Bah Humbug Now With Added Wonderfulness

On Tuesday I wrote my last exam ever. Wednesday was my last day of work. Thursday is my last day in Ottawa until April. I am going to miss it here; over the last year Ottawa and I have gotten very close. It is truly a beautiful place in the summertime: the streets are full of happy people revelling in their ability to go sit on a patio (like, an outside one! You don't even get frostbite, it's the coolest thing, you guys!). Gardens overflow with flowers planted in a charmingly random fashion I like to think of as Civil Service Haphazard. The air is warm and humid, but usually not uncomfortable. I spent most of the summer (as I recall) tripping about idyllically, tending to my tarragon and cherry tomatoes, making salade nicoise, and wearing sundresses. You can only imagine how fondly I look back on such sunlit, potentially hallucinated memories now that we are in the season known as Awful, getting freezing rain layered over two feet of snow and experiencing mysterious and cruel temperature fluctuations. Compounding the misery is the OC Transpo strike. I cannot imagine how anyone who lives any distance at all from downtown has gotten anywhere in the past eight days; it is hard enough for me, and I'm about 3km from where I work: a pleasant jaunt in the morning and evening, no serious hassle apart from the weather. This morning it took one of the admin ladies three hours and twenty minutes to get to work. Neither the city nor the union seems particularly interested in helping people get mobile again, and to all of them I deliver a resounding Bronx cheer.

Anyway, some extremely nice things have happened this week. The choir's annual Sankta Lucia celebration went off pretty well, although I did manage to have a coughing fit in the middle of Stilla Natt (Silent Night, for any non-Swedes reading). Five of the guys get to carry wands with stars on them every year, and can be relied upon to make an amusing spectacle of themselves over who gets to have the wands, who is whose fairy godmother, and things of this nature. This year the boys who got wands were all very miffed because the small children who were part of the procession had wands with stars at least twice the size of theirs. Then we drank glog (umlaut not included here), which is a deadly Swedish concoction of spiced cider stuff and vodka. It tastes like mulled wine teleported through a stained glass window.

The second nice thing preceded the first: I entertained! I decided that instead of trying to get together with various batches of friends before I left, I'd just invite a whole crew over for drinks and cookies and such. It was quite a nice evening! People didn't mingle as much as I'd hoped: the room basically had choir people on the couch, capoeira people by the papasan chair, and B.PAPMers on the table'n'chairs and standing in the kitchen. Now that I write that down, it seems weirdly reminiscent of the collective dynamics and personalities of each of those groups. Hmm. Anyway, aside from that it was All Good, and really lovely to see everybody before I left. The choir gang (consisting this evening of Dannik, John, Steph, Brian, JP, Nicole, etc) threw on some impromptu four-part harmony (like we do, what what!). Steph brought her Matt, and Graham brought some homemade wine that I am very much looking forward to drinking if it is anything like as good as the stuff that comes out of his kitchen whenever we're over for dinner. Glinski drove up from Kingston to be there! It wasn't hard to put on, either, because I have an awesome former roommate. A few weeks ago Katherine and I got together and made vast quantities of baked stuff for this extravaganza, which was the ideal Christmas present from her and made life much easier for me - all I really had to do was buy some artichoke asiago dip and nice fresh pita, make a batch of hummus, and get the drinks together. Oh, and spend three hours making a snowflake mobile when I should have been studying. Oops.

Finally, Garrafa/Sebastien tried to kill me at capoeira on Tuesday by making me play the entire class. I assumed it was just a little goodbye game to celebrate the end of a good session, but then people kept tagging out the person I was playing rather than me. I think I was on my fourth game before I figured out what was going on, and by the end I was more into repeated flailing actions than actual playing. Ah, the combination farewell and hazing ritual.

That's about it for now. Watch out, Bubble, I touch down in 37 hours.