A Long Day

Well, I guess I never got around to rewriting that brilliant post that y'all didn't get to see. Curse you, Safari.

I'm in UCD library after a very long day. I had judo last night, which was interesting. I was the only girl of 16 people in a tiny room with mats on linoleum floors. I'm surprised my insides didn't get turned inside out like they used to during the Bay State Games; but again, I didn't work out very hard. The guys there, for the most part, aren't very good, though there are a couple of exceptions, and everyone is very friendly. They're used to fighting with guys, first all of, which means trying to out-gorilla each other. But they can't really do that with me, since I already know that they're stronger and I have no desire to get hurt. The club is moving to a new location in a couple of weeks, so there will be a wood floor and three times the mat space, and hopefully more people will show up, which means more people for me to choose from. Working out with dudes makes me so nervous, especially when I can't be sure that the black and brown belts will actually have any idea what they're doing. It's a competition-focused club, not a technique-focused one like the one I went to in Montreal, so I just have to readjust, I guess. I really got spoiled at the Shidokan. The club here reminds me a lot of the one I started out in in Massachusetts, actually. I'll give it a few weeks.

On a related note, I hate the busses here. They suck. One of the girls in the house has a bike that she doesn't use, so hopefully I will start biking ASAP. Biking on roads terrifies me, but the cyclists here seem less stupid than the ones in Montreal, and the drivers much less homicidal, so I think it should be okay. I'm a little nervous about the whole "driving on the left side of the road" thing. It's hard enough for me to remember which side of the road to catch the bus on, and which way to look when I jaywalk. I hope I don't lose concentration for a second and turn right into oncoming traffic! But it will be better than waiting for the bus. There's no way to tell when the bus will come; the timetables only give the times that the bus leaves each terminus, so unless you know how far away that is and how much traffic it's likely to hit before it gets to you, you can't judge at all when the bus will come. I have yet to wait less than 15 minutes for a bus. I bought a pass, and the bus to the downtown stops just outside the house, but it runs very infrequently and I hate watching people zip by on their bikes while I stew for 20 minutes. 20 minutes wait plus 25 minutes ride thanks to traffic means a whole hour out of my day commuting each way. Not fun. Also the fact that I get off the bus and still have a 20 minute walk to judo at night doesn't exactly make for a fun evening. It's okay now, but in the rain, and once it starts getting cold, I am not going to be happy with this situation.

So today I woke up nice and early, 6:20am to be exact, because the girl in the room next door turned on the fan in her bathroom which is right next to the wall next to my head when I'm in bed. It's not like there's anything to be done about that, though. So I went back to bed for a couple of hours after breakfast. Then I hopped over to UCD to pay their exorbitant fee and pick up my reader's pass to the library, since Trinity will only let me in in the evenings and on Saturdays once term starts in 10 days. It's a pretty good library at UCD, actually, better than I expected, and open until 11pm. I think I'm going to spend quite a bit of time here. The religion section is as far away from anything as you can possibly get, though, which means it will be nice and quiet to study in, hopefully.

I cursed the internet, and brought it to the IT department so I could get back on the UCD network. After I had spent yesterday fiddling with the Glenard network, I managed to kick myself off the UCD network. So then the guys fixed it for me, but when I went downtown afterwards I found out that I couldn't get on any other network. *sigh* At least UCD is close.

So I went downtown to try to place a phone call (unsuccessfully) to a lady at Concordia, and to pick up my Trinity library card. So I can use their library during the day until the 26th, and after that only weekend and Saturdays. But it does give me access to the Early Printed Books collection, which is excellent, and I plan to use gluttonously. Yes, gluttonously. I will get more into my old-book gluttony at a later time. That was the main gist of the previous ghost-post, actually, and I'm too tired to rehash it now.

Book Glutton.

So now my library access is fairly complete, between UCD, TCD, and the NLI (explanations to come). I hopped over to the library after dinner to try to get some work done, but I'm tired and I've had a long and aggravating day, and I have my first class tomorrow afternoon, before which I hope to get some stuff done in the library. So I'm going to head home and try to get some sleep. Hah. Updates to come as regularly as I can provide them.

Curse you, internet gods.