More books

See? Titles... so you can decide whether you want to read the rest of the post. But I should warn you that just because I've felt the need to add titles does not mean I feel the need to strictly adhere to them and not wander off into talking about other things.

Having said that, I haven't written about books for a long time - over a month, so here's what I've been reading:

Finished:

The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
How the Dead Live - Will Self
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R. L. Stevenson
Five Children and It - E. Nesbit

Reading:

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle

On Deck:

[Ha! This is actually a very long list, but I think I'll start with the following:]

Dracula - Bram Stoker
Narrative/theory - David Richter
Lullaby - Chuck Palanhiuk

So, The DaVinci Code was interesting, but it's definitely plane-material. It's got some cool ideas, but doesn't make you think to hard about them. And even though it's long, it's also a really quick read. That some of the far out stuff mentioned in the book actually takes place outside literature (i.e. the real world) is slightly disturbing in a fascinating kind of way.

Walking on Glass was cool in a alternate-world-intersects-with-thought-process-of-insane-person kind of way. A neat premise and also a fun read. Quick too because it's short. Only problem is that I think I had to special order this one if I remember right because it's out of print. Maybe I could do a documentary about it in a kind of Stones of Summer (which is also on that summer list, but I'll read it later when the pool opens) way and get it back in print!

The Victorian stuff, Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde, Tess, are actually not very Victorian (i.e. they weigh in at less than the usual 800 pages) and I have a newfound respect for Hardy that I had lost reading Jude the Obscure. I actually found myself empathisizing with Tess and really getting involved in her problems, feeling the injustice of her position and such, something that I rarely lose myself to in Victorian lit, so I was duly impressed by the book.

I did not feel that How the Dead Live or Day of the Triffids wasted my time, but unless you want to read a lot of obscure sf, don't bother. If you are into obscure sf and you like old sf film, then you definitely need to read Triffids and then see the movie adaptation.

I'm looking forward to rereading Dracula, since its been a very long time and too many film adaptation screenings since I read it to really remember it well. Hopefully I'll get it done before next weekend when Van Helsing opens, since I'm DEFINITELY going to see that.

I can't believe my week is almost over. I had so many things that I wanted to get done. Not that I didn't get them done, I actually scratched a lot of stuff off the to do list, but most of it was the boring stuff. And I go back to teaching on Tuesday with assignments still waiting to be written. UGH!

I'm also feeling really sleepy - I think I got too much sun yesterday... yes, the weather's gorgeous here this week. I spent most of the early afternoon cleaning the weeds out of the garden at the back door. It's not very big, about 10x12, and there are some shrubs and the A/C ground unit that I can't move or replace, but it will do for growing some veggies, herbs and maybe even some nice flowers. I like digging in the dirt - I haven't had a garden for about four years, so I had great fun cleaning it out and dreaming about what I'll put in there. Now I just need to go get the plants - maybe we'll do that this weekend.

I also got lots of sun while playing basketball. In playing with my friends, I've come to the conclusion that it was probably a really good thing that I wasn't into sports as a kid. I'm clumsy enough as an adult, but as a kid, I would've just been one big messed up body of injuries. Only yesterdays scrapes and bruises weren't my fault... no, honestly. We played next to the track field here in Watertown since Sandy & Steph were both there at a meet (Steph) and practice (Sandy). I even managed to surreptitiously watch Steph's high jump without messing up my own game, but then as I went for the ball, Sandy called to me and I got distracted. I rolled. But basketball courts are pretty hard. At first I thought the scraped up knee was the worst part of it, but then a couple hours later I saw the bruise, and now that leg from knee to ankle aches. Dammit. I don't like injuring myself, but I do like the games. Sucker for punishment I guess.

Oh, and before all this, before the distraction and my lovely rolling, when we first got there, I said hi to Sandy as she walked past. She looked a bit puzzled because I don't think she'd expected to see me and then looked over my shoulder toward the basketball court and said, "Oh! It's the old people!"

I think it was Alex said I should ground her for the comment. I'm seriously considering it.

I guess after all that, I can't complain about not getting fun stuff on my to do list done, since I had a really good day yesterday, but that leaves me with mostly boring stuff to do today. Which I of course am procrastinating about.

I've had coffee on my mind for a while I guess. Must be the Tim Horton's I got! I like coffee a lot. I often get energetic and make my own capuccino at home, or Irish coffee *mmmm*, which is especially good with a quality whiskey (or scotch, though then I suppose it's scottish, not irish coffee) and lots of whip cream. Just writing about it makes me want to got get one. Anyway, took one of those ubiquitous quizzes that tell you what kind of all sorts of things you might be.

Turns out that I'm Plain.

You Are a Plain Ole Cup of Joe But don't think plain - instead think, uncomplicated You're a low maintenance kind of girl... who can hang with the guys Down to earth, easy going, and fun! Yup, that's you: the friend everyone invites. And your dependable too. Both for a laugh and a sympathetic ear. What Kind Of Coffee Are You? Take This Quiz :-)

Ever wonder about the word "plain"? Say it three or four times. It starts to lose its meaning doesn't it? Odd how you can take a word for granted and then when you really focus on it, repeat it over and over, you sort of unhook it from its usual meaning and it seems alien and strange. Plain. It kinda is a weird word.... and its a homonym (which is another weird word). So, today's weird word of the day is plain.

I had such an odd weekend.

On Friday night I came home from school, did the dinner thing, read some of my book, The Iceman Cometh (okay, its actually a play) for the Book club last night, cleaned up some stuff, watched some tv.

On Saturday, I helped friends move, went to see The Punisher, and had dinner at the Elephant Walk (mmm, very good) with another friend to celebrate her birthday. On Sunday, I finished reading the play, cleaned up some more (since the book club was meeting at my place this month), met with them and then read the last couple of weeks of The New Yorker, which I'd put aside because I didn't have time.

What was so odd about that, you ask?

It was so bloody lovely ordinary! That's what was odd. I cannot remember the last time I had such a wonderfully mundane weekend.

I have to do this more often!

I had such yummy coffee this morning! It was Tim Horton's coffee and it was absolutely fabulous!

A friend who was in Maine last week had heard (from me, of course) that there was a Tim Horton's there and she bought me a tin of coffee. Ah! Tim Horton's coffee. Beats Dunkin Donuts hands down any day of the week. What a great way to start a Sunday!

I feel a little lost.

I have no deadlines hanging over me... well, other than having to read the book for the Book club (which I'm also hosting this week, so I can't just bag it). It's a weird feeling - I haven't not had some kind of deadline looming for a couple of years now.

And since it looks like I'll have July & August off, I'll not have anything to do then either.

Good news is that the pool opens Memorial day! Yeah!

So since I have nothing pressing, I was surfing - since I'm always looking for film adaptations, well, okay, in this case, a condensation, I just had to share. The possessed bunnies are quite amusing.

Done the papers! Yeah!
Now I have to mark student papers to submit final marks before tomorrow. Boo!

It really is a small world you know. One of my students wrote a paper on home schooling and quoted an article from a couple of weeks ago in the Calgary Herald. Cool! Mixed feelings. Happy memories & homesickness.

Speaking of which, I had a dream the other night that I came home and all my very bestest friends were there. I woke up happy.

Since my brain is dead right now, I was doing a little mindless searching when I came across this on Book TV from one of my favorite authors. I knew there was a reason he was one of my favorite authors!

I'd put in a profanity warning on this, but its no worse that what you might get reading this blog, so fuck it.

Halfway through the last papers I will ever have to write... yeah, yeah, I know I have to write the dissertation and I have to write the proposals for my exam areas and I have to write the prospectus, but leave me my fantasy that these are the last papers I'll ever have to write.

One down, one to go. Man! Will it be nice to finish this!

Been reading lots of disaster fiction lately, you know end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it kind of stuff. Where something happens and most of the population is gone and people have to start all over. Got me thinking how useful I'd be if everything came crashing down. I think I'd fall into at most a moderately useful range.

My friends and family who would be really useful: the mechanic, the dentist, the engineer, the veterinarian. Those of my friends and family are teachers, well, we'd be useful for the next generation but not immediately. The social workers, political scientists, computer programmers and us teachers would presumably have other skills though - at least I know how to grow vegetables and then how to preserve them, how to sew clothing and how to bake bread. All rather domestic skills, but necessary. Not unique though - many other people have the same kinds of skills.

How would you fare?

So I have the dubious distinction of winning the Graduate student essay prize this year for an essay titled "Indelible Ink of the Palimpsest: Language, Myth and Narrative in H.D.s Trilogy". Did that title mean anything to you? No? That's okay - probably doesn't mean much of anything to most people. Though the metaphor of the palimpsest is interesting. It's based on the early, early practice when people were writing on vellum (sheepskin) before they imported paper from the Chinese, of reusing vellum by scraping off the top layer with the ink and rewriting on it. [It would have been a bit like writing on your leather coat and then scraping away the top layer - by the way, that's where we get the term 'sheepskin' when referring to degrees because they were written on it. In fact, there are some schools in Britain that still use sheepskin and being a calligrapher is an actual profession over there - I know, I sat in a lecture with a bunch of them] The problem with this practice (or in the case of people who study manuscripts, the cool part about it) is that sometimes the indentations made by the first writer as they scratched across the vellum with their styluses were left behind after the ink was scraped off, so you could see shadows of the earlier writing through the later writing on top. So the metaphor refers to literary situations where you find echoes of earlier writing in later writing.

