Quittin' Time

Well!  It appears that my days of playing Mary Poppins are now over!  One week into the sordid affair and I threw in the towel.  Six more weeks of tantrums, hitting, biting, screaming, name calling, etc with no means of punishment and only bribery with sweets to encourage good behaviour did not seem to me to be a good way of spending my summer.  The child I was sitting can be very sweet when he wants to be, but he also realizes that nothing will happen to him if he acts poorly, and so he takes advantage of that fact.  My friend Lakshmi has agreed to step up to the bat in my stead, as she has worked with children developing schizophrenia for the past three years, and she is probably better equipped to babysit this child.  I also felt very uncomfortable every time I was at school to drop him off or pick him up, because I was approached by teachers who wanted me to tell his mother to call them, or parents who were wondering if I was his mother so they could tell me what horrible things he had been doing to their children.  ANYWAY, after Friday I should be done, and back to sleeping in past 6:30 in the morning!  I asked the friend who recommended me the job what she had done while babysitting, and she said she'd never had these types of problems, but she wasn't responsible for taking him to and from school, either, she just babysat occasionally in the evenings.  Sigh!

I'm afraid I haven't been terribly active in London cultural activities lately, but I will be going to a symphony concert this Thursday and the National Portrait Gallery on Saturday.  A lot of people from my dorm are leaving this Saturday, as the summer housing begins.  Already there are a few new faces in the dorm hall, but it's difficult to tell who is a new student, and who is an "illegal," as we are calling them.  Quite a few students have moved into each other's rooms and then rented out their old rooms to their friends.  It has not yet happened on my floor, which is very good, because there is only one shower and I would object to more people needing to use it.  Serene is getting very upset, because there are now four extra people on her floor and they wreck her bathroom each day (squatting on the toilet seats = a mess, hair babies in the showers, blood, etc), plus things from the kitchen have begun disappearing.  She had the vice warden retrieve her personal items from the illegals' rooms and is now keeping things in her room, but still the kitchen continues to be an issue.  Look what we found there last weekend!

The fish and prawns in the bucket were very much dead, although the crabs were still alive and doing well, it appeared.  It was stinking up the entire floor!  The vice warden was pretty angry about that, but I fear now that he has decided to pretend as if the illegals problem doesn't exist, he won't take a strong stance on the issue.  There are some new people on the ground floor (legals), who seem nice, although quiet.  I think we scared them when six people introduced themselves and started asking questions all at once, though.

The weather has been a little nicer, lately.  Now it is sunny and fine starting at about 4:30 am until 2 pm, when suddenly it becomes quite gusty, cloudy, and rainy.  There are trees that keep throwing cottony material into the air.  It comes through my bedroom window (no screen) and lands all over my room and bedspread, so I have been vacuuming quite often.

I bought tickets for the Paralympics.  I am going to see an equestrian event!  I don't know what exactly, but I'm excited.  The tickets were only £10, so I think I will get tickets to another event as well!  I hope I can still find tickets for an Olympic game.  They keep slowly releasing more and more of them, but they are quite expensive and I don't know how much I'm willing to spend to go to a match / event.

I don't have much else to add at this moment, I'm still just working on my dissertation.  I'm hoping to go to a conference on Friday for electronic music that a lot of people I would like to speak to will be attending as well.  I'm also applying for an internship so I have to mash together a CV.  Whoo!  Talk to you later!