17 Feb

Fridays…I was feeling sleepy this morning so I decided to just take the trash out and not have my room cleaned. I heard Lainey and Gregg leave while getting ready and waiting to take a shower. This place will be rather quiet without them this weekend. Boohoo. It’s fine though, I certainly have more than enough work to keep me busy. I worked for a while, ate a light lunch, took a little break to watch the Olympics, and then continued working. I kept up this pattern of lightly eating, working, and breaking for most of the day.

I decided I’d gone long enough without doing laundry so after scoping out the laundry room and fortunately finding it free, I washed my clothes. Washing is a simple matter of waiting about 50 minutes. Drying the clothes ended up taking most of the evening. I feel that my clothes don’t dry as quickly here as they do at home, even though UNC uses the same washers and dryers, is because my loads are so extraordinarily large because I’m cheap. A £1.20 per wash and 20p for every 16 minutes of drying is no small amount, so I have to cram all my clothes into one wash and only dry them for 32 minutes (of they’d be really wet). Fortunately, the radiator was on full blast and by hanging stuff on it and around the room, I managed to dry everything to my satisfaction. While I waited for all the stuff to dry, I worked more on linguistics and watched more Olympics. Curling was on!

Curling is a sport that you just have to know the rules to in order to appreciate it. It’s not like hockey where it’s fast, full of action, and obvious what the objective is. Curling is a bit more complex; the BBC commentators and players of the game call it “chess on ice,” and it certainly requires many of the skills used in chess. It was nice to listen to the BBC commentators explain the game and after looking up some curling websites, I learned the lingo and could follow along as various strategies were discussed. Great Britain was playing Switzerland so of course the BBC folk were interested in the outcome of the game. They did well to keep the bias out and made some funny comments on the “brotherhood” of the game and how disputes would often be “settled out in the bar afterward.” Not surprisingly, curling is a Scottish sport and as one BBC woman said, “they had to do something on those long, cold nights.” The Scots started sliding big rocks across ice and before the world knew it, curling was born.

Once all my clothes dried, I put them away before reading a bit more Shakespeare then calling it a night. Cheers!