Cool, eh?

Anyway, the distinction is rather dubious, not because the cash prize is paltry (nothing like the Laurence Decor - now that was a nice cash prize, AND I didn't know about it ahead of time and was terribly/delightfully surprised when they called my name), but because it requires me to present a 10 minute precis of the paper at the graduate end of year reception this afternoon. I spent three hours last night trying to condense 30 pages of writing down to 4 - I still only made it to 5 - they'll have to sit through 12 minutes. And it wasn't because I was procrastinating - I didn't find out till noon yesterday that I'd won. Ergh!

Taxes. Ugh. And I have two sets to complete.

Luckily they're both pretty basic... 'cause I don't have any money! Hehe

Unlike in Canada, where the government only cares if you file on time when you owe them money, here you have to file...and the deadline's tomorrow. I don't know what the penalty is... maybe for non-residents its deportation. Who knows? I don't want to find out, so I've been dutifully doing my taxes.

Actually, I started them in February when I got my W-2 (= T4) ... [sounds like some strange robot language]. But I put it aside when I realized they took Social Security and Medicare off, which of course they're not supposed to do since I can't access either of those resources. It took me a while to find out how to get it back - I don't get it from the government, but instead I have to yell at my employer. Normally, international TAs don't have it deducted, but when I worked last summer, I was classified as part-time staff, so they processed me the same as everyone else.

So, okay, I get the form and photocopy my I.D. etc. and take it back to payroll so that I'll get my $200 back. And me, thinking it would be smart to avoid this mess next year, asks what we can do to keep this from happening again this year. Good idea, no? No. The answer: there's nothing they can do to avoid taking taxes off of me again this year when I work part-time in the summer. And I'll have to submit a new form next year to get the money back again.

So, does this strike you as a bit asinine? Maybe I'm just being picky...

But computers are supposed to be such wonderful tools to help us make paperwork so much easier....

It's raining again.
I think I'm going to cry.

Spring is here - my nose and cheeks are pink from standing outside for a couple of hours yesterday watching Angela's first soccer game. I guess the sun was strong, but I was still wearing a tee, sweatshirt & fleece. Hope it continues nice - would like to get out and enjoy some sun!

Happy Easter!

...in whatever way you want to take that. Whether you celebrate the holiday as a chance to have an extra day off, or as that week when you have to find something to do with the school-age kids 'cause they aren't in school, or as a chance to spend time with family, or as a deeply religious celebration. Happy Easter to you.

Since I don't get any extra days off, my kids are old enough to take care of themselves for their week off of school, my extended family is far, far away, and I'm not particularly religious, I'm not sure what to think of the holiday. But you do get chocolate if you've been good, right? (Actually, I bought chocolate for myself... I had bought bunnies for the kids, but then on my next grocery trip thought 'well, no one else is going to get you chocolate, so if you want it, get it yourself - why should the kids have all the fun?' So I did.)

Chocolate is good.

So is coloring Easter eggs. I suspect this year it will only be Ange & I. But that's okay - all the more for us!

Hmmm... maybe I should make the chocolate a reward for participating in the egg hunt... acting like a kid is always good - especially for teenagers I think. They tend to take themselves WAY too seriously!

Hehehe... I think I will! New house rule: You don't get your chocolate until you've hunted for eggs. Beauty!

Having children is a bit like having ghosts. Either way, you live in a house full of strange noises where your things never stay where you left them.

yesterday I wanted to poke a pen in my eye - if only to take my mind off other things

today I want to stick it in someon else's eye... anyone else's

after all, sticking it in my own eye would HURT!

60 litres.

Little did I know when I added Watertown weather to my blog that water and weather would become central components in my day today. I just vaccuumed up three gallons of water that have leaked into the basement. And since the forecast is for rain (90% chance +) till Saturday, looks like I'll be doing more of the same for a while to come.

So you can assume as long as my weather block says its still raining here, that I'm vaccuuming! Grrr!

I got very wet today. I made a choice, what I thought was a reasoned decision, to leave my umbrella at home because I had too many other things to carry. My rationale was that I only had a ten minute walk from the house to the bus and vice versa (if I took the south route). Little did I know that my impromptu discussion with a professor would lead to the necessity of walking blocks through the rain to get books.

So to enlighten you about my environment, I've now included the weather here - for your enjoyment!

[p.s. I've you've never experienced it before, wet wool is really gross!]

Three weeks till the language exam in German. I'm a bit nervous about it, since my German isn't as strong as my Spanish, though I managed to muddle through that one okay last year.

And four weeks until the end of the semester and all my work has to be done as well as student papers marked. The good news is that I have only one of those big 25-30 page papers to write (though I have to read pretty much all the primary and secondary material yet) and a presentation week after next. The other course, the one where I'm doing all the reading, I only have to submit a summary to finish it up. I will likely write a conference paper out of the course as well, but to get the credit, I just have to do summaries, which I've been doing all along anyway, so I should be set pretty good for that.

I still have lots of student work to do though - I have two sets of drafts to comment on yet as well as two final papers for each of the eighteen in the class. Ugh! I'm trying something new this time. I'm having them submit the drafts by email (or Blackboard) and by tracking changes in word and adding comment boxes, I'm going to give them back my comments electronically as well. My hope is that this method will be slightly more effecient than printing everything out and handwriting is, since my typing is faster than my writing (at least legibly!). We'll see how it goes. You may be amused to read the story my students are writing about. I like it alot. Its by Jorge Luis Borges and is called the Library of Babel. I was surprised at how many of my students had absolutely no idea what the Babel of the title referred to.

Played our first official spring basketball game yesterday. Not too sore today, but I need to develop some callouses or get some of those funky anti-blister socks. They're not bad, but I don't want blisters to get in the way of fun.

We actually have 8 people playing. That's more than we've ever had before. If we can get a couple more, it might be worthwhile thinking about playing full court instead of half court....not that I'm really that eager to work even harder at it, but it IS a really good workout. And we have fun, the best part of all!

I cannot wait until the day when I can again afford to drive my own car to work. I hate public transit, particularly the buses.

It's not actually the vehicle or the driver that's the problem (though I've met some that are great and others that really must hate their job), even though its loud, bumpy and sometimes smelly. Its the other passengers that annoy me the most....come to think of it, the ones who are annoying are loud, bumpy and smelly too.

Had a guy sit next to me who could not keep still today. So, that's his problem, right? No - not when he's stomping on my feet and elbowing me because he can't sit still. If it wasn't fussing with his bag, or his newspaper, or his drink or his tissue, or his hat, it was twisting and turning in the seat to talk to his girlfriend in the next seat. My toes also got stomped by a group of girls who thought it was funny to stand without holding onto anything and see whether they could keep their balance (which they absolutely couldn't). Put me in a very bad mood for the day... and I hadn't even gotten to work yet.

How sweet it is to have your own car... I can't wait to stop riding these buses.

I've been wasting lots of time surfing through ebay since the hard drive experience. There's a lot of weird and wacky stuff on there and its amazing what kinds of things you come up with when you punch in a keyword. One of the tamer ones: I punched in "narrative" looking for a book on narrative theory, and got Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, which makes some sense I suppose, but really wasn't what I was expecting.

Spring has yet to emerge here - it's gotten nasty over the last few weeks...snow, cold, windy... feels a bit like home. The spring was feeling really nice a couple of weeks ago. I remember driving Sandy back from her wrestling tournament (three hour drive away - she won third place - yeah!) thinking about how much nicer this place looks in the spring. But that's gone now. It just looks and feels like home in March and that makes me miss home all over again. My homesickness is not near as acute as it was, and I think some of my missing home could be alleviated by at least being able to visit, but all the same, I still don't feel really comfortable here.

I'm sure my ongoing interactions with INS have something to do with that as well - their bureaucracy seems to be designed to make you feel like a carbuncle on Uncle Sam's bottom.

So last night Dwayne asks everyone how their weekend went. The best answer?

Angela: "Lots of Shakespeare, Offspring... and Sponge Bob!"

What a mix!

Haven't written about books for a while... well, haven't written period (funny how quickly I actually got out of the habit of blogging when I didn't have my own computer to do it on). What have I read since last noted?

