Settling in

On Sunday I was deposited in my hall of residence at Warwick University. Since then I've been thrown into lectures and such, and it's been a busy, busy week. Whenceforth comes the myth that uni students have so much free time and can sleep until 12 every day? I mean, I could do that, but I'd miss four lectures a week, and have the cleaner walk in on me every day.

So far I've only had one piece of work (which I did quickly this evening, in time for Monday) and I've still had barely any idle time. I have many books to read (more than I planned since I discovered that the university bookshop also stocks fiction) and my brother brought me Shaun of the Dead on Monday as a birthday present. I've managed to read a total of 126 pages since Sunday, and Shaun is still shrinkwrapped. (Even despite all the special features!)

Lectures are going okay, if a little slow at the moment (though I'm sure I'll appreciate that in later weeks when everything's whizzing by). Nearly all of my lectures have been maths so far, but it's nice maths — set theory and algebra and logic. I did manage to turn up to the wrong lecture without realising it, since I thought the time was an hour later than it actually was. I wasn't greatly helped in realising my mistake since it was a computer science lecture that I erroneously sat in on :-)

My TV tuner is being one of the biggest sources of annoyance at the moment. When we got here and set up the computer, we checked to make sure everything still worked. The TV software didn't, and we decided we had to reinstall the drivers. This solved the problem, and yours truly was a happy bunny once more.

Until a couple of days later, when the same "initialization error" came up as the program refused to start. Since then I've had to reinstall the drivers nearly every time I've used it. This includes a reboot of the machine, which isn't that nice when you're actually trying to watch something now. We're going to try to reseat the card at the weekend and see if that works, otherwise I'll still be Really Quite Annoyed.

The other thing that isn't going so well is sleeping. The noise level's mostly been okay so far (but on the other hand, I haven't experienced Friday or Saturday nights yet, so we'll see). The bad thing is the streetlight shining into my room through the not-very-thick curtains that are in place. To be honest, it probably wouldn't be that much of a problem for most people, but at home I had a blackout blind which left almost no light at all. I like sleeping in as close to pitch-blackness as I can get. I have difficulty when there's enough light in the room to clearly make out shapes in the darkness. This is worse in that there's a very obvious difference between the light levels when I close my eyes, and when I hold my hand over my closed eyes.

I'm going to see whether I can sleep in an eyemask, such as people use on planes. It's really making a difference; I'm sleeping so much lighter than I used to. I usually am a very heavy sleeper, the kind that doesn't wake up during horrifically loud thunderstorms and will sleep until she is woken. For the last five mornings, however, I've been waking up every ½-1 hour from about 5am onwards. I'm exhausted even though I've only got up at 10am on three mornings and I've been going to bed before midnight every night. It's really not doing me much good.

Neither is my diet at the moment really (I'm sounding terribly doomy and gloomy, aren't I? Apologies). I've lost my appetite quite a bit since arriving here; of the potential 16 meals I could have had, I've only had 6 'proper' meals (as in, food that requires plates and possibly cutlery). And when I have eaten proper food I feel full incredibly quickly — even the cheese sandwich I had on Tuesday meant I felt stuffed for hours afterwards.

Maybe it'll settle down. If not, at least I'm saving myself some money ;-)

And the kitchen lesson for this week is: when confronted with an old-fashioned toaster, of the kind with mechanical lever for putting down and popping up the bread and a toasting dial where you turn according to how burnt you want the toast and let it slowly rotate back to zero — do not be tricked by the dial rotating round and the lever working smoothly, since the toaster will do this anyway even if the power's turned off.