Sunday

Happy Holi, dear flist. May your days be full of colour and light, regardless of whether you actually do go and dump paint on anybody. (Although I do recommend it, in socially acceptable situations.)

I have not dumped paint on anyone. I have a hangover. I deserve it. Yesterday morning I had my exam, which was... okay. I hope. The main flaw was that I was so tired - the usual problem, lack of sleep, nine am on a Saturday, etc. - and even so, not to begin with, but by the end of it, I was feeling like I'd fallen straight into that mouth-falling-open, too-much-energy-to-think stage, which is not good at any time but especially when you're doing an exam that involves lots of finicky detail and mental arithmetic.

(One thing that did amuse me. You can't leave the room in the first hour or last fifteen minutes of an exam, and I had weighed up the usual balancing act of caffeine-as-stimulant and caffeine-as-diuretic, and gone for the cup of coffee, yes; consequently at 10.31am I put my hand up, was attended by an invigilator and said as neutrally as possible, "Would a toilet break be a possibility?"

The invigilator looked embarrassed, and whispered, "There's a small condition."

I said I was perfectly willing to hand my papers in for two minutes, I understood that she would sign my current page and write "toilet break 10.31am" at the point I was up to, and nevertheless...

"It's not that," she said. "Would you absolutely hate to use the gents?"

Where no woman has gone before, etc. Apparently the other set of toilets is too far from the exam room as the crow flies to be safe from, I don't know, answer sheets falling out of the sky. Luckily there was no one else in there I might have given a fright; on the whole it was quite an anti-climactic experience.)

Anyway, so, I wrote long lists of numbers and hoped they would add up, and didn't cry into my calculator at any point, and eventually emerged into the dreary wet morning feeling rather like I'd been hit by a truck. When I got home my neighbour was playing Hit Me Baby One More Time on repeat, and I went back to bed.

This is not why I have a hangover. I have a hangover because I went to dr_biscuit's for dinner, and shall we say, for drinking, and had a truly lovely time, and ate a lot of cake, and played Werewolf, which I hadn't played before (shanith and I were the werewolves and killed everyone with a surprising degree of dispatch), and ate more cake, and watched literal music videos on YouTube, and ate yet more cake. Somehow or other it got to be three in the morning. It was a lot of fun. Shim and I delivered teh_elb tipsily home and wandered equally tipsily home ourselves.

Today I crawled out of bed at lunchtime, and ran a few errands, and tried to buy Shim a chocolate heart and entirely failed to do so, central Oxford being lacking in this particular commodity, who knew. I actually rather like having an anniversary of February 29th, but it does mean that keeping track of these things is more complicated than it might otherwise be; nevertheless, Shim and I have been together some integer quantity of years. I'm happy. It needs to be said for the record sometimes, doesn't it? I'm happy.

My exams are not over yet by any stretch of the imagination; I have them the next three Saturdays, and right now I am preparing for my advocacy on Wednesday, hurrah. Before I disappear, purimgifts is open(ing) for business: here are the stories for day 1, and here for day 2. I will do a proper reclist tomorrow, so I can rec complete stories where they're being issued by parts.

Back to work, I guess.

edited to add: I forgot! Lovely anonymous person who sent me the bunch of balloons, thank you very much! An especially nice Holi to you, yes.