Bag Lady!

Today I brought to school the following items:

Travel mug

Gym shorts

Change of clothes for after capoeira

iPod

Cell phone

Laptop

Lucia music binder

10-lb econ coma-brick textbook

Two semesters of economics notes in a blue binder

Chapstick

Lip gloss

Concealer (for concealing myself)

Chickpea-and-beet salad

Two clementines

Wallet

Pens! Many!

Hat

Mitts

Sweater

A fork

Bus pass

Deodorant

The difference between "student" and "hobo" is such a fine distinction. Today in capoeira we learned to do an armada and it was quite entertaining. Spinning kicks for the win! A little preliminary research on YouTube demonstrates to me that this is but the first step in learning to do kicks where you fly through the aaaaair, which is just inexpressibly exciting.

And now back to the world where I have schoolwork to do. Feh!

!!!

Alert CuteOverload.com!

My thesis is finally halfway starting to make sense! Oh man. Exciting.

Weekend Update

Last week I ate cookies and pasta and drank water and beer. I have lost four pounds, which is confusing.

Last week I did not practice my Lucia music. I knew most of it for the concert tonight anyway, which is confusing.

Last week I demonstrated once more my exceptionally poor time management skills. I expect somehow to both finish my thesis outline and not fail my econ exam, which is unlikely.

Last week I went to my first capoeira roda and totally sucked but that is to be expected and I had fun anyway, which is also to be expected.

This week I'm going home!

Depressing Realizations

My life is less interesting than the lives of the people to whom my spam is addressed. Look what shot down the intertubes this morning, somehow bypassing my spam filter:

Hi James,

Here is the video of this patient interrogation / cross-examination. I think he doesn't say everything.

I'll ask the psychologist to work with him. I suppose he can fall under hypnotist's spell. Also I'll make him to pass lie detector examination, and then we'll compare all the information and make a conclusion.

If you need me, I'm online.

Gerald.

Intrigue! Lie detectors! Broken English!

Child of the 80s

Oh, no. I have a mullet. Must call hairdresser instantly.

International Relashuns

My IR paper is done, hallelujah. "Done Is Good," as Mum says. Now all I need to do before December 12 is an outline for my thesis and study for economics, and go meet my new boss (not the same as the old boss). Friday night the gang is getting crunk somewhere, I think, and I have to memorize the music for Lucia and on Saturday I am double-booked for a climate change protest for the Day of Action and a roda for capoeira. Overall, though, I pretty much feel jaunty. Maybe even as jaunty as these gentlemen are:

Did I hit my head on the ground today harder than I thought I did, or is this kind of awesome? I'm also curious about those hand gestures at 2:14.

Last Sunday was delightful because I went to Montreal to hang out with Boopsie at nationals. She wasn't too happy with how she performed but I'm proud of her for making it - and for beating the girl who won the silver medal, at least in the pools round. She wasn't competing the day I was there, we just trucked around the city finding great classical music stores and eating at bistros with Dad.

Friday night the B.PAPMers and Notl and Graham took some time out of studying and writing papers and generally freaking out to decorate the apartment. There were some complaints about the lack of oranges with cloves stuck in them all over. And that day it had snowed so we went to the park and sledded like big stupid kids. It all ended happily, the lights in our apartment are hysterically ugly, just as we like them, and our kitchen is full of booze and cookies (two of the food groups right there). Things are looking up.

Feminism Question Time

Hey, if you'd done a bunch of research and editing work on a group paper*, and one of the guys in the group thanked you for the typing, would you feel a little like that guy was being kind of sexist? Or do I just read too many Grrl blogs that make me even more angry and hysterical than uterus-bearing individuals are wont to be? Discuss.

Today is Paper Day. There are four more pages before my limit on this paper but tonnes of material to put in. I guess I'll be doing a lot of "typing". And then it's time for political science, which is terrifying to me and I do not know how I am going to finish it.

Katie has set up a blog to chronicle her adventures at pre-vet school! How very exciting. She also appears to be changing her name to Kat for the purposes of her Grenadan adventures. I may add her to my blogroll. Oh wait, I don't have a blogroll.

*Not to mention: if you were the only one of your group of three people to come to meetings consistently instead of failing to show for no discernible reason and then, later, failing to apologize. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Oh, French-Canadians

Radio-Canada is playing a song right now whose lyrics include, "les terroristes sont partout, jusqu'a dans nos culottes". The terrorists are everywhere, right down to our underwear. It's pretty jaunty, actually.

I Want For Christmas: Caffeine, Seratonin, and/or Hard Drugs

Please let this nonsense not be starting up again over such a great book: why do people think God does not want little kids to read fascinating, challenging, beautiful stories?

Haaarch. Hairball Noises Against Censorship is totally a good idea for a protest movement against this stuff.

Unrelatedly, group projects are basically never a good idea. Unless... nope, still terrible.

My wee Boopsie is off to Montreal with no parental supervision for her fencing tournament. On Sunday I will, hopefully, get out to see her! I am very excited.

Helpful Hint

When you have capoeira at noon, try to avoid waking up at 11:50. However, I did not get kicked in the head this week, so that's good.

Tis The Season

To wig out over papers. The last three people I have talked with have all been basically vibrating with stress. Everyone else is making me feel lazy with my normal course load and lack of job. Whatever, guys, I suck, okay? I'd rather have time to stay at home and make unappetizing bean stews from scratch. Also to fart around online. That's just how I do.

Today has been especially magical for me because I have managed to get coffee on my pants and also in my armpit. Then, later on, I learned that cocoa powder shows up on khakis, and does not come out of them. Frontiers in stainage!

This weekend my running shoes seem to have died. They were fine one day and then the next I made it 5km before developing hideous blistering and pain in my arches which has persisted to today.

Limbo

AUGH I am going to get 79% on everything until I die. I will never get into grad school, if I should ever want to do such a thing. Seriously, so far this year I have gotten five assignments or tests back and four of these have been exactly 79%. Fine, universe, I get it: I am almost good enough for an A- but not quite. Lay off.

Libvember

So I basically won't be leaving the library for the next three weeks. I'm comfortable with that; it's a nice library and there are usually comfy seats available. So here I am, assiduously working on my geography essay. I'm writing about the geopolitics of the oil sands, because my other (difficult, interesting) topic fell through. I probably could have made a case for it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it would just be "hey, this is really cool and is sort of related to what we're talking about except it's fictional!" And I don't think I can sustain that in any convincing way for 12 pages. The oil sands paper has the very considerable advantage of being easy to write because I actually know a moderate amount of stuff. Now watch me get a B+, again.

Shortly after I arrived at the library this morning, some horrible little man began listening to metal at exceptional volumes, such that I could hear it through his earphones from two seats away. WHY would you do that? And then I read a BBC News article that convinced me I am going to get cirrhosis of the liver due to being an undergraduate, and that one day with no warning I am going to wake up with yellow eyeballs and esophageal bleeding. Nobody should ever read health articles, because they are a leading cause of hypochondria.

So yeah. This is a happy library.

Department of Things We Knew Already

1. Norse mythology is round the twist.

2. Colleen is awesome. We spent two and a half very lovely days bumming around eating bagels and giggling. She's en route to Toronto to begin her illustrious stage career in earnest. We hit most of the shopping and eating highlights we wanted, because she's been here before and didn't really need the "this is Parliament! Here is the Supreme Court!" shtick again. Nobody likes parliamentary democracy that much. Friday night we had dinner with the other Jessica, and made the discovery that pizza is delicious (see: post title). Nobody had taken the Colleener to the Glebe for boutiquing before, so we did that. The By Ward Market kiosk people were able to set her up with a very attractive green scarf. Katherine's birthday do was on Saturday night, so we proceeded to the dive bar for karaoke fun times. It was pretty awesome; some old sketchy guy proposed to Colleen and she was suitably horrified.

3. Sometimes Colleen and I are lame. This means we did not take any pictures, nary a one, that were not ludicrously grainy camera-phone snaps. My camera keeps eating batteries, I'm not sure what her excuse was. There are photos from karaoke, but we are singing in all of them and thus look ridiculous. Oh, fine, here is one plagiarized from someone else's camera. I call it "Karaoke Is Serious Business".

How humiliating for the seriously crazed girl on the left. I do hope she doesn't fail her international relations essay.

Goose Eggs

I got kicked in the head in capoeira today! It was (a) my own fault and (b) awesome in that now I have nothing to fear. It was just a little tap but it turns out that when you're playing with someone tiny you have to dodge really low otherwise you, well, you get tagged in the forehead. Fortunately my hair covers it.

