catching up part 2: blah blah blah and pictures

1. This week has been loooong. I am officially sick sick SICK of winter at this point, which is, coincidentally, the point where it has rained and frozen as though God really wants a back yard skating rink, and the city of Fredericton tend to fail utterly in the business of making sidewalks walkable (apparently they are immune to lawsuits, by law... maybe that's the problem?). My locomotion options have been limited to A. bussing absolutely everywhere that isn't downtown proper, and therefore manicured, or campus, which has its own maintenance crew; B. making Sean walk around everywhere with me so I can lean on his arm to avoid falling and breaking my everything; C. walking in the roads instead of on sidewalks, because they are mysteriously in far superior shape.
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and the sun is making our white curtains glow, I pretend it is summer out there for a few minutes just to feel optimistic about walking around outside. True story.
At least the snow inadvertently provides the cats with entertainment. The landlord, showing more concern for their property than pretty much any other landlord I have ever had, pays fairly frightening men to come up the fire escape and shovel off the roof so that it doesn't collapse on the knitting store below us. Parallax quite enjoys sitting on the sill making eyes at them until they come too close, but Tonks just quivers under my chair, poor thing.


2. Anyway, our social life has dwindled because Stu has a house of his own with people and a dog, and Megan is working hard at burning herself out with an insane courseload, and Danielle doesn't seem to leave her house except to go to work. We still have D&D, though, with Will and Marie, and last week was a really terrific session. I got killed by some unusually vicious cave lizards, but after booting around as a ghost for a couple seconds, Sean got killed too, and Marie ran away, so we two ghosts drifted about and found an entire ethereal component of the dungeon and managed to get brought back to life (my character, who only had one eye, now has both! another Festivus miracle!).
I'm not looking forward to tomorrow's session as much, solely because Sean and I decided this week that we really can't go to Ontario for the Break. I can't tell you how much this bums me out, but it's the responsible thing to do. We're utterly broke, and even with jobs coming out our ears we will have to work pretty hard to make ends meet even staying here and working through the Break.

3. So what do we do when we have no social life and no money? We stay home and knit and download science fiction. I've been knitting up a storm in a modest sort of way and have more or less perfected the sock recipe for my grandfather's socks. I'm going to write it up shortly so I don't forget the important bits. I had just finished them when Gail asked me to come to a baby shower for Patience and Aurora on Sunday, so I ran downstairs to the yarn store and picked up a single skein of pink Misti Alpaca worsted, and prodded Michelle on MSN for the umbilical cord hat from Stitch & Bitch (I have the second book, and also the crochet installment, the Happy Hooker, but not the first book) and set to work. By the end of the night, the hat was finished, and I had also knit up two little thumbless baby mittens from a mostly made up pattern of my own design.

I went to the shower the next day and saw my little cousins Jessica and Emily, and got to hold our new baby (the first of my immediate family to do so - take that, godmother Michelle!):

And later on she modeled the hat and mitts for her grandmother's blog:


So cute! I hope they fit until spring, anyway.

4. Financial news: my student loan finally came in the mail Friday afternoon, which is annoying because I had checked the mail hopefully that morning and, finding nothing, had gone to Financial Services to beg them for another extension. Of course, I don't have the money yet - you have to bring it to the school and have them sign it, and then find a Royal Bank and get them to process it, and then wait five business days for it to show up. Boo. At least it will be here soonish.
We found out that Sean hadn't in fact gotten the maximum emergency bursary, but only half of that, so we still need to give the school $450. This was pretty much the dealbreaker for the Ontario trip, but now that we have resigned ourselves to staying home, it shouldn't be that much of a problem.

5. Miscellaneous other things: Sean and I are going to attempt to sit Gail's cat, Angel, formerly known as Kitty, for the month of March when Mert and Gail are in Myrtle Beach. We're going to give it a trial run on Sunday night, because this means AngelKitty will be boarding here with my spoiled girls (getting to/from the North Side daily would be impossible for us). She has a bigger voice than my two put together, but on the other hand, they have the claw complement of 2.5 cats, and she only has .5. Hopefully they will all get along.
Oh, and the mysterious Valentine's Day dinner I wrote about? We started with roasted garlic with pita bread, both toasted and not:

And then had fresh spaghetti with shrimp in a garlic white wine sauce, with the rest of the Pinot Gringo (as Sean calls it) on the side.

My photography skills and lighting do Sean's cooking no justice at all.