I love the whooshing noise they make when they go by

Weeks, that is, not deadlines (the original quote, of course, is Douglas Adams on the subject of publishing deadlines). It was Tuesday, and now it's suddenly Friday in a different province and I'm utterly confused. Let's take a stab, anyway.

1. Wednesday was another dash to the finish line day; I have such a block about presentations I tend to put off the preparation as much as possible. In the end, though, I got there on time and gave the best presentation I've done all year - best feeling, anyway. It was the sort of presentation that ended up more like a group discussion, because everyone had questions about my thesis proposal. And, of course, I'm very comfortable with the class. We spend about half of every three hour class just chatting about things - usually topical things, but we have educated Christiane on more than a couple areas of knowledge that she just doesn't get exposed to.

2. When I got home, riding high on the feeling of having finished THE LAST PRESENTATION OF THE YEAR, I checked my mail and got possibly the only news that could make the day better - the Financial Aid Angel emailed me to say I have the loan and I can go to Mexico!!
Less than a month until Merida! I can't even believe it. Really. I hadn't expected to get it at this point.
People going on the trip include:

• Sam, who is in my honours seminar and went to Belize with me.
• Will, who goes to Carleton, but came to Belize and was just awesome the whole time. He doesn't really need the credit, but he's coming for the fun of it, and the experience of the ethnography side of anth (apparently lacking at Carleton).
• Mary, of my honours seminar. She's a mature student whose husband is Venezuelan; she's in International Development Studies, so she has a unique perspective on a lot of our work.
• Steve, the only guy in my Maritime archaeology seminar, and the one who did all the map stuff for the project.
• Anne, who is in my maritime archaeology seminar as well, and I'm surprised she's not dead from all the stress of the past few weeks. She's a full time student, a mom of a 13 month old boy, and last week bought a house. Mexico will be a vacation, courses or no courses.

The program info is here... I just can't wait! I don't know yet if it's possible, but with any luck I'll be blogging from Merida, so this will get a whole lot more interesting for you, the readers, too.

3. Yesterday was a travel day. I got up early to pack and offer what support I could to Sean, who is suffering terribly from economics papers. There wasn't much I could do, being hopeless at anything that involved numbers, so I took off early for the bus.
The bus has been getting worse and worse every time I take it. Last time was epic in its own right, but this was just awful; every bus I was on was packed, late, and going on every detour and rural route possible. This meant no stopover for lunch in Moncton, which is usually one of the best parts of traveling (Fahdi's souvlaki, mmmm), so I didn't get anything to eat until Amherst. The only thing that really made the trip fun at all this time was texting back and forth with Michelle and Sean throughout the day - Sean with updates on the paper, and Michelle with updates on what she and Scott were up to in Halifax (they had taken an early bus so as to have some fun in the city before my bus got in). Because we ran through every kind of bad weather I know (snow, rain, freezing rain, drizzle, hail...) the bus ended up being over an hour late into Halifax.
Home sweet home :)

4. Today has been a quiet day so far; even Mom doesn't wash windows when it's snowing out, so I've been knitting and watching the kids playing Atari.

5. Links:

• A baby hatch?
• The Yarn Harlot has the best travel stories. My bus travels aren't nearly as exciting.

6. Pictures (not mine, but pretty):

I love the idea of having shutters inside the apartment with plants - maybe just half shutters for the top bit of the window so the cats can have their windowsill? Ideally it'd be for kitchen herbs that wouldn't drape like those plants, because the cats would rip them down or chew them to bits inside a week. They don't look hard to build, either, especially if you use watertight tubes horizontally instead of diagonally like that. (via pan-dan)

Very nice modular thing. It's more of a screen or room divider than a shelf system per se, but still nice. (via pan-dan)


A revolving fish tank! It has weird white sculpture in it so the scenery is always changing for the fish (presumably it rotates slowly). The water only fills up half way. (via pan-dan; more pics there)

Pretty, pretty phyllo breadsticks. Recipe here (via Apartment Therapy Kitchen blog).