Mais Non!

Ach. Exam schedule is out today, and I have only three exams in all, so how is it possible that I have two economics exams on December 21?! Minus several thousand points, Carleton exam planners.

The apartment is full of pumpkins after today's produce expedition. I am eating delicious pumpkin seeds even now. Katherine and I amused ourselves for a while by scouting out the pumpkins, then going to the Heart and Crown at 11 a.m. for sweet potato fries. After that we walked through the Rideau Centre, making revolted "chuh!" noises at all the retailers who have their Christmas decorations up before it is even past Hallowe'en. Enough, yet! Is there no decency?

This weekend is going to be insane, but in a good way. The same applies to the weekend at home -- in a detour that can be seen from space, Dad is going to pick Boopsie up from Calgary on his way back from Lethbridge.

Speaking of things large enough to be seen from space, apparently people have been doing unspeakable things to the Great Wall of China (viz. raves, public urination, skateboarding stunts, absconding with bits of masonry). Given that China seems to be kind of into the whole idea of vengeful, active ancestors, I'm thinking maybe these people ought to lay off, no?

On My "To Steal" List

Hooray! Today on the way to work I had a happy reunion with a hilarious baby. Katherine and I met her in the bus station while we were out shopping this weekend and spent about fifteen minutes jumping up and down, making faces, and otherwise embarrassing ourselves to amuse her. It was very gratifying, because whenever you did something really good she would shriek, as if to say, "can you freaking believe these girls? I could do this all! Day!"

She got on my bus with her mother this morning, and I was somewhat on the morning-brain, sleep-deprived side. So it was wonderful to see her for a minute and make faces and hide behind my newspaper for her entertainment. And now I know her name: Awa.

I haven't said anything about this weekend, really... it was quite nice, I went to a birthday party for a friend of Kyle's, which was at a salon-cum-nightclub. Kyle's sister Kaitlyn and brother-in-law Eric were there, and it was quite the fun evening.

Y Un Poncho Blanco de Alpaca Real

Today I overheard the kind of sentence fragment that inspires intense curiosity about the rest of the conversation: "... well, if a cop specifically told you not to..."

More choir practice tonight; soon choir will have taken over my life completely. But the music is fun and I am making friends with the choir folks (going to the retreat has been very helpful in that respect) so it's all good! And I got out of economics to go to rehearsal. So today is quite Zen.

Mistakes I Have Made

Getting into The Office and into a business course in the same semester. Tell me, please, which of the following is parody and which is course material:

Michael : Phyllis, Stanley, I want you to switch desks. I am going to reorganize and restructure the physical layout of the office to maximize everything. I think we’ll get a lot done. Don’t you? On paper, at least, and we are, after all, a paper company.

Brooke: Mail will come into a special room on the top floor; each item will be opened, scanned, sent to the central computer, and then shredded. Rubbish will go down a meter-diameter clear plastic tube through the floors and the cafeteria so everyone can see it going out. I want study cells set up for meetings -- but bare, so no one can claim one of them as an office. No lingering. Internally we must share, folks, share all, all the time.

Anyway: I have an assignment due tomorrow and I don't want to do it. This blog is definitely going to get me in trouble at some point.

Redeeming Qualities of Planet Earth

Mood marginally improved by sight of huge heronlike bird in the canal, crouching evilly in the shadow of Heron Bridge and staring upstream with steely intent. V. amusing.

Apparently, have become Bridget Jones in sentence construction. Really do not understand inside of own head today. Perhaps bilious humour is unbalanced?

My Yahoo account has spam from Jesus, but apparently the Son of God can't make it through the filter, because He has been directed to my Bulk Mail folder. "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal contact?"

Huh.

Intensity-based targets. Well, that's just dandy, I'm sure those will create the kind of immediate changes we need to be making to our energy consumption patterns. Thirty bucks says that by 2020 we'll all be a little busy fleeing the supercell typhoons tearing across the Rockies to bother figuring out hard caps on emissions. But, you know, four more years of negotiations could work, too. Feel the sarcasm.

I am beyond fed up. The world is just incomprehensibly stupid some days, and I can't tell if that's because I'm stupid or because other people are stupid, but either of those seems eminently possible today.

Also, my econ midterm this morning was Bad. If I didn't know how he marked the first assignment, I would be less scared. And Tuesday's econ midterm was supposedly a series of three essays, except that instead of real essay topics that would enable you to write a decent beginning, development, and conclusion, we were presented with seemingly random pairs of questions. I think I handled it OK, though.

And so, to geography.

New Friends

Against my will, I seem to have a pet fly. No definitive word yet on whether it's the same fly that irritated me last week during a study session by doing laps around my room. Anyway: sigh.

Kyle just called me. If we can both get enough work done today and tomorrow, we may go out to Lewis Black's show tomorrow night. Phwoargh! That would be the bomb. I'm so glad it's not sold out. Alternatively, we may wind up having a Sit Around And Complain While Studying Night. Because I have two economics midterms this week, and there is a word for this, and that word is: bleargh.

Mary Freakin' Sunshine!

