It’s been a busy week down here in Cornwall. Well, not busy as in rushing around, but I’ve had a lot to do.
First thing of note – I don’t think Cornwall has ever been so cold! The wind is biting! It even snowed a little bit on Monday. In Cornwall! It snowed in Cornwall!! The wind made kayaking this weekend great fun though, as the usually flat harbour was wavy and had some pretty strong currents. We pretty much stuck to the marina and looked at all the boats. I tried to use my new video camera to get some footage but it wouldn’t stay on the helmet and having it round my neck didn’t work too well…
The only decent picture from Sunday – Second time Kayaker, Hannah
So the dissection – for one of my modules we did a grey squirrel dissection/necropsy. They had been killed as part of an eradication programme to help red squirrel numbers and so instead of wasting them, we got to cut them up in the lab. It was really quite interesting, I thought it’d feel a bit weird dissecting a mammal, but it was fine. It was an excellent time to get a cold as I couldn’t smell a thing and apparently they stunk! One thing I learnt from the dissection is that I’m pretty good at skinning a squirrel, so I would be at least slightly useful in the wild as a live-off-the-land explorer. I would need to find someone else to start a fire though as I suck at that.
However the downside of the dissection is that we have a fairly important lab report as a result of it, and it needs drawings. I can’t draw. At all. There are people who can’t draw and then draw fairly good doodles, there are those that can do it if they try hard enough and then there are those that have absolutely no artistic talent at all. I’m in the latter category. I can draw roses and manga-esque eyes and thats it, considering I need to draw part of a squirrel, this could be interesting! I guess if I make the labels blatantly obvious it should be okay….
The year abroad students are coming out of the wood work now, we’re all nervously checking our emails every hour (minute) or so and discussing which choices we put to try and suss out the competition. The deadline was the Sunday just gone and we got an email saying that they will try to let us know by friday evening. Now absolutely terrified. Excited, but terrified.
We all thought that our exams results would come out on Tuesday, since out university grades site was down for ‘maintenance.’ So it has come up for a few people, but not most. So a few anxious people (not me, I swear) emailed some important person and apparently we find out next week. So I’m waiting for that email too!
As for diving, nothing yet. The weather’s still too bad and I still need to get two deep dives in so I can get my last qualification. Then it’s on to stress and rescue, which I’ll hopefully get done before the summer term/holidays so that then I can focus on getting my dive count up. Once I have a load of dives under my belt then it’s on to dive master, which is exciting. I don’t feel like I’ve dived enough to be aiming for that yet…
Nothing else has really happened since the last post. I’ve been sleeping, eating and then curled up under my duvet, hiding from the cold and alternating between reading papers and books for my lectures and watching anime/reading random free books I downloaded onto the kindle… The cold weather and all this reading has really made me crave either a bay window seat or a big old armchair in front of a fire. Alas, though my student accommodation is lovely, it’s not that amazing. The fires, armchairs and bay window seats will have to wait until I’ve made my millions and bought my dream house… a girl can dream. However, check out the sky tonight:
View from our front room – and yes that is a palm tree
(Cornish palm but who’s picky)