In other news, I am the only person in my group of three for public affairs who has not sent me an e-mail saying that they can't come to a meeting we're supposed to be having in a half hour. I guess rescheduling is what Tuesdays are for. I'm not bitter, frankly I have some work to do anyway.

Maybe I should go do that.

School Days: Terror Of The C's

This year I am a B+ student. I will do better. In hopes of beginning this process, I went to a Hallowe'en party (but was home before 1 a.m., which is the new midnight) and then went to see CATS on Sunday night with Jen and Kristen. It was quite good if you are open to spending two hours on plotless, leotarded extravagance. Which I am, obviously. It was great!

But I am doomed schoolwise, oh my brothers. Skip this section if you are easily bored by people talking to themselves about term papers. Don't worry, I'll tell you when to start reading again. This political science paper is going to be the easiest thing to write, because anybody who has laid in a sufficient supply of acid and 'ludes can write international relations theory. Anyway I have a funny feeling it's going to wind up being about the dangers of yucky squishy moral relativism compared with uncritical fundamentalist certainty. For those interested in my future academic career, I will reveal only that my current draft includes the phrase "bomb some of these motherf*ckers". This will be excised before submission. Probably.

My thesis has gone nowhere so far. I've been doing some reading which will be quite useful for public affairs class, as we're talking about environmental matters in Canadian foreign policy this week, but as to what I'm actually thesisising about, no progress has been made. This clever use of passive voice was engineered to avoid saying that I have made no progress. At least I have some ideas of theoretical works that could be useful, so that's good, I just have no idea what I'm applying them to.

Geopolitics remains terrifying. My paper needs at the least a lot more research, at most a complete topic change, and frankly I'm leaning toward the second option because, frankly, the topic I was working on is a media studies topic and nothing to do with environmental geopolitics as she is studied.

But! There is a ray of light in all this badness: public affairs is actually going non-disastrously. Even the group project is going well so far. My individual presentation is next week and not only have I done a decent amount of research, I've also found a cool PowerPoint template to use. Hooray. And Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang have helpfully published The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, which contains almost exactly the kind of background information I need.

Now there will be no more term paper talk, gentle readers. Matt just called from his Outpost o'Isolation in northern BC. Being a junior guy at an engineering firm sucks because you get sent off to the middle of nowhere all the time. And once you're there you only get fifteen minutes on the phone to call a girl, thousands of kilometers away, who is all cranky due to a sinus headache and academic pressures. So basically it's a penal colony with good pay, I guess? And one where they let you do core samples? It is probably much more fun than that. I hope.

This all sounds like I'm in a terrible mood, but aside from an occasional stab of "Oh holy mother of God" terror, things are actually going pretty well. For instance, I made forty-eight cupcakes yesterday, and all of them were adorable. Not coincidentally, yesterday was Katherine's birthday, so happy birthday to her. And Colleen's coming this weekend, so I am very excited about that. And on that cheery note, I'm going to go become unconscious.

Employments

Hello, possums. It is a good pre-Hallowe'en type of weekend and soon I am going out to a party, dressed in safari style. It should be pretty exciting. Last night I stayed home until it was time to go out and see the Red Light Saints again, because they were competing in a Battle of the Bands type of thing. They didn't win, but they did pretty well methinks. There is a chance they'll get a "wild card" slot in the next round of the competition based on popularity.

This post is partly an experiment to see whether, when one has started a post and not posted it until days later, the date stamp shows as being the date of publication or the date the draft has begun. I will report back.

Girl Power!

Didn't get Spice Girls tickets twenty minutes ago. Now they are up on eBay at $953 for two floor seats. Noooooooo.

UPDATE: YAY. Emily told us they have added another date. We are going to relive our childhoods, but this time we can stay out past 11. And our mommies don't have to come pick us up.

This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened, ever.

Just To Remind Myself

It looks like maybe (maybe!) I can graduate at the end of December 2008. That would be ultra-fantastic. All I need after this year is: GEOG 2000, GEOG 2005, a third-year geography class of my choice, an international affairs class, and one poli sci. Oh wait, my language requirement is going to ruin everything unless I can get two courses' worth of stuff taken during the summer... which I so can. It will be fine.

Oh, No.

I think... maybe I am still writing my public affairs paper on something not sufficiently related to the themes we are supposed to cover. But I have 15 whole hours to fix it! It's fine! And at the same time I can write my weekly commentary for gepolitics, attend that awesome One Voice rally downtown, file my passport application, get somebody from the super's office to fix the #%@^ leaky tap, research my thesis, study for my econ midterm, and get my public affairs group project in order. Why didn't I think of any of this this morning when I was thinking how awesome life was? And why did I waste 180 of my non-renewable life minutes in an international relations seminar arguing with the Hate German? I call him the Hate German because I hate him. And he's Austrian. Jokes!

Isn't there something you can do to lab rats where you expose them to so much stress that they forget to perform basic life functions and their systems completely shut down?

Go Team Iveson!

My mother's colleague's son and someone I've known for a very long time has just run an extremely well-organized, Internet-friendly, and idea-tastic campaign for city council and won! This is great - from what I've seen of Don's campaign literature he has good, sound ideas and can bring a lot of vitality and social awareness to the council. Well done to everyone who worked hard on the campaign and to Ward 5 voters for making an excellent decision.

Sometimes good things do happen. That's something I need to work on remembering some days, but sometimes they do!

Two Pounds Of Awesome In A One-Pound Bag

There's really something to be said for a good breakfast. Might I suggest coffee with milk, an apple with cheddar, and a buttered slice of toasted light rye?

I have a paper due tomorrow and I am soooo not worried. My capacity to crank out writings has increased exponentially every year. Writing to deadline is not really a concern, especially because I've already done a bunch of research.

However, my thesis is a worry. I'm seriously starting to get a little cagey about the amount of reading I haven't been doing on it. But it will get done! It will!

Finally, just to make this a complete hash of a post with no coherence whatsoever, I'm in the market for Hallowe'en costumes. I'm thinking either Sonic the Hedgehog (lots of work) or Julie Andrews from Victor/Victoria. The latter would probably be less work. Or I could do something else entirely, I'm open to suggestions, easier is mo' better. What do you guys think?

Rediscoverye of Oulde Favourits

Just a week or so ago I went back to reading Geoffrey Chaucer's blog, which is most delightful and is now linked on the right. Highly recommended, and not just for the very lovely scrollwork at the sides of the page.

Whirligig

I could use this post to do some serious angsting about distance and family and stuff, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to retrospectively enjoy a nice weekend and look forward to doing some good work and having some fun over the remainder of the semester.

Katherine and Jordan went home for Thanksgiving, too. Jordan threw up on the train both ways on their trip to Chatham, poor guy. Katherine and Jordan puke more than any other couple I know, what with the food poisoning and the motion-sickness-slash-early-morning-sickness.

Anyway. Last weekend was pretty good. My flights were smooth. Thanks to a mad sprint down the terminal and across the tarmac I even got the earlier flight and arrived an hour early on Friday rather than waiting around in Calgary. Friday I picked Boopsie up from school, which wasn't technically a surprise but sort of was because I succeeded in sneaking up on her and Kylen as they came out of school.

Friday night I dropped in on Lo-man's birthday party for a bit. D-Prins tried to pressure me into staying and going to the bar but I begged off because I was going to the same place the following night anyway, and had been up since 3 a.m. Mountain time.

Saturday was pretty chill. Katie and her mum came over for breakfast before trooping off to Calgary. Boopsie and I watched the season premiere of Supernatural and had one million conniptions which will make no sense to anyone who doesn't watch the show. I had dinner with Jeanne-Marie and her new boy, Corey, after going to their new house and meeting their new hedgehog, Maurice. Hopefully I got those names in the right order. Both Corey and Maurice are good value, although Maurice is much cuter when he tries to put his whole body through a toilet paper tube and fails miserably.

Saturday night was the third installment of Respect The Ave, a traditional festival of song, drink, and dance presented by many of the crazy people I know. We all crashed at Becca's house, it was quite fun. Dave now has the distinction of having been the most plastered guy in Marco's Donair on a Saturday night; no easy feat. Don't try this at home. Or in Marco's Donair, either. Matt and I did get him back to Becca's eventually, though. It was a bonding experience, though not really necessary given that we already like each other very much.

Saturday morning I stumbled home, dropping off Matt and Dave in Mill Hoods on the way, and had a pretty quiet day with dinner at home. The fam played Trivial Pursuit on Saturday night and we realized afresh how smart and funny we are. It's a quality gene pool, I can't help the way I've turned out.