After checking back through my last peck of posts, I have realized that in every one of them there has been some element of complaining about something: fatigue (school-related), overwork (school-related), overscheduling (school vs. actual life of fun vs. work vs. sleep), or apocalypse (North Korea -- thanks, Kim). Anyway, I don't want my negativity circuits to overheat, so here is a post of happy things, many from Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was lovely, so, so lovely. My flight there went completely smoothly, and my moment of freakout at the ticket counter that the flight left at 17:55 instead of 7:55 p.m. was completely unfounded in reality. Phew. When I got in, Boopsie and I stayed up late watching Parkour videos on YouTube. Look how cool! Look! Look! The ones I like best are when the people in them don't look like gymnasts gone AWOL from their neo-Stalinist training compounds; it's cooler when the parkouristes just look like regular people.

The fam is A-OK, and on Friday I went into the city and had lunch with my madre and her boss, Diane, at Booster Juice because Earl's was full. We discussed the importance of not spoon-feeding your students. I called Becca on the spur of the moment (well, actually on my cell)and went with her to genetics class and then the library. Her genetics prof sort of vaguely reminds me of Mrs. Kelly, my grade twelve English teacher who I love dearly Anyway, there was a lot of phosphorylating happening and something about reaction regulators. Apparently it all had something to do with the movements of bacteria and their responses to stimuli. Becca can probably explain it better than I can.

Similarly, Heather can explain Darkwing Duck better than I can, because she has it on DVD. (!!!) She came over for a bit and we watched a couple of episodes and it was like being nine again and watching weekend morning cartoons. Only in the afternoon! And then I went skating, like you do, and met Boopsie's friend Kelsie and Kelsie's boyfriend, John From St. John. Like me, John was in town for the weekend. Unlike Ottawa, Newfoundland is multiple flights away. Yuh.

Anyway, Mum and Dad abandoned us Saturday night, so I replaced them at dinner with Laura, Becca, and Katie, as well as Katie's puppy, Gromit. It was most lovely, of course, for they are most lovely people (and a most charming puppy). It is a source of continual amazement to me how different my friends have all turned out from each other, and from me. Laura's in anthro and regaled us with tales of totally terrifying lab exams where they give you a bone splinter and ask exactly what bone it is. Katie and Becca are both so much into the medical/animal side of things, and I'm into... whatever it is I do. And Laura's a Pi Phi, so she can tell you absolutely anything and everything about the Greek scene at U of A (she was happy that there had been a fraternity "Myth Busters" type of feature in the campus paper a week or so back). Katie and Becca are actually in a few of the same classes, which I hadn't expected, but I suppose even in third year the animal science people and immunology people have quite a bit in common. Then we watched Beauty and the Beast and realized that our irony detection powers have developed considerably since childhood. Shopping for dinner supplies yielded new botanical knowledge for Boopsie:

Sunday afternoon was a cup of tea with Tom, who was doing carpentry but has decided that it is not for him and is going back to Games Workshop. After tea, it was back home for the production of Thanksgiving dinner -- Mum, being enterprising, had put the dolma together a couple of hours earlier, and I had stuffed my veggie variation, tofuma. My request for dolma meant that there was no cranberry sauce, natch! We considered putting some out anyway, to garnish the rice with toasted pine nuts. It was just a nice, quiet dinner at home.

Before going home, I also managed to squeeze in a cart ride with Katie and Cricket, one of her two miniature horses. I met her new kitten, Chester, and marvelled at how very, very tiny he is. Tawnie and I had brunch and walked around on Whyte for a while, too. And then it was home for a couple of hours, and off to the airport. All is well, all is well. School is insane, but there are a certain number of good things going on in my life that makes all the crazy not matter so much.

Goder afton i denna sal

First things first: much excitement! There is a new baby! John George (Paul Ringo?) was born October first to my first cousin once removed, Michael, and his wife Marian. So Sofia has a little brother now, as well as a little cousin. I should probably get my bad self down to Jersey to see them, seeing as I am now two babies behind on introductions! Congratulations, Michael and Marian. John is just gorgeous, and it must be so nice that he's home from the hospital so they can get to know him.

On a totally different note, I should really not have read Guns, Germs, and Steel this summer. Because this geography essay could get to be a book at the rate I'm going "hmm, should probably cover that. And this, too. What about the number of navigable watercourses? And the time unique political cultures had to develop? And how about debt relief? And the Catholic Church? How is society structured in all these places, anyway?" Note to self, it is just a 1500-word paper, not the New, Improved Theory of Everything (now even more comprehensive!). And it's due tomorrow, so really.

Here are a couple of photos from this past weekend. Oh, the fabulousness. Diane has the one of us by the fountain. I'm not going to tell you what's in the fountain, you'll find out when I chivvy her to send me the picture! And here she is in the National Gallery!

Jordan and Wulfric threw a party for the occasion of Diane's visit (OK, it was the traditional party for Jordan's birthday, but whatever). It was a great party no matter how you slice it. And, fortunately, nobody got sliced and the fuzz didn't show up. Just lots of people (some B.PAPMers, some -- gasp! -- not, but still very pleasant). Katherine agrees:

Oh, Good

Hey, maybe I shouldn't bother writing this term paper proposal after all.

No, Sir, No Dancing Today

Hello all!

This is by way of saying that (1) I am still alive! Though I am sick and have mountains of work to do, and (2) my weekend with Diane was uber-fantastic and tons of fun, and I would do it again next weekend it were not true that (3) I am going home for Thanksgiving this weekend! Yes, American readership, I am going home for Thanksgiving in October. Just deal.

I will write more about Diane's visit soon. But first I am going to go register to vote in my first American elections ever! Whee!