God Put a Smile Upon Your Face (Coldplay)

Wow, where did the motivation go? I've been absolutely rubbish about writing for this lately, in spite of my impressive 2-month streak of 12 posts per month. You'd think that with less course work to slough through I'd devote more time to something like a blog that I do for fun. Alas, you'd be mistaken. Though my mountain of work no longer resembles the monstrous Russian snow drifts faced by Napoleon's soldiers, my motivation in general seems to have disappeared along with it. Good thing there's only 1 more week of real work left in the semester!

The weather lately has finally taken a resolute turn for the better: no more freak snows or bitter cold rain. Aside from some drizzle on Monday and a freak rain yesterday, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous of late. All the trees on the quad are blooming (just in time for graduation!) and there are tiny pink flower petals everywhere. It feels like the setting for a Romantic love sonnet, or one of Cecily's dream sequences in the 2002 version of The Importance of Being Earnest. Love that play.

So the semester pushes onward ever onward, and thankfully as it does, summer looms on the horizon. Not that I have half a clue what I'll be doing for the majority of the time - the National Maritime Museum apparently has better things to do than let me know if I've qualified for their internship programme - but still; the idea of time away from Winston is quite refreshing. My mum has promised canoeing and a proper cook-out once we're back in Provo: an idea I'm all for. It's been far too long since I've done either of those things. My secret hope is that we turn said cook-out into a barbecue. Oh ho! Before quibbling semantics, be aware that having been raised in the south, I'm fully qualified to say that there is a difference.
Cook-outs are what happens whenever one decides to cook out-of-doors. It involves a grill and charcoal (or a propane grill if you're lazy) and whatever food one chooses to apply to the heated grill. Barbecue is a much more involved process. The term can only really be applied to meat on the bone - stuff like ribs, or a whole pig, or something - and involves an hours-long process of marinating, slow cooking over low heated coals, and repeated basting with some homespun concoction of juices and sugars and spices. The cook-out is a popular entertainment while the barbecue is the province of artists. Sort of like comparing The Da Vinci Code to The Three Musketeers: both are novels that pretend to tell the truth, but I'll bet Dumas never had his books likened to toilet paper on BBC radio shows.