Additionally, we realized that the answer for every single question involving Canadian prime ministers in our edition of Trivial Pursuit is either Mackenzie King, Dief the Chief, or Trudeau. Hint: if the question is about seances, the answer is "Mackenzie King".

Monday was Thankstravaganza. Danica, who I had not seen in forever, came over for a cup of tea and a chinwag, which was lovely. A few of Mum's colleagues came over for dinner, Simone popped by for a bit, and Becca slept over. We fell asleep after insightful discussions, and I feel we have solved a great many global and personal problems. Take that, world!

Since I got back everything has been speedy speedy speedy. Lots of work, and I have to go do more now.

However, I have taken the Sabbath day as an opportunity to go out to lac Philippe in the Gatineaus for a hike with a couple of the people from the Carleton University Students for the Environment. The Lusk caves were a highlight. Fortunately Paul and Gregory had lights with them so our group of five hikers went quite far underground and climb around on the rough marble walls, squeeze through chimneys, . We re-emerged into vaults of red and golden leaves, clear skies, and brisk pleasant air. The Gats are so close and so beautiful, and we are lucky to have them. They make my economics homework bearable.

I Hate You, Erik Prince

I have a few words for this man. Brazen and offensive are just a few of them. "Oh, it's fine, no Americans died. Support the troops, OK? Tell 'em to have fun dealing with the enraged relatives of those dead Iraqis! I'll be busy swimming in a vat of money like Scrooge McDuck."

Panke & Risse: I Hate You Too

Today I spent four hours in the library, because I am diligent. I learned that academia's way of saying "go away" is just to use obnoxious phrases like "structurationist ontology" while you are innocently trying to understand your readings.

Oh, and then to cause you to remember that you have a five-page critical review to write for the following afternoon. Yay.

Andy Samberg makes everything better by being hilarious. "You're in New York now, baby!"

How To Tell You Are A University Student

You bring your international relations textbook to a bar. You know, just in case the bands come on late. It is possible I'll repeat that feat tonight: I hadn't planned on going out but it's Mal's birthday and Jordan's birthday on Monday, so festivities are in order for our favourite crim major and history buff/barbershop quartet enthusiast! They are separate festivities but I'll figure something out.

The bands did come on late last night, as it happened, and I was there before anyone else, so I was quite happy to have some reading material. It was good to see Notl and Joni, and the Saints sounded really good, as usual. They are delightfully danceable, and I give the evening positive reviews. After a mad sprint down Dalhousie and around the corner to the Rideau Centre I made the last bus home, and tucked myself into bed at a decent time.

This week has been very exciting because I finally have a thesis adviser! Hooray. I think it's going to go well.

It's also been a good week because I managed to find something for Boopsie: the last two episodes of Supernatural. Our usual pirate bay has let us down, and it was necessary to go elsewhere. So she's happy, partly because now she can read all the fanfiction with spoilers in it from those episodes. Fandom in the 21st century is a strange thing.

And so, to acquire my laundry from the machine. Oh, and maybe read some more international relations. Delicious liberal institutionalism!

Da Capo

I am in love with capoeira. It was so much fun, you guys! And I'm awesome at it. In fact, I'm in this video:

Look closely, it's totally me.

In other news, I sat and studied with Indra today, which was lovely because I hadn't seen her all year. As per Mum's suggestion I made a veggie chili, which is moderately delicious though I should really have used the second half of the green chili I bought. Katherine is not home -- she has class, Tuesdays? I think? I should really get her schedule nailed down a litle better.

And so, to get a first draft done on my economics assignment. Ew, ew, ew. This report brought to you by Stream of Consciousness.

Week Three Rollout

This has been a relatively good week. Except I still don't have an adviser for my research essay, because (a) I don't like pushing myself onto people, and (b) I was too lazy to get myself together and find one over the summer or earlier in the year. So that's just a big steaming pile of something that I've been walking toward for months and have now stepped in. Officially I haven't stepped in it until Friday.

That said, this weekend was quite good. Kemal and co had a B.PAPM party on Friday night, and although I went home early (i.e. before karaoke at the POWER) it was quite fun. There ain't no party like a B.PAPM party, 'cause a B.PAPM party don't stop until it has a sophisticated phase-out strategy with appropriate interim measures working toward a longer-term plan.

The reason I went home early was so that I could be up and at 'em to rehearse for Lindsay's wedding, which was a really lovely ceremony at her Catholic church on the other side of town. The choir improved over the course of the ceremony, too -- at the beginning we were so gobsmacked to see Lindsay in her white gown that Pachelbel's canon in D sounded a bit shaky. She looked beautiful and was grinning from ear to ear through the whole ceremony, and I'm not sure if she stopped all evening. The reception was a relaxed affair in the church hall, and everyone had a great time eating, drinking, and dancing with friends. Lindsay and Jonathan went to the Lord Elgin (a rather fancy hotel in Ottawa), while Louise, Anne-Marie, and I crashed Kristen and Jen's apartment. Because we are awesome, we made a fort out of blankets, couch cushions, and the kitchen table, and slept in it before waking up at ten to watch Victor/Victoria and get brunch at the Elgin Street Diner. The rest of the gang and Johnathan (not Lindsay's husband, a different one) went to their Beethoven rehearsal and I took the bus home.

And then I took out the recycling and read from my international relations textbook. Peace and quiet. Realism is kind of a crock, methinks, and I'm going to enjoy learning exactly why.

Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal!

This morning the Geography Club put on a shoreline cleanup at Mooney's. Nothing like picking up cigarette butts on a crisp fall day. One of the collecting pairs got over 120 of the little things. That is just disgusting. I honestly don't know where smokers think these things go -- they pretty much just expect them to disappear, I suppose. It is no end of irritating to me. The park is so pretty and then you look at the ground and it is littered with these little nasty things. As we were leaving, we saw an entire basket of water balloons, waiting for children to fling them onto the ground and leave, I'm sure, tiny scraps of rubber all over the place. I feel like such a crank: "Hey, you kids! Quit getting stuff on the lawn! I know your dad."

I need to do more of the schoolwork and less of the watching Firefly. But my pirate TV site seems to have lost a lot of the episodes to the malevolent copyright police, so I have that going for me in my quest for productivity.

And so, I'm resorting to my international relations textbook and the thoroughly fabulous mix CD Colleen has sent me. Realism and "Saturday Night", a match made in someplace strange!

Katherine is making dinner and I suspect it is going to be delicious. It involves garlic, tomatoes, pasta, and chili flakes.

Fortunate Son

Today was one of those days where you feel like you're living in a movie, because you have no real schedule and everywhere you go there are people you know who have interesting things to say to you about their lives. And then you seem to see a woman walking a squirrel, and before you can realize she's not actually holding a leash, that image has squished itself behind your eyeballs and whooshed down your optic nerve and made your brain go, "what?"

Yesterday I missed my first capoeira class because I thought it started at 1. No indeed, it starts at noon. Well, damn. Better luck next time, Inepticus.

Classy!

Tonight is my first class of the year. Hopefully it won't suck. To prepare myself mentally, I've been watching lots of Firefly and hanging posters and pictures on the wall.

Oh, and sleeping in until 11 a.m.

Kelly is off to Cuba now, and I shall miss her! Jacob came over last night to hang out and catch up. He has befriended a sitcom's worth of nutters and was telling me all about them. Wulfric, Emily, and Nate should all be back on the weekend. Soon the full complement of B.PAPMiness (minus Kelly) will be in full swing.

Caution: This Post Is Ridiculously Lengthy

Hello, possums. It has been a busy summer and, I am happy to report, an exceptionally good one. Let me tell you the stories.

We kicked off with Grandma's visit from Tucson. Well, in actuality we kicked off with me on antibiotics for a persistent and yucky cold, but let's not focus on that. I was starting work when Grandma was here, so I didn't get to see her much, but we did have a nice Father's Day brunch at La Ronde (mashed sweet potatoes!), and we all enjoyed Boopsie's piano recital together. She is getting to be quite an artiste. We also had dinner out for Mum and Dad's anniversary at a nice little restaurant called The Dish.

