bad mood

1. Today I slept through my alarm, apparently having too much fun in a series of nightmares to wake up. We missed the bus, so Sean and I sat and had a quick cup of coffee before heading up to campus. When I got to campus, I had to wait an hour or so before Sue got out of her meeting, and then did barely anything except spend an hour looking for specific artifacts in the lab, and a while planning when to go on trips this month hither and thither. Yup, a productive day.

2. When I got home I was determined to get something done, so I finished up what I was doing with John's website. It's useful and more attractive than it was, so I guess that's a thumbs-up.

3. And now I've fallen into the depths of a mood the likes of which I haven't encountered yet this winter. I'm just plain soul-weary. I don't need food or sleep or anything else I can put my finger on, but there's something nagging in the back of my head and it just won't let go.
Worse, I can't seem to reconcile my honours seminar thesis proposal topic with this week's assignment. It's this confining, boring little thing where I'm supposed to come up with hypotheses to prove or disprove, as though anthropology was some sort of grade school science fair project, and also dependent and independent variables, as though cultures are pea plants or something. Ethnography =/= science fair project.

4. I don't have any pictures today, but I do have a new Google Desktop widgety thing that has a little weird spider crawling in it that I like. That's something, anyway.

pessimism can be a positive thing

... when you expect a day to be really bad, and then it turns out well, it's especially sweet.

1. In reply to Mom's comment, Sean's painting is actually not an assignment, as his art class last semester was drawing and sketching only, no painting allowed. That painting came about when he was having a bad day and slashed some charcoal across the canvas, and then later decided to salvage it while he was doing some Christmas painting. The charcoal shows through the acrylic in these ghostly, foggy lines like power lines on a rainy day, almost like a more colourful version of the motif of an anime called Lain which I rather like. It's not his favourite, but I like the charcoal.

2. Last night Nick came over unexpectedly after play practice; his roommates were throwing a party, and he wanted to cook vast amounts of shrimp, so he borrowed our kitchen.

3. Tomorrow: class, work with Sue, and then oodles of Latin and honours thesis things. I'm a little tired of this semester already, but I always knew there would come a time when I'd have a monstrous load of seminars. It must simply be put up with.

4. Today I got a letter from the Dean of Arts congratulating me for being approved for the Honours in Classical Studies; while this is nice, it's not what I applied for. I'm taking hideous amounts of Latin because I want the slightly better Classics degree, not Classical Studies. So I have to talk to someone about that. They're probably just relieved that I finally declared a major.

5. I like this idea so much I could kiss it - no technology is more intrusive than a big dumb TV - and I like this picture an awful lot:

6. Tonks wuvs her chair.

mea culpa

I've been poorly behaved.

1. I haven't posted in over a week. Not Good.

2. Despite brave words about getting two major projects done this weekend, I've basically done nothing (not completely nothing, as seen below) except plough through Taipan again and start reading Samuel Marchbanks, the non-trilogy work of Robertson Davies (having finished the Cornish trilogy again earlier this week). No matter how much I fight it, I get kind of stuck on things one might class "non-productive" in the dead of winter, and the important degree-getting, money-making things are a real drag.
Marchbanks is, like all of Davies' work, hilarious. He's a semi-fictional alter ego to Davies, being slightly more scandalous and perhaps less true to the memory and more to the spirit of anecdotes of daily life. Like Davies, he's a curmudgeonly old writer, living along in Toronto (I believe) in the 60's, wrestling with his health, the stress of dealing with people, taxes, and his furnace, which he refers to as though it's some sort of evil crouching monster in his basement, plotting and scheming how to make the most mess and bother while producing as little heat with as much coal as possible.

