favourite song of all time. and he had quite a large music collection to draw from (although he did maintain that all good music stopped being made around 1975).

so yeah Love. they had their height in the late 60's and early 70's. all really centres around the genius that is arthur lee. love were pretty much the first multi racial rock group that were really big in america. they are still going in some form today but only in a very diluted version. some of them had troubles with drugs, arthur lee spent some time in prison in the 90's ( i think on a 3 strikes thing) so not really worth seeing now unless it's love with arthur lee.

so why should you listen to them. man there's just something about the songs that take you away. i don't know if it's the pace, the guitars or the capturing lyrics. i find myself hanging on each word, caught up in it all. that pandora thing describes their sound as

"electric rock instrumentation, mild rythmic snycopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality and a prominant flute part"

does that cover it, i don't now. it's definately of that summer of love psycheldelia thing but with rock, folk, and even showtunes added in. you might be listening to a hippyish upbeat song before in takes a left turn into something much darker.

anyway to end this love fest i'll tell you my favourite stuff. the most famous album is Forever changes which is consistently cited by critics as one of the outstanding albums in the history of rock music . look at this for a song title maybe the people would be the times or between clark and hilldale. great song . also a house is not a motel and the red telephone. then the album four sail. possibly takes a little longer to get into but definately rewarding . check out august as stu would recommend and robert montgomery.

next week......hmm i'll have to think amybe pavement or somethng like that . oh flaming lips have their new album out about now- at war with the mystics. the first proper followup to yoshimi battles the pink robots. now there's a tip.