I was working at Alberta Environment again this year, and got to see the gang from last year. Brian burned me some Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was much appreciated. Christeen gave me a really nice card on my last day, and continues to be wonderfully madcap (she insists she’s reformed and “no fun” now, but I do not believe her for a second). My supervisor, Andy, is a very understanding and helpful boss. Basically everyone was just fantastic to me. Plus, I was part of a posse of summer students in the Policy Branch – Nicole, Blake, Carolyn, and Patricia were there all summer, while the Colleener got hired on for an administrative position in August. We “jollily strolled the Legislature grounds” at lunch (as Blake put it in his final presentation), identifying superheroes in disguise and debating who would take a branch-wide cage match. After work we gave Frisbee golf a try. I learned that I am hilariously inept at frolfing, except in games of Frisbee golf where the goal is to send the Frisbee into trees, lakes, and other landscape components. Carolyn and Nicole instituted Fun Food Friday, a Friday afternoon snacks-and-coffee do which let us all get to know our coworkers better. Sometimes we talked about karate, sometimes about the Darwin awards, or headless snakes. Sometimes we just made fun of engineers (ask me for some engineering jokes, if you’re interested). Nicole is there full-time until December and Blake is coming in two days a week, so they may be able to put Costume Friday into effect as well. We’re thinking maybe a Renn Faire theme for the inaugural week. Work time was fun too. I worked on a pretty big variety of environmental issues, like my usual climate change and air pollution stuff, but there was also a meeting in Red Deer where I got to do some water policy – new and exciting!

The biggest field trip was to the Syncrude plant and mine north of Fort McMurray. A group from various parts of the department took a government Dash-8 up to the Mildred Lake airstrip and got trucked around in a bus all day – it was very, very interesting and really drove home to me the magnitude of development going on up there. The oily-sheened tailings ponds alone are enormous, never mind the mines and the processing plant with its maze of pipes. The air smells of oil. Environment has just set up a new division to deal with oil sands environmental stuff, because the regional office of Alberta Environment is overwhelmed. My desk wound up being on the same floor as a lot of the new division’s staff, a lot of whom were summer students, so it was great to get a little exposure to their topics and research projects.

Another fun part of work was meeting the new babies. Kim and Pam, who I’d known last year, had little girls in November and July respectively, so little Syrah and Kylie came to visit us and were both adorable and well-behaved. Syrah had a habit of giving people the finger, but at her age we’re pretty sure it was unintentional.

Although I didn’t attend Folk Fest, this was a pretty good summer for live music too. Blake drums for a band called snic, so I went to two shows they played with a bunch of other bands. Loud but awesome! Colleen and I went to Rufus Wainwright and Sarah Slean’s concert at the Winspear, which was uber-fabulous. The finale involved a Judy Garland medley and some very high heels, not worn by Sarah Slean. Colleen and I also went to see Hey Ocean! at the Starlite Room. They’re from Victoria and play a sort of laid-back West Coast-y folk-ska (or something; it’s pretty so just roll with it, OK?). Colleen had met their very pretty lead singer once at a party. The set didn’t start until rather late for a school night, so we had to miss Current Swell’s set afterward, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves anyway. The late start also gave us a chance to chat, which was helped by the fact that pretty much lived at her apartment this summer, at least when she wasn’t at our house.

It’s been extremely good living in the same city as Colleen again, even for just a few months. To show our appreciation of her return, Katie and I bought her one of these for a house-warming present. We saw it for $6 in Wal-Mart (where else?) and were struck dumb with hilarity.

Luckily, Colleen is still talking to us.

In fact, lots of other people are talking to me, too. This has been a really sociable summer, and I’ve been out dancing, dining, and trucking around with friends a lot. The only interaction I’ve been lacking was with Boopsie, because she got a job at the drycleaners’ and was working evenings most of the summer, so I only really saw her on weekends. Terry and I had lunch one day when he was downtown, and he also introduced me to an excellent woman who works in a different department of the Alberta government. Katie, Keith, Mike, and I started a half-assed running group (though this has been interrupted by laziness and injuries, along with Mike’s decamping to D.C. for an internship). Despite increasingly painful badness in my hip, I managed to run a 22-minute 5km race for Corporate Challenge as well as one decent 10km and one pretty slow 10km (49:40 and 54:50 respectively).

I hung out with Tom, Tory, Paul and Vic, too. With them I gave D&D another stab and found it to be almost as much fun as playing Trivial Pursuit mildly sozzled, which was a truly choice evening. So now I own my own set of dice. And I discovered that when one hangs out with boys, one plays zombie-themed tabletop games and watches Rambo: First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II. “God didn’t make Rambo, I made him!” A related discovery was that zombie-themed tabletop games rule and that it’s pretty funny when Sly Stallone tries to cry. Burning things is fun, too. For perspective in the following picture, please note that both of these guys are at least 6’3”, and that Paul's shirt really does say "Jesus is f'ing metal".

That picture is also a pretty accurate representation of the temperature in New Jersey and New York City while the family and I were there. We spent four days in New York at the end of July and moved on to the Jersey Shore after an afternoon at Aunt Marie’s. The city was great – we toured the UN building, saw the Museum of Natural History and its exhibit of 200 live frogs (corresponding numbers of excitable children were in attendance), popped in to the New York Public Library, visited the Metropolitan Museum and revelled in its fabulous art and totally cool exhibit of weaponry and armour, and ate delicious food. There was a street fair on Second Avenue the Saturday we were there, and local colour abounded. My favourite quote of the entire trip was a small, bossy girl outside the Museum of Natural History, running up the path after her camp instructor and persistently yelling, “Mistah D! Mistah D!” with great stridency. I nearly died laughing; the two guys sitting on a bench near the path looked at me like I was mental. Mike had told me horror stories about the smell of the city in summer, but the worst place we found was right next door: the garbage bags from the Radisson next to our hotel. Even the subway was fine, the night we took it over to Brooklyn for a (charming, home-made, outdoor) dinner with my mother’s college friends and their son. It really impressed me the way people seem to know and care about their city – there is a level of civic pride and interest on the East Coast in a way I don’t think the West really matches.

Dinner with the clan was exciting, as always: the babies are running around now (except for John George, who is crawling around with his fabulous head of hair). Pictures of cute babies will follow, but I was too bamboozled to take many, so I have to get them from Dad.

From North Jersey we drove south, and spent two nights at Ruth’s lovely little beach house, which is just so perfectly summery I could steal it. It’s not far from a state park, so a quick drive into the park guarantees quieter beaches than there are in most parts of the Jersey shore. The shore has a pretty neat ecosystem, too, or at least it did before everything got so built up. There are estuaries and such on the mainland, then a tiny bit of water, then these tiny, arid barrier islands that are basically just sand dunes, with dune grass and lots of seabirds and things. So naturally people have decided that this is the best possible place to build the boardwalks, those homes of fried everything, of thrillingly vomit-inducing midway rides, and of the t-shirt shops that are the wellspring whence all the tackiness in the world flows forth. The boardwalks were also the scene of my family’s brief-but-disturbing skeeball addiction. We played enough skeeball to win sheriff’s badges for me and Boopsie and a plastic “kangaroo” for Mum, to shame her for having called giraffes “kangaroos” earlier in the day. In case you don’t know how much skeeball you have to play to get those three prizes, just let me tell you it is kind of a lot but not as much as some other people were playing.

We had the opportunity to sample two different boardwalks; the one closest to Ruth’s, and Wildwood Crest when we spent a few days with Uncle Jim, Aunt Ronnie, and Jenna. They’ve just bought a condo in the thick of the shore, so there’s lots to do in the area and a really good fish market two blocks away. Everyone is well there, and Jenna was busy getting ready to move into a new apartment. We spent some time on the beach, and I caught a terrible cold that stuck with me through most of the next week, when I was at home alone. I left a week earlier than everyone else, to get back to work since I’d started two weeks late.

A few weeks before I left, Diane got back from Quebec, Rebecca got back from New Zealand, and Laura got back from Siberia, so we all got to hang out together a few times. The Thursday before I left, we went to Becca’s new pad and had a Ludicrous Dance Party at which much bad music was played and many stupid pictures were taken. I'm looking forward to the ones of our interpretive dance to Rihanna's summer smash, Umbrella. A week or so earlier we had Round Two of Respect the Ave, our Whyte Avenue outing, and I got to see Matt and Scott and a few other people again (the previous time was for the inaugural Tour de Mill Woods bicycle-mounted pub crawl earlier in the summer. All participants survived and had a wicked time). Everyone had a great time on their trips, and as far as I can tell Becca is the only one who’s having a boy follow her home – her Alex is coming to study at the U of A in January, which is very exciting!

I will tell you three new things, and then I will say goodbye. New Thing no. 1: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Yay! I really liked it. Maybe not so much the epilogue, but the rest was good. It is the end of an era that there will be no new books and since I started reading them before it was cool, I'm very sad it's over. New Thing no. 2: ear piercing. I got a piercing on the helix (the shell part) of my right ear about two weeks ago, and I love it. New Thing no. 3: computer. My Dell laptop, Paddington, blew out over the summer, and has been replaced with a shiny little white MacBook, whose name is Rupert. I love Rupert so far, although Paddington will be missed.