Currently reading:
Ghoul - Michael Slade
The Time Machine and War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

On deck:
The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Just finished:
King Rat - China Mieville
The Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
Weaveworld - Clive Barker
Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The way Ghoul is put together is really interesting. Michael Slade is actually a pseudonym for three Vancouver area lawyers who write detective/horror fiction, which is what this novel's about, obviously. I find myself wondering who wrote what. I mean, how did they collaborate? I can't really detect a difference in writing style from chapter to chapter, so I can only assume they didn't split it up but worked on it all together. I wonder if they all sit in the same room, or if one person starts a chapter then hands it round for changes/additions? I'd love to know.
But what's interesting about the story is the way it moves between Rhode Island (mostly Providence - which I finally visited when I went to an Oscar party that was held out there - but also Newport) and Vancouver and London. I'm impressed that the characters seem to differ according to nationality, and that they speak and act differently - even seem to have different expectations. My only caveat to that would be that the RCMP officer in the Vancouver sequence seems a bit more American than Canadian (and the character grew up in Duck Lake Sask, so he should be very Canadian), but maybe that's a hazard of working in law enforcement... interesting thought.... Anyway, its a fun book. It's almost twenty five years old now, which makes the descriptions of cutting edge UNIX systems etc. quaint echoes of the past, but I'm finding it a good read.

Other stuff? Well, Mieville is just as good in King Rat as he was in Perdido Street Station (which is also on my must-read-again list), in fact, maybe more so since its an earlier book and maybe a little less ambitious than the subsequent one. He's definitely a writer that I want to keep an eye on (along with Neil Gaiman & William Gibson). It's a fairly short & easy read and Mieville doesn't spend an excessive amount of time describing things just because he wants to stretch his literary muscles, unlike Mr. King, who spent most of Wolves describing a lot of minutiae and an even greater amount of time referring back to earlier events in the series (as well as his usual penchant for plugging his own books). Not that I didn't enjoy Wolves, it just took a lot of time to get through the extras to the diagesis.

The Lessing and Pynchon books were harder to get through. I didn't really care for the obscuring of Lessing's book - its difficult at times to tell what's going on in the narrator's head and what's actually happening in the world. Pynchon does the same thing, only most of the characters exhibit some kind of neurosis (which I suppose is reasonable considering they are all involved in the race to build rockets during WWII) so its difficult even when you can tell what's fantasy/neurosis and what's real to understand what's actually happening because each character's view of the world is warped in some really fundamental way.

Burgess and Orwell are of course classic and I'd read each of those books before, but the reread was necessary for the course. The other (usually) horror master Barker wrote a fascinating book when he sat down to write Weaveworld. Its fairly wide ranging, even though the geography is limited, and even when some of the character's motivations are unclear, it still tells a damn interesting story. It would make a fascinating movie. Its not horror at all, more fantasy of the elves-living-among-us type, and both the fantastical characters and the mundane ones are well portrayed.

If you're looking for one book to read, well, I don't know if I could recommend just one. But if you want more details, e-mail me and I'll try harder.

Yeah! Dwayne brought home a working computer... with new hard drive yesterday - he's my hero!

My God! Do I have a lot of work to catch up on now... my fingers are going to fall off from typing... but that at least will be a break from the writer's bump that was redeveloping on my right hand - you ever had one of those? I did when I was younger, you know, B.C. (before computers) - writing a lot gave me a odd bump on my right middle finger from gripping the pen. It disappeared many years ago when I left school and even when I went back, I was typing so much that if never really reappeared. Well, it's back... after almost a month of having to handwrite everything I usually type, my middle finger is now deformed.

Heh - I guess it will just make my greetings to fellow commuters that much more bent! Teehee - hey - don't knock it if you've never driven in a Boston rush hour!

So, a gazillion things need to be transferred from paper to electronica... that is, if I want them to be useful later on. The good news is that I met with the prof who is overseeing that massive reading project/directed study that I'm doing this term and he'll be happy with a summary of everything I've read as fulfilling the course requirement - SWEET! The great thing is, I've been doing book summaries all the way along (well except for the last two 'cause I was waiting for the computer to come back), so I'm halfway done the final requirement. It's almost too good to be true! [The thing is, I know I'm gonna end up writing up something that's at least conference paper length 'cause I want to present it... or... god forbid... even publish it, but the nice thing is that I won't have a deadline for that project hanging over my head!]

I also got a few things straightened out about next year's comprehensive exam proposals (3), but I still have to meet with at least four more people (hopefully no more than that) before I can even think about beginning to read up on the areas before writing the proposals.

Overall, life is incredibly busy, but good.

Still no computer - may know later today. So, ebay guy sends us a hard drive, but its the wrong model - what a moron! The model he sent us runs at the same speed and the same specifications, so we took it to IT guys who will see if it will do... if not, I'll have to spend the next week returning this one and waiting for the proper one.

Am I annoyed? YES!

Do I have many other things to worry about? YES

Are those other things also important? YES

Good news is that academics are going better these last few months than they have been for the last couple of years. Will fill in the details when I have my own computer back and I'm not trying to grab a few minutes of blogging at work.

I am so computer dependent I feel like I've been going through withdrawal over the last week. Ugh!

The hard drive on my computer is toast... apparently it has been producting bad sector data for quite some time and the funny stuff it was doing last november was just the start of it. Funny how the same guys who looked at it then said it was a software problem and they'd removed the offending software and a few months later they look at it again and realize its hardware. I'd kinda suspected it was, 'cause it made the kind of mechanical noises that electronic things aren't supposed to make.

Good news is thanks to my wonderful husband, it'll only cost $100 to replace - I went on Compaq's original site, got the part number and cost ($400) that they recommended and still couldn't find that part for much less. Meanwhile, Dwayne goes to the IT guys who pull the hard drive out and discover the one that it came with was a cheaper model... hmmm...sounds like Compaq isn't quite honest with its customers when it tells you what you're missing now doesn't it? Anyway, thanks to ebay, it should arrive early next week and I will be up and running again by this time next week.

The thing that sucks the most about this timing is that its spring break this week, which means I have extra time - during which I could be working on my computer - instead of saving all my computer work up. I'm using Dwayne's computer, but the software I work the most with isn't loaded onto his machine & since it's database software, I can't really replicate it elsewhere without a lot of extra fiddling. Ergh!

But it will be good to be connected again & then you'll hear more from me... I promise!

The computer is still in diagnosis - I'm hoping we'll hear later today that they've fixed it. Right now it's with the BU IT guys, who can fix any software problem it's having, but if it's hardware, then we'll have to go elsewhere. Frankly, I think it is a hardware thing 'cause it all of a sudden started doing the same grinding, mechanical noise thing before shutting down that it was doing before. And it had been working so good for the last two months.

When I told a friend about the computer he suggested that my computer and my car should quit talking to each other! I agree, and hopefully the computer will come home this week especially since I have to do minor car repairs this Saturday - maybe the car repair will fill my things breaking down quota for the month. Having the computer back for next week would be great since it's spring break here and since I'm not jetting off to some warm, tropical haven of hedonism, I was hoping to get lots of work done.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news, I got my BCIS application sent off last week, so I'll know in a couple of months if I can work off campus this summer. I'm going to keep my eye open for positions in the meantime - hopefully I'll know if I have the permission before I would got to any job interviews. It would be kinda neat to do some work other than teaching, even if just for this summer, and we need the money because we've both hit the cap on student loans and have to find funds elsewhere.

My computer is down again. Posts will likely be infrequent, but hang in there - I need the damn thing so I'll have to figure out how to fix it or replace it... though neither of those options excites me.

I had a great teaching day today!

What an excellent feeling it is when you feel like the discussion in a classroom was productive, interesting and actually *gasp* educational! I've taught this text four times before this and I have never had such a good preliminary discussion of it. And I have to wonder if it has to do with the conscious choice I made this time to structure the beginning of the class period by talking about something that was in many ways actually peripheral to the text. I started talking about a theme that is only dealt with in about a tenth of the essay, mostly just because I felt like I needed to put some more structure into what are usually more loose discussions in class. But the strategy seemed to work. It gave us a language with which to contrast the important parts of the essay, and I think more importantly, the students felt more comfortable talking about the text after they had sat through a traditional style 'lecture' full of unfamiliar terms and concepts.

It's odd, this psychological dimension to class planning. Many times, I can't always put myself into the head of a freshman undergrad - I would find it boring to get a lecture about Marxism when what I'm supposed to eventually write about is Requiem for a Dream, but they seemed to actually like it. At one point, I just stood back and let them discuss it among themselves - they really engaged with it.

So I guess the lesson I've learned is to lecture at them for a bit, as much as I dislike doing so, and then get a discussion going. Who would've thought a seminar would run best with a lecture component? I always thought of them as two different things. If you've taught before, maybe you know what I mean... or maybe I just have a weird group of freshmen... or maybe it was a fluke. Regardless, I felt like it was worth going to school today to teach, and that makes some of the disappointments of the last week seem less intensely important.

Unusual week. I was at school all five days, which is unusual - I can usually count on one uninterrupted day of studying at home (well, as uninterrupted as it can be when I've usually got family running back & forth while I try to concentrate). Now I know you might be thinking I'm complaining about doing something that most people actually do in a week, but with a 2 1/2 to 3 hour round trip commute, going to school two more days out of the week than I usually do chopped a significant chunk out of my week. And the reason I was there so much was to go to a bunch of meetings, presentations, appointments etc., so that ate time too.

