I'm back. The day after I got here Bloomington got snowed on pretty heavily, and I got snowed in. Moreso than I would have been in the place on 2nd St., because now I live in the woods. Deer wander up to the windows and peer in. There are lots of birds at the birdfeeder. Since it's a little on the isolated side, I've idly given the woodland ( Read more... )

So I chickened out on seeing New Moon because it's like a million years long. Two hours and two minutes. Nobody needs that much preternatural teen sulkies. So I bought a ticket to see 2012, which started at 3:40, figuring that I probably hadn't missed much even though it was a little past 4. And I think I had missed about five minutes, because they ( Read more... )

Oztoberfest. Yeah. There is a little town near here (yes, even smaller than the one I'm in) called Wamego. It's a pit. I mean it. A total pit. Even when I was in high school, saying "Wamego" was pretty much synonymous with saying "The Place With the Hillbillies That Probably Have Chainsaws And Are Living In A Meat Shortage Type Situation." Wamego ( Read more... )

So I was talking with Lorna this evening and she said that she was maybe developing some Warhammer Fantasy characters, and this reminded me of Warhammer 40,000, and of a short story for a value of short story that basically means "thing that amused me to write which isn't very long" that was inspired (in considerable detail) by this satirical image ( Read more... )

So I'm back from Bloomington, where I finally realized my long-time dream of 1) declaring that incantation in medieval magic might not be a proto-science, but it is definitely part of the history of applied high-order symbolic language, and 2) did so in a room about half full of philosophers of science, and was not promptly cut to ribbons. I didn't ( Read more... )

I posted a thing on facebook asking who put Rumpshaker in my iTunes because it wasn't me (of course it was, I eventually figured out that it came from a torrent full of songs from Veronica Mars) and my college friend Wendy - now a land developer who lives in Dubai - said "Wasn't this playing that time when you Greta and I stepped into the Wrong ( Read more... )

BEFORE:


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I spent the day doing paperwork for the university and various other address-changing things. Hoop, jump, hoop, jump. So boring. By the time I was ready to get up and be somewhere that was not at my desk, I had a terrific hankering to cook and bake. It's better when that impulse is "terrific hankering to go to the gym" but oh well. Tomorrow is a ( Read more... )

I slept most of Sunday and then got up and finished my NSF final report - I was under the impression we had three months to complete it from the end of the study (June 1), but then we found out it needed to be in before other peoples' funding would be disbursed, so it had to be done pronto, Tonto. Did I mention that I found that out in the middle ( Read more... )

Today I did a bunch of shopping - my mother has minor surgery this weekend and there was a lot to do. I stopped at Westside Market (it's a kind of permanent farmer's market here) and picked up fruits and vegetables. I decided that I would make a peach pie. The peaches were decadent and perfect:


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