And that’s about it. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You have been briefed on my whole summer. I’m back in Ottawa now, and starting school in two days. Everyone seems well here, Jordan and co. are moving into an apartment a few floors down, and Kelly’s off to Cuba for a three-month exchange. The air is becoming excitingly crisp and autumnal, and I’m thinking of buying new file folders. Pip pip!

Abednego

Hooray, final grades are in and it appears I will keep my scholarship! You need an A- average and I have once again proven myself the master of scraping by. I've done my criminal record check for work, and am still not a criminal, and I'm starting Monday. For real this time. And the antibiotics I've been put on for this beastly cold actually seem to be helping now, although they didn't prevent me from waking up coughing twice last night. Last night I checked out the distance I ran on Monday with Katie, Keith, Mike, and Katie's friend Vicky. It turns out that for the time we did it in, I'm nearly as fast as I was in high school! Even with my cold! Admittedly it wasn't such hilly terrain as my high school XC races, but it's close enough, right? Onward and upward.

In honour of the Ladysmith Black Mambazo playing on CKUA right now and enhancing my good mood, I present to you the following piece of genius:

And now off to take my pill. Delicious, delicious pharmaceuticals, how I love you.

Windup, Doll

And so it is that I am back in Al Birda, as is usual for this time of year. The remainder of exams was quite horrifying scholastically. The Middle East take-home exam got away from me a little, I'm hoping the professor doesn't think it's as bad as I suspect it is. It came out to about 30 pages, all told. Eek.

The last few days in Ottawa were pretty busy, not only with the paper. I also popped out to Kelly, Kyle, and Viv's "We're Going to Europe!" night out. This turned out to be quite good fun.Somehow all of the photos I have from the night, bar three, are of Kelly and/or Rachael. In the other three, Wulfric, Janet, and I have managed to sneak in. Rachael and I split cab fare back to her place, and I crashed there and went home in the morning. Partly this was because neither of us had a roommate that night, so it was better than sleeping in an empty apartment! Katherine was in Niagara on Saturday, winning the Best Daughter award for taking her mum to a bed & breakfast with gourmet lunch and wine-tasting tour. Quite the birthday present!

Saturday I had dinner at Steph's, which was a pleasure apart from my asthma acting up and giving me a vicious coughing attack. Steph came and hung out at my house, and Jacob came over later. They were very tolerant of all the packing detritus (viz. my entire wardrobe) festooned about my room.

Monday was more and more packing. And more. And then choir practice, which was delightful but I'm very sad to be leaving them before the 25th Anniversary concert (May 14, if anyone is interested! I can hook you up with someone who can hook you up with tickets). The Chichester Psalms are equal to or greater than amazingly cool, and it's been a blast just rehearsing them but it would have been quite great to actually perform them. Oh well -- next time! The usual post-choir gathering was lovely, as usual. The routine is that we take over the basement of a pub close to U of O, then sit talking, eating zucchini sticks and drinking whatever it is we feel like (except Johnathan, who always has "what she's having"). It almost always devolves into Monty Python references or Lindsay doing the Dying Pig Laugh. This laugh makes Jaime cackle, which Lindsay finds so funny that she keeps on laughing. It is a surreal and wonderful positive feedback loop, surely one of the wonders of the modern age. So we giggle hysterically for an hour or two, then go home. The difference was that this time I got hugs because I was going to the airport in the morning.

The flight back was routine. Since then I've gotten in a minor fender-bender (my own fault, stupid stupid). I've also had Katie, Keith, and Mike over for dinner, been to see Spiderman 3 (not bad, but not as good as the previous two), and been to a bonfire at Paul's. Vic and I took Tom and Paul down two times out of three at Trivial Pursuit, despite having no hockey knowledge.

That's about it from here, apart from an administrative announcement: I may maintain this blog during the summer this year, though I haven't decided yet. If I do, posting will probably be less frequent than during the school year. But I'm thinking about it! And so, to start dinner for my parents upon their return from France. Tah-rah!

Middle East, Blah Blah

The Onion has an extremely macabre little stock news article that seems to reflect current situations. Or something.

Everybody Hates John

What does everyone think of the Shiny New (Leaked) Climate Change Plan? Well, it looks pretty much like everyone hates it. Everybody from EnCana's CEO (Randy Eresman) and Buzz Hargrove to John Bennett has piled on. Ouch. Also, the part where the chief economist of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters turns into Dr. Evil is pretty funny. He threatens us with costs of "billions and billions and billions of dollars" if the plan is implemented.

It's beginning to seem like the oil will just run out before this stupid civilization will actually stop arguing and misdirecting long enough to do anything.

Holy Calamity, Scream Insanity

Some good old mellow times of being sick and thinking too much have been on the agenda this week. I've had a cold that robbed me of my (admittedly divine) voice. I sounded like a cross between a raven and Whoopi Goldberg, with the bad voice conveniently coming on right before my choir's performance last Saturday evening. Ech. Monday I went to choir practice, for I am a trooper and go places even when I can do nothing but infect other choristers with Mystery Microbiota. Tuesday I went out to Free Cone Day with Rosina and Ian. We cruised in Ian's sweet ride. Then I got home to find that Facebook had exploded because Joanna and Jaime (from choir) are dating (OMGBBQ!). It was pretty cute. Wednesday was study-tastic and libraryacious. Thursday was examinationlicious. I wrote a paper on the causes of the Rwandan genocide and neglected to mention any external political factors whatsoever, because apparently I am an idiot, and then I went for a run with Jacob. Hill sprints are murderous, but we must do them again!

Friday night was very busy. I was busy feeling like shit, for reasons I don't entirely understand. I hate not knowing exactly why the world strikes me as a bad and evil place, but no more than I deserve, on certain days while on others everything is fine.

Katherine zoppitied off to Toronto on the Saturday afternoon bus to be a Birthday Surprise for her mum -- I successfully maintained her cover when her mum called this afternoon. She returned on the late-late-late bus bearing news that the party was a very great success and there was much champagne and many teriyaki shrimp.

All this excitement was bookended nicely by a divine Saturday night. I met up with Louise and Matt, Joanna, Anne-Marie, Kristen, and JP to see the Ottawa Choral Society's production of Carmina Burana, a new Matthew Larkin piece, and the Canciones por las Americas, all of which were quite beautiful. After that, it was off to the Thirsty Toad for the Red Light Saints' show, which was very good and actually a lot smoother and more put-together than last time. They're developing some stage patter and seem really comfortable performing now, whereas last time they just sounded good. So well done, them!

Mellow times are being superseded now by frenzied studying for international affairs and wigging out over my Middle East exam, which terrifies me deeply. I am not alone in this, I know.

I got an A in geopolitics and am now going to bed. Goodbyeeee!

Motioning a Table

As promised: the new table, and the microwave stand they threw in with it. Much love to craigslist for this, although the microwave stand has indirectly ruined our Franz Ferdinand poster. I will explain. The Easter chicken appears to have squirted greasy juices onto the poster during carving, which would never have happened were it not for the microwave stand being there to support said chicken. The tangled web we weave...

I cordially invite everyone who reads this to a choir concert tomorrow at St. Paul's, on Woodroffe Avenue north of the Queensway. It's going to be at 7:30 and feature the Toronto Mendelsohn Youth Choir as well as the ORYC, and we'll have some instrumentalists and some solo acts from within the choir as well. It should be pretty cool. Tickets are $7 for students, so give me a ring, Facebook message, or e-mail if you're interested!

Exam In Nations

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that for my critical geopolitics exam, the only bit of my study notes I will be able to remember is this: "We hate Henry Kissinger sooooo much!" Which is really a disservice because it was a fantastically interesting course and I had a blast all through it.

Sweet Relief

Classes are done! As of Tuesday, that is, but today was my first day without a schedule because yesterday was my last day at CanSIA's office. If you want to take a look at our Solar Ready page, it is here. Et nous l'avons traduit en francais, r'gardez!. So that is what I have been spending some of my time doing this year.

Now I only have a one-page-long to-do list to get out of the way before the end of the month! Highlights include four exams, one of which is a take-home, a final research proposal, and... I don't know what else, but I have it written down so that I don't have to remember. One of the things is figuring out when to pick up a table that I have bought. It is spectacularly nice and has tiles on top that manage to match our carpet without being as, you know, hideous as the carpet is. Pictures to follow, fear not, because there is little that is quite so awesome as Real Grownup Furniture.