Now I feel behind yet again. Ergh!

Oh, yeah, Happy Valentines Day!

Obviously, this day of love and sweetness is not the first thing on my mind. I had to ask the piano tuner the date this morning for his cheque. Duh! It's the 14th! But if you know me, my lack of enthusiasm for a holiday that seems to be all about spending as much money as possible to say things that you really should be saying all the time, not just on one day, isn't too uncharacteristic. And my cynicism grows each year - not about love, but about the holiday. Love I do believe in.

What else?

Oh, yes - Sandy's going to Colorado this summer - she's got a scholarship to go on one of those experiential/human service junkets out West (more than just Colorado). Only 150 high school students in the greater Boston area are selected, and she's one of them! Cool, eh? She's just gotta decide which tour she wants to go on. She seems pretty cool with the whole thing - I think right now I'm the one who's more nervous about it. But she's highly capable and will manage well - they wouldn't have chosen her otherwise.

Perhaps there's some cosmic message that I'm just not getting. The events of the last week seem to have multiplied.

I had a conversation with my advisor that began with her saying, while smiling, "So, we're meeting to plan the rest of your life"... which would be an accurate assessment of the conversation if by my life you mean my academic career. The meeting ending with me having the distinct impression that I need a new advisor. Not because I would not be able to get along with this one, no, certainly not - I have been drinking with the woman and it was all fine & good. No, the reason that I got this impression is because the areas where my interests lie, and more importantly, the areas that I might market myself under, don't really lie in any of her areas of expertise.

In part that saddens me, because I've liked working with her.

In part it scares me because I feel very cut loose. There's a piece of my brain that says I should celebrate such freedom - at least my advisor hasn't planned out my dissertation for me like a colleague's has (down to the title!) - but it's also a bit scary because I'm not sure who to turn to for advice now. Or who to approach as a supervisor. I have some suggestions, but I still feel like they're quite vague and not terribly helpful.

I also feel a bit out of my element - like I don't know anything.

I had gone into the meeting with a series of questions. I guess you could say that I got answers to those questions, but they weren't answers within the realm of what I had imagined they might be, and they generated as many, if not even more, questions in turn.

But I think the part that really gets me is that - I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

It's very humbling when you realize that you've been blind to something that has been in front of you all the time... particularly when the reason you didn't see it is because you were running on an assumption... a cherished assumption.

I have been humbled. I am sad to have to abandon that cherished assumption, but I guess I deserve to be sad at letting go when I was the ass who held onto it in the first place.

I suppose this is how one eventually gets older and wiser, but there's a little part of me that would rather still be blissfully unaware rather than wiser.

Hmm... what to say about the weekend. It has been a full one. It has also been a crazy, frustrating, funny, annoying one. But thank god its over! Betcha haven't heard anyone say that about the weekend for a long time!

Something deep down inside me suspects that it has something to do with my birthday. Last year I hated the day and this year, the miserableness seemed to extend through the following three days. I'm suspicious. Perhaps I'll need to conduct an experiment next year to test this hypothesis.

On the plus side, I have a good friend who was very understanding and empathetic when he found out about my weekend. And because his family is going through a rough spot right now, I'm wishing good karma back on someone who deserves it.

*good karma wish*

In fact, I'm wishing good karma throughout all the places that this post will be read... it may not be much, but a broad karma spread has to be better than just my localized good karma wish, right?

I've been very busy in rather odd ways in the last couple of days. Monday started off rather ordinarily with a visit to the library, workout at the gym, teaching a class, heading home, doing the dinner thing, reading... usual kind of stuff.

It got unusual about 1:30 in the morning when Dwayne informed me that the basement was flooding. My first thought was one of confusion because we hadn't had any rain or snow in a week. It was not nature invading our home however, but the water tank. Nature had invaded our home with basement flooding earlier - minor compared to this outbreak! - so the landlord had left a wet/dry vac. Fortuituous, is that not?

But spending three hours in the middle of the night sucking water out of carpet was painful...not at the time, but even now my muscles are aching with the combined effort of a gym workout and then the workout of the bent-over-pressing-the-vac-nozzle-down-hard-to-create-suction for three hours in the middle of the night. OUCH!

So I rescheduled my Tuesday morning in an attempt to regain some of that lost sleep. But it was pretty much in vain. I called to request a cash release on that loan that I was having problems with, and they STILL had not released the money - needless to say, I need it pretty bad by now. And then the library lost my photocopy card - that was just adding insult to injury. They had my card in the first place because it stopped working in the middle of a copy job and took it telling me it would take a week to fix. And the only reason I have a card is because half the time the photocopiers in the library don't accept cash [as a canuck, it amazes me that people actually would expect a machine that has to accept papers bills to work]. By the time I got home, with waiting longer than usual for buses, I was cold, hungry, tired, and getting wet since we had this weird kind of snow-rain-sleet thing happening.

I get home, and someone has already put the chain on the door, so I can't get in. And there's no food (its 8 pm), and everything that was stored in the entry is getting wet in the snow because it got pulled out so the water heater could enter. I'm afraid I was awfully grouchy. And I had to say I was sorry later.

But, at least we had hot water.

Today was much better. I called to harass the loan people again, and this time they had my money! - now I just have to wait for them to cut a cheque and mail it. And the library actually found my card! And I found out that I have (some) summer work on campus.

Now I just need to finish all these little paperwork things and get back to my reading and meet with the profs I was supposed to meet with yesterday. But that's okay.

You know, my husband is a fabulous man. He's taken care of all this hot water heater thing so well. He's great!

The New England Patriots win the 38th Superbowl in the last 9 seconds of the game and only by a field goal. Well.

An interesting game - the Pats outran and outthrew the Panthers, but they made some bad plays in the second half and by the fourth quarter I was thinking that if they lost, no one should think it an outrage because they were starting to lose it.

I think I like the CFL better though. With one less down, there's more passing and kicking and less of that mishmash huddled up-the-center rushing. Okay, yeah, I know, I'm sure there are proper terms for all of it, but I only watch infrequently and these are the most descriptive terms I can think of. There were a couple of tries at a 2 point conversion during this game, which I think is more interesting, though overall, I like 3 downs better than four. Having said that, I've never mastered the skills of the game myself, and my comments are not meant to be critiques but expressions of my own preferences for amusement. Did that CMA enough?

Attended a Chinese New Year's party last night - emphasis on the getting-together aspect of party and light on Chinese New Year's. I enjoyed myself and saw quite a few people who I hadn't seen since last year. Met a couple of new people too. Got invited to a SuperBowl party tomorrow. I'd like to go - it would be neat to watch with a bunch of other people, but I don't think Dwayne wants to go, and I'd like to watch with him. So since I can't be in two places at one time, I guess I'll have to decide.

Good news: My budget increase was approved, so I will get all the loan I need for this year.
Bad news: They still haven't released the funds even though we're creeping up on a month since they were supposed to be disbursed.

I HAVE SO MUCH READING THIS TERM! I can't believe how much I have yet to read, and how quickly I'm falling behind. It's not even that I've been busy with other things 'cause I'm only teaching one section this term, I haven't gone out since New Years (unless you count stopping in at IHOP during a grocery shopping trip), and I've put a hold on all my other writing. And I still can't keep up! Over the last year I've gotten better and better at reading quickly, reading later at night without falling asleep, staying focused and getting more out of what I'm reading, but it still isn't helping. Right now it's all Critical social theory (a.k.a. Marxism), which is one of my least favorite theoretical approaches - I'd rather be reading Jung even! So my strategy is just to keep reading as much as I can whenever I can and hope it'll work out in the end... either that, or I take an incomplete in one class - which I did last spring and I regretted it for months after. Humfph.

*Sigh* I've spent much of my weekend doing paperwork - a necessary evil you say? In this case, NO. An evil, yes; necessary, no.

I've been trying to get a hold of my loan money since the beginning of the month. I have a loan from a private lender (one of the only lenders who will provide loans to Canadians studying abroad) that is supposed to be disbursed to the University at the beginning of each term. Each term so far I've had to usually wait for a couple of weeks before the University pushes enough paper around to satisfy the whim of some paper-eating demigod - hidden in the basement of the library most likely - before they credit my tuition account and then I can request a cheque for any positive balance in my account. The loan I am awaiting is private - did I mention that? - and has NOTHING to do with the University. This is how I pay my rent, since the stipend - there's an understatement of the term! - barely covers groceries, insurance, utilities etc.

But as of Friday it still wasn't in my account, and I'm starting to run out of cash. I've been calling & leaving messages for people all over the place, but not getting responses. Finally on Friday morning, I got one of my calls returned...

