slowly going crazy

1. In case you aren't aware, I really, really hate the winter. You can call it SAD or school or being mopey, it all comes out as "most days I don't want to get out of bed". I've gotten pretty good at fighting on through and I even get to class, etc, but I still hate feeling snappish and bored and tired all the time.
The bit I always forget about, though, is where I wait with bated breath for the snows to go and school to wind down, and am actually thrown more out of whack by the up-and-down weather of March than by the relentless snow and cold of, say, January. The prospect of slushpuddling around Fredericton in leaky boots trying to do all of my assignmentish things is daunting from here (which is, coincidentally, that late Sunday afternoon wasteland that Douglas Adams named a whole book after, the Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul).

Assignmentish things this week:

• While it's not actually due yet, I have to do my book report for my honours seminar sometime last weekend, because the stupid book is overdue, and thanks to the nature of document delivery, there are no renewals.
  
• LATIN TEST PARTY!! Minus, of course, the party bit.
  
• Thinking about writing my paper on Augustus-era moral reforms for Kerr's class.
• Somehow summoning a friendly NB Power hydro engineer to answer dumb arts-student questions about dams.
• Ten hours of cataloguing.
• Probably two hours of filling out government forms at the NBCC offices for a grant I don't really qualify for, and then hopefully throwing some pictures into that nice gallery script I found (it still shocks me that that seems to be going okay - knock on wood).
• My honours seminar thesis proposal thing is due, um, next week I think. Maybe I ought to get on that.

Not so bad for this time of year, actually, but considering I'd rather hide in my Megatokyo blanket and knit socks...

2. A weird side effect of taking the cats to the vet:
Parallax now equates the cat carrier with visits to the outside world, where people will pet her and be nice to her, instead of being shuttled from her familiar and happy home to a new and scary place. She's been sleeping in it for the past two days, and doesn't even protest when I zip it up and carry her around. Maybe the time will come in the summer when I can put the leash on her and we can go to the park in the cat carrier... I always wanted to do that with Tonks, but sadly, my poor little paranoid princess is anything but friendly towards the carrier, the door, or the outdoors.

3. I bought my new nailpolish! I've been getting one new OPI shade every six months, since they tend to start to die by then, and I wear them constantly in the interim.
Why yes, I am pretty pale and spidery these days. It's a shade called Suzy Love Sydney, from the new Australia line from OPI. I'm thinking it looks good already, but will look much better when I am brown with the Cancun sun instead of pale from the Fredericton winter.

4. Oh yes, the Cancun sun. I said it.
I've put in my deposit on the Mexico ethnography field school, so as far as my reality is concerned I'M GOING TO MEXICO IN A MONTH AND A BIT. Take that, icky slushpuddles. The details are a little sketchy on exactly where and when everything happens, but very basically (and sorry if I've outlined this before), it's May 1-24, just over three weeks, a weeks of which will be traveling to see things in the area. We fly into Cancun and bus to Merida, in the Yucatan area (just north of the bit of Belize I was in last year), to do ethnographic fieldwork among the mostly Yucatec Maya people in the area. The week of traveling is rumoured to include Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Dzibilchaltun (say that three times fast) and some sort of riverboat excursion.

5. Anyway, tonight I fully intend to ignore my aforementioned assignmenty things and read more of this blog (I love it), start over on the Quill Lace socks, and hopefully have coffee with Erica. Ciao.