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!