Then I went down into the cellar, and addressed my furnace in these words: "O Furnace (I always model my speeches to my furnace on Cicero's orations).... O Furnace, three winter months having now gone by and the Yuletide and New Year seasons having been complete, I, Marcus Tullius Marchbanks, have purchased all the coal, wood, coke, charcoal and kindred combustibles that I intend (to purchase, understood). Look to it, Furnace, for I shall feed your justly, but not wastefully, and if it should so hap that when all these good things are gone the gods still send us inclement weather, I shall cram your maw with broken chairs and cardboard boxes, but not another morsel of coal will I buy. Witness, O ye gods of the household, and you, O Furnace, that M. Tullius Marchbanks will throw himself upon his poker and perish before he will spend another denarius on coal." ... The furnace was impressed and roared politely, but there was a faintly contemptuous smell of coal gas when I went to bed.

Maybe not for everyone, but I'm entertained, and that's what matters.

3. I've started two new knitting projects, despite having one around already (though it may go for a swim in the frog pond soon, due to issues of gauge and design). This is also Not Good, because, now that Sean is knitting too, the number of WIPs (Works In Progress) laying around getting attacked by cats is multiplying frighteningly.

So, in penance, here's a bunch of pictures. Because on the list of things I didn't do is "cleaning the house", there are no sweeping panoramas yet of the rearrangement of the house, but some cats and yarn and a rat.

This is Binnie:

She's Sean's rat, and mainly stays in his room. We get along well on the basis that I do not touch her nest, and occasionally give her a bit of food; in return, she usually doesn't chase me around. Usually.

My cat is extremely unphotogenic. For every picture like this:


There are about twenty like this:


I think she looks like a disapproving bunny. Still, most of the time in real life, she looks like this:


Seriously. The same chair, the same jumble of mismatched black and white limbs, no face. I wonder what a veterinary chiropractor would say.
And yes, sometimes she falls clean off.

In the interest of somewhat equal time, here's a picture of Parallax. She always looks more or less elegant.


On to the knitting. Here's the right side of my brilliant new scarf pattern:


And the wrong side:


I'm very proud of it. It's easy, and the resulting fabric is squishy and thick. And it's a relatively dignified sort of scarf - the kind that could be made for a man without being embarrassing.

This lump of black wool is going to be a large, floppy, undignified beret:

Because you can't really be an undergraduate without an obnoxious beret, and it's too cold out for the one I've got.

This is the older one that will probably getting frogged and restarted:

Lovely chart, but ye gods. I was supposed to be knitting it for Sean's brother, who may or may not make the bar stools he was constructing to trade these for. I'm pretty sure these socks will be too big, and they're definitely too short in the ankle, and really a lovely chart isn't an excuse to preserve a crappy sock. So, to the frog pond.

Just to wrap up, this is Tonks modeling my favourite of Sean's paintings to date:

cheek to jowl

1. As I write, my poor neighbour is getting told off by his girlfriend for not going to class. She's not doing a very good job. I kind of want to bring him a pecan pie, partly because I have a spare but also because she's being pretty mean. I don't know him at all, but because of the construction of the apartment we know a surprising amount about him (or his roommate; they're sort of a unit).

• he plays poker.
• he plays guitar, but not as well as the guy who visits occasionally, which seems to leave him dispirited.
• he likes reasonably good music; I have heard the Beatles and Gorillaz from on high, occasionally.
• his mom thinks his fridge is a disgrace.
• he bikes a lot, and apparently cares deeply for the bicycle as he brings it up the stairs to store it at night.
• a previous (October) girlfriend was a crazy stalker. This may be the same girl over again, because the incessant phone ringing has started again, as well as the dial tone when he takes the phone off the hook and leaves it on the floor (yes, our floor/ceiling barrier sucks that much).
• based on above, I'd say he has crappy taste in girlfriends.

I wish there were a way of expressing sympathy without coming off as a creepy stalker, but there's no way I can tune this stuff out constantly, though headphones usually help (the argument has now crashed down the stairs and is taking place six inches in front of my front door, which is less easy to shut out with headphones, or at least earbuds). Ganbatte, Dude Upstairs.

2. Because the weather is seasonably cold, for a change (not that I really approve, but it does mean a more traditional, "it's cold, eh" sort of weather small talk instead of "global warming, eh"), I have learned something very interesting: iPod earbuds become stiff, almost brittle at -20. I'm wondering if the warranty is invalid in Canada or something.

