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!