happy friday

1. I haven't written since Tuesday? Man. I'm not very good at this.

2. Most of my news is pretty wintery and bleak, like the weather. I'm fighting off the ubiquitous student cold that goes around this time every year, starting in the dorms and then spreading via class. My house is freezing because the furnace is out of oil again and the oil people are coming later today. The Metepenagiag lab where I catalogue rocks is also freezing, for no real reason that I can see. Mexico is starting to look really, really good.

2. My week picked up a little since Tuesday, but not much. Wednesday was Latin (in which I did surprisingly well for a change) and my honours seminar (where I did less well for a change, owing mostly to my frustration with the assignments). I was so tired by the evening that instead of doing something exciting with my "night off", I went to bed by 10.
Yesterday was busy-busy; the classics seminar was pleasantly lecture-like (O for the days of simple lecture classes and term papers!) and then I had work in the icebox-lab. I've gone back to the most tedious type of work, the cataloguing and weighing of individual flakes instead of lots of flakes. I'm doing my best to streamline the process with technology, but I've run out of little flake bags, which is a serious issue. If there are no more today, I may have a real problem on my hands. Anyway, after that I had an interview with the QAR people who are conducting a routine external review of the anth department, so they could get a sense of what Student Everyman thinks (haha, not much).
Work at NBCC has been centering more and more on this fundraiser they're planning, and so I redid the poster I made last week and updated the website and so on. My nights at the NBCC have been punctuated lately by visits from the janitor, an older woman who seems to have a bitter feud with the man who throws salt on the sidewalks outside, and has the misfortune of cleaning one of the local clubs, Nicky Z's, as well. She had to clean during the afterparty of the recent Snoop Dogg/Ice Cube show here. I feel her pain.

3. Speaking of the NBCC, Shasta hinted yesterday that there will be "changes, good ones" this summer. I'm mystified. And a little worried. I'm sure she wouldn't be holding out on me if it were something that would mean no job for me, but I still worry.

4. Last night was another exhausted night of reading and then going to bed early, trying to fight off this cold. I'm up early to translate a chapter of Latin, but seem to be wasting lots of time instead... I still have tons of time to get my chapter done.

5. The only good thing about so many seminars is that I only have one exam per se this semester. The tentative schedule is out; my Latin exam appears to be scheduled for... April 20th. The second last day of exams, classes having ended April 6th or some such. Ah, tradition.