3. Class was, as usual, interesting but challenging. Latin is slowly creaking along; it occurred to me that it's strange for eighteen lines of prose taking three hours to translate to seem reasonable. Or maybe not; this the first sentence of what we've done so far (not my translation, which makes little sense, but a public domain, professional translation):

If there is any natural ability in me, O judges,--and I know how slight that is; or if I have any practice as a speaker,--and in that line I do not deny that I have some experience; or if I have any method in my oratory, drawn from my study of the liberal sciences, and from that careful training to which I admit that at no part of my life have I ever been disinclined; certainly, of all those qualities, this Aulus Licinius is entitled to be among the first to claim the benefit from me as his peculiar right.

Yeah.
Anyway, my honours seminar is coming along. We had to pick a field of interest and a working title, and a few other things, for our mock master's thesis proposal, and my assignment (which had to be copied and distributed to all of my classmates) was surprisingly well-recieved. I'm basically writing about doing an ethnography (a formal description of a tribe, people, or community) of Craftster.org, because it says a lot of interesting things about reciprocity and community and identity and so on. Research into online communities is, I gather, pretty popular at the moment. I probably won't ever write this thesis, as I don't plan to do a sociocultural anth thesis at all, but it's still fun, and good practice for the thesis I will write eventually.

4. Rome marches along; knitting progresses slowly. I really need to recharge my camera batteries to put up pictures of these things, now that I have a blog again. Here's an old picture instead:

death to the pen-shaped objects

1. Sorry for the lack of posting; somehow on Friday I fell into some sort of time warp and ended up here. I knew that in time, the semester would begin to speed up, but it's already decided to break into a gallop and shows no sign of letting up until the beginning of April.

2. The weekend was very restful, compared to the week before. On Saturday, I had some work for Sue, and some readings, but mainly I straightened up the apartment, picked up a few groceries and baked pecan pies. When Sean got in from play practice he made supper, which was amazing. I'm not much of a shrimp fan, or shellfish in general, but how can you possibly dislike shrimp in butter and white wine and garlic and a bit of lemon? Can't be done.
Sunday was also pretty quiet. I went over to Gail's in the afternoon to play with her sock knitting machine, which unfortunately seems to be missing a critical component at the moment. The rest of it works beautifully, though, and Gail is looking into buying the component or, failing that, bringing the machine to Nova Scotia this weekend for Dad to jury-rig something to make it go. We had a roast, with roasted vegetables, and chocolate frozen yogurt with homemade chocolate pirelle bowls and fresh strawberries and chocolate sauce... it was a good weekend for food.

3. The cats are getting squirelly with the weather acting up; Parallax found, somewhere, the end of a roll of Rolaids with a couple still wrapped up in the foil and has been viciously batting it around, while Tonks periodically attacks anything vaguely pen-shaped.
Cats: better than cable.

4. Yesterday was a sort of fuzzy haze of Cicero and Paleoamerican projectile point characteristics; I can't think of much to say that would be halfway intelligent about the schoolwork except that this semester of Latin is going to be a shock to the system. In the evening, since I recently discovered that Sean hasn't seen HBO's Rome, we watched a few episodes while I finished up some work for Sue and knit. He seems to be enjoying it; as for me, I'm pretty excited about Season 2, which started Sunday night and will be covering the material that we're studying in my Augustus seminar.