So that's awesome. Tuesday night I went to Mike's Place karaoke with Jacob and a small group of people who have bonded courtesy of their mutual hatred of their security studies class. Jacob and I butchered Layla ("darlin' won't you ease my worried miii-EEEEE-nd!") and then drank a glass each of bad cider and have both felt absolutely dreadful for some time now. It is not usual hangovery headache, it is more like having a bear sitting on my head and digging its claws into my skull. Oh the bad. But it's better now! It's OK!

Mum and Dad are at an Arlo Guthrie concert right now. My parents are cooler than I am.

"Flight of the Galvatron"? +10!

OK, so on my study break I found this:

Yes, new Franz Ferdinand! I am immoderately excited for the new album if this is anything like what it sounds like, because it is so different from what they have done previously. For one thing, there is so much more synth, which is eighties in the best possible way. The whole thing sounds like the soundtrack to a broken-down spaceship taking off.

Feel free to mock my taste in music and my attempts at pretentious rock critic writing, starting... now.

Pysanky Season Approaches

International affairs paper: only a few pages to write tonight and then much editing to do tomorrow. It will be fine. Yes?

Boopsie's visit was ever-so-lovely. Sadly I didn't have as much time to hang out with her as I would have liked, but she seems to have largely enjoyed herself anyway. We may or may not have had cake for dinner on Thursday night after we went to the National Gallery. Saturday we stopped in at Kelly's shoe store, where she gave me a pretty excellent deal on some fabulous (yet practical! So practical!) red heels. This morning was a very early morning indeed, as Boopsie and I went to the airport to put her on a plane back to Al Birda. More on these exciting events later; for now, I have a paper to write. Below: debauchery! Hilarity! Horrible faces! Whipped cream with chocolate smushed in!

A Small Conglomeration of Things I Appreciate

1. The enormous sign for the Virtual Simulation Building on Carleton campus. I dunno, guys, it looks pretty real to me...

2. The bus shelter ads for Jewel FM whose alternating font colours don't break well over the lines, resulting in an advertisement for something called "Barry Manilow Air Supply".

3. The graffiti under Heron Bridge reading "The blue butterfly of the mind". Extremely accurate spelling, for someone who was clearly on acid.

4. The efficient, friendly, and Hot/Guilt-Trippy waiters at the Greek Place. Always a pleasure.

5. Boopsie is coming to visit on Monday! I only have twelve pages to write before she gets here. Excellent.

In other news, I'm sleep-deprived and cranky, oh wait that's not news at all. And I've sent out my CanSIA resignation, though everybody knew I was leaving at the end of the month anyway because that's when my contracts are due.

The New Yorker Is King For The Day

This is uncommonly good: The Wisdom of Children. Link courtesy of Dooce.

Potatoes: Because Saint Patrick Says So

Delicious roast potatoes. I love potatoes. As members of the carbohydrate family they are automatically a superior foodstuff.

Not much new here. Mad, mad, mad amounts of work to do before the charming Boopsie comes to visit, but it is actually looking semi-feasible since my research methods statement is working out fairly well so far. It could even be good, or close to it...

Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

Reasons to adore Nature: it has, in the recent past, featured the sentence "We believe the assumption that wizarding has a genetic basis to be deterministic and unsupported by available evidence." Sublime. This was in a rebuttal to a brief piece speaking about how Harry Potter analogies could be used to teach children Mendelian genetics. For instance, Neville Longbottom's poor wizarding skills demonstrate variable expressivity of the wizarding gene (as opposed to incomplete penetration, as stated by the authors of the original piece, "Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele"). Everybody and his Muggle-born brother is writing about HP these days, but hey, I'm definitely buying and reading Deathly Hallows the instant it comes out, despite the slightly lame title, so who am I to judge?

I Prefer to Think of it as Impromptu Gravity Research

Finished my Africa essay. I think it is respectable but not phenomenal, which is becoming usual given the amount of work I have to do and the mysterious capacity of my own motivation to recede when I need it most. Fell over on my way to school, so that I walked into class with a scraped knee to match my cracked hands, which themselves were holding a book the prof had lent me so that I could let my nose haemorrhage all over the cover. Apparently I am some kind of reverse vampire, sprinkling all with delicious plasma.

Public affairs class was insane on Monday because everyone got angry because we didn't get our assignments back. The next assignment was supposed to be handed in in the next class and we need the first assignment to do the second. Whatever, it's not like I was going to do it until the weekend anyway, right? Right? And there's no way it was going to meet the prof and TA's standards because, among other problems, we all speak Quantitativese but they speak Qualitarian. The translation is not smooth so far. It is probably a bad sign that these assignments have taken so long to mark in the first place, as it suggests quite a lot of red ink.

Kelly, Wulfric and Steph jointly win the Champs of the Day Award for their heroic nocturnal essay-writing. I wish all three a very good sleep. Perhaps I will even refrain from misting them with blood should I pass them on the street.

She Goes To The Land Down Under

While I'm thinking of it: I've meant to post a linky to Becca's New Zealand blog, since it is a very entertaining read and helps us keep track of the adventures of our favourite honours immunology student. So here she is:

Kiwi, or Beckie Does New Zealand

Gumball Wizard

Here is the truly fabulous cake Katherine made for Kelly's birthday. The only photo I took of the birthday girl didn't turn out because in it she is taking a big breath to blow her candles out. Other people's cameras took over for the remainder of the evening, so get Facebooking if you want to see those!

Here She Comes In Her Palanquin

Tonight is the PAPM formal but I am not going, because tickets are mad expensive and I didn't really feel like getting gussied up and wearing heels. Besides, I'd be pretty much the only person I know who wasn't going as one of a pair, and this gets awkward when the DJ starts playing slow dances. So I figured I'd sit this one out. I might meet up with some of the gang later in the evening (there's nothing like attending the after-party but not the party).

This week has been pretty standard, I guess.

Sunday was lovely before the Ersatz Cashew Incident -- brunch at Cora's with Katherine was first on the agenda, and was most delicious. We bummed around the Market for a bit, and bought a couple of stylish buttons and a picture book for Jordan, because it is not every day that one finds a children's book about Operation Barbarossa. Then I left Katherine to meet up with Goran for a coffee and walk-and-talk, followed by thoroughly delightful grocery shopping with Steph. She lives close to Chinatown and is good with the Asian cooking, so she gave me a guided tour. We bought all kinds of nice things, including some delicious, cheap snow peas and chili garlic sauce, and did some Girl Talk. However, it later turned out that she had bought a bad piece of ginger. And I would now like to warn everyone in my small readership that packaged mango with chili tastes disconcertingly like sweet pickles, and it will wig you out if you are not prepared.

Another highlight of the week was going out for a drink after choir with a bunch of the Chorister Posse. They are fun folks, and I got home early enough to actually wake up on time for Politics of War in Africa on Tuesday morning.

Work was hellish on Wednesday because a couple of people criticized the organization for things over which we had no control or which we already knew needed fixing. One of these was someone who had some perfectly reasonable things to say until he came a little unglued... and that was on a call where I called him. Ambush!

Janet Wulfric's Girlfriend (she's very sweet) has come over to start getting ready for formal. She's in humanities, and they're having their formal in the same building on the same night, but she's coming to ours. Ha, hums kids! We win!

Any Blogger Worth Her Salt...

... would be blogging immediately upon her arrival home from the hospital. I am taking out a vendetta on the Independent at Meadowlands and Merivale for labelling as "Cashew Pieces, $7.99/lb" a bulk bin containing, yes, some cashew pieces, along with a lot of peanut pieces. But I am fine, and still wearing my hospital bracelet.

At about quarter to eight, I put the curry I'd had for dinner (okra and tofu, yum) into a plastic container and sprinkled some "cashew pieces" over top for later, then popped a handful into my mouth. About forty-five seconds later I started feeling decidedly itchy and hive-ridden in the throat and mouth, and called upon the gallant services of Emily and Katherine. They promptly called TeleHealth Ontario, which told me to use my Epi-pen and put us through to 911 at incredible speed. The ambulance was out front by eight o'clock and we watched them come in on the closed-circuit camera.

By this time the Epi-pen was kicking in but good. Epinephrine is not really a fun trip. It's basically a terror hormone, as far as I can tell -- you start feeling quakey and too-fast, and as it wears off your teeth chatter, your muscles tense up, and you shake. Much to Katherine and Emily's amusement, the heart monitoring equipment the paramedics had me on sped up every time I was asked a question. Decisions are, yes, scarier than potential bodily harm. I elected to go to the hospital, just for safety. It turned out not really to have been necessary. We rode to Ottawa General in an ambulance, but with the sirens off which made me feel that probably I was okay. The wait time was six hours, increasing to eight after Katherine and I arrived. So all we did was get me checked in, say goodbye to our charming new paramedic friends ("I hope I never see you again, okay? Take care."), and sit around for three hours or so trying to avoid the no-doubt exotic germs of the other E.R. waiting room denizens.

