I Think It Might Be Winter...

Last night, I was inexplicably exhausted. So, at around 7pm, I decided to make like an 8-year-old and go to sleep. I left my light on, and woke up at around 10pm. I got up to turn off the light, and then glanced toward my window, where I noticed it was gray outside. Out of curiousity, I opened the curtain further and looked out.

IT WAS SNOWING.

Yup, that's right. Snowing. On October 28. In London, where it almost never snows. I was so excited I started jumping up and down. I haven't seen snow since I was 18, so this was a very big thing for me. I naturally ran ouside immediately and froze to death running around my block. You know those movies where they show London in the snow, and it looks just like Christmas was meant to look? Like Muppet Christmas Carol, Hook, etc? It looked just like that. There's a cobblestone street outside my window, and a 19th century brick building across the road with those old-fashioned chimneys that have 4 or 5 chimney pipes coming out of them. Looking at that in the snow at night was incredibly awesome. I couldn't have been more excited. Needless to say, I didn't get back to sleep for a very very long time.

However, London being a city, the snow naturally all turned to slush within an hour, and by this morning was all gone. It's still unusually freezing though, so today I finally broke down and bought a pair of gloves. No more pretending I still live in Miami, I suppose...

In other news, I mentioned in my last entry that I would talk about the manuscript I get to analyze this year. IT'S AWESOME. It's a book from the early 12th century comprised of sermons and parables of unrepentent deaths. The really cool thing about it is that the stories are all from St. Ephraim in the early 2nd century, and are translated from Greek into Latin. So really, the book is a bunch of second century stories and sermons, just copied and translated in the 12th century. As far as I know, the Greek copies are no longer surviving, so this manuscript is actually reasonably valuable. Also, either the scribe who copied it or the guy who bought it was a doodler. They even cut a clover-shape out of one of the pages. What they did with their parchment clover I couldn't tell you. But it was funny to stumble across a folio with a clover-shaped hole in it.

Anywho, I fear I must now run to my Latin class. Bring on the public humiliation!