5. Today I woke up at five in the morning to the sounds of an incredibly loud snow plow thundering past my bedroom window down the boarding house's driveway, and then backing up - complete with ear-piercing beep noises - over and over for about fifteen minutes. I was not impressed. I was more impressed with the snow dumped all over the place. It's about time we had a real winter storm. Sadly, school wasn't cancelled. It never is.
Class today was the Augustus seminar, which is looking as terrifying as ever, and then a brief meeting with Sue to talk about things to do this semester (yes, we've already done this twice, but objectives keep changing). The latest version of events includes two or three road trips (a trip to Halifax and either one or two visits to Metepenagiag), the cataloging of site 2, and converting old footage of field schools and excavations from VHS, Super 8 and other exciting formats into DVD in order to edit them into something useful. After heading over to the lab, I discovered that I had forgotten to bring the keyboard again, and also that before I would need it anyway I will have to bring the artifacts from site 2 over to the Anthropology barn to clean them, because they're caked with mud. Boo.

6. Tonight: Latin, Honours seminar homework, Rome, sleep. Maybe some curry in there. Last night's maple curry was so good I might try to talk Sean into having it again tonight.

7. Oh yes, and Grant's marks finally went through. A+; well worth the wait. It's nice to see my battered and bruised cumulative GPA make a triumphant leap to 3.0. Very nice indeed.

"sunday afternoon knights"

1. First week back is finally. OVER. I'm so tired. I know it'll get easier, but wow.

2. Yesterday was a blur of class and work; I only really had a couple of hours off in the afternoon, in which time I was supposed to be working in the lab. The lab's keyboard has mysteriously vanished, which almost makes a sort of symmetrical sense since I now mysteriously have a key to it. Anyway, this means that I did the report for Sue entirely at home, so while I'm technically still on the clock, I can spend four hours juggling tables of figures in the middle of the night when nothing is going on, instead of in the afternoon when I could be doing grocery shopping. It works alright.
I also got some work done on John's site; I think the old version is pretty clunky, so I've started on a similar but more streamlined version here. He hasn't given me feedback, but I expect he'll be okay with it. I'm not thrilled with it - I'd rather do something a little more freeform - but he's pretty definite about the old layout so I'd like to stay within the lines as much as possible. And it's an improvement. It'll be even better when I finished polishing up a Javascript gallery for his images, which will be a pain in the behind to put together but will look very, very nice when finished.

3. This is the best radiator ever. Not a very hotly contested field, maybe, but it's still awesome.

4. These are the best pizza cutting devices ever. It seems to be a random assignment from an industrial design school. (Props to Angus for pointing them out.)

5. I have made an monumental decision: this is going to be my first full-scale sweater. It's called Rogue and has a pretty large following of fans in the online knitting community... I'm thinking a deep purple.

"grammar can be exciting"

1. Something about the first week back is just so brutal on the senses. I can't believe I still have class for two more days before I get to "rest" and work on other, equally pressing things.

2. First thing today was Latin. I had an awful lot of homework for the second class; but you know, in the beginning ten practice sentences would take me two or three hours to decipher. Now, in the last chapter of the text (finishing up odds and ends before tackling the Pro Archia), the eight sentences took me about half an hour, and the fairly tricky passage of Cicero only took about an hour. I did pretty well, too. I'm somewhat hopeful.
Geyssen made a point of telling us today that the next few weeks of translation would be, in his words, hellish. It's good to have some warning, I guess, but I do feel pretty good about it at this point. Relatively, anyway. Latin always gives me vapours, but that's more or less to be expected.

3. And then there was my honours seminar. Last semester I had a really good time, surprisingly, mainly because even though the work was fairly intense theory (which I had no background in at all), the people were really fun and our discussions were unbelievably helpful for making theory make sense.
This semester we've been joined by Sam, another of the field school chicks, and also Tanya, Brian Campbell's girlfriend of several years. I know them both very slightly but I'm hoping that, the class being a fairly friendly environment, I'll get to know them more. Our work is different, too; I explained some of it yesterday, but today I learned we're also passing in written assignments almost every week as we prepare our master's thesis proposals. It's going to be a lot of work.

4. When I got home, I did some grocery shopping (the cats were verging on mutinous over the state of the cat food) and then tried to get some work done for the report I'm pulling together for Sue. It was slow going until much later this evening; I'm just getting a bit worn out from the shock of actually doing things all day long. I spent a while reading and playing online, and then Sean's parents unexpectedly showed up in town, so we went out to have coffee with them. It was a pleasant evening, and in the end I even got some work done on the report, though not as much as I'd like (I just don't have the information I need at the moment; I'm going to have to ask Sue about some of it and put in more work tomorrow night or Friday).

