Nano no-no

[liv]

I am sooooo not doing NaNoWriMo or any of its variants this year. So much not that it's almost funny; I barely have time to keep up with the minimum of reading I need to know how my friends are doing, let alone producing anything. That said I'm very much benefiting from the excuse for more posts from some of the fantastic writers of my acquaintance, such as khalinche and j4.

I have a pretty heavy teaching load this term, and next week it's about to explode because we're starting "my" part of the curriculum. That is the part that I've been assigned overall responsibility for; it's mainly an admin role, but it's quite exciting (if a little daunting!) In between times, I'm working on my higher education teaching qualification (one afternoon a week plus preparation, but it's hard going because I don't really speak the language of sociology.) And squeezing as much socializing as possible into weekends, because I doubt I'll have much free time between next week and Christmas.

Weekend before last I decided to make a more or less spontaneous visit to Cambridge, realizing I hadn't seen jack or my parents for a few weeks. I made the (foolish, in hindsight) decision to go to shul on Friday night and take the train late in the evening directly after the service. This was good because it meant I could do my usual job of running the service, but bad because the trains were delayed (of course) and I didn't get in until rather after 1 am. So I ended up having a fairly quiet day on Saturday, sleeping late, some walking by the river and lots of chatting.

Our social plans for Saturday evening fell through, so we ended up going to the cinema. I wanted to see Made in Dagenham and jack wanted to see R.E.D; we felt very gender stereotypical! In fact the feminist history film wasn't on at any convenient time in any local theatres, so we ended up with the madcap action film. This turned out to be rather glorious, purely because of the astoundingly high calibre of the actors in it. Also, I rather liked the way that Mary-Louise Parker's character, Sarah, was relatively competent and brave. She didn't need rescuing because she was a girl, she needed rescuing because she was a young civilian woman caught up in an assassination plot and finding herself among trained hitmen. Thanks to rysmiel for a review which let me to realize that it wasn't going to be utter trash!

Sunday we had a rather rushed visit to the parents', and then spent the afternoon at a memorial service for someone from the Cambridge community. Finally jack drove me back to Stoke, which meant I got to have him around for a couple of weeks. With so much going on at work he didn't get to see all that much of me, but it was still pleasant. As soon as I got back here, I had to go to a funeral of someone in the Stoke community. *sigh* I also had a random trip to York to network with some of the people I met at the conference last month, in the guise of them teaching me a useful technique. I stayed at a fairly mediocre, but at least cheap, B&B called The Beckett.

Last weekend was a reasonable break from the mad dash! We spent Saturday, when the weather was really gorgeous, walking on footpaths near Leek, which is at the foot of the Peak District and is generally a lovely little town. It's particularly well set up for walking too; the Tourist Information place had a lot of really helpful info about paths and leaflets with suggested walks. I plan to go back there, for sure. The only trouble was that we chose a little café / tearoom place for a quick lunch, only they managed to take nearly an hour to serve us soup and a sandwich! That meant we were a bit short of daylight for our walk. We came to the top of the hill, about half a mile from where we'd parked the car, at about dusk, and decided to risk completing the walk across some fields, rather than walking down the main road due to lack of light. Unfortunately, it was dark enough by the time we got to the bottom that we lost our path, and ended up caught behind a row of houses with no way through to the road. It all turned out well because one of the home owners was out walking his dog and very kindly let us cut through his garden to the road. We weren't in any danger of getting lost; we were walking parallel to the road in any case, and in the worst case scenario we could have retraced our steps up the hill to get back onto it. But strangers being generous with small favours is always heartening, the more so when it saves you having to walk up a steep, muddy hill in the dark!

Sunday we had a day in Manchester. I wanted to attend R Solomon's induction at Manchester Liberal, and jack was happy to join me for the trip. We had lunch at Chaopraya, partly because New!Improved!Google doesn't let you search for actually vegetarian restaurants but includes anything that mentions "vegetarian" anywhere on its website or menu in its search results, and I didn't check carefully enough. However, Chaopraya did in fact have a decent veggie selection, and a very nice atmosphere, and very reasonable prices considering it's right in the main shopping district. jack went to the beautifully geeky Museum of Science and Industry (which I've been to before) while I attended the moving and thoughtful service and reconnected with my Manchester peeps, including R Silverman and student rabbi Lea M. One of the lovely lovely things about Manchester is that it's chock-full of lovely, characterful indie pubs; we ended up drinking Weißbier in the Deansgate, which has all these cute little nooks and is generally adorable. I really need to spend more time in Manchester, both with the Jewish community and just enjoying the city, which is one of my favourite places.