At quarter to midnight, Emily and Nate came and drove us home, which was very and extremely nice of them and much appreciated.

I'm going to bed, because the scary injected adrenaline high has worn off. But on that note, I would just like to proclaim my high opinion of whoever designed the wonderful and user-friendly Epi-pen. I'm hoping never to use it again, but it is pretty fabulous when you need it. The same goes for our friendly neighbourhood paramedics, Colin and Warren. And rest assured I will be paying the Independent a visit tomorrow.

Uncharming!

Well, it is minus six outside, wind chill minus 15, and this would be fine except that the wind is blowing ice pellets, which are banging on my window as if thousands of Lilliputians were trying to get me to sneak out of the house and go to the malt shop with them in some horrifying 1950s film (Daddio Gulliver's Travels). And yet we have to go to school. It is un-hep.

What is even less hep is that our air conditioner is letting gusts of freezing air into the main room. But at least that is fixable.

The Joys of Solid Food

One of the reasons I adore the BBC's website is that it shows you what other people are searching for. Right now, other people are searching for: pussycat dolls, iceland, kenya. Gee, I'm pretty sure I know where the last two are, but the first item is probably on tour.

This has been rather a good Reading Week, though as usual I didn't get nearly enough work done. I flew in on Thursday the 15th and got myself home before getting up obscenely early for my wisdom teeth thing. It was... well, it was pretty much like pulling teeth. They gave me Halcion, which was relaxing though not as exciting as the name implies. Friday was a day of drooly sleep (just like every other Friday, what?) but in the evening I felt pretty good and was able to talk to Simone when she came over, bringing me two lovely little jewellery boxes and many photos of her family visit to Goa over Christmas. Everyone looked so happy and warm and full of delicious seafood; we were all extremely jealous!

The weekend was not eventful. I wore pajamas and ate a lot of jello and soup, before getting back onto semi-solid food on Sunday. Hooray. Keith came over (Katie was in Whistler) and we watched Running With Scissors, the extremely insane film version of Augusten Burroughs' memoirs. It was good, but don't watch it if you have a low tolerance for substance abuse, family dysfunction, and Freud.

Monday morning Mom and I left for Jasper, and got in a delicious half-day of skiing/riding at Marmot Basin. Tuesday morning was insane for me because I chose to take another run before our hot chocolate break and got stuck at the top of the mountain in weather like this:

With blowing snow, aw yeah. Because I couldn't see where "downhill" was, I took a couple of good sit-downs before getting down into the basin where the wind wasn't so bad. Happily for us, it turned bluebird in the afternoon, or at least non-apocalyptic. By the time Dad arrived on the 5:45 Greyhound, it was actually pretty nice out.

Wednesday was another brilliant day of skiing. I did a couple of runs on the delightful mogully powdery stuff off the Knob chair. The universe decided to freak me out by peopling the chair behind mine with two guys who talked the entire way up about how "they shouldn't even stop this chair, ever, because if you fall over getting off this chair, you shouldn't be on this chair." But I survived anyway, and was rewarded with scrumptious dinner at Andy's Bistro. This is one of the reasons it is good to go places with one's parents rather than with fellow cheap students: cup-o-soups < assorted salads, wild mushrooms on corn bread, and vegetable stuffed green peppers. Also, there was a rather edifying discussion of Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device which ended with Dad insisting that linguists are wrong to say there is an infinite number of sentences in the English language, because that's the whole point of infinity. I volunteered that Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.

Anyway. Skiing good. We managed to be the first car in the lot on Thursday morning, much to our satisfaction:

Thursday afternoon we drove back, and Friday we had Katie, Keith, and Laura over for dinner, which was most lovely. This is probably the only week that I have seen Keith sans Katie since high school, which is sort of bizarre, but hey! We'll take whoever turns up, particularly when they are as nice as Keith is. Katie was both late and early for dinner, leaving for a couple of hours to go to a horse acupuncture demonstration. Well may you ask: she says the horses enjoyed it.

The downside of this week's schedule was that I didn't have much time with Boopsie, because Model UN precluded her coming along to Jasper. I did get to see her a few nights and go "BYE!" at her extremely early on Saturday morning before Dad took me to the airport. But we'll make up for it when she comes to visit in March.

Whoopee Hooray

Hm... I'm talking with Bev on MSN about my impending wisdom teeth removal, and have just realized that a weekend lying in bed drugged and eating Jello actually sounds really good.

Also, I think I have a stye in my eyelid. Because everyone who reads my blog needs to know this, as my personal medical consultant. This state of affairs would be fine if I could just close my eyes and sleep but no, I have to finish this public affairs commentary so I can get up early to study for Africa, which sounds like a charity event but again no, it's actually just me studying to save myself.

Libera Animas Defunctorum

It has been a while since my last post, so here I am! We got some sad news this weekend: Katherine's grandmother passed away on Sunday. It wasn't unexpected, she had been declining, but probably that doesn't help that much. Katherine was able to go home for the visitation and funeral, though.

Several days have passed since I started writing this. It's two performances at the NAC later, and it was quite delightful. The choir kids got to use the extra tickets for the concert to sit in the front row, because we weren't on until after intermission. The Ottawa Fesival Choirs led off the concert with Faure's Pavane, op. 50, which is meltingly gorgeous even if the program was very disparaging about the lyrics. These are described variously as a "saccharine poem" and "merely a textual overlay", but this is okay because it "adds nothing essential to the music itself". Burn. Amanda Forsyth then played Shostakovich's cello concerto no. 1 op. 107. The cello diva wears a great deal of eyeshadow, but it went with her blue-and-gold gown with a Cleopatra collar. Anyhow, that didn't really matter because hot griddlecakes, can that woman play! It was the orchestral equivalent of a rock concert. The fact that the piece she played is insaaaane helped, because it must be mindbogglingly difficult to play as well as being really cool.

Anyway, I must get back to my studies. Politics of War in Africa midterm is on Tuesday and I am terrified.

How Very True

Due to the apparently paucity of information on Mozambique and Angola in our school library system, I am finding myself driven to Wikipedia to find other books to look in. However, the following problem has presented itself:

(This image borrowed without authorization from xkcd)

Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby

New Kaiser Chiefs song on the radio = good week, apparently. Most things have been going well. I had a moment of doubt on Tuesday, but the usual fun in international affairs followed by a trip to the gym with Kelly did the trick! It looks like I'm coming back to the Birda for summer, too, so that's been cheering me up. It's not that I don't like Ottawa and my friends, my job, and my school work here -- actually, all of the above have been going quite well -- but it will be nice to have a change of pace and to be back home. Also, since the thing I've been really excited about is that Boopsie is coming to visit in March, it kind of made sense to go back where she is.

Monday I went to a pro-Kyoto demonstration in the morning, in -29C, of course -- nothing brings out the chill like global warming. Jack Layton was there, busily having Paul Dewar inform people that the reason Jack got into politics was climate change, not mentioning the fact that the day before he'd been really big on ATM fees being the anti-Christ. Oh, politics, what incoherent bedfellows you make. But I still love David Chernushenko, who was also there and who spoke very well from the depths of a hideous Gore-tex parka. Anyway, I then went to Zak's Diner for breakfast with Karen, who graduated a year after me from Facey and is now taking design at Algonquin. We had delicious diner food and caught up -- she's one of those people whose social circle overlapped with mine, but we never actually talked that much.

Internationally, the Middle East continues to wig out. This is sad.

And now, I have to go finish my paper outline on contemporary Israeli geopolitics. Right after I watch Ugly Betty. Actually, it's pretty much done. Yay for sleeping tonight!

Spam A La Mode

"fat umbrella"

"A volumetric by pooh"

Who on Earth is responsible for spam? What is the purpose of the spam economy? Is anyone actually making any money off such things? My answer, of course, is that aliens are responsible.

Saturday Night's All Right

Hello all! Apologies for my absence from blogland but I have been very busy doing I am not quite sure what. Another relatively uneventful week in Me-land...

Monday I went to the Rideau Centre after class (public affairs; social science research theory; kind of tedious but I'll live). There I haggled for Mum's birthday present with a middle-aged Indian dude. It was kind of fun. And I know I got a better price than I would have gotten on something similar at the Bay, because I went to check before I bought it. So I saved, oh, $10 or so. Whee! Then it was off to choir practice, where I was delighted to see that we are singing Goin' Home from the New World Symphony, which is one of my absolute favourites. We're also singing Gate Gate, the Chichester Psalms, J'entends le moulin, and Soon Ah Will Be Done Wi' De Troubles Of Dis World. Not sure how we're going to handle the patois in that last one, as we are the Whitest Choir Ever. J'entends le moulin is a real blast from the past for me, because I remember singing it with my elementary school choir. Good days, good days.

