I'm really quite happy with where I am and what I'm doing, but Feist's song "Mushaboom" (Mushaboom is a town in Nova Scotia) makes me want to drop everything and go raise children and sheep on a farm in upstate Vermont, or possibly Cape Breton Island.

There is this commercial on TV up here for a product called CLR (Calcium, Lime, Rust) that, with much fizzing, removes calcium buildup, cleans tile, makes your coffeepot "look new again," unclogs your shower head, and contains "natural ingredients," which Matt and I are pretty sure means, um, "water."

One of my students has the email address "legendarymonkeyfairy."

This always, always, ALWAYS happens: the boots that were so fabulous they actually arrested my progress down Whyte Ave last Tuesday turned out to be seven hundred and sixty dollars.

So Canadians, being all wacky like that, have Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. This, of course, means that there are two uninterrupted months of Christmas sales, starting the day after Halloween. Thanksgiving isn't a huge deal up here; it's kind of just another three-day weekend, and people have Thanksgiving dinner sometime on ( Read more... )

Today I paid $8 for a messenger bag, which I suppose makes me one of the cool kids, in an intensely Parkisish sort of way.

Today I had a meeting with my advisor in which Rich raised the possibility of tossing all of my months of work on Pisaster and starting a new project, and not only am I not upset, I'm relieved.

Well, the parental units left on Tuesday, after two weeks of mostly rain. I blame them for the rain, actually, which was biblical in its proportions. I think they brought it with them from New England. This is a province that usually measures rain in millimeters, and for two weeks it rains nearly every day? But it was pretty much all worth it ( Read more... )

Our story opens on our heroine, HOLLY, who is frazzledly leaving Edmonton at the end of May, and who, as a result of the university's insane entire-semester book-lending periods for graduate students, has approximately one-third of the U of A science library on her office bookshelf. She is moving out of her office. It is very hot and there is no ( Read more... )

Um.

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and in it he hath written a, um, well, you just kind of have to read it. Serpentes on a Shippe!

A moment while I giggle beyond all control.