It's been awhile...

I haven't been very good at posting lately, so this may be a long one. Last week we went to the Royal Melbourne Show, which was fun. As Mark said, it's amazing how similar some things are even on the other side of the world. Despite the similarities, there were a few interesting differences. For example, they call it Fairy Floss instead of Cotton Candy, they sell jam-filled donuts instead of scones (this only applies to the Puyallup Fair), and they have the Pie in the Sky, which is a tall post with a large meat pie at the top (I'm not sure if it functions as anything, but it'd be a great meeting place if your group gets separated). After the fair, we went to a classmate's house to housesit. I thoroughly enjoyed the space, the coffee (she has a high-end espresso machine), and her two cats. She lives near a park with a river, which we biked along one afternoon, but the rest of the time we didn't do much since the weather wasn't great and I was working on an essay. I submitted my essay yesterday and I'm a little worried; I'm still struggling to break free of my fact-filled science writing style and move into a persuasive philosophical style, and I'm not sure that I accomplished that with this essay. I'm also a little worried because I had to cut quite a bit to meet the word limit and I'm not sure that I cut the right stuff. It's funny that I used to struggle to come up with enough to say and now both essays that I've written have been over! Anyway, since this one is worth 50% of my grade, the last couple weeks have been pretty stressful. To celebrate turning it in, we went to dinner on Lygon Street (the Italian district) and shared a bottle of wine with a classmate and her partner. This morning I checked my email to find the results of the first essay that I submitted a few weeks ago. I earned a 75%, which is a distinction (the options are fail, pass, credit, distinction, and high distinction), plus I got some good feedback that I can use to improve my next essay. Although I have over a month before the next one is due, it does take awhile to do all of the research and writing, so I figure I'll get started now.