5. This book looks extremely entertaining. From the back cover:

That is a knit lace coracle. (A BOAT.)

bag of nails

1. So, I finally finished my post about the weekend. Whew. (See below this one.)

2. Yesterday was the first day of classes of the winter semester, which is, you know, exciting and all that. This will be my tenth semester, not counting my field school, and it's looking like it's going to be a fairly challenging one. Let's see:

• Latin. Yup, the grand prize for passing Latin last semester is... taking more! We're reading Cicero (actually this whole reading, the Pro Archia), instead of learning more grammar and exercises, so hopefully things will be slightly easier. Or at least more fun. I rather like Cicero.
• Archaeology of the Maritimes. Ooh, that should be easy, what with the field experience and the lab experience, right? Wrong. It's going to be a seminar, and one with two of my very favourite things: group work, and presentations (three). YUM. Snarking aside, I am looking forward to the work and even the assignment, because it looks really interesting; she's decided to teach it as a sort of introduction to how archaeology works in the real world (CRM) as opposed to academic research, which is free to pursue its own pace and aims but tends not to put food on the table or roof overhead. The group project will consist of splitting the class into three imaginary CRM firms, doing up proposals for a hypothetical project at the headpond of the Mactequac Dam, which we will then present to Sue, a professional CRM archaeologist, and the provincial archaeologist at a meeting in a board room. It should be fairly intense. I'm a little afraid, honestly.
  
• Honours Seminar in Anthropology. This is the second half of the course, with less theory and more methodology. This seems to translate into learning how to apply for funding and writing thesis proposals (which we then present), which are important life skills for academics of any stripe. Also, the text, called Auto-Ethnographies, is really, really interesting. Interesting enough that I am halfway through reading it, having bought it yesterday. I'll probably write about it another day.
• Augustus, Architect of the Roman Empire. I thought this was going to be a typical Kerr course; I can recite the standard Kerr syllabus by rote. Not so! It's... a seminar. With presentations. I'm not exactly happy about that, but I suppose it won't kill me.

So as you see... lots of presentations, with a little Latin in there just to keep things interesting. I'm excited about all of the classes individually, but as a semester... I'm a little concerned for my sanity. Even just one presentation is (literally) enough to make me cry.

3. And then there's work.

• I met with Sue yesterday and again this morning to talk about my work study position and what we're up to this semester. So far I'm writing up a report of what I did last semester, and then probably shoring up that work as she sees fit. I'm also going to be doing a (relatively) quick bulk cataloging of the site 2 material (last semester I did site 1) and going to Metepenagiag to screen more material, and hopefully learning how to use some very expensive, very cool archaeological software for modeling some of this information.
• I'm still working a few hours a week on the Crafts Council website, which will probably entail finally getting the members' section together.
• And I've agreed to do similar work for a local craftsperson/entrepreneur, John Welling, which will be interesting work.

4. So, in amidst all of this, I've been knitting some very cool socks from this chart, somewhat modified for my needs, and I've taught Sean to knit. He finished his first dishcloth today, which was pretty exciting, and now he wants to embark on learning to knit in the round so he can make some ribbed legwarmers to make his boots more practical.

