17/11/06

I have a big project due on Monday, and I've been in the library all week trying to get it finished. Consequently, I don't have a lot of exciting things to talk about unless you think that Chaucer and Boccaccio are exciting. Well, they kind of are, come to think of it.

I will hit the week's highlights just to prove to you guys that I'm still alive over here or at least that someone with the password to my blog is alive. I finally met my fellow tenents in this apartment (which is really a large 2 story house broken up into separate living quarters). I came home on Wednesday night with some groceries and such. I put my key in the door and turned it as usual, but when I pushed the door to open it, it was locked. Confused, I tried again. Nothing. I rang a doorbell or two (each apt. has a separate bell) and tried to explain my situation to a man I later learned was named Declan through the mail slot. He tried to open the door. Nothing. We eventually found a dead bolt (or chubb lock as they call it, but I'm not okay with that name yet) a little below waist height that had become locked somehow. By this point, the whole house iswas down in the hall talking about how to get out. They were locked in; I was locked out. We tried to call the letting agency and the landlord to no avail. Finally, one woman remembered that the landlord gave her a key that he told her was useless. Others like her threw the key away, but I assume she always thought it might come in handy. She went and found it and opened the lock that none of our keys would open. The strange thing is, no one owned up to locking the door, and another lady said that she had just come in 45 minutes before we found the door bolted. The leading theory is that the landlords sent someone to work on the empty apartment and gave him a keyring full of keys; then he locked the door with all of the keys that he had, one of which no one else had except the heroine of my story.

Another highlight: the kids in my program came over for dinner last night. We're trying to set up a weekly tradition of cooking for one another and getting together for meals. That was fun, though less adaptable to story form than the dead bolt episode. They left late, but I slept late because I have no 8 am classes on Fridays.

I met a couple of people for lunch today, and another one of my friends (or perhaps his girlfriend) will cook for me and some other people tomorrow evening. In summary, I'm eating alone less for this week.