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!