5. Sue showed me this today, and we had a good laugh.

6. But now I must run and do some Latin homework and some readings for my Classics seminar and also some writing for Sue. And maybe some grocery shopping, because I suspect we are running low on some key ingredients to our veggies-pasta-tuna diet.
Tonks is sleeping on her face. I kind of want to copy her fine example. The first week of class/work/life is getting to me a bit, I think.

goodbye guisiguit

One of my projects that kept me busy all last semester was a weekend job doing archaeological fieldwork for a local cultural resource management (CRM) firm, Archaeological Prospectors, at a site called the Lower Guisiguit. Guisiguit, for those not fluent in Maliseet, means "wide enough so as to be navigable by canoe". The project started in November and finished up, finally, yesterday.
The story goes something like this: the government of New Brunswick gave the contract to build a stretch of highway near Florenceville to a corporation called Brunway, which hired a construction company called Atcon, which hired an archaeologist named Darcy to do the archaeological assessment portion of the environmental impact assessment. I met Darcy in Belize, by the way, he's a good guy. Anyway, he found enough in testing to recommend that they have an archaeologist on hand while building the highway, monitoring, in order to make sure they weren't destroying anything important. So they called Archaeological Prospectors, which is generally a one-man show consisting of Jason. Jason was hired to do the monitoring, and almost immediately had to put a stop to the work on the riverbank because they were turning up a lot of artifacts. That's where I come in.
In early November I heeded the call to go digging, despite a pretty busy semester (two jobs and a fullish course load), because it sounded like fun and there was a distinct possibility I would get paid. As it turned out, it's better pay than I've ever had before, with a free single hotel room and a pretty decent per diem, and the work has been very interesting. Unlike the field school in Belize, which was at a fairly slow pace (as is typical of research archaeology), CRM moves fast, and we were working for every scrap of daylight, every day.
A typical day would start at 7 am, meeting in the hotel lobby and heading out to the truck to drive out. We'd stop at the gas station to fill up the gas cans, and to get coffee and, in my case, a light lunch for later from Tim Horton's, and then drive out to the back roads to get to the site. Jason's choice of pump-up music varied from the Arctic Monkeys to Sigur Ros, which is fairly surreal at 7 am.
The site itself was next to the Guisiguit, with construction leading to it on the both sides of the river. There had been extensive dynamiting and excavating all around, so the landscape was jagged and full of rubble, and there was a large pond almost on top of the site, about fifteen feet from the river, where the concrete footings of the culvert are to go; it was a fairly weird shade of green. The excavation itself was under a blue and white striped circus tent, which became more and more bedraggled as the dig wore on; the dirt and wind, not to mention the shrapnel from the dynamiting, took their toll, and as the dig expanded past the bound of the tent, extensions were built on three sides with tarps and lumber and a metal-framed car park. On the very last day, we came in to find that part of the tent had blown down on to the space heater (kept running to keep the ground from freezing) and melted, luckily without burning up the whole thing.
There were a lot of people working on the site over the two months; there were four students, including myself, but really, Sarita only came the first weekend; Josh and Dierdre came up quite a lot. There were also a bunch of workers from the reserves nearby - Bev, Jamie, Danny, and Jinks, and also Storm though I didn't meet him. And there was Greg, Jason's friend from his army days. A lot of the non-students had worked at the project at Jemseg years ago.
So what did we find? Mainly a lot of flakes. There was a broken biface, and also a hearth feature and a kind of strange hole that may have been a storage pit, but the vast majority of what we found were flakes from stone tool-making. If you can picture the scene, one can imagine maybe an overnight camp where people would stop on the riverbank and make a fire and sit around making tools in the evening, possibly while on a longer journey along the river. It's not what you could call a major site, but we pretty much had to excavate it now if ever because the construction means digging out the whole thing - that's CRM for you. Jason has a reputation for erring on the side of excavating more than he needs to rather than less, but I can't really see the harm in being thorough, except that it makes the corporations rather grumpy.
My heart bleeds for them.
Anyway, we were supposed to finish up by Christmas, but Jason set the policy early on that we were to dig until we found no more flakes (as opposed to stopping when we found five or less per unit, or some other arbitrary number) and the flakes jut kept showing up. This weekend was the last weekend; I ruined everyone's day on Saturday by finding the very last flake, and so we excavated two more units on Sunday, finding nothing, and packed up. It was exhilarating being there for the end of such a long project, and one that's pretty out there as far as methodology goes; winter in Canada is not a particularly popular time to be excavating. Diesel space heaters, heat lamps, a couple of generators, de-icing cable for eavestroughs, lots of lighting equipment to stretch out daylight hours - it's an endeavor. On the last day we had to bust up the surface of the new units with a rock hammer and melt the chunks in buckets before we could screen them. That is not really standard, as you might imagine.
So it's over, and I am richer in money and experience for it. If you ever drive on the Trans-Canada just outside of the McCain's Fries capital of the world, keep your eyes peeled for a big culvert with a little river running through and you'll be driving over what used to be an archaeological excavation. The more you know!