Well, it seems that the University is always looking out for its students, making sure they don't fall down elevator shafts while in custody oops, registered, or spend their money unwisely on healthy food at a non-university eatery, or just plain don't have too much money. Yes, the university has a budget line for me - and I am not to have too much money it seems. Being in the home of capitalism, it's fine for me to work 50+ hours a week outside the university and make what paltry money one can as a student (not me of course since they hate us here), BUT they cannot handle more money for me than they deem appropriate for a student. If they give me my loan, they will be giving me $4000 more than they think appropriate. ("Give" is the wrong word, since they only "give" me the stipend and the rest is loan - which incidentally is accruing interest at this moment and will ALL need to be paid back - no student loan forgiveness here!)

I told her I could not support a family of five on the paltry figure she quoted (I have a hard enough time with the little bit more that I do survive on and even then, they are reluctant to give that to me). The long & short of it is that I have to submit a budget, bills (thank god I've been anal about actually keeping receipts), credit card receipts etc. to prove that it does take more than $23000 a year to support a family of 5 in Boston! No shit - my rent is $18,000 a year - you do the math...

So, I have to prove that is costs more than that to live here, and then MAYBE they'll increase my budget line to allow me to get all the loan money that the private loan company HAS ALREADY APPROVED ME FOR AND DOES NOT COME OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY COFFERS in any way shape or form.

Does this system strike anyone else as asinine?

Countries I've travelled/lived in:



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Lots of world left to explore!

Sandy kicked ass at wrestling today. She got 12 points for the team - yeah Sandy!

The part of Bush's State of the Union address that made me laugh out loud:

"A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription. (Applause.) By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America's health care the best in the world. (Applause.)"

Ha! As far as my experience has been - the service is the same but costs 4X as much... maybe it's different when you're a rich fat cat.

Interesting things

Sir Winston Churchill had a parrot (among other pets) that is still alive! It's 108 years old and still repeats the phrases he taught it including "F*** the Nazis!"

tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous.
2. The act of abandoning a party or cause.

"Doodlebug" in addition to being the larva of an insect was the nickname given to V1 bombs that fell on London (most heavily in July/Aug 1944). The bombs' engine would cut out just before it would hit, so people would hear it coming and then nervously wait until they heard it hit, knowing that it had missed them. You can hear it about half way down the page under V1 'Doodlebug'

That big exam Dwayne wrote in December? He aced it! Yeah!

Currently reading:
Mother London - Michael Moorcock
Tithe - Holly Black

On deck:
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Wicked - Gregory Maguire

Just finished:
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
London under London - Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman

If you've been keeping track, Ulysses has dropped off the list for a while. I'll get back to it, but I only have so much time in a day. You can obviously tell which books I have to read for the Victorian lit class, though it might be harder to spot the independent study books.

The Red tent was an interesting book - it retells the biblical story of Dinah, the ony daughter of Jacob from her point of view, including her mothers' histories and Joseph's rise to power in Egypt later. It's an interesting take on a minor event in the bible, but if you decide to pick it up, you might find the first third of it rather slow - I know I did and had to be encouraged to keep reading before it got good. And yes, it made me both laugh and cry.
David Copperfield, well, it's Dickens. I like Dickens a lot - his characters seem so real, and hence likeable, even when they're scoundrels - but you have to have a bit of fortitude to get through the length (as with most Victorian novels). I think I enjoyed it more than Great Expectations, but less than others.
And Neil Gaiman? Just fabulous! I definitely have to read American Gods now. What was fascinating about this book was the way it imagined the London underground, and I read it along with the Trench and Hillman book, which was a fascinating non-fiction history of how everything under London - and there's LOTS of stuff under it - got there in the first place.

The Michael Moorcock is also interesting, though I must admit it's not a page turner. It's a bit too obscure in some places to keep me up at night reading, but the way he shapes the narrative through the lives of the characters is interesting. The chronology is messed up though, and it means I'm constantly having to make mental (or actual) notes about where things are at during any given chapter. It can be annoying, and is (I'm about half way through), but sometimes those chronological displacements are what end up pulling a story together in the end.

If you like fantasy - try the Gaiman. If you'd like a light read (even though a bit slow at first) pick the Diamant (and no, you don't need to know the biblical references, but if you do, it makes it a richer read). If you're in a blizzard, trapped in the house for four days... well, maybe then the Dickens would carry you through best! *wink*

School was cancelled yesterday because it was cold. BECAUSE IT WAS COLD. Yikes!

So the kids are bored, getting in each other's hair, and it feels like today is the last day of the weekend. But there's still three (!) more days to go because Monday is a holiday and Tuesday a PD Day. And because it's cold, there's not much to do outside. Ugh!

I am drowning in stuff... okay, specifically books & papers, but I'm drowning nonetheless. I pack up boxes of the stuff but it seems like I never get any more space in which to work. I know I tend toward pack-ratness, but over the years, I've gotten pretty good at discerning what I truly will need and what I won't. The big purge last summer sure helped pare things down into the critical and the non-critical. And although I make mistakes about what to keep and what to throw occasionally, overall I think I'm pretty good at it.

But I still have no space. I have to pile books on the floor in order to have a desk to work at. I am drowning.

Okay, this is nuts. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the coffee maker, whose element is on. The cup of coffe was cold because the machine sits next to the kitchen window. WTF!

Cold

Cold is very much on my mind. I come from Canada. I grew up in Saskatchewan. I know cold.

But I don't like it. Why do people here think I would get jolly in the cold? Just because I've lived in it, doesn't mean I like it any better than they do. It just means I think it's less fruitful to complain about the cold. Now, complaining about stereotypes about how I must love the cold, that's something to complain about!

It is cold here. Somehow, this coastal cold is colder than dry prairie cold. It feels that way.

I think I'm also colder here because I have to take transit everywhere (and no, I don't take an underground subway - which would be very nice in this weather). I also have yet to be in a home that is properly insulated. I don't doubt such buildings exist, but in the kinds of homes my colleagues and I can afford to live in, the wind sneaks in through windows and doors at an alarming rate. I see $$ float by everytime the temperature drops and dread getting the gas bill. And the kind of building that English departments get put into is the same kind - it is either exceedingly hot (and you're wearing a turtleneck) or frigid and you have wear gloves to type.

I don't understand why these places aren't properly insulated. We have the technology. Maybe this is why they need to go to war to keep fuel prices low. Hmmmmm.

I went to school yesterday not wanting to teach this semester. I walked into the classroom feeling that way. I walked out of the classroom feeling that way. I contemplated taking their first assignments home to read feeling that way. I answered e-mail from one of my students still feeling that way.

I'm sure that I remained entirely professional in the execution of my duties, but I had no enthusiasm for the task. Usually I do. Perhaps I have a bit more enthusiasm today, but it's hard to say.

I think mostly I would just love to have one semester...one little semester...out of the multitude of semesters I have completed in the last decade where all I had to worry about was being a student. Not trying to balance student and employee. I think that's why I loved the summer session I taught - because there was no conflict with a student schedule - I could just be instructor without feeling like I was stealing time away from my own studies to do so. I want to feel just like student without stealing time away from that to be the teacher.

I know I'll never be purely a student...I doubt many students ever are just that... because I have a family to also take care of, but it would be nice just to worry about family and student stuff without working-type stuff too. It's great experience, but I feel like I neither do my own work well, or my teaching well, because I'm always dividing up too little time between them.

Currently reading:
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Just finished:
The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing
(odd, creepy, but interesting)

On deck:
Tithe, A Modern Fairy tale - Holly Black
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Just in case you're curious.

Some of these last posts have been pretty dull. Probably 'cause I've been feeling off - feeling sorry for myself not getting to go home for the holidays - scared to take the car anywhere far in case it decides to stop running. Ugh! Apologies to all who have fallen asleep or other unpleasant sensations when reading them...

Have been watching lots & lots of movies - it's interesting how your impressions of a movie can change due to intervening experiences. I first watched Spike Lee's Clockers about two years ago. It was the Lee film I had ever seen, and it was in an academic context where we were focusing on the director's oeuvre, tracing favorite scene set-ups, themes, camera angles and movements etc. I watched it last night, and in the intervening years have become much more aware of the music of Seal (which figures prominently in the film), lived across the street from some "projects" (though small) and ridden transit with many people who talked and acted like some of the characters of the film. If you have never seen this film - you should - and if you have the opportunity, watch it back to back with American History X - guaranteed conversation starters and no easy answers in either (well, okay, maybe not really easy answers - I think Lee does cop out a bit at the end and the brother's fate is a bit too unrealistic).

[Seal is also one of Dwayne's favorite performers & his North American engagements are few and far between - he had the opportunity of seeing him live at the Avalon nightclub here last month (while I sat in a lecture!) :( ]

Also watched Y tu mama tambien which is well worth sitting through subtitles for, though I can't say the same for Andre Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake, which won at Cannes, but its faults far outweigh the unusual camera work.

Also watched Amityville Horror. I had seen it before, but had forgotten much of it, and coming back to the movie, I really found myself respecting the decision to leave the ending fairly realistic - there are no clear cut winners - the house is left as is, but the family escapes to start again. Many times in life, there isn't a clear winner, and you have to make concessions and leave things less than satisfactory, but you're still standing - the movie seems to say the same thing.

