museums and a double dose of Hobbit art recs

[bedlamsbard]

Ah, yes, I'm managing to lapse back into oh shit panic panic PANIC stress/anxiety zone because, ahahaha, I can't tell time and I have papers due on the 12th. HALP. (I have very little research done, but I have books out from the library; that counts, right?) (And yeah, that's papers plural, because they're both due the same day, to the same professor. Thanks a lot, Simon.)

*

I went up to London with 5/7 ARW people and the Class Med boys for an artifact handling session at the British Museum, where we got to go into a fancy-ass back room which looked like something out of a movie. It had a second story of bookshelves with a balcony that went all 'round the room and a spiral staircase going up to it! And then we got taken around the guts of the BM, which was creepy, and into some of the rooms that used to be displays but are now closed off because they don't have the money to keep them up and/or staff them, which was also creepy, because it was these shadowed rooms with these giant blocks of stone and marble standing around, some of them boxed up, others partially wrapped up, and sometimes weird bits like a giant stone foot. (...in retrospect, I kind of wish I'd done this trip before I wrote the last few chapters of Dust.)

After that we went to Sir John Soane's Museum, which is also creepy and also had sizable and not so sizable chunks of stone and marble in various odd places, after which we were technically done for the day, but a lot of us had later trains, so about five of us went across the street to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and if you just got to "Royal College of Surgeons" and went OH NO, you pretty much have the right response; if I never see another human fetus in a jar or the head of a bird or a dissected syphilitic penis again it will be too soon. Best viewed in the company of four other horrified archaeology students who are all going, "THANK GOD WE JUST DO POTS," I feel.

After that, the remaining other ARW girl took off, and I hung out with the Class Med boys for the next few hours, because I had nothing better to do and I wasn't really in the mood to wander aimlessly around London alone until my train. (aella_irene and I were supposed to meet, but there was a hiccup.) The Class Med boys are quite nice, and I think I might actually know their names now. (There are only three of them, but we've never been properly introduced, so despite being in class with them since the beginning of the year I wasn't entirely sure what the names of 2/3 were. The third one I had another class with.) (At this point I feel I should maybe add that Class Med is short for Classical Mediterranean, which is the other archaeology MA course that has to do with the classical world. They do Greece as well; we technically just do Rome.) I had a much later train than everyone else, so after they took off, I ended up wandering around St. Pancras for two hours. I may have tripped in Foyles and bought books, whoops.

*

Still resisting the urge to write a Hobbit historical Roman-era AU, though I keep poking it tentatively 'round the edges. I'm probably saved by having two papers to write in the next ten days.

*

Hobbit art recs: Thorin and young Fili and Kili

Play with us, Uncle! by piiib
Uncle Thorin by kadeart
bedtime stories by flatbear
Thorin returning home by kaciart
Tear by em-mika

Oh, yeah, I can totally do another few sets with that same theme, since it's barely scratching the surface of my frankly alarming collection.

Double feature, since I missed a few days this week; Thorin and grown-up Fili and Kili

Reflection by murr-ma-ing
Relief by lorna-ka
get up already! by lanimalu
Fili and Kili watching over an injured Thorin by kaciart
Heart of Gold by maelstromarts