Saturday is Cleaning Day - Don't forget to turn your clocks back!!

Fall is upon us, and the leaves are turning here in Glasgow. Tonight we, along with the rest of the world that observes this strange practice, turn our clocks back 1 hour. Those of my flatmates who come from more southern countries who do not do this are quite taken aback by the whole process and it seems rather silly to them. Usually I'd say it seems rather silly to me too, being a staunch supporter of Saskatchewan's choice to not do the Daylight Savings Time thing, but I am looking forward this weekend to an extra hour of sleep, and to a slightly brighter wake-up time.

It is actually significantly darker here in the morning than in Minden, even though latitude wise we are really only about level with the top of James Bay. However, as my flatmate (and engineering student) Lilliana showed us this morning, the Earth's tilt makes Glasgow actually farther away from the sun than James Bay, so the days here are quite a bit shorter. Not as short as in, say, Iceland... but shorter than I am used to.

My week of hell turned out to be busy, but not really hell. I had a full week of labs, oddly symmetrical with 4 labs dealing with blood, semen, and saliva sandwiched by 2 labs dealing with document analysis. For one lab I got to drip blood from different heights and at different angles (food grade animal blood) and observe what it did. What a mess that was. Blood dries really fast and gets really sticky, so getting it off of things like wood and carpet is awful. The cleanup I think took the longest of any lab I've had. Alot of people were complaning about the smell of the blood too, but I didn't find it all that bad. Then again, I've also been to visit an 1,800 head hog farm... and the smell of 1,800 pigs is waaaay worse than a little tupperware container of animal blood.

Today I got up early and did my laundry. Did my bedding, clothes, and towels. All in all I did two loads, wash and double-dry, which costs me £4, which today is around $8.48 Cdn. Stupid considering the same in Canada (using the exact same machines) is $6... and as low as $4.50 because you don't actually need two dries to dry your clothes. I hate doing laundry in the first place, and I hate paying this much for it even more. But it's either that or stink.

I also cleaned my room today (how boring is my life right now that cleaning my room is bloggable material? ;-), darn school for getting in the way of my vacation in Scotland!). Hoovered everything (our hoover's name is Henry), dusted... Mom would be proud!

To backtrack a little. Tuesday night we celebrated Eid with Shabnam. She made a huge spread of Indian dishes. It was soooo good! We had guests and everything. Got a little "beatiful and interesting" with the wine (no, not really... but it's our joke when we go out for beer or have wine). Lesley's Mom who is in Scotland this week also joined us. It was really fun! I'm going to have to try making savayya sometime, a very tastey dessert made of noodles and milk.

Oh, and I've gotten to meet Kate, our new flatmate from China a little better. She's a year younger than me (yay! I'm not the youngest anymore!), and she's very very friendly. This is actually her second year at Strathclyde doing a multi-year Master's degreen in marketing.

Anyway, that's really all that's fit to blog for now. Shabnam and I are going to walk down on Glasgow Green for a little exercise (I've had to tighten my belt a notch, if you can believe it!) and then I've got some residual homework to do from the past week. Enjoy your extra hour of sleep everyone!