Wow, I've actually neglected my blog for a while. It's interesting to note that I neglected my blog during the week where I didn't have much work to do...oh, how I've become an expert procrastinator. But look! I should be doing a paper for American history now! So here I am.

Not that I really have a ton of interesting things to say. I turned in that big paper and small web project on the 2012 London Olympics that I was procrastinating so violently in the last few posts, and I feel good about them (well, the paper, anyway...the project was kind of thrown together, but I was proud of myself for learning how to make a webvideo in the span of three hours). I also had a stupid presentation for American history that actually went better than I thought (we got a 60 on it...I know that would be a D in America, but in England, a 60 is the equivalent of a B+. Go figure). Since all of that, I've been shooting all around campus trying to get answers about my potential UEA transfer, running errands in and around Norwich, fighting with the Royal Mail, giving a walking tour of Norwich in the rain, and visiting Emma in Cambridge. This week, I'm going to London on Wednesday to see Phoenix (!!!), coming back for classes on Thursday, and then training up to Scotland with Dickinson friends on Friday for the weekend. And that's only this week: these next two weeks are so jam-packed with travel I can't even see straight, but I'm excited, and it's the perfect time, since once I get down to doing this stupid American history paper, there's an unusual lull in coursework.

However, it's not a long-winded Chelsea blog post without a bulleted list. Hi-ho!

-The clocks changed in England on Sunday (yesterday), so it now gets dark at 5PM as opposed to 6PM. And it's October. I've been told that in December, the sun can set as early as 2 or 3PM and rise as late as 11AM. I actually find this quite cool, since I've never been one of those people emotionally affected by the weather, but it just means I have to be more careful about how late I'm out by myself, since it gets dark so early.

-There was a rare Beatles photo show at a random little art gallery in Norwich last week, so of course I went. It was £5 to go, but I just had to. The guy that owned the gallery was there, and he was talking to me as if I was a potential customer, telling me all the prices of the photos listed didn't include framing costs or VAT (tax). Believe me, mister, if I had the money to buy a £1000 signed photo of the Beatles from the Mad Day Out in 1968, I would, but I think my UEA sweatshirt and American accent should have told you that I was a poor interational student that's just nerdy about the Beatles.

-My lovely flatmate Rosie and I have been slowly making our way through season 1 of both 24 and the West Wing, shows I've been meaning to get into for years. Unfortunately, the stupid UEA library only lets you take out DVDs for one night, so we have five-hour-long marathons every night and renew the discs we don't finish the next day. I can see myself becoming a total West Wing nerd.

-Because no one really reads this blog, I feel like I can talk pretty freely about my process of trying to transfer to UEA (it's not exactly strictly confidential, but I'm not too keen on Dickinosn finding out about my plans too soon, and I don't like telling everyone my big plans before they're set in stone). Apparently, the two professors I have on my side are quite optimistic about it all, but ever since I found out that I need to be granted several academic concessions to have my Dickinson course credits count at UEA, I've been a bit nervous. That might seem obvious to everyone else that it would be necessary, and I assumed it would be necessary, but basically it's not up to individual people that decide if my Dickinson courses were good enough to transfer: it's a computer program. If my credits and number of courses don't match up with what's required, the computer might just throw it out and say "no," and then I'll have to go in and fight individual people to get on my side all over again. If I don't have an answer by the beginning of January, I might go insane.

-I've decided that if I'm staying at UEA, I'm going to buy myself a proper phone to last me the following year and a half. Nothing against the cheap one I have, but...I can't text on a regular number pad anymore. Once you go QWERTY, you can never go back. I'm like a monkey on crack when I try to text, and it takes me upwards of 5 minutes to send out a simple message. I'm a fan of the LGKS360, which is a perfect combination of touch-screen and QWERTY buttons.

-Because I'm actually (mostly) enjoying myself at university for the first time in ages, all of a sudden, my Wooster years feel very far away and long ago. In the process of applying to UEA, I had to dig up the saved PDF file of my old Common App to get accurate SAT and AP scores off of it, and I couldn't even remember writing some of the things on there, let alone doing them. I took the math SAT II? I barely remember taking the SAT IIs. It was strange to look back on all the technical (and therefore kind of useless) statistics of high school like that...very few of my Wooster memories have anything to do with academic material I learned in a classroom. I learned time management, responsibility, and a good liberal arts base, among countless other valuable things, but I've forgotten almost every essay, project, test, presentation or other pieces of work I produced there. At one point in my life, I knew all the major English kings in order and what they did thanks to Ms. Maxwell's AP European History class, but now I just remember a few odd inside jokes from the classroom and perhaps some of the stranger facts included in our textbook. I guess that's what gets me about education: there's all this song and dance about the actual information you learn in the classroom, but rarely do you ever need to use any of that stuff again, so you forget it. During my transfer process, I've been thinking a lot about the ideology of education, so expect a blog post about that soon.