realigning

1. Traveling is something I usually enjoy quite a bit. It's an excuse to buy food in strange and wonderful places, and I sometimes meet interesting people even just commuting between Greenwood and Fredericton. I don't mind the bus or ferry as much as most people seem to and I've gotten pretty good at navigating them. I hardly ever show up at the ferry to find no ferry there anymore.
Just when I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to travel like a civilized human being, though, things happen like this past trip. It's not that it was particularly unpleasant, but just generally being unwell makes even the smoothest journey uncomfortable, and the ferry was not at all a smooth journey. It started two hours late, on account of poor weather making it impossible to dock well enough to load, and then of course we were on the water in the poor weather which is not very fun. Still, there is no sea-sickness that Gravol cannot fix, or at least put you so out of it you can ignore it.
Our overnight stay at Sean's parents' house was short but pleasant. I was still pretty out of it from the trip, but I met his cousin Maggie, who is staying with them while doing something (a placement? co-op? work-study?) for her occupational therapy training.

2. After a short bus ride we were back in town yesterday, but I didn't do much at all. After a quick lunch out, I spent the afternoon napping and pulling myself together a bit. I went over to Nick's with Sean briefly in the evening but still wasn't feeling up to that level of energy and came home to read a book.

3. Today, I've finally started feeling somewhat human again and had a pretty good day, all told. Sean and I went uptown looking for a textbook for one of his classes and completely failed to find it, but because it was gorgeous out we walked home, stopping at the Indian grocery to buy curry and random treats. We went downtown and had a cup of tea at Trinitea's and spent a while knitting quietly by the fake fire and small, fake puppy (it lays in a basket, breathing as though asleep) before coming home to supper and getting things together for tomorrow.

4. While my classes don't start until Monday, unlike poor Sean who was technically back today, I do have things to do already. Tomorrow I have a meeting with John Welling about his website and what he wants me to do to it.
Also, the digging that was supposed to be finished by December 22 that I kept saying would probably be continuing into January? Yeah, it's still going on. Jason emailed me to ask if I wanted a day or two of work this weekend while they finished up and I said yes. So if there's still digging to be done as of tomorrow, I'll being going up tomorrow night to play in the frozen mud again.

5. Oh, and while Professor James has posted my Roman Republic mark (A-, I'm pretty pleased) I still haven't heard from Grant, and apparently no one else has either. Strange.

quiet days in the valley-o

1. First and foremost, I bring you the Geostationary Banana Over Texas Project.

2. Happy New Year, all, and I hope your years are better than the previous. Sean and Scott and Michelle and I spent the evening switching around our ipods in the speaker dock and getting really, really drunk. Unfortunately that meant today was throwing up and sleeping most of the day, but we rang in the year in style, anyway.

3. What have the past few days been spent doing? Not a heck of a lot, really. I finished Mom's socks:


And we went a-Frenchying, and took a couple of walks. I taught Sean to knit and we played a lot of Crazy Eights and dice. Peaceful and quiet and I feel just about ready to get back into the thick of school and work.

4. I still don't have my marks from Grant and Professor James. It's not really anxiety-inducing but I would like to know. Maybe I should email them...

5. Tomorrow is traveling again. Sean and I will be going to the ferry in the afternoon and likely picking up a car on the other side, then heading to his parents' house for the evening. The next day, back to Fredericton and our lonely kitties, who have been lovingly cared for by Nick for the past week and a half.

6. Still tired from festivities; naptime, I think.