said Friedrich von Schiller.

So it's good to know that my soul is getting a good dose of ozone-fresh smell. I suppose I'm still a little bitter about the 'loss' of the job, and the fact that the IND _STILL_ hasn't gotten my passport back to me (I call them on Monday if it isn't back by then, 'cuz I really want it back. Screw getting a job, I'd just feel a lot better if I had my passport back in my hands). But in spite of all that, I did wake up on Monday after my giant point-form rant and feel much better about life, the universe, and everything even if I still don't exactly feel happy.

I've been cooped up in the Borthwick Institute for a the last few days now, only emerging at 3:30 this afternoon from THREE straight days of reading documents that look rather like this (in fact, this is one of the books I was reading, just a slightly earlier edition): Holinshed's Chronicles, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs (those being the short titles, because the long titles are a few paragraphs long). Holinshed's Chronicles was a little easier as it was an 1808 edition, and so was in a much more modern typeface and with slightly modernized spelling - the long 's' symbol (the one that looks like an 'f', but that's really an 's') died out somewhere in the eighteenth century, thank god, but really, once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad. I was just thankful that I wasn't trying to read someone's 16th century handwriting for three days straight. The woodcuts in this book are absolutely amazing - each one is quite unique (although a lot of them are of people tied to stakes being burnt, so thematically... not so much difference), so this book would have been fairly expensive. Unfortunately the Borthwick's copy of Volume III also has mold in it, but fortunately all the mold in that particular copy is dead, so I was able to use it right away.

I don't know how I ended up in England with a group of friends that couldn't care less about football. I mean, honestly. What is up with that? With the exception of the R (to whom I made mention of potentially watching the friendly on the 30th with Hungary in an email but have yet to hear anything), all my classmates couldn't be bothered with football, and when I mentioned that I was really looking forward to next month and the football to the people from bells, they just looked at me like I was slightly nuts. Which I am. But that's completely beside the point.

The more I think about it, the more I'm entertaining the idea of going into book/paper conservation (esp. book conservation). I met the Borthwick's conservator after discovering the mold in the Foxe, and he was just as nice as the lady at the Minster Library. Didn't get to ask him as many questions, though, but he seemed to really enjoy his job and not get pissed off that I was bothering him. The lady at the Minster has an MLIS (or its equivalent) in historical bibiography and about three other degrees, though... which sound kinda boring (sorry Bonobo)... and Borthwick dude wanders around in a lab coat checking the temperature and humidity in the reading room about three times a day, which seems a bit technical, to be quite honest...

It was a girl from bells' birthday last night... went to her place, sat, ate, chatted, sang show tunes (yup, geeks, the lot of us)... must have ate something manky, though, as I have been feeling like ass since...

And tomorrow it's back to the library (although I will be reading modern stuff this time 'round).

I Am Reading
No change since last time - took a few days off to read Foxe/Holinshed and am back to where I was before I started (with a lot more people dead on the floor than there were last week).