Thursday there was a CUSE Coalition (Carleton University Students for the Environment) meeting at which there were some very good people interested in waste disposal, climate change, biodiversity and other worthy causes. There was also pizza, so plus several hundred points for that. I would like to issue a memo: Fida's Pizza makes a fine slice.

After the meeting I repaired to the library for a couple of hours and read about massacres and the Lebanese civil war. Charming stuff. It's surprising to me, though, how well I am holding up. I expected to be working toward a minor in Hysterical Weeping this semester, what with my two courses on Africa and the Middle East. Instead, though, I'm finding it's very easy to be sympathetic to all sides and to understand that motivations are complicated. We are all afraid, sometimes, and when large numbers of people are very afraid, for their lives, their livelihoods, their family, or their country for a long time, strange and terrible things happen. This doesn't make it desirable or okay, it's just what happens.

Post-library I went to Rosina's on-campus pad, and from there out to Sin, which happens also to be the capital of the People's Republic of Lame. It was the Journalists for Human Rights fundraiser and turnout was okay, but that didn't change the fact that the music kind of sucked. Oh well. Ian, Rosina and Adam and I went across the street to a bar and grill for nachos, which was much more satisfactory. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful in locating any cider -- apparently Elgin Street is a cider-free zone.

My Friday classes rule. For reals. And then Katherine made cookies, hurrah, and I went out for a run with Jacob in minus several thousand degree weather. Most of our conversation during the run consisted of saying, "My eyes are freezing shut. We are so hardcore." "God, I know. I can't feel my legs, but they are still moving!" It was pretty cool, and we did 9.5km, and we are awesome. That is all. And then I got home and ate a lot of cookies, because I deserve them. Jordan came over last night to hang out with Katherine, and it struck me once again what a very intelligent and nice guy he is. Three cheers!

Tonight the lovely Steph is having a very small group over to her place for her birthday festivities. It is most excellent that she is having a party, because last week she was going, "naaaah, I don't think I will, I don't even like birthdays." So much for that! I will be celebrating not only for her but also for Dad, because his birthday was yesterday. It wasn't very exciting for him, but there is talk of going for brunch at La Ronde, where there is deliciously delicious bread pudding. Or so I hear.

Anyway. After Steph's I'm going out to Pier 21 with some people -- not sure exactly who, but Em and Katherine are in. Wulfric's brother Axel (fabulous names in that family!) is in town, so hopefully the guys come. We all want to meet him, partly because then we will have met someone called Axel. Which would be awesome.

Tallyhooooooe!

Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled Due To Lack Of Interest

This has been nice quiet weekend, to settle down after last weekend's birthday fun. Friday night I watched both volumes of Kill Bill with Jacob, though I can't say I'm really a fan of it. Clockwork Orange is horrendously violent but for the purpose of posing an interesting moral question; Tarantino just seems to want to see how stylized and surreal he can make gore. There are some very beautifully shot sequences, sure, but it seemed kind of empty to me. The Bride's need for vengeance is never questioned outright, except maybe for a certain amount of ambiguity in her actions: she puts off killing someone until their child is not in the room. Anyway, corpses shouldn't mist blood 10 feet into the air. It's nasty.

Yesterday there was a rehearsal for the performance of Faure's Requiem in February (augh! So soon!). I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but it's actually a fantastic score so I've really come around to it. This applies particularly to the part where we get to sing "dies illa, dies irae, calamitatus et miseriae" with utmost jauntiness. That day shall be a day of wrath, a day of ire, of calamity and misery, hooray!

It occurs to me I haven't actually said what we did for the afore-mentioned birthday: Katherine and Emily took me to the Mud Oven on Bank Street, where we painted various pottery items. I did a paisley-patterned soap dispenser, because our old one was plastic and exceptionally ugly. It has turned out very well, methinks. Then we went out to Pier 21 with Janet and Wulfric, Kelly and Kyle, and Katherine. Emily stayed home because she was feeling poorly -- she seems better now, but had a nasty cold/fever thing last week.

Without further ado, here are a few photos:

This was truly a spectacular birthday cake.

Katherine and Wulfric are what make public transit classy.

Kelly and Kyle: equally classy.

The Gals: me, Katherine, Kelly, and Janet.

Janet and Wulfric.

To the victor go the spoils!

And-a Apricot-a Too

Rosemary Clooney singing Come On To My House is maybe the best thing ever. EVER. It's funhousey and ethnic and cool.

Also pretty great? The Office and Ugly Betty tonight. My favourite moment from the latter was when Amanda, the mean blonde girl, dialled the phone in preparation for evildoing and then smirked, "it's totally ringing," while waiting because, like, it totally was ringing. It was a throwaway line but the delivery really made it.

Today was good, actually. I haven't seen my roommate once all day. Hurrah! I kid, that wasn't the reason it was good. Oddly, she's been much more cheerful and pleasant since someone got back from a weekend away. But they're out tonight, which is OK because sometimes one just needs a little space in which to dance madly to Rosemary Clooney songs -- I haven't felt much like hanging out with anyone lately, it seems to be time for repelling classmates in a sort of Teflon fashion by being sullen and irrational. Whatever, I am just a mean person who hates six billion people for no palpable reason (except you, Elementary School Nemesis Jason. I have many excellent reasons to hate you). Anyway, I think the reason today was good was because I went to the gym after work. We also had a fairly productive staff meeting. My running shoes have started giving me blisters. Boo. Kelly is getting me into good habits of actually doing weights when I go to the gym so that I don't collapse of osteoporosis by the time I retire. She is a very good influence, despite being a crazy person who works two jobs while taking a full course load. How does she do it? Come to think of it, how does Katherine get up at 4:30 a.m. to go to work? How does Jacob build his own zipline and not die while I, whilst holding the rope, manage to fall down a gully? Wonders never cease.

I'm going to the bank tomorrow morning. They will say, "you want to save how much money per month? Sure, you can go to Europe... by cargo freighter, in 2071!" Man, I hate those guys at the bank. Except I'm pretty sure it's actually a woman.

Augh! Late! Late! Sleep.

Next, Please

Let me just say that the amount of reading I have this semester is insane. This week I have read 200 pages of the Middle East textbook, journal articles, and internet sources. Class is tomorrow and am still not done. This is because I have been busy spooning up the alphabet soup of my African conflicts textbook:

"Thus it was that in March 1962 the UPA formed a front with former members of earlier associations such as ALIAZO (Association of Natives of Zombo) and ASSOMIZO, which had created the PDA, from the later union with which emerged the FNLA."

OMGWTFBBQ. All of this frontin' is taking place in Angola, in case you're interested. I'm certainly not, because this text seems to eject characters onto the stage as though from a chicken cannon in the wings. They just appear, with no exposition, such that every so often F.W. de Klerk wanders onto the scene and you wonder whether he's left his reading glasses in the parlour, because he has no apparent connection to the events of the previous sentence. However, apart from the risk of eye strain, my classes this semester look much better than last semester. This is good, because frankly if it had been worse I would have had to seriously reconsider my choice of major/school/planet.

Anyway. The birthday celebrations on Tuesday were modest yet fab -- Wulfric, Janet, Kelly, Katherine, and I went to Grace O'Malley's. Jordan tried to come, but didn't arrive in time to beat the lineup, so he got stuck outside. Further festivities are planned for the weekend. Wulfric's birthday was on the 7th, so I suppose this is a nice little tapering-down of birthday stuff for him. He had a Beerfest/Beerstravaganza/Beer Mitzvah on Saturday. The proceedings were impressive in the dedication of the participants and also in the true foulness of the rum selection. Note: just because the British Navy drank it doesn't mean normal human beings should.

I departed Jordan/Wulfric/Derek's to hang out at Jacob's, where his dad was having an office party featuring Steph, tiramisu, and an abundance of cute babies. From there it was off to the Thirsty Toad for James' band's show. I had never actually been to see the Red Light Saints, but they are highly recommended for a rockin' good time. The Red Light Saints' Facebook group has grown to something like 140 members in the past week, so hooray for them!

Work has been good. I suspect one of my projects is going to turn out to take hideous amounts of effort -- not at all what I'd wanted. But that's OK, I can sleep in April once the contracts are finished.

In conclusion, I am tired and miss my family.