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!