Watched a bunch of other stuff - Terminator 3 - mostly what I expected except the special effects were pretty wild - Attack of the Clones, Finding Nemo etc,... but nothing else that I'd highly recommend. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to get to the theatre in the next little while, which is a shame 'cause there's lots of neat stuff playing right now.

Happy New Year!

Spent last night with a few friends (who we'd actually spent the evening with the day before too) just hanging out - then over to the local Irish pub for the midnight countdown. It was nice, casual, good evening. We weren't sure if we wanted t to head out because we weren't sure about getting home again (it would've been at least $50 for a cab from their place back here), but with new year's, they were running extra transit of all sorts and we took the commuter train home (something I've never done before). Reminded me of the train rides across England when we were there, only in this case, most of the people on the train were in some stage of inebriation. But it was quiet, with everyone saying happy new year and all. The train was kinda the coolest part of the whole thing.

Happy holidays to everyone. I wish I could be seeing everyone in person who reads this (or at least all the people I know read regularly). So have a great holiday!

I just finished making sugar cookie batter and starting the egg nog (one for Dwayne & I - yum... - and one for the girls). The cookies should be chilled and ready to roll by the time the girls get back from last minute christmas shopping (and who says the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!)

We're considering seeing LOTR in the next couple of days, but there's also a big rainstorm rolling in and the car doesn't like rain, so we'll play it by ear. I also want to see Gus van Sant's Elephant and Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, so I'm hoping both of them will continue to play until the new year. We've also got 17 videos from the library to work through, and I've got more books than I can count that I want to read (including one for each book club). The mother-daughter book club is starting a fantasy cycle, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of interesting books to read. Looking forward to it.

It will be nice to do nothing - no pressure - well, at least for a week!

Gonna go for a run since the temp's in the teens. Yeah! Unfortunately, after Christmas it gets nasty cold round here, but I'll take advantage of it till then.

Happy Holidays!

Have finished papers, marking (including flunking a student who really could've passed, he just didn't get it together and hand in the final assignment) and am now starting to relax.

Had lunch today with Dwayne and a friend from school, got some shopping done, got a huge pile of videos to last us for the week. Now just need to go shopping for food and beverages (another commodity that gets ignored during the end of term rush). It will be nice to have nothing serious to do for a while... well, okay, there's lots to do for next term, but I'm gonna try not to think about it for a while yet....

Big push today to try to finish the first paper. I am halfway there - yeah! - but because we've switched to semesters, and because I'm PhD, instructors have assumed that we have more time (and more brains I guess) to say more, so both papers are a good 50% bigger than they would've been last year. And while I never have a problem saying things, it's saying something useful and intelligent that's the problem!

On a positive note, the meeting on Monday went fairly well on both counts. We had our department get together last night, and it was a casual situation in which I took the opportunity (only once, 'cause I didn't want to only talk shop, and we didn't) to ask how the presentation was received by the committee after I left. It seems to have generated some discussion, which is good, though whether anything will actually change is another story. I also had my directed study approved conditionally if I agreed to add 5 additional books to the bibliography. I agreed, but man! am I gonna have lots of reading to do next term!

Still keeping my fingers crossed that my computer keeps working while I finish off these final papers. Keep your fingers crossed for me too!

I have realized I hate the end-of-term-need-to-write-papers-on-short-schedule. I'm glad next term will be my last one for taking classes and the end of term push to finish writing will be over (at least I hope) in my career.

I am trying to put together a directed study (thanks to everyone who provided suggestions for texts to use), but I am also the GSC rep and am bringing an issue before the committee at the next meeting, which will probably be the same one where they will decide whether or not to approve the directed study - an iffy situation at the best of times.

Wish me good luck!

Computer is finally working again (I hope) - it seems to be working better, but being the cynic that I am when it comes to technology, I'm thinking that I'll keep my fingers crossed and be backing up to disc every five minutes for the next little while.

So since nothing much is happening with me, here's news about everybody else...

Dwayne survived his monster certification exam, though he won't know the results for months. He doesn't think he did very well, but I have faith that he did much better than he thinks he did. It was a rather dull thanksgiving weekend with both of us studying our tails off and my computer not working, but it is over, and now that it's gotten really cold here (we're getting a nasty wind from the northwest...hmmm....wondering where THAT might be coming from!), we're all trying to stay indoors as much as possible.

Black ice on the roads yesterday meant that it took very long to get anywhere, but at least on the bus, you don't have to worry about the driving...just the standing around in the cold waiting...

Wrestling season has started again, but Sandy hasn't gone to many practices 'cause she's also stage manager for the high school production this weekend, so she's been spending lots of time on that. Steph's been managing basketball and homework (her math mark on the last report card was a big improvement) and Angie has gotten used to having mom as her piano teacher (though I'm not sure I have! there's been a few times where I've really had to strain to remember correct terminology etc.).

And me? Trying to figure out how I"ll write papers.... not much more.

I feel like an arm has been cut off. I still don't know what's wrong with my computer. I tried wiping it clean hoping it was a soft problem, but it isn't, so I will need to spend money on having someone crack it open. *expletive*

The good news is that I could get it to run for about 15 minutes at a time, so I at least got all the critical files off it, and have only lost minor, incidental data.

The bad news is, I have a project and two substantial papers to write in the next two weeks. And that's gonna be hard to manage without a computer. Yes, I know it's possible, but it's definitely not what I'm used to, and the adjustment will detract from my efficiency. It already has, just in compiling notes from what I've been reading.

My laptop has been making strange noises...distinctly clicking noises that an electronic device should not make - a clock maybe, but a computer no. And now it does not want to work.

I was really hoping I could avoid expensive repair bills this year, since we spent thousands on the car last year.

I'm bummed out about it.

There's nothing else to say.

So I'm flipping through the Boston Globe and a headline jumps out at me: Survivor exposes Saskatchewan police abuse of Indians.

Great, the only Canadian news I get in a major U.S. paper is about bigotry in Saskatchewan. Part of me suspects that the reason they ran the article was only because Saskatchewan is such a weird word - believe me, no one around here has ever heard of it!

My friend Allie is blogging about how she's happy to be Canadian because there's hockey. And I'm from Saskatchewan - what braggin rights do I have here if this is the only thing they know about those of us born in the heart of the Canadian prairies?

Depressing.

Since November is half over, that means that schoolwork is starting to pile up. It's not reached that urgent-need-to-stay-up-all-night stage yet, but the pile of things that I need to read before beginning to write my papers is beginning to grow. And I think I'm becoming more of a perfectionist, because I keep thinking about all the additional things I should do and prepare before beginning to write.

In part, my problem is that I've got a couple of additional things going on that are taking time away from the usual. I'm trying to prepare a proposal for a directed study next term. Not only am I trying to put together a reading list, but I also need to get it approved. Since it's about science fiction AND film, I have my work cut out for me, because the chair of the Grad Studies committee has a relatively negative attitude toward both, especially film. So, the proposal has to look good - but to look good, I have to spend lots of time on it - which means that I'm falling behind in other things.

I'm also writing a language test this Friday in partial fulfillment of the language requirment for my degree. Wish me luck! I'm gonna need it! The more I study for it, the more I realize I really don't know!

*Sigh* So much work... but the good news is, I only have 5 more of those godawful 8 am classes to teach - I definitely am not a morning person and the early morning commute is making me extremely grouchy... not to mention trying to speak coherently in front of a class for 100 minutes at that hour of the morning.

Had to share this giggle. I wish I had some extra Canadian Tire money kicking around, but I thought it was useless and threw it all away when I left! Too bad, I woulda kept it had I known I could get a beer for it!

Went to a hockey game last night. I had mixed loyalties going in - As a Calgarian, I should cheer for whoever is playing against the Oilers, which would mean I'd cheer for the Bruins. However, I was with a group of 12 Edmontonians (so I was slightly outnumbered) and I felt like a patriotic solidarity might be in better order. So, yes, I cheered for the Oilers. (Though on a patriotic note, only one of the Bruins starting lineup was actually from the US - the rest were all born & bred in Canada, though Eastern Canada, so it was more a matchup of Eastern vs. Western Canada played on US soil!)

And they lost.

They deserved to lose 'cause they played like they'd forgotten how to skate or pass, and in the first period only took one shot for every three that the Bruins did, but they came close.

It is a very odd feeling cheering for the away team. There were a few nasty looks from one group nearby when we cheered the second Oiler goal. I actually was glad we were a good sized group. At least they lost, so we weren't a threat.

And speaking of cheering, I know I haven't been to an NHL game for a long time, but since when did it become de rigeur to boo the opposing teams goal? Booing a bad call, a fight, a penalty that doesn't get called, sure, but a goal? After all, if they other team doesn't score, it's a cakewalk, isn't it? and that's no fun to watch. Where's the excitement if your team doesn't have to work hard to win? Seems very unsportsmanlike to me.

