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.