Most good things come to an end

Eventually, Miss Marshall had procrastinated for so long that it seemed like it would be fun to go ahead and do her master's anyway. This did not happen instantly, of course, because there were Bills to Pay and Situations at Work that prevented her from getting a move on, but eventually she bit the bullet and enrolled at the university, and not the cheap and cheerful one so beloved of her youth, mind, but the flash one in the big city. This was a good thing. She got to take the intercity bus to the big city once a fortnight to meet with her supervisor, and sometimes they drank green tea; she also found a number of places that did good eggs benedict, one of which was not forty steps from her supervisor's office. She could walk into the big bookshop and buy books, and also have a not bad vegetable stack with salad at the cafe inside; she could sit in Starbucks with her iBook fending off attention from weedy Mac and weedy PC users alike, and use the grossly overpriced wireless network to check her emails; she could nip into the classy shopping district across the bridge and nose around there, which was fun, though expensive.

Naturally, every second Saturday afternoon, she had to buckle down and write her thesis; this was not too much of a problem, though it did tend to cut into alternate Saturday afternoons...

All in all, Miss Marshall enjoyed this kind of living, though it did mean that she was somewhat broke, and relatively often she would dream of returning to a life of lunch orders, jumbo nappies, and group hugs. At the time of press, Miss Marshall has managed to restrain herself.