In the last two days I have received e-mails from friends who I haven't seen or heard from in over a year. Wow! One was from a friend who has been overseas for the last year, and for whom I did not have a current e-mail address. The other was from some friends who recently began their own company, and have been (understandably) very busy getting it off the ground.

But what a delight! I've been feeling like I'm stuck off at the end of the world and missing everyone from home so very much, and here I hear from old friends who I thought I'd lost touch with.

I am, as I said, delighted!

And on Friday, I learned that good friends are going to have a baby! Yeah! They are gonna be super parents, and I'm excited and happy for them. Their lives are going to change so much, but it's all good...I'm gonna enjoy hearing all about it!

These joys have lifted my homesick spirits.

Comment overheard on the bus from two pretty women with prim smiles, perfect hair and pointy shoes: "He needs to start buying groceries." End of conversation.

Week 9 of the semester is almost over. Which means we're about two thirds of the way through the term. I'm trying not to panic.

So far, most of my teaching work is done. I have two more drafts to comment on, one proposal, two papers to mark, and a final portfolio to review. Sounds like a lot, and it will take a lot of time, but I've done at least that much work already. And it looks like two of my students will likely drop the class before the end of the term because they've missed so many classes and so much of the work, it really would be in their best interests to withdraw.

But my own work is hanging over my head, and that'll just get heavier and heavier as the term goes on. I still have a translation project for medieval lit to start, and I haven't even read all the primary material for both the papers I want to write, let alone the secondary stuff. It wouldn't be too bad a schedule if I hadn't signed up to take the language exam this fall, which means I need to review my Spanish translation skills, which are, much to my dismay, pretty rusty. I spent most of the beginning of the term translating a German text for the professor who I'm helping as a research assistant, and the switch between languages is throwing me off.

The good news is that things seem to be going pretty good for the kids in school. Steph is getting much better marks in math than she was before, and the other two are holding their own, even with all their extracurricular interests. I just signed Angela up for soccer in the spring, so she'll be busy with that in addition to her piano lessons. Speaking of which, they are going better than I thought they would. I've been trying to teach her since I can't really afford to pay anyone, even at the discounted rate that I'm sure I could get from my colleague's wife. I'm sure it would be better for Ange if I could, but for a year or so, I don't think it will hurt her to have an amateur give it a try. So far, so good, but I'm finding myself having to stretch back in memory to try to explain things I haven't thought about myself in twenty years!

So the semester roller coaster is starting to pick up speed (I'm getting tired of this ride!), and I just need to hang on tight, stay focused, and NOT GET SICK! If I get sick, that'll be the end of the workable plan and I'll have to move into panic mode.

Went to school today for the sole purpose of fulfilling my role as PhD rep only to find the meeting cancelled.

Thanks for telling me.

Apparently in an effort to conserve paper, they e-mailed everybody but me.

Three hour round trip in the rain and cold for nothing.

*Big fat raspberry*

Have you ever tried googling yourself? [interesting how this noun has taken on verb-like qualities]

I get more hits under my old name than my new one. I guess that's to be expected, but I think the ones under my new name are overall more impressive. It's funny who else pops up. When I googled my old name, I kept running into a Lietenant commander who has apparently done lots of stuff (there was a soccer player too, but she apparently only played soccer). Under my current name, I kept running across articles about a woman in Ohio who supposedly videotaped a UFO - the weird part is that she also has a daughter named Stephanie! It also comes up on a German site...kinda tickles my fancy.

I suppose I was lucky to find so many legit references because of the unique spelling of my first name (and of my former last name). If you've never tried it, you should!

Had a friend send me a link to the Observer's top 100 books of all time.

The list anticipates a list being compiled by the BBC which will be released later this year, and is mostly comprised of the reading habits/desires of the staff at the Observer. What surprised me was the low number of these I've actually read (23). Though if you include books that I've read by some of the authors, just not the books listed, my number goes up a bit. So, if you're wondering what kind of stuff I like to/have been forced to read, here's the list replicated along with my relationship to each of the books. I may have to change my response to some of these books though if friends recommend the ones I haven't read.

So, what I've actually read, want to read, would never read...

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes - no attraction there
2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan - read in university
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe - ditto
4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift - ditto
(though I think it might count for extra credit to read the entire thing and not the abbridged version for these two)
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding - nope
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson - probably should - it's considered the first novel in English
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne - nope
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos - not even sure what this one's about... eek!
9. Emma Jane Austen - nope, but I think Pride and Prejudice should count
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley - at least 3 times!
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock - nope, but sounds interesting
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac - no interest
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal - no interest
14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas - abbridged version, does that count?
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli - nope
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens - it's on a course list for next term....
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte - actually have never read!
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte - yes, avoided reading it till I was forced to for a course last year and then was surprised to find I liked it!
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray - nope
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne - yep, American Lit
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville - ditto - ugh! it was WAY too long!
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert - nope, but sitting on a shelf waiting to be read
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins - that reading list for next term again
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll - yep, liked it
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott - nope
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope - nope
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy - nope, but sounds a bit interesting
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot - nope, but I read the 800 page Middlemarch - does that count?
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky - nope
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James - American Lit again
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain - as a kid
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson - yes!
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome - nope
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde - yes, loved it
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith -nope
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy - yep, it was okay I guess
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers - nope
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London - no, can you believe it?
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad - nope, but I've read The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness - might count?
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame - no, bad eh?
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust - nope
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence - nope, but like Lawrence...(I've heard it's juicy, hmmm....)
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford - nope
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan - nope, not sure if I've ever even heard of this one
45. Ulysses James Joyce - on the shelf...the more I hear about it, the more I want to read it
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf - nope, no desire to read it either
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster -nope
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald - yes, liked it
49. The Trial Franz Kafka - of course! love Kafka
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway - nope, and probably never will, tried For Whom the Bell Tolls and hated it
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine - nope
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner - no, probably should though....
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley - yes! loved it
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh - nope
55. USA John Dos Passos - ? never heard of it or the author
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler - nope, not a bit detective/mystery fan
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford - nope
58. The Plague Albert Camus - yep, pretty good - read it in a class on Representations of Epidemic in Literature - cool class
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell - yes! multiple times (also love animal farm)
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett - nope
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger - yep, only vague memories of it 'cause it was back in high school - couldn't have impressed me much
62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor - nope
63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White - yes, love it
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien - this doesn't even warrant a comment - I had to buy a new copy of the books last year 'cause my old one literally fell apart!
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis - nope, but I like what his son writes...
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding - yep, read it in high school and it spurred a whole season of interest in apocalyptic fiction
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene - nope
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac - no, but this is on a must read sometime list
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov - ditto
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass - nope, haven't even heard of this one either
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe - nope, but love the poem (and poet) that the title is borrowed from - Í'd like to read this one
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark -nope
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee - yep, read it to help a student I was tutoring... wasn't overly impressed though
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller - nope
75. Herzog Saul Bellow - nope
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez - love Marquez, just haven't read this one - it's high on that must read list!
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor - nope
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre - nope
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison - hmm...like Morrison, but there are other novels of hers I'd put higher on the list
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge - nope
81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer - nope, no interest at all
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino -nope, might be interesting though
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul - nope
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee - nope
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson - nope, haven't heard of this one either
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray - nope, no interest
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster - nope
88. The BFG Roald Dahl - love Roald Dahl! Have probably read every one of his books except this one!
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi - nope, never heard of it before, but sounds interesting though
90. Money Martin Amis - haven't read this one, but i like the author!
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro - nope
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey -nope, no interest
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera - nope
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie - loved Rushdie's Satanic Verses, probably would put this on a reading list...
95. La Confidential James Ellroy - nope
96. Wise Children Angela Carter - love Angela Carter, haven't read this one though - I've read her revisions of fairy tales (kinda like James Garner's) and liked them alot!
97. Atonement Ian McEwan - nope
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman - nope, no interest
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth - nope, no interest
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald - ? never heard of him or the book

Guess I've got reading to do (whenever I might possibly have the time!

Still not sure what it was I forgot on Saturday. Hope it wasn't important.

Have had an odd weekend. Not that anything odd happened, just that the things that happened seemed to happen in an odd, stretched-out sort of way. I know I worked all weekend, but if you ask me what I did, I honestly don't know if I can account for the whole thing. I know I studied Spanish, read medieval romance and modern poetry, but that amount of work doesn't seem to add up to the amount of weekend I spent working.

It was almost as if I was studying in slow motion - everything taking much longer than it should. Sorta like when you have a nightmare where you're trying to run away from something/someone chasing you, and the harder you try to run, the slower you seem to be going....and you just know that the thing that's chasing you is going to catch you.

And then you wake up.

I don't think I've woken up yet.

Came upstairs to where the computer is to do something but forgot by the time I sat down in front of it. I hate that!

Pretty sure it had something to do with the computer...look something up? write something down? e-mail somebody?

So I'm blogging, though I don't think that was it either...or if it was, I've forgotten what I will blog about!

A few recent posts probably could use some follow-up, so here goes:

I am much more mobile now - although I have not yet gone for a run - and probably won't for another week or so - I feel almost fully healed. Aside from some stiffness in the morning that usually goes away after stretching (and only comes back after marathon reading sessions in which I don't get up for hours) I feel good. I was ready to play basketball with friends yesterday, but we couldn't gather enough people, which I suppose is good since I'm sure I'll be in much better shape next week - they'd better look out!

My computer has been on and running for almost four hours now - and that's much longer than it has been working all week. I have no idea what it was that was shutting it down...and since I have no idea what it was that caused it, or which of the myriad things I did to it in an attempt to fix it actually worked, it will remain to be seen if I have actually fixed it, or this is just a temporary respite.

I also spent four hours poking around under the hood of the car trying to figure out how water was getting into the interior. A wet interior is not life threatening to a car, true, but it is annoying, makes the car smell like wet...dog? kid? upholstery? whatever it smells like, it's not great. And I'm worried that the water will not just flow through the dash harmlessly but will trigger the kind of $2000 meltdown we had last winter. And since winter around here means rain, and lots of it, something needs to be done. I think I found the problem, though I guess I won't know till after the next big rainstorm. If that fixed it, I'll be glad; if not, I'll be annoyed at the waste of time.

I've also had to fix a kitchen cabinet, spray for ants that are invading (though I'm not sure from where), and fix the cheese board (so I could use it for dinner guests last night) this week.

[I really hate being poor and having stuff that is old or doesn't work!]

And of course the Sox blew it. It was really rather amazing - at the bottom of the seventh in the seventh game, they're up three runs and then in the eighth, the Yankees even up the score, they go into overtime and lose the five hour long game! After the disastrous eighth, I went to bed - it was already almost midnight and I had to teach at 8 the next morning - and told Dwayne to only wake me if they won. I woke up at 3 am after a vivid, and particularly realistic dream about being reamed out by my supervisor, but I did not wake up for a Sox win. [insert expletive] I wanted to see them play the Cubs (though they lost too), but even the Marlins would've been cool.

And academically, I still have too much work to do.

Interesting...though I don't think I should quit my day job...

MAJOR STARS

10 names from the US entertainment industry who majored in English literature:

1 Alan Alda
2 Dave Barry
3 Chevy Chase
4 Jodi Foster
5 Chris Isaak
6 Paul Newman
7 Joan Rivers
8 Paul Simon
9 Steven Spielberg
10 Sigourney Weaver

Source: msstate.edu
Compiled at Roddy Lumsden's Vitamin Q site

So nothing much today has gone as planned. And those are even the plans I had to modify yesterday in response to events then. Sometimes I wonder if I should just chuck planning all together...but I'm not sure how you do that without becoming a complete vegetable...and it would drive me nuts anyway - maybe even more nuts that when my plans have to change.

So in my disgust I starting reading favorite blogs...and trying to find the one I was reading when my computer crashed the other day - still haven't found it - mostly 'cause I can't remember what it was called, but it sounded very interesting (and useful along the lines of the last post).

In my random internet wanderings I came across this series of pictures. Before you go there, note: you can change the music by clicking the down arrow in the top right hand corner. They certainly aren't Ansel Adams calibre, but I think these kinds of pictures say something about the choices we make when confronted with the kind of absurdity that the request to shoot a picture proving your camera isn't a bomb inspires in people. I looked at each of them, trying to imagine what the owner/photographer was thinking about as he/she snapped the shot. Some obviously just shot, not caring what was being recorded while others, faced with the demand to shoot a picture, felt the need to compose the shot - some even going so far as posing a subject.

Interesting, in one of those odd sort of ways. I think I'd like to see the rest of them.

Life's getting busy - probably seems busier than it should be 'cause I've gotten the first batch of student papers - always a joy *eye roll*. The one thing I dislike about the drafting process that we employ is when you tell a student to fix something in the first draft and it's still there in the final paper - erghh! I try not to take it personal, but each time I think "I am not making comments on papers because I just have so much damn time to spend doing it, or because I just love doing it - I'm doing it to teach you how to improve your writing!" Usually they pay attention, but it's the ones who need the most help who often refuse to take it. So I keep churning out the feedback and try not to get annoyed when students choose to ignore it - I only hope they return the favor and don't get too annoyed when they only get a C on the paper!

I've been starting to try to imagine a way that I can integrate all my various interests into three relatively coherent avenues of inquiry for the comprehensive exam next year (and the dissertation to follow eventually). I think it's just because it's the beginning of the year, but it might also have something to do a colleague who I greatly respect making ABD in the last few months. And he and I actually are interested in many of the same areas - science fiction, Celtic myth, memorializing in literature - so I guess I figure I need to be just as smart (though my performance on the preliminary comps last year was dismal to say the least, and not an auspicious start). He has managed to integrate many of the areas of interest by forming them all around the theme of memory. So I'm thinking I might be able to do the same thing with myth.

I'm not sure I really want to identify myself as a mythologist anymore than I wanted to be an Arthurian, but it might be a way of holding it all together. I will start to investigate the field to see if it's something I'd like to be working within for the rest of my career. That's the thing that's really starting to hit home with the idea of the comprehensives - they start to mark out a field that you will always be identified with, and I've generally resisted any kind of labelling that would see me aligned primarily with a single genre, period, or theoretical stance. I've been happy to dig into many different areas of inquiry - which provides a fairly broad overview of things, but is also at the same time much too shallow an approach for the dictates of the profession I want to enter.

I hate trying to figure this out! The things I really want to do don't all hang together in a way that will make me marketable in the future, so I need to tie them together in ways that maximize what I want and minimize the outside interference of themes, genres, theoretical or methodological stances etc that I don't want to study. But every time I think I've got it figured, I find something in the plan that I don't like. Ergh!

Too bad there wasn't such a thing as a PhD fairy godmother! I don't want to just get the degree handed to me - I just want a road map!

Our family - I would say entire, but there have been occasional moments when one or more family members have held out - has been watching the progress of the Sox - Yankees match-up over this week. Why do I suddenly find myself watching baseball, when I usually do not more than watch the occasional football game? Good question. Perhaps its just because I'd rather watch it than study, though I think that category is reserved for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Perhaps it comes from having met some avid Sox fans who are actually intelligent too - making me wonder what I might be missing. Perhaps its because I'm having students skip class because they can't be bothered to get up in the morning after celebrating a victory the night before - the series dominates the airwaves and newspaper pages of this city. Perhaps because my book club meeting next weekend will potentially be rescheduled or cancelled to accomodate fans who would rather watch the game than read books - what gives with that!? Whatever it is, I've been watching - and will likely continue to watch till they lose.

Game 4 starts in a few minutes...the Sox need to win this one to tie the series back up at 2 and 2...otherwise, the next couple of games will be nailbiters.

Harvard Square stank today - I'd like to say it was a barnyard kind of smell, which it was occasionally, but I've been on farms, and the odor pervading the entire area was not the brand that cows, pigs, chickens etc. produce - it was the kind that only the human animal can produce with its diet rich in fats and carbohydrates. It was, to say the least, disgusting.

Now that we've moved, I don't always go through Harvard; sometimes I go through the next square down, where the bus stop usually smells of the remainders left behind by people who've drank too much the night before. Different brand of odor. Harvard usually ain't as bad, but today - ick! The place is usually pretty cool during the day and only gets dodgy at night, or early in the morning before the square is swept out, but today it had a particular charm.

I couldn't help but mourn the 20 minute ride in my own car, with my own music, to a reserved parking space that I had before I left. Now I travel and hour and a half (one way) through other people's filth in a public conveyance that is frequently pervaded with the same odors. And as the weather turns cool, I'm reminded that those conveyances frequently are not much warmer than the ambient temperature, which means I don't always warm up after my 10 to 15 minute walk to the stop. I suppose this won't matter five years from now. But right now, it's just depressing.

The major preoccupation of my life is still my state of health. I am happy that I have ditched the cane and can walk (mostly) without it. I'm not too bad in running shoes (sneakers in local parlance), but barefoot I am still barely doing better than hobbling. And my relative grace in walking depends on whether I've been sitting for a while, or already walking for a while. It doesn't even take long - sit for an hour, and I can barely move. Walk for five minutes, and I can imagine actually running again in a few weeks. It's a very 'divided' kind of sense of how well I'm recovering.

Other than that, I suppose my academics are benefitting since I'm not out doing anything, or exercising at all, though I'm feeling like I have cabin fever.

We did go out on Friday night over to the house of one of the other Alpha Omega members. Actually, it was this gorgeous loft apartment that looked like slightly lived in showroom, but it was a nice gathering. At one point in the night, it was just four of us around the table. It was the most Canadians I had hung out with since leaving home. Miss lots of people lots.

Older colleagues keep telling me about injuries they sustained months ago (i.e. half a year) that